Articles from GigaOM

1. VSS Gets $20M to Keep an Eye on Corporate Networks

   Explore Article GigaOM (Aug 24 2010) Monitoring , Cloud Computing , Networking

   VSS Monitoring, a network traffic monitoring company, has taken $20 million in growth equity from Battery Ventures. The funding was the first for the company — founded in 2003 — and it will be used for R&D and to accelerate the company’s expansion. What’s noteworthy is that until this point, VSS had built network monitoring software and hardware and sold it for five years without taking venture capital. (Read Full Article)
   

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2. Facebook Doubles Size of Data Center Before It’s Even Built

   Explore Article GigaOM (Aug 2 2010) Construction , Cloud Computing , Servers

   Facebook said late Friday that it is adding 160,000 square feet to the 147,000 square-foot data center it’s currently building in Prineville, Ore. Being able to make such on-the-fly changes is part of why Facebook wants a wholly owned data center that it can manage and optimize at its whim. The company cited a need for more servers to accommodate its 500 million users. (Read Full Article)
   

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3. When It Comes to Social Networks, Infrastructure Wins

   Explore Article GigaOM (Jul 22 2010)

   Facebook is playing host to half-a-billion people. And one of the main (and unsaid) reasons it has been able to get there -- its technical underpinnings. From thousands of servers to its own datacenter, Facebook knowns social web needs big beefy and superfast web infrastructure. (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Google

4. Why Intel is a Likely Winner of Tech Recovery

   Explore Article GigaOM (Jul 21 2010)

   Despite lingering fears of a second half economic slowdown, corporate spending on information technology is on an upswing. Forrester Research, in its most recent quarterly update, notes that during 2010, the IT market will grow 7.9 percent worldwide to $2.464 trillion. The U.S. IT market is expected to grow around 9.9 percent to $753 billion, thanks in part to a big upsurge in demand for computer equipment. Europe will grow by about two percent, down from previous forecast of five percent. (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Europe   Intel   Forrester Research

5. Puppet Labs Gets $5M for Data Center Software

   Explore Article GigaOM (Jul 19 2010) Monitoring , Cloud Computing

   Puppet Labs has raised a $5 million second round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which brings the total funding for open source configuration management software provider to more than $7 million. The company also announced the latest version of the Puppet software. (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

6. Structure 2010: Dell on Blurring the Line Between Data Centers, Servers

   Explore Article GigaOM (Jun 24 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers

   Heading up the team at that’s responsible for Dell’s server products, Forrest Norrod leads a kind of startup within the PC giant’s organization. Other groups typically consider anything less than five-for-five record of success for any given project a failure. But Norrod said today that the Data Center Solutions team launched in 2006 with a less rigid goal — seven wins out of 10 attempts — in hopes of having the leeway to take risks and deliver big innovations for the world’s largest cloud computing providers and hyperscale data center operators. Speaking at GigaOM’s Structure conference event in San Francisco, ... (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Yahoo   Dell   Microsoft

7. Structure 2010: Intel vs. the Homogeneous Cloud

   Explore Article GigaOM (Jun 24 2010) Cloud Computing

   Hey guys, we should really work together, was Intel’s message at the GigaOM Network’s Structure conference in San Francisco, where the company’s GM of high-density computing, Jason Waxman, correctly identified himself as the elephant in the room (something at least one panelist had called Intel earlier in the conference). Rather than the current ideal of the homogenous cloud — where uniform, consistent building blocks scale in tandem — Waxman called for a “best of breed” standardized cloud. He said this alternate kind of cloud would be good for both data centers and vendors. It would be federated, connecting virtual machines ... (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Intel

8. CloudSwitch Makes Going Cloud as Simple as Can Be

   Explore Article GigaOM (Jun 23 2010) Cloud Computing

   CloudSwitch, a Burlington, Mass.-based cloud porter, today launched the commercial version of its flagship product to help enterprise customers seamlessly move applications into the cloud. The startup claims that using it, applications from stack components to security protocols run in the cloud just as they do within the data center. For businesses hesitant to learn the intricacies of cloud development and management tools, CloudSwitch should be a welcome sight. The underlying premise behind the CloudSwitch offering is simple. Applications and associated data currently housed in VMware or Xen environments, and running on Windows or Linux, are transported to compatible public ... (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Amazon.com   Sun Microsystems

9. The Origins of Amazon’s Cloud Computing

   Explore Article GigaOM (Jun 18 2010) Cloud Computing

   The story of Amazon creating a cloud computing business to take advantage of capacity left over from the peak holiday season has settled into the Internet apocrypha, but blogger Carl Brooks claims he’s uncovered the real reason the online bookstore got into the cloud: homesickness. Brooks interviewed Jesse Robbins, the guy who formerly kept Amazon’s servers running. As he tells it, the project began as a way to keep an engineering talent named Chris Pinkham with Amazon after he wanted to return to his home country of South Africa. From Brooks’ story: (Read Full Article)
   

