Earlier Cloud Infrastructure
Newvem enlists tech support friends to squelch AWS hiccups
Newvem, which has carved a niche for itself babysitting compute and storage capacity on the Amazon Web Services cloud with its Cloud Care service, is now brokering tech-support services with third parties to help get their AWS setups correctly configured and keep them that way.
Sometimes you create a new business, and sometimes …
Ex-NASA OpenStackers launch Nebula cloud control freak appliance
Chris Kemp, the former NASA CTO who helped build the wonking Nebula infrastructure cloud for the US space agency and the techie from the NASA side who spearheaded the development of OpenStack along with Rackspace Hosting, knows about as much about control-freaking clouds with OpenStack as anyone else on the planet – and that's …
Cloud chairwoman crashes down through glass ceiling, grabs the CEO helm
Storage-in-the-cloud startup Nirvanix has joined HP and Yahoo! in appointing a female CEO.
Debra Chrapaty adds the CEO role to her existing executive chairwoman position, having joined Nirvanix' board in November last year following on from a $25 million C-round of funding led by Khosla Ventures in May 2012.
She came to that …
Microsoft LOVES YOU: Free Wi-Fi on the British railways for a month
Waiting for a train could be a marginally more interesting experience next month: Microsoft will provide free Wi-Fi on platforms to tempt commuters into buying an Office 365 subscription.
The wireless internet access comes from The Cloud and will cover the larger UK stations. Travellers can already bag 15 minutes of free …
Hadoop distie MapR trousers another $30m to take on big data rivals
MapR Technologies, one of the commercializers of the Hadoop big data muncher, has pocketed another $30m to help it ramp up its business and keep it on track for what the company hopes will be an initial public offering..
While Cloudera was out of the gate early commercializing the Hadoop big data muncher, MapR was close behind ( …
Beijing IT biz taunts Microsoft: Show us your licence for Office 365
Microsoft Office 365 customers could be in for a tricky time in China after a Beijing IT company called on Redmond to prove it has the legal authority to operate in the country or risk being blocked.
Enterprise IT service provider and Microsoft customer Baihui Zongheng Technology made the calls at a press conference at the China …
HOT SWEATY RACKS blamed for Outlook.com, Hotmail MELTDOWN
Microsoft has admitted a dodgy firmware upgrade cooked its servers and knocked its Hotmail and Outlook.com email services offline for 16 hours.
In a postmortem examination of the disaster, the Windows 8 giant said a software upgrade for its data centre equipment - an update that had worked successfully in the past - failed …
EMC launches its cloudy Federation with Pivotal big data spinoff
Wall Street events can be pretty boring unless you like money and profits, but there was a moment of levity during EMC's financial analysts meeting that marked the birth of the Pivotal Initiative, the gathering up of big data and application framework assets from EMC and its virtualization minion, VMware.
Joe Tucci, EMC's CEO …
Speaking in Tech: Cloud, yes. Doughnuts, yes! Five-mile run, NOO!
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
It's time for the weekly Speaking in Tech podcast, hosted by Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela - although Sarah is out and about yet again enjoying SXSW 2013. But the guys are joined by special guest Brian Gracely, vice-president of solutions at enterprise-grade …
VMware and partners to build uber-vCloud to take on Amazon
Rumors have been going around since late last year that server virtualization juggernaut and cloud wannabe VMware was working on building its own infrastructure public cloud, said to be called Project Zephyr, and it turns out to be true. Mostly. Maybe.
In a financial analyst meeting held in New York by EMC, VMware's majority …
Outages plague Hotmail and Outlook users
Microsoft's spanking new Outlook.com and creaking Hotmail service are experiencing prolonged outages around the world.
Hotmail and Outlook.com users are complaining they are either unable to access email or unable to see all their email messages.
The problem seems to have initially affected cloud storage service SkyDrive, too, …
Oracle’s cloud slowly condenses
Oracle has started touring the world, throwing “CloudWorld” events at which it explains it’s not late to the cloud, but took its own sweet time getting there in good shape.
That was the message at the Sydney event today, where the Big O’s chief communications officer Bob Evans predicted 2013’s “dumbest idea” has already been …
Dell floats Boomi master data management into the cloud
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 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 …
Scalding clouds too hot to touch? Newvem adds heat map to AWS
Not everyone thinks visually, but a lot of us do. And for those of us who think in pictures better than tables of data, Newvem - which has launched a set of monitoring tools for the Amazon Web Services cloud - has created a new heat map tool that rides on its cloudy service.
