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One was the Red Hat Summit. The other was Google I/O. Guess which was which.

The two shows spotlighted the dichotomy of the tech between stolid-if-productive companies that furnish technologies (or at least support and service of technologies) that businesses pay for. The other represents dot.com-era consumer-oriented ventures with gobs of dough, but not much of it deriving from actual product sales. (Online advertising is a whole other matter.)

Google I/O day one was marked by a bit of chaos — the keynote kicked off with half the attendees still milling around outside . No such snafus for the orderly Red Hat crowd. Google had lots of virtual reality fun and games after hours. Red Hat had cocktails at Fenway Park. Neither is good or bad, just different.

Red Hat brought out Red Hat Storage, as expected. It brings acquired Gluster technology firmly into the fold to form another layer of the Red Hat stack. And it updated its OpenShift PaaS roadmap. Google showed off slick new tablets and Google Glasses and debuted its  infrastructure as a service which, arguably will end up competing with Red Hat but more importantly represents a full-on assault on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud monolith. In fact, Amazon, with its public cloud might, may be one thing these two companies have in common — Amazon’s coming after both of them.

Contending with Amazon’s cloud

Paul Cormier,  Red Hat’s president of worldwide products and technologies addressed the Amazon-as-threat issue in an interview this week but said it will be hard for Amazon to lure enterprise applications into its cloud.

“If I’m a three-person startup and want to get online fast, great, I’ll do AWS. I’d be crazy to buy hardware and software to do that. But as an enterprise spread across multiple sites, I have to worry about security, reliability — all the ‘ilities,’” he said. “The risk with the public cloud stuff is you get locked in the same way you used to get locked into the Suns, the DECs, the HPs of the world.”

Still, I have to note, that other enterprise tech players, including HP, are painfully aware of Amazon. Folks who say Amazon won’t target — and win — some enterprise workloads — should remember that most people never foresaw that an online book seller would become one of the biggest tech powers on the planet.

Amazon won’t ever be an enterprise tech supplier? Never say never.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Red Hat’s official stream

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Oracle’s rumored NoSQL database made its splashy debut, along with Oracle’s Big Data Appliance, on the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 main stage Monday. Less trumpeted was news that MySQL, the venerable open-source database, got an update that vows to speed query and improve cluster capabilities.

The update could allay concerns among the MySQL faithful who worried that Oracle’s ownership of MySQL (through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems) meant it would not be enhanced and supported.  Many younger, web-oriented companies gravitated to MySQL, or other open-source databases instead of Oracle 11G, because of price and licensing issues.

This early-release of MySQL 5.6.3 claims a faster MySQL optimizer to speed query performance and diagnostics. In internal testing, some query execution times are claimed to be three times faster.

MySQL VP of Engineering Tomas Ulin outlined the update, as well as another for MySQL Cluster 7.2 which adds multi-site clustering capability, at the show. While the existing MySQL Cluster let users distribute whole clusters to remote data centers, the new multi-site option lets them split data nodes themselves across data centers. That lets users replicate updates synchronously between data centers without having to modify their application or schema.

Ulin also told show attendees that the company is pushing to make MySQL a better Windows citizen, according to reports.  The goal is to put the Windows experience on par with (or even better) than it is on Linux.

MySQL has been cross-platform for years but is usually associated with Linux distributions.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Severud

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The Exalytics box — the younger sibling of the Exadata database machine and Exalogic middleware-and-application server — was front and center during Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s opening keynote.

“I’ve been reading about this [unstructured data] in the press,” Ellison said. “I’m proud to say our Exalytics machine not only handles relational data, not only multidimensional data, [but] also analyzes unstructured data at the speed of thought. Nothing is faster. There is no response time.”

Ellison’s mantra was “parallel everything” when it came to Exalytics, as well as Oracle’s recently announced Sparc Supercluster, which he said melds Exadata database and Exalogic application perks into a single Sparc/Solaris machine.

While there was no explicit mention of Hadoop or NoSQL per se,  Exalytics — and its promised ability to handled unstructured as well as structured data — is clearly a big part of Oracle’s big data play.  Oracle is expected to talk more this week how its database and middleware can coexist with and complement those big data technologies.

Exalytics is powered by 40 Intel Xeon cores and relies on Infiniband pipes to connect it as needed with Exadata. The secret software sauce is in-memory database technology that came with Oracle’s acquisition of TimesTen six years ago and the multi-dimensional database expertise from Essbase, which Oracle acquired with Hyperion two years later.

