The big hosting provider that, along with NASA, launched the open-source cloud infrastructure project two years ago, will start beta testing the software, running tens of thousands of computing instances as opposed to the hundreds under test now, said John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO. Read more »
Is IBM joining OpenStack? It sure looks like it, according to one OpenStack contributor page, which lists IBM having joined as of February 2. There has been no announcement, but given IBM’s open source bent, an OpenStack membership makes sense for the computing giant. Read more »
As promised, storage kingpin EMC has integrated its Isilon NAS product with Hadoop in a way that will bring Isilon’s OneFS file system to bear on data. EMC isn’t alone. Vendors from Amazon to Oracle are trying to tame this big data beast. Read more »
IBM has teamed up with NEC to deliver an OpenFlow-based controller-and-switch combo that tries to find the sweet spot in software-defined networking between expensive, proprietary gear from Cisco or Juniper and the brand-new, open-sourced stuff that startups and webscale companies are peddling. Read more »
To hear IBM and Microsoft tell it, their respective cloud strategies are coming along nicely, thank you very much. But given the hazy definitions of cloud computing and the lack of real numbers, it’s hard to tell if that really is the case. Read more »
Computer and memory chips usually tend to get smaller over time, but in a paper published Thursday in Science, IBM details how it’s building memory chips that would be 100 times more dense than today’s hard drives by starting with the smallest building blocks: atoms. Read more »
The cloud is looking pretty good to software developers this year, according to new Zend Technologies’ research. More than half of the 3,335 developers surveyed said they expect to use a public cloud for their work in 2012, with AWS being the top draw. Read more »
The coming wave of open-source hardware, 3-D printing and other breakthroughs will open the floodgates to tech innovation, just as open-source software sparked the last tech boom by fueling the Google, Facebook software empires, said Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab. Read more »
The wave of M&A activity swelling the cloud services sector won’t stop with in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) arena. Internap’s $30 million purchase of Voxel, announced early this week, signals a land rush for cloud services, with many smaller, capable cloud providers now in play. Read more »
This year may have been the beginning of the big data onslaught, but big data will only get bigger in 2012. Watch for companies to check out specialized databases for different data types and to segment their data centers for old and new workloads. Read more »
Oracle is finally learning that the hardware business is not the software business. Revenue for the company’s Sun Microsystems-rooted servers fell 14 percent in the second quarter compared to the year-ago period. And gross margin on those hardware sales is returning to earth. Read more »
Are Google, Yelp and Facebook scared of Siri? If they aren’t they should be, as should any mobile website, service or app that depends on advertising. Siri is the first user interface that shifts our attention away from our phones’ screens, but it won’t be the last. Read more »
In this era of cheap-and-reliable renta-data centers run by Amazon, Rackspace, and others, does it make sense for a company to build a new data center on it’s own? Unsurprisingly, Amazon’s own James Hamilton doesn’t think so. More surprisingly, other IT pros agree. Read more »
There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
