Concurrent, the company providing the Cascading data workflow API, has raised a $900,000 seed round to capitalize on the newfound excitement around Hadoop. Cascading is an open-source API for creating and running data workflows atop Hadoop clusters. Read more »
On Tuesday Dell announced a reference architecture, open-source software and services offering designed to make deploying an OpenStack-based cloud as easy as following directions. Called the Dell OpenStack Cloud solution, the collection of tools shows that OpenStack will be a driving force in the private-cloud space. Read more »
All the speculation about how Yahoo’s Hadoop spinoff company, Hortonworks, will affect Cloudera and other companies providing Hadoop-based products might have been overblown. The company is still figuring out its strategy around offering a Hadoop distribution, which could be good news for competitors such as Cloudera. Read more »
Open-source cloud computing project OpenStack turned one this week, and cloud backup provider Backblaze freely shared detailed specifications for a storage device capable of holding 135 terabytes of data. Open-source options for everything from servers and data centers to clouds and application platforms are growing more robust. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
[OpenStack] looks not only like an open-source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space. As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come a […] Read more »
Less than two years after open sourcing the design of the 67TB “storage pods” that underpin its cloud backup service, Backblaze is at it again. This morning, it shared on its blog specs for a new, 135TB storage pod that costs only $7,384. Read more »
Something I thought about a lot while writing about OpenStack yesterday is how much it democratized access to cloud computing in just a year. But OpenStack is just one example of how information technology, overall, is undergoing a period of arguably unprecedented democratization. Read more »
Nginx creator Igor Sysoev is planning a company based around the wildly popular open-source web server. Sysoev announced the decision on the Ngnix blog Monday morning, writing that the commercial entity’s primary goals will be better support and more consistent feature releases. Read more »
OpenStack, the open-source cloud-computing software project founded by Rackspace and NASA, launched a year ago today. It has been a busy year for the project, which appears to have grown much faster than even its founders expected it would, and it’s only picking up steam. Read more »
There’s little doubt that VMware will continue to maintain its lead as a virtualization supplier in the short run, but doing so over the long run is tricky business. So says Art Wittmann at InformationWeek about VMware’s vSphere 5 offering, updated this week. Despite the bolstering […] Read more »
Heroku might have expanded its embrace to include Node.js and Clojure, but its heart is still with Ruby. To wit, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto is joining the company as its chief architect for Ruby, which should only improve its standing in the developer community. Read more »
Users that search for VLC on the Android Market get to see a whole bunch of apps that kind of look like the popular open-source video player, despite the fact that VLC for Android hasn’t been released yet. The foundation behind VLC wants to change that. Read more »
Apps will save the world. Or at least are providing an important way for the developer community to give back and work on rewarding projects, while at the same time adding some much needed innovation around data sets for the public good. Read more »
Big processors or little processors, scale-up or scale-out, on-premise or in the cloud: the answers might not be as easy as one would think. Web-style, scale-out architectures, low-power server processors and cloud computing are getting more attention by the day, but they have their limits. Read more »
Ravel now offers an open-source graph database that looks to bring the benefit’s of Google’s Pregel project to the masses. Graph databases don’t get the attention of other big-data technologies such as Hadoop or NoSQL, but every Twitter user is familiar with what they can do. Read more »
While open standards give customers options, execs from Dell, VMware and Facebook said the availability of free computing options isn’t necessarily the death of innovation. However, businesses that wish to survive will need to provide value over and above the commoditized aspects of open computing platforms. Read more »
The future of the cloud is a programmable network with applications that are smarter about using resources, said Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing for Cisco at Structure 2011 in San Francisco on Wednesday. Read more »
Big data startup MapR is now an official corporate contributor to the Apache Hadoop project, a somewhat interesting turn of affairs given its corporate mission to lure users away from Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System. However, other companies commercializing Hadoop shoud follow its lead. Read more »
The dream of open cloud computing took a couple of small steps forward in the past 24 hours with Apache promoting the Libcloud project to top-level status and with Microsoft releasing a new software development kit for PHP applications on its Windows Azure platform. Read more »
