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 »
More granular cloud management features will make it easier for companies and service providers to set up group policies and lessen server sprawl in their environments, says Tier 3 CTO Jared Wray. 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 »
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 »
Cloud computing is at the top of virtually every CIO’s interest list and is expected to grow 126.5 percent over the next two years. A new report on GigaOM Pro details each sector of cloud computing and forecasts a shift toward hybrid models in the enterprise community. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It’s increasingly clear that no cloud is perfect. After public Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure outages — the latest just this week — more business customers are evaluating multiple-cloud deployments to build in redundancy and hedge their cloud computing bets. 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 »
AT&T has decided to build another cloud, this one focusing on developers and, ultimately, incorporating elements of the open-source OpenStack project. It’s an ambitious undertaking as AT&T tries to prove it can hang with the big boys in delivering cloud infrastructure to the masses. Read more »
Internap, the first company out of the chute with an OpenStack Compute–based public cloud, is buying Voxel for that company’s dedicated hosting and cloud services expertise. This could be a sign that the cloud-service consolidation that kicked off last year will continue into 2012. Read more »
Data center operator Telx will break ground soon on a 215,000-square-foot data center next to an existing facility in Clifton, N.J. The network-rich Clifton Cloud Connection Center will target customers that want to build hybrid cloud computing solutions. Read more »
Managed-hosting veteran and now enterprise cloud-computing provider Savvis is trying to woo even more big-name customers with its new Symphony Database service that features Oracle Database 11g and Microsoft SQL Server with their usual cumbersome enterprise licenses. Read more »
Virgin Media is using Savvis to launch business-oriented cloud services–minus the tech double talk–through its Virgin Media Business subsidiary. The company–which already offers broadband, fixed-line and mobile phone services to customers–promises jargon-free service to businesses that want to quickly test in-house applications or launch e-commerce services. Read more »
Global Gossip, an Australian telcom that specializes in internet access, chose Verizon’s Computing-as-a-Service as the engine for its cloud offering going forward. Verizon CaaS, sold by Verizon Global Wholesale, is just one of several Verizon cloud options after the company’s buying spree. Read more »
Internap, which till recently was in the business of providing interconnections and co-location services, started offering data center services and that has made it a likely target as telecoms eye buying into the fast growing datacenter business and tap into the cloud-computing gold rush. Read more »
At the end of last month Verizon acquired CloudSwitch, adding value to Verizon’s January acquisition of cloud data center provider Terremark. Around the world, big telecommunications providers such as AT&T, BT, Telstra and Verizon have been hard at work, diversifying and seeking new business opportunities as ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Web applications that are deployed in one or a few data centers can watch their bandwidth costs exceed their server and hosting costs as their applications scale up, according to a paper looking at what telecommunications companies can offer as cloud providers. Read more »
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 »
Virtustream, a cloud computing provider focused on hosting enterprise applications, has raised $10 million in a Series B round. The round was funded by existing investors Intel Capital, Columbia Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners, and TDFunds, which invested $49 million in Virtustream’s Series A round last year. Read more »
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Jim Ousley, CEO and Chairman of Savvis is having a great day. Yesterday Verizon agreed to buy a rival for $1.4 billion, and today he has joined a small group of companies that are suddenly sought after as acquisition targets. In response Savvis stock has traded up. 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 »
VMware is pushing an aggressive cloud computing strategy, but questions remain as to how successful the vendor can be in its quest to become the dominant player at every layer of the cloud stack. The challenge will be repeating its early hypervisor dominance by getting a first-mover advantage in advanced virtualization and cloud deployments. Other vendors, such as Microsoft, Citrix, and Red Hat, now provide additional cloud capabilities, and cloud-management solutions mean organizations need not even choose a virtualization vendor to complete their cloud transitions. These report examines VMware’s advantages in the cloud computing sector, its competitors, and why, in the end, the company may be a leader, but should not expect to dominate. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The second quarter of 2010 belonged to the little guys and the new guys. Almost across the board, from processors to virtualization to cloud services, relatively small vendors and startups had the market cornered on innovation and mindshare. And where there’s tinder in the forms of customer demand, products, funding and a greater societal movement toward environmentalism, something is bound to catch fire. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
An event more than a year in the making, Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-computing offering is finally available to the public. The software giant announced Azure in October 2008, made the service available as a limited Community Technology Preview (CTP) project shortly thereafter, and has been releasing pricing and product details at a regular clip in the meantime. Preview customers have been experimenting for free with a limited version of Azure, but as of April 1, 2010, all existing CTP customers who have not upgraded to the official version will have their accounts deleted. As the cliché goes, general availability is where the rubber meets the road for Microsoft and its vaunted cloud platform: If it can leverage its existing customer base and convince potential users to trust an oft-criticized software vendor with an entirely new delivery model, Microsoft could become a major force among cloud providers. While Windows Azure is a more-than-capable offering, trust could be an issue for a large number of developers and businesses that don’t believe Microsoft will deliver the openness so valued in the cloud world. Here’s a look at what Azure is, what it costs, and how it fits into (and will differentiate itself in) the market. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The growing ubiquity of the Internet is having a major influence on the video and software industries, which are using it to enable delivery of their products online.
Advanced infrastructures are required to deliver those contents efficiently. The Internet has been built on a best-effort model, but ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
