-
Want to build a business? You need an IT ecosystem.
Just thirty years ago, innovation in almost any category was measured in years, but today it’s measured in weeks or months. If you were to focus on information technology specifically you could even argue that change can occur in days — and that cycle will continue to accelerate.
But adapting and innovating in IT requires that you have a platform strategy that allows for heterogeneous adoption of technology at each layer of infrastructure. You also need simplified, cost-effective, real-time access to a wide range of partners and solution providers, otherwise known as your technology ecosystem. This group of providers will be a veritable marketplace of vendors that are proprietary and open source, but whom together create a combination of technologies and services that allow the buyer to mix and match for any solution requirement.
(Read Full Article)
Will clean power and microgrids be the future of data centers?
Will an idea to build a data center park powered by onsite clean energy and paired with a microgrid in Colorado, represent the future of data centers? Created by developer Craig Harrison, the Niobrara Data Center Energy Park is a proposal for a company or even the government to build one or more data centers on a one-square mile plot of land in Colorado’s Weld County.
Harrison says the site is unique in that a natural gas power plant could be built on it (a gas hub is a few miles away), and has a sunny climate that would enable an onsite solar panel farm. These local clean energy sources could be connected in a microgrid that could add uptime security for a data center, as well as reduce efficiency losses from transmission.
(Read Full Article)
For Facebook, infrastructure concerns loom large
Beneath all the Zynga games, likes, personal timelines and pokes, Facebook's business relies on fast, reliable infrastructure. And concerns about that underlying figure heavily in the risks it faces as it goes public, according to its S-1 filing.
(Read Full Article)
Don’t call it a wimpy node: SeaMicro rethinks the server for webscale
SeaMicro, the startup that has built a business in the low-power microserver market, said it has now integrated Intel’s workhorse Xeon chip inside its boxes. SeaMicro, which crams hundreds of Intel’s low-power Atom-based chips inside its specialty servers for smaller workloads, has gradually proven to Intel and the rest of the market how strong the demand is for low-power architectures. Intel eventually designed a specialty Atom chip just for SeaMicro that gave it the capabilities that data center customers were looking for. Today it goes further.
(Read Full Article)
The era of the 100 MW data center
The first phase of Facebook’s data center in Prineville, Oregon will have a capacity for 28 MW of power, points out Data Center Knowledge. That’s about the same amount of power used by all the homes and businesses in the rest of the Oregon county where the data center is located. And that’s just the first of three potential parts of Facebook’s data center in Oregon. When all three stages are built out the entire facility could have a whopping power capacity of 78 MW. Data centers are increasingly requiring energy capacity of close to 100 MW of power, which is the equivalent power for about 80,000 U.S. homes, says Greenpeace. While most Internet companies don’t disclose the details of their facilities’ energy consumption, Apple’s billion dollar data center in North Carolina is estimated to require 100 MW, according to Greenpeace. Google ...
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Apple Greenpeace Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Under the covers of eBay’s big data operation
For online auction powerhouse eBay, big data is serious business. The company has 100 million active users globally, 300 million live listings at any time (and it archives them all), receives 2 billion page views daily, and handles 250 million search queries and 75 billion database calls a day. How does eBay make sense of all this activity? With Hadoop, of course. Hugh Williams is VP of experience, search and platforms at eBay. His team is responsible for theentire eBay experience from the moment users hit the site until moment they make a purchase, from code to data center automation to building new picture-hosting platforms. If it has to do with driving traffic to eBay and improving the customer experience, Williams’ team builds it. But in order to know what to build and how to build it, the team needs insight into what customers want and what they’re doing.
(Read Full Article)
Sumo Logic drops cloak, picks up cash to take on Splunk
Sumo Logic emerged from the shadows Tuesday with $15 million in Series B funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Greylock Partners and Shlomo Kramer bringing its total to $20.5 million since its founding in April, 2010. Greylock and Kramer also participated in the Series A round. The company, founded by Arcsight veterans Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, aims to bring log monitoring and analytics to cloud computing environments via a software-as-a-service model. In that arena, Sumo Logic is bound to face off against Splunk, which filed for a $125 million IPO two weeks ago, as well as Loggly, a company that spun out of Splunk (see disclosure.)
