It looks like Microsoft is serious about becoming the operating system for cloud computing. At its Worldwide Partner Conference on Tuesday, the company announced what amounts to a white-label version of its Windows Azure cloud platform targeting current Windows Server-based web hosts. 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 »
According to 451 Research, the enterprise PaaS market will grow to be worth more than $3 billion by 2015. For businesses, it’s important to know the developments that are critical to properly deploying a PaaS solution that save time and development costs. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Most platforms as a service focus on helping developers write shiny new cloud-based applications. Startup CliQr Technologies is more interested in putting the applications that already run businesses into the best cloud to run them and then to make them transportable from cloud to cloud. Read more »
Typesafe continues to push the Scala programming language and associated Akka middleware as top-tier software development tools for the webscale age, and now claims Juniper Networks as a convert. The networking hardware giant will use Scala and Akka in upcoming — and undisclosed — products. Read more »
If you ever wanted to take a stroll through the computing industry’s past, it’s not necessary to go all the way to Mountain View, Calif., to visit the Computer History Museum. Just step inside a data center. Read more »
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 »
Wipro’s latest IT foray — a global infrastructure as a service for enterprises — shows how the giant Indian outsourcers are striving to become strategic cloud partners for their business clients and compete for cloud implementation money with IBM, CSC, as well as their in-country rivals. 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 »
As major PaaSes like Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud Foundry and Salesforce.com’s Heroku race to embrace multiple languages, a few like Apprenda say that’s exactly the wrong approach. Language-specific PaaSes are better able to exploit a company’s native applications and features, says Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuler. 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 »
Can a niche player build a business offering an offshore cloud to rival Amazon’s infrastructure as a service? Calligo wants to try. The startup has formed on the Channel Islands to provide an offshore cloud option for enterprises and eventually, an offshore personal storage account. Read more »
VMware’s set its sights on becoming a bona fide application development powerhouse. With the latest version of its Springsource-based vFabric Suite, VMware adds application deployment automation, vSphere-optimized Posgres and a SQLFire in-memory database layer — all are geared to woo web scale developers. Read more »
The OpenStack army marches on. On Thursday, Hewlett-Packard put its public cloud to public beta. The services had been available to a limited number of customers up till now. The news comes a week after Rackspace launched its own OpenStack cloud. Read more »
For the last two, three maybe more years, various pundits have said that the year of desktop virtualization is just around the corner. And each year, they were wrong. Still, we gotta ask, will 2012 be the year of desktop virtualization? Read more »
Derek Collison, the guy who built VMware’s CloudFoundry service, left the hypervisor giant in mid-February with an idea to make platforms as a service even better. His startup, Apcera is the result. Now, with $2.2 million in funding Collison is ready to begin. 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 »
Up-and-coming IaaS player Tier 3′s new Web Fabric Platform aims to give enterprise customers access to infrastructure services and higher-level application services from a single console. It builds on Iron Foundry, an open source fork of Cloud Foundry that adds .NET support. Read more »
At its third summit, the Open Compute Project is adding new partners, showing off cool use cases and adding new technologies. And surprisingly, it’s being done in a way that will enable hardware vendors to hold onto some of their margins and still deliver innovations. Read more »
Piston Computing plans to integrate VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service with Piston’s own OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure as a service offering in what the two companies are billing as an integration of “the world’s most popular open source IaaS and PaaS together.” 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 »
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 »
Amid all the OpenStack news this week, there is a feeling in some quarters that two years after Rackspace and NASA launched this attempt to counter Amazon Web Services and VMware, it may be too late for the effort to take hold. Read more »
Cloud platform provider Eucalyptus will use $30 million in new Series C funding to build its engineering and sales staffs, said CEO Marten Mickos.
The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners with contributions from Benchmark Capital, BV Capital and New Enterprise Associates. Read more »
Customers can now get early access to Rackspace’s OpenStack-based public cloud, slated to come online May 1. The news comes as the OpenStack Spring Conference kicks off in San Francisco. The company also unveiled OpenStack-based Cloud Block Storage and MySQL-based database services. Read more »
With its new BOSH management process, VMware keeps pushing CloudFoundry as a good multi-cloud PaaS option by making it easier to deploy and manage across clouds and on the biggest clouds. That’s important as more companies hedge their bets when it comes to cloud deployment. Read more »
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Hewlett-Packard is putting more of its chips on OpenStack as a key foundation for its upcoming public, private and hybrid cloud implementations. HP says its Converged Cloud will amalgamate existing HP technologies and OpenStack so applications can be managed uniformly across cloud types. Read more »
It looks like OpenStack won’t have the open-source cloud spotlight to itself anymore. Citrix has released the CloudStack software it acquired along with Cloud.com to the Apache Software Foundation, creating a competitive option to the OpenStack project of which Citrix was an early member. Read more »
For anyone interested in cloud computing, Adrian Cockroft’s recent presentation on how Netflix uses a combo of Amazon Web Services and its own home-grown PaaS is a must read. Cockroft is director of cloud architecture systems for Netflix, the giant streaming media company. Read more »
Pivotal Labs will keep on doing what it does best after EMC’s acquisition, according to Pivotal CEO Rob Mee. There has been concern over Pivotal’s future as part of the EMC behemoth, which Rob Mee did his best to alleviate at Structure: Data 2012. Read more »
It seems like every cloud storage company really, really want to be the Dropbox of the enterprise when it grows up. It’ s easy to see why. Dropbox, which now claims 50 million users, is the sweetheart of the cloud storage, file-share-and-sync world. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is indisputably the largest cloud service provider by far, and by all accounts. So what rivals could be No. 2 and maybe even give AWS a run for its money? Some of these names might surprise you. Read more »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
The emergence of the big data phenomenon is fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. Here we highlight 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When Microsoft and VMware latch onto a technology, you know it’s for real. VMware is now pushing a project called Spring Hadoop that lets developers use the popular Spring Java framework to write big data applications atop Apache Hadoop. Read more »
Systems integrator Dimension Data bought OpSource for its cloud services in June, and is now unveiling the updated cloud offering under its brand. The updated services include a public compute-as-a-service cloud, a private version of same, as well as managed hosting and managed services. Read more »
Last week IBM launched the first third party virtual switching platform for VMware environments. This is an important development because as the first tier of network switching moves into the server, the virtual switch becomes extremely strategic real-estate and control point for emerging SDN architectures. Read more »
Zerto Virtual Replication 2.0 promises to bring enterprise-class business-continuity/disaster recovery to VMware virtualized environments, taking aim at applications that run “in and between private, public and hybrid clouds.” Target customers are large businesses and cloud service providers. Read more »
