Start-up unveils storage platform for large-scale Web applications

A storage company emerged from stealth mode this week with software designed to efficiently manage the file serving needs of Internet applications such as social networks, online ad serving and software-as-a-service.  Nine data storage companies to watch MaxiScale announced the Flex Software Platform, which is installed on commodity gear, such as a bank of Apache Web servers. Retrieving a small file with the MaxiScale system requires just one I/O operation, a feature that eliminates bottlenecks caused by systems that require multiple I/O operations for each small file retrieval, says IDC storage analyst Noemi Greyzdorf. "They built a very interesting file system that handles small files – files that are one megabyte or smaller – incredibly efficiently," Greyzdorf says Configurations start with as few as four nodes but can scale up to 50,000 servers, the company says. The goal is to improve performance and reduce cost, space and power requirements for Web companies that have to deal with large numbers of small files. "We think people deploying Web applications have been paying too much money and we're out to change that," says Gary Orenstein, vice president of marketing for MaxiScale. Instead of using expensive storage boxes with interconnects like InfiniBand or Fibre Channel, MaxiScale recommends using Flex with 2TB SATA drives and says the Flex system relies on IP and Ethernet connections. "We're using standards-based, commodity hardware for everything," Orenstein says.

Maxiscale's first publicly named customer is AdMob, a mobile advertising marketplace that has served more than 110 billion ad impressions in the last three years. Flex uses a patent-pending Peer Set architecture that replