Nimbus announces E-Class Flash Memory.  Nimbus Data unveiled the new E-Class Flash Memory System, which it said ws the industry’s first fully-redundant multiprotocol solid state storage system.  Built for applications such as enterprise-wide server virtualization, Web infrastructure, and database clusters the E-Class platform contains no single point of failures. The E-Class platform consists of a pair of redundant controllers and up to 24 solid state storage enclosures. New features supports 500 terabytes as one logical pool, consumes as little as 5 watts per terabyte, and has comprehensive data management software and “unified” storage without any licensing fees. “The Nimbus E-Class sets a new standard for solid state storage scalability and operating cost economics,” said Benjamin  Woo, program vice president, worldwide storage systems at IDC. “Large enterprises and cloud providers must consider the significant infrastructure consolidation possible with all-flash storage systems. By providing both innovative hardware and comprehensive software, Nimbus is well-positioned to not only capitalize on the need for high-performance systems but also the significantly greater trend towards primary storage based exclusively on solid state technology.” The Nimbus E-Class is available immediately.

SGI introduces modular InfiniteStorage Platform. SGI announced the introduction of SGI Modular InfiniteStorage, an integrated server and storage platform designed to provide cloud and data storage customers with the maximum flexibility for compute and data management applications. To meet diverse data environments the new platform will be available as either SGI Modular InfiniteStorage Server (SGI MIS Server) or SGI Modular InfiniteStorage JBOD (SGI MIS JBOD) products. When built into SGI’s D-Rack cabinet configuration, up to 2.37 petabytes of capacity and up to forty discrete processors can be supplied within a single standard 19 inch rack footprint. ”The SGI Modular InfiniteStorage platform is designed to couple very dense storage and compute capabilities in an adaptable platform, to give cloud and other storage IT customers important new choices for tuning and growing the system to meet their specific requirements,” said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president for HPC. “The SGI Modular InfiniteStorage platform aims to allow IT managers to design customized solutions based on standards-based components.” Both storage products are available for preorder now from SGI.

EMC Isilon scale-out NAS with Hadoop support.  EMC announced that EMC Isilon scale-out NAS with HDFS, combined with EMC Greenplum HD, is an enterprise-ready solution with native support for Hadoop. EMC Isilon’s OneFS 6.5 operating system natively integrates the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocol and delivers the industry’s first and only enterprise-proven Hadoop solution on a scale-out NAS architecture. As a single vendor solution it leverages end-to-end data protection including Snapshots, Replication and Backup for Hadoop Big Data. “Hadoop will be a game-changer in unstructured data analytics once enterprise customers are convinced that adoption can simplify their infrastructure and architecture without compromising data security or management capabilities,” said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing at EMC Isilon. “We’ve taken the guesswork out of Hadoop deployment by bringing together the strengths of Isilon’s enterprise scale-out NAS storage systems with the Hadoop ecosystem. With EMC Isilon, enterprises now have the type of archiving, replication and management capabilities their businesses rely on combined with the innovative analytics of EMC Greenplum and the training, services and support of EMC to make the most of their Hadoop deployments.”

Oracle launches Big Data Appliance and Netra SPARC T4 Servers.  Oracle (ORCL) announced the availability of Oracle Big Data Appliance Tuesday, an engineered system of hardware and software that incorporates Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop with Cloudera Manager. The appliance comes configured in a full rack of 18 Oracle Sun servers with a total of 864GB memory, 216 CPU cores, 648TB of storage, 40Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity and 10 Gb/s Ethernet data center connectivity. “Oracle Big Data Appliance, in conjunction with Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, offers the broadest, most integrated product portfolio to help customers acquire and organize diverse data types, and then analyze them alongside existing enterprise data to discover new insights and make the most informed decisions,” said Cetin Ozbutun, vice president, Data Warehousing Technologies, Oracle. Oracle also introduced new Netra SPARC T-Series servers based on the SPARC T4 processor, the first processor designed to meet the demands of application workloads in communications network infrastructure. “Oracle’s new Netra SPARC T4 servers with Oracle Solaris 11 deliver the performance and scale communications companies require to rapidly deploy new services and support cloud-based offerings,” said Raju Penumatcha, Vice President, Netra Systems and Networking, Oracle. “With Oracle’s new carrier-grade servers and complete solutions portfolio for the communications industry, customers have a rock solid platform for long-term service deployments.”

Dell delivers new storage solutions. At the first Dell Storage Forum in Europe Dell announced advancements in its Fluid Data architecture that enable customers to quickly adapt to the changing demands of their organizations and increase automation for management of their primary, backup and archive data. Designed for small to medium sized business the new DR4000 Storage Platform combines the performance and reliability of disk-based backup with innovative deduplication and compression capabilities from Dell’s Ocarina Networks acquisition. A new Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.0 software  includes new 64-bit support that doubles memory size to improve performance and scale. “Dell is one of the unique companies to offer an end-to-end data center solution that can help customers transform IT from a rigid cost center to a flexible productivity center,” said Scott Winslow, CEO, Winslow Technology Group, a Dell Premier PartnerDirect channel partner. “These new Dell storage solutions offer an open, flexible platform that provides customers with a foundation for painless future growth and complements Dell’s expanding server, networking and software portfolio.” On Wednesday Dell announced today that Adriana Karaboutis has assumed the role of Global Chief Information Officer, responsible for continuing to drive Dell’s IT organization evolution, from managing an efficient and innovative global information infrastructure, to creating innovative breakthroughs that provide technology advances for the company and its customers.

Cloupia supports NetApp FlexPod.  Cloud and data center management and automation provider Cloupia announced the general availability of a new module of the Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC) that now supports the Cisco and NetApp FlexPod architecture.  The CUIC provides comprehensive management and automation solution that integrates with the FlexPod management system with features that include: provisioning, monitoring and management for physical, virtual and cloud environments. It is available for the Cisco and NetApp FlexPod immediately.

SGI reaches $90 million in ICE X orders in 8 weeks. SGI announced today that its new SGI ICE X high performance computing (HPC) platform has $90 million in orders under contract, reflecting the strongest and broadest customer interest of any new product introduction in the company’s history. Announced at the Supercomputing 2011 show in November 2011 the ICE X is the fifth generation for the ICE platform and is able to scale from tens of teraflops to up to tens of petaflops. ”IDC expects that over the next few years more HPC buyers will be looking for systems with higher performance capabilities beyond what is available in standard products,” said Earl Joseph, program vice president, High Performance Computing at IDC. “The newest design of the SGI® ICE platform, based on the next generation Intel Xeon processor E5 family, fits well with the needs of these demanding customers to achieve new levels of speed and scale in their compute workloads. ICE X is a flexible, performance-oriented design that should fit well into these customer requirements.”

The 10 TB ioDrive Octal, which delivers up to 20 Terabytes of flash-based acceleration in a 1U server.

At the Supercomputing 2011 conference Tuesday Fusion-io (FIO) announced the 10 TB ioDrive Octal, delivering up to 20 Terabytes (TB) of flash-based acceleration in a 1U server, such as the Supermicro SuperServer 6016GT-TF.

Additionally, it was announced that the Lawrence Livermore National Library recently broke its previously held record of a single node server containing 12 TB of ioMemory technology.

10 Terabytes on one PCIe device

The 10TB Octal achieves the capacity and density through the integration of eight 1.28 TB MLC (multi-level cell) ioMemory modules in a single double-wide PCIe device. A little over a year ago, Fusion-io was ahead of the industry by delivering a 1.28 TB on a single PCIe card.

The new Octal delivers more than 1.3 million IOPS with 6.7 GB/s bandwidth, up to 20 TB in a 1U server, optimized performance for read-heavy environments such as data warehousing, scale out architectures, supercomputing, and Octal can reduce power and cooling costs of data-intensive server farms. Powered by Fusion’s VSL software platform, the ioDrive Octal allows even very large data sets to be accelerated within the server for extremely low latency performance.

“The 10 TB ioDrive Octal packs increased raw flash capacity in a server, enabling customers to accelerate even very large data sets with an intelligent and efficient ioMemory solution,” said David Flynn, Fusion-io Chairman and CEO. “Previously, a 4U server could contain 10 ioDrive Duos for 20 TB of total capacity, but now up to four 10 TB ioDrive Octals can be integrated into a 4U server, such as the HP ProLiant DL585 G7, delivering 40 TB of total capacity.”

68 Billion Node Graph

Fusion-io also announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) recently broke its previous graph size record set in the June 2011 Graph500 competition with a single node server containing 12 TB of ioMemory technology from Fusion-io.  The LLNL system, called “Leviathan,” is based on a four-socket 40-core Intel Xeon 7500 processor, nine Fusion ioDrive Duos, and one ioDrive.

