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The just released the annual 2010 Open Source Management Survey found that open source is seen to be easier to deploy than previously, IT professionals are articulating a preference for open source., and no longer focusing on whether it’s open source or proprietary
Most companies that want the advantages of running an internal cloud aren’t prepared to make the shift, according to a report issued by Forrester Research. Analyst James Staten notes the lure of the cloud is strong, but most companies don’t have applications ready for cloud deployments.
Just as general purpose computing paved the way for specialized machines, general purpose clouds are going to evolve into specialized clouds. Like the Nvidia GPU-based cloud, launched today. It uses Tesla GPUs and 3D web services software and is targeting entertainment centric companies and services
There is a resurgence of activity around virtual desktops — where enterprises take desktop compute environments and make them configurable, deployable and manageable from a central location. Since it’s so hot, we look at companies that will challenge Citrix and VMware in this emerging sector.
I’m all for openness, but as I discuss in my weekly column at GigaOM Pro, it’s do not too difficult to play devil’s advocate and make the case that open source cloud platform OpenStack won’t create true rivals for leading cloud providers or cloud software vendors.
Riptano, an almost four-month-old startup building a business around the open-source Cassandra key value store, is so far seeing a lot of demand from enterprises eager to adopt the code. I spoke with Matt Pfeil, co-founder and CEO of Riptano, to learn more.
OpenStack is an open source cloud project being backed by Rackspace and supported by NASA and two dozen other companies. Since the initial news was released, a lot of folks have been sharing their sentiments about the offering and why they think it is important.
Puppet Labs has raised a $5 million second round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which brings the total funding for open source configuration management software provider to more than $7 million. The company also announced the latest version of the Puppet software.
In an effort to develop a standard cloud computing platform, Rackspace is open sourcing some of its key technologies and along with NASA is starting a new open source cloud platform project, OpenStack. Nearly 25 vendors have signed on for the new open source effort.
Microsoft has decided on its vision for the cloud: Treat cloud computing like it treated the PC business. Microsoft is once again looking to server makers to sell its software, but now it has added service providers to the mix.
Server virtualization created cloud computing, and while most assume that it is a fundamental enabler of the cloud, it is only a crutch we need until cloud-based application platforms mature to the point where applications will be built and deployed without reference to hardware or OSes.
Commercial Hadoop champion Cloudera is building a connector to enable movement of data between Netezza’s data warehousing appliance and Cloudera’s Hadoop clusters. It’s just the latest instance of an analytics vendor integrating Hadoop support, and further evidence that Hadoop has legs as a commercial technology.
Joyent, the hosting company turned private cloud provider, has purchased Layerboom, a Vancouver-based startup, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition helps Joyent create an easier on-ramp to the cloud for customers of its appliances and software.
Verizon Business has created a service to store medical records online in a manner accessible to patients, physicians and insurers. This comes a day after the Obama administration made it easier for doctors to access $27 billion in incentives for online medical records.
Newspapers are in a tough spot, with circulation flat or declining and advertising revenue looking weak. So how can they become more efficient? The chief technology officer of the Telegraph Media Group says more papers should take a cue from startups and make use of cloud-computing services.
Amazon today said it would now also offer high-performance computing through Cluster Compute Instances, which use more powerful processors and clustered nodes to help get around some of the latency issues associated with distributed computing. Amazon could advance HPC while also promoting specialized clouds.
Twitter has scaled back its plans to store billions of tweets using Cassandra, but the interest in this news and NoSQL data stores in general goes beyond one company’s decision. It touches on the changing nature of the web and the software that underlies it.
Microsoft says it is going to start selling a Windows Azure–powered appliance that will help companies establish private clouds and migrate. The appliances that have been tested by eBay will be sold via a handful of partners that include partners Dell, HP and Fujitsu.
We are settling in to cloud deployment models and can see how it will play out on the infrastructure side. But now cloud computing vendors need to go from selling ideas to selling products and services, while end users need to invest in more than experiments.
