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Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 06:55:36 +0000

Cloud computing is finally starting to add value to business, as those in charge of cloud within enterprises are moving from talking to doing. That much was very evident in the first quarter of 2013.

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Oracle buys private-cloud pioneer Nimbula

Derrick Harris — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:18:14 +0000

Remember Nimbula, the startup from Amazon Web Services veterans Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon that launched in 2010 amid a firestorm of private-cloud activity in every direction? Well, now it’s part of Oracle, the two companies announced Wednesday morning.

Details on the acquisition are still sparse (trust us, though, we’ll find them), but here’s the official statement from the Oracle website:

On March 13, 2013, Oracle announced it has agreed to acquire Nimbula, a provider of private cloud infrastructure management software. Nimbula’s technology helps companies manage infrastructure resources to deliver service, quality and availability, as well as workloads in private and hybrid cloud environments. Nimbula’s product is complementary to Oracle, and is expected to be integrated with Oracle’s cloud offerings. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2013.

It’s difficult to say at this point what inspired the deal, but my early assumption is that it’s a win-win. Oracle currently has a cloud computing strategy that’s questionable at best, and its private-cloud strategy seems hinged on selling big, expensive, over-engineered systems with some legacy Sun Microsystems and Oracle software cobbled together to make them, cloudy.

Nimbula co-founder Chris Pinkham (center) at Structure 2011.

Nimbula was on the scene early and, from all accounts, built a good product, but appears to have succumbed to a lackluster private-cloud buying market. It has a handful of publicly named customers, including Russian search engine giant Yandex, but like so many other private-cloud startups, it might have fallen victim to market confusion (i.e., “Can’t we just keep buying VMware?”) and an industry consensus around OpenStack as the private-cloud savior. Indeed, last year, Nimbula made a strong pivot and actually began rebuilding itself as an OpenStack distribution.

Maybe Oracle just needed some real cloud talent and/or software and Nimbula just needed a buyer. At any rate, we’ve reached out to Nimbula, Oracle others for comment and will update this story as we hear back.

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This week in cloud: Big outages, OpenNebula updates, Yottabyte debuts

Barb Darrow — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 14:14:12 +0000

Last week’s cloud computing news was highlighted — if that’s the right word — by major outages affecting Amazon Web Services on Monday and Tuesday and other snafus with Google App Engine, Dropbox and Tumblr on Friday. Amazon released a post-mortem late Friday attributing its problem to a memory leak. Google said its problems originated when traffic exceeded the capacity its routing capacity. (Cedexis posted its look at the GAE snafu here.)

But there was other news in cloud computing. Here’s a taste.

OpenNebula gets better VMware, KVM support:

Ignacio Llorente, Project Director, Co-Founder and CEO, OpenNebula C12G Labs Structure Europe 2012 JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY http://www.juliadeboer.com

The new OpenNebula 3.8.0, released this week, offers deeper integration with VMware ESX and KVM hypervisors which are already used in many OpenNebula clouds. For example, the new release supports VMware’s Virtual Machine File System, both locally or remotely over iSCSI. That’s a big request from existing customers who already run SAN storage exported via iSCSI in production data centers, said Ignacio Llorente, director of OpenNebula via email.

That new feature means customers can run OpenNebula instead of VMware’s vCloud Director to save money and avoid vendor lock-in, he said.

OpenNebula, is based out of Europe but has some big-name state-side customers including NASA Langley, IBM and others.

Yottabyte pitches new “cloud OS”

In other cloud news, Bloomfield, MI-based startup Yottabyte emerged from stealth to launch its cloud operating sytem that it said will enable companies to build virtual data centers from commodity server, storage, and networking gear and software.

Yottabyte’s software, which has been in beta for months, competes with Nimbula, which joined the OpenStack consortium at the recent OpenStack Summit.

AWS earnings remain a mystery

For its third quarter, Amazon, the big book reseller and leader in public cloud infrastructure, on Thursday reported a loss of $274 million of $0.60 per share compared to net income of $63 million ($0.14 a share) for the year-ago period. The company doesn’t break out how much of its revenue relates to its web services business but Technology Business Research took a stab at it, estimating that AWS revenue grew 65 percent year over year to $413 million for the quarter.

TBR analyst Jill Mirandi said these outages could hurt AWS especially as more public cloud options from the OpenStack crowd and others come online. With new enterprise clouds coming online from Verizon, Rackspace, IBM, and HP, Amazon isn’t the only game in town anymore and will see “slower net-new customer adoption in coming quarters.”

