Two things are true: Consumers love cloud-based file share and storage systems and consumers have concerns about cloud-based file share and storage systems. Dell makes another acquisition in hopes of bolstering its cloud storage after a rough earnings call. Read more »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Diablo Technologies is an Ottawa-based startup that has brought flash memory even closer to the processor — making applications run even faster. It has built chip technology as well as software and has raised $28 million to bring the technology to market. Read more »
Is an advanced business degree from Harvard or MIT or Stanford something that tech startups really, really want? It didn’t seem so at last weekend’s Harvard Business School Cyberposium. Where do you sit in the on-again debate between the builders and the bean counters? Read more »
Tablet sales are rising says IDC, as 27.7 million slates were sold in the last quarter. Apple still holds a majority market share as Samsung, Amazon and others are catching up to the iPad. But there’s a bigger story here when it comes to PCs. Read more »
Brand advertising’s focus on cross-platform media measurement has grown dramatically in the past five years. Within the next 36 months cross-platform digital video advertising will standardize, driven by the shift in media dollars to online viewing and the adoption of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group recently shipped its 1 millionth server just five years after coming into existence. It’s proof of how important webscale buyers have become to the server market, as well as how different their demand are than those of traditional IT buyers. Read more »
AMD, which has fallen behind its chief rival Intel in the x86 processor business, announced on Monday plans to make new 64-bit chips based on ARM’s chip technology that will target data center and cloud computing companies. AMD will continue to make x86 processors as well. Read more »
Dell is donating an ARM-based server to the Apache Software Foundation so contributors can test their projects on new, energy-efficient hardware architectures. Big data projects such as Hadoop and Cassandra are low-hanging fruit, but many webscale applications likely could use them to save power. Read more »
Dell’s XPS 10 is the company’s tablet that runs Microsoft Windows RT and it starts at a reasonable $499. Add the useful keyboard dock though — which also includes additional ports and a second battery — and you’re looking at a base price of $679. Is that compelling? Read more »
Calxeda, a company making dense, low-power servers using the same ARM chip architecture found in cell phones, has raised $55 million to take on Intel as well as the myriad other vendors that want to take ARM’s low power chips and cram them into servers, Read more »
Agility is increasingly recognized as one of the main advantages of cloud computing, but an important aspect of agility is choice: the choice to run computing jobs in house, in a private cloud, or on public cloud services from the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, and a growing number of other providers. To exercise choice, customers require information and the ability to compare the costs and benefits of competing solutions. This report explores opportunities for accurately measuring computing resources and their use, simplifying the comparison of competing cloud offerings and opening the door to charging models based more closely on actual consumption. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
OpenStack is hot, but determining which companies are best poised to capitalize on its promise is hard to do. Prabhakar Gopalan assesses what hardware vendors, software vendors and service will have to do if they want to be among the big OpenStack winners. Read more »
While cloud, mobility, social, and analytics have been driving demand for IT products and services in 2012, the worldwide IT spending picture has become dimmer as the year has progressed: We’re looking at 5.1 percent worldwide IT spending growth in 2012. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It’s slow going for the HP turnaround Meg Whitman is trying to engineer. There’s softness in the PC business, in printers, in servers — just more bad news atop the $8 billion write-down of enterprise services that HP pre-announced. Not a pretty picture. Read more »
Microsoft announced four initial hardware partners for the first Windows RT slates. Of the four, two have some solid tablet experience while another showed promise with early smartbook designs. The last one, however, is a dark horse, as it has limited success with consumer electronics devices. Read more »
The software-defined networking (SDN) market is expected to soar in size to $2 billion by 2016, according to IDC. Growth this fast may very well signify that SDN is the third epoch of computer networking, creating vendor discontinuities and a new IT order. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The new deal between EMC and Lenovo to sell server-storage bundles could shake up hardware rivals including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and — perhaps most intriguingly — Cisco Systems. EMC, Cisco and VMware are partners on the VCE Vblock effort. Read more »
