EMC CEO Joe Tucci gave a lecture at the University of Washington last night in which he said EMC spent $10.5 billion on research and development and $14 billion on acquisitions between 2003 and 2010, numbers that should only rise over the next eight years. Read more »
Last quarter we highlighted the fast maturation of the Platform-as-a-Service and big data spaces. Those two trends only picked up speed during the third quarter of 2011. Joining them on the cusp of IT greatness, though, are the OpenStack project and flash storage. The former gathered serious validation from big-name companies, while the latter saw less funding than last quarter but a significant number of product launches. Of course, the third quarter wasn’t all lollipops and rose petals. We saw new computing technologies and delivery models such as tablets wreak havoc on both HP and Cisco, and there are concerns (aren’t there always?) about how the Internet will handle our increased use of streaming video and cloud computing. Unfortunately for HP and Cisco, the latter problem might be an easier fix than the strategic woes facing them. Additional companies mentioned in this report include CloudBees, Rackspace, Engine Yard and Joyent. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
DataDirect says its new WOS 2.0 (web object scaler) release adds charge-back mechanisms, multitenancy and support for Amazon and CDMI cloud storage interfaces that better suit it for use by big, third-party service providers. Read more »
Cloudera and Hortonworks have been playing a game of oneupsmanship over the past few weeks in an attempt to prove whose contributions to the Apache Hadoop project matter most. Reputation matters to both companies, but maybe not as much as fending off encroachments to their turf. Read more »
Hadoop is becoming a popular choice for large organizations needing to store and process large volumes of unstructured data, but is it merely the flavor of the day? An eBay exec recently questioned his continued use of the platform if the pace of development doesn’t improve. Read more »
Red Hat’s planned $136 million purchase of Gluster should give the enterprise Linux leader a strong play in the cloud-inflected world of scale-out storage. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions by vendors trying to stake a claim in the storage of unstructured data. Read more »
Oracle customers have lots of questions for the database giant. If you’re one of the 50,000 people Oracle expects to converge on the Moscone Center starting Sunday–or even if you’re not–here are some key things to look out for at the big Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Conference. Read more »
You might have heard of the SuperNAP data center before because of its military-grade security, more-than-400,000-square-foot footprint and roots as Enron’s attempt to build a bandwidth exchange, but the cutting-edge facility is also home to some very interesting customers. Read more »
Storage giant EMC is adding more muscle to its Hadoop strategy with a 1,000-node cluster for testing new Apache Hadoop releases and a new analytics appliance combining EMC’s Hadoop distribution with the EMC Greenplum Database. Read more »
VMware has transformed the enterprise computing model more than any other company in the past decade. Now, with the latest release of vSphere containing several new storage features, VMware is set to disrupt storage. Its parent company, EMC, and NetApp may want to stay alert. Read more »
Bloomberg is reporting that HP plans to announce a $10 billion deal to buy Autonomy, a U.K. based software company that has bought up a variety of assets over the years to create an unstructured data storage and analyzing powerhouse. Read more »
Dell’s stock took a dive this morning after it said it lowered its revenue estimates of the year citing weak consumer demand, but while it’s server business remained strong there’s no doubt that Michael Dell, the company’s CEO is navigating a fine line Read more »
Cloud-computing insurance has long been posed as a solution to the problem of cloud users assuming too much risk of failure in the wake of things such as lengthy outages, data breaches and Lulzsec attacks. But it seems the idea of off-loading some of that risk ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Alpine Data Labs, a predictive analytics startup that incubated within Greenplum (now part of EMC), is expanding its support beyond the Greenplum Database and into Oracle’s Exadata appliance and the open-source Postgres database. Alpine tries to distinguish itself by running entirely within companies’ analytic databases. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
IDC’s latest snapshot of the digital universe suggests that data volumes continue to grow at a dramatic pace that shows little signs of slowing down. The sheer scale of the problem suggests that simply adding more storage is not a sustainable strategy. What is the solution? Read more »
The fight for Hadoop dominance is officially on. While Hortonworks is busy answering questions about its product strategy, Cloudera and MapR will demonstrate new versions of their distributions overflowing with bells and whistles. And there are several other competitive products lurking in the background. Read more »
Yahoo will be spinning off a separate company focused on the development and commercialization of Apache Hadoop, called HortonWorks. The official announcement likely will come tomorrow or Wednesday to coincide with Yahoo’s annual Hadoop Summit, but rumors have been circulating for months. Read more »
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
NYSE Technologies is rolling out a cloud platform for financial services firms that lets them provision infrastructure and access the suite NYSE Technologies trading services and market data. The cloud is built using a variety of VMware tools, as well as EMC storage products. Read more »
