CloudSigma spins-up all-SSD storage cloud
Flash, a-ah, saviour of the Euro-cloud
Zurich-based infrastructure-as-a-service slinger CloudSigma has moved to all flash storage for the data center infrastructure running its cloud.
Its migration to an all-SSD cloud is designed to deal with the randomized, multi-tenant access patterns of a public cloud, the company said in a statement announcing the move on Tuesday …
PaaS Heroku's misleading of customers poisons the cloud
Comment If you can't trust providers, then why outsource in the first place?
Platform-as-a-service Heroku spent two years misleading customers because it was so focused on building a new product that it didn't bother to update old documentation – this is unacceptable.
The Salesforce-owned company admitted on Wednesday that customers using its 'Bamboo" application automation technology could have spent …
Amazon cuts S3 storage prices AGAIN
How low can other clouds let their margins go?
Cloud titan Amazon Web Services has cut the cost of getting data out of its storage service, putting pressure on rivals Google and Microsoft.
Request pricing for S3 GET operations across the company's nine globe-spanning data center hubs have been reduced by 60 per cent, and prices for PUT, LIST, COPY, and POST requests have …
MuleSoft kicks out app integration platform
Births enterprise service bus suite, slurps VC cash
After a long gestation, MuleSoft has kicked out an application integration software platform it calls Anypoint.
The suite, announced on Wednesday, sees enterprise service bus-specialist MuleSoft arming enterprises with tech that lets them deal with the cats-cradle of interdependencies created by sprawling IT estates.
Anypoint …
Alcatel-Lucent uncloaks its software-defined network tech
Troubled company dispatches SDN lifeboat named Nuage Networks
Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary Nuage Networks has leaped into the crowded money-pit of software-defined networking (SDN) with a technology suite designed for carriers and large enterprises.
The "Virtualized Services Platform" (VSP), announced on Tuesday by Nuage, is a proprietary network virtualization overlay that uses distributed …
Virty network whisperer Midokura takes VC cash
Skeptical SDN punters unlikely to start paying en masse till 2014
Software-defined networking startup Midokura has raised $17.3m to help it hunt a rarely seen creature: a punter who actually pays for SDN.
Midokura's cash infusion was delivered by Japanese government–backed sovereign fund the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, the company announced on Tuesday, along with investments from …
Facebook prepares to dominate Android
'We'll own your homescreen'
Facebook's upcoming Android announcement could see Zuckerberg & Co. take over smartphone homescreens, making the social network an ever-present companion for people with a thirst for e-validation.
The company will announce on Thursday an HTC phone that comes loaded with a Facebook app that supplants the traditional smartphone …
Arista wires software-defined networking into its kit
Joins rest of industry in collective hypegasm
Network speed-freak Arista Networks has woven software-defined networking technologies into its operating system.
The company announced on Thursday that it had integrated SDN support via OpenStack Quantum and the OpenFlow protocol into key parts of its network software, the Arista Extensible Operating System.
The move sees the …
Dell directors foresee unremitting brutality in PC market
PC-led business as appealing as cold sick to Mickey D and the gang
The global PC business is in a woeful state, and Dell founder, chairman, and CEO Michael Dell thinks the best way to put his eponymous company back on top is give it reconstructive surgery away from the prying eyes of the public stock market.
In a 274-page proxy filing with the SEC on Friday, information trickled out about …
Public cloud will grow when experienced IT folks DIE
Analysis Clouds get real when the Facebook kids sit in the big chair
Major adoption of public cloud computing services by large companies won't happen until the current crop of IT workers are replaced by kiddies who grew up with Facebook, Instagram, and other cloud-centric services – so says Rackspace CTO John Engates. Should we be worried?
"10 to 15 years ago no one would put their credit card …
Google vows no patent prosecution for open source cloud tech
Protects Hadoop community, perhaps others in the future
Google has vowed to not sue users, distributors, or developers of technologies covered by some of its key patents, and has started out by protecting the cloudy Hadoop community.
The Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge was announced by Google on Thursday, and will initially see 10 MapReduce patents receive protection from the …
Rackspace gobbles Exceptional Cloud Services for Redis smarts
A little Redis to go with your MongoDB, sir?
Just a month after chowing down on MongoDB provider ObjectRocket Rackspace is announcing plans to devour another company, this time gobbling up a Redis hoster Exceptional Cloud Services.
The folks at the Texan cloud company just can't get enough NoSQL, and Thursday's acquisition sees them absorb a team familiar with both Redis …
IBM unfurls SDN network manager
If you've got it, Big Blue will manage it
First virtualization chewed up processors and regurgitated them as a pile of fungible compute resources, then it started gobbling storage, and now it's turned its hungry eye to networks, and IBM wants to help VMware, OpenStack, and others, do the chewing.
