Open source

What users are saying about open clouds

Cloud openness, and what "open" means exactly in the context of cloud computing -- whether on-premise or in a public cloud--are hot topics at the CloudOpen conference, which is being held by the Linux Foundation in San Diego this week. CloudOpen is a new event being run in parallel with LinuxCon.

That those on stage and in the audience at this event favor openness is hardly news. Nor is the fact that an open cloud is a challenge that goes beyond open source. During a panel moderated by Red Hat's John Mark Walker, Greg DeKoenigsberg of Eucalyptus … Read more

Who's topping the big data charts?

Thanks to the rise of open-source data analysis tool Hadoop, business intelligence and analytics have reached new levels of interest and hype as the market scrambles to keep up with the volume of data and the need to make sense of it immediately.

In the wake of Yahoo nurturing Hadoop, an ecosystem sprung up among other big Internet companies developing their own tools, in many cases variations of database management systems. Facebook eventually rolled out Cassandra, Google introduced BigTable, and from there variations began to appear among smaller companies and open source foundations.

The majority of these databases rely on … Read more

Server wars: Open-source Java vs Weblogic and WebSphere

Open source is winning the Java application-server war in the age of the cloud, according to a new survey.

Web application performance company New Relic released results of its recent study on commercial vs. open-source Java application server usage among enterprises. The result: open source is winning by an overwhelming margin when it comes to web applications.

New Relic surveyed 1,000 customers to get some data on the state of open-source in business today. According to the results, over 80 percent of enterprise users across five main industries (business software, consumer internet, ecommerce, gaming, and social web) are using … Read more

Interest in deploying open-source clouds is rising--survey

As interest in open-source cloud computing continues to grow, a new--albeit self-interested--survey shows that users are looking to move from experiments to production deployments.

Today, systems management software provider Zenoss released the results of what they've titled the "OpenStack Adoption Survey". (OpenStack is an open-source cloud operating system.) The data was culled from 772 surveys filled out at the recent OpenStack Conference in Boston and the Zenoss open source management community.

OpenStack, which came on the scene in July of 2010 out of Rackspace, is software that delivers a massively scalable cloud operating system for both public … Read more

Open Virtualization Alliance adds 100-plus members

The Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, today announced total membership of more than 200, up from 65 in just over three months. New members include CA Technologies, DataStax and Jaspersoft.

I spoke with Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM of Cloud for Red Hat, who told CNET that infrastructure as important as virtualization needs an open alternative. And Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has emerged as a strategic initiative at many large companies, including Intel and HP. KVM is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware that provides for multiple virtual … Read more

Open-source BPM startup BonitaSoft raises $11 million

A recent Gartner survey found that business process management spending will increase significantly this year, with 54 percent of medium and large companies planning a 5 percent increase or more in their BPM spending this year and 20 percent of companies planning to up their BPM spending by at least 10 percent.

This week, venture-backed startup BonitaSoft announced a new $11 million round of financing to take advantage of the growth in the market.

Gartner explained the market growth by pointing to increased interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, which offer a cheaper entry point, and a shift toward funding BPM … Read more

Hortonworks looks to grow Hadoop ecosystem

As big data becomes more and more top of mind, a number of new companies have popped up to support Hadoop, the leading open-source platform for data-intensive distributed applications. One of the newer entrants is Hortonworks, a company spun out of Yahoo, with a $15 million-plus cash infusion from both Yahoo and Benchmark Capital.

Last week I sat down with Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschwieler to understand how the company intends to differentiate from other vendors such as Cloudera, MapR, and the many as yet unlaunched companies that venture capitalists are still funding.

Hadoop itself was initially developed at Yahoo by … Read more

Can PostgreSQL pickup where MySQL left off?

EnterpriseDB, a provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL, today announced Postgres Plus Cloud Server, which the company has billed as "a full-featured, Oracle-compatible, enterprise-class PostgreSQL database-as-a-service for public and private clouds with support for Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, and GoGrid."

We've seen other database-as-a-service offerings come on the scene from the likes of Salesforce.com's Database.com, Amazon RDS, as well as from startup Xeround. But they're not based on PostgreSQL, which has had years of hardening and development by a committed community. The other databases are not "Oracle compatible," … Read more

Private-cloud growing pains

As cloud adoption continues to soar, the debate between public and private continues apace. While I am a fervent believer in the public cloud, I do believe there is a lot of opportunity for private clouds in many areas, especially industries that have strong technology footprints and experience with large data center management, such as financial services and government.

Over the weekend I read a piece by Jonathan Feldman that really showed how challenging private cloud solutions can be. Lots of dependencies on non-mainstream software packages coupled with a lack of cloud-specific skills shows the lack of maturity in the … Read more

Coders choosing Mac OS over Linux environment

Apple's Mac operating system has surpassed Linux in popularity as a development environment in North America, according to an Evans Data survey.

Windows remains at the top of the development environment heap, used by 80 percent of the survey's more than 400 professional software developer respondents in June; Mac OS was used by 7.9 percent of those surveyed, displacing Linux, used by 5.6 percent.

A few other tidbits from the survey:

Developers believe that mobile and cloud development will increase the most in importance over the next three years 44 percent of respondents are actively engaged … Read more