“When you have [an] in-memory database working in parallel, it’s important to get the right data in memory. We have a heuristic adaptive in-memory cache… that tracks this. As different people ask different questions, it migrates different data in-memory. It keeps popular query results in cache,” Ellison noted.

In-memory databases, and their fast response times, are a battleground as Oracle, SAP, IBM and others try to claim supremacy in the burgeoning realm of business intelligence. There is no shortage of huge data stores, but a huge demand remains for tools to help companies better parse and apply this data profitably. That’s why SAP bought BusinessObjects and Oracle bought Hyperion.

Accessing data in standard relational databases can be slowed by disk I/O issues. If the data remains in memory (or in cache), access is much faster. SAP is pushing its HANA technology to address speed-sensitive BI applications and SAP also bulked up its in-memory capabilities by buying Sybase.

Given Oracle’s huge database market share, it’s hard to bet against the company in this arena although both SAP and IBM are strong contenders. And Ellison has said Oracle’s ability to incorporate new data types into its core offerings is a key advantage.

On Oracle’s first-quarter earnings call two weeks ago, Ellison told analysts object-oriented databases were supposed to replace relational databases years ago. “What actually happened is that object database capabilities got integrated into the Oracle database,” he said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Eddie Awad.

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Expect a lot of cloud talk out of the conference and more on hardware-software bundles a la the company’s Exadata, Exalogic and new database appliance. But Oracle still has a lot to prove on the cloud front.

Oracle’s cloud problem goes back at least two years, when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison famously mocked cloud computing hype at a Churchill Club event. “What do you think Google runs on? Water vapor?” he asked. “How about databases, and operating systems, and microprocessors and the Internet?”

As colleague Derrick Harris wrote for GigaOM Pro at the time, Ellison showed a lack of understanding of true cloud benefits:

Cloud computing is about far more than simply serving applications via the network. It is, at the least, about pay-per-use billing, process automation, on-demand provisioning of additional resources and increasing efficiency through multi-tenant architectures. Many believe cloud computing is about openness. If it does not increase flexibility and efficiency while decreasing extraneous costs, it is not cloud computing.

In order to establish some cloud cachet, Oracle needs customers — e-commerce companies, ISVs, vendors — to concentrate their cloud workloads on Oracle’s high-end Exalogic or Exadata  super-servers running Oracle’s high-margin database and middleware. But most new cloud-oriented startups steer clear of pricey anything, opting for cheaper but productive open-source databases and commodity hardware: the kind of products Ellison doesn’t care to sell.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, illustrated this point yesterday when he told Business Insider that Oracle holds no allure for these next-gen companies:

Ten years ago it was a joke: you’d raise $20 million in venture capital and write a $4 or $5 million check to Oracle, Sun, BEA, and EMC. … When it started, Salesforce looked like a toy compared with Siebel. Look ahead five years later, it’s obviously better. Not a single one of our startups uses Oracle.

Akamai,  not exactly a newbie in this arena, illustrates Oracle’s problem. At a recent tour of Akamai’s Cambridge, Mass. network operations center, CTO Mike Afergan was asked about the racks of (mostly Dell) blades on view and whether the company ever went with high-end hardware. The answer was no. Akamai puts its data center gear out to bid and prefers to use lots of cheap boxes versus a few pricey ones.

Another Bay Area VC agreed that he never sees Oracle software or hardware going into his companies but said that risk-averse older companies will continue to foot Oracle’s expensive software bills. “A lot of these guys think that the only way they can function is with their Oracle database and tightly linked financial applications,” he noted.

The traditional financial services firms re-up on their Oracle software licenses for compliance reasons, but these are legacy accounts. But even of those software customers, few want to give more of their IT spend to Oracle when it comes to hardware because of the company’s hardball support policies.

Oracle clearly sees its Sun hardware franchise as a way to capture more business, especially by building tightly integrated appliances like Exalogic. But, while two Exalogic machines probably could, as Ellison said last year, run all of Facebook or Twitter’s workloads, those kinds of companies don’t run this type of hardware.

There’s also a lot of talk about the challenges Hadoop  poses to Oracle in big data. Ellison prefers to think of Hadoop as a complimentary rather than competitive. On Oracle’s first quarter earnings call last week, Ellison said that Hadoop and associated utilities will feed into Oracle databases, driving more Oracle adoption. Oracle has announced Hadoop-Oracle interfaces to help achieve that.

