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 »
With more than 45 million users already connected to his company’s cloud storage service, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston knows he has an infrastructure challenge ahead of him. That, Houston says, is a big reason Dropbox bought Cove, which brings with it Facebook engineering cred. Read more »
Facebook, the social networking giant that’s already made big waves with its open-source server plans, is now taking on storage in a very big way, according to a published report. The hardware will help Facebook keep up with the exploding demand of its 840 million users. Read more »
Tablets represent the next evolution in the advancement of mobile computing, and by 2015 or 2016, the tablet will begin to replace the laptop and the desktop operating systems market will begin to level off or perhaps decline. Our latest forecast examines these trends in detail. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you bought a Mac last year, you probably have a Thunderbolt port on your computer doing nothing right now. As of Wednesday, however, Seagate’s GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter is available to order, which means you could soon be transferring data to GoFlex drives at lightning speeds. Read more »
Apple CEO Tim Cook said iCloud “is not just a product, it’s a strategy for the next decade.” What will that mean for a company trying to lead us all into the post-PC world? We look at possible future applications of cloud-based services from Apple. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is rolling out a new feature called Storage Gateway that lets companies upload data to its cloud-storage services directly from their on-premise storage systems. This should enable cloud cloud backup and cloud bursting without worries about latency as data traverses the Internet. Read more »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. It’s designed to better CloudSigma’s price-performance ratio overall, which will bring in more and bigger customers that want to do things in its cloud that they can’t do elsewhere. Read more »
Targeting customers demanding more-reliable and efficient Hadoop clusters to power their big data efforts, NetApp has partnered with Cloudera to deliver a Hadoop storage system called the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop. It combines Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management software with a NetApp-built RAID architecture. Read more »
Scale-out SAN vendor Coraid raised $50 million in additional venture funding in a Series C round led by Crosslink Capital, joined by other new investors Seagate, Kinetic Ventures, and Silverlake AG. That brings Coraid’s total VC take to $85 million in 7 years. Read more »
The rapid growth in storage and processing power will put a big strain on the capabilities of the cloud and our wireless networks. But Jeff Belk of ICT168 Capital believes that there is opportunity to be found if we look both forward and backward. 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 »
EMC, having spent billions on acquisitions over the last few years, ain’t done yet. At the top of the shopping list is more security, more management and more data analytics know-how, EMC’s Pat Gelsinger told reporters today at an event at Gillette Stadium. Read more »
Fusion-io has released a pair of new components that more than double the capacity and improve performance of its previous-generation products on the latest generation of NAND flash. Enterprise flash providers must keep up with short consumer innovation cycles while operating within long enterprise buying cycles. Read more »
With Apple’s special iPhone announcement event coming up Tuesday, Vodafone Germany may have pressed the start button a little early on device listings. Its site featured six varieties of “iPhone 4S” in addition to existing iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS models Monday morning. Read more »
New reports surfaced late Thursday night that the next iPhone could come in a 64 GB flavor. A doubling of internal storage is a reasonable expectation for Apple’s iPhone 5, but how much of an impact will more storage capacity have on your buying decision? 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 »
Fusion-io, a newly public company that makes flash memory components for servers on Monday released the results of its acquisition of IO Turbine, a mere three weeks after it acquired the startup. The combination of the two companies has resulted in a product called ioCache. Read more »
VMware has transformed the enterprise computing model more than any other company in the past decade. Now, with the latest release of vSphere containing several new storage features, VMware is set to disrupt storage. Its parent company, EMC, and NetApp may want to stay alert. Read more »
Amazon has been adding all kinds of features to attract enterprise users to its cloud computing platform, but with it’s new caching product, it’s returning to web developers. Perhaps with an influx of platforms and OpenStack, Amazon realizes it needs to concentrate on its core. 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 »
One of the most dreaded questions in any household is “what’s for dinner?” The question is fraught with complex issues of family responsibilities, finances, and personal preferences. While it won’t do the dishes, iPhoto has become an indispensable meal planning tool in my family. Read more »
It looks like Zynga’s infrastructure strategy is rubbing off on gaming startups. Digital Chocolate, purveyor of social games such as Millionaire City and Pro MMA Fighter, is following in Zynga’s footsteps of launching games in the cloud, then bringing them back in house when demand levels. Read more »
Nimbus Data Systems today rolled out its second-generation platform and announced online auction giant eBay as a major customer. In fact, eBay has deployed a non-trivial 100TB of Nimbus gear. Have we finally reached the inflection point for primary flash storage? Read more »
All iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion users can get 5 GB of storage in iCloud for free, but those who need more storage can pay $20 per year for 15 GB, $40 per year for 25 GB, or $100 per year for 55 GB. Read more »
Fresh off its $50 million in funding, note-taking and memory service Evernote is preparing for its first-ever developer conference next month, where it will outline its broader strategy and how it plans on becoming a 100-year company by building a productivity platform. Read more »
[OpenStack] looks not only like an open-source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space. As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come a […] Read more »
Less than two years after open sourcing the design of the 67TB “storage pods” that underpin its cloud backup service, Backblaze is at it again. This morning, it shared on its blog specs for a new, 135TB storage pod that costs only $7,384. Read more »
Nimble Storage, a startup selling flash-equipped storage appliance to small businesses, has closed a $25 million Series D round. Nimble’s approach is interesting in that it pushes flash almost more for convenience than for performance, which distinguishes it from high-end plays like Violin Memory. Read more »
Apple quietly introduced its first Thunderbolt peripheral gear to the online store early Tuesday, and it’s a $49 Thunderbolt cable that connects Macs using the new high-speed, low-latency I/O standard either to third-party drives and accessories, or to other Thunderbolt-equipped Macs. Read more »
Cloud computing depends on the idea that we will have ample and cheap bandwidth that will allow us to access various types of information and services on any kind of device, anywhere. This need only goes up as we start living in an on-demand world. Read more »
Hitachi unveiled its G-Connect wireless media storage drive, designed for use with mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone. It follows the example set by Seagate’s GoFlex battery-powered mobile streaming hard drive, and both represent an alternative to cloud computing that’s gaining momentum. Read more »
Apple unveiled new Time Capsule wireless router / hard drive combo options today, including a 3 TB version that ups the maximum storage available for the device. It’s a sign that despite its move to the cloud, Apple still respects the average Mac users’ local storage needs. 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 »
San Jose, Calif.-based storage startup MapR, which provides a high-performance alternative for the Hadoop Distributed File System, will serve as the storage component for EMC’s forthcoming Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition Hadoop distribution. Cloudera announced an HDFS partnership of its own with compression expert RainStor. Read more »
So far, tablet computers have been more useful as “data consuming” tools, rather than genuine work devices. One stumbling block is the inability to easily edit documents stored in the cloud. Soonr is the first service to offer integrated editing of Office documents for the iPad. Read more »
As a rule of thumb, systems can grow ten times under their current architecture or paradigm, and then they must be re-architected. This 10X effect causes old technologies to become obsolete, new ones to emerge and underlies the massive shift to cloud computing. Read more »
Yesterday, Cisco and NetApp announced more than 150 customers have adopted their joint FlexPod converged infrastructure architecture, a sign that might point to a falling out between Cisco and its VCE partners, EMC and VMware. Rumor has it Cisco isn’t happy with that arrangement. Read more »
A day after Twitter experienced its “CNN moment,” John Adams , the messaging service’s operations engineer, posted a nice slide show on how the company has scaled and the tools it uses. Entitled, “Talk Cloudy to Me” the slide show reviews old insights and offers new ones. Read more »
