Box, the cloud storage and file-sharing start-up, has gotten a massive $125 million E round. That makes roughly $284 million since Box started in 2005.
Most of the new money – $100 million, in fact – is coming from General Atlantic, which is also contributing one of the operating partners, former GE CIO Gary Reiner, to the Box board. Reiner is also on HP’s board.
It’s believed Box was valued at $1.2 billion as the Wall Street Journal suggested last week. It’s expected to go public next year, but could delay to burnish its P&L.
Current Box investors Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, New Enterprise Associates, SAP Ventures and Scale Venture Partners, as well as new investor Social+Capital Partnership also kicked in. All Things Digital thinks there are also two undisclosed institutional investors.

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“We are at Cloud Expo to talk about how people can use the cloud for data backup, for better data protection in a little bit of a different way,” noted Margaret Dawson, VP of Product Management & Marketing at Symform, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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There are many ways to convert local storage to cloud storage. For small data size, some will just do a simple drag and drop upload. For medium data size, some will setup two-way sync to cloud storage.

For large data set, above methods are not

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Savvis and Ciber have entered into an agreement under which Savvis will purchase certain assets of Ciber’s global IT Outsourcing (ITO) business for $7 million in cash at the time of closing, plus additional future consideration in the form of a cash earn-out payment based on results through December 2013.
According to Jim Ousley, CEO of Savvis and president of CenturyLink’s Enterprise Markets Group, «The acquisition of Ciber’s global ITO business will complement Savvis’ existing ITO assets by expanding the organization’s capabilities for application management services and help desk support.»

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By David Krozier, Principal Analyst, Network Infrastructure Practice

On July 23 VMware, the server virtualisation powerhouse, agreed to acquire software-defined networking pioneer Nicira for $1.26bn; both parties expect the transaction to close in 2012.

VMware, a subsidiary of EMC, expects the acquisition to advance its progress towards programmatic control of virtualised compute, storage, and network resources – what it calls software-defined data centres.

Although Nicira’s current annual revenues are only in the $10m range, its technology complements VMware’s cloud strategy and will allow the combined entity to attack data networks with a comprehensive software-based cloud solution that is completely hardware-agnostic.

The acquisition certainly complicates the relationship between EMC, VMware, and longtime ally Cisco in providing virtualised infrastructure for cloud data centres.

While the companies have been long-term partners they also compete in the market, and Ovum expects the acquisition will end up polarising the EMC and Cisco camps …

Cloud application auditing and security company, SaaSID, has announced its partnership with big data and business analytics company, EMC Greenplum.

EMC is a global leader in cloud computing, enabling the world’s largest organisations to store, manage, protect and analyse their information: transforming their operations. In July 2010, EMC acquired Greenplum, a vendor of database technology that is optimised for large scale data warehousing and business analytics.
SaaSID’s software provides organisations with a simple way of provisioning, controlling and reporting on cloud-based application use, to extend corporate information security, identity management and governance to the browser. All user interaction with applications managed by SaaSID is provided in a detailed audit trail, to help organisations to maintain regulatory compliance when they adopt cloud-based applications.

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One of the features in GridGain’s In-Memory Data Platform that often goes unspoken for is ability to launch multiple GridGain nodes in the single JVM. Now, as trivial as it sounds… can you start multiple JBoss or WebLogic or Infinisnap or Gigaspaces or Coherence or (gulp) Hadoop 100% independent runtimes in the single JVM? The answer is no.

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Our friends at Kinvey posted an update to their really nice Backend as a Service Ecosystem map. Some call it the subway map, the Pacman map, or you can also look at it as “Where we fly map”. Thank you to Kinvey for including Tiggzi, we really appreciate it.

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Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) database deployment is one of the most common cloud implementations we encounter, yet cloud encryption for databases remains a complex challenge. We often get questions around cloud database encryption methods (row/column level, vs. full disk, vs. application level encryption), and I would like to spend some time reviewing pros and […]

The post Cloud Encryption – Identifying the Right Cloud Database Encryption Strategy appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.

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R’s glm function for generalized linear modeling is very powerful and flexible: it supports all of the standard model types (binomial/logistic, Gamma, Poisson, etc.) and in fact you can fit any distribution in the exponential family (with the family argument). But if you want to use it on a data set with millions or rows, and especially with more than a couple of dozen variables (or even just a few categorical variables with many levels), this is a big computational task that quickly grows in time as the data gets larger, or even exhaust the available memory. The rxGlm function…

David Smith

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