Earlier Cloud Infrastructure
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, …
Microsoft still reviving Azure SQL Reporting after MONDAY FAIL
Four days have passed since a "procedural operations error" downed Azure SQL Reporting in Microsoft's East US data center, and Redmond is still trying to restore customer data.
After saying on Thursday that full restoration from Monday's fail would have occurred by Friday, the recovery date has slipped again, according to …
Amazon opens Redshift data warehouse to Joe Public
Amazon's Redshift cloudy data warehousing service is now available for general consumption after a trial among blessed customers.
The pay-as-you-go technology, which scales from around 200GB into the petabyte range, represents a direct threat to the warehousing divisions of IBM, Oracle, Teradata, and EMC (Greenplum).
Redshift …
Opera gulps Skyfire, takes aim at mobile data applecarts
Opera has bought one-time competitor Skyfire, for $50m down with another $100m in performance-related bonus on the table. The idea is to get into cell-operator racks with a view to making mobile pay.
Under the deal, which should complete in a month or so, Skyfire will continue to exist as an independent product but as a division …
Why virtual network application
Live today According to readers of The Register, Private Cloud is low-moving towards being a central plank of IT with more than 30% of them estimating their IT will be based on such a dynamic infrastructure within the next three years. This isn’t a project that can be done at server level in isolation of course. Rather, it’s a project that …
Heroku tech change leaves customer with bill-shock
The cloud is not as easy or as simple as its providers' marketing departments may want you to believe – that's the moral of the story of a startup and its platform provider Heroku.
Web-startup Rap Genius, which pays Heroku $20,000 a month in fees, alleged in a forceful blog post published on Tuesday that the Salesforce-owned …
Red Hat revs OpenShift Enterprise to 1.1
Red Hat has whipped out version 1.1 of OpenShift Enterprise, its locally deployable platform-as-a-service.
The main changes in the 1.1 release are a slew of bug fixes relating to stability and security, a bit of judicious code pruning, and enterprise-certification of a web GUI. The release comes just two and a half months after …
Capita gobbles Northgate Managed Services for £65m
Outsourcing monolith Capita has coughed up £65m to buy Northgate Managed Services (NMS) in a deal announced to the London Stock Exchange this morning.
As revealed by The Channel last year, VC Kholberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and Company - owner of NMS parent Northgate Information Solutions, touted the division with a price tag of £ …
Ericsson readies carrier-grade OpenStack for telcos and SPs
Ericsson is going with OpenStack, and in fact joined the consortium that is steering its development a year ago. The company and now previewing a tweaked version of OpenStack that will run on its network iron.
Network equipment providers created carrier-grade versions of Unix and Linux operating systems, or worked with partners …
TransLattice inks partnership with Amazon's AWS cloud
Distributed-database company TransLattice has sailed into Amazon's AWS Partner Network, giving developers confidence that they'll get the most out of their database when running it on the AWS cloud.
The company announced on Tuesday that it had gained AWS Partner Network Standard Technology Partner certification (snappy acronym: …
Rackspace rides OpenStack, lassos chubby, cloudy cash cow
Rackspace Hosting is doing something right – many things, actually – as proven by its latest financial report that revealed hefty increases in customers, revenues, and profits.
The company started out small, and has only recently entered the ranks of large enterprises with its dedicated hosting and now cloud computing services …
Pertino uncloaks, fires 'cloud network engine' at Cisco
Plucky startup Pertino Networks has taken aim at Cisco's Meraki with the release of its new network-as-a-service, ummm, service.
What Pertino is up to takes a bit of imagination. Imagine first that your email was your network address and out there on the cloud, and that some magical big virtual switch knew all of the devices you …
DropBox seeks to woo IT admins with team data controls
Dropbox is changing its cloud storage service to reassure IT administrators that they can control their users and not have sensitive information taking wing out of their corporate servers.
Last November the company claimed it had 100 million users, and that 95 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have at least one Dropbox user. …
Amazon adds DNS Failover to Route 53
Amazon has encroached further onto the turf of traditional web-hosters with a DNS Failover upgrade to its Route 53 DNS service.
The free upgrade lets developers use the DNS Failover feature to automatically route traffic to a backup website hosted on Amazon S3, or to a site hosted in another AWS region if part of the Amazon …
Amazon cloud spin-off 'inevitable,' says Oppenheimer
Analysis Amazon Web Services must be spun-off from its mothership to prevent it losing out on cloud customers, one analyst has argued – but a break-up could render AWS toothless, says The Reg.
The spin-off was recommended by Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan in a report published on Monday.
"In our view, we believe an ultimate spin-off of …
Microsoft's Azure SQL Reporting FAIL
Updated Microsoft's Azure cloud is grappling with an "unexpected outage" in its SQL Reporting component.
The failure in the US East data-center hub began on Sunday night and meant the SQL Reporting Service suffered "service degradation" – a softie-euphemism for anything from intermittent connectivity to outright failure.
"We are aware …
Barrall, beam me up: 'Private cloud' biz builds Transporter device
Data Robotics (Drobo) and BlueArc founder Geoff Barrall's new small biz Connected Data has revealed itself after gaining $6m in A-round funding and cash from a Kickstarter launch.
Connected Data's product is the Transporter, a 2.5-inch disk in a small conical desktop package, which copies files to other Transporters in a network …
Facebook glitch briefly crashes several sites
Facebook Connect, the single sign-on tool Facebook uses to allow its accounts to serve as logins to other online services, has experienced a glitch that froze users out of many popular websites and sent them to an error message.
The incident took place in the very early hours of 8 February, GMT, and saw Facebook Connect users …
Google Drives into web hosting
Google Drive has turned on a feature that lets the cloud storage service become a limited web host.
It's long been possible to allow others to access data stored in the service, which can produce a URL for files. The new tweak means it's possible to ask for a “Preview” of an HTML file stored in Google Drive. Doing so renders the …
Morphlabs to cloud builders: Osmium is kryptonite to Amazon, Rackspace
Cloudy infrastructure provider Morphlabs is revving up its private cloud iron while at the same time wooing service providers with add-on software that makes it easier to run the OpenStack cloud control freak to create public clouds.
No one who can do math and configure and run systems well would argue that compute and storage …
Brit cloud Elastichosts chases boom to Asia
British cloud operator Elastichosts has splashed down in Asia, renting space in Sydney and Hong Kong data centres and declaring it is ready to cash in on the boom in cloud and the healthy economies of Asia.
Elastichost offers a range of cloud hosting and compute services, using the KVM hypervisor and its own enhancements to that …
Ravello uncloaks with $26m, fires cloud hypervisor into the heavens
A cloudy startup called Ravello Systems raised eyebrows last March when it partially uncloaked as a bunch of techies who created the KVM hypervisor at Qumranet (now part of Red Hat) and got back together for some unknown purpose. Now we know what that purpose is.
Namely, Ravello aims to create a hypervisor that spans clouds and …
WORLD temporarily FREED from BURDEN of TWITTER!
Twitter is broken for an unknown number of its 500-million-strong userbase.
The site's over-capacity Fail Whale is greeting many people who are trying to access the site, while others are finding the service to be extremely slow.
A spokeswoman at the privately-held company confirmed to The Register (by email) that there was …
