Chicago Mercantile Exchange floats Wall Street cloud
Cloud computing promises the easy migration from one supplier to the next, but we all know that isn't the case because there isn't any market punters can access to buy and sell their resources.
But on Monday that changed when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) announced it had signed a non-binding Letter of Intent with cloud …
Distributed systems boffins flock to RICON West
Database denizens, infrastructure priests, and cloud herders are all preparing to descend on San Francisco for the RICON West distributed systems conference.
El Reg is a media sponsor of the event, which will be held on October 29 and 30, and as per our high-availability triple-replicated reasonably consistent partnership with …
Microsoft follows Amazon in gaining critical US gov certification
Microsoft has gained a US federal government certification that makes it easier for agencies to buy cloud services from Redmond.
The company announced on Monday that the platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service components of its Windows Azure cloud have been given a Joint Authorization Board (JAB) provisional …
Google's robot army learns Spanish
If you want to learn another language, you need to spend time in the country, talk to people, get drunk and attempt to order complex drinks, and eventually read that country's great works of literature – unless you're Google, that is.
In a recent paper, three Googlers outlined a new approach to machine-based translation that …
Violin Memory falls through basement in first day of trading
Violin Memory's hotly-anticipated IPO fizzled on the first day of trading.
The flash-array company had raised some $162m by selling its shares at $9, but on the first day of trading the stock opened below $8 and fell from there.
The stock closed at $7.02 on Friday, down 22 percent. Violin Memory has posted a loss for the last …
Microsoft keeps Skype content safe from police data slurping - for now
Microsoft has not yet handed over the content of any Skype conversations to regular law enforcement requests in the last six months, Redmond has revealed.
Redmond's stance was shown in its second transparency report, released on Friday. However, the report does not contain national security letter requests, so NSA and FISC and …
Amazon adds free Oracle analytics tool to cloud
Just two days after Microsoft made Oracle's technology available on its Windows Azure cloud, Amazon has added a sophisticated diagnostic tech to its own Oracle database service.
Amazon announced the addition of the Statspack performance diagnostic tool for all Oracle editions and engine versions offered by its Relational …
Microsoft defends Azure with two-factor auth security
Microsoft's multi-factor authentication service has gone into general availability, doubling prices and giving enterprises a service-level agreement.
Microsoft announced the general availability of the product in a blog post on Thursday. The MFA technology allows admins to add an additional layer of security to accounts using …
Google reveals its Hummingbird: Fly, my little algorithm - FLY!
As more people have come online, the way people search has changed - so Google has overhauled its algorithms to better deal with the vague, rambling questions we bombard it with.
The new "Hummingbird" update was announced by Google at a shock-and-awe PR event held in the Menlo Park garage where the ad-slinger spent its early …
eBay unveils data center that runs on fuel cells
Online bid bazaar eBay has plugged a much-hyped fuel cell technology into its new data center, as the company tries to increase the efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of its colossal bit barns.
The announcement of the new facility was made by eBay at a press event in Utah on Thursday. The company revealed that along …
Oracle mounts cloud on FrankenStack underlay
Six months after borging the cloud management startup Nimbula, Oracle has ginned up an infrastructure-as-a-service product suite based on the open source OpenStack platform and a mish-mash of other technologies.
In building this cloud, Oracle has embraced open source (but not, we should point out, apparently contributed any code …
HP unleashes OneView admin tool on lazy, uncooperative servers
IT admins, polish up those online gaming skills because HP is coming for your job. Again.
The new OneView management platform for HP BladeSystems, and Proliant Generation 8 and 7 servers was announced by HP on Wednesday with bold claims of dramatically shortened provisioning times and easier management than ever before.
The …
Microsoft comes through on Oracle cloud partnership
The Brobdingnagian growth of the Amazon cloud has forced longtime rivals Microsoft and Oracle into a substantive tech partnership.
