Alex Williams

Alex Williams is an editor for SiliconAngle and lives a charmed life in Portland, Or.

Latest from Alex Williams

Oracle “Exalytics” – the Frankenstein Follow Up to Cloud in a Box?

Yesterday I reported that Oracle will launch a NoSQL database at Oracle OpenWorld. In addition, the company will unveil a Hadoop data loader and in-memory store. So is Oracle becoming a true big data company? I say “true” because Oracle gets a lot of criticism for its double speak about cloud computing. In the past ...

Oracle to Launch NoSQL Database at OpenWorld

Oracle plans to launch and demo a NoSQL database at Oracle OpenWorld next week along with a Hadoop data builder and in-memory data store. According to information from the Oracle Open World Web site, the new offering will be part of keynotes from Intel and Cisco. It will also be demonstrated on both Intel and ...

Yammer – the Search Angle on its $17 Million From a Facebook Backed Fund

Yammer received another round of investment on Tuesday. This time $17 million from a Facebook-backed fund. The fund is led by Social+Capital Partnership, established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya. Facebook is an investor in the fund. Also participating in the Yammer investment were current investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners. ...

Violin Memory Marches into Airports – Hypergrowth Ahead for Flash Market?

No pun intended but Violin Memory is one of the more flashier companies in the red-hot storage space. That’s apparent in a few ways. Today the company announced new flash storage arrays for what it calls the “all silicon data center.” That may sound like marketing speak. Well, it is. The company loves to market ...

The Future for Enterprise Search is as a Service

Lucid Imagination is launching a cloud-based platform for search with connectors to Hadoop, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Sharepoint CMS. LucidWorks Cloud is what the company calls a “Search as a Service” offering. It joins LucidWorks Enterprise and LucidWorks Certified Distributions to give users the choice of on-premise or in the cloud search platform. It is now in private beta. ...

Get Me Another Virtual Machine – We Need More Cowbell!

The platform market is changing the way apps are delivered and points to a future that raises some questions about the role of virtualization in cloud computing. For example, this past week Heroku began accepting F8 apps. In 24 hours, Heroku delivered some 34,000 apps. Facebook serves apps to its community through its state of ...

What is Amazon ElastiCache?

Simon Brunozzi is a developer with Amazon Web Services. He produced an excellent primer about Amazon’s ElastiCache service. The fast-paced demo comes with a basic and clear explanation about memory caching, Memcached and how t AWS compares. Video: Turbocharge your apps with Amazon Elasticache View more videos from Amazon Web Services LinkedIn, Twitter, Wikipedia and ...

The Data Graph in Facebook and Supply Chains

Peering into the live stream for the Facebook Developer conference is like looking into a scientist’s laboratory about the future of business. But take a step back and its apparent that innovative uses for data goes well beyond the F8 developer conference in San Francisco. The use of analytics to identify the connections between pieces ...

Cloudscaling Gets Funding – Doubles Down on OpenStack

I have to get one more post done tonight to note the news that Cloudscaling has secured an A round from Trinity Ventures. Cloudscaling is known for building cloud infrastructures. The company is one of the few in the world that has actually built open cloud infrastructures from scratch. It is also one of the ...

OpenStack Releases Diablo – Barely Production Ready but Getting More Stable

OpenStack’s latest release is now available, the first ever production ready open cloud infrastructure. Diablo is OpenStack’s fourth release. It includes updates to the storage, compute and image services. We should place an asterisk to what is meant by production ready. It is ready but few have the expertise to build production ready environments with it. Randy ...