IBM gave details on Tuesday of its Software Defined Networking for Virtual …
Red Hat revenues rise but not enough for Wall Street
Q4 figures show growth everywhere, but not quite enough
Red Hat is growing like a weed, and thinks that in a few years open source cloud computing could be worth more to it than the entire Linux market.
The open source firm reported revenues of $348m on Wednesday for its fiscal Q4 2013, up 17 per cent year over year.
Though the earnings saw big increases year-over-year, they were …
Citrix moves into SaaS management
Control your apps, users, clouds
Citrix is moving into application management as part of the company's continued shift away from merely delivering virtualized Windows apps.
With a new software package named the CloudPortal Business Manager 2.0, the company hopes to woo enterprises to the mythical (and expensive) lands of consolidated app management.
The …
Amazon adds crypto modules to AWS cloud
Psst, enterprises: Get a load of this
Amazon is plugging ultra-secure key management appliances into its cloud to calm enterprise security admins while locking them into its way of doing things.
The AWS CloudHSM Service lets cloud customers that need to follow stringent data regulations move secure data into AWS by giving them access to dedicated hardware security …
Business intelligence startup tarts up Hadoop for managers
Platfora puts lipstick on the elephant
For the world's most lauded open source data platform, Hadoop is remarkably difficult to use, so Tuesday brings another company slinging a tool that entices managers and analysts into fiddling with the elephant.
This time it's analytics startup Platfora with the general release of its in-memory business intelligence layer atop …
Cisco to acquire services management firm SolveDirect
First partially funds, then gobbles up management toolmaker
Cisco has announced plans to acquire SolveDirect as the company looks at adding more management tools to make it easier for businesses to manage multiple IT systems.
The acquisition was announced by Cisco on Monday, and will see SolveDirect's executive team join the networking company's services division. The privately-held …
Oracle grabs Tekelec for telco assault
Sticky control tech destined for inner networks
Oracle has added another network-focused tech company to its business as Ellison & Co. try to takeover the IT stacks of telecommunications companies.
The acquisition of Tekelec was announced on Monday, and follows Oracle buying unified communications specialists Acme Packet for $2.1bn in early February.
Oracle will add Tekelec' …
Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system
Canonical to help government add "Chinese specific" features to OS
Ubuntu is going to become the reference architecture for a Linux distribution, backed and developed by the Chinese government.
The news means Ubuntu-stewards Canonical will work with China's National University of Defense Technology, and The China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Center, to develop a Chinese-flavored …
Apple: Our data centers are green. The other 98% of what we do ...
Foxconn keeps churning out smog like there's no tomorrow
After a vigorous campaign by Greenpeace to highlight the carbon-spewing computer halls of the cloud giants, Apple has announced it is feeding its data centers entirely with renewable energy.
Apple's flagship Maiden, North Carolina data center is now supplied by 100 per cent renewable energy, with 42 million kWh coming from an on …
EMC rakes in more of the world's storage, others struggle
IBM lags, Oracle division continues to shrink
EMC is controlling more and more of the world's disk storage and Oracle is controlling less and less, according to trackers at Gartner.
In a report on the worldwide external controller-based disk storage market released on Thursday, EMC had 34.2 per cent of the market in the quarter and recorded revenues of $2.067bn – a 6.7 per …
Joyent tools up for Amazon battle
Hopes CouchDB will lure devs away from Bezos's Dynamo
After almost a year of continuous technical development, Cloudant is taking the wraps off of a database-as-a-service product served out of data centers operated by Joyent – a product that looks to be technically superior to its nearest as-a-service rival, Amazon's DyanamoDB.
The deal was announced on Thursday and will see …
Oracle's hardware wing keeps on bleeding
Cloud blots out Sun
Oracle's shares dropped 7 per cent in after-hours trading in response to an quarterly earnings report that showed muted adoption for its latest software offerings and a continued shrinkage in its troubled hardware division.
The database giant reported on Wednesday third quarter earnings of $2.504bn on revenues of $8.958bn – down …
Hadoop whisperer Concurrent slurps VC money
'In crisis there is opportunity'
Hadoop whisperer Concurrent has trousered $4m of VC money so the data analysis platform company can hire more people, extend its open source efforts and generally stay in business.
The $4 million in funding from VC firms True Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners was announced on Wednesday. It also sees the company take on a …
Riak cloud storage's secret sauce splashed all over the web
NoSQL biz Basho attempts to woo developers with code
Riak database stewards at Basho have released their multi-tenant high-availability cloud storage technology as open source under the Apache 2 licence - but to what end?
