Maria Deutscher
Latest from Maria Deutscher
What you missed in Cloud: Applications come first
Last week saw the rivalry among the giants of the infrastructure-as-a-service world intensify even further after the release of several new price cuts and features from Amazon Inc., most notably an option for customers to use their own encryption keys for data in its object storage service. That ticks another key item off the privacy checklist for the ...
Amazon’s new M4 general-purpose instance packs up to 40 cores
For Amazon Inc., infrastructure-as-a-service is not just about chasing Moore’s law. The latest proof of that came this week in the form of a new iteration of its general-purpose instances that propels the core count deep into double-digit territory and upgrades the underlying silicon to a custom variation of Intel’s newest E5-2676 v3 Haswell architecture. ...
Microsoft adds Linux monitoring to Azure in continued open-source push
Whatever trace of doubt that there may have remained about Microsoft’s commitment to Linux in the open-source ecosystem is now likely gone following the addition of a free monitoring utility to its public cloud for tracking the activity of instances running the operating system. It’s the newest gesture in what is shaping up as a highly aggressive campaign ...
SolidFire beefs up its flash arrays with new data services
Flash arrays may be miles ahead of their disk-based predecessors when it comes to performance, but there’s still a lot of catching-up to do up the stack in the software layer, at least for some of the newer players that haven’t had much time to build out their management software yet. SolidFire Inc. is now ...
Cisco flaunts new switches and hybrid cloud capabilities at Live 2015
Hot on the heels of the big launches from HP and Nutanix Inc. at their respective events, it’s now Cisco Systems Inc.’s turn in the spotlight with the introduction of new solutions on the second day of its Live conference that bring its software-defined networking and cloud strategies much closer together. Leading the launch are ...
Google open-sources homegrown SDN configuration tech
While the stated goal of the software-defined networking movement is shifting managment up the stack, it’s also driving significant changes at the bottom layers, where Google hopes to enable some much-needed standardization with an internally-developed configuration model that it’s now releasing for free. The contribution is the latest fruit of a low-key initiative that is proving ...
Pivotal supercharges its Big Data Suite with Quickstep acquisition
While the analytics community has its attention turned away towards Hadoop Summit 2015, Pivotal Software Inc. is acquiring a little-known startup called Quickstep Technologies, LLC in a small but strategic deal that could provide its relational database with a much-needed needed performance edge. That’s thanks to a unique technology that the team originally developed at ...
Rancher Labs bags $10 million for its jack-of-all-trades container platform
The answer to the fragmentation of the container ecosystem may have finally arrived from Rancher Labs Inc., which raised $10 million in funding this morning to combine operational features currently scattered among numerous different projects into a unified platform. At the center of its efforts is a homegrown Linux flavor orders of magnitude smaller than ...
Nutanix debuts new hyper-converged management stack with homegrown hypervisor | #NextConf
Moving up the stack is one of the most tried-and-true strategies for standing out from the intense competitive in the data center, but Nutanix Inc. is bringing a whole new meaning to the term with the latest iteration of the software powering its popular appliances. The upgrade, which is being introduced as the company’s Nutanix ...
AppFormix launches out of stealth to solve containers’ noisy neighbor problem
Another week, another new startup jumping aboard the container ship. AppFormix Inc. is launching out of stealth this morning with a new solution that takes aim at one of the biggest obstacles standing the way of the lightweight virtualization format from achieving mainstream acceptance: orchestration. Balancing the often overlapping operational requirements of different services is a ...