Free from the scrutiny of public markets, Dell should let its freak flag fly and take some real risks to distinguish itself from the server-vendor pack. I think that means doubling down on next-generation software and server design. Read more »
At the AWS Re: Invent conference, engineers from Pinterest, Flipboard and Yelp detailed some of the strategies their companies employ in order to keep costs low as computing demand increases. The keys are keeping an eagle eye on usage and using the right types of resources. Read more »
Facebook has open sourced a new system called Corona for scheduling and managing Hadoop jobs. Corona attempts to do away with many of the problems that come along with massive-scale Hadoop operations, and soon looks to take Facebook’s Hadoop deployment beyond just MapReduce. Read more »
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group recently shipped its 1 millionth server just five years after coming into existence. It’s proof of how important webscale buyers have become to the server market, as well as how different their demand are than those of traditional IT buyers. Read more »
It’s not for everyone, but if you’re storing petabytes of data Hadoop, Quantcast thinks it has the cure to your woes. Its newly open sourced Quantcast File System promises smaller clusters and better performance, and it has proven itself over exabytes of data inside Quantcast. Read more »
If Twitter wants to remain opaque about its practices, that’s fine — but it shouldn’t expect any slack from upset users or investors. Blaming a two-hour outage on an “infrastructural double-whammy” after remaining mum on even where its data centers are located doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Read more »
Drawn to Scale’s Spire database is meant to be all things to all people — it combines Hadoop, HBase and SQL to provide a fast, scalable, robust experience — and now it has integrated with MapR’s Hadoop distribution. It’s no surprise the young company already claims big customers. Read more »
Elliptical Mobile Solutions is hardly a household name in the data center world, but don’t bet against it. While bigger data centers seem to be better for webscale companies such as Google and Facebook, many are happy to grow about 105 cubic feet at a time. Read more »
Flash-based storage pioneer Fusion-io says it has developed a method for extending a system’s memory from DRAM into Fusion-io’s NAND-based storage tier, enabling the possibility of bigger, cheaper in-memory applications than are currently possible. Read more »
AOL is taking its flexible infrastructure strategy to a whole new level of flexibility by building data centers that are about the size of French door refrigerators. Now, AOL will be able to deploy infrastructure where needed with little more than an electrical outlet required. Read more »
Lest storage vendors thought they were immune to disruption that open source hardware is having on the server industry, Netflix’s new Open Connect content-delivery network might make them think again. It’s inspired by open source storage designs first released by Backblaze almost three years ago. Read more »
Facebook is rethinking how it does networking, as Wired reports, but it’s actually rethinking the entire composition of the data center. Its plans will destroy the servers, switches and storage boxes vendors sell today in an effort to operate efficiently at web scale. Read more »
Facebook’s hyperinflated valuation heading into its IPO has everything to do with its promise, and very little to do with its actual profits. Here are some numbers we know about Facebook’s infrastructure that speak to its promise perhaps as much as its 900 million users. Read more »
The Open Compute Project is a coup by the buyers of servers to take control of their hardware destiny, but wisely it’s also leaving the vendors enough room to make a business for themselves. The nature of IT is changing. Here’s how companies adapt. 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 »
The concept of webscale computing gets a lot of attention thanks to the impressive scope of operations at companies like Google and Facebook, but one could argue there’s an even more-impressive tier of IT infrastructure: bank-scale. Here’s what scalbility means at Citigroup. Read more »
Instagram is pretty proud of the infrastructure it built atop the Amazon Web Services cloud, but does an acquisition by Facebook mean goodbye to Amazon? If I were a betting man, I’d say there are already some engineers working really hard to make that happen. Read more »
While webscale data center operators such as eBay are deploying custom-built data center containers designed for maximum performance and efficiency, IO Data Centers is pushing modular data centers for the rest of us. Its IO.Anywhere modules aren’t designed for HPC, but do promise flexibility. Read more »
In a webscale data center, peak efficiency feels like a blast furnace. I stepped into the hot aisle of Dell Modular Data Center and 1,920 servers blasted 115-degree air right in my face. If eBay’s Dean Nelson has his way, that was just the beginning. Read more »
It all seems so easy: You log into Facebook, update your status, tell everyone where you are and — voila! — your Timeline is geospatial. Only, while it’s just one extra step for you to add location, building that capability was a tad more complicated for Facebook. Read more »