Despite its current decline, RIM is a different firm today than it was in 2007, with new management, a full awareness of its shaky position, an upcoming OS release and a number of lingering advantages that can still be leveraged. Here’s how it just might survive. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Organizations are coping with the challenge of processing unprecedented volumes of data. However, the processes involved with using a large cluster to run applications like Hadoop are error-prone. So IT managers are turning to cluster-management solutions to automate tasks associated with cluster creation, management and maintenance. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new ARM-based OpenStack cloud comes online this week, courtesy of HP, Calxeda and Canonical. The new “TryStack” facility gives developers who want to test out OpenStack clouds another flavor to try. The news comes out of the OSCON conference this week. Read more »
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Dell has agreed to purchase Quest Software in a deal valued at $2.36 billion, giving the computer maker a path forward in the software business, and helping Dell reduce its reliance on selling hardware. The bid brings a bidding war for Quest to a close. Read more »
Facebook is boosting its edge network with its own servers to speed the delivery of its photos according to Frank Frankovsky, a VP at the social networking company. Frankovsky outed his plans onstage at the structure 2012 event and explained how he hopes to scale. Read more »
As we move into the age of webscale and cloud computing the traditional data center architecture is blowing apart, according to execs of startups that have built new kinds of disruptive data center gear and software at the Structure conference on Wednesday in San Francisco. Read more »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The world of information technology is always changing, but in the last six years it has started to change more rapidly. We celebrate the people who are orchestrating this change. Here’s ten innovators that are changing the game of Internet infrastructure. Read more »
Facebook is rethinking how it does networking, as Wired reports, but it’s actually rethinking the entire composition of the data center. Its plans will destroy the servers, switches and storage boxes vendors sell today in an effort to operate efficiently at web scale. Read more »
Changes in the power market are rippling through the Internet industry, altering both the location of data centers and their sources of power. There are many factors in picking a data center location beyond the geographic location, such as how to procure energy and green-energy models. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Dell showed off a box that contains 48 ARM-based servers, joining others making boxes with processors that uses the same architecture as the chips inside your cell phone. The server consumes less power and could find a home in web servers and Hadoop clusters. Read more »
Dell may buy Quest Software in a bid to bolster its overall software management play, according to a Bloomberg report. Quest makes management software and tools that could help Dell to become an enterprise services provider — a long-time goal for the PC maker. Read more »
Here’s our daily pick of stories about Apple from around the web that you shouldn’t miss. Today’s installment: Dell says “alternative mobile devices” are putting a crimp in its PC sales, Digitimes responds to accusations of Apple rumormongering, and Microsoft could be readying Office on iOS. Read more »
With its Project Sputnik laptop, Dell hopes to lure Linux-loving developers back into its camp and perhaps even get some who defected to Mac OSX to return to the open source fold. The laptop bundles Ubuntu, tools and an on-ramp to github repositories. Read more »
The Open Compute Project is a coup by the buyers of servers to take control of their hardware destiny, but wisely it’s also leaving the vendors enough room to make a business for themselves. The nature of IT is changing. Here’s how companies adapt. Read more »
At its third summit, the Open Compute Project is adding new partners, showing off cool use cases and adding new technologies. And surprisingly, it’s being done in a way that will enable hardware vendors to hold onto some of their margins and still deliver innovations. Read more »
The rumor mill is adamant that storage giant EMC is in serious talks to buy Israeli flash-storage startup XtremIO, a move that could trigger an avalanche of flash acquisitions rivaling the scale-out-file-system feeding frenzy a couple years ago. Here’s who might get bought. Read more »
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Hewlett-Packard is putting more of its chips on OpenStack as a key foundation for its upcoming public, private and hybrid cloud implementations. HP says its Converged Cloud will amalgamate existing HP technologies and OpenStack so applications can be managed uniformly across cloud types. Read more »
The fact that perennial PC power Dell is buying Wyse Technologies for its thin client and desktop virtualization smarts shows just how much the power equation has shifted from low-margin PCs to cloud computing and other services in recent years. Read more »
Morphlab’s latest mCloud uses uses all solid-state disks while also claiming Amazon Web Services-like pricing. The company’s newest offering, which is part of a partnership with Dell, targets service providers that want to add private cloud computing capabilities that interoperate with AWS as needed. Read more »