Ironically, when it comes to hardware, the biggest potential driver for Oracle business going forward could be the mess at Hewlett-Packard. “People are really skittish about what’s happening at HP now,” said an executive with a Sun partner who saw many customers defect from Sun hardware since Oracle bought the franchise last year.  Most went to HP.  But now HP is in turmoil over recent management shakeups and confusion over its PC business plans. Customers don’t want to make any long-term decision under these circumstances.

This exec thinks Oracle could win over disaffected HP customers if it comes up with the right products at the right prices — and more flexible support plans. Big-bang Exadata or Exalogic, with hardware-only list price starting at $330,000 for a quarter-rack,  won’t do the trick, although Oracle has been known to discount.

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Jim Baum, IBM Netezza, at Structure Big Data 2011

IBM shares were trading up Tuesday morning after it reported strong second-quarter results yesterday. While Big Blue got a profit boost from recently released mainframe products, it also gave us some indications for the future growth of the cloud and big data. Mark Loughridge, IBM’s senior vice president and CFO for Finance and Enterprise Transformation, said IBM is still on track to double its cloud revenue in 2011 compared with the year before.

Because IBM’s definition of cloud can be pretty loose (i.e., it sells a lot of software, servers and services that conceivably could be labeled as cloud) take that with a grain of salt. However, here’s what we can learn:

The private cloud business is doing well. So much so that Loughridge said, “In private cloud, IBM’s average transaction size more than tripled from a year ago.” It also released new software to create private clouds during the quarter.

New products can keep revenue growth up. IBM has made more in the first of 2011 in cloud than it did the year before and said it had 2,000 cloud wins to date, but some of that success comes from new products such as the new private cloud software mentioned above as well as the “IBM Smart Cloud” infrastructure as a service product that launched also during the quarter.

New markets help boost growth too. IBM saw strong growth in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries) but also growth in cloud deployments in places like Africa. Many emerging economies are turning to cloud computing as they build out their IT infrastructure, leapfrogging the legacy client server paradigm. IBM appears to be benefitting from this trend.

Big data is big business. IBM’s business analytics software grew by double digits for the seventh consecutive quarter. The company’s distributed database products experienced double-digit growth in the base business, and Netezza’s transactional volumes were up 70 percent versus a year ago,according to Loughridge’s prepared remarks.

Is it time to say sayonara to Sun gear? IBM’s Power brand of servers are winning over the competition, especially the former Sun boxes now owned by Oracle. Loughridge said that IBM had 250 competitive displacements that resulted in more than $300 million of business. About 60 percent of these wins came from Oracle’s legacy Sun-installed accounts, and 30 percent came from HP-installed accounts–a ratio holding steady from the previous quarter.

So there we have it. IBM has long been seen as a bellwether for the overall IT industry and for business spending on technology in general, and now it can help us predict the future for the cloud and big data.

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I’ve reached out to Khosla Ventures for more details on the fourth fund and am waiting to hear back. According to the filing, Khosla Ventures hasn’t yet raised any of the funds for this fourth fund. Raising a fund of this size takes many months, if not a year.

Khosla Ventures announced a $1 billion raise for the combo of its third fund and seed fund back in September 2009. Later, in January 2010, Khosla Ventures upped that to a combined $1.3 billion. The Khosla Ventures III fund, with $1 billion, is a more traditional venture fund looking to invest in early-, mid- and later-stage firms, while Khosla Ventures Seed Fund has been using $300 million to invest in early-stage startups, which Khosla described in 2009 as looking for “highest risk projects,” that “often cannot find any other funding.”

These two funds were one of the first times Vinod Khosla turned to external investors, and he was previously largely using his own funds to invest in startups (quite unusual for a VC). I would guess that Khosla Ventures IV will be similar to Khosla Ventures III: a more traditional venture capital fund. Previous limited partners that have invested in Khosla’s funds have been Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates.

Khosla has had a couple of exits in recent months that have made some of the fund’s investments back. Two of Khosla’s biofuel portfolio companies — Amyris and Gevo — had successful IPOs, and a third, KiOR, has filed for a $100 million IPO. Khosla Ventures has invested in over a dozen biofuel companies.