Eucalyptus Systems, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based start-up that is developing cloud computing management platform based on the open source Eucalyptus says that it has raised $20 million in a new round of funding. With this infusion, Eucalyptus has raised a total of $25.5 million.
The race is on to find relevance in the reams of social data produced every day, but one problem is the sheer quantity of information involved. Researchers now say they have developed software that can analyze that data in a matter of seconds using cloud computing.
Cisco today unveiled an Android tablet that means it has an integrated solution stretching all the way from the network and server to the client device. Cisco is betting that the integration and its cachet in the enterprise justifies its entrance into the tablet market.
Hadoop creator and champion Yahoo is taking advantage of its annual Hadoop Summit today by rolling out some new features for its open-source Hadoop distribution. The new features tackle security and workflow management, which Yahoo hopes will help Hadoop continue its proliferation among mainstream users.
The idea that 3-D content is going to become widespread within the next few years thanks to Hollywood and sporting events isn’t likely, according to Paul Sagan, the CEO of Akamai. He said he’s more concerned about mobile traffic than 3-D traffic at this point.
There are public clouds like Amazon’s EC2, and private clouds run behind firewalls, but some networking experts believe the big opportunity for infrastructure companies and service providers in the future will be finding ways of blending the private and public, or creating bridges between the two.
Providers of what’s called platform-as-a-service, or PaaS, face a problem: How do you make it easy for users to grasp the idea of paying for “pieces and slivers” of a platform — the layers of technology underlying a software application?
Dell and some of its customers have taken “sort of a journey together,” arriving at a point where today, “it’s hard to draw a hard line around some of our systems and say that’s the server, that’s the data center.”
Network engineers from Yahoo, Facebook, PayPal and Zynga said that startups and other companies need to think about how they are going to scale their infrastructure as they grow. However, they also said companies need to recognize their predictions will probably turn out to be wrong.
The most successful vendors of software-as-a-service, or SaaS will be those who can offer a model similar to banks, giving customers the option to withdraw data at any time.
What do banks, soccer fans and smartphones have in common? They’re all part of what’s shaping Akamai Technologies’ business, according to CEO Paul Sagan, who joined Om for a fireside chat today at Structure 2010.
The growth in bandwidth and cloud computing makes it easier to handle the massive amounts of data the world is producing every day, but latency — the lag in transferring that information across large networks — is still an issue, networking experts said at Structure today.
Data — massive amounts of it — are emerging more quickly than ever before thanks to always-on networks and sensors, and companies are increasingly turning to new tools to help make sense of it. But how do you know if your company has hit “big data?”
The big cloud computing opportunity for Rackspace is in providing services for a wave of new applications, according to the company’s president and chief strategy office, Lew Moormon.
Does the rise of cloud computing mean that traditional SQL databases and solutions are dead, or dying? Not according to a panel of database companies at the Structure conference. Although the “noSQL” movement is gaining steam, most agreed there is still a place for traditional SQL.
The GigaOM Network is at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco again today hosting our annual cloud computing-focused conference, Structure. Our live stream of the keynotes, panels and presentations starts at 8 a.m. Enjoy the show!
At Structure this afternoon, 11 LaunchPad companies had just four minutes to present its business to a panel of three judges from the venture capital industry and the audience. CloudSwitch won the judges’ vote as well as the audience choice.
Dave Wright, who founded the Amazon S3-based Jungledisk storage service, is back in the entrepreneurial saddle with today’s launch of the cloud-focused SolidFire. It’s building a scale-out block storage offering, which will try to address the growing and vexing problem of storing virtual machine images.
A panel of GigaOM Pro analysts said the future of cloud computing will likely involve the development of shared standards for interoperability of private clouds, and that “platform as a service” is the inevitable successor to the SaaS industry that most companies have become accustomed to.
