HP has quickly made itself a key supplier of some of the most important technologies of the present corporate era: cloud computing and big data processing.
This week here at the HP Discover 2013 conference — despite the gulf of 70 years but originating in the same Silicon Valley byways — has found a kindred spirit in … Facebook. The social media juggernaut, also based in Palo Alto, is often pointed to with both envy and amazement at its new-found and secretive feats of IT data center scale, reach, efficiency and adaptability. It’s a mantle of technological respect that HP itself once long held.

read more

HP has quickly made itself a key supplier of some of the most important technologies of the present corporate era: cloud computing and big data processing.
This week here at the HP Discover 2013 conference — despite the gulf of 70 years but originating in the same Silicon Valley byways — has found a kindred spirit in … Facebook. The social media juggernaut, also based in Palo Alto, is often pointed to with both envy and amazement at its new-found and secretive feats of IT data center scale, reach, efficiency and adaptability. It’s a mantle of technological respect that HP itself once long held.

read more

A few more days and 2013 is history. The big events for the year must include the IPO of Twitter, the unusual valuation of Pinterest and Snapchat, and the increasing velocity of Big Data and cloud adoption into the mainstream. I read this article in The Guardian, where Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, predicts four cloud computing trends for 2014. With the pioneering work at Amazon in cloud computing via its AWS stack, who better than Vogels to see the future? He says that despite all the amazing innovation we have already seen over the last seven years in cloud computing, we are still at day one. I also had the chance to listen to him at IBC 2013 Amsterdam last September. Here are his four trends.

read more

A few more days and 2013 is history. The big events for the year must include the IPO of Twitter, the unusual valuation of Pinterest and Snapchat, and the increasing velocity of Big Data and cloud adoption into the mainstream. I read this article in The Guardian, where Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, predicts four cloud computing trends for 2014. With the pioneering work at Amazon in cloud computing via its AWS stack, who better than Vogels to see the future? He says that despite all the amazing innovation we have already seen over the last seven years in cloud computing, we are still at day one. I also had the chance to listen to him at IBC 2013 Amsterdam last September. Here are his four trends.

read more

It’s that time of the year again. That time when we humans like to celebrate the annual revolution of our arbitrary measure of chronological quantities and units known as time. Or to put it another way, it’s that time of the year for 2014 predictions, postulations and hypothesizing on the state of the road ahead.
The very easiest and possibly most certain prediction we can make for technology as we head into 2014 is that we are precisely five years away from the next major paradigm shift in IT, as compared to where we stand today. Paradigm platform shifts come around just about every five years – you can count on it.

read more

GreenButton™ on Thursday announced the GreenButton WarpDrive, a solution providing accelerated and secure transfers of large datasets to the cloud. Previously this capability was only available to GreenButton customers for running Big Compute and Big Data workloads; however, demand from other use cases, such as enterprise backups, has led to a new standalone service.
“WarpDrive provides the best performing UDP data transfer technology for moving large datasets to the cloud.” said Dave Fellows, Chief Technology Officer at GreenButton. “UDP is far more efficient than TCP over high latency and congested networks. The ability to deliver this capability for a fraction of the cost of what’s currently on the market should open the door for many exciting cloud-based initiatives.”

read more

In my first post in this three-part series I talked about the need for distributed transactional databases that scale-out horizontally across commodity machines, as compared to traditional transactional databases that employ a “scale-up” design. Simply adding more machines is a quicker, cheaper and more flexible way of increasing database capacity than forklift upgrades to giant steam-belching servers. It also brings the promises of continuous availability and of geo-distributed operation.
The second post in this series provided an overview of the three historical approaches to designing distributed transactional database systems, namely: 1. Shared Disk Designs (e.g., ORACLE RAC), 2. Shared Nothing Designs (e.g., the Facebook MySQL implementation), and 3) Synchronous Commit Designs (e.g., GOOGLE F1). All of them have some advantages over traditional client-server database systems, but they each have serious limitations in relation to cost, complexity, dependencies on specialized infrastructure and workload-specific performance trade-offs. I noted that we are very excited about a recent innovation in distributed database design, introduced by NuoDB’s technical founder Jim Starkey. We call the concept Durable Distributed Cache (DDC), and I want to spend a little time in this third and final post talking about what it is, with a high-level overview of how it works.

read more

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

Box hopes to give subscribers greater analytic insights into, and control over, the content stored in its cloud service following its acquisition of privately held dLoop for an undisclosed sum. This is a move that Ovum has been predicting for some time, and will make Box more attractive to the enterprise customers who are becoming increasingly interested in online storage and collaboration services like Box, but who also put a sharp focus on content security and management. It also comes on the heels of Box’s publicly stated intent to raise another $100m in venture funding, which could point to further acquisitions and a likely IPO in 2014.

dLoop will provide more granular safeguards over Box content

dLoop is billed as a “data analytics” vendor – but not in the traditional business intelligence (BI) sense. The company has a narrow focus on analyzing access …

Agility means being able to change direction rapidly in response to a change in market conditions. As business increasingly moves to online and mobile interfaces, the agility of enterprise applications becomes a critical success factor. With the advent of the cloud, making applications agile means moving them away from the on-premise data center. Cloud-based applications are not automatically agile, however. The “lift and shift” approach to porting applications from on-premise data centers to cloud infrastructure can actually impede agility.
To make cloud-based applications agile, there has to be a commitment to platforms, tools, processes and people. Enterprise applications were created to serve business needs. As a result, business managers tend define agility in the following terms: How quickly one can get feedback from the end customer or customer-facing systems; how quickly one can decipher the feedback; how quickly one can decide what to do about it and implement the plan. To make this work, IT managers are moving applications to the cloud.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that the BigData-Startups, the online Big Data knowledge platform, has been named “Association Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo® and 5th International Big Data Expo,, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 15th International Cloud Expo® and 6th International Big Data Expo, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

read more