Red Hat is the latest company offering an alternative to the Hadoop Distributed File System, only this one is open source and ties into Red Hat’s bigger vision of hybrid cloud computing. Read more »
Partly to differentiate itself from the likes of OpenStack and Eucalyptus, and partly to boost enterprise adoption, OpenNebula is moving beyond its traditional business of infrastructure management. Read more »
VMware CTO Steve Herrod is leaving his post to join venture capital firm General Catalyst, where he’ll be managing director. I think this is a big loss for VMware, which has already been hemorrhaging technical talent to younger, nimbler companies. Read more »
This shift in WAN requirements is placing increased cost and performance pressure on traditional WAN solutions, which either pose the exorbitant costs of private WAN services or are burdened by the unreliability of the public internet. WAN optimization and virtualization can address and improve this in enterprises. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Big Switch, Nicira and Schuberg Philis share their insights on software-defined networks–how they’re being deployed today and how they will evolve to replace traditional infrastructure driven networks. Read more »
Software-defined networks and data centers are the future if enterprises want to manage their infrastructure with the agility of cloud computing providers, but they’re nowhere near ubiquity yet. However, according to two senior VMware executives, the pieces are in place and maturing every day. 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 »
Thanks to the rise of online business, companies must now get their products and services to market as fast as they can, and releasing software now means small releases that occur very frequently. Enter devops, which is disrupting traditional assumptions about the roles of development and operations. 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 »
The goal of the cloud is to reduce disparate systems and to let IT departments manage their infrastructure and services within a single, integrated solution, from the design stage all the way through production. Here’s how to measure your company’s current cloud plan against this goal. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
The software-defined networking (SDN) market is expected to soar in size to $2 billion by 2016, according to IDC. Growth this fast may very well signify that SDN is the third epoch of computer networking, creating vendor discontinuities and a new IT order. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
VMware has made two big acquisitions this month, both focusing in part on the ability to work with competitive hypervisor and cloud computing software. The company seems to get that the future is in making it easy for customers to choose. Read more »
VMware will spend $1.26 billion to buy software defined networking startup Nicira in a deal that shows how much VMware is counting on its vision of the software defined data center. This is a strategic acquisition of a young technology and startup for the hypervisor giant. Read more »
EMC might be smarter than we thought it was. If it handles the rumored spin-out and the Maritz-Gelsinger transition well, the companies under its banner could do great things. Of course, there are a lot of moving parts here and the transition won’t be easy. Read more »
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As VMware CEO Paul Maritz launched a four-year acquisition spree that brought the virtualization kingpin into software development and end user applications where it competes with Microsoft and others, he also left the company’s core business unprotected, critics say. Read more »
The number of principal engineers and other technical leaders leaving the company and trying to have big impacts elsewhere suggests VMware might achieve mafia status a la Sun Microsystems, Facebook, Google or PayPal. But is that good news for VMware? Read more »
VMware has acquired DynamicOps, a Burlington, Mass.-based cloud computing startup that spun out of banking giant Credit Suisse’s IT department in 2008. VMware is touting DynamicOps ability to manage resources running on Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2. Read more »
Forget the ideas of virtual desktops and desktop hypervisors to separate employees’ work lives from their personal lives. Bromium, the latest company from Xen creators Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt, creates isolated instances on computer processors that keep code from going where it’s not wanted. Read more »
The world of information technology is always changing, but in the last six years it has started to change more rapidly. We celebrate the people who are orchestrating this change. Here’s ten innovators that are changing the game of Internet infrastructure. Read more »
VMware is launching a new open source project, called “Serengeti,” that aims to let the Hadoop data-processing platform run on the virtualization leader’s vSphere hypervisor. VMware apparently smells a lucrative opportunity in Hadoop and isn’t about to miss out on getting a piece of the pie. Read more »
The “Facebook generation,” as VMware CEO Paul Martiz called it in a presentation Tuesday morning, is post-PC and post-paper, and they want to experience information within the context in which they’re consuming it. And like it or not, they’re the future. Plan your IT accordingly. Read more »
VMware CTO Steve Herrod has a message for the IT world: “[S]pecialized software will replace specialized hardware throughout the data center.” Via virtualizations and SDNs, software-defined data centers will bring the dynamic natures of Google, Facebook and Zynga data centers into the mainstream. Read more »
VMware has acquired Cetas, a startup that provides analytics atop the Hadoop platform. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but Cetas is an 18-month-old company with tens of paying customers that didn’t need to rush into an acquisition. So, why did VMware buy it? Read more »
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 »
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 »
G-cluster plans to enter the U.S. market with an on-demand gaming service. The company has secured an unnamed amount of funding from Intel and French mobile carrier SFR to expand its reach beyond home casual gaming and movie streaming into high-end gaming for tablets and smartphones. 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 »
Playing off the interest in creating software defined networks for virtualized environments, startup ConteXtream has launched a product that allows a data center operator to separate network services such as firewalls and load balancers from the physical hardware. It joins several startups pushing virtualized networks. Read more »
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If a recent blog post by Gartner analyst Lydia Leong is telling, it looks as if cultural hurdles are impeding private cloud adoption as well as public cloud adoption — at least when it comes to doing it right. It takes sacrifice to operate like Google. Read more »
I doubt mobile computing will evolve to computers on a USB stick for most people, but this prototype is intriguing. Thanks to an HDMI port, the stick — which has the guts of a smartphone — connects to a monitor for standalone computer use. Read more »
Vyatta, which provides open-source networking software, has raised $12 million in expansion round financing as the entire networking field finds itself on the cusp of big changes. The round, its fifth, was led by HighBAR Partners and brings Vyatta’s total funding to $45 million. Read more »
Boundary, a startup that aims to rethink network monitoring for the cloud, has raised $4.1M. The San Francisco-based startup, founded by Amazon Web Services veteran, Benjamin Black, launches Tuesday with the funding from LightSpeed Venture Partners and a new beta. Read more »
The networking industry is set for a change as the shifts caused by the needs of webscale operators and virtualization bring complexity and costs to moving data around a data center. As networks look more like a cloud, does the field need a DevOps culture? Read more »
A little over a week after releasing its App Player for Windows software that lets computer users run Android apps, BlueStacks now says that it has raised a strategic investment from AMD and Citrix Systems along with funding from existing investors. Read more »
VMware has signed deals with Verizon and Telefonica to offer virtualization on phones provided by the operators. The net result of this deal is that employees who want to combine their work phone and their personal phone will soon be able to do so. Read more »
I last looked at Windows gaming options on OS X in 2010; the choices haven’t gotten any better. However, Parallels 7 was recently released and boasts improved Windows performance in a virtualized environment, so it’s time to take another look. Read more »