There have already been 33 cloud-computing related deals close so far this year. So for entrepreneurs hoping to win the next venture capital investments in the cloud, partners from Redpoint Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Accel Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and GGV Capital offered some advice.
Supercomputer experts, including the chief information officer of NASA’s Ames Research Center and a computer strategist for the U.S. Army’s research and development center, said that scientists are still working towards developing an “exascale” computer — one that can do a million trillion calculations per second.
To share or not to share memory, that’s the question that sparked the most heated debate in a Structure panel on next-gen architectures for the cloud. Though the panelists agreed that cranking out more code at higher speeds is a top priority for the web.
One of the biggest challenges AMD faces as a chip manufacturer, according to Rick Bergman, who heads up the company’s processor and computing platforms initiatives, is that old problem of predicting the future.
Salesforce.com chairman Marc Benioff said his company has spent more than half of its research and development budget developing social features like the recently launched Chatter, and is trying to bring Facebook-style features to enterprise software in the same way it originally learned from Amazon.
Creating an Internet that will serve us well into the future demands a new, open approach to data flows and networking, according to Nick McKeown, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University.
As the use of cloud computing grows, this issue emerges: mo’ servers in the cloud, mo’ problems. That’s one of the reasons why cloud computing users are increasingly relying on more sophisticated analytics to fine-tune the way the systems are working.
Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, said at GigaOM’s Structure conference that the biggest change in cloud computing over the past year is that “we went from talk to action.” Instead of just thinking about implementing cloud solutions, companies are rolling them out aggressively, he said.
With an ownership stake in VMware, a tight alliance with Cisco and consistent placement at the top of IDC’s external disk-based storage revenue list, EMC is widely seen as the 800-pound gorilla of the storage space. So how does EMC see it evolving?
Cloud computing is often seen as beneficial for companies primarily because it lowers information technology costs, but panelists at GigaOM’s Structure conference said that this is a misconception, and enterprises that focus solely on using cloud computing to cut costs will miss the point.
CloudSwitch today launched the commercial version of its flagship product to help enterprise customers seamlessly move applications into the cloud. The startup claims that using it, applications from stack components to security protocols run in the cloud just as they do within the data center.
If you have not heard of a job description called Cloud Admins, soon you will. Makara CEO Issac Roth thinks that cloud…
The big buzz at our Structure 2010 pre-event event was about Lew Tucker, Sun Microsystems’ CTO & VP of Cloud Computing, joining Cisco Systems as the new CTO of Cisco’s fledgling cloud efforts. I’m being told the news is going to be announced very soon.
NorthScale, a Mountain View, Calif.-based web infrastructure startup, along with social gaming giant Zynga and a South Korean search and gaming portal are joining hands to launch Membase, a new open-source database that joins a fast-growing list of NoSQL databases that includes MongoDB and CouchDB.
Makara, a Redwood City, Calif-based startup that’s developed a cloud application platform for the Java world, is launching Makara Cloud for JBoss tomorrow at JBoss World. And while it supports LAMP-based applications and public clouds, Makara sees its future inside the enterprise.
Since an API alone is not going to get the enterprise to the cloud, a new crop of companies are aiming to bridge this divide with familiar enterprise-style storage interfaces and bridge them to the cloud, or in some cases to a choice of cloud providers.
[digg=http://digg.com/tech_news/The_Big_Shift_The_Rise_of_Cloud_Computing] For more cloud computing research, see GigaOM Pro (sub req’d). Or join the GigaOM Network at its annual cloud-focused conference, Structure,…
Tilera, the maker of a massively multicore chip, has signed a deal with hardware manufacturer Quanta to offer a server designed especially for the cloud, becoming one of several startups aiming to meet worldwide demand for compute-based services and amid concerns about energy efficiency.
Selling cloud computing to established businesses is no easy feat. They understand the potential benefits, but they’ve just spent years on virtualization efforts, and they have their own specific problems that aren’t easily addressed by one-size-fits-all cloud offerings. As a result, many cloud companies are turning to channel partners to remedy these sales obstacles.