She wrote:

Major vendors who run their entire businesses on AWS, such as Netflix, Foursquare, Pinterest and Salesforce.com’s Heroku platform, were affected by the outage in October. If major companies such as these continue to experience outages, they will be tempted to move services onto competing IaaS products.

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Nimbula, MapR want to give Hadoop a home on your private cloud

Barb Darrow — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:05:24 +0000

We all know that Hadoop is the darling of the big data crowd. However, the data-processing platform typically runs on big, brawny dedicated clusters of physical hardware. And although it’s massive and powerful, it’s also messy and hard to manage. But that’s starting to change.

Witness Tuesday’s news that private-cloud startup Nimbula worked with MapR Technologies to put MapR’s Hadoop distribution on Nimbula’s private cloud infrastructure. The resulting offering pairs Nimbula Director – with its management and scaling capabilities – with MapR’s high-speed Hadoop product, the two companies said.

The promised benefit is that Nimbula brings its elastic, multi-tenant technology, Hadoop brings its big data capabilities, and together they offer an infrastructure that promises to be easier to scale and manage by mere mortals.

According to the company’s statement about the news:

Nimbula Director … takes bare metal servers with local disks and turns them into a large multi-tenant pool of compute with a self-service provisioning interface enabling the repeated provisioning and deprovisioning of Hadoop and non-Hadoop workloads. The automation of the Hadoop services from MapR and the automation of the underlying instances from Nimbula work together to maintain a fully-functional and highly-available Hadoop cluster.

VMware’s plan for highly available Hadoop

Making Hadoop more manageable, more available and more flexible is a huge opportunity and one that is being attacked by many tech companies. VMware’s Serengeti project aims to put Hadoop on VMware’s vSphere hypervisor, as Derrick Harris reported in June.

And MapR is definitely playing the field, trying to entrench its Hadoop distribution on as many cloud platforms as possible — it already has partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine, as well.

One thing seems clear: The company or companies that can solve the problem of making big data jobs less of a big management problem, are in for a lot of business.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user 1971yes.

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Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:01:23 +0000

If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:01:55 +0000

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.

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It’s not about shared vs. dedicated. It’s about the application

Ryan Lawler — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 22:56:44 +0000

Users have different reasons and preferences for deciding between shared and dedicated resources in the cloud. But most shouldn’t be making those decisions based on the infrastructure, but based on the application that they’re trying to run, according to executives from GoGrid, Nimbula and Softlayer at GigaOM’s Structure conference on Thursday.

The three panelists — GoGrid ~~CEO and~~ Founder and Executive Chairman John Keagy, Nimbula CEO and Co-Founder Chris Pinkham, and SoftLayer CTO Duke Skarda — agreed that what’s most important when making infrastructure decisions around cloud services is the type of application that they’re using, how flexible it is and what degree of reliability or security is required.

While dedicated servers have their advantages, Keagy said the decision to run dedicated hardware generally comes from a market mentality, and is not based on what a customer needs but what he has used in the past in using on-premises equipment. At the same time, there’s also a group that grew up on services like Amazon Web Services and still relies on those types of shared services.

“A lot of the world just knows one or the other,” Skarda said, noting that people tend to gravitate toward what they know. But instead, Skerda said they should be thinking, “What is application doing and what’s the best architecture for that?”

Pinkham agreed: “Focusing on the infrastructure is not the right focus,” he said. “Customers should be focusing on the application. Different applications have different requirements… What matters is, what are those requirements?”

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The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

Thu, 19 May 2011 00:01:53 +0000

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Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:23:33 +0000

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.

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Nimbula’s Cloud Software with EC2 Pedigree Finally Available

Derrick Harris — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:49:38 +0000

The flagship private-cloud software from Nimbula, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup created by two of the driving forces behind Amazon EC2, is now available for purchase by the public. The product, called Nimbula Director, promises to give both service providers and traditional organizations an Amazon EC2-like infrastructure-as-a-service experience within their own data centers or even in hybrid environments. Nimbula is far from the only private cloud startup around, but it has attracted a lot of attention because its two founders, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, helped create the Amazon EC2 cloud that’s the focal point of Amazon Web Services.

Now that Nimbula Director is available as an official production release, Nimbula will have to compete for deals against cloud vendors that have been selling their software for considerably longer. Among its two primary competitors will be Cloud.com and Eucalyptus Systems, both of which have established impressive customer traction recently. Nimbula took a step toward making itself more appealing to paying customers last month when it launched a partner ecosystem that presently consists of Opscode, Puppet Labs, Scalr, enStratus and Cloud Cruiser. Nimbula launched at our Structure event last June, and raised $20.75 million in funding thus far.

Image courtesy of NASA.

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