Earlier Cloud Infrastructure
Facebook plans vast data center in Iowa
Facebook's fourth gigantic data center will be in Iowa, a state already favored by major infrastructure operators due to its renewable utility options.
The new data center in Altoona, Iowa, will be the company's fourth dedicated bit barn, along with facilities in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden …
Mellanox adds VM-flitting to ConnectX-3 server adapters
Switch and adapter maker Mellanox Technologies added support for virtual LAN overlays to its Ethernet switches late last year and now it is building in support for the two primary overlays into its ConnectX-3 server adapters to match.
Virtual LAN overlays make Layer 3 routing between networks invisible to those networks and look …
Nvidia Tesla bigwig: Why you REALLY won't need x86 chips soon
Interview Life is what happens when you are trying to do other things, as the old saying goes.
Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia has been perfectly honest about the fact that the graphics chip maker didn't intend to get into the supercomputing business. Rather, it was founded by a bunch of gamers who wanted better graphics …
Cloudmeter pulls big data from the network, not the servers
Last year, Atomic Labs, the creator of the Pion web analytics tool, changed its name to Cloudmeter, raised some money, and set above to make its analytics tool more broadly useful for enterprises. Pion has been transformed into a broader tool called Stream, which runs on premises, and Cloudmeter has cooked up an adjunct …
Are you being robbed of sleep by badly designed servers?
Sysadmin Blog How should we design the servers and end-user computers of the future?
The construction of my testlab has given me the opportunity to play with technologies I normally wouldn't be able to get my hands on. The "advanced" features in them – standard fare by now for large enterprises – have caused a measure of introspection …
IBM selling x86 server business to Lenovo?
There are rumors swirling around, again, that IBM is looking to sell off all or a portion of its x86 server business to Chinese PC maker and server partner Lenovo Group.
US channel mag CRN caught wind of something going down between IBM and Lenovo on Thursday and referenced an anonymous source with knowledge of the talks now …
Project Savanna tames Hadoop big data muncher with OpenStack control freak
Batman and Robin. Peanut butter and chocolate. OpenStack and Hadoop. These are things that go together, with the latter pairing being something that commercial OpenStack distie Mirantis, commercial Hadoop distie Hortonworks, and commercial KVM and Linux distie (and soon to be OpenStack commercializer) Red Hat are putting …
Intel: Now THIS is how you forge physical, virtual switches
Intel has x86 chips, switch ASICs, and tweaks to the Linux operating system that it says allow it to not only make better physical switches, but is also advancing the idea of using its chip and software tech to build a virtual switch for linking virtualized servers together and to layer network application services onto the …
OpenStack: Control freak is a platform, just like Android and iOS
The OpenStack Summit is underway this week in Portland, Oregon, and the top brass at the companies who have been building the cloud controller and selling it to customers want everyone to know that this is not some open source project with promise, but a real product that can be put to use in data centers today.
Jonathan Bryce, …
Teradata cranks appliance iron, adopts InfiniBand as cluster backbone
Another database and data warehousing vendor has adopted InfiniBand as its backbone for data transmission. While upgrading the x86 iron inside its Active Enterprise Data Warehouse appliance and rolling out a new data mart server, Teradata said it was ditching its proprietary networking hardware and moving its homegrown Bynet …
HP: You know what healthy OpenStack bods need? Fibre Channel
Hewlett-Packard says it is enabling OpenStack users to connect to two of its Fibre Channel and iSCSI-access storage arrays.
OpenStack is the NASA and Rackspace-initiated open-source platform for building an infrastructure cloud. The build-yer-own platform has both compute and storage controller components and aims to lower …
Dell axes IT channel middlemen, installs Windows in the factory
Microsoft has granted Dell the power to install Windows on specialised computers before they leave the factory - neatly bypassing the distribution channel.
Typically, customers buy these machines via an integrator, which provides the software with the kit.
But now Dell's hardware-building biz OEM Solutions can manufacture and …
Red Hat emulates Fedora Linux project with RDO OpenStack community
OpenStack is sometimes called the Linux for clouds, and Red Hat, the dominant Linux distributor, seems to be all over that. The firm is now working to bring its Red Hat OpenStack distribution into the ever-crowding field of companies that want to peddle supported distributions of this cloud control freak. Red Hat Open Stack, or …
HP uses OpenStack to glue CloudSystems to public clouds
Before OpenStack was even an idea, HP had cooked up an all-blade system strategy and some utility computing control software that it merged together into the BladeSystem Matrix. The software in that automated cloud-in-a-box has now evolved.
