Cisco on Monday announced it will invest $1 billion over the next two years to develop what it says will be the world's largest cloud.
The company's "Intercloud" project will endeavor to join, figuratively, the major providers that offer public cloud services, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Hewlett-Packard, Salesforce.com, VMware, Rackspace and IBM. The Intercloud will essentially be a cloud of clouds that is aimed at letting enterprise customers move workloads between private, hybrid and public cloud services.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/24/2014 at 1:42 PM0 comments
As it eyes an initial public offering, Cloudera this week raised $160 million in funding from some big-name investors. The company plans to invest much of the proceeds in engineering resources to extend its contributions to the Apache Hadoop community.
Cloudera, the leading provider of Apache Hadoop, an open source framework for storing and processing in real-time large-scale unstructured datasets using commodity hardware and cloud infrastructure, received the huge infusion from T. Rowe Price, Google Ventures and an affiliate of MSD Capital, the private investment firm for Michael Dell and his family.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/20/2014 at 12:42 PM0 comments
A growing number of traditional enterprises are showing an increasing willingness to deploy modern cloud-based architectures that are open and enable real-time streaming of data, even if it means discarding legacy systems.
That's the observation of Pivotal Software CEO Paul Maritz, who said a third of all companies realize if they don't take major steps, they risk being obfuscated by upstarts and competitors who have done so.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/20/2014 at 1:36 PM0 comments
Microsoft on Thursday said Windows Server-based virtual machine images of Oracle software are now available on Microsoft's cloud offerings, following nine months of development.
The agreement between Microsoft and Oracle to run the Oracle database, WebLogic middleware and Java on Windows Azure was announced last summer, despite a bitter, years-long rivalry between the two companies. However, tensions have eased in recent years as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had bigger fish to fry -- like IBM, SAP and Salesforce.com.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/13/2014 at 3:17 PM0 comments
SolidFire, a startup that provides flash storage for enterprises and cloud service providers, on Thursday said the next release of its Element OS that powers its arrays will fill some key gaps.
The new platform, called Carbon, will gain Fiber Channel connectivity and real-time replication to public clouds.
The company is one of many new providers of storage arrays that support flash-based solid state drives, which are gaining ground in organizations that require higher performance than traditional disk drives provide.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/13/2014 at 1:07 PM0 comments
Amazon Web Services customers will no longer have the ability to retrieve keys to their root accounts effective April 21.
While Amazon announced the pending change last summer, it issued a reminder this week.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/13/2014 at 12:35 PM0 comments
Acronis has relaunched a simpler but more complete suite that it says more readily spans data protection across the physical, virtual and cloud computing spectrum.
As well as a simpler user interface and a claimed 50 percent hike in performance, the newly dubbed AnyData lines offers both disk, VM, file, single-pass and sector-by-sector backups, full or fast incremental or differential backups and allows for the exclusion of files during backups. On the storage side, it offers a unified backup format, universal restore, deduplication, backup and staging to cloud (as well as tape), encryption, staging to tiered storage and multi-destination staging and retention.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/03/2014 at 1:44 PM0 comments
IBM pulled out all the stops this week to convince the IT world that it's transforming its entire business into a cloud company where all its hardware and software will be consumable as a service.
Big Blue used its annual Pulse conference in Las Vegas to outline to the 11,000 attendees how it will fill the gaps in its current cloud portfolio. Much of that effort centers around last year's $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer, which operates a large global Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) public cloud. At last year's Pulse conference, IBM made a big push around OpenStack, saying the open source cloud IaaS platform would be the basis of its entire cloud infrastructure offerings, including its SmartCloud public IaaS.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/27/2014 at 5:13 PM0 comments
Pivotal on Monday said it will spin off its Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) open source project, which will have its own governance model by this summer.
Joining the effort as founding members of the new foundation are Pivotal's parent company EMC and VMware, along with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Rackspace, SAP, telecommunications provider CenturyLink (which operates the Savvis cloud services) and ActiveState.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/24/2014 at 2:32 PM0 comments
Convirture is hoping it can spread the use of its multi-hypervisor management software by letting administrators manage their KVM and Xen virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based company on Thursday launched a new version of its open source software that lets Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers manage KVM and Xen VMs on local Linux servers and in the cloud. ConVirt Open Source is the free version of Convirture's software that provides basic management of virtualized environments.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/20/2014 at 10:44 AM0 comments
Cloud Cruiser has extended the analytics engine designed to help IT decision makers determine whether it's more financially feasible to use private or public cloud services.
The company's new Cost Advisor tool tracks usage of datacenter resources, including compute, network and storage capacity, and compares with public cloud service usage and costs. It uses the metrics to predict costs and determine whether it would be more affordable to run specific jobs in a private or public cloud based on historical and future usage.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/20/2014 at 12:17 PM0 comments
The sudden "retirement" of CEO Lanham Napier has brought to the surface a lingering question looming over Rackspace: Can the pure-play cloud and hosting provider sustain its battle with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a slew of other formidable challengers?
After 14 years at Rackspace and eight years as its CEO, Napier is stepping down and his predecessor, Rackspace Chairman and Founder Graham Weston, is returning to the helm, the company announced Monday. Despite posting a decent fourth quarter of 2013 with $408 million in revenues -- up 16 percent year-over-year -- and earnings of $.14 a share, Rackspace's profit slipped 33 percent year-over-year. Moreover, growth has slowed and annual earnings declined for the first time since Rackspace went public in 2008.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/13/2014 at 4:45 PM0 comments