While most submissions to Graph500 count on expensive supercomputers the Fusion-io ioDrives enabled an alternative way by giving low-latency access to graph nodes and edges, thus using a single computer to process a graph with 68,719,000,000 nodes.  The Hyperion Data Intensive Testbed is a LLNL and Fusion-io collaboration to explore data-intensive computing systems that leverage low latency flash memory.  The single node Leviathan system achieved 52.796 million traversed edges per second (TEPS), the Graph500 speed metric, while the Hyperion DIT attained more than an order of magnitude higher TEPS.

“Given the energy and costs associated with building out and running a supercomputer, LLNL’s benchmarks point to vast savings while achieving the top tier performance required by leading HPC research. LLNL was one of the first to adopt Fusion-io technology, and we congratulate their visionary team for beating their previous results with Fusion ioMemory and their powerful algorithm on a single node,” said Neil Carson, Fusion-io Chief Technology Officer.

IO selected to support large health-care data center. IO announced that it has been awarded a contract with the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health (CSS Institute), NantWorks LLC and National LambdaRail (NLR), to support the largest health-care data center in the world.  IO will provide private cloud computing services at IO Phoenix. ”In addition to generating massive volumes of information requiring high-performance IT, the regulatory environment of the healthcare ecosystem also requires a highly protected and reliable infrastructure,” said Anthony D’Ambrosi, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. “IO’s high-density and ultra-secure infrastructure enables healthcare IT to accomplish their goals both today and into the future.” When completed, the central health-care database will securely store patient information, to be accessible nationally and eventually globally and be connected to LambdaRail, a 12,000 high-performance communications network linking major research institutions throughout the United States.

Equinix opens second IBX in Hong Kong.  Equinix (EQIX) announced the opening of the first phase of its second International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Hong Kong. The $63 million investment in the HK2 facility extends Platform Equinix to 99 data centers worldwide across 38 strategic markets. The expansion in the western part of the New Territories region of Hong Kong was driven by demand from financial services and cloud service providers in the region. “Commercial growth and the continuation of Hong Kong’s dominance as a financial hub in Asia are key drivers of demand for data center services in the local market,” said Alex Tam, managing director, Equinix Greater China. “Data centers are an essential part of the city’s infrastructure and the opening of HK2 ensures the supply of data center availability needed to support the sustainable growth of traditional pillar industries such as financial services and trading.”

CloudSigma launches SSD in Public Cloud IaaS.  During the 2011 Cloud Computing Expo CloudSigma launched the industry’s first solid-state drive (SSD) storage solution for a public cloud IaaS environment. As I/O operations become even more random in multi-tenant, public cloud environments, magnetic storage solutions that rely on physical, spinning disks simply cannot keep up. Using a multi drive-to-server model the ability exists to create a tiered storage system and stage critical application data and files on SSD. “With our new SSD storage product, companies can, for the first time, easily handle the random nature of I/O loads in public clouds while minimizing necessary servers and realizing significant cost savings. Because the storage performance of hard drives has not kept pace with server performance or networking bandwidths, incorporating an SSD storage solution was a necessity, and will significantly expand the breadth of computing tasks that our public cloud can handle effectively,” said Patrick Baillie, CloudSigma CEO.

Severe flooding in Thailand has led to more than 500 deaths and extensive property damage. In addition to the human toll, the flooding has had a devastating impact on the Thai economy, including some of the world’s leading production facilities for hard disk drives. Here’s a roundup of the notable media coverage of the impact of these production halts on the availability and pricing of hard disk drives.

Thailand Flooding Cripples Hard-Drive Suppliers (NYTimes.com) – Consumers worldwide could see increases of at least 10 percent in the price of external hard drives because of the flooding, according to Fang Zhang, an analyst at IHS iSuppli, a market research company. The effect will be less noticeable for laptops and desktop computers, he estimated, because demand has been weakened by the current global economic malaise. The world’s biggest names in hard-drive manufacturing, for example, operate from Thailand, where suppliers and customers come together. Until the floodwaters came, a single facility in Bang Pa-In owned by Western Digital produced one-quarter of the world’s supply of “sliders,” an integral part of hard-disk drives. Over the weekend, workers in bright orange life jackets salvaged what they could from the top floors of the complex. The ground floor resembled an aquarium and the loading bays were home to jumping fish.