Drawn to Scale, a two-year-old startup focused on making SQL ready for the world of big data by combining it with Hadoop, has raised an initial funding round of $925,000. Its product, Spire, utilizes Hadoop to increase scalability and reduce latency across large data sets. Read more »
Zynga is in a tricky position technologically thanks to its new frenemy status with Facebook. Zynga claims 240 million active users, and it wants a lot more, but scaling to those heights might require one heck of a computing infrastructure. Read more »
Everybody who has watched The Terminator knows about Skynet, the computing system that becomes self-aware and decides to destroy humanity. But I look at cloud computing and automated systems and I fear something much more depressing: the total leisure paradise of the movie Wall-E. Read more »
Now that AMD has confirmed its purchase of low-power server maker SeaMicro, I bet its next move will be an announcement around licensing the ARM architecture. That’s right: AMD will do a deal with the company that provides the architecture for chips inside your cell phone. Read more »
Cloud computing consultancy Cloudscaling is realigning its business around the open-source OpenStack framework, and it has a message for the world: If you want to use open-source software but operate like Amazon Web Services, we’re your man. Read more »
Facebook’s S-1 filing shows the company is all about infrastructure. The ad revenue and user experience it relies on to exist mean Facebook can’t afford to take it easy on IT, which means shareholders and users will both find plenty of reasons to get upset. Read more »
Call it M2M, the Internet of Things, or a web that talks back, but once we start connecting devices and sensors we’re adding complexity to a system that’s already highly complex. Axeda wants to deliver a cloud with the intelligence capable of managing the connected world. Read more »
Luxtera has developed an optical chip for the data center market that can achieve speeds of more than 100 gigabits per second. That’s the same speed delivered by long-haul networks under the sea, but now harnessed to move big data and deliver cloud computing. Read more »
Today there are two primary players making the brains inside servers. But that’s about to change if ARM adding 64-bit processing to it’s cores has the impact the chip IP licensing firm is hoping for. It usher in more innovation, and chips that cost less. Read more »
Cell phone chips just became more appropriate for server workloads, as ARM released a 64-bit version of its low energy processor. And the first company to take advantage of the new design looks to be AppliedMicro, which will build servers for webscale environments. Read more »
Over the past couple years, Facebok has released details on a number of its internal efforts to automate and simplify the management of its massive infrastructure. As reliance on web applications and cloud services become more common, Facebook’s tools and technologies could be a cash cow. Read more »
Building at scale doesn’t just require new tools, it requires a new mindset, said Google’s CIO Ben Fried, who spoke at the Surge conference in Baltimore today. That mindset is more general than specialized, and requires a developer to admit that some things aren’t solvable. Read more »
NSN today laid out a new architecture for mobile networks that brings concepts such automation and elasticity from webscale and cloud computing to mobile broadband as network engineers at carriers face the challenge of scaling their infrastructure to serve billions of endpoints. Read more »
Earlier this year, rumors swirled about whether Twitter had actually moved into a new Utah data center, or if it was forced to move its operations to a different facility. Now there are reports that Twitter is leasing more data center space, this time in Atlanta. Read more »
MongoDB-based startup 10gen has raised $20 million in a Series D funding round. The latest round speaks to the popularity of the MongoDB document database among large companies, even though the hype around NoSQL has lessened considerably over the past year. Read more »
Getting to next generation systems in high performance computing has inspired technologies that we now use everyday in data centers, but as the drive for exascale computing continues, it seems ingenuity is coming to an end. But is power consumption the real hurdle for bigger systems? Read more »
Dell’s Crowbar installation-and-configuration tool now works VMware’s Cloud Foundry. With servers fast becoming low-margin commodities thanks to the push toward micro servers, Dell is doing its best to make deploying the software that inspired the new generation of servers a breeze. Read more »
Mu Dynamics new service allows developers building in the cloud to load test their apps for as little as a $1. The company has a product for ISPs that shows how 1 million people playing FarmVille might affect their networks, is branching out into the cloud. Read more »
Couchbase has big plans to take NoSQL mainstream. It unveiled two today: Couchbase 2.0, which combines the Membase Server key-value store with the CouchDB document database in a single product, and UnQL, an open query language designed to bring uniformity to the diverse NoSQL landscape. Read more »
Facebook engineers have tested a 64-core chip from Tilera and found it ideal for grabbing data quickly from key value stores. This may galvanize the creation of new benchmarks as the debate of which architecture works best for webscale and cloud computing rages. Read more »
