Last week’s Big Data World Congress delivered a number of important messages, but none more so than the sentiment provided by Lastminute.com’s Director of Innovation, Bill Beckler, who reminded the data-hungry delegates in attendance that getting the most out of analytics isn’t just about number crunching – it’s about human interaction too.
Monthly Archives: November 2012
Quantum’s Got Big Data Storage
Quantum Tuesday introduced a new storage line based on next-generation
object storage technology geared to Big Data that challenges traditional
storage solutions.
The company, which has over 6,000 Big Data customer installations
worldwide, says conventional RAID drives aren’t up to handling large
datasets. They struggle with drive errors and long rebuild times. And
mirrored RAID is pricey.
Boring Cloud Could Be a Good Thing
Much of my writing on cloud computing over the past couple of years has been in near-panic mode. The US economy refused to bounce back, it seemed millions of jobs were lost forever, and the US seemed to be at the start of a long decline into obscurity.
Then hey, the United States might become the world’s largest oil producer in a few years! It might even be self-sufficient! This revelation alone should give the Obama administration some long-term breathing room and prod Congress to be a little more cooperative, on both sides of the aisle. Maybe not all hope is lost.
So perhaps we can now pause for a bit. Holiday season upon us, only a few weeks left in the year, and no time for radical transformation of enterprise IT or anything else. This year’s Cloud Expo in Silicon Valley has come and gone, with nothing truly earthshaking to report.
What’s going on? Well, OpenStack has gained steam, Cloudability says it can precisely monitor your Amazon AWS usage, Amazon itself has opened a new cloud center in Australia, and the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs is moving forward with Office 365 e-mail (delivered through HP Enterprise Services) for an initial 15,000 employees as part of the government’s Cloud First effort.
How Fast?
Cloud seems to be growing slowly, here and there, and is maybe in a bit of a boring stage right now. Boring can be good; it can signal stability. Cloud growth is hard to measure, as it’s hard to measure something you can’t define.
Holding that thought, Big Data was the big byword last year and this year, but the difficulty in defining it and complexity in deploying it is going to take many years. We’re still at the point of asking, “What does Big Data mean for you?”
Internet traffic is predicted to continue to grow rapidly, thereby putting more pressure on big datacenter operators to go green and to be cloudy.
For 2013, I expect to see continued growth for VMware and on-site virtualization. But I also expect to see the red herrings of security and sovereignty start to disappear as companies become more at east with devoting some of their IT to public cloud.
Should be great news for Rackspace, and perhaps Amazon, if the latter can stop those pesky outages. I’m still looking for my spigot, but I think we’re getting closer every year. Moore’s Law will continue to work its magic, and prices will become ever more attractive and delivery ever less granular.
Cloud Computing: MapR & Hadapt Offer Combined Hadoop Solution
MapR Technologies and Hadapt have cut a partnership so joint customers can combine the MapR Distribution for Hadoop with Hadapt’s Interactive Query capabilities to analyze all types of data – structured, semi-structured and unstructured – in a single enterprise platform without connectors, complexities or rigid structure.
Hadapt is the only data analytics platform natively integrating SQL with Apache Hadoop.
Hadapt marketing VP Scott Howser said, “We have already brought interactive applications on Hadoop to market and now, through this partnership with MapR, we are providing customers additional ease-of-use, performance and reliability advantages.”
Platfora Gets $20 Million Round
Platfora, the Big Data analytics start-up that just surfaced last month, has picked up a $20 million B round led by Battery Ventures with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, is also an investor in the company.
Platfora got a roughly $7.2 million A round a little over a year ago.
It will use the new money to expand sales and marketing and build out its product engineering and design team.
Platfora transforms raw data in Hadoop into scale-out, in-memory BI without recourse to a data warehouse. Non-technical business users can explore and analyze Big Data through a web-based interface. It uses HTML5 canvas technology for collaborative data analysis across any device or platform.
Commercializing the Cloud
A cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new types of IT services to Thomas Duryea’s many Asia-Pacific region customers.
Why cloud services for your consulting and business customers now? Have they been asking for it
Certainly, the customers are the big driver while we are moving into cloud services. Being a traditional IT integrator, we’ve been very successful showing a lot of data-center solutions to our customers, but more and more we’re seeing customers finding it harder to get CAPEX and new projects and they are really starting to look at the cloud alternative.
Oracle Buys into Engine Yard, Integration to Follow
Oracle has made a strategic minority investment in Engine Yard, the Platform-as-a-Service company with the cloud development platform that supports the Ruby, PHP and Node.js development languages.
The exact sum, position and valuation went unmentioned. Engine Yard will continue to operate as an independent company.
Ironically Amazon was part of a $15 million B round in 2008 and a $19 C round in 2009. Prior to the Oracle, Engine Yard is understood to have raised $37.5 million.
The investment means that Oracle and Engine Yard will connect their respective PaaS offerings to enable more rapid development of applications in a secure, reliable and scalable environment. Developers are supposed to be able to extend their packaged applications more efficiently to support additional business requirements and test, prototype and deploy new purpose-built apps without having to assemble and maintain the infrastructure.
Windows Azure Poster Cloud Services Defined
Do you want to learn about Windows Azure and Microsoft’s Cloud Platform? C
Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. Build applications using any language, tool or framework. You can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
C12G Launches OpenNebula Pro 3.8
C12G Labs has just announced a new release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of its widely-deployed open-source management solution for enterprise data center virtualization and private cloud computing. OpenNebulaPro integrates the most recent stable version of OpenNebula (3.8) with bugfixes, performance, and scalability patches developed by the community and by C12G for its customers and partners. OpenNebula 3.8 (codename Twin Jet), released one month ago, enhances its AWS and OCCI API implementations and provides a tighter integration with VMware and KVM.
C12G also announces the first stable release of the OpenNebulaApps, a suite of tools for users and administrators of OpenNebula to simplify and optimize cloud application management. OpenNebulaApps provides a service management layer on top of OpenNebula by configuring the software stack in the applications, managing multi-tiered applications, providing configurable services from a catalog, and building your own private market to distribute applications across several OpenNebula instances. Cloud applications consist of complex software stacks, OpenNebulaApps helps to manage their life-cycle and contributes to significantly reduce the time needed to build, distribute, and deploy cloud applications.
SolidFire’s Solid State Cloud Storage Comes Out
SolidFire, which is positioned as having the only solid-state (SSD) storage designed exclusively for cloud service providers, has gone GA with its cost-effective high-performance SF3010 and SF6010 systems as new customers ViaWest, Databarracks, Calligo and CloudSigma roll out services with guaranteed performance and firm SLAs.
SolidFire storage systems combine up to one hundred SF3010 or SF6010 nodes over a 10GB Ethernet network, making the system capable of delivering over 2PB of capacity and five million IOPS. Both products run SolidFire’s Element OS 4.0, and can deliver an effective storage capacity below $4/GB and a price/performance ratio below $1/IOP.
The products are sold direct.
The company says the widgetry will enable SPs to bring tier-one enterprise applications like Oracle, SAP, Hadoop and NoSQL into the cloud for the first time.