Thailand Floods Causes Hard Drive Prices to Soar (Techie Buzz) – Last month, some of Thailand’s biggest industrial estates including Nava Nakorn, Bang-Pa-in, Hi-Tech, Factory Land, Rojana, and Saha Rattana Nakorn were flooded. Among the companies impacted were Western Digital, Toshiba, and Seagate. So far, Seagate’s factories haven’t been directly affected; however, the Dublin based storage giant is suffering from component shortages.

Serious Hard Drive Shortage Expected for at least 2 Quarters (James Hamilton) – The floods are far from over and, as we look beyond the immediate problem in country, the impact on the technology world is expected to continue for just over a year even if the floods do recede in 3 to 4 weeks as expected. Disk drives are particularly hard hit with Digitimes Research reporting that the flood will create a 12% HDD supply gap in the 4th quarter of 2011 and the gap may increase into 2012. Digitimes estimates the 4Q11 hard disk drive shortage to reach 19 million units.

1TB Hard Drive Prices Up 180 Percent in One Month (Zorinaq) – “Shortages have caused phenomenal hard drive price increases. Over the past month, I observed on (online computer retailer) Newegg 1TB SATA hard drives went from $50/TB to $140/TB, +180%, almost triple the price …. Large-scale data center operators who are currently growing very rapidly with a focus on storage must be financially impacted by the situation.”

Retailers Rationing Hard Drive Inventory (Storagezilla): “A visit to two competing retailers across the city confirmed a shortage of external hard drives with only the higher end Media & Home NAS devices on the shelves.”

More Demand for Flash? (The Register) – Flash storage suppliers such as OCZ and Micron anticipate a rise in solid state storage demand as frustrated drive buyers trade up, but this is a drop on the ocean as flash fab capacity cannot simply ramp up to cover the missing drive gap, even if flash prices made that an affordable prospect.

Seagate Sees Q4 Drive Industry Unit Shortfall (Forbes) – Seagate said in an SEC filing that it expects a huge gap between supply and demand for hard disk drives in the December quarter as a result of the recent severe flooding in Thailand, which has hampered production of both drives and key components. The company sees industry-wide “unconstrained demand” for 180 million drives in the quarter, but says that shipments are likely to be in the 110-120 million range.

PC Forecast Cut in Wake of HDD shortage (CNET) – Barclays Capital has slashed its PC growth forecast for the fourth quarter due to the shortage of hard disk drives and continued weakness in the PC market, according to reports. The investment bank cut its global PC growth forecast for the fourth quarter to 4.3 percent from 7.2 percent “due to continued weak demand and a shortage of hard drive disks (HDD) resulting from the flooding in Thailand,” according to a number of Asia-based outlets such as the China Post, citing a Barclay’s research note.

Thai flooding impact on tech companies, suppliers – Business Week has a list of technology companies that have announced business impacts from the flooding in Thailand.

Hard disk drive image by Jeff Kubina via Flickr.

The new ioDrive-2 from Fusion-io.

Fusion-io (FIO) this week introduced the next generation of its ioDrive enterprise Flash technology.The company said its new ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo will outperform the original ioDrive on all measures and deliver powerful latency performance, improved endurance and reliability.

New features of both products include nearly symmetrical read and write access, 15 microsecond write latency, 2.4TB in a small footprint, an intelligent self-healing feature called Adaptive FlashBack, system-level integration with Fusion-io VSL 3.0 software subsystem, field programmability and extended support for all major operating systems including Windows, Linux, OSX, Solaris x86, ESXi 5.0 and HP-UX.

‘Building Block for the Next Generation’

“A new approach is necessary to address the growing problem of datacenter inefficiencies,” said Benjamin S. Woo, Program Vice President, Storage & Big Data, IDC. “The I/O subsystem in use today was developed over 30 years ago and is no longer sufficient to serve the demands of today’s growing business. Fusion’s ioMemory is a building block for next-generation datacenters that provides applications fully scalable memory for accelerating throughput and drives higher-performance density and efficiency in application server platforms.”

“We developed the ioDrive2 to outperform the original ioDrive on all measures,” said Fusion-io CEO and Chairman David Flynn.  “Customers have grown to expect nothing but groundbreaking products from Fusion-io. Today, we are proud to raise the bar once more with the ioDrive2.”

The new drives will be available in Late November 2011 in 365 GB, 785 GB, 1205 GB and 2.4 TB capacities, followed by SLC products in 400 GB, 600 GB and 1.2 TB capacities.