Perhaps it's because new technologies need to experience widespread adoption before they can have much of an effect on the IT used by many companies, and …
Microsoft responds to Chinese software contract bribery claims
A yuan in the hand is worth two software licenses in the DC?
Microsoft has responded to the WSJ's accusations that its business partners bribed Chinese officials in exchange for software contracts, by noting that it is reviewing the allegations and may find dirt.
The company published a statement on Tuesday in response to the WSJ's report that lawyers from both the Justice Department and …
Report: AWS gets $600m contract to build CIA spook cloud
Amazon joins military-industrial complex
Amazon has signed a contract with the CIA that will see Bezos and Co. help the intelligence agency build a big yellow cloud, according to reports.
The news, if true, would mark Amazon's graduation to the elite set of major OEMs that have aided intelligence organizations, putting AWS's alleged spook cloud alongside IBM's Nazi- …
MongoDB developers 10Gen tool-up NoSQL database
Polish paid-for version, fix flaws, pray for wider adoption
MongoDB has been given a search engine, analytical features, and broader reporting capabilities as steward 10Gen tries to make the NoSQL database more accessible.
Version 2.4 of the open source NoSQL database became generally available on Tuesday. The additions to the platform deal with some of the usability criticisms that the …
EA Origin vuln puts players at risk
Game platform allows remote exploits, millions vulnerable
A flaw in EA's Origin game store puts its 40 million or so users at risk of remote execution vulnerabilities
The vulnerability was described by security researchers Luigi Auriemma and Donato Ferranta of ReVuln, in a paper released on Saturday.
Origin is the distribution platform behind just-launched SimCity, along with other …
Microsoft begins automatic Windows 7 SP1 rollout
You will be assimilated
Microsoft will start the automatic rollout of Windows 7 Service Pack on Tuesday.
The extensive software update will be handled via Windows Update, and will make its way onto PCs whose users have Automatic Update enabled.
"Updating customers to Windows 7 SP1 is part of our ongoing effort to ensure continued support and improved …
SimCity owners get free game, EA will get A NEW CEO
Updated Maxis/EA 'we're sorry' giveaway includes SimCity 4
Maxis has published the list of the games it's offering free miffed 'Mayors' to compensate for SimCity's disastrous launch.
The offer was announced by Maxis on Sunday and lets existing customers and those who register before March 25 to get a free game along with their copy of SimCity as compensation. The downloads start on …
Google+ architect: What was so great about Reader anyway?
Google pumps users for info to take Reader features to the "modern world"
The chief architect for Google+ is asking Google Reader users what they liked about the due-for-execution RSS service.
The request for information comes after Google said it would kill the popular web-based RSS reader on 1 July 2013 as part of a round of "spring cleaning".
Google is now pumping the community for information on …
Google makes BigQuery easier to question
SQL commands let devs probe BigQuery AaaS
Google has updated its BigQuery cloud analytic service to make it attractive to people familiar with SQL.
The new features for the analytics-as-a-service (AaaS) – Big JOIN, Big Group Aggregations, and support for the TIMESTAMP data type – were released by Google on Thursday.
They are designed to cut the steps developers need to …
Netflix cracks wallet to spur open source cloud development
$200,000 of prize money for devs building 'the missing piece of AWS'
Netflix wants its open source software to become the preferred platform for massive cloud-based applications, so it has launched a cash-conferring contest to generate developer enthusiasm for its technology.
The Netflix OSS Cloud Prize was announced by the company at an event in Los Gatos, California, on Wednesday evening. The …
Downed US vuln catalog infected for at least TWO MONTHS
Adobe software vulnerabilities blamed for NIST NVD infection
Adobe's ColdFusion web development software is to blame for the downtime of the US Government's National Vulnerability Database.
The malware infected two servers, and caused the National Institute for Standards and Technology to take the NVD database and other US government sites offline on Friday.
The servers were compromised …
Software seer shows companies path to cheaper databases
DBSeer cuts through clouds with predictive database performance model
Anticipating where bottlenecks are going to develop in a live database has been one of the most bankable skills any self-respecting database administrator can have, yet researchers may now have figured out a set of algorithms that can do this automatically.
The DBSeer predictive modeling method, described in two academic papers …
US national vulnerability database hacked
Malware infection forces government vuln catalog offline
The US government's online catalog of cyber-vulnerabilities has been taken offline – ironically, due to a software vulnerability.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology's National Vulnerability Database's (NVD) public-facing website and other services have been offline since Friday due to a malware infection on two …
Report: Amazon dominates global cloud spend
IBM and BT follow, Google and Microsoft struggle
Amazon Web Services dominates the infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing market, and is dramatically growing its share in platform-as-a-service as well, according to reasonably-believable research figures.
