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Friday, December 14th, 2012

    Time Event
    1:22p
    Cloud News: Oracle, Violin, Nirvanix, Mirantis

    News from the cloud computing sector includes developments from Oracle, Violin Memory and Nirvanix, and Mirantis:

    Oracle to acquire DataRaker.  Oracle (ORCL) announced it has entered  into an agreement to acquire DataRaker, a provider of a cloud-based analytics platform that enables electric, gas and water utilities to leverage vast amounts of data to optimize operational efficiency and improve the customer experience. The combination of Oracle and DataRaker’s cloud-based solutions is expected to provide utilities with the most complete solution to harness the benefits of utility Big Data to improve operational performance and enhance customer experience. “Big Data created by smart meters and sensors has presented utilities with an enormous opportunity to improve operations and deliver better customer service by acting on the unique insights that can only be found by understanding the massive amounts of data coming from their customers and networks,” said Rodger Smith, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Utilities. “With DataRaker, Oracle can provide customers a complete and integrated set of products to further unlock efficiencies and create data insights that maximize business value.”

    Violin selected by Nirvanix.  Violin Memory announced it has been selected by Nirvanix for its public Cloud Storage Network spanning 10 data centers around the world. The Violin Flash Memory Arrays are implemented across several multi-petabyte clouds, including a leading $50 billion financial services company. Nirvanix evaluated multiple traditional SAN storage options but Violin convincingly demonstrated superior performance and economics. “Integrating Violin Memory with our public, private and hybrid cloud solutions expands the opportunities for our customers to build their business on a cloud foundation and opens up business opportunities for us to better serve both new and existing customers,” said Dru Borden, CEO of Nirvanix. “The superior performance of Violin’s primary Flash Storage Arrays enhances the enterprise-class scale, security, data integrity and data accessibility that we provide.”

    Mirantis offers DIY OpenStack.  Mirantis announced that it will off Do-it-Yourself Assist Services for OpenStack. The solution will incorporate services such as development of company-specific OpenStack reference architectures (hardware architecture and logical deployment architecture of OpenStack components), developer training, and short-term deployment support. “During the past two years, Mirantis delivered more than 30 OpenStack deployment and integration projects for some of the most well-known early adopters of the OpenStack platform, such as NASA, Internap, WebEx, Gap, and PayPal,” noted Adrian Ionel, CEO, Mirantis. “With DIY Assist for OpenStack, we are sharing our accumulated expertise with a broad group of early adopters in a manner that will help them create advanced OpenStack capabilities within their companies and fast-track their OpenStack deployments.”

    2:49p
    Facebook Now Hosts 220 Billion Photos

    Facebook’s data centers house more than 100 petabytes of photos and videos. User photo uploads have reached 300 million per day. (Photo: Rich Miller)

    It’s well established that Facebook now has more than 1 billion active monthly users. But what does that translate into in terms of the demands on its infrastructure?

    At an Intel briefing earlier this week, Facebook Director of Hardware Design Frank Frankovsky attached some large numbers that illustrate the company’s infrastructure challenge. Facebook now hosts 220 billion photos, Frankovsky said, with another 300 million photos being uploaded every single day. How many more photos have been uploaded while you’ve been reading this? The 300 million uploads a day work out to more than 208,000 photo uploads every minute of the day.

    Facebook’s data centers now store more than 100 petabytes of photos and videos. “That is a fantastic amount of information,” says Facebook director of site operations Tom Furlong in this video from “How Do They Do It?”, which is one of the better video tours we’ve seen. It includes rarely-seen shots of the racks of servers rolling into the Prineville data center, and also provides a look at how the Facebook team keeps all those servers running.

    For a closer look at the technology inside Facebook’s data centers, see these DCK videos:

    Also check out our Facebook Channel for more stories.

    2:58p
    Data Center Jobs: Opengate Data Systems

    At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Opengate Data Systems, which is seeking a West Coast Regional Sales Manager in San Jose, California.

    The West Coast Regional Sales Manager is responsible for developing relationships with key technical and decision makers within a customer’s organization; including data center and facility managers, engineers, project managers, management, executives, construction, financial, and purchasing personnel, gaining organization trust by demonstrating and constantly improving technical consultation and service, high level sales activity through initiative, persistence, ingenuity, creativity, personal and business relationships, and influencing the design of integrated data center cooling and airflow systems along with data center management and automation systems. To view full details and apply, see job listing details.

    Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed.

    3:30p
    Video: Glasshouse – ‘Cloud’ is No Longer Sufficient

    At the Gartner Data Center Conference, we sat down with Glasshouse‘s director of cloud practice, Ken Copas. He said that the term “cloud” is no longer adequate to explain the variety ways enterprises can use cloud services to meet their needs. There are multiple ways to use cloud to meet an organization’s needs. Glasshouse is a consulting practice so they are agnostic about technology, and help facilitate clients’ collaboration and planning around data center consolidation, migration and move to leveraging cloud services. Also, Glasshouse assists clients in addressing “server sprawl” by working with them on implementing a cloud orchestration tool on top of their existing virtualized environment. Video runs 5 minutes.

    For additional video on data centers, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

    4:30p
    EMC Enhances Atmos Cloud Storage and Joins OpenStack

    In a blog post Wednesday EMC VP and Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis announced that EMC has joined OpenStack as a corporate level sponsor.

    Stating the EMC perspective on joining OpenStack, Hollis explains that EMC has done a great deal to integrate with Microsoft technologies, but markets demand choices, and to address the open source community OpenStack provides the cloud stack for providing an integrated suite of software capabilities that perform the necessary function. “Over time, we believe that OpenStack-based distributions will be considered by more IT organizations — just like Linux before it,” said Hollis.  ”The per-customer specifics will vary widely based on all sorts of factors, but it’s hard to argue the macro trend.”

    Atmos Cloud Storage Enhancements

    EMC  announced new products and enhancements across the entire EMC Atmos portfolio, significantly extending Atmos value for enterprises and service providers as they transform to cloud.  The company introduced a new Atmos G3-Dense 480, based on Intel x86-based architecture, 10GbE network connectivity and options for 60 disks or 480 disks with 3TB drives. In addition to the REST API, Atmos 2.1 software now natively supports the Amazon S3 API.  This provides customers with the ability to easily migrate their S3 applications to any of the more than 40 Atmos powered public clouds around the globe or any internal private cloud they are deploying.

    Atmos is also now available in complete, light and virtual editions. A new release of EMC GeoDrive Windows software adds CIFS Cloud Gateway support for unlimited users and eliminates a client software requirement, shareable URLs, drag and drop file capabilities, Microsoft clustering and is avaialble in 10 languages.

    “With the general availability of Atmos 2.1 software, a new generation of Atmos hardware, new configuration options and multiple new enhancements to virtually all elements within the Atmos portfolio, EMC is evolving its Atmos Cloud Storage offering with compelling new capabilities that service providers and enterprises alike should respond very favorably to.  For service providers who are evaluating ‘build versus buy’ cloud platform decisions, EMC Atmos tilts the scales with a powerful, yet flexible array of features and options that can be deployed rapidly and scale to support their customer acquisition velocity.”

    6:06p
    Highlights From the NJ Data Center Summit

    The New Jersey Technology Council held its annual Data Center Summit Thursday at the Eisenhower Corporate Center in Livingston, N.J. The day’s program included discussions on the economics of cloud computing, (DCIM) tools, the New Jersey market, and lessons learned from SuperStorm Sandy. For more, visit our photo feature, Scenes From the NJ Data Center Summit.

    6:11p
    Friday Funny: Snowman Surprise – Vote for the Best Caption!

    It’s Friday and time for a few laughs. Towards that end, we run our caption contest on Fridays, with cartoons drawn by Diane Alber, our fav data center cartoonist! Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.

    First, we were remiss last week and didn’t announce the winner of the “Bubbling Servers” cartoon. Hearty congrats to AB who entered “Yeah, that’s not what I meant by a clean install.”

    This week, please take a moment to vote on the caption suggestions for our latest cartoon–“Snowman Surprise” in the data center. (Scroll down to vote!)

    The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion.

    The winner will receive his or her caption in a signed print by Diane.

    Take Our Poll

     

    And for the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel.

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