ReadWriteCloud

We haven't written much about TIBCO's enterprise social media tool tibbr since a year ago. But they have interesting news, including updates to the service, that they are announcing today with v3.5, scheduled to be available next month.

Craigslist loves Perl, Amazon wants to help customers use geo-blocking, and if you're looking for an overview of Hadoop solutions then we've got a good link for you.

Geo-Blocking Content With Amazon CloudFront – Geo-targeting has its good and bad side. I'll let you decide where geo-blocking content falls. If it's something your company needs to do, though, Amazon has a short post by Nihar Bihani of the CloudFront team on using geo-blocking for content with CloudFront.

Last month, we introduced you to a cloud-based backup system called CTERA - a practical demonstration of the flexibility of the underlying object storage platform. That platform, called CAStor, is essentially a mapping system for files stored over a widely distributed pool of clusters in the cloud. CAStor takes care of where things are located in the cloud; applications like CTERA map those locations using systems that make sense to humans.

Today, the company behind CAStor - Austin, Texas-based Caringo Inc. - altered the definition of "things" in that context, with the introduction to its customers of CAStor version 5.5. With the help of a little process learned from Web mechanics called chunked encoding, data centers will become able to store widely distributed chunks of files up to 4 TB in total length. It's part of Caringo's latest effort to squash RAID using the cloud as its weapon.

The RedMonk folks are getting ready to close the door on signups for The Monki Gras. The conference is scheduled for February 1st and 2nd in London, and features a delightful pairing of industry experts and beer. If you want to attend, you need to speak up today – the organizers are closing ticket sales on January 25th.

The Monki Gras is a follow-on conference to Monktoberfest, which took place last October in Portland, Maine. (As some would have it, "the Real Portland.")

As the Windows Azure platform began branching out last year from support for purely Microsoft frameworks like .NET, going so far as to incorporate Java, one possibility that was overlooked at the time was to support JavaScript. The reason seemed obvious: JavaScript, as its creators would tell you, is a client language. Well, that's no longer true, now that Node.js makes it about as easy to write JavaScript for the V8 interpreter on the server as it is for V8 in Google Chrome on the client.

Last month, Azure demonstrated how much both its platform and its proprietor's attitude had matured by opening up support for Node.js. Today at a summit of Node.js developers in San Francisco, the maker of a SaaS-based IDE for developers, announced it has added the ability for developers to deploy Node.js apps to Azure.

Much has been said about Facebook's Timeline feature, but very little attention has been paid to the actual tech behind the feature. Timeline goes well beyond the scope of Facebook's previous profile pages and deals with years of Facebook activity. Starting this Fall, O'Reilly and Cloudera are going to be smooshing together their conferences, and Siddharth Anand has some thoughts on the state of NoSQL in 2012.

The State of NoSQL in 2012 – Anand has some thoughts on the limitations of today's NoSQL options. "Many of the NoSQL vendors view the "battle of NoSQL" to be akin to the RDBMS battle of the 80s, a winner-take-all battle. In the NoSQL world, it is by no means a winner-take-all battle. Distributed Systems are about compromises."

While Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has always had its cheerleaders - yours truly included - the harsh reality is that, commercially speaking, PaaS offerings have underperformed relative to expectations for several years running. This is particularly the case among enterprises, which have, by and large, turned a blind eye to the technology.

Two technologies have made the quantum speed leaps in high-performance computing possible. One is the rapid ascent of commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) processors that made computing speed cheaper. The second is InfiniBand (IB), the switching technology that Sun Microsystems helped evolve into a fabric - the underlying infrastructure of a carrier-grade cloud.

Today, after an on-again, off-again relationship with InfiniBand that stretches back to its very beginning, Intel is back in the networking fabric business in a big way. With as big a message of "we're back" as you can send, the company has agreed to purchase the InfiniBand production assets, along with many of the employees, of QLogic. Analysts estimate the company to be the #2 player in the InfiniBand switch market with over one-fourth the global market. The deal has a reported value of $125 million.

Little bit of news around Node.js today, Amazon has added support for Identity Federation, and Oracle customers might want to pay attention to a fundamental flaw that's been discovered in Oracle database systems.

Node.js v0.6.8 – The Node.js team has released a new stable version, 0.6.8. This release updates V8 to 3.6.6.19, updates npm to 1.1.0-2, and fixes a number of bugs.

Government computing resources, like any other government procurement, used to be purchased by agencies for those agencies... and nobody else. It didn't make sense to share, because the very concept of sharing compute power didn't even exist. Now in an almost unprecedented shift of philosophy, the U.S. Government is one of the world's leading adopters of private cloud infrastructure. In order to slash costs fast, it's moving to the cloud sooner than almost anyone else.

Now, some government agencies, departments, bureaus, and divisions that no longer have any reason to avoid maintaining their compute resources separately from one another, also have no viable reason for staying separate from one another. IDC analyst Shawn P. McCarthy has discovered, and discusses in a newly published report, local governments are rapidly slashing costs by purchasing compute power and capacity on a metered basis from state governments.