Citrix today announced the first commercial distribution of the open source OpenStack cloud-computing software, which Citrix ix calling Project Olympus. It’s a bold move to announce an OpenStack distribution so early into the project’s existence, but Citrix must to something to combat bitter rival VMware. Read more »
Just 12 days later the entire Mono team was laid off from Novell, the Mono Project’s founder and lead developer Miguel de Icaza has announced the launch of Xamarin, a new startup that bills itself “the new home of the engineers that created Mono.” 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 »
Data-integration specialist Syncsort is releasing two new Hadoop tools that it says will give Hadoop users a better, faster experience than they can achieve using Apache Hadoop alone. Unlike some other recent announcements, however, Syncsort is looking to improve Hadoop rather than replace aspects of it. Read more »
Managed service provider Internap has announced that it will be offering a public infrastructure-as-a-service cloud built atop the OpenStack platform. The service will be available in the third quarter of this year, and also features the option of running applications on VMware-based virtual infrastructure. Read more »
Cisco’s cloud computing ambitions might be judged by outsiders as being centered around selling servers and networking gear to cloud data centers, but recent developments show that such an assessment might not be entirely fair as Cisco comes around on open source software. Read more »
CloudBees is now offering its RUN@cloud service as software that lets users build their own PaaS environments on OpenStack- or VMware vSphere-based infrastructure. Choice in PaaS deployment environments is becoming a new must-have feature, especially in light of Amazon’s recent outage and projects like Cloud Foundry. Read more »
Hadoop is the talk of the town when it comes to big data, but it’s not without faults that have some users begging for an alternative. Like many open source projects, it’s relatively unpolished and often requires a great deal of learning and much strenuous customization […] Read more »
Google’s open video format WebM has some new backers, with companies like Cisco, LG and Samsung joining a cross-licensing initiative to insure themselves against patent-related litigation. However, the need for such an initiative also shows how serious Google has to take any threats of patent lawsuits. Read more »
TechAmerica’s Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD2) officially kicked off its three-month mission today to advise the Obama administration on cloud computing best practices, and pushing cloud interoperability is high on the commission’s list of goals. Read more »
The latest OpenStack code release, dubbed Cactus, is now available and generally capable of running within enterprise data centers, but underlying the project’s progress are concerns over its true commitment to the open source ethos. Read more »
For anyone trying to understand why bloggers would give their content for free to a site like The Huffington Post — which is being sued by contributors for as much as $100 million — here’s a related question: Why do some programmers choose to create open-source software? Read more »
After years of debate over the role of open source in cloud computing, the possibility of a top-to-bottom, open-source, infrastructure stack now looks very real, with much of the designs and code needed to build a cloud from the ground up available free of charge. Read more »
Cloudera released version 3.0 of its distribution of Apache Hadoop (CDH3) Tuesday. CDH3 is a big reason why, despite a recent spate of Hadoop-based big data products either on the market or about to be there, Cloudera says it isn’t sweating all the new competition. Read more »
Do you have any idea what your incessant status updates require Facebook to do on the back end? Supporting 100 million photo uploads each day and as many as 18,000 comments requires the social network to perform 24 billion calculations a second at peak times. 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 »
Ravel wants to provide a supported open source version of Google’s Pregel software called Golden Orb to handle large-scale graph analytics. Ravel COO Zach Richardson told me in the following video interview that the startup would release the Golden Orb code on March 31st. Read more »
VLC’s developers are busy working on an Android implementation of the popular open source video player, which could be released as early as next month. Next up will be a tablet-specific version of VLC, which could run on devices like Motorola’s Xoom with Android 3.0. Read more »
Just over than a month after discontinuing its Hadoop distribution to focus on the flagship Apache Hadoop project, Yahoo is proposing some changes to the Hadoop MapReduce component that could significantly improve processing performance. The proposal illustrates just how beneficial Yahoo’s renewed focus could be. Read more »
Rackspace is now offering official support services for the OpenStack cloud platform under the moniker of Rackspace Cloud Builders. Until now, companies wishing to deploy OpenStack-based cloud offerings had to either rely on community members for informal support or seek out third-party consultants. Read more »
NoSQL has been able to withstand the trappings of its newfound popularity and maintain a communal spirit, an observation proved once again by the NoSQL Tapes. But how long until they become like many open-source movements, united under the same banner but jockeying for position? Read more »