The operating system giant announced a wide-ranging cloud partnership with the database titan back in June, in response to the rise of the Amazon Web Services cloud. On Tuesday, Microsoft's Windows …
Ellison ditches own cloud keynote for billionaires' America's Cup boat race
Oracle OpenWorld turned into Oracle SnubWorld on Tuesday, when Larry Ellison ditched his hotly anticipated speech on Oracle's cloud strategy so that he could watch his boat race in the hugely expensive America's Cup.
The swap-out of Larry Ellison for senior product management veep Thomas Kurian was met first with muffled …
Oracle plugs OpenStack into its cloud
Oracle has adopted the open source OpenStack cloud technology for its upcoming public cloud service, but though the company has made many tweaks and advancements to the technology, it does not appear to have yet contributed code back to the community.
The OpenStack announcement was made by the company on Tuesday at the Oracle …
Engine Yard loads Oracle tech into cloud platform
Less than a year after taking a cash injection from Oracle, platform cloud Engine Yard has announced that its technology will support the Oracle Public Cloud as a selectable infrastructure layer.
The announcement of support for the Oracle Public Cloud was timed to coincide with Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, …
CloudBees straddles firewall with VPN connection
Cloud startup CloudBees has launched a technology that lets customers of the developer-oriented cloud connect their sensitive on-premises resources to the company's cloud via VPN.
By building hosted OpenVPN into its infrastructure, the Java cloud has been able to launch the service which it says can assuage security concerns and …
CloudSigma lashes cloud to colocation partners
European infrastructure-as-a-service provider CloudSigma has followed in the steps of Amazon and Microsoft to offer a direct connection between private servers in colocation facilities and its cloud.
The "hybrid hosting" service was announced by the company on Wednesday, and will see it give customers the option of renting …
Microsoft hooks up with AT&T, gazes into YOUR data center
Microsoft and AT&T have announced a strategic alliance that should let punters shift workloads from their data center into AT&T's cloud and then into Windows Azure.
The unnamed service is due to launch in 2014, and was announced by Microsoft in a fluffy blog post on Wednesday.
The technology lets people "access Windows Azure as …
Red Hat and dotCloud team up on time-saving Linux container tech
Red Hat is working with startup dotCloud to co-develop new Linux container technology to make it easier to migrate applications from one cloud to another.
The partnership was announced by the companies on Thursday, and will see dotCloud's open source "Docker" Linux-container technology get enhancements to work with Red Hat's …
Google's BigQuery gets data slurping capability
Instead of having to upload stuff into the Google cloud and then feed it through to BigQuery, cloud wranglers can now stream data directly into the Chocolate Factory's analytics-as-a-service tech.
Google announced the "streaming data" update to BigQuery on Wednesday and it means admins can pour data into the service and start …
Oracle revenues miss expectations – AGAIN
Oracle posted lower than expected revenue for the first quarter of its 2014 financial year, making it the third consecutive quarter that the database giant has missed analyst expectations.
Oracle announced revenues of $8.38bn and earnings per share of 59 cents on Wednesday, compared to the $8.48bn and EPS of 56 cents that the …
Google fluffs DEATH DEFEATING startup Calico
Google has helped found a company that will focus on life extension technologies, presumably because if you die, then you can't click on ads.
The death-defeating company "Calico" was announced by Google chief Larry Page in an insubstantial blog post on Wednesday, along with a PR-puffed article in Time magazine.
Calico's chief …
LinkedIn joins Yahoo!, Google in squeezing gov for NSA request info
LinkedIn has joined Yahoo! and Google in lobbying the US government to let it tell the public how many super-secret requests from spies it gets for user data.
The career network said on Tuesday that it has filed a legal challenge with the US government to let it be more open about the number of spy requests – "National Security …
IBM proffers $1bn for Linux development on Power
After opening up its Power chips to bit fiddlers through an ARM-style licensee model, IBM is pouring $1bn into Linux development on the architecture.
