Amazon Web Services has introduced its latest instance — an 88-core, 240 GB SSD, 244 GB RAM and 10 GbE behemoth designed for real-time analytics with software like SAP HANA, as well as demanding scientific workloads. Read more »
The usual suspects Amazon and VMware made significant announcements in cloud in the third quarter, while Hadoop remained the talk of the town in big data. Emerging trends in software-defined networking and flash storage stirred up lots of M&A and venture investment in the quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Flash storage startup Nimble Storage has raised another $40 million in preparation for an IPO within the next two years. The company, which builds appliances fusing both flash and hard disk drives, is part of a hot flash market that’s raking in venture capital. Read more »
Etsy shared the details of its hardware architecture on Friday, showing the world a whole lot of Supermicro servers running everything from web servers to Hadoop. At this point, software is the name of the game at webscale, so hardware openness is just welcome community service. Read more »
A Mountain View, Calif., storage startup called Tintri has raised $25 million for its virtualization-focused flash storage appliances. The appliances, called VMstore, mix hard-disk and solid-state drives and promise better storage performance than traditional systems for virtualized applications. We wrote about Tintri last summer as the […] Read more »
EMC has bought Israeli flash-storage startup XtremIO for $430 million, according to Israeli news site Globes. The acquisition was expected after rumors began swirling in late April that EMC was courting the company, which sells a storage composed entirely of flash. Read more »
Although the storage world is awaiting an M&A explosion if EMC actually acquires flash startup XtremIO, Violin Memory and Fusion-io are keeping the hits coming in the meantime. Fusion-io is bringing in new software partners, while Violin brought in another $30 million. 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 »
Violin Memory is a force to be reckoned with in the storage world. It’s not just the industry shift toward solid-state drives replacing slower, less-efficient hard disk drives that’s driving Violin’s value through the roof, though, it’s also the company’s very strategic set of investors. Read more »
Morphlab’s latest mCloud uses uses all solid-state disks while also claiming Amazon Web Services-like pricing. The company’s newest offering, which is part of a partnership with Dell, targets service providers that want to add private cloud computing capabilities that interoperate with AWS as needed. 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 »
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 »
SolidFire, which wants to bring all-solid-state storage to cloud providers serving you, raised an additional $25 million in venture capital bringing its total to $37 million. New investors in this second round include Data Domain veterans as well as former Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopolous. Read more »
Nutanix just closed a $25 million Series B round for its system that puts computing and storage on the same node, allowing companies to scale their storage layer without investing in a SAN. Khosla Ventures led the round, along with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Blumberg Capital. Read more »
Violin Memory released a new line of all-flash-memory storage arrays yesterday, but my recent discussion with CEO Don Basile was all about the company’s future, which he says includes an upcoming IPO and possibly a flash acquisition or two. Read more »
In a Silicon Valley technology landscape where young hotshots tend to make their marks with innovative new startups, Farah Giga is different. After nine years in various mangement positions at Hitachi Data Systems and HP, Giga, now 27, has joined Valhalla Partners as a principal. Read more »
VMworld can be a lot to digest, but it also can be a good barometer of where IT is and where it’s going. A couple days removed from the show, I gave some thought to the interesting trends I noticed and the insightful discussions I had. Read more »
The latest idea from Facebook on how to revolutionize the data center is elegant in its simplicity: put a switch on hard-disk drives that slows their speed when their data is no longer hot. I wonder if Facebook will take up the cause and build it. Read more »
Nutanix is counting on mid-size enterprises to drive its adoption of its converged infrastructure appliance. CEO Dheeraj Pandey’s stance is that SMEs have the budgets, the IT demands and the right cultures to justify taking chances on new approaches to infrastructure. He could be onto something. Read more »
New types of storage technology will be needed in order to shift cloud storage from a backup service to a primary function, according to a panel made up of storage entrepreneurs and execs at Structure 2011 in San Francisco on Thursday. Read more »
Cloud storage startup SolidFire is giving cloud providers early access to its solid-state-disk-based systems for storing customers’ data. The Atlanta-based company is building SSD-based appliances that it says will help ease the migration of enterprise applications into the cloud by significantly boosting storage performance. Read more »
Flash-storage component manufacturer Fusion-io is trading well above its initial public offering price, signaling that investors believe solid-state drives might actually live up to their promise to displace large quantities of spinning disks in enterprise data centers. Read more »
It looks as if solid-state cache specialist Fusion-io’s IPO on Thursday has investors thinking big about the possibilities of flash storage in the enterprise. Flash array maker Violin Memory raised a $40 million round from strategic public-market investors, and a software company called VeloBit emerged from stealth. Read more »
According to Violin Memory CEO Donald Basile, Fusion-io’s proposed IPO is just the start of what should be a very busy era for flash. Basile, whose previous job was as chairman and CEO of Fusion-io, sees an impending multi-billion-dollar market, spurred in part by Larry Ellison. Read more »
There’s a lot of talk about speed today: SSDs will speed consumer devices, China’s new supercomputer is the fastest ever, Microsoft AppFabric for Windows Azure will get upgrades faster than on-premise users, and SAP wants to speed up the resolution of its lawsuit with Oracle. Read more »