The global economy continues to face uncertainty, but despite this, many technology companies have cash on hand and are opting to spend it on mergers and acquisitions. Here we examine some likely strategies from five different companies: IBM, Oracle, HP, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. Read more »
San Jose, Calif.-based storage startup MapR, which provides a high-performance alternative for the Hadoop Distributed File System, will serve as the storage component for EMC’s forthcoming Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition Hadoop distribution. Cloudera announced an HDFS partnership of its own with compression expert RainStor. Read more »
Yesterday, Cisco and NetApp announced more than 150 customers have adopted their joint FlexPod converged infrastructure architecture, a sign that might point to a falling out between Cisco and its VCE partners, EMC and VMware. Rumor has it Cisco isn’t happy with that arrangement. Read more »
EMC is throwing its weight behind Hadoop. Today, at the EMC World, the storage giant announced a slew of Hadoop-centric products, including a specialized appliance for Hadoop-based big data analytics and two separate Hadoop distributions. EMC’s entry is going to shake-up the Hadoop market. Read more »
The recent excitement around Hadoop has culminated in five new Hadoop products today from EMC, NetApp, Mellanox, SnapLogic and DataStax. What’s interesting now is that we’re seeing large technology vendors with hardware expertise pushing gear optimized for Hadoop. Read more »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Despite an industry-wide push for better and more-complete big data strategies, it’s beginning to look like EMC and IBM will be the two technology vendors earning the most data-related dollars once the dust settles because they’ve embraced the new big data bundle while others have not. Read more »
VMware officially entered the service provider market by taking over operations of the Mozy storage service from EMC. VMware CTO Steven Herrod announced the news on his blog today, writing that “VMware has hired the team and acquired assets behind EMC’s Mozy cloud-based data protection service.” Read more »
Hadoop has been used by large web companies for applications such as search engines, but the reality is that the project is so much more. This report takes a closer look, examining what Hadoop is (and isn’t), who’s doing what to productize it and why we can expect to see the market pick up serious steam in 2011. We profile the growing number of companies — from startups like MapR to Cloudera, the arguable leader in the space — using Hadoop, the challenges still hindering widespread adoption and where potential users can expect the market to go as we move through 2011 and beyond. Companies mentioned in this report include Yahoo, Facebook, EMC, Teradata and Appistry. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cisco said it plans to buy newScale, a software provider that allows more control and visibility inside a compute cloud. The deal highlights the rise in M&A activity among cloud vendors as well as the need for more accountability in corporate cloud environments. Read more »
Data isn’t the solution to business problems. Pulling data into applications and using it to make decisions and improve the user experience is the way to solve business problems said Jim Baum, the CEO of Netezza, at Structure Big Data. Read more »
Being able to process and understand big data has enabled new business models to emerge. But for the next generation of applications to flourish, EMC CTO Luke Lonergren says that data will need to be accessible even to folks that aren’t necessarily data scientists. Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Consolidation and convergence mean many things in this industry, and impact everything from technical minutiae to broad-brush business decisions. Monopolies are undesirable, but the opposite extreme of an unbounded set of companies may also be unhelpful in a maturing market. Read more »
With enterprise data volumes growing, business and IT leaders face significant opportunities and challenges from big data. Using cloud-computing technologies, organizations are experimenting with distributed data stores, cloud compute capacity for data analytics, hosted data integration and even operational databases in the cloud. Hadoop/MapReduce, meanwhile, has moved past test and development stage to become a viable extension or alternative to traditional relational databases. Though the space is not without its obstacles, including plenty of privacy concerns, there are numerous sales-growth opportunities and new business models finally surfacing in 2011. Companies mentioned in this report include Google, IBM, Apple, Oracle, Salesforce and VMware. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With the launch is its new low-end VNX line, EMC shifted focus away from its high-end Symmetrix products and down to the other end of the spectrum. And, all of a sudden, Dell’s move to acquire Compellent looks much smarter. Read more »
EMC launched a slew of new products and a new product line that it hopes will keep it relevant in a changing IT world where cloud computing and products with a more consumer feel are changing the dynamic at both ends of the spectrum. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In 2009, Cisco launched its Unified Computing System. It signaled to data center equipment vendors that the separation between servers, networking, and storage was gone. With that single move, the industry set forth on a course to consolidate. Here’s a play by play since then: Read more »
Heading into the long holiday weekend, the news today is all about what’s new: Salesforce.com’s new chief scientist, Google’s new data centers, EMC’s new business and Fujitsu’s new versatile blade server. Read more »