The $1bn commitment to Linux on Power was announced by IBM on Tuesday at the Linux conference in New Orleans, and follows Big Blue letting licensees fiddle with Power chips through …
Joyent turns cloud into a Riverbed content-delivery network
Midsize cloud Joyent has partnered with network appliance vendor Riverbed to create a "Content Delivery Cloud" to give developers on a budget a way to push data closer to users and reduce load times.
The Riverbed Stingray & Joyent Content Delivery Cloud service was announced by Joyent on Monday, and it lets the company's four …
KVM kings unveil 'cloud operating system'
Virtualization sucks, because it makes it difficult for an application to get the most out of its underlying infrastructure. And so a startup staffed by the originators of the KVM hypervisor wants to change that with an ambitious open source project called OSv.
The OSv "cloud operating system" was announced by Cloudius Systems …
Box spreads platform over enterprises
Cloudy document-sharing service Box wants its customers to slather its offering across as much of their data as possible, so the company has upgraded its technology to better embrace mobile devices and enterprise file management.
The upgrades indicate the company's grand ambition to become a central repository and display …
Box morphs into Google Docs competitor
Document management startup Box has added a collaborative document editing technology to its product suite, taking on Microsoft's Office 365, Google Docs, and others.
The "Box Notes" product was announced by the company before dawn on Monday, just in advance of its document-sharing jamboree that BoxWorks kicked off in San …
Memory muddle muddies Intel's Exascale ambitions
Intel's lofty attempt to make a supercomputer capable of an exaflop by 2020 while consuming a mere 20 megawatts of power is running into major problems due to the pesky laws of physics.
When Intel announced its exaflop goal back in 2011, the chipmaking giant talked up a variety of technologies it was bringing to bear on the …
Couchbase relaxes NoSQL derrière into mobile seats
Database startup Couchbase has developed what it believes is the first NoSQL database for mobile devices, but why would anyone want such a thing?
The Couchbase Lite database was announced by the company on Friday as part of its "JSON Anywhere" strategy, which sees it also create a new data syncing service and a cloud test and …
Amazon cloud goes down in Northern Virginia
Amazon's mammoth compute cloud experienced problems on Friday, disrupting the constellation of sites that depend on it, such as Heroku.
The faults in the company's Northern Virginia US-EAST-1 data center cluster were spotted by Amazon at 7:32am Pacific Time, and as of the time of writing they were still experiencing problems. …
Amazon spits out offline DynamoDB tester
Amazon has released a tool to let developers test apps that use the DynamoDB API, and to do so offline.
The DynamoDB Local test tool was announced by Amazon on Thursday, and gives devs access to a client-side database that supports the complete DynamoDB API, but doesn't manipulate any tables or data in DynamoDB itself."
The …
Twitter announces it's going public, via Twitter
Bird-backed babble network Twitter has filed for an IPO.
The blue avian-branded company announced on Thursday that it had submitted an S-1 form to the US Securities and Exchange Commission in, of course, a tweet.
"This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale," the social network cautioned. At the time of …
Google swaps out MySQL, moves to MariaDB
Google is migrating its MySQL systems over to MariaDB, allowing the search company to get away from the Oracle-backed open source database.
The news came out at the Extremely Large Databases (XLDB) conference in Stanford, California on Wednesday, one month after El Reg reported that Google had assigned one of its engineers to …
SAP inks Hadoop deals with Intel and Hortonworks
SAP has partnered with Intel and Hortonworks to resell the two companies' Hadoop offerings, as the enterprise software giant tentatively gets involved with the new fashionable data platform.
The announcement was made on Wednesday at Techcrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, and means SAP will be able to sell SAP's HANA in-memory …
Microsoft opens Azure boffinry giveaway
After several informal schemes, Microsoft has forged an initiative to give academic researchers free access to the Windows Azure cloud.
The Windows Azure for Research program was announced by Microsoft on Monday, and will see Redmond accept proposals for grants for wedges of Windows Azure resources, offer training in the program …
Amazon cloud erupts in Intel BRANDGASM
Amazon has fessed up about the types of Intel chips it has in its cloud, pulling back the curtain on its hitherto dark infrastructure underlay.
