Disruptors

Nimbula raises $15 million more for private cloud

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 … Read more

Google revs AppEngine for multitenancy

Google updated its AppEngine cloud platform earlier this week with new features and functions that help to address some of the services initial shortcomings.

According to a blog post from the AppEngine development team, new features include multitenancy support (to run multiple instances of an application), high-performance image serving, and increased data storage quotas.

Multitenancy is accomplished via the new Namespaces API, which allows multiple organizations to run the same application, segregating data using a unique namespace for each client. This allows developers to serve the same app to multiple different customers, with each customer seeing their own unique copy … Read more

Lunascape iPad browser is tab-happy

Lunascape, the Japanese Web browser company that boasts the world's only "triple engine browser," recently released a version for the iPad.

Considering that the iPad is as much of a browsing device as it is an application platform, you'd think there would be many alternatives to Apple's Safari, but thus far no other full-featured browser has shown much of a presence.

Opera Mini can be used on the iPad but was really developed for the iPhone. Firefox has a history and bookmarks app on the iPad, not a browser. But neither offers much in the … Read more

Taking the 'blind spot' out of cloud-based testing

Some of the most highly trafficked interactive systems today are accessed through the Web: Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, Zynga just to name a few. These apps have to work flawlessly across any browser or risk losing eyeballs and audience consistency.

The browser wars after all, are still alive and well, and any serious Web application needs to work on the most popular browsers , such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome but don't forget others like Safari and Opera.

But for most companies, it is difficult and costly to maintain and update a test infrastructure on premise that keeps up … Read more

Survey: 98 percent of enterprises using open source

Not only is open-source software thriving in systems management but across businesses as a whole, according to a new survey released Tuesday. A nearly 4-year-long survey of open-source systems management usage compiled by open-source software developer Zenoss showed that 98 percent of the respondents said they used open-source software in their enterprises.

These latest statistics, along with survey results from consulting firm Accenture, are further testament to the inevitability of the pervasiveness of open-source software.

What's important to note about the survey results is how both the perception and reality of open-source software has changed--users believe the software is … Read more

From feature to product the free-mium way

One of the struggles in developing software is figuring out which features are part of a bigger product and which ones may be products in and of themselves.

A case in point is Zurb, which makes the Notable application for Web site feedback. In June, Zurb launched a simplified version of Notable called Bounce, which it viewed as a demonstration of just one of Notable's features. Little did Zurb's team know that Bounce was not just a feature, but a new product that intrigued a broad user base.

Bounce saw these results:

The Bounce site went from zero to more than 30,000 links pointing to it in first seven days after launch. Bounce went from zero to about 150 countries using the tool in first seven days after launch. In its first month, Bounce made it to the No. 4 spot in Google search results for "bounce."

While these statistics will surely change over time, they are impressive. So what made this launch successful? … Read more

Open-source 'R' gets Hadoop integration

Lately, you can't talk about business without talking about "big data," which, incidentally, is the focus of the latest package from Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics, which commercialized the open-source R statistics language, emphasizes expanding the use of R beyond its academic roots to business.

On Tuesday, Revolution is expected to release a new addition of big data analysis to its Revolution R Enterprise software. This is an add-on package called RevoScaleR that provides a framework for fast and efficient multicore processing of large data sets.

According to the company, the new package will allow users to process, … Read more

Big data in context

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.… Read more

Open-source Lustre gets supercomputing nod

A new start-up called Whamcloud is coming out of stealth mode Wednesday with $10 million in private funding and a notion to disrupt the often academic world of supercomputing by leveraging the Lustre open-source project.

According to CEO Brent Gorda, the company is targeting the need for high-performance storage solutions based on the popular combination of Linux and Lustre for application and data storage environments. The company plans to offer support and services initially, with an eye toward a turnkey supercomputing setup with hardware and software components, in the future.

For those less familiar with supercomputing technologies, Lustre is a … Read more