Citrix hypervisor open source

IT departments reevaluating their server virtualization spending have another free option to choose from.

Citrix Systems Inc. today released its XenServer 6.2 hypervisor to the open source community. All of the features previously in the XenServer Platinum Edition will be available at no charge.

Citrix had made parts of XenServer code open source in the past, as part of various cloud computing initiatives, but this marks the first time the entire product has been made available to the community.

Competitor  VMware pricing has come under fire, but Microsoft's Hyper-V -- not XenServer -- has been the biggest beneficiary. More than 22% of respondents to TechTarget's 2013 Data Center and Reader's Choice survey identified Microsoft as their primary server virtualization hypervisor -- up from 13% last year. XenServer's numbers actually dropped slightly, from 4.1%in 2013 to 3.3% in 2012, while VMware's tumbled from 73% to 60%.

Meanwhile, cloud computing has created an inflection point where organizations are reconsidering how many workloads they need to run in-house and how much money they need to spend to do so.

Tibco Streambase

Palo Alto Calif.-based Tibco is a midsize enterprise company that competes with giants like IBM and Oracle. It has been around since the late ’90s, and it provides infrastructure software that its clients can use in the cloud or on site.

Tibco targeted Streambase for its data analytics technology, which is used for algorithmic trading, and it’s a known brand in the capital markets. Tibco is also popular with Wall Street firms, a highly lucrative source of business.

“This combination extends our event-processing abilities and provides a terrific opportunity to address a growing number of use cases for data in motion – in financial services and beyond,” said Tibco chief technology officer Matt Quinn in a statement.

This spring, Tibco acquired a French location analytics company Maporama, which it will roll into its Spotfire offering. Spotfire, along with Tibco’s messaging product, Tibbr, and some other cloud products, is growing rapidly.
 

DataSift Intro

DataSift, an enterprise social data company, has added Instagram, Facebook Page and Google+ data to its managed data offering, and partnered with analytics and visualization vendor Tableau on data integration.

Datasift is now offering aggregate data of these popular sites through their public developer interfaces, and companies will be able filter relevant data from them for behavior and sentiment insights. Large companies sometimes have dozens and dozens of Facebook Pages across different departments, and DataSift will allow them all to be viewed in one stream, for example.

Mining sentiment from social media with DataSift includes features like extracting topics and sentiment around what fans are posting on those fan pages. Additionally, businesses can figure how deftly their content is picking up new fans, a good sign it is finding new customers.

The attached diagram displays the data integration from outside the enterprise with business data for maximum insight.

IBM 10gen Collaboration

IBM and 10gen, the MongoDB company, have announced they are collaborating on a database development standard to push MongoDB as a core NoSQL database for enterprises building web and mobile apps.

Speaking at a press event at the IBM Innovate 2013 conference here, Matt Asay, vice president of business development and corporate strategy at 10gen, said: “IBM embraces open source communities. And IBM is working with 10gen in establishing MongoDB as an industry standard for NoSQL databases. But this by no means indicates that IBM will be diminishing its investment in its own proprietary databases.” Asay was quick to note that he was not trying to speak for IBM.

The identification of a standard NoSQL database is important because millions of developers designing web and mobile apps are using popular NoSQL database technology like MongoDB, and companies need the tools to combine data from these new apps with enterprise databases like IBM’s DB2 that power organizations of all sizes today. By embracing MongoDB IBM is providing mobile developers with the ability to tap into critical data managed by DB2 systems and enable organizations to extend their business through compelling enterprise apps.

Netflix BigData

Netflix is the big Kahuna of a Web media businesses, with 33 million subscribers in more than 40 countries. As Netflix's "watch now" streaming service has grown, the company has had to rethink its data and storage strategies to cope with ballooning workloads managed in the cloud.

Today, the company is nearly complete in its migration from Oracle to the NoSQL database Cassandra, improving availability and essentially eliminating downtime incurred by database schema changes.

Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007, using the Oracle database as the back end. In 2010, Netflix began moving its data to Amazon Web Services. The current step is to replace its Oracle database with Apache Cassandra, an open source NoSQL database known for its scalability and enterprise-grade reliability.

With billions of reads and writes daily, Netflix relies on NoSQL database Cassandra to replace a legacy Oracle deployment.