Up-and-coming IaaS player Tier 3′s new Web Fabric Platform aims to give enterprise customers access to infrastructure services and higher-level application services from a single console. It builds on Iron Foundry, an open source fork of Cloud Foundry that adds .NET support. Read more »
Rackspace is the Dr. Jekyll of hosting. For the last few years, it has been a legacy managed hosting provider by day that dabbled in cloud computing at night. As Dr. Jekyll ultimately did, though, Rackspace is becoming Mr. Hyde for good. Read more »
The lead developers behind open-source storage system Ceph have launched a company, called Inktank, to commercialize the software. The company describes Ceph as a “fully open source, distributed object store, network block device, and POSIX-compatible distributed file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability.” Read more »
Piston Computing plans to integrate VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service with Piston’s own OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure as a service offering in what the two companies are billing as an integration of “the world’s most popular open source IaaS and PaaS together.” Read more »
Internap bought Voxel early this year to boost its dedicated hosting and public cloud portfolios and to extend its reach into smaller companies. Now its new Voxel.net Agile Hosting services will let even tiny businesses configure and deploy IT infrastructure from an online configurator. Read more »
This quarter saw Amazon Web Services finally relaxing its public-cloud-only stance and launching services to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Meanwhile, Hadoop players moved to make their platforms more accessible to mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. A new quarterly report analyzes these trends and provides a near-term outlook. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amid all the OpenStack news this week, there is a feeling in some quarters that two years after Rackspace and NASA launched this attempt to counter Amazon Web Services and VMware, it may be too late for the effort to take hold. Read more »
Cloud platform provider Eucalyptus will use $30 million in new Series C funding to build its engineering and sales staffs, said CEO Marten Mickos.
The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners with contributions from Benchmark Capital, BV Capital and New Enterprise Associates. Read more »
Customers can now get early access to Rackspace’s OpenStack-based public cloud, slated to come online May 1. The news comes as the OpenStack Spring Conference kicks off in San Francisco. The company also unveiled OpenStack-based Cloud Block Storage and MySQL-based database services. Read more »
OpenStack filled in some important checkmarks this week by adding IBM and Red Hat to its roster of corporate backers. Eighteen companies are slated to become members of the evolving OpenStack Foundation which is expected to come online in the third quarter. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard is putting more of its chips on OpenStack as a key foundation for its upcoming public, private and hybrid cloud implementations. HP says its Converged Cloud will amalgamate existing HP technologies and OpenStack so applications can be managed uniformly across cloud types. Read more »
Two major tech players — IBM and Red Hat — are ready to sign on the dotted line to join OpenStack, sources said. That should go a long way to ease the pain of Citrix’s decision to set up CloudStack as an OpenStack rival. Read more »
Now that at least some of the smoke has cleared from the blockbuster news that Citrix is putting its CloudStack technology into the Apache process to compete with former partner OpenStack, here are 5 takeaways emerging from the latest cloud kerfuffle. Read more »
Citrix surprised the market this week by handing over its CloudStack software to the Apache Software Foundation, firing a shot over the bow of the competing open source project, OpenStack. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It looks like OpenStack won’t have the open-source cloud spotlight to itself anymore. Citrix has released the CloudStack software it acquired along with Cloud.com to the Apache Software Foundation, creating a competitive option to the OpenStack project of which Citrix was an early member. Read more »
Amazon’s Eucalyptus deal, which gives it a better hybrid cloud story and solidifies the dominance of the AWS API, plus the ever-growing AWS feature set, aren’t necessarily all good news to PaaS and other partners that run their services on Amazon infrastructure. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is indisputably the largest cloud service provider by far, and by all accounts. So what rivals could be No. 2 and maybe even give AWS a run for its money? Some of these names might surprise you. Read more »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Sony’s gaming arm is moving at least some of its online workloads from Amazon Web Services to the rival OpenStack cloud-computing stack implemented by Rackspace, according to a report. Such moves show a growing threat to AWS from OpenStack-based rivals. Read more »
