Samsung Ventures backs Cloudant with undisclosed investment
Cloudant gets backing from Samsung’s investment arm to help push its database as a service into large enterprises. Read more »
Piston Cloud raises $8M — from Cisco and others — to push enterprise OpenStack
photo: Piston Cloud
Piston Cloud will use its dough — from new investors including Cisco, Data Collective and Swiscomm Ventures — to bolster its “differentiated” technology that will run on the OpenStack cloud. Read more »
This week in cloud: Office 365 goes down and Microsoft stocks up Azure store
photo: Shutterstock / winui
Another week of high-profile outages may spook some prospective cloud users but Amazon Web Services strength shows the appeal of cloud. And Microsoft keeps adding Windows Azure options. Read more »
Data centers haven’t just changed computing, they’ve changed communities
photo: CC license by Flickr user IntelFreePress
Following the opening of data centers, communities in Oregon, Washington and Virginia have made new policies, built many new homes and prompted environmental activism. Read more »
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The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud
The last quarter of 2012 saw the rise of cloud-based databases, the cloud awakening of software giants such as HP, and many cloud outages that have left question marks. Enterprises found more IT dollars, and they will focus on the cloud for much of that spending. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Rackspace will build its own servers just like Facebook and Google do
photo: Rackspace
Rackspace’s bet on Open Compute has been taken to a new level as the hosting provider has decided to build its own servers — a move it hopes will save it up to 30 percent in costs. Read more »
Bad news for Amazon could be good news for “other” cloud providers
photo: Flickr / Editor B
Any cloud vendor that does not try to take advantage of Amazon Web Services’ US-East woes is probably guilty of malpractice. But most tread carefully — it’s fine to talk up your uptime and service, but vendors in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Read more »
This year in cloud: Amazon-almost-all-the-time and the other 5 top stories of 2012
photo: Flickr / karindalziel
Last year, AWS saw big success and big snafus; Superstorm Sandy prompted worry about data center location; legacy IT giants bought their way into SaaS; VMware regroups; the OpenStack crowd got their clouds off the ground; and Europe starts to buy into cloud. Read more »
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The role of converged infrastructure in the data center
Cloud computing’s increased performance cannot be sustained if the corresponding cost to the service provider (SP) for delivering this performance also increases. What service providers need is a way of delivering low latency, fast response, and increasing performance while minimizing the cost of the network. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gets more kudos, but challenges loom
photo: Amazon
Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon 16 years ago, is the second-best CEO on the planet, according to Harvard Business Review’s latest rankings. Last month Fortune named him its Business Person of the Year. Read more »
Financial services and the public cloud: Go or no go?
photo: Shutterstock / AshDesign
Most financial services companies officially forbid the use of public cloud (aka Amazon Web Services) completely. But the forward thinkers among them — like State Street — keep their options — and minds — open about such deployment in the future. Read more »
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How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look
photo: Facebook
The “mobile first” philosophy is under way today. That means a new generation of mobile-centric data centers will arise over the next three years, with chips, servers, and power architectures customized for mobile workloads. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map
The way the industry will use cloud-computing technology in 2013 will require following the existing adoption patterns and trends into the New Year. Those trends include the rise of standards, big data’s role in the cloud, industry-specific clouds, security, and more. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Cleantech and investment in 2013
In 2013 cleantech investing will move toward companies serving unsubsidized markets where software plays a role in reducing power consumption. In many ways this is a return to plays for energy efficiency, and there’s still money to be made from business models built around saving energy. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
This week in cloud: Rackspace and Cloudant team; OpenNebula updates
photo: Shutterstock / winui
Cloudant aims for cloud ubiquity with Rackspace partnership; OpenNebula offers private testing cloud inside Amazon Web Services; and Dell vows (late) OpenStack-based public cloud, partners with Inktank on Ceph storage. Read more »
What we’ll see in 2013 in cloud computing
Next year, “the cloud” will finally be ready for enterprise workloads and big companies will finally start moving them there. Data centers will stop being enclosed by walls and those are just two of GigaOM’s 5 big cloud predictions. Read on for more. Read more »
This week in cloud: Rackspace whoops, sizing Amazon cloud and more
photo: Flickr / karindalziel
Cloud news you can use this week: rough times for Rackspace; a look at Amazon Web Services revenue; EMC-VMware come clean (kind of) about spinoff; and Heroku spiffs up its add-on marketplace for developers. Read more »
Amazon’s dead serious about the enterprise cloud
photo: Amazon
All the talk about big companies not wanting to put workloads on Amazon Web Services is hot air. The biggest companies already deploy workloads beyond test-and-dev on AWS. The question is: can AWS sustain that momentum as new options come online? Read more »
What HP’s cloud chief wants you to know about HP’s cloud
photo: HP
Zorawar Biri Singh, who leads HP’s cloud effort, says the company’s vision aligns nicely with what enterprises want. HP will fill in check marks to its OpenStack-based game plan next month but the big question is whether HP’s brand still carries weight. Read more »
Nebula promotes NASA vet to oversee OpenStack effort
Jesse Andrews, an OpenStack veteran who’s done stints at NASA, ANSO Labs and Rackspace, will lead Nebula’s plug-and-play OpenStack development effort as it nears launch, the company said. Read more »
Amazon adds down-under presence with new Asia-Pacific region in Sydney
photo: Flickr / jimmyharris
Amazon is adding a new region based in Sydney to offer lower-latency services to customers in Australia and New Zealand. The addition brings total regions worldwide to nine at a time when cloud competitors with global reach are coming online. Read more »