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Amazon.com
For Apple, iCloud is just the beginning
No one can doubt the sheer awesomeness packaged in Apple’s recent quarterly performance. However, for me the real story is the company’s iCloud and CEO Tim Cook’s assertion that with 85 million sign-ups in three months, Apple is only getting started with iCloud. “It’s not just a product, it’s a strategy for the next decade,” Cook declared. The recent elevation of Eddy Cue to SVP of Internet Services and his generous stock options are a sign of how serious Cook is about iCloud. The $1 billion data center in North Carolina is more proof of the company’s seriousness.
(Read Full Article)
A CTO’s take on cloud
As Capgemini’s CTO for North America, Joe Coyle hears an awful lot about cloud computing. He hears it from customers that want to evaluate cloud solutions and from vendors that want to win that business. Capgemini, a $12 billion global systems integrator, has relationships with all the major vendors and many enterprise customers, so it’s interesting to hear what Coyle has to say about the current state of the market.
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Amazon.com Cisco IBM
Intel’s next big wireless play: It’s not smartphones
Intel’s wireless ambitions go beyond smartphones and tablets. It’s set its sights on the guts of the mobile network as well. By embracing a new network design concept called Cloud-RAN, Intel believes it can reshape wireless networks from highly-specialized architectures into more generic computing platforms that run over its off-the-shelf silicon. And in the world’s largest operator, China Mobile, Intel sees the opportunity to make that vision happen.
China Mobile has a massive network of 700,000 GSM and 220,000 3G base stations built into towers throughout China’s vast landscape. The base station is easily the most expensive element of the wireless network, and as China Mobile looks to the next wave of wireless technology, LTE, it doesn’t want to repeat that enormous infrastructure investment by installing pricey hardware at the bottom of every tower. Instead, it’s looking for Intel’s help to ...
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Amazon.com Intel IBM
CIOs come around to cloud storage
It is not surprising that Aaron Levie says CIOs are ready to sign off on big corporate cloud-storage deals. He is, after all, the co-founder and CEO of Box — a company staking its claim as an enterprise-grade cloud-storage service.
More surprising is the fact that experts with no dog in this fight agree that even the biggest companies are ready to commit to cloud storage.
They are late to the party. Consumers have already embraced the notion of cloud storage — whether it is Dropbox, which claims more than 45 million users; Apple’s iCloud; or a dozen other offerings.
(Read Full Article)
The Mega empire: details of the MegaUpload indictment
You can't make this stuff up: The indictment of the popular file hosting site MegaUpload reveals a hugely profitable business run by people whose Mercedes novelty license plates included "GUILTY" and "MAFIA." Also included are numerous juicy internal emails between MegaUpload employees and executives.
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Carpathia Hosting Netherlands
Cisco touts 10,000 UCS customers
Cisco Systems says it now has 10,000 Unified Computing Systems customers for it’s not quite three-year-old product. That’s up from 4,000 customers a year ago.
The March 2009 UCS announcement was the first shot fired in what became a raging battle by vendors to sell hardware that melded compute and networking in a single box, tightly integrated with storage. Since then HP and Oracle entered the fray. These converged infrastructure servers are pricier than the commodity boxes that power most webscale operations but are pitched as a way to consolidate workloads, cut wiring, and save power.
The 10,000-customer number is impressive because these are the sort of IT buyers that are notoriously conservative, said Brian Modoff, analyst with Deutsche Bank. The figure also represents growth off a very small base — Cisco still doesn’t crack the top five server vendors by unit market share.
(Read Full Article)
Kleiner Perkins backs AppDynamics in $20 million round
AppDynamics netted $20 million in new Series C funding led by Kleiners Perkins Caufield & Byers, a new investor. Existing backers Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in this round which will help fund the company's application performance management offering.
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Kleiner Perkins IBM
Cloud server shipments to skyrocket in 2012
For anyone who doubts cloud computing is driving IT, check out new numbers from IHS. The researcher predicts unit shipments of "cloud servers" -- those that run cloud computing infrastructure -- will grow 35 percent to a whopping 875,000 this year, from 647,000 in 2011.
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Apple Amazon.com Google
The next big thing for data centers: DC power
In 1893, Rudolf Diesel was awarded a patent for the diesel engine. Gandhi committed his first act of civil disobedience. Thomas Edison created the movie studio. And zany New Zealand became the first country to give women the right to vote. Nabisco invented Cream of Wheat.
It was also the year that direct current (DC) took a back seat to alternating current (AC) after Niagara Falls Power Company chose AC transmission for its power plant.
Although we live in an AC-dominated world, DC seems poised for a comeback, particularly in data centers. Facebook adopted a DC architecture in its Prineville, Ore., data center. SAP spent $128,000 retrofitting a data center at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to rely on DC power. In 2010 it cut SAP’s energy bills by $24,000 per year.
