Never say never. VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation, a group initially backed by other industry giants as a counterweight to VMware’s server virtualization dominance. Intel and NEC are also on deck to join as Gold OSF members. Read more »
Rackspace CTO John Engates said the company’s new monitoring service, based on its Cloudkick acquisition two years ago, will give customers a better way to monitor the performance of their cloud resources. As more companies consider cloud deployment, tools like these are becoming essential. Read more »
Two weeks after launching its public OpenStack cloud, Rackspace follows suit with its private cloud implementation. The availability of both options will make it easier for customers interested in running hybrid cloud for their workloads, the company said. Read more »
The company behind the enterprise Linux market leader has now made preview code of its OpenStack cloud platform available for download. The final release is due next year. Rackspace, Internap, HP and others already have OpenStack deployed. Is IBM next? Read more »
While computing in the cloud can cost less than running servers in your enterprise data center, the question of how much less isn’t an easy one to answer. The cloud will get cheaper in the future, but not before these challenges are addressed and overcome. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
OpenStack has had a great week with eBay coming out as a user and Rackspace rebranding around the open source cloud project, but life isn’t all good in OpenStack world. There are still plenty of questions over its governance and development models that keep skepticism strong. Read more »
With its OpenStack cloud now ready for its closeup, Rackspace is rebranding itself to emphasize open cloud as opposed to its hosting roots. Company CMO Suaad Sait said the company will continue to stress “fanatical support” as a key differentiator. Read more »
The Rackspace Cloud is now based fully on the open source OpenStack platform. I recently spoke with CEO Lanham Napier, who discussed how his company doesn’t necessarily see Amazon Web Services as a direct competitor, and how OpenStack is changing his company’s entire business. Read more »
Amazon is offering customers unprecedented deals to stick with its cloud services. Some big companies can get annual “true up” deals while many report incentives to use reserved, rather than on-demand, instances. And Amazon is making an effort to keep startups in the fold. Read more »
For companies wanting to put workloads on a public cloud without having to sweat the details, Appfog has a bold proposition. It says its new PaaS will abstract out all that annoying tweaking and tuning for loads running on Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft or HP clouds. Read more »
A cadre of OpenStack developers is leaving Rackspace, taking their talents to Nebula, another OpenStack backer. Most of those leaving came to RackSpace via its acquisition of Anso Labs, in February, 2011. Read more »
Remember when there were just two or three cloud computing platforms to choose from, and just about as many cloud databases? Well, as clouds have proliferated, so have the database services built on top of them. Here are the available services and where they’re running. Read more »
The need for a way to plan and deploy cloud computing most efficiently is growing. The latest proof: RightScale’s acquisition of ShopForCloud, a free service that assesses the costs for cloud deployments before they’re rolled out. It works across multiple clouds and currencies. Read more »
A new ARM-based OpenStack cloud comes online this week, courtesy of HP, Calxeda and Canonical. The new “TryStack” facility gives developers who want to test out OpenStack clouds another flavor to try. The news comes out of the OSCON conference this week. Read more »
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The OpenStack cloud computing project turns two this week. That means the open-source project — which fancies itself the Linux of the cloud — is entering a critical stage of its development process. The opportunity is huge, but the challenges are too. Read more »
With the OpenStack project turning two years old soon amid what will no doubt be a ton of vendor-generated hoopla, Ignacio Llorente wants the world to know that the more mature OpenNebula open-source cloud continues to evolve, just with a lot less noise. Read more »
Google’s new infrastructure-as-a-service offering Compute Engine is a big, big deal in the world of cloud computing. Now that it’s a reality, here are five things I think Google Compute Engine means for the cloud industry. Read more »
Cloudability’s new Reserved Instances Explorer helps companies keep track of and best utilize their discounted Amazon reserved instances even across accounts. The tool can search Amazon EC2 instances by size, region, operating system and expiration date. Read more »
Satya Nadella, who leads Microsoft’s Azure effort, said he would welcome the chance to sit down with Rackspace president Lew Moorman to hash out how to make it easier to move workloads between the companies’ respective clouds and ease cloud lock-in fears. Read more »
Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace, said cloud providers that clone Amazon APIs miss the point of true cloud interoperability. Eucalyptus and other cloud providers clearly disagree. The debate will doubtless rage on this week at the GigaOM Structure conference. Read more »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In a recent blog post, NASA’s CIO Linda Cureton gives both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services a shout-out for helping NASA save money while serving its constituencies. But she made no mention of OpenStack, the cloud platform NASA helped bring to life. Read more »
Cloud storage player gets $13.6 million from newbie OpenView Venture Partners and existing investors with the conspicuous exception of Amazon, which ponied up $9M last time out. Sonian will use the money to bring CAD and medical images into its managed/searchable cloud service. Read more »
NASA, one of the two original backers of the OpenStack project, plans to stop actively developing software for that open-source cloud computing platform. NASA executive Karen Petraskas signaled the move at the Uptime Symposium this week, according to a published report. Read more »
The OpenStack army marches on. On Thursday, Hewlett-Packard put its public cloud to public beta. The services had been available to a limited number of customers up till now. The news comes a week after Rackspace launched its own OpenStack cloud. Read more »
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 »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Building sustainable data centers is hard — especially if you’re trying to do it in office space in Houston. This and a few less obvious lessons were the takeaways from a panel on sustainable data centers at the Open compute Summit on Wednesday. Read more »
Cloud computing and big data are in the enterprise to stay, but making the most of them presents challenges for IT decision makers. The future belongs to those companies who can work through legacy tools, ongoing security issues and the data scientist shortage. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
There are now more than half a dozen commercial Hadoop distributions in the market, and almost every enterprise with big data challenges is tinkering with the Apache Foundation-licensed software. A new report examines the key disruptive trends shaping the Hadoop platform market. 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 »
The recruiting ecosystem is changing, led by professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo and companies like Jobvite and BranchOut, which are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and democratic. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Eleven startups building the “plumbing of the internet” presented today for the TechStars Cloud demo day, and the common thread running through them all was making it easier to build app-like products and services as well as an obsession with data. Plus one cool consumer startup. Read more »
We’ve all heard the saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” It’s a simple, but profound message that many of us forget on a daily basis. When it comes to the cloud the same idea prevails, but using multiple clouds can have advantages. Read more »
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