   Comment on Article Mentions:   Amazon.com

10. SeaMicro: The Right Cloud Server at the Right Time

    Explore Article GigaOM (Jun 18 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers

    SeaMicro’s server reveal this week reverberated across three distinct groups of techies: the green IT crowd, cloud computing devotees and computer server market watchers. Not that they’re mutually exclusive, but it’s rare to get all three to sit up and take notice at once. How did SeaMicro pull it off? With some innovative thinking and good timing. SeaMicro’s low-power server, the SM10000, arrives at a crossroads in the computer industry: Demand for cloud computing centers keeps growing along with the energy required to operate them. Sure, IBM, HP, Dell and other server makers have jumped on the cloud bandwagon, but ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   IBM   Dell

11. SeaMicro’s Low-Power Server Finally Launches

    Explore Article GigaOM (Jun 14 2010) Container , Cloud Computing , Networking , Servers

    SeaMicro, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup building a low-power server using Atom chips and its own specially designed silicon to manage the networking, has finally unveiled its hardware, and it’s pretty darn impressive. The startup, which has raised $25 million from venture firms such as Khosla Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital, has made a bet that companies from Facebook to Amazon would be better off using its sever, which consumes one-fourth of the power of a regular server but packs more than 2,000 CPU cores into the $139,000 box. (Read Full Article)
    

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12. The VMotion Myth

    Explore Article GigaOM (Jun 13 2010) Cloud Computing , Networking , Servers

    Among the many innovations that virtualization has brought to the data center is server mobility, or the ability to live-migrate virtual machines (VMs) across physical servers. With it comes a marketing story that dynamically moving VMs inside a single data center or between two data centers is a seamless process. While at some point that will undoubtedly be true, it’s far from an operational reality today. In the meantime, there are numerous opportunities for startups to offer solutions that will help make such seamlessness a reality. (Read Full Article)
    

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13. HP’s Transition to the Cloud Will Cost 9,000 Jobs

    Explore Article GigaOM (Jun 1 2010) Cloud Computing

    Hewlett-Packard said today that it would cut 9,000 jobs and take a $1 billion restructuring charge spread out through Oct. 2013 as it seeks to automate its data centers so it can deliver enterprise business services, which I read as HP's transition to delivering cloud computing. (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Hewlett Packard

14. How Much Integration Is Too Much in the Cloud?

    Explore Article GigaOM (May 30 2010)

    If you’ve been following the data center hardware space for the past year, you might be under the impression that integrated stacks are the future of IT. After all, Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems was all about integration and HP and Cisco appear locked in a death match over which one of them is best equipped to handle your server, storage and networking needs. However, as detailed in my weekly column on GigaOM Pro, IT spending is ramping back up after the economic meltdown, and it doesn’t look like customers are buying into the promise of having just one throat ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Cisco   Sun Microsystems   Oracle

15. Greenqloud: Iceland’s Clean Power Cloud Computing Co.

    Explore Article GigaOM (May 28 2010) Carbon Footprint , Geothermal , Cloud Computing

    A large data center operator in Iceland like Verne Global (which Greenqloud is in discussions with) is able to offer a competitive 20-year fixed electricity rate, which protects the customer from volatile energy prices, and that is 100 percent clean ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Amazon.com   Iceland   Verne Global

16. Google’s Bill Weihl on Data Center Efficiency

    Explore Article GigaOM (May 5 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers

    Efficient data centers are key to managing the cost of running a massive computing operation such as Google’s, but they also seem to tie into the search giant’s “Don’t be evil” credo. At least that’s the sense I got when interviewing Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar, at our Green:Net conference last week after his talk on data center efficiency. Weihl and I talked about why Google has a responsibility to buy green power and build efficient data centers; we also hit on other ways to create efficient data centers, including specialty hardware and optimizing compilers. At the end, he ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Bill Weihl   Google

17. Microsoft Joulemeter: Using Software to Green the Data Center

    Explore Article GigaOM (Apr 25 2010) Monitoring , Cloud Computing , Servers

    Exactly much power does it take to run a virtual machine or specific piece of software? That’s the answer the Joulemeter team at Microsoft Research is hoping to answer for IT managers. Over the years there have been several innovations to reduce energy usage in the data center, from custom, low-power servers to non-traditional cooling approaches. But more recently, attention has been turning to one feature common to all IT infrastructures: software. Intel, for example, recently unveiled its Energy Checker SDK in a bid to help developers optimize their code for energy efficiency. Now Microsoft is getting in on the ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Intel   Microsoft   U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

