Negative Approach

How desktop virtualization survived the recession

It's fair to say desktop virtualization has had a checkered past.

As far back as 2005, VMworld had presentations on the topic of desktop virtualization, also known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. By 2007, VMworld had developed a desktop virtualization track with a number of deep-dive technical sessions. In June of 2008, IDC issued a report on "The Promise Of Desktop Virtualization" touting how desktop virtualization can help rein in the costs of managing and maintaining PC infrastructures.

In February of 2009, CRN reported Gartner's predictions that by 2013, between 10 percent and 15 percent of enterprise PCs would be virtualized. … Read more

Hortonworks looks to grow Hadoop ecosystem

As big data becomes more and more top of mind, a number of new companies have popped up to support Hadoop, the leading open-source platform for data-intensive distributed applications. One of the newer entrants is Hortonworks, a company spun out of Yahoo, with a $15 million-plus cash infusion from both Yahoo and Benchmark Capital.

Last week I sat down with Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschwieler to understand how the company intends to differentiate from other vendors such as Cloudera, MapR, and the many as yet unlaunched companies that venture capitalists are still funding.

Hadoop itself was initially developed at Yahoo by … Read more

IBM goes for really, really, really big data

According to an article in this week's MIT Technology Review, IBM researchers are working on a new 120 petabyte data repository made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around 1 trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.

The new system benefits from a file system known as General Parallel File System (GPFS) that was developed at IBM Almaden to enable supercomputers faster data access. It spreads individual files across multiple … Read more

Can PostgreSQL pickup where MySQL left off?

EnterpriseDB, a provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL, today announced Postgres Plus Cloud Server, which the company has billed as "a full-featured, Oracle-compatible, enterprise-class PostgreSQL database-as-a-service for public and private clouds with support for Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, and GoGrid."

We've seen other database-as-a-service offerings come on the scene from the likes of Salesforce.com's Database.com, Amazon RDS, as well as from startup Xeround. But they're not based on PostgreSQL, which has had years of hardening and development by a committed community. The other databases are not "Oracle compatible," … Read more

24-hour design marathon to benefit children's nonprofit

Companies everywhere get stuck. A lack of resources or passion--as well as any number of dysfunctions that can plague an organization--can all get in the way of building great things online. Today, a close-knit Bay Area design firm called Zurb is trying to help one lucky nonprofit get unstuck.

Today marked the kickoff of this year's ZurbWired design marathon, an annual event during which the Zurb team and a group of volunteers work together to pull off a marketing miracle for a nonprofit in 24 hours. This year, the fourth annual event of its kind, the challenge will benefit … Read more

Amazon releases secure cloud for government

Cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced AWS GovCloud, a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Amazon's move reflects the ongoing adoption of public cloud services by government entities, including the U.S. Treasury's Recovery Accountability and Transparency board, which hosts Recovery.gov and Treasury.gov on AWS, as well as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which processes telemetry data and high-resolution images on an array of EC2 cluster compute instances.

The announcement also … Read more

Private-cloud growing pains

As cloud adoption continues to soar, the debate between public and private continues apace. While I am a fervent believer in the public cloud, I do believe there is a lot of opportunity for private clouds in many areas, especially industries that have strong technology footprints and experience with large data center management, such as financial services and government.

Over the weekend I read a piece by Jonathan Feldman that really showed how challenging private cloud solutions can be. Lots of dependencies on non-mainstream software packages coupled with a lack of cloud-specific skills shows the lack of maturity in the … Read more

Netflix reportedly getting kid-friendly with new tab

Select Netflix members have been getting a new tab labeled "Just For Kids" in the main menu of the Netflix Web site, according to a GigaOm post.

When clicked, the tab opens a sliding bar of characters from a number of kid-friendly sources, including Nickelodeon and Disney, GigaOm explains. A click on one of those characters opens up a new page with access to TV shows and films starring that character. "Each episode is previewed with a screenshot," the post says, "and there is barely any text at all. Everything is optimized for instant playback … Read more

Coders choosing Mac OS over Linux environment

Apple's Mac operating system has surpassed Linux in popularity as a development environment in North America, according to an Evans Data survey.

Windows remains at the top of the development environment heap, used by 80 percent of the survey's more than 400 professional software developer respondents in June; Mac OS was used by 7.9 percent of those surveyed, displacing Linux, used by 5.6 percent.

A few other tidbits from the survey:

Developers believe that mobile and cloud development will increase the most in importance over the next three years 44 percent of respondents are actively engaged … Read more