ReadWriteCloud

It could be the killer combination of server technologies: unified object storage with sharded, distributed big data. Imagine Hadoop clusters whose locales transcend both geographies and clouds, and whose contents can be addressed the same way as any other file. It could help bridge the current gap between big data clusters and regulated, relational databases. 

Red Hat is planning such a move, as part of its ongoing beta of what’s now called Red Hat Storage 2.0 (RHS 2). The company’s Tom Trainer, a veteran of the storage industry, spoke with ReadWriteWeb about this latest unreported revolution.

If security engineers could simply pool their intelligence, wouldn't that help thwart Internet clients' access to known, malicious agents?

Check Point - the producer of security appliances and software that came to prominence after its acquisition of ZoneAlarm - takes a key step toward building a collective detour system for malicious agents, with something it calls ThreatCloud.

This morning, managed desktop provider MokaFive is launching a new approach to solving two of the most pressing issues facing IT and security professionals: the infusion of consumer devices - notably the iPad - into corporate data centers; and enterprise workers turning to consumer cloud storage services like Dropbox and Box.net to save and share corporate data - both coming without IT's control or supervision.

As it turns out, MokaFive for iOS is not a Windows or Mac virtualization platform for iPad, as many had expected. From the IT department's perspective, it may actually be better: a secure storage platform that enables corporate data saved from the corporate PC at work and the notebook PC at home, to be viewable and manageable on an iPad.

Last September, a cloud-based customer-service session manager built on the Salesforce platform called Assistly made a big splash at the Dreamforce '11 convention. Within weeks, Assistly found itself acquired by Salesforce, with the intention of making it the engine behind its Desk.com domain.

Now Assistly has become Desk.com, and in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, its former CEO-turned-Salesforce-VP, Alex Bard, shows off the results of their integration: a jaw-dropping communications nexus that resembles SharePoint for the call center the way an iPad resembles a Palm Pilot.

There's one big problem with the growing number of cloud-based applications and platform services, and it's growing faster than its prospective solutions: They typically handle authentication for their users by themselves. And when they do enable OAuth or another method to share authentication duties between services and sites, their implementations are sometimes cumbersome, and too often users don't even notice the option.

Ideally, you should only have to log in once: when you begin your session with your PC, tablet or smartphone. The single sign-on (SSO) ideal is not just about user convenience. Implemented correctly, it could prevent a user's session from being remotely hijacked by a malicious user. Microsoft will be assembling the tools for services to enable some kind of SSO with its upcoming Windows 8. But the viability of those tools will depend not only upon, once again, how well services implement them, but also whether users will trust Facebook, Yahoo, or Microsoft itself to vouch for their identities. Today, there are a multitude of alternative architectures put forth by services opting to be your one source for identity, and ReadWriteWeb has chosen to spotlight three of them.

Easily the largest contributors to ReadWriteWeb's overall traffic on any given day include technology news aggregation services, one of them being Techmeme. It's a service that pulls interesting headlines from amid the ever-flowing sea of content, and compiles them into an amalgamated front page of what's happening; it's directed toward a specific audience, which Techmeme hopes includes you. It's done largely by humans, as opposed to automated services that glean articles' potential relative interest level through semantic analysis.

The CEO of a company called Flow has demonstrated to ReadWriteWeb what he describes as a tool that conceivably enables anyone to do for their businesses or even for a mass audience what Techmeme does for its audience, and with relative ease. Eric Alterman (not the noted professor) showed ReadWriteWeb a tool created for his Flow Platform that essentially enables any user to navigate selected streams of digested Web information on any number of filtered topics, and effectively generate a cultivated, "curated" stream of related content. Imagine a Techmeme that pertains only to what you do and who you are.

PLM is far from the sexiest acronym floating around the Internet these days. Short for Product Lifecycle Management, PLM is often thought of as an esoteric offshoot of the equally obscure PDM, or Product Design Management - the way engineers track control technical data related to a particular product.

PLM is like PDM on steroids, extending the concept to cover "the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal," as Wikipedia puts it. If you haven't heard of PLM, don't feel bad. The category hasn't exactly set the world on fire. But Autodesk thinks cloud computing can change all that.

Earlier this year, my colleague David Strom shared with you the sudden rise of a mobile presentation tool called SlideShark. It was a fairly simple concept to begin with: Upload a PowerPoint presentation to Brainshark's servers, and then deploy that presentation to multiple recipients who can watch them from their mobile devices. Think YouTube without the possums chasing squirrels, and with a tailored suit.

Today, that concept got simpler in a way that's both compelling and scary: One of the charter iOS apps for Box.net's new OneCloud platform lets you effectively open up PowerPoint preso files in Box, in a way that uploads them to SlideShark and displays them in front of you.

The presumed "elasticity" of cloud technology tends to fall apart whenever the bindings change. That is, when a virtual machine or virtualized application relies upon the specific configuration of the hardware providing its infrastructure, it isn't exactly cloud-like when you have to migrate that element to a new host. You often find yourself rewriting some configuration file or maybe even engineering some one-time script. You don't have to write an instruction manual every time you stretch a rubber band.

In rethinking its approach to making it easier for you to rewrite and reconfigure components that are said to be elastic, VMware has decided to engineer an administrative system that dispenses with the notion altogether. Call it a "zero-step process." In its place, the company's vFabric Application Director, which VMware We introduced you to vFabric App Directorannounced last October and is generally releasing this morning, substitutes this process for application deployment with a procedure that's reminiscent of drawing an org chart in Visio.

Here's the proposition: If your business fronts a marketing Web site, perhaps with a digital storefront and probably with additional content on Facebook, Salesforce.com is now offering a service - not a software package, but a cloud-based system - for you to compose the entire site, including layout template and content, and host the site including the database on the Force.com platform, for a flat fee of $1,500 per month.

It is exactly the type of business model that Salesforce is aiming directly at another huge competitor with dominant market share: this time, WordPress. Salesforce is betting that businesses give WordPress its 50-plus-percent market share in the content management system category because it's the most convenient product to adopt, not because it's best suited to the task. And just like before, Salesforce is doubling down all its chips on a simple domain name: this time, Site.com.