IBM and Cisco have both launched specialized hardware designed to securely and efficiently handle big data, but is there a large market for specialized big data gear? If there is such a market, are these the boxes that will fill it? Read more »
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the Series B round which also includes contributions from Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures. SimpliVity is building a data center appliance that it says can replace a half-dozen specialized boxes and be run by a single VM admin. Read more »
The changes in enterprise IT and infrastructure has been very good for VC firms which have put billions in startups and seen lucrative exits. Now, as IT continues its shift Battery Ventures is promoting Itzik Parnafes to general partner for the next stage of enterprise IT. Read more »
According to a new 8K filing with the SEC, EMC CEO Joe Tucci will stay on at the storage giant until at least February of 2015. But he may not hold the top job for that whole time, according to the document. Read more »
Well into the cloud computing era, the definitions of what constitutes an “open cloud,” and how to select the right technology are still a mystery to potential users. And, consumers are still in the dark when it comes to the concept of cloud. 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 »
Nearly all the news out of VMworld 2012 shows a company in flux. With a new CEO and its core server virtualization market commoditizing, VMware continues to push into new areas — end user computing, open source — where it is not a leader. Read more »
As VMware transitions from CEO Paul Maritz to CEO Pat Gelsinger and keeps pushing beyond its server virtualization roots, there are a lot of questions about where the company is headed. Here are 6 key issues the company should address at VMworld. Read more »
If you wanted to use Pure Storage’s FlashArrays but weren’t a Fibre Channel shop, you were out of luck. Untill now. The startup has added 10GbE and iSCSi support — as well as snapshotting capabilities — to its solid state storage arrays. Read more »
Coraid built its business with fast-and-simple ATA-over-Ethernet storage which doesn’t require expensive infrastructure upgrades. Now it’s diving into software-configurable storage with EtherCloud which incorporates Yunteq cloud orchestration technology the company acquired last year. Read more »
Why should mid-market companies deploy multiple data center appliances if one can do the job? That’s the rationale behind SimpliVity’s new OmniCube appliance that merges storage, server, deduplication, and other tasks into one 2U box and can be federated across sites. Read more »
The Gemini flash array is the first of what will probably be many solid-state storage products announced this week. Nimbus Data says the new array will cut all-in storage cost to $8 per GB from $10 per GB for its previous model. Read more »
The flash memory land rush continues with IBM buying Texas Memory Systems and its RamSan line this week. The news comes as flash storage startups touting flash-everywhere game plans are reaping big VC investments. IBM rival EMC bought EXtremeIO a few months ago. Read more »
It’s all-flash, all the time for Pure Storage, the Mountain View startup that just netted another $40 million to pursue that goal. The funding will go toward fueling a global push and staffing up sales and engineering teams, the company said. Read more »
Watch out hard drives — slick startup Skyera, launched by the founder of SandForce, says it really can put flash storage everywhere — without breaking the bank. It’s a bold claim but one that’s backed up with some pretty credible storage expertise. Read more »
Many companies want to be able to deploy applications across multiple public clouds, but thus far the management tools to facilitate that have been lacking. That’s a gap Boston startup Stackdriver hopes to fill, say co-founder Dan Belcher. Read more »
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 »
Silver Spring Networks is beefing up its energy data software services for utilities by focusing on real time access via software-as-a-service and the cloud. Read more »
Investments by venture capitalists into smart grid companies — or firms that are adding digital intelligence to the power grid — has remained “extremely weak” over at least the last three quarters, according to research firm the Mercom Capital Group. Read more »
A recent internal VMware memo that has emerged via CRN says that our previously published report about VMware and EMC pooling assets such as Cloud Foundry and GreenPlum and spinning them off into a separate entity was “unfounded.” It sounds like a classic non-denial denial. Read more »
The new Pat Gelsinger-led VMware must do three things to succeed: Carefully guard against favoring its parent company’s products too much; tend to the crucial virtualization and management technologies that underlie its entire franchise; and be nicer to customers and partners. Read more »
EMC might be smarter than we thought it was. If it handles the rumored spin-out and the Maritz-Gelsinger transition well, the companies under its banner could do great things. Of course, there are a lot of moving parts here and the transition won’t be easy. Read more »
VMWare is going through an equivalent of executive convulsion. Paul Maritz, who was CEO for past four years have been replaced by EMC executive Pat Gelsinger. Maritz takes on new role as a chief strategist for EMC. Here are some video conversations with Maritz. Read more »
A day after reports surfaced that Paul Maritz is out as CEO of VMware there is offical confirmation. Maritz will become chief strategist at parent company EMC reporting to EMC CEO Joe Tucci. As expected, Pat Gelsinger will take the top slot at VMware. 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 »
A tech trade publication is reporting that VMware CEO Paul Maritz is being pushed out and will be replaced by Pat Gelsinger, the current COO of EMC. EMC owns roughly 80 percent of VMware, the market leader in server virtualization. Read more »
Hadoop is on its way to becomig the de facto platform for the next-generation of data-based applications, but it’s not without some flaws. Ironically, one of Hadoop’s biggest shortcomings right now is also one of its biggest strengths going forward — the Hadoop Distributed File System. Read more »
Cloud storage specialist Nasuni is embracing unified storage, meaning its service now supports block storage (typically addressed by iSCSI and Fibre Channel devices) as well as the file storage it already supported and which is commonly used in branch and remote offices. Read more »
Despite that smart grid network company Silver Spring Networks has yet to go public, the company is chugging along and had a pretty good quarter, according to the latest amendment to its S-1. Read more »
Wipro’s latest IT foray — a global infrastructure as a service for enterprises — shows how the giant Indian outsourcers are striving to become strategic cloud partners for their business clients and compete for cloud implementation money with IBM, CSC, as well as their in-country rivals. 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 »
The greater Boston area’s bid to be the go-to big data hub will get a boost as Intel and MIT will announce the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data as well as bigdata@CSAIL, a research group for MIT academics and industry researchers. Read more »
Cloud storage provider Box experienced a snafu early today, as some users reported via Twitter that they could not access their stored documents. The company acknowledged that some customers experienced difficulty getting to their Box-stored files for about two hours early Tuesday. Read more »
Storage giant EMC has acquired cloud-storage startup Syncplicity in an attempt to compete with consumer-focused offerings such as Dropbox and for storing business users’ files. Cloud-based storage has become the primary villain in the move toward BYOD , but is also an area of strong growth. Read more »
EMC has bought Israeli flash-storage startup XtremIO for $430 million, according to Israeli news site Globes. The acquisition was expected after rumors began swirling in late April that EMC was courting the company, which sells a storage composed entirely of flash. Read more »
Paul Doscher, CEO of Lucid Imagination wants you to know that when it come to enterprise-class search, open-source Lucene is a contender. And a strong contender that can face off against Google, Amazon and Microsoft in the big data search arena. Read more »
A cadre of DevOps experts will gather later this week at an undisclosed location in Northern California. The goal: To hash out issues they see in their own shops, to compare notes on problems and talk in a way that they cannot in vendor-driven conferences. Read more »
Market research firm IDC released the first legitimate market forecast for Hadoop on Monday, claiming the ecosystem around the de facto big data platform will sell almost $813 million worth of software by 2016. But Hadoop’s actual economic impact is likely much, much larger. Read more »
One reason the year of desktop virtualization is always on the horizon but never gets here, is its expense. Atlantis Computing says its software cuts RAM requirements to 500MB per user, down from 1.2GB so VDI can be deployed without storage hardware. 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 »