This week in cloud: hedging Amazon’s regions and Rackspace seeks deals
photo: Shutterstock / Oleksiy Mark
In the wake of several glitches at the Amazon Web Services’ US-East data centers in recent months, RedisToGo opens shop in US-West, will others follow? Also in cloud news: Rackspace and Savvis seek critical mass for their new cloud service offerings. Read more »
Rackspace: In search of really huge accounts
With its OpenStack-based cloud coming online, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier says the company can take on Amazon Web Services for the biggest of big accounts, provided those accounts want the sort of value-add service Rackspace provides. Read more »
Amazon speeds up EBS storage input-output — again
Another busy week for Amazon Web Services which added new compute instance types, cut prices on others, and upped the limit on provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes. Amazon is getting busier as more public cloud options come on line. Read more »
Rackspace versus Amazon: The big data edition
Rackspace is busy building a Hadoop service, giving the company one more avenue to compete with cloud kingpin Amazon Web Services. However, the two services — along with several others on the market — highlight just how different seemingly similar cloud services can be. Read more »
This week in cloud: Big outages, OpenNebula updates, Yottabyte debuts
photo: Flickr / karindalziel
It was a busy week in cloud, bookended by Amazon and Google App Engine outages. In between those snafus, OpenNebula updated its cloud and stealthy startup Yottabyte launched technology that it says will let companies yoke commodity hardware into clouds of their own. Read more »
Rackspace breaks out block storage with disk and SSD options
photo: Flickr / getinet
Rackspace’s new OpenStack-powered Cloud Block Storage comes in spinning disk and faster SSD tiers and lets customers mix and match block size with compute instances as needed, says company CTO John Engates. Read more »
CloudStack strikes back in the battle of open-source clouds
Cisco and CA are working with Citrix to support its CloudPlatform implementation of CloudStack. The news, out of Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, comes as a raft of OpenStack news hits the wire. Read more »
New OpenStack clouds mean something for everyone
photo: Flickr / JoeInSouthernCA
If there isn’t an OpenStack cloud you fancy, wait a second, there’s more — a lot more — in the pipeline. Cloudscaling, Metacloud and Dreamhost will all preview their take on the open-source cloud this week at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego. Read more »
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Examining open hybrid cloud options for the enterprise
A major cloud trend over the past decade has been open source, but at present there is no one standard all providers obey. But anyone looking for a longer-term alternative to AWS now has two exciting new prospects: OpenStack and OpenShift. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Top 8 questions for the OpenStack Summit
photo: Flickr / karindalziel
If the OpenStack Summit is anywhere near as dramatic as the events leading up to it, it will be a really good show. As the open-source cloud effort transitions from a Rackspace-dominated move to a true community effort, here are 8 big questions. Read more »
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Metered IT: the path to utility computing
Agility is increasingly recognized as one of the main advantages of cloud computing, but an important aspect of agility is choice: the choice to run computing jobs in house, in a private cloud, or on public cloud services from the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, and a growing number of other providers. To exercise choice, customers require information and the ability to compare the costs and benefits of competing solutions. This report explores opportunities for accurately measuring computing resources and their use, simplifying the comparison of competing cloud offerings and opening the door to charging models based more closely on actual consumption. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Change.org: 20M users but not a single server
photo: Flickr / Ryan Resella
The online social networking platform for promoting social change handles more than 20 million users, but has a tiny in-house IT footprint thanks to its use of cloud services from Amazon and Rackspace. The key thing, says infrastructure manager Kyle VanderBeek, is flexibility. Read more »
The dark side of OpenStack
photo: Flickr / karindalziel
Buyer beware when it comes to adopting OpenStack — or any open-source cloud — according to a newly released Gartner report. Long story short: evaluate OpenStack just like you’d assess a commercial offering, cautions analyst Lydia Leong. Read more »
OpenStack gets real
The OpenStack Foundation is official as of Wednesday with a new 24-person board, $10 million in funding, 5,600 members, and a mandate to promote flexible open-source cloud infrastructure. Question: Will the foundation echo the success of Eclipse or the failure of OpenOffice? Read more »
5 things you need to know about cloud in Europe
photo: Shutterstock / Iakoy Kalinin
Yes, cloud adoption in Europe hasn’t happened as fast as in the US. But despite the difficult economy, there’s considerable interest in cloud on the continent. The market bears watching and here are 5 things you should know about it. Read more »
ProfitBricks says it can out-Amazon Amazon’s cloud
As ProfitBricks rolls out its scale-up infrastructure as a platform in the U.S. this week, it says it can offer more powerful instances to customers cheaper than market leader Amazon Web Services. That’s a tall order, but an intriguing one. Read more »
Why winning in OpenStack means knowing your buyers (and your code)
OpenStack is hot, but determining which companies are best poised to capitalize on its promise is hard to do. Prabhakar Gopalan assesses what hardware vendors, software vendors and service will have to do if they want to be among the big OpenStack winners. Read more »
Finally! VMware joins the OpenStack Foundation, this time for real
After weeks of back and forth and considerable anxiety, VMware, Intel and NEC are now Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation. The news comes out of Friday afternoon’s OpenStack board meeting. Read more »
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Emerging trends in the non-relational database market
Observers of database technology should look closely at the non-relational database market to see where the most interesting growth lies in the world of applied information storage and retrieval. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