The story of Amazon creating a cloud computing business to take advantage of capacity left over from the peak holiday season has settled into the Internet apocrypha, but blogger Carl Brooks claims he’s uncovered the real reason the online bookstore got into the cloud.
SeaMicro’s server reveal this week reverberated across three distinct groups of techies: the green IT crowd, cloud computing devotees and computer server…
VMware is among those companies duking it out with incumbents such as Microsoft and Oracle thanks to cloud computing. VMware CEO Paul Maritz will join me onstage at our upcoming Structure conference to talk about, among other things, his vision for the future of cloud computing.
Eucalyptus Systems has launch which support for Windows virtual machines (VMs), that allows Eucalyptus users to run Windows images and applications. Eucalyptus now supports all major hypervisors. The new software allows easy switching from Amazon’s EC2 to VMware-based cloud offerings.
So far this week two storage startups offering a hardware product have launched in as many days, both offering variations on the theme that more data requires more storage and faster networks require faster access to stored data. The trend has been building for years.
IBM is reportedly close to buying Israeli-American storage startup Storwize for about $140 million. Such an acquisition could indicate the start of consolidation in the cloud storage sector, as predicted by industry insiders and venture capitalists.
SeaMicro, a startup building a low power-server using Atom chips and its own specially designed silicon to handle the networking, has finally unveiled its hardware, which is pretty darn impressive. But can its $139,000 box containing more than 2,000 CPU cores win over data center operators?
While at some point, dynamically moving VMs inside a single data center or between two data centers will be a seamless process, it’s not now. In the meantime, however, there are numerous opportunities for startups to offer solutions that will help make such seamlessness a reality.
Public clouds are the new storage service providers. So for those keeping an eye on the enterprise storage future, it makes sense to consider whether the infrastructure challenges being faced by these large service providers today indicate what the largest enterprises will face tomorrow.
VMware, the company that took the hypervisor mainstream and still controls the virtualization of some 80 percent of servers worldwide, is indulging in some retail therapy as it seeks to change its image from the provider of commodity hypervisors to become a concierge of the cloud.
Pew Internet says the future of computing is Internet-based. One doesn’t need a survey to figure that out. Just look at how we, our families and kids already use computing devices. Nevertheless, 71% of those surveyed say that by 2020, we will be cloud computing.
VMware is continuing its acquisition spree as it looks to raise its profile in the platform-as-a-service market, and sources tell me its latest target is EngineYard, the Ruby on Rails platform that’s raised $37 million from the likes of Amazon and Benchmark.
Amazon’s Import/Export Service, which allows companies with large data sets to mail their files to Amazon’s cloud is now available to all. The success of the service points to several business opportunities when it comes to optimizing bandwidth, cloud portability and creating markets for big data.
Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker says the mobile market is growing at a phenomenal rate, that online advertising could finally be entering its “golden age,” and that online commerce is also slated to take off, thanks in large part to mobile devices like the iPad.
Certain cognitive biases should be of particular interest to cloud service providers, as they can be intangible barriers to cloud computing acceptance, and to customers, who can recognize these behaviors and moderate their impact. With that in mind, I offer the 10 Laws of Behavioral Cloudonomics.
When all is said and done, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com might be battling it out for PaaS (and SaaS) dollars against a whole slew of smaller providers operating within the infrastructural confines of AWS, Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis.
Amazon Web Services was the first source of cloud computing available and ended up at the forefront of the trend. A post today at Elastician attempts to relay how hot Amazon’s services are using the number of postings and participants in forums for individual AWS products.
Want to know how Apple’s Genius song recommendation system for iTunes works? A post telling folks was deleted without explanation, but it’s worth reading since recommendation engines are the key to shoving the web onto devices like mobile phones and for creating a hyperpersonalized surfing experience.
With its new accelerated processor unit AMD is following its rival Intel down a path to keep x86 chips both powerful and power efficient as computing goes mobile for consumers and requires millions of processor cores running a “cloud” on the server side.