VSL-Powered Atomic Writes for mySQL

Fusion-io also announced a new extension to its VSL (Virtual Storage Layer) software subsystem for conducting Atomic Writes in the popular MySQL open source database. Atomic Writes are an operation in which a processor can simultaneously write multiple independent storage sectors as a single storage transaction. This accelerates mySQL and gives new features powered by the flexibility of sophisticated flash architectures. With the new Atomic Writes extension, Fusion-io testing has observed 35 percent more transactions per second and a 2.5x improvement in performance predictability compared to conducting the same MySQL tests without the Atomic Writes feature.

“With a software-centric approach, intelligent memory architectures can leverage the potential of flash to develop new features that accelerate databases and applications in ways previously not possible,” said Nisha Talagala, Fusion-io Lead Architect. “By reducing the number of steps required to safely write data, the Atomic Writes software extension enables a substantial improvement in predictable performance and reduces the impact of database processing on the host CPU.”

The Atomic Writes extension will be available to select customers for testing in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Scale and Speed

The new 5.5 petabyte system is 100 percent disk-based and interconnected by high-speed 10 gigabit Ethernet switching technology, providing extremely fast read and write performance. Scalable to hundreds of petabytes the SDSC cloud has sustained read rates of 8 to 10 gigabytes per second, and will improve as additional nodes and storage are added. The cloud can be accessed from Rackspace or Amazon S3 API’s, or the SDSC Cloud Explorer web interface.

The SDSC Cloud leverages the infrastructure designed for a high-performance parallel file system by using two Arista Networks 7508 switches, providing 768 total 10 gigabit (Gb) Ethernet ports for more than 10Tbit/s of non-blocking, IP-based connectivity. Costs on the SDSC Cloud site is listed for as low as $3.25/Month for 100GB ($32.50/Terabyte/Month) with no transfer costs.

Massive Data – Long Term Storage

“We believe that the SDSC Cloud may well revolutionize how data is preserved and shared among researchers, especially massive datasets that are becoming more prevalent in this new era of data-intensive research and computing,” said Michael Norman, director of SDSC. “The SDSC Cloud goes a long way toward meeting federal data sharing requirements, since every data object has a unique URL and could be accessed over the Web.”

The project began at UC San Diego’s campus Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) project and grew quickly in scope and partners as they saw it as functionally revolutionary and cost effective for their needs. “The SDSC Cloud marks a paradigm shift in how we think about long-term storage,” said Richard Moore, SDSC’s deputy director. “We are shifting from the ‘write once and read never’ model of archival data, to one that says ‘if you think your data is important, then it should be readily accessible and shared with the broader community.’”

The SDSC serves as the site lead forTeraGrid, the grid infrastructure for open scientific research, and also hosts the Triton Resource compute system. In this 2010 video, SDSC’s Data Center Manager Matt Campbell provides a short tour of the facility.

NetApp selected by U.S. DoE.  NetApp (NTAP) announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has selected the company to provide the storage foundation for its Sequoia supercomputer. Set to launch in 2012 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Sequoia is expected to be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. “The Sequoia system will enable LLNL to open up new doors for scientific discovery and exploration,” said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research. “The NetApp E-Series storage platform will play a vital role in Sequoia’s ability to process, manage, and store the immense amount of data and information required for its various workloads.”

6WIND Optimized for Tilera TILEPro64.  6WIND, makers of commercial multicore packet processing software announced the availability of its 6WINDGate software with optimized support for the TILEPro64 processor family from Tilera Corporation. The software powers the development of high-performance, energy-efficient TILEPro64-based equipment for cloud networking and mobile infrastructure applications. “Tilera’s processors offer the best performance per watt of any processor on the market today,” said Omid Tahernia, CEO of Tilera. “6WIND’ssoftware enables our OEM customers to extract amazing packet processing performance from our processors while retaining full compatibility with standard APIs. We’re pleased to see 6WIND launch their support for the TILEPro64 processor. We look forward to an ongoing partnership in delivering the most power- efficient networking solutions.”

