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 »
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 »
Big data now touches everything from enterprises to smart-meter startups, while Hadoop is fast becoming the leading tool to analyze that data, and debates around privacy abound. GigaOM Pro analysts offer insights on what to consider when it comes to big data decisions for your business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With Microsoft Hyper-V 3 coming down the pike, and Red Hat revving its KVM push, VMware executives continue to tout vSphere as the best way to virtualize everything — including the mission-critical databases and ERP systems that power businesses of all sizes. Read more »
Fans of enterprise social networking tools tout their ability to break down silos and pierce the executive bubble. But as hot a topic as these tools are, not everyone is a fan. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst thinks they’re “garbage,” claiming you can’t buy collaboration. 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 »
Amazon, the market leader, plays at the infrastructure level. But there was a lot of talk at Cloud Connect about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, where cloud folks think the real action will ultimately lie. The company will soon have to address these shifts as well as trends ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Large data centers are increasingly moving to converged infrastructure, and most of the chatter has been about this slick, new hardware. But it also has deep implications for enterprise employees and the CIOS and managers that must retrain them — or do away with them altogether. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Red Hat says its new POSIX-compliant virtual storage appliance will make it easier for IT shops to move legacy Unix applications to Amazon’s public cloud. The scale-out NAS appliance, based on Gluster technology, also replaces Centos with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Read more »
The most striking thing about Amazon’s Q4 filing was that head count was up a whopping 67 percent to 56,200 full- and part-time employees, compared with 33,700 from a year ago, according to Amazon’s 8-K filing; 67 percent is a very big number — even for Amazon. Read more »
DynamoDB, AWS’ latest effort to rock the technology establishment, has many implications for other players in the big data and cloud computing markets. A new GigaOM Pro research note examines just who is affected, and how. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The free version of Jaspersoft’s analytics software will be offered as part of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service. As Red Hat, Microsoft, Heroku, and Cloud Foundry PaaSes compete, watch for them to add more services and capabilities just as they’ve raced to add language support. Read more »
Windows Azure is an ambitious PaaS that doesn’t get a lot of love from web developers. Here are four things Microsoft must do to make it a more compelling option for the new-age, non-.NET developers who now flock to Amazon Web Services or another PaaS. Read more »
Red Hat is bringing more cloud-based automation to Java developers in an update to its OpenShift Platform as a Service which integrates the JBoss tool suite and supports two open-source tools that will shift more of the programming workload to the cloud itself. 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 »
Red Hat’s planned $136 million purchase of Gluster should give the enterprise Linux leader a strong play in the cloud-inflected world of scale-out storage. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions by vendors trying to stake a claim in the storage of unstructured data. Read more »
Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux. But now, like Microsoft itself, it obsesses more on cloud infrastructure than lowly operating systems. Questions about Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS and CloudForms IaaS dominated last night’s earnings call, but CEO Jim Whitehurst was cautious on revenue predictions. Read more »
Mu Dynamics new service allows developers building in the cloud to load test their apps for as little as a $1. The company has a product for ISPs that shows how 1 million people playing FarmVille might affect their networks, is branching out into the cloud. Read more »
AppFog, the company formerly known as PHP Fog, has raised $8 million in a healthy second round of funding for the year-old company. The company’s name change coincides with the funding and hints at a future supporting languages beyond PHP. Read more »
Cloud computing startup CumuLogic is making its Platform-as-a-Service software available for beta users that want to deploy it on their own infrastructure. Until now, CumuLogic’s Jave-only PaaS software had only been available for beta users running it atop the Amazon Web Services cloud. Read more »
Here are three lessons to take away from the $10.5 million funding round for Java-centric Platform-as-a-Service startup CloudBees: Be specialized, inclusive, and first. 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 »
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. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If there’s one thing that can make the idea of platform as a service (PaaS) succeed, it’s this: make it easy for developers. That was the overall consensus from a panel of execs working on the platform as a service at Structure 2011. Read more »
In five short years, cloud computing has gone from being a quaint technology to a major catchphrase. Amazon and others are now moving at Internet speed, trying to offer better security, faster networking, more compliance and a host of other products that are attempting to meet the demands of startups, consumers and enterprises alike. On GigaOM’s Structure channel, we cover the gear and software that comprises the cloud, the services and the people who are changing the industry. Now for the first time, we’ve decided to condense that knowledge into the Structure 50, a list of the 50 companies that are influencing how the cloud and infrastructure evolves. All of these players, big or small, have people, technology or strategies that will help shape the way the cloud market is developing and where it will eventually end up. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon, Rackspace, Cloudera, China Telecom and SeaMicro. For a full list of companies, and to see the Structure 50 as one full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Red Hat today is launching two new cloud computing offerings, IaaS software called CloudForms and PaaS software called OpenShift. CloudForms helps users configure, deploy and manage virtual resources, and OpenShift is Red Hat’s incarnation of the Makara technology that it bought it November. Read more »
Red Hat is expanding its set of cloud capabilities by announcing the JBoss Enterprise Data Grid. The product gives customers an in-memory data grid that scales along with the server infrastructure and provides a high-performance cache to offload the demand on the primary database. Read more »
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. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With each passing day, cloud computing — and the platform-as-a-service space, in particular — looks a lot more like a large software vendor’s game than it does a space where plucky startups might actually be able to establish a presence and remain independent for the long run. Read more »
VMware has entered the cloud game by offering an open-source package called Cloud Foundry, a platform as a service that should strike fear in the hearts of its compeitors, especially the likes of Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Rackspace. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Oracle and Red Hat once again reported very impressive quarterly earnings in the past week. And as cloud computing really starts to take hold over the next few years, Red Hat will see even bigger growth, while Oracle — unless it changes its tune — will ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two very different vendors – Oracle and Red Hat – once again reported very impressive quarterly earnings in the past week. However, as cloud computing starts to take hold over the next few years, Red Hat will see even bigger growth, while Oracle might see revenues plummet. Read more »
Red Hat just announced another solid fiscal quarter, continuing a trend of increased operating system and middleware market share that carried on even through the worst of the current recession. According to CEO Jim Whitehurst, customers know that buying Red Hat means “future-proofing” their IT investments. Read more »
Private-cloud pioneer Eucalyptus is furthering its partner-centric growth strategy by partnering with Red Hat. Possibly more important than the announcement, though, is the timing: Eucalyptus is not the only internal-cloud software on the market, and it needs to win back its space in the spotlight. Read more »
Heroku’s $212 million exit made headlines this week, but Ruby is just part of the emerging PaaS landscape. From Java to Python, providers that can support the gamut of web-programming languages will thrive, which is why everyone from Salesforce.com to VMware is getting into the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
PaaS – Java PaaS, specifically – was the word of the week in cloud computing. Suddenly, it seems, an area once devoid of options with swimming with choices. Now, it’s not a matter of who’ll step up and offer a Java-capable PaaS service, but which approaches ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The cloud computing world is in for yet another shakeup: Red Hat has acquired platform-as-a-service (PaaS) startup Makara. The purchase immediately vaults Red Hat into the role of cloud provider, but also gives Red Hat the means to sell its PaaS vision across the cloud landscape. Read more »
When patent troll Acacia sued Red Hat in 2007, Acacia’s patents were invalidated by the court, and all software developers had one less legal risk to cope with. So, why is the outcome of Red Hat’s next tangle with Acacia being kept secret? Read more »
For years, Linux has grown at the expense of expensive Unix like Solaris, but a new study shows Linux gaining at Windows expense for the first time, and not because Linux is cheaper. Rather, survey respondents cite Linux’s “technical superiority,” which may be a hard argument for Microsoft to counter. Read more »