Hewlett-Packard said today that it would cut 9,000 jobs and take a $1 billion restructuring charge spread out through Oct. 2013 as it seeks to automate its data centers so it can deliver enterprise business services, which I read as HP’s transition to delivering cloud computing.
With the web and cloud computing generating new data sources and consumption patterns, a fresh crop of software solutions and companies have emerged to tackle big data. In order to better understand the trends, let’s take a look at some of the popular solutions.
If you’ve been following the data center hardware space for the past year, you might be under the impression that integrated stacks are the future of IT. But it doesn’t look like customers are buying into the promise of having just one throat to choke.
BroadVision, an enterprise software company that went public not long after Netscape and then spent almost a decade recovering from the Web 1.0 boom and bust, is launching a new SaaS offering called Clearvale, which it says is designed to bring social networking into the enterprise.
I can’t open my email without see a new cloud-based startup pitch (or three), which is why this year at Structure 2010, we’re adding a new feature: the Launchpad. See which 11 companies you could meet this June in San Francisco.
Allied Fiber today said it has begun construction on the first phase of a nationwide wholesale fiber network that will span 11,548 miles.By combining the pipe, the data centers and cell towers the Allied network could fundamentally change the economics of providing bandwith and encourage competition.
The SaaS model offers two distinct competitive advantages for software developers — massive economies of scale and sustainable profit streams –- over the traditional model. Yet astoundingly, many firms take the plunge into providing SaaS without understanding the underlying requirements necessary to ensure success.
I wrote recently that the time may be right for AWS to launch its own PaaS offering, if only to preempt any competitive threat from other providers’ increasingly business-friendly PaaS offerings. The time is indeed right, now that Google has introduced App Engine for Business.
Salesforce.com and VMware recently unveiled a Java-focused platform-as-a-service offering, VMForce.com. Meanwhile, Microsoft has Azure, a PaaS offering focused on the .Net stack, and startups Heroku and Engine Yard both deliver Ruby-on-Rails cloud platforms. But who’s going to offer a PaaS for LAMP?
We’re once again in the homestretch of preparations for our web infrastructure and cloud computing conference, Structure. This year, the event’s third, we have expanded it to two days in order to accommodate an even more diverse range of topics.
Google has tweaked its App Engine platform as a service to make it palatable for business customers. Today at its developer conference Google launched App Engine for Business, but Google still has a ways to go before it can offer a truly competitive platform.
Amazon will offer a lower-priced, less reliable storage tier of its popular Simple Storage Service for folks who don’t need the full redundancy of the traditional S3 service, the retailer said today. The service is another way Amazon is changing its pricing as cloud computing matures.
Nvidia today said its graphics processors will be in a new IBM server used for high-performance computing and webscale deployments. IBM’s iDataPlex servers will combine CPUs with GPUs for faster compute using less energy. As ARM eyes the data center, Nvidia’s success should be a lesson.
NorthScale, a Memcached-focused start-up based in Mountain View, Calif. says it has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Mayfield Fund. Previous investors Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners also invested. NorthScale has also hired a new president & CEO – Bob Wiederhold.
It’s taken a full year and upward of $700 million in acquisitions, but CA Technologies (yes, it’s a new moniker) finally delivered on its cloud-computing strategy with several major product announcements. With these products, CA has set the bar for how management software must act within cloud-connected organizations.
The PaaS segment of the cloud computing market is hot. Just look at the ado VMware and Salesforce.com created with their VMforce announcement, or the attention Heroku is attracting with its Ruby-centric service. Could Amazon be the next cloud player to enter this market?
Business Intelligence is a multibillion-dollar market made up of enormous software projects from the likes if various IT giants — think high barriers to entry, long enterprise sales cycles and expensive software licensing. But several cloud-based solutions are in the process of disrupting that market.
