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Amazon cloud erupts in Intel BRANDGASM
IDF13 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 …
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 …
China's corruption crackdown killing off Unix
China's crackdown on Bo Xilai and other scandal-hit Communist Party outcasts may be making Unix systems less attractive behind the Great Firewall.
That's the opinion of EMC's president for Greater China, Denis Yip, who last week told attendees at an EMC Forum event in Hong Kong that the “political environment” across the border …
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 …
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 …
NSA is 'great at some sophisticated tasks but oddly bad at the simplest'
Quotw It's all going down in Redmond! Last week, chief exec Steve Ballmer announces his retirement, this week, the one-time king company of computing announced it's going to slurp down the tattered remnants of Nokia's mobile business.
Yes, in a bizarrely timed acquisition, Microsoft has decided to take them newfangled speaky-boxes …
BT doles out measly 2GB to customers in Dropbox-alike BT Cloud
BT Cloud, the telco's own Dropbox-a-like offering, was launched in February. But BT has only just gotten around to telling its BT broadband customers about it.
Perhaps it's because it's only allowing them 2GB of free BT cloud storage space.
Here's the BT announcement – but before you hit that link, cast your eye over these free …
Chasing pack about to sink teeth into Amazon's AWS, says Gartner
Amazon Web Services' position as the leading infrastructure-as-a-service provider is under threat, as competitors target markets the organisation has to date ignored, according to Gartner research veep Lydia Leong.
Leong's expressed her opinion in a double-barrelled blog post, the first instalment of which says the source of AWS …
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 …
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 …
Rotten routers caused Intermedia service crash, says CEO
The service blackout at third-party Microsoft Exchange hosting biz Intermedia was caused by glitches in core routing kit, the CEO has confirmed.
As revealed by El Reg on Tuesday, Intermedia went down in the UK early afternoon and remained down for some hours, with customers forced to vent their spleen on Twitter because they …
Speaking in Tech: Stay a virgin at VMworld – wear a rubber unicorn head
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
This week, your Speaking In Tech podcast hosts Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela are dropping it live from VMworld with special guests Stephen Spellicy, senior director product management and enterprise data protection at HP and Bryan Beal, director at cloud and …
Cisco pours cash into log management startup
A remotely hosted log management company has garnered $10.5m in filthy valley lucre from Cisco, Data Collective Venture Capital, and others.
The funding round brings Loggly's total funding to date to $20.9m. The company's hosted service lets companies upload server log files into a central repository, where they can then run …
Microsoft soars above Amazon with cloud cache
Microsoft has launched a new Azure technology to give developers a dedicated storage layer for frequently accessed information, and its pricing and features trump similar tech fielded by cloud incumbent Amazon Web Services.
The caching service was launched in a preview format by Microsoft on Tuesday, and marks the creation of …
Rackspace cracks wallet on cloud 'developer discount'
Rackspace has is seasoning new developer accounts with cloud credits as the Texan company tries to lure punters into its bit barns.
The "Developer Discount" program was announced by the company on Tuesday, and will see it give developers new to the service $50 of account credit per month.
"Developers, hackers, devops people and …
Intermedia's Exchange hive goes titsup ... and no one's answering calls
Updated Intermedia, the world's largest third-party provider of hosted Microsoft Exchange services, today delivered a masterclass in how to mismanage customers' expectations when cloud services crash.
Hordes of angry customers on both sides of the Atlantic took to Twitter this afternoon to complain about "issues" with the company's …
Microsoft - do you really think you can take on Google with Nokia?
Blocks and Files Microsoft's purchase of Nokia's phones business – which outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer has since described as a way for Redmond "to accelerate" – appears to be an attempt to add another weapon to its anti-Google arsenal.
Ballmer is quoted as saying: "By the early part of this year it was clear to me that perhaps acquisition would be …
Microsoft takes second run at platform cloud
Microsoft is taking a second run at platform-as-a-service clouds with a set of features to be included in Windows Server 2012 R2 that may give Redmond some credible tech to take on a field flush with rivals.
When Windows Azure launched in 2009 many media and analyst reports (El Reg excluded) thought the future for platform-as-a- …
Tencent offers 10TB of free cloud storage for all
Given the recent revelations about mass data slurping by the NSA, we were relieved to hear that a Chinese company has begun offering a whopping 10TB of free hosting to privacy-conscious punters.
After Chinese rivals Baidu and Qihoo 360 served up a terabyte of free cloud storage to punters, rival Tencent this week floated a 10TB …
Microsoft fattens Exchange Online mailboxes to 50GB
Microsoft's Exchange Online service now comes with bigger mailboxes.
Redmond has let it be known that henceforth Exchange Online mailboxes will offer 50 gigabytes of capacity, up from 25. Kiosk mailboxes go from one to two gigabytes. Shared mailboxes and those for Resources now have 10GB to play with, more than twice their …
Amazon's GovCloud upgrade hints at CIA cloud tech
Amazon has brought its automatic application deployment and provisioning tech to its government cloud service.
The launch of CloudFormation on GovCloud was announced on Wednesday, and means customers that use the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) compliant cloud service can now access Amazon's CloudFormation tools …
VMware bursts into public cloud with vCHS
Analysis Here is how the cloud infrastructure market works: you can compete with Amazon Web Services and commit yourself to punishing capital expenditures as you build out your data centers, or you can try and come up with a service that does something Amazon doesn't, and charge a premium for it.
Take a guess as to which one VMware opted …
Microsoft gives away more data with SkyDrive upgrade
Microsoft has dramatically increased the default storage space available for customers of its SkyDrive Pro service.
