Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Data Collective is a new venture capital firm focusing on seed-round investments in big data startups, from the infraastructure level up to analytics and applications. Among its collection of portfolio companies are Kaggle, MemSQL, Continuuity, Parse, Keen.io, Meteor, MongoHQ, Citus Data and Piston Cloud.
big binary

For almost two years, Data Collective has been lurking in Silicon Valley’s shadows, investing seed money in a slew of big data and cloud computing startups without ever showing its face to the public. On Thursday, the firm officially launched with a unique partnership model and an investment portfolio that should make any dataphile drool…

Grazed from EquityBulls. Author: Editorial Staff.

Unisys announced that entries are open for the fourth annual Cloud 20/20 competition, which recognises innovative thinking among students across India in addressing the technical challenges of cloud computing. In an evolution of the contest, this year participants are being asked to put theory into practice by working in teams of four, supported by two project guides, to showcase live cloud computing projects.

The topics for this year focus on the real-world challenges of implementing successful cloud computing solutions. This year’s contest topics include: Automation for Cloud Computing; Virtualization; Application Development for the Cloud; Security Issues in the Cloud; Moving Workloads from Datacenters to the Cloud; Consumerization of IT; Potential Future Technologies, Open Source Technologies and Disruptive Technologies. Registration for the contest closes on September 5, 2012…

Grazed from NewsObserver.com Author: Aaron Ricadela.

Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman, in her drive to boost profitability, took another step toward dismantling the computing empire former CEO Mark Hurd built with $24.3 billion in acquisitions.

The company is writing down the value of its enterprise-services business by $8 billion and shuffling management at the top of the division, Hewlett-Packard said Wednesday. That follows an announcement in May that Whitman is eliminating 27,000 jobs, many of them from that unit. The write-down reflects the dwindling value of Electronic Data Systems, bought by Hurd for $13.2 billion in 2008. The deal pushed Hewlett-Packard into the low-margin business of information-technology outsourcing, handled more efficiently by rivals such as Wipro Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services. It left the company ill-equipped for the shift toward cloud computing, making it a laggard in services that help clients deliver software over the Internet…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

SevOne officials are unveiling an update to the company’s network and cloud performance management appliances, which can be used in a peer-to-peer cluster environment to enable the monitoring of millions of objects across networks.

The ability to cluster the SevOne appliances in a P2P fashion allows for significantly greater scalability than in competing network performance management tools, and that scalability is become more critical as big data, exponential network growth and a rapid increase of endpoints—such as mobile devices—become more prominent in with the rise of such trends as cloud, virtualization and consumerization of IT, according to SevOne CEO Mike Phelan.

Legacy networking performance monitoring weren’t made for the modern IT environment, Phelan told eWEEK…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

A new acquisition puts compliant and secure cloud and hosting services provider Layered Technologies directly into the federal, state and local government market. The company announced it has acquired New World Apps, a secure private cloud and community cloud computing provider focused on the government markets.

With experience and expertise in serving the U.S. intelligence community, law enforcement, the Department of Defense and most civilian federal agencies, New World Apps brings a new level of secure cloud and a new market to Layered Technologies…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

Nobody likes to find themselves locked into a particular vendor, and that’s doubly true when it comes to cloud computing.

The standard that is supposed to prevent that from happening from a storage perspective is the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) developed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). CDMI addresses the way applications create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the cloud.

NetApp adds support to CDMI with the 9.0 release of StorageGRID, software that is specifically designed to manage hundreds of petabytes spread out across billions of records stored in hundreds of sites in a single name space…

Grazed from Talkin Cloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Burstability may be an important feature for many businesses, but cloud services providers pinning their sales plans on bursting had better think again. According to Kyle MacDonald, Canonical‘s vice president of cloud, bursting is not a primary use case for cloud computing, but a nice-to-have add-on feature.

Vendors have been hyping the importance of bursting in their cloud computing strategies, most of which revolve around a hybrid cloud mix of both public and private cloud services, but while bursting is a useful tool to have during peak times, such as the holiday rush during November and December, it’s not a feature that is top-of-mind for most businesses, MacDonald told Talkin’ Cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Matt Endler.

Online retailer and auction site eBay this week announced that it has been using Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) within the OpenStack open source environment to run some of its research and development operations. The move is one of the first by a high-profile company to build a cloud service using OpenStack.

OpenStack has gotten a lot of attention as an open source cloud-computing framework. It was originally developed at NASA, and has attracted support from a number of the tech world’s heavy hitters, including IBM, Dell, and Red Hat. Rackspace is using it for its public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service offering.

Nicira’s NVP within the OpenStack environment lets eBay spin up hundreds of on-demand virtual networks in which new Web applications can be quickly tested and deployed. This process lets the company reduce or eliminate the time-consuming and error-prone task of manually reconfiguring network hardware…

Grazed from TheServerSide. Author: Jason Tee.

Virtual computing lies at the foundation of cloud services. But what exactly does this term mean? What is it and what does it do? Most important, how might it enhance the performance of your business? Let’s take a look at the answers to each of these questions.

Virtual computing basics

Some people confuse virtual computing with cloud computing or distributed servers. In fact, the cloud and .net servers can be and often are used for virtual computing. However, the actual term simply refers to divvying up any computer or similar hardware infrastructure to act as if it is many computers. In other words, a desktop PC could seem like a single machine on the outside. But it can be linked to a network that allows many users to access storage space, apps, computing capability, and even different operating systems using the computer’s internal resources…