Organizations going down the private cloud path have some tough decisions to make. Most cloud management solutions are merely works in progress at this point, leaving customers with a Catch-22-like situation.
Marvell, in an effort to cut the power consumption inside enterprise data centers, plans to ship chips for servers that use the same type of processors that power cell phones. Marvell’s ARM-based chips will deliver a five-fold reduction in power compared to the x86 architecture.
Heroku, a platform provider built on top of Amazon’s EC2 compute infrastructure has raised $10 million for its second round of funding. The money will help Heroku create a partner program to handle the influx of vendors who use the platform on behalf of their clients.
Michael Capellas, the former CEO of Compaq and the former CEO of MCI, has taken the helm of the Acadia joint venture between Cisco and EMC Corp., which was created last year with VMware to help the three companies market their unified computing system.
Netronome, which makes networking chips, today said it raised $23 million in an oversubscribed fourth round of funding. As broadband speeds get faster and cloud computing grows, the need for Netronome’s speedy processors, which can route bits despite the tsunami of information, grows.
We managed to create 800,000 petabytes of digital information last year, according to a study released today by IDC and EMC. The creation of digital data will increase to 1.2 million petabytes by the end of this year, which means we need fatter pipes.
Clustrix, a Y Combinator grad from 2006, launched today with claims that it has built a transaction database with MySQL-like functionality and reliability that can scale to billions of entries. This is big stuff as scaling databases is a key bottleneck for web services today.
Cloud computing has played a starring role in the technology press for two or three years, but it’s now moving from the haven of startups or random corporate side projects to the enterprise, so get ready for another round of acquisitions and investments.
Much has already been written about this week’s VMforce announcement, but my biggest question still hasn’t been answered: Who’s the biggest winner in this partnership -– Salesforce.com or VMware? And who’s the biggest loser?
ARM plc today confirmed that within the next 12 months its architecture, which is used today primarily in cell phones and consumer electronics, will also be used in servers. Such a move upmarket, will pit the ARM architecture against the lifeblood of Intel’s chip business.
Building webscale applications is hampered by figuring out how to spread tasks out over thousands of computers without slowing things down or requiring too many people to keep things running. A Berkeley researcher hopes to solve some of those issues with a programming language called Bloom.
Salesforce.com and VMware have teamed up to offer an enterprise Java cloud called VMforce. The offering, which combines Salesforce.com’s infrastructure with VMware’s software is an indication of a larger trend for infrastructure and platform-as-a-service providers to sell the application, rather than the platform.
Microsoft this week rolled out its CampaignReady suite of services, anchored by the Windows Azure-hosted TownHall. Especially for local or regional campaigns without the resources to build specialized tools, Microsoft’s pitch should be appealing. But Microsoft’s SaaS-plus-PaaS business model has legs beyond politics, and beyond Redmond.
Any debate between open or closed systems has to touch on open-source software and the ways companies are attempting to build code as a community effort while profiting off of it in some way. I talked to Mark Shuttleworth about how Ubuntu walks that line.
MorphLabs made available in the U.S. today its cloud computing solutions, which are designed to let managed service providers enter the cloud provider market as they try to fend off cloud-based competition from the likes of Amazon Web Services and others.
Google has purchased a stealthy startup called Agnilux. Agnilux was founded by engineers who formerly worked at chip startup PA Semi, and it is supposedly making some type of server. This might prove for webscale there’s nothing like tweaking your infrastructure– from the silicon up.
Microsoft Research is the first commercial customer of a new optical equipment module made by a seven-year-old tech startup called Lightfleet, which hopes to sell gear that will enable a faster way for servers to send and receive information in highly dense computing environments.
As much as we hear about virtualization, it can be surprising to get actual numbers on deployments and realize how low they remain — just 18-19 percent of workloads on enterprise x86 servers have actually been virtualized, according to new data released by Lazard Capital Markets.
Fusion-io, a maker of specialty solid-state storage drives, has raised $45 million in a third funding round, bringing its total investment to $111.5 million. The company is succeeding because webscale businesses and cloud computing need its gear that speeds up access to stored data.
