Stories by Brandon Butler

How Facebook aims to reinvent hardware

Facebook used to be a company just like many others: It would buy servers, racks and other hardware from vendors like HP and Dell and rent out co-location space from vendors like DuPont Fabros and others.

Cloud SLAs 'fall short,' says user advocacy group

Service level agreements in the cloud computing market are skewed in the favor of providers, can be difficult for customers to decipher and in some cases are rigid and non-negotiable. Those are some of the findings from the Cloud Standards Customer Council, a user advocacy group that recently reviewed SLAs from some of the industry’s largest providers.

Is Twitter broken?

Twitter, the increasingly popular micro-blogging service, has come under quite a bit of criticism in the past few weeks. Users of the platform, which describes itself as an "information-sharing network" are struggling with what to do about false information being spread around.

How big is Cloud's impact? Depends on who's asking

Is Cloud computing really catching on in the enterprise? Well, that depends on who you talk to, recent surveys have found.

Pivotal puts PaaS in the spotlight

In launching Pivotal, the partnership of EMC, VMware and GE is attempting to refocus the conversation in the market about how a new generation of applications that use big data will be built.

'Good enough' Microsoft Hyper-V starts turning more heads

About three years ago Embotics jumped into developing support in its private cloud management platform for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, hopeful that the VMware virtualization challenger would take off. When that takeoff initially stalled, Embotics curtailed its Hyper-V work to focus resources elsewhere.

Interop planning guide 2013

It's that time of the year again: Interop is almost here.

Cloud fight keeps Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Rackspace clamouring for enterprise customers

Amazon Web Services is attempting to distance itself from other cloud providers by enhancing its services to incorporate the differentiating features of its competitors.

Google Cloud open for business – includes $US400 cover charge

Google earlier this month made a significant Cloud announcement, opening up its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering to customers and removing the beta tag from the service.

In Pictures: OpenStack's hottest products right now

As the OpenStack Summit is underway in Portland, Ore., this week, a variety of companies are making product and services news at the show

Why servers should be seen like cows, not puppies

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing is fundamentally about managing hardware resources, and the CTO of OpenStack company Piston Cloud Computing has an interesting way to think about the issue.

OpenStack grows up: But is it grown up enough for enterprise IT?

Less than a year ago the cool thing for IT vendors to do was jump on the OpenStack bandwagon.

Navy CIO: Use the cloud, but be careful

The U.S. Navy's CIO has directed that Naval information systems be migrated to commercial cloud service providers, but only for information that has already been approved for public release.

EMC teams with Avaya (not Cisco) on communication pods

Two stalwarts in the enterprise IT market joined forces today to release a unified communications stack that integrates hardware from EMC, virtualization technology from VMware and communications apps from Avaya. Perhaps most interesting about the news, though, is a company that was not involved: Cisco.

Nonstop cloud computing price war: Amazon, Google both drop rates again

Just as industry watchers have predicted, the race to the bottom for cloud computing prices continues.