Fusion-io selected by Deutsche Bank.  Fusion-io announced that Deutsche Bank has deployed ioMemory technology to reduce latency and increase performance by up to 60 percent in its Credit Risk Calculation and Information System (dbArtos). Given the importance of the dbArtos system to Deutsche Bank and its customers, extensive evaluations were conducted before selecting technology from Fusion-io over traditional disk-based solutions and solid-state disk (SSD) offerings. Additionally Deutsche Bank discovered that Fusion-io technology delivered raw I/O increases that offered four times the performance of traditional hard disks and SSDs also evaluated by Deutsche Bank. “Latency is significantly reduced when the large, evolving datasets used in financial analytics are stored in the server where data is processed and accelerated through a dedicated memory tier. With Fusion ioMemory, financial organizations like Deutsche Bank can provide their customers with significantly faster responses to market developments,” said Neil Carson, Fusion-io Chief Technology Officer.

This chart from IDC's Digital Universe report illustrates the many sources generating data, which all converge on the data center.

If there’s one takeaway from the many insightful discussions at last week’s O’Reilly Strata Summit, it is this: Our society is generating an ever-growing ocean of data, and developers are building tons of new applications to extract value from this data. It’s a trend that crosses the spectrum, with examples in finance, retail, government, entertainment, journalism and the non-profit sector.

Each panel reinforced a key point for the data center industry: all this data needs a place to live. Big data will require storage devices to house it. It will require servers to power the applications that will make sense of it. In many cases, that data analysis will require supercomputers or high-performance computing clusters.

Where Will All This Data Live?

That all adds up to a bullish case for the data center industry, and a huge opportunity for the growing ecosystem of companies specializing in Big Data.

“Data is the new oil,” said Andreas Weigend, social data guru and former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Oil needs to be refined before it can be useful. Big data startups are the new refineries.”

If big data generates big analogies, analysts say the trends are reflected in the growing investment in storage hardware. Forrester’s James Kobielus said enterprise storage budgets are growing by 20 to 40 percent per year to keep pace with soaring data needs, That’s driving demand for strategies like deduplication that can compress data and save hardware costs.

The silver lining: Storage continues to get cheaper and cheaper. This trend will continue, Kobielus predicted, with “dirt cheap petabytes” on the horizon. “By the end of the decade, petabytes of storage will live in the palm of your hand,” he said.

While that level of data portability poses challenges from a security perspective, the ability to pack more data into smaller devices is important in the data center, where this tidal wave of data must be tamed.

“Our ability to generate data is outstripping our ability to store it,” said Michael Chui, McKinsey: “We believe the use of big data will change the nature of competition.”

Opportunities for ‘Middlemen’

That’s creating some interesting opportunities for companies that have been handling large datsets for years. An example is LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which provides data services to the legal, accoutning and government markets. “We’ve been doing big data for about 15 years,” said Armando Escalante, who heads HPCC Systems, the technology arm of LexisNexis.

HPCC Systems recently open sourced its data platform and released it on Github. “We did it to remain relevant, gain from the community and make our platform better,” said Escalante. “This is not a startup. This is an old company with a new spin on life.”

The Big Data economy will create many of these kind of opportunities, according to Robert Lefkowitz of analytics specialist 1010data.

“If you want to profit from big data, figure out who you are a middleman between,” said Lefkowitz. “The middleman often knows more than parties on either side. That knowledge has value. The Internet is the greatest engine for the creation of middlemen that our civilization has ever seen.”

BookRenter Chooses Opscode to Automate Infrastructure – Cloud infrastructure automation specialist Opscode, Inc., announced last week that BookRenter, the largest and fastest growing textbook platform, is successfully using Hosted Chef to rapidly spin up additional servers and handle application updates and editing without manual interference. BookRenter also will use Hosted Chef to build the capability to launch a mirror site in a separate datacenter in a matter of minutes, a preemptive move in the event of any kind of outage at its primary datacenter. Launching the textbook rental category in 2006, BookRenter’s mission is to make education more affordable and accessible for university and K-12 students and institutions. The company allows students to rent textbooks for up to 80 percent off the retail price by providing them with the best price, highest quality books and most flexible rental experience.

Platfora Raises $5.7 million for Hadoop Analytics – Platfora, a startup focused on generating effortless insights from big data, has raised $5.7 million in Series A funding to expand and accelerate development of its analytics platform for data stored in Hadoop. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and General Partner Scott Weiss is joining the board. In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. intelligence community, also participated in the funding round. “Businesses are increasingly looking to Hadoop, rather than traditional databases, to store their fast-growing datasets,” said Ben Werther, founder and CEO of Platfora. “We transform Hadoop from promising back-end technology into an effortless, interactive and beautiful way for business users to get rapid insight and answers from any sized dataset, even those with petabytes of information.”