BladeSystem Matrix now includes some elements of the OpenStack cloud controller and is …
Rackspace attacks Amazon with new cloudy clones
Look out, Amazon Web Services. Rackspace is cloning its own cloudy service – and to quote Jimi Hendrix's Foxy Lady, it's "comin' to getcha."
Way back when, Rackspace Hosting teamed up with NASA to create the OpenStack community precisely to leverage the smarts and excitement of the open source community to take on the closed and …
Cisco ports Nexus 1000V virtual switch to Microsoft's Hyper-V
Upstart server-maker Cisco is bounding around the Microsoft Management Summit this week in Las Vegas to talk about how it is plugging its technologies into Redmond's cloud stack.
First up, as it promised it would do back in the summer of 2011, Cisco has ported its Nexus 1000V virtual switch to run atop Microsoft's Hyper-V server …
Oracle embraces NetApp and Cisco's FlexPod
A couple of weeks back, Gartner told The Reg that Oracle has more room for growth in virtualisation than just about any other player, perhaps including Microsoft.
That prediction looks a little sounder today, after LarryLand let it be known it has teamed up with NetApp to create an Oracle-centric of the storage vendor's FlexPods …
Oracle cuts down Big Data Appliance to make pilots cheaper
It is hard to imagine a rack of servers and switches being too much of a machine for a pilot Hadoop system, but that is exactly what prospective customers have been telling Oracle. And so it is offering a cut-down "starter" version of its Big Data Appliance with a much lower price point.
George Lumpkin, Oracle's vice president …
Speaking in Tech: Facebook's BETTER than Twitter ... for stalking your ex
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
Facing another tedious commute home with only the dead-eyed grumblings of your fellow passengers - or the blaring radio of other motorists - for entertainment? Download this banter-packed episode of El Reg's one-and-only podcast and you could be catching up on everything …
HGST unveils 12Gbit/s SAS SSDs for bankers, gamers and cloud-pushers
Western Digital subsidiary HGST has slapped 12Gbit/s SAS interfaces on three solid-state drives - which it claims is a storage industry first - and they fly, with one model boasting prolonged endurance as well.
The SSD800 and SSD1000 drives store up to 800GB and 1TB respectively, using enterprise grade 2-bit multi-layer cell …
Piston ready to capture 'waves of customers' coming off AWS
Many of the core OpenStack developers who worked on the Nebula cloud at NASA ended up at cloud controller appliance maker Nebula or at Rackspace Hosting, the other initial collaborator for the OpenStack project. But more than a few of them ended up at Piston Cloud, which has come up with its own twist on the OpenStack cloud …
Amazon widens .NET to catch Windows cloud devs
Amazon has broadened the ways in which .NET users can fiddle with its platform-as-a-service cloud AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
The expansion of the technology was announced on Tuesday and sees Elastic Beanstalk for .NET now support Amazon's enterprise-focused Virtual Private Cloud technology. It follows an announcement by Amazon last …
Google inflates infrastructure cloud
Google has taken another step toward opening up its Amazon-competitor Google Compute Engine to the general public.
The ad-slinger announced on Thursday that anyone who is paying the company $400 a month for "Gold" support for cloud services can now try out the GCE beta.
"Now you can sign up online for Google Compute Engine with …
Building the actual real internet simply doesn't pay
Analysis It isn’t unicorns that keep the internets running, but eye-watering amounts of capital investment by infrastructure operators. However a substantial chunk of that investment never pays for itself and most of it barely repays the cost of the capital, reckons consultancy PwC.
The telco industry as a whole spends $320bn on …
IBM readies PureData Hadoop appliance for the summer
IBM wants to make it easier for companies to consume and use Hadoop, just like everyone else who is chasing that yellow elephant that likes to munch big data.
Big Blue hosted a big data shindig at its Almaden Research Center in San Jose, the home of the RAMAC disk drive (really a disk drum) from 1956 and also the place where the …
Flash to the future: Memristors, photonics, MLC-y tsunami
For a non-volatile storage medium flash development sure is volatile, as attendees at a distributor conference found out.
Aaron Rakers, managing director of analysts Stifel Nicolaus, attended the conference and sent out a despatch from it that contained a mouth-watering array of tit-bits.
The distributor had suppliers of hybrid …
VMware teaches Serengeti big-data virt new Hadoop tricks
It comes as no surprise that VMware wants companies to run everything virtually rather than on bare metal, and for several years it has pushed the idea of virtualizing the Hadoop stack to make it run better and easier to manage. The tool it created to do that, called Project Serengeti, now has some feature tweaks to try to …
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 …