Newvem was founded in 2010 by Zev Laderman and Ilan …
HP, SAP talking HANA-as-a-service
HP and SAP are discussing the possibility of introducing an as-a-service edition of the software giant's Hana in-memory computing product.
Anita Paul, senior director of HP's industry transformation consulting practice for Asia Pacific and Japan today told The Reg she will shortly meet SAP to discuss creating the service. …
Amazon makes EC2 stickier with default virtual private clouds
The evolution of the Amazon Web Services cloud has proceeded at a steady pace since 2006, and while a number of companies have built up cloud businesses and close the gaps, Amazon keeps moving ahead. Two recent tweaks to the Amazon cloud make it that more useful, and therefore more sticky for the applications running upon it. …
Do you need to command an OpenStack cloud? Hello, Rackspace
Once you get a complex piece of software like OpenStack built, the next thing you have to do is make it easier for system administrators to use.
Then you have to integrate it with the various management tools they already have deployed in their data centers.
This is what Rackspace Hosting, one of the driving forces and probably …
Facebook builds 'McDipper' – memcached for flash
For some things you need DRAM, but for everything else there's flash.
At least that's the message Facebook gave on Tuesday when it took the wraps off 'McDipper', a technology the social network has developed to let it save on memory and get more out of its flash.
In a post to the Facebook engineering blog that is sure to get …
Amazon chops EC2 virty server prices – again
The dance of Cloudy Server Limbo continues, with Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing subsidiary of e-tailing giant Amazon.com, lowering the broomstick a little closer to the floor and dancing under it with lower EC2 compute-cloud prices.
Specifically, on Tuesday AWS cut prices on compute capacity that customers reserve …
EMC: No need to swallow an array - just breathe in our storage cloud
Storagebod So EMC has finally announced the VMAX Cloud Edition: which according to this blogger is an iteration that has little to do with technology and everything to do with the way that EMC wants us to consume storage.
Firstly, let's discuss the cost model - in many ways the most important part of the announcement. EMC has now moved to …
EMC intros self-service VMAX CE for cloud-slingers
In May last year EMC rolled out a VMAX for service providers, the VMAX SP. Now we have its successor, VMAX Cloud Edition, which provides tenant self-service provisioning and pre-organised storage service classes to make life easier for cloud storage slingers. The upgrade provides a new payment model, too.
The big VMAX CE …
Cloudera sends in the auditors – for Hadoop
Techies need tools to manage cranky Hadoop clusters, and business managers need to manage and report on access data stored in Hadoop to appease cranky auditors. And so, as part of an update to its CHD4 stack on Tuesday at the Strata conference in San Francisco, Cloudera is previewing a new data visualization and auditing tool …
Engine Yard plugs multiple IaaS players into back end
Platform-as-a-service Engine Yard has expanded its technical capabilities so developers can rapidly switch their apps between multiple infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds.
The announcement telegraphs a shift away from cloud king Amazon Web Services by allowing customers to select the underlying IaaS cloud they want their …
Skyhigh Networks lets bosses snoop on employee cloud use
RSA 2013 People have a tendency to skirt corporate IT policy and use their own applications on the network, and Skyhigh Networks thinks it has a way for IT admins to stop this from happening.
The company came out of stealth on Monday to announce the general availability of its Skyhigh Networks software, which can monitor any of 2,000 …
Microsoft coughs up compensation for Azure cloud cock-up
Microsoft has vowed to compensate users of its Azure cloud after an expired SSL certificate took the service offline.
Victims of the Blue Sky of Death, which lasted 12 hours, will get credits as per their service-level agreement (SLA), the Redmond giant confirmed on its website.
Windows Azure was knocked offline globally …
Microsoft brings Azure back online
Microsoft has managed to repair its Windows Azure cloud, after an expired SSL certificate downed storage and other services for people across the world.
Ninety-nine percent of the affected services have been brought back online, Redmond said early in the hours of Saturday morning, Pacific Time.
"We will continue monitoring the …
Microsoft secure Azure Storage goes down WORLDWIDE
Updated Microsoft's Windows Azure storage cloud is having worldwide problems with secure SSL storage, probably because Redmond let the HTTPS certificate expire.
Being 'in the pink' is not good news for Windows
Azure, as this screenshot from the Windows Azure
Service Dashboard attests (click to enlarge)
The problems were first …
Rackspace cuts network bandwidth prices on its cloud
Rackspace, which bills itself as "the open cloud company", is cutting prices in its ongoing effort to tear a chunk or three of business away from closed source Amazon Web Services, the public-cloud leader.