Khosla Ventures has made some of the most high-profile, and risky, bets in cleantech, but it also invests in web and mobile companies, too. While some generalist venture investors are backing out of cleantech, it looks like the firms that have had some success are doubling down. Peter Rothstein, president of the New England Clean Energy Council and a former investor at Flagship Ventures, told Mass High Tech that the cleantech specific firms might be smaller and fewer but that they’re doing more deals. Some firms are also looking to raise large funds to do later stage and growth investments in cleantech, including Silver Lake’s new Kraftwerk fund, which is reportedly also going to be of a similar size to Khosla’s new fund at around $1 billion.

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A loan guarantee serves essentially as a promise by the government to make good on a loan if the company can’t, and typically enables better interest rates and lower costs than would otherwise be available to a company for project financing. In total, the DOE has chosen 21 clean energy projects for loan guarantees and offered conditional commitments for $21 billion in loan guarantees. The loan program office also has already issued term sheets for more projects than it actually has the budget to finance.

Eliminating, or dramatically reducing, funding for the loan guarantee program, would “literally pull out the rug from under,” the companies’ projects, “just when we are about to break ground,” wrote the group in the letter. The group represented in the letter have been awarded, or have pending, loan guarantees the companies are using to raise millions of dollars in financing to construct clean power projects, from solar farms to biofuel plants.

We are deeply concerned that eliminating funding for this critical program will not only destroy thousands of pending jobs and hinder the growth of critically-needed U.S. domestic energy production, but also defeat Americaʼs effort to compete with China, Germany and others in the clean technology marketplace.

A report out from Pew Research and Bloomberg New Energy Finance Tuesday morning found that because of an uncertain political climate, the U.S has dropped to third on the global list of investments in clean energy, behind China and Germany. The U.S. was the leader in clean energy investing back in 2008. With an uncertain political climate, investors tend to make their investments elsewhere.

The CEOs say the currently supported projects with the DOE loan program “represent an estimated 58,000 direct and indirect jobs across 19 states,” and the remaining not-yet-allocated loan guarantee commitments represent another 35,000 jobs.

Beyond urging Congress to continue financial support for the program, the CEOs asked the congressional leaders to support a logistical change that would allow companies with project applications in one section of the loan program (Sec. 1705) to be able to transfer those applications to another section (Sec. 1703). As Silver explained at the Cleantech Forum earlier this month, it could be easier to get loan guarantees out by consolidating the sections.

The DOE loan guarantee program has come under scrutiny over the past few months for its increasingly conservative terms, for its less-than-detailed electronic records, and for picking winners that haven’t seemed to be winning. Some question the government even having a program that picks winners and losers. But for the companies that have already built their businesses around it, it’s a crucial program.

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You can see a slow increase in attention on lower-power chips, servers, networks and data centers, from Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, startups like Calxeda and Power Assure and investors, too. The mentality is no longer that computing needs to maximize performance regardless of anything else, but there is emerging a new desire to design systems that use just as much power as needed for the necessary computing or network performance. The less power used, the lower a company’s energy bill — and the fewer carbon emissions. (Hear more about low-power computing and data centers from Google and Yahoo at Green:Net 2011 on April 21 in San Francisco).

At our Structure Big Data event, Sun Microsystem and Arista Networks Co-Founder Andy Bechtolsheim, pointed to recent developments in chip design that look at how to minimize power consumption while also getting more bandwidth out of chips. In particular he mentioned Calxeda, which was presenting at Structure Big Data, and which builds servers out of clusters of cell phone chips in order to optimize power efficiency.

As Stacey wrote earlier this month on GigaOM, the Calxeda system on a chip uses an ARM Cortex A9 quad-core and server manufactures can jam 120 ARM quad-core nodes (480 cores) in a 2U enclosure, with an average consumption of about 5 Watts per node. That power consumption includes DRAM. In comparison, Intel and AMD boxes using the x86 architecture can consume about 80 to 130 watts for a quad-core machine, while low-power versions of x86 chips can consume 30 watts.

The idea is that data center operators can save considerable money on their energy bills by installing ARM-based servers. Chip designer Marvell is following suit with ARM chips for servers, and Intel is also developing lower power server chips.

But using ARM for servers is just one innovation. Data center operators are looking to lower the cost of cooling systems and turning to virtualization, while telcos are developing lower power networks.

All the push in performance — and now subsequent trend in low power systems — can thank Moore’s Law. Bechtolsheim said during Structure Big Data that so far Moore’s Law has produced progress that is “without equal in the history of mankind” and which will continue for another 10 or 20 years. That means that the trend towards big data and cloud computing will only continue and accelerate, and the need for low-power computing infrastructure will be even more crucial.

Image courtesy of Randomskk.

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