Earlier Cloud Infrastructure
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 …
Startup decloaks, rolls out cloudy security 'conductor'
Security startup NetCitadel is tackling the problem of automatically applying security policies across physical and virtual environments with a cloud-based approach.
NetCitadel's OneControl Security Orchestration Platform enables the application of network security policy changes across cloud, virtual and physical environments …
Cisco and NetApp fatten up Flexpod, chuck it at cloud biz
Cisco and NetApp are drawing closer together with their FlexPod converged system effort, an attempt to grab branch office, data centre and public cloud infrastructure business.
Cisco has servers and networking, which is not enough, and NetApp has storage, which is not enough either - because IT people need servers, storage and …
Microsoft to stream blue movies
Microsoft has unveiled a cloudy content distribution service that will intensify its competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Azure Media Services is billed as a “cloud platform for managing and distributing media to any screen, anywhere” and as a cloudified version of Microsoft's existing Media Platform.
Users can encode …
VMware ponies up $30m for Puppet Labs partnership
VMware injected a little money into systems management software upstart Puppet Labs in its third round of funding back in November 2011. But now the server virtualization juggernaut has its hands firmly up the backside of Puppet Labs as it has become one of the bigger investors in the company after doing the fourth round of …
Dotcom's Mega smacks back: Our crypto's not crap
Kim Dotcom's comeback cloud storage service, Mega, has responded to criticism about its approach to cryptography and password security after security researcher Steve Thomas (@Sc00bz) released his MegaCracker tool, which cracks hashes embedded in emailed password confirmation links.
In a blog post designed to reassure users, …
Flash, cloud boom flings storage startups into piles of money
Nasuni, Nimbus, TwinStrata and Whiptail have all announced flying starts to 2013, suggesting it's going to be a quite a year for both cloud storage and flash array technology.
Cloud storage gateway supplier Nasuni said its 2012 business performance featured:
200 per cent growth in bookings
Quadruped the size of the enterprise …
Cautious Brits less likely than US firms to puff on clouds - survey
A "fragmented" legal framework, the "attitude" of regulators and a naturally cautious approach to security issues are among the reasons why UK businesses have made less use of cloud computing than US counterparts, according to experts.
IT law and cloud computing specialists Charles Park and Christopher Mann of Pinsent Masons …
Google to devs: Fork with our cloudy code
Google has released a substantial trove of code for its Cloud Platform to github.
Don’t connect the dots between github, cloud and a large web company and assume this is all about generosity. Facebook and Twitter may have offered production code to the open source world so anyone can learn from their innovations. Google has been …
Foxit outfoxes fiendish flaw to fix foxed-up Firefox PDF plugin
Foxit Software has fixed a critical security hole in its PDF plugin for web browsers.
A bug in the code allowed overly long URLs in web links to crash the utility - billed as a "better" alternative to Adobe's software - or potentially inject malicious code into vulnerable Windows systems. The stack-based buffer overflow flaw is …
Beware the coming of the ROGUE CLOUDS, wails Symantec
With one eye on Larry Ellison's Oracle in 2011 Salesforce chief Marc Benioff attacked “fake clouds” saying they aren’t the future.
Oracle - late to clouds - threatened to challenge Benioff’s message of using public clouds that house your data next to other customers' data in a secure, multi-tenant model with the idea of keeping …
DataStax cranks up Facebook NoSQL to 3.0 with enterprise features
DataStax, the company that was founded to take the Cassandra NoSQL data store created by Facebook commercial and therefore usable by mere enterprise data centers, is keeping to its cadence and is rolling up a new release of its DataStax Enterprise Edition.
The company has also put out an update to its Community Edition, which is …
Oracle reveals cloudy engineered systems
Oracle is rolling out private infrastructure as a service clouds, with capacity-on-demand (CoD) pricing, based on its various "engineered systems" setups.
Financial services organizations have very stringent – and significantly higher – capital requirements since the Great Recession. These days every million counts and any shift …
LIVE TODAY: Windows 8 licensing - Speak your brains, believe your eyes
Taking a snow day today? You might want to join your fellow Reg readers in assessing what Windows 8 actually costs. We don’t mean in the sense of estimating the financial fallout of poor Q4 sales for Microsoft and the PC makers, but rather: what do you get for your money?
Putting Metro aside and forgetting the fact you must buy …
Skytap fires up Hadoop data-chewer as cloud crash-test dummy
Hadoop might be a popular tool for munching on unstructured data, but setting up and tuning the software requires a lot more expertise than many people have and it takes a lot of time, too. That makes it a perfect piece of software to put on a cloud, provided you can either generate your data there to begin with or pipe it over …
Speaking in Tech: Why EMC is like a club, geek gifts and more
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
Welcome to our first enterprise and consumer tech cast of the year. Join your hosts Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela along with repeat offender Chad Sakac, senior veep of Global Systems Engineering at EMC, as they discuss the hiring culture at EMC, what they got …
Microsoft control freaks Server 2012 clouds with System Center SP1
Redmond is pushing out a Service Pack 1 update to System Center to get all of the functionality it has been talking about out the door.
It was only last September when Windows Server 2012 was launched with much fanfare and the combination of System Center 2012, Microsoft's server and hypervisor control freak, was billed as "the …
Verizon puffs up Terremark cloud over London and Dallas
It has been two years since telecom behemoth Verizon shelled out $1.4bn to buy cloud computing partner Terremark. And since that time, this poster child for VMware's vCloud wares has been pretty quiet as corporate types work to absorb it into the telco and realize the $500m in "synergies" – that means cross-selling and cost- …