(Read Full Article)
IBM builds memory chips one atom at a time
Computer and memory chips usually tend to get smaller over time, but in a paper published Thursday in Science IBM details how it's building memory chips that would be 100 times more dense than today's hard drives by starting with the smallest building blocks--atoms.
(Read Full Article)
Who knew? Data center segment is hot, hot, hot!
Most people think of data centers as a big, stodgy category, but in this era of cloud computing it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that the sector has been hot, with more hotness to come.
As more cloud services come online — as they seem to be doing by the day this week at the Consumer Electronics Show – the demand for webscale data centers to power them will grow as well.
“In public cloud, where you do more things for more people — things like iCloud or perhaps what Acer and Lenovo are doing [at CES], you’ve got to build out data centers to accommodate a bigger user base,” said Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud for market researcher Infonetics.
(Read Full Article)
ClearEdge Power lands world's largest utility fuel cell deal
ClearEdge Power lands world’s largest utility fuel cell deal By Katie Fehrenbacher Jan. 10, 2012, 5:00am PT No Comments * Tweet * * * Fuel cell maker ClearEdge Power has scored the mother of all utility deals: a 50 MW, $500 million deal with Austrian utility Güssing Renewable Energy. ClearEdge Power VP of Marketing Mike Upp tells me in an interview that Güssing will run the entire distributed network of fuel cells off of biogas, produced from the area’s forest and agricultural bi-products. To pu (Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Sempra Energy Bloom Energy ClearEdge
Don’t run your own data center if you’re a public IaaS
Keeping a data center online is a highly complex and often underestimated task, but one that provides the bedrock of any public cloud availability. Patrick Baillie of CloudSigma explains why he thinks public IaaS cloud service providers shouldn't run their own data centers.
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: CloudSigma
SuVolta gets $17.6M to make power sipping chips
Apparently, I’m not the only one who thought SuVolta is a great example of the future of chip tech. Bright Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, August Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Northgate Capital and DAG Ventures all have contributed to a $17.6 million funding round in the company, which doesn’t exactly design chips but has come up with a novel way to design transistors in a way that makes them use less power.
Chips made using its technique have recently run at full speed but consumed half the power of their counterparts that use traditional transistors. This isn’t just a concern of a crazy startup; Intel recently unveiled a new process technology using 3-D transistors that is designed to save on power by helping chips continue to get smaller.
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Intel Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Feds rip a page out of Amazon’s playbook in data center move
Much has been written about the U.S. government's plan to shutter 1,200 data centers. There's been considerably less chatter about the fact that some of the remaining, revamped federal data centers are now leasing out excess capacity to other government agencies.
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Amazon.com James Hamilton Microsoft Corp
Grading my cloud predictions for 2011: How’d I do?
I made a lot of predictions about cloud computing and the general IT infrastructure space heading into 2011, and I impressed myself with my skills of prognostication. Of course, some might have been no-brainers, and it’s possible I’m just grading myself too generously, so I’ll let readers be the judges.
For your assessment, here’s what I predicted (the full predictions are all available on GigaOM Pro, subscription required) and a synopsis of what actually happened. Comment away.
5 trends not to expect
Ubiquitous cloud adoption. This might be one of those no-brainers. We certainly heard a lot more about large enterprises experimenting with the cloud this year, but we’re still nowhere near ubiquity, especially when it comes to serious applications. I’d argue we’re getting there, however, as Amazon Web Services’ incessant enterprise push makes it more appealing and newcomers such as Virtustream successfully ...
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Apple Amazon.com
What's up with Google and biomass power?
What’s up with Google and biomass power? By Katie Fehrenbacher Dec. 27, 2011, 12:46pm PT 4 Comments * Tweet * * * Out of all of Google’s close to $1 billion in clean power projects, turning biomass into energy seems like the least relevant technology to Google’s core business. But Google has made a few small investments into biofuels and biomass to energy projects including a venture investment into CoolPlanetBiofuels earlier this year, and one I learned about this week: a project that turns was
(Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Google Bloom Energy
RSS Feeds
Recent Comments
ControlCircle » Gartner: Build your own datacentre rather than hosting
It’s startling that in today’s volatile environment Gartner is prescribing such a high risk strategy. ...
Carbon3IT Ltd » Does efficiency matter when your power is renewable (and affordable)? - By Peter Judge
Peter, do you really think that this is good practice?, as you say its like ...
See all recent comments