Cloud computing — where mega-data centers serve up webmail, search results, unified communications, or computing and storage for a fee — is top of mind for enterprise CIOs. But cloud adoption will depend less on the technology involved and more on strategic and economic factors.
Google announced plans for it’s Cloud Print service, but the whole idea appears foggy at best. When you look at the idea from the perspective a mobile user, it’s clear that Cloud Print could be the next major advancement in the printer industry.
Marvell is going to Hollywood next week in an effort to show the film industry what it’s missing because the U.S. has such slow broadband speeds. The chip firm wants the film industry to agitate for broadband speeds of up to 2.5 gigabits per second.
Twitter will move into its own data center soon as it seeks to scale its social messaging service. Speaking at the Chirp developer conference yesterday in a session on scale, John Adams, a Twitter engineer, laid out Twitter’s strategy to keep the fail whale at bay
When talking about cutting-edge topics like cloud computing and web infrastructure, it can be easy to let startups and niche vendors dominate the discussion. In the first quarter, however, the IT infrastructure market was all about the big boys.
Microsoft may be testing servers that use cell-phone chips instead of Intel or AMD silicon in addition to solid-state storage drives for its online services division, which operates sites like Bing, most likely in an effort to drive down energy costs without sacrificing performance.
The Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use predictive analytics software from IBM to predict which of its juvenile offenders are likely to return to crime. Sounds like Minority Report, but get ready for cloud computing and real-time data analytics to usher in new surveillance technologies.
SpringSource, a division of VMware, purchased an open-source cloud messaging company today behind the RabbitMQ software. The purchase of Rabbit Technologies Ltd. is another effort by VMware to become the operating system for enterprise clouds and add value to its commoditized hypervisor.
Google’s core philosophy about opening up access to the world’s information drive its pro-net neutrality stand, is the reason Google is building its own fiber network and is driving it to search for protocols for moving information between cloud providers.
Twitter today open-sourced the code that it used to build its database of users and manage their relationships to one another, called FlockDB. The move comes shortly after Twitter released its Gizzard framework, which it uses to send thousands of queries a second to FlockDB.
Proprietary next-generation databases, which lock customers into one vendor, could limit the openness associated with cloud computing. To ensure continued adoption of the cloud, the industry needs to support an open cloud by using open-source database technologies such as Cassandra and Drizzle.
The U.S. PTO today published a patent application from Verizon Communications detailing how to offer market-based spot pricing for cloud computing. The application could be significant indication that Verizon plans to offer spot pricing for its cloud, or it could be just another overzealous patent effort.
Amazon Web Services launched its Simple Notification Service today that allows developers to create a push notification system for applications. The service allows companies to deliver messages to customers of their applications or even to other applications in formats including HTTP and email.
O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly wrote a post recently looking at the state of what he calls an “Internet Operating System.” But does such a thing even exist? And if so, what does it look like, how does it function, and what does it mean?
Most clouds of any appreciable scale are built on open-source software and, in fact, might not even exist without it. As to whether there’s any money to be made with open source, however, that’s up for debate.
Cloudkick today launched Hybrid Cloudkick, an extension to its cloud-monitoring service that brings non-cloud servers into the fold via the same API and dashboard. With businesses looking for easy and low-risk methods for cloud adoption, anything “hybrid” is sure to draw some eyes.
For all the talk about openness in cloud computing, both public-and private-cloud providers operate very much in their own silos. However, things may be changing — especially when it comes to internal clouds.
Microsoft recently outlined its plan for data centers as it begins its expansion into cloud services with its Azure platform, and the software company’s emphasis on commodity gear and modular components hearkens back to Henry Ford’s first production line.
Dell will use cloud computing software made by Joyent, a San Francisco company that owns and operates public clouds. Dell will use Joynet’s software to offer a new Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications. The moves allows Dell to sell gear to owners of private clouds.