New medium Elastic Compute Cloud instance fills the gap between — you guessed it — smaller and larger “medium” EC2 instances. That brings the total number of EC2 instances to 13 (for now) as Amazon keeps churning out options for every possible compute load. Read more »
Ray Ozzie, the former Microsoft executive charged with driving the development of Windows Azure, is evaluating Azure, along with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack, for use by Cocomo, his mysterious startup company. Read more »
When Amazon Web Services isn’t adding new services, it’s cutting prices on those it already offers. Late Monday, the company said it is cutting the price of its EC2, Amazon RDS, ElastiCache and Elastic MapReduce, according to a post on the AWS blog. 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 »
Cloud computing consultancy Cloudscaling is realigning its business around the open-source OpenStack framework, and it has a message for the world: If you want to use open-source software but operate like Amazon Web Services, we’re your man. Read more »
Joyent will use the cash to fund expansion of its cloud services and take on Amazon, the behemoth in that space. The company hosts its own public cloud services and sells infrastructure that customers use to field their own public or private cloud services. 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 »
2011 is surely a year that Hewlett-Packard would like to forget. It fired its second CEO in two years. It said it might sell its PC business and push WebOS phones and tablets only to back off on both moves. Here’s what HP needs to do in 2012. Read more »
How does the cloud market for the next year look? There will be no silver linings or lemonade. This research note, part of GigaOM Pro’s outlook for 2012, examines startups’ chances to challenge traditional enterprise IT practices, cloud pricing models, the true state of federated clouds, and how IT jobs will change in the coming months. Expect plenty of defensive M&A, cloud lock-in, phantom data discovery, outages, availability headaches, pricing confusion and job displacement over the next 12 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Rackspace has productized the OpenStack open-source software stack to run in customer data centers. This is an interesting private cloud move for Rackspace, a big cloud provider/managed services provider which now runs customers’ compute loads in its own data centers. Read more »
Managed-hosting provider turned cloud provider Internap now has an OpenStack-based cloud ready for public consumption, beating even OpenStack founder Rackspace to the punch. It’s a big day for OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing platform, but it’s likely only the first of many. 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 »
As the OpenStack project moves into its second year and more companies evaluate the open-source cloud technology, prospective users have some requests. Documentation, for one. A longer-term roadmap, for another. A more formal process for submitting and receiving feedback, for yet another. Read more »
The OpenStack community is pleased that RackSpace will relinquish control of the open-source cloud infrastructure effort, but many OpenStack Conference attendees want to see the details before they fully endorse the effort. The foundation is expected to be operational next year. Read more »
Rackspace will be giving up control over its OpenStack cloud computing project to an indepedent foundation. OpenStack is the open-source cloud computing platform that Rackspace and co-founder NASA began pushing last year, but it has been somewhat plagued by concerns over Rackspace’s control of the community. Read more »
In its new Diablo release, the OpenStack cloud OS gets perks including a dashboard to give IT a peak into what’s happening in the cloud, better authentication that ties into existing directories, and an API to ease integration into big, dynamic networks. Read more »
On Wednesday HP released its first two public cloud computing services for private beta, based in part on the open-source OpenStack code. The services, some details of which were leaked in the spring, are HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage. Read more »
OpenStack has attracted tremendous developer and partner support since launching a year ago. But according to Netflix’s chief cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, the open-source cloud project has its work cut out for it if it hopes to attract major clients like Netflix. Read more »
Dell has officially become a cloud provider with the launch of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud built atop VMware technology. The move is just the first in Dell’s three-pronged IaaS attack, which will soon include clouds based on the Microsoft Windows Azure and OpenStack platforms. Read more »
Eucalyptus Systems released the third generation of its pioneering private cloud computing software on Wednesday, complete with high-availability capabilities to ensure maximum uptime. Rumors of Eucalyptus’s demise have been circulating since OpenStack launched its open-source cloud project last summer, but the company isn’t slowing down. Read more »