18. Can Networking Be Made Cool Again?

    Explore Article GigaOM (Apr 24 2010) Networking

    Remember when networking was cool? When I started my career in 1997 as a wet-behind-the-ears intern in Yankee Group’s data communications practice, networking was the coolest thing around. Billions of dollars were flowing into the market to drive the emerging Gigabit Ethernet wave, build out the Internet core and jump-start the carriers (CAPs/IXCs/ CLEC/BLECs) that had been spawned by telecom deregulation the year before. Some, such as Juniper, Foundry, Extreme and F5, became well-known players in the space, while others, like Qtera, Xros and Sirocco, were gobbled up in billion-dollar-plus acquisitions, never to be heard from again. Far more were ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Amazon.com   Cisco   James Hamilton

19. Akamai Ranks Fastest Cities in the US

    Explore Article GigaOM (Apr 18 2010)

    Led by Berkeley, Calif., at the end of 2009, college towns are among the fastest cities in the U.S., according to Akamai’s latest “The State of the Internet” report. In order to qualify, Akamai put a filter of a minimum of 50,000 unique IP addresses. Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Stanford (California), Durham (North Carolina) and Ithaca (New York) made up the top five cities in the U.S. The U.S. might not rank top in most broadband categories, but it was interesting to note that Berkeley, Chapel Hill and Stanford are the three fastest cities in the world, followed by Masan ... (Read Full Article)
    

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20. The State of the Internet: Now Bigger, Faster & Mobile

    Explore Article GigaOM (Apr 18 2010) Networking

    The Internet as we know it is not only getting bigger and faster, but it is also becoming more mobile with more and more people accessing Internet-based services from their smartphones. These are some of the key findings of Akamai’s “The State of the Internet” report for the fourth quarter of 2009. The report uses data collected from Akamai’s global content delivery network to draw conclusions that are a good representation of the Internet. A Bigger Internet During the last three months of 2009, nearly 4.7 percent more unique IP addresses were connecting to Akamai’s network. At the end of ... (Read Full Article)
    

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21. Doubling Down on Scale-out Storage

    Explore Article GigaOM (Apr 10 2010) Cloud Computing , Storage

    NetApp this week agreed to acquire Bycast, whose storage virtualization is used for large-scale digital archives and storage clouds — yet another investment by a major systems provider in scale-out storage aimed at tackling the growth of unstructured data. But while big systems vendors realize they need a new approach to solve the workloads generated by the web, cloud and data-intensive applications, are they really ready to ride the commodity hardware cost curve embraced by large web and cloud providers? (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Dell   Oracle

22. Smooth-Stone Bets ARM Will Invade the Data Center

    Explore Article GigaOM (Apr 9 2010) Servers

    Intel, with its x86 architecture, has owned the corporate computing market for decades, but Barry Evans, CEO of Austin, Texas-based systems startup Smooth-Stone, thinks it’s time for a change. Smooth-Stone, which Evans co-founded in 2008, is using ARM-based processors to create a box for the data center. Its goal isn’t a slight reduction in power efficiency, he said, but to “completely remove power as an issue in the data center.” However, the specifics of Evans’ stealthy company are overshadowed by one key question: Is ARM ready to invade the data center? (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Cisco   Dell   Intel

23. Scotty, We Need More Bandwidth!

    Explore Article GigaOM (Apr 6 2010) Cloud Computing , Networking

    A slew of news out this morning — ranging from AT&T’s $1 billion expansion of its network to Cisco’s update of its unified computing system — highlights the continued need to invest in networking. We’re piling on compute power and boosting storage at a much faster pace than our networking infrastructure can handle — both inside the data center (GigaOM Pro sub req’d) and on the long haul networks running between (GigaOM Pro sub req’d) them. There isn’t really a Moore’s law that pertains to networking. (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Cisco   At&T

24. Facebook Acquires Photo Site Divvyshot

    Explore Article GigaOM (Apr 2 2010) Cloud Computing

    Facebook has acquired the group photo-sharing startup Divvyshot, a three-person team that will shut down its product and work on Facebook Photos as engineers. Divvyshot was an appealingly designed product that only launched to the public in February after participating last year in the Y Combinator program. According to a landing post on Divvyshot, Divvyshot will begin winding down operations as of today. Existing users can continue to use Divvyshot; however no new accounts will be issued and our iPhone application will no longer be available for download. We’ve always given users access to their original-resolution photos and we hope ... (Read Full Article)
    

    Comment on Article Mentions:   Microsoft

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