Another week of big data, data analytics, BI news and reviews is behind us. Last week we saw a collection acquisitions, new products launch, partnership, news on fund raising from start-up data analytics and business intelligence providers.

VMworld looks to the future of big data, virtualization

Last week started with the EMC COO Pat Gelsinger round up with Wikibon Co-Founder David Vellante and SiliconAngle Founder John Furrier on the importance of big data, particularly in database and analytics area.  According to Gelsinger, maintaining huge amounts of data in the range of 10-or 15-Pbyte and backing it all up is really a big challenge. Virtualization is the next possible solution to address our big data needs, and lot of innovation will be happening over the next few years under the virtualization blanket.

The four day VMworld 2011 ended last month on a high note, with more than 19000 attendees.  VMworld has been marked with product and services releases in the cloud and virtualization space, holding true to its mantra: “Your Cloud. Own It.” We have seen VMware’s introduction of their datacenter virtualization arm, including a global connect expansion and vFabric Data Director, and their partnership with AMAX on Hadoop Distributed File System or HDFS. Companies such as Cloupia, McAfee, Emulex, NexentaStor and others either demonstrated or released cloud-based storage virtualization solutions, enhanced I/O connectivity solutions, data center security and more, to accelerate customers use of cloud based solution to next level.

Putting big data to work

NASA last week launched a space-related big data web application called “Eyes on the Solar System” that lets you see galaxy.  The web application will allow user to visit planets or asteroids, manipulate time and space and allow you to see satellites and NASA spacecraft. Google’s Android technology seems a winner here, as NASA is using Android for their space events. Recently, NASA sent two Android-powered Nexus-S smartphones on the last manned space shuttle, Atlantis, as part of the STS-135 mission.

Then there was some news from start-up enterprises. New York-based 1010 Data jumped into the big data space using the cloud to analyze a trillion line spreadsheet rather than using the data warehouse approach. The company said their technology can help business identify patterns in data in days rather than months. User can upload up to 425,000 million row tables to the 1010 Data platform and then perform their analysis.

The business social network group, Viadeo, released its public open API to leverage big data approach to new market research and social enterprise capabilities market. Third party developers can create a personalized web experience for their site visitors using Viadeo’s open API to build applications and services.  Social network media companies are leveraging their data rapidly to expand their brand power and to generate alternative revenues.

HP announced on Wednesday the launch of its HP Cloud Services private beta program and HP Cloud Object Storage to selected testers.  The former allows customers to deploy compute instances on-demand, while the later provides scalable online storage on-demand. With this announcement, HP’s goal is to provide advanced, next generation cloud infrastructure, platform services and cloud solutions.

Mergers, acquisitions and funding

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) acquired another start-up BlueArc Corporation, the company that develops and sells clustered NAS systems for storing and managing digital content and unstructured (file-based) data. The acquisition would open the door for HDS into storing and managing digital content centers.  Customers can seamlessly store, manage and access all data, content and information using BlueArc’s NAS system and can control highly scalable, high performance BlueArc network attached storage all as a single pool.

Platfora, the newest Hadoop distributors, secured a $5.7 million series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The funding aims to simplify Platfora’s transform of Hadoop from promising back-end technology to private and public sectors customers with big data backloads.

IBM was in news again last week for two reasons. Firstly, YLZ, a Chinese IT solutions provider, selected IBM System z mainframe to extend its “citizen livelihood service information network” to seven more provinces for a total of about 300 million people beyond Fujian. The cloud services platform System z will enable the sharing of public resources and information while supporting service integration, improving government efficiency and ensuring effective administration of citizen services.

Secondly, IBM acquired i2, a data analytics solutions provider with a focus on the public sector, and also acquired Algorithmics for $387 million, a provider of risk analytics software and services.  The acquisitions would further strengthen IBM’s reach around big data and public services.  IBM thinks the analytics market is a bigger opportunity than the ERP business, and they have spent approximately $14.0 billion in acquiring analytics companies.

Potential loss of data

Microsoft and Google were in news last week for bad reasons. Microsoft’s cloud-based email services experienced a global outage and affected millions of Hotmail, Office365, SkyDrive, and other Microsoft Live-based products.  The services were restored after some hours by Microsoft, while Google Docs also suffered outage last week.  Incidents such as these can affect millions as more and more users are adopting cloud-based services, but this also provides a learning opportunity for big enterprises as how they can apply better processes to minimize the occurrences of such incidents.