Amazon took in around 35 percent of the $1.2bn spent globally on infrastructure-as-a-service clouds in Q4 2012, with …
Oracle acquires Nimbula, buys way into open clouds
Ellison & Co. to serve up cloud control freak with lashings of open source
Oracle has announced plans to acquire Nimbula, an purchase that gives the database company a route into the open source OpenStack cloud management system, and a private cloud software stack as well.
The strategic buy was announced on Wednesday morning by a brief statement posted on Nimbula and Oracle's websites.
Nimbula builds …
Dell floats Boomi master data management into the cloud
Agent in the sky to assure on-premise data reliablity
Dell Boomi has put a new twist on master data management (MDM), by asking dev-starved organizations to keep their critical information in the cloud.
The Boomi MDM technology was launched by Dell on Monday and is meant for medium-sized businesses that dabble in cloud services along with on-premise software, but which lack the IT …
On Amazon, cloud service companies put themselves at risk
Analysis It's a risky business to swim in Bezos's petri dish
The power that Amazon Web Services wields over its cloud partners illustrates the new business reality brought about by pay-as-you-go rentable IT – and it's not a pretty picture.
Last week we reported on allegations made by Amazon partners that the cloud king was using its third-party ecosystem as a proving ground for products …
AWS plugs Node.js into Elastic Beanstalk
Opens another front in cloud language price war
Amazon has plugged Node.js into its free platform-as-a-service, Elastic Beanstalk.
Elastic Beanstalk helps developers deploy applications by automating capacity provisioning, load balancing, health monitoring, and auto-scaling the company announced in a blog post on Monday
It also promises some Node.js-specific support features …
Seattle drinking den bans Google Glass geeks
Violent consequences for Google-eyed privacy violators
A Seattle bar has issued a preemptive ban of Google Glass to preserve the privacy of its tipplers.
The 5 Point Cafe in Seattle announced plans to suppress the futuristic devices on its Facebook page this week, and didn't mince words.
"The 5 Point is the first Seattle business to ban in advance Google Glasses," the bar wrote. " …
Amazon slashes DynamoDB prices
NoSQL flash-backed database gets cheaper
Amazon has slashed the cost of DynamoDB as the cloud giant passes on operational savings to customers.
The price cut was announced by Amazon on Thursday, and sees dramatic reductions in provisioned throughput costs, along with the price of indexed storage.
"Rapid adoption has allowed us to benefit from the scale economies …
Amazon accused of knocking off AWS customers' products
Exclusive Partners: Cloud kingpin playing the copycat game
The torrential growth of Amazon Web Services' cloud is coming at the expense of the web giant's customers, some of its partners contend – and they're not happy about the tactics being used by the company.
For several months, Amazon has been encroaching onto the turf of other companies, typically by producing knockoffs of …
Amazon yanks SimCity download from store
EA server woes lead to well over 800 one-star reviews – so far
Amazon has stopped selling the downloadable version of SimCity after hundreds of incensed gamers gave the just-launched game one-star reviews.
The SimCity – Standard Edition was removed from Amazon's virtual shelves on Thursday. The always-online game has been mostly unplayable since it launched on Tuesday because of problems …
Red Hat tempts devs with OpenShift Origin upgrades
Moves all pull requests to GitHub for community equality
Red Hat has instituted changes at platform-as-a-service OpenShift that put outside contributors on more equal footing with Red Hat employees.
The Linux kingpin and cloud-wannabe announced a set of features designed to increase community participation in its PaaS in a blog post by the OpenShift Team on Thursday.
The most …
Facebook rides Unicorn to graph search nirvana
Data-guzzling index tech unfazed by billions of likes
Facebook has given details on "Unicorn," the technology that makes its needle-in-a-haystack query engine Graph Search possible.
The company revealed Unicorn in a post to its Facebook engineering blog on Wednesday.
Unicorn is an inverted index that can theoretically handle queries with "hundreds" of operands (aka, the things wot …
RBS and NatWest FAIL downs services across UK
Updated Megabork takes down ATMs, cards, online banking, telebanking
Thirsty NatWest and RBS customers across the UK are finding it difficult to get the last round in tonight, as the banks' systems have failed.
The megabork, which began at around 9:30pm, has taken down cash machines, online banking and telephone banking for the majority of its customers across the UK.
"We are aware of the …