The upgrades were announced by Microsoft on Tuesday and see Redmond increase the overall storage space available for each user from 7GB to 25GB, and add other features as well.
SkyDrive Pro is a store 'n' sync …
Snowden is great news for hybrid cloud says VMware
VMworld 2013 Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of the online snoopery in the US are good for business, say VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and COO Carl Eschenbach.
Speaking today at VMWorld 2013 the, pair were asked if Snowden's leaks are changing customers' attitudes to public clouds. Both answered in the affirmative.
“We have clearly …
Google adds 'Differential Snapshots' to cloud storage
There are only so many ways you can build a gigantic infrastructure cloud, so it is with little surprise that Google has introduced a snapshot feature already found in Amazon Web Services.
The "Differential Snapshots" feature was announced by Google in a post to the Google Compute Engine Google group on Monday, and the Chocolate …
News Ltd benches AWS, floats footy app on Azure
News Limited, whose Australian entity has delivered customer testimonials at an Amazon Web Services event (here are the slides), has a little bit of Microsoft lipstick on its collar, courtesy of an announcement that a new Australian Football League (Aussie rules) service is going to be running on the Windows Azure cloud.
It may …
CYBORG CLOUD comes to VMware
VMworld 2013 VMware just can't seem to make its mind up about Cloud Foundry.
After tossing the open source platform-as-a-service cloud initiative out into a spin-off named Pivotal along with a grab bag of tech products like GemFire, Greenplum Database, Spring, and others, the virtualization company announced on Monday it was tapping Cloud …
VMware teams with Savvis to expand vCloud footprint
VMworld 2013 VMware has struck a new partnership with Savvis that looks as if it will bring the virty giant's hybrid cloud to nations beyond the USA.
News of the relationship was revealed during the VMworld 2013 keynote, when VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger announced that VMware's hybrid cloud is officially open for business. Senior veep and …
Amazon's weekend cloud outage highlights EBS problems
Problems in the Amazon cloud over the weekend crushed apps like Vine, websites like Airbnb, and numerous other services that depend on Bezos & Co's hulking cloud, and the problems were due to a familiar culprit – Elastic Block Store (EBS).
EBS is a network-attached block level storage service for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon …
HP to offer SAP's HANA-as-a-service
HP has announced it will offer SAP's in-memory database HANA in as-a-service mode, an offering The Reg revealed was under discussion back in March 2013.
Details of just what is on offer are sketchy for now. HP has not made a price list available, saying only “Pricing will vary according to client need.” Nor has the company …
VMware's Project Zombie gives dumb servers BRAAAAINS
VMware has taken the wraps off the gigantic task-automation system that will marshal resources in its upcoming infrastructure-as-a-service cloud.
"Project Zombie" was unveiled at PuppetConf 2013 in San Francisco on Friday by VMware's infernal zombie commander (officially: Automation Architect, Hybrid Cloud Services) Nicholas …
Piston links with Cloud Foundry, forges CYBORG CLOUD
OpenStack company Piston is donating hardware and developer expertise to the Cloud Foundry community, as the infrastructure-as-a-service specialist seeks tighter ties with VMware-spinoff Pivotal's grand platform cloud.
The partnership will see Piston become the community infrastructure provider for Cloud Foundry, which means it …
Amazon tightens grip on cloud market, report shows
Another day brings another wisp of data highlighting the difference in revenue between Amazon Web Services and the other megaclouds.
This time the data is courtesy of analyst firm the Synergy Research Group, which says that for the second quarter of 2013, global infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service revenues …
Amazon extends IP configurability across virtual private cloud
Amazon Web Services has given developers more control over how IP addresses are configured for rented virtual machines within its virtual private cloud technology.
The advance was announced on Wednesday, and it means admins can now choose whether or not to give public IP addresses to rented virtual machine instances when …
Whoosh, whiff, swiffle.. CLINK: Cleversafe chucks $50m in vault
Investors seem sold on the idea of Cleversafe's mad "terabyte-a-second" gobbling kit, so much so that the startup has received an injection of $55m to strengthen its big data and cloud-focused product and sell it more widely.
The company received $31.4m in a C-round of venture capital funding just three years ago. Why does it …
Amazon legal filing flames IBM's 'materially deficient' CIA cloud
There's a war going on for the future CPU cycles of the US Central Intelligence Agency, and behind closed doors and under fluorescent lights, representatives of IBM and Amazon are spitting blood at each other as they vie for the contract.
In a heavily redacted report made public on Tuesday, new details came to light as to why …
Rackspace to fire up VMware hybrid cloud
VMware's world has just become a little more complicated, after Rackspace announced it now offers “Dedicated VMware vCenter Servers”.
Rackspace's new service will allow VMware users to “migrate existing VMware workloads out of their on-premise data center into a Rackspace data center” in an arrangement that “will look and feel …
Amazon's cloud dwarfs all others, Gartner finds
The disciples of Gartner's Magic Quadrant have sallied forth to reveal the latest findings of their uncaring quadrilateral god – and the results show that Amazon is the one true cloud, followed at a distance by enterprise supplier CSC.
The magic quadrant is Gartner's way of ranking technologies, and sees the analyst firm plop …
Amazon DISAPPEARS from internet
Updated Amazon.com has dropped offline*, amid widespread reports of trouble in the underlying Amazon Web Services infrastructure cloud.
The problems began at about 11.50am Pacific Time on Monday in California, and Twitter quickly flooded with reports of people having trouble accessing both Amazon.com and the Amazon Web Services cloud, …