Thanks to a new Microsoft (s MSFT) pilot program, Amazon Web Services’ (s AMZN) enterprise customers can now bring their EA Windows Server licenses into the cloud. This is yet another step by AWS to continuously woo the corporate customers.
Eucalyptus Systems, which makes an open-source cloud management platform, last week hired former MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos to turn Eucalyptus into a big business. Can Mickos turn Eucalyptus into a market leader for building open-source private clouds and repeat the MySQL success story?
For many workloads, the cloud appears to be replacing the grid. Space agencies in particular are using the cloud to do work that likely would have had the word “grid” written all over it just a few short years ago.
In a world of web-based services that depend on aggregating other data sources, your product will only be as strong as your weakest API call. We are seeing the emergence of new ecosystems of data built around cloud providers and popular APIs such as Twitter’s.
NorthScale, a Mountain View, Calif-based software start-up co-founded by leaders of memcached open source projects, launched today. It has raised $5 million in venture funding from Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners and hopes to cash in on the growing needs of web-based businesses.
Pat Gelsinger is stirring things up EMC with a plan to virtualize and federate storage so data and compute can be linked together to keep constantly changing information up to date despite networks that are built for gigabytes rather than petabytes.
Appistry today added another element to its cloud-computing application platform, announcing the April availability of CloudIQ Storage. With it, St. Louis-based Appistry joins the growing ranks of companies seizing on demand cloud storage solutions that maintain performance in the face of rapidly growing data volumes.
Dealing with the awesome amounts of data generated by users and serving up relationships tied to that data quickly are forcing web-scale sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook to investigate a variety of home-built, open sourced solutions. Here’s what they are using and why it matters.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking in Abu Dhabi this week, confirmed that the Chrome OS operating system is on track for the second half of this year. There are new reasons why its brightest future may be as an adjunct OS on netbooks and tablets.
Digg, the San Francisco-based social media company, is dropping MySQL and instead betting its future on Cassandra, an open-source data store. It’s just the latest sign of the growing popularity of the software, which was developed (and open sourced) by Facebook to search through its inbox.
CA today announced that it is acquiring privately held Nimsoft, which makes performance and availability monitoring software, in an all cash transaction valued at $350 million. According to CA, Nimsoft will help it better serve “emerging enterprises” (read smaller businesses) adopting cloud computing solutions.
From new data stores to large-scale databases to cloud-based storage services, it seems VC dollars these days are primarily flowing into two important (if somewhat unsexy) technology sectors: storage and big data. Here are some of the recent fundings that bring this trend into focus.
Tilera, one of many companies trying to build specialty chips or systems for cloud and web-scale computing, received a strategic investment today from Broadcom. But even as the investment validates Tilera, does the cloud need its own specialty chips and gear?
Compiled Networks, a stealthy Austin startup is building an appliance that can securely link two clouds at the network level, and uses the same technology to improve Wi-Fi offload for ISPs. It has managed to straddle two large markets but can it sell into them?
Kicking things off with the proclamation that “we’re betting the company on it,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discussed cloud computing and the future at the University of Washington this morning. “The goal can’t be to throw out all the world’s software and start again,” he said.
Google (s goog) for the past three years has been trying to upend the enterprise market’s leading software suite, Microsoft (s msft)…
Big data is on the tip of everyone’s tongues these days as more information is contributed to electronic records and more sources provide that information. We now have a river of data that we’re going to harness and use to make money and better decisions.
On Tuesday afternoon, Elliott Associates, L.P., a hedge fund with a significant position in shares of Novell, placed an unsolicited offer to buy the company for approximately $2 billion. The offer places a high valuation on Novell, and the troubled company must consider it carefully.
CA, the company formerly known as Computer Associates, is buying Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based 3Tera for an undisclosed amount as part of its ongoing makeover to capture the opportunities presented by cloud computing. It is competing with IBM, HP and BMC for attention and market opportunities.
