Open Source and Cloud Computing

Gluster Wednesday materialized a Connector for OpenStack that will hitch the GlusterFS file system to the OpenStack Compute block storage controller and resolve a built-in limitation in the young open source cloud platform. See, OpenStack can store data as objects, complements of its embedded OpenStack Object Storage (a k a Swift), or it can store data as files, complements of CEPH, which has just been contributed to the effort. It can't do both at the same time. Gluster says it can and is offering its widgetry to OpenStack as a core piece of the stack. The contribution is supposed to give OpenStack highly scalable, highly available VM storage functionality and let users add scale-out integrated file and object storage to any deployment. What that means is that users can scale-out the number of VMs deployed in their cloud environment and the widgetry will support t... (more)

AT&T Joins OpenStack, Floats Cloud Architect

AT&T has joined OpenStack. It's the first US telecom service provider to sign up for the free Rackspace-NASA-spawned open source cloud initiative. AT&T CTO John Donovan said AT&T has been participating in OpenStack for more than a year and has contributed a blueprint for a potential new function in OpenStack focused on transactional task management. Donovan said the OpenStack IaaS is housed on dedicated infrastructure in AT&T data centers in Dallas, San Diego and Secaucus, New Jersey, to start. The company means to more than double the number of centers with open source capabili... (more)

StorSimple Supports OpenStack

StorSimple is supporting the OpenStack ecosystem with its cloud storage appliances by integrating with Rackspace's underlying Cloud Files. It said the move reflects "industry demand for solutions that bring the economics of public cloud services to the enterprise data center." Using the StorSimple Appliance, Rackspace customers will get primary storage, backup storage, archival storage and a disaster recovery solution without any changes to existing infrastructures. The widgetry automatically tiers deduplicated, compressed data into the Cloud Files service and is supposed to offe... (more)

Piston Delivers First OpenStack-Based Cloud OS

The first OpenStack-based cloud operating system came out Wednesday. The start-up Piston Cloud Computing Inc delivered the thing, which makes sense since Piston's founders were instrumental in OpenStack, which is a framework, not a product. The widgetry is called Piston Enterprise OS or pentOS for short and it will sell for $3,500 a server a year, a price that includes 24/7 telephone support. Piston co-founder and CEO Joshua McKenty said Piston sold maybe 10 of the things ahead of general availability and the code was destined for big iron $250,000 hardware installations. People ... (more)

More Use Cases for Big Data Analytics

After its initial start in research work and in social network sites Hadoop is now becoming a big part of the enterprise IT landscape. There were recent announcements from Microsoft about embracing Hadoop as part of its Windows Azure High Performance Computing initiative and from Oracle regarding new options like Oracle Loader support for Hadoop-processed data. Initial Use Cases for Hadoop The following are typical use cases that can be realized with the power of Hadoop: Analyzing customer web usage towards predicting what would be of interest to the customer and target advertis... (more)