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Amazon is offering direct connect more widely, Dell has gone green with its cloud and the folks over at CloudBees have some helpful tips on triggering builds in Jenkins from GitHub commits.

Amazon is offering direct connect in more areas. Now you can create a dedicated network connection between your business and AWS facilities in US West (San Jose or Los Angeles), EU West (Ireland) and two locations in Asia Pacific (Singapore and Tokyo). We covered the Direct Connect rollout in August of last year.

With the announcement by Oracle of their acquisition of RightNow earlier this week, it has brought about some strange bedfellows on how their mutual customers can connect up disparate CRM and other SaaS-based customer support systems. Indeed, at the center of the integration between Oracle and RightNow's technologies lies a product that is sold by IBM called WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration. Let's look a bit more closely at what is going on here.

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre had a problem. It faced rising demand for IT services, but its main data center had nearly reached capacity. With a very tight budget, Sunnybrook's IT director Oliver Tsai needed to come up with a creative solution to meet demand.

Tsai and his team took a two-pronged approach. They beefed up the data center with an additional UPS, replaced the HVAC with a better design, and standardized on Dell PowerEdge R710 servers with Intel Xeon processors. They also deployed VMware vSphere 4.0, giving them a 30:1 virtual machine density. The result? A reduction of energy demand by 267,158 kWh annually – giving them a savings of CAD 26,716 yearly.

With the world's #1 PC maker HP now in full transition mode, now may be the time for Dell to get its full come-uppance. On the enterprise side, it's had two big aces in the hole for a few years now: One is Optimized Deployment, which borrows Microsoft's data imaging technology to enable admins to rapidly deploy fully-configured Windows operating systems and applications to multiple clients in minutes. A 2010 study (PDF available here) showed automated image-based deployment could save businesses up to $337 per PC, in IT management costs alone.

Another is Dell's extraordinary KACE management appliances - literally plug-and-play tools that perform inventory analysis on corporate networks. A KACE tool lets admins deploy applications, patches, and updates to designated systems in the network.

Opscode is releasing new Cookbooks for rapid deployment and automation of OpenStack clouds. The new Cookbooks work with OpenStack's five core projects, including the new identity and dashboard projects announced in September.

The new Cookbooks for Chef were developed in conjunction with Rackspace and Dell, and are immediately available on GitHub.

The rate at which data, or content, is being produced for the Web and being generated for businesses has outpaced the rate at which conventional databases are evolving to better manage it all. It's a fact of life that we perceive on a gradual basis every day, but that we haven't yet acknowledged to be as significant or dangerous a trend as it is: Data is getting slower. Networks are getting bigger as the cloud is getting broader, and data that was already difficult to manage is becoming impossible. Content management systems today continue to be based on the types of structured database systems about one or two steps more evolved than dBASE. We've known they would be insufficient for the task, but we've put off the problem of composing a new architecture.

It's already too late for major IT companies to start that new architecture from square one; if a company has any hope of addressing this colossal, underappreciated problem, it will need to acquire the architectural project in progress. This is what Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that it intends to do: acquire a software firm whose core product aims to supplant everything we know about databases, both the SQL kind and the Google kind. In its place would come a clustered approach whose goal is no less than to be the central repository for meaning in the world.

And in exchange for this, HP is willing to let go of the promise of Palm.

Since VMware's introduction of Cloud Foundry last April, the first major open source platform-as-a-service has made significant inroads. Although VMware is the project's benefactor, it's been promising developers an easy way to build applications using the Sinatra and Rails frameworks for Ruby, the Grails and Spring frameworks from VMware and such web frameworks as Node.js.

To go up against major corporate efforts in PaaS such as Salesforce's Force.com and Microsoft's Windows Azure, Cloud Foundry needs all the third-party support it can get. Today, that support came in something of a thunderstorm, with no fewer than four major announcements with new partners. Perhaps the most important of these announcements comes from enStratus, the producer of cloud management and automation tools.

Following the announcement of its partnership with Dell, Cloudera announced a new partner program for resellers and professional services providers. Among the various elements of the Cloudera Connect Partner Program will be a certification program.

Cloudera sells enterprise support for Apache Hadoop and its own Cloudera Enterprise product. The company funds much Hadoop development, and employs Hadoop creator Doug Cutting. The new program is designed to expand Cloudera's reach through partnerships with systems integrators and independent hardware and software vendors.

Cloudera has long been seen as a potential acquisition target. Last year GigaOm's Derrick Harris questioned whether Cloudera was allying its way to an acquisition. Earlier this year RedMonk co-founder and analyst James Governor wrote that it was "highly likely" that HP would make a play for Cloudera.

This week Cloudera entered a new alliance with Dell to offer a pre-configured stack of hardware and software for running Apache Hadoop clusters. Also, last year Dell fought a bidding war with HP over storage vendor 3Par. HP ending up winning even after Dell released a press release stating that it would acquire 3Par. That's got to smart.

Do you think Dell will make a play for Cloudera?

Cloudera and Dell today announced an agreement to sell a complete Apache Hadoop solution. The package will include Dell hardware (including Dell PowerEdge C2100 servers and PowerConnect switches), Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop, Cloudera Enterprise and of course support. It should be available for purchase within the next 30 days. Details can be found on dell.cloudera.com.