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 more
There's no such thing as "the" open-source license. There are lots of them. Sixty-nine to be precise if one accepts the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as the definitive arbiter of what is open source and what is not.
Some are essentially legacy licenses; in general, the continued proliferation of licenses has abated in recent years but it's often more trouble than it's worth to fully retire licenses that are still in use by active software. Others won't be relevant to a specific type of copyrighted material, such as software programs. (Material under an open-source license is more
The Linux Foundation is releasing its "Who Writes Linux" analysis, illustrating who crafts the code, the pace of its evolution, and which companies are behind the kernel's development.
Kernel development follows a time-based release model with a new release occurring every two to three months. This is designed to help speed the development for all Linux distributions so that each one doesn't need to make kernel-specific updates or changes. More than 6,100 individual developers from more 600 different companies have contributed to the kernel since 2005, according the report.
Nimbula, a provider of cloud infrastructure software and founded by former Amazon executives Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, on Monday announced that it has secured $15 million in its second round of venture capital funding led by Accel Partners. That brings total funding to more than $20 million. Current investor Sequoia Capital, which led Nimbula's first round of venture financing, also participated in this round.
Nimbula emerged from stealth mode in June and in fact has remained somewhat stealthy. The basic premise of the software is to provide private-cloud infrastructure similar to Amazon Web Services EC2 platform--an approach more
A few weeks back I attended venture firm Accel Partners' New Data Workshop event and learned quite a bit about the state of what we are now commonly referring to as "big data" and the challenges that await the vendors trying to target this new way of slicing and dicing vast amounts of information.
One of the big takeaways for me was the realization that even with all of the processing power available nowadays, the amount of data is growing at such a rapid pace that people are simply looking to cope with the problem, rather than facing it head on.
The issue of processing large amounts of data is not necessarily new--most developers and IT staff can tell you about having too much information to deal with--but, the big difference is that there are new approaches, tools and technologies that can help alleviate the difficult in processing.
Over the course of the last 30 years or so the way that machines process transactions has changed, but so too has the vast amount of data that is being processed and collected, now with an eye toward real-time analysis of information.
This has led to the advent of a number of technologies that allow for data processing to be offloaded and managed in both structured and unstructured ways--examples include open-source projects like Memcached and Hadoop as well as NoSQL data storage mechanisms like Cassandra.
Despite what is often considered to be a conservative approach to business, IBM has no shortage of big thinkers who use their skills both internally and externally to influence the way the company thinks about technology and how it applies to business processes.
This week I met with Jeff Jonas, chief scientist, IBM Entity Analytics, to talk about how predictive analytics is moving into new realms of big data and how companies are using software to deal with the deluge of information.
Jonas joined IBM in 2005 when Big Blue acquired SRD, a company he founded to develop so-called extraordinary systems with specific data analysis tasks, such as facial recognition and analysis systems casinos use to catch cheating gamblers.
The main thrust of Jonas' research right now is trying to figure out ways to better take advantage of as much data as possible as fast as the transaction is happening--with an eye toward real-time predictive analytics. This is basically pattern detection in real-time, based on patterns that may or may not exist already.
Jonas explained that you may not know of a pattern, but you want to find one, and that many might be interesting but they don't always matter. In the casino example, bad guys are looking to perform channel separation by mixing and matching, people, places, and things, but the casino needs to do channel consolidation to aggregate information and determine an immediate course of action.
The massive amounts of data being created on the Web and the rise of cloud computing together make an ideal environment for alternative database technologies to thrive. And the Web is often proving to be just an entry point for bleeding-edge technology to be tested out before it starts heading into the enterprise.
NoSQL databases and associated operational-data technologies based on nonrelational approaches to data management and manipulation continue to be top of mind for big Web shops and are slowly starting to make their way into enterprise IT infrastructure.
I've spoken with a number of vendors roaming the NoSQL space over the last few months and there seems to be one common thread that they push: traditional relational databases are expensive, bulky, and simply not ideal for this new era of Web technology.
On Wednesday, a new NoSQL database joins the fray: Membase. Launched as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license and co-sponsored by NorthScale, Zynga, and NHN (Korea's top online gaming portal), Membase is optimized for storing the data behind interactive Web applications.
Membase says it is 100 percent compatible with Memcached, the de facto standard for distributed object caching behind Web applications. Basically, Membase is as easy to use as Memcached but also stores data.
According to James Phillips, NorthScale co-founder and senior vice president of products, the thousands of organizations that use Memcached (18 of the top 20 most visited Web sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Google) have a demand for a solution that looks like Memcached but acts like a distributed, highly available, high-performance, elastic database technology.
A new service called OpenVBX from cloud-communication provider Twilio hopes to change the way we think about and deploy phone services for businesses large and small.
Twilio provides a programmatic approach to phone calls much in the same way that we apply business logic through HTTP or XML for complex applications.
OpenVBX is a Web-based phone system that provides for virtual phone numbers as well as a wide range of other functions that are programmable through the OpenVBX plug-in API in PHP OpenVBX lets you take advantage of all of Twilio's integrated services, like text to speech, voice transcription, more
The open-source Eclipse development environment has become one of the mainstay options for developers thanks to its extensibility and support from a broad range of organizations, both open-source and private.
Every year, the Eclipse Foundation publishes the results of its community survey and this year's report shows that open-source adoption is continuing to grow, with a number of projects emerging as clear leaders among Eclipse developers.
The primary takeaway from the results is the shift in how engineers are choosing to develop and deploy. Linux, especially Ubuntu, has taken market share from Windows on an ongoing basis, and is more
If there is one aspect of mobility that has yet to live up to user expectations, it's the ability for data to be accessible in near real-time across multiple devices.
Despite all the advances in technology, including a wealth of Wi-Fi and 3G networks, many devices become impotent without an Internet connection.
This issue becomes even more apparent when you are dealing with browser-based applications and smartphones that don't have multithreading functionality to maintain state across applications and data stores.
I recently had the chance to chat with Damien Katz, the creator of CouchDB and CEO of Couchio, more
EnerG2 opens a plant to make an engineered carbon that will improve performance of energy storage devices and make storage for start-stop hybrid cars less expensive.
Tommy Jordan, the man who shot his daughter's laptop for YouTube, gets a visit from police and child protection services. Oh, and Good Morning America.
As UC Berkeley students, the co-founders of "Back to the Roots" discovered they could grow mushrooms using recycled coffee grounds. Now their mushroom kit sells at grocery stores across the country.
For people who don't have time to tend a Zen garden, the Zen Table will handle the work for you. The table is filled with silicone beads and a robotic system that "rakes" images into the sand.
The Washington State Senate passed a bill that would charge electric car owners $100 per year to compensate for not paying gas taxes. The bill still has to pass the House.
