Mellanox, the networking chip company famous for its Infinband products has agreed to to buy photonics startup Kotura in an all-cash deal. The purchase comes after Kotura started making products for the data center. Read more »
Cisco said it would buy Lightwire, a company that makes optics chips using traditional chip manufacturing in a deal valued at $271 million. This is a significant acquisition for Cisco because it stays true to its core networking business and advances it with deep technology. Read more »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Luxtera has developed an optical chip for the data center market that can achieve speeds of more than 100 gigabits per second. That’s the same speed delivered by long-haul networks under the sea, but now harnessed to move big data and deliver cloud computing. Read more »
AMD sells digital TV chip division to Broadcom for $193 million in cash. It is part of companies desire to be an asset-lite company. Read more »
HP is trying to eliminate copper on semiconductors to make them run faster, and today the company is gathering about 150 researchers at its Palo Alto campus to push lasers as a means to do this. If it and chip manufacturers such as Intel, IBM and […] Read more »
