Author: David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Hadoop and Big Data specialist MapR Technologies will be expanding its global presence a lot quicker thanks to a new round of funding that has put $30 million in the company’s coffers. The funding was led by new investor Mayfield Fund, but also includes existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA and Redpoint Ventures. In total, MapR has raised $59 million in funding.

The new funding will be used for accelerating MapR’s global expansion and continued research development. With this latest round of funding, MapR’s first goal will be expansion into the Asia-Pacific region to serve what it described as a "growing customer base in the region." The company has already expanded into Europe, opening offices in 2012 in London and Munich…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The BSA has put together a report which ranks the top 20 countries worldwide in terms of cloud readiness, and it may not be a surprise as to which nation is at the summit… Japan is the highest ranked cloud computing nation worldwide, according to research published by BSA: Software Alliance. In its 2013 BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard, the Alliance aims to “provide a platform for discussion between policymakers and providers of cloud offerings, with a view toward developing an internationally harmonised regime of laws and regulations relevant to cloud computing.”

In other words, the raw figures perhaps are not the be all and end all. But the overall statistics, taking into account such areas as data privacy, security and ICT readiness among others, still make interesting reading. Japan is the most cloud-oriented nation by some distance according to the study, scoring 84.1 overall. The rest of the top five were very closely matched, with Australia (79.9) and the United States (79.7) ahead of Germany (79.1) and Singapore (78.5), who climbed five places compared to last year’s study…

Grazed from Signal. Author: George Seffers.

The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) began working on its Yourcloud solution about two years ago and expects to have the cloud computing solution in place by year’s end. You can read more about this in "U.S. Nuclear Agency Enhances Cybersecurity With Cloud Computing?."

One of the surprises along the way to cloud was that NNSA is not alone in the problems it needs to solve, according to Travis Howerton, NNSA chief technology officer. "When we first started putting this together, I would have thought that we were more unique than we are, but when I traveled around talking to other chief information officers and other leaders in government agencies, or even in the commercial sector, everybody’s struggling with the same set of issues," Howerton observes…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Alistair Croll.

There isn’t a simple answer to the above question. First of all, cloud computing is hidden behind a fog of abstraction. Whereas IT organizations could once instrument every element of an application, today’s applications are like Descartes’ brain in a jar — we’re never quite sure if they’re real or virtual.

Second, many cloud service providers’ goals aren’t aligned with those of their customers. Service providers want to maximize revenue and profit and want the freedom to do what they will with the underlying infrastructure. That’s how they make the most of what they have and stay in business. Without that freedom, they lose economies of scale and skill. By contrast, customers want special treatment and instrumentation all the way down the stack…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

Yesterday I had the honor of being included in Charles Babcock’s InfomationWeek list of early cloud pioneers. It’s a great list and includes an extensive group of early cloud trailblazers including James Urquhart, David Linthicum, Michael Crandell, John Keagy and others. Although an impressive list, I couldn’t help but think it was missing a few of the folks I’ve looked up to in the early years of cloud computing. So without further ado, here’s my list of a few early cloud computing mavericks.

Moshe Bar – The Xen Master

You can’t have a list of early cloudy folks without including Moshe Bar. He is arguably one of the most prolific entrepreneurs in the early virtualization and cloud computing space. His earliest claim to fame was as the main developer and project manager of the openMosix project. Created in 2002 openMosix was a free cluster management system that provided single-system image (SSI) capabilities, e.g. automatic work distribution among nodes. It allowed program processes (not threads) to migrate to machines in the node’s network that would be able to run that process faster (process migration). His work with openMosix is in my humble opinion the basis of all IaaS platforms today. He later went on to form Qlusters Inc, an early data center infrastructure tool then later founded the company behind the Xen hypervisor, XenSource, which was sold to Citrix for US$ 500 million in 2007. If that wasn’t enough he went on to co-founder Qumranet, creator of KVM virtualization, which sold a year later to Red Hat for US$ 107 million…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) may offer $2 billion to buy SoftLayer, which claims to be the world’s largest privately held cloud services provider (CSP). But I can’t help but wonder: Has IBM also been taking a look at Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the best-known provider of OpenStack-based cloud services? The answer to that question sounds like a definite maybe. GigaOm’s Barb Darrow on March 15 suggested IBM has been poking around Rackspace. I’ve known Darrow for several years and I trust her reporting. In some ways, Rackspace could be a better fit for IBM. But in other ways, SoftLayer is the less risky acquisition. Here’s why.

Rackspace is publicly held and a huge proponent of OpenStack. IBM has also made a big OpenStack beg. But here’s the twist: Instead of owning and dominating open source platforms, IBM tends to influence them through strategic partnerships. Back in the late 1990s, IBM gradually built winning relationships with Red Hat and SUSE in the Linux market. IBM ultimately made a $1 billion bet on Linux without outright buying a Linux distribution…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Loek Essers.

Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents. The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced on Wednesday.

OX Text doesn’t mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. XML-based documents can be read, edited and saved back to their original format at a level of quality and fidelity previously unavailable with browser-based text editors, according to the company…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Kirill Tatarinov’s keynote this morning at Microsoft’s Convergence 2013 marks a subtle, yet very significant shift in how this technology leader is marketing itself to partners and the outside world. They are humanizing their marketing, messaging and products.

Gone is the Spock-like precision of presentations packed with roadmaps, mind-numbing metrics and intricate feature analysis. The Nick Brophy Band made the keynote complete by delivering excellent sets. Microsoft is learning that telling a good story trumps terabytes of metrics…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

IBM’s endorsement of OpenStack is both insignificant and more significant than it might have seemed on its March 4 announcement. IBM was already behind OpenStack. It joined the project in March 2012, taking a $500,000 seat on the board of directors in November. So wasn’t too surprising when IBM ‘fessed up earlier this month and said, "Hey, we like OpenStack."

But as Jim Curry, the early organizer of the OpenStack project at Rackspace, said, IBM’s endorsement "is exactly what we wanted to happen — build an open cloud platform for the world." As a matter of fact, he says, "I would have liked it if IBM had gotten on the list sooner rather than later." But IBM, like many companies, was concerned about the future of a cloud project that was under the initial control of one company, San Antonio-based managed hosting and public infrastructure provider Rackspace. Rackspace hadn’t sought to end up as sole proprietor, but its founding partner, NASA, fell away from the initial July 2010 launch during the recession…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Bernard Golden.

As VMware gears up to compete in an increasingly cloud-led IT world, the company wants its customers standardizing on VMware hosting technologies. In the data center virtualization battle, the company was very successful in homogenizing a customer’s software setup. Cloud computing, however, is a very different beast. VMware users are very unlikely to standardize on a VMware-only software stack to host clouds, due to other viable cloud orchestrator providers and the lure of public cloud computing.

Tools from several established cloud orchestration software providers can ride atop VMware’s hypervisor. For VMware cloud computing to attract users away from these companies, it must offer functionally superior and economically competitive products…