The deal was announced on Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and sees Amazon give more detail than ever before on the processors that sit inside its cloud, with an …
Intel uncloaks micro-microchip assault with Quark SoCs
As ARM has come to rule mobile phones, tablets, and internet-of-things devices, the keynotes at the Intel Developer Forum have turned into glitzy, shock-and-awe affairs that see Daddy Silicon attempting to reassure the world that it, too, is into low-power and mobile. Tuesday's keynote was no different – but it contained at …
IBM: Closed clouds are dead meat
After adopting OpenStack and embracing the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service, IBM has become convinced that clouds are destined to be made of open source software.
In a speech at the PlatformCF conference in Santa Clara, California, on Monday, IBM's veep of software standards and cloud labs Angel Diaz said vendors that "take a …
Gartner complains no public cloud is good enough for business
No public cloud fits the stringent criteria required for "enterprise" use, according to the soothsayers at Gartner, though Amazon is far ahead of the competition.
In a report released on Monday Gartner ranked Windows Azure for public cloud use and found it fit 55 per cent of enterprise criteria, compared with 53 per cent for …
Oracle spins-up public sector 'Cloud'
Oracle has fired up its big red branding machine and coated some of its software-as-a-service products with a cloud label as it tries to create a suite of tech for public-sector organizations.
Just as Amazon, Dell, and others have forged their own dedicated cloud services for the US public sector, so too has Oracle. But there's …
Amazon to offer FREE smartphone?
Amazon may offer a free smartphone, as it contemplates another market to get into and sterilize. Though the strategy is a bold one, it is hardly new, and its basic idea goes back to Henry Ford.
Bezos & Co are planning to launch a free smartphone, ex-Wall Street Journal reporter Amir Efrati reported on Friday, and hope to offer …
Google thrusts cash at developers in emerging countries
Google is preparing to dispense a couple of hundred thousand dollars in prizes for developers in emerging countries who are willing to take its cloudy platform for a spin.
The Google Cloud Developer Challenge was announced by the Chocolate Factory on Thursday, and sees the ad-backed search behemoth offer developers from around …
Bristol boffins announce QUANTUM CLOUD
Ever wanted to fiddle with a quantum computer, but don't have the sort of connections to get you inside a lab? If so, the boffins at Bristol University have just the thing for you: a "quantum cloud"!
The wonk-run quantum cloud will give researchers and the general public the chance to book time on a diminutive quantum chip …
Linode adds analytics package to Linux cloud
Xen hosting company Linode has added a statistics collection and graphing service to its cloud to keep current users happy.
The "Longview" technology uses a server-side agent written in Perl – available as an open source project on Github – to inspect server performance, massage data, and output it to a Linode admin GUI.
It …
Salesforce invents a telephone book for corporate data
Salesforce has previewed a technology that makes Benioff's customer-loving cloud the central point for file discovery within an organization.
The Salesforce Files technology was announced on Thursday at a briefing in the company's Bladerunner-lite "executive briefing" center in San Francisco, where Salesforce Chatter manager …
Reports: NSA has compromised most internet encryption
The NSA and the GCHQ have compromised much encryption used on the internet through a potent mix of technological theft, spycraft, and collaboration with major technology companies, according to new reports.
In a series of news articles that highlight how the code-breaking crypto-fiddling agencies NSA and GCHQ are doing their job …
Cassandra trundles into 2.0 release
The Apache Software Foundation has announced the 2.0 release of the Cassandra database, bringing with it new features for querying and transactions.
The release was announced by the ASF on Wednesday, and brings enhancements to the SQL-like Cassandra Query Language (CQL) to the database.
Cassandra was developed initially at …
Amazon hits back at Microsoft with Redis ElastiCache
Amazon has broadened its set of services for storing frequently accessed data, just one day after Microsoft announced a competing product.
The upgrade to the Amazon Web Services ElastiCache was announced by Amazon on Wednesday, and see Bezos & Co make Redis a caching option for the previously Memcached-only tech.
Redis is a …