Amazon didn't just build the first viable public cloud, it keeps cutting the price on its various compute, storage, and …
Google in cloud-support price war with Amazon, Microsoft
Google has updated its cloud support packages, and in doing so has opened up another front in its cloud pricing war with Amazon and Microsoft.
The four support packages across the Google Cloud Platform — which comprises App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and other public-facing services — let …
Newvem fluffs up penny-pinching control freak for AWS cloud
Startup Newvem uncloaked from stealth last November with Cloud Care, a control freak that reaches into CloudWatch and other Amazon Web Services management APIs to help companies figure out what they are spending and where they might be wasting resources and money. The service has tracked over 125,000 EC2 instances over the past …
Oracle plans deep integration of Eloqua marketing tech
Oracle will make sure its recently acquired Eloqua marketing cloud plays along with Microsoft and Salesforce systems, though it plans to closely link the marketing suite with its own sales technology as well.
Describing Eloqua as "the centerpiece for Oracle's cloud," Oracle's president Mark Hurd said in a webcast on Thursday …
OnApp packs bullet-proof SAN into v3 of its cloud software
UK cloud control freak OnApp has released the third version of its OnApp Cloud, which packs in its distributed SAN for telecommunications companies that want to spin-up Amazon-like iterations.
The v3.0 release, which became generally available on Wednesday, incorporates OnApp's ambitious distributed SAN, along with CDN, DNS, …
Concurrent gives old SQL users new Hadoop tricks
Application framework specialist Concurrent has given SQL devs a free tool to get at data stored in Hadoop, without having to learn the intricacies of the trendy computational framework.
The "Lingual" tool is an ANSI-standard SQL engine built on top of Concurrent's "Cascading" software, a Java application framework for Hadoop …
Nasuni fondles clouds, says Microsoft's is nicest...
Nasuni says Microsoft's Azure is the best cloud service provider for users of its cloud storage gateway. Last year the enterprise storage company ranked Amazon's S3 at the top.
It tested five cloud service providers (CSPs): Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, HP Object Cloud Storage and Rackspace Cloud Files.
Last …
Amazon preparing 'disruptive' big data AWS service?
Exclusive Amazon Web Services looks set to launch a "disruptive" big data service that is sure to put the frighteners on traditional IT vendors.
The as-yet-unnamed product will be run within AWS Data Services – an internal cloud product team that also handles the AWS Data Pipeline, AWS RDS and AWS RedShift, among others – according to …
Amazon releases OpsWorks, muscles into cloud management
Amazon has launched a free add-on for its fleet of cloud services that lets developers better manage and automate their application stacks – a move that stabs at the heart of many of Amazon's technology partners and some of rivals.
The 'AWS OpsWorks' control-freak tech was announced in a blog post by Amazon on Tuesday.
The tech …
TransLattice 3.0 dreams of multi-cloud nirvana
Distributed database TransLattice has a dream of scalable multi-cloud data for all, but competition among providers may quash it.
With the release of the TransLattice Elastic Database (TED) 3.0 on Monday, the company is trumpeting its ability to run across multiple public clouds.
At launch, TED can run across Amazon Web …
LogMeIn uncloaks cloud storage bypass
By now you know the prosumer cloud storage schtick: an agent on your device monitors a designated folder and copies everything in it to the cloud, from where any other device running the service's agent and logged in with the same account sucks down that file so it is available locally.
The likes of DropBox, Google, Microsoft, …
VMTurbo 'invisible hand' control freak grabs more virty servers
There are a lot of tools out there to allow system administrators to monitor the various aspects of virtual computing capacity and help them figure out how to manage its use. But VMTurbo wants to get humans out of the way and automate the allocation of resources using the "invisible hand" of market economics - pushing the admins …
Hard Man of Facebook: We might just eat those cheap TLC flash chips
Micron has built the world's smallest 3-bits per cell NAND chip, targeting USB stick memory and the like, while Facebook's open source hardware guru has indicated such chips could be used in its cloud's data centres providing ultra-cheap flash storage.
TLC (Triple-Level Cell) NAND Technology has 3 bits per cell, one more than in …
Heroku cops to poor tech performance for last THREE YEARS
Heroku has admitted that apps running on its Bamboo tech stack have been exposed to shoddy performance for the past three years.
In a surprising mea culpa, the Salesforce-owned platform-as-a-service copped to architectural failures alleged by $20,000-a-month customer Rap Genius earlier this week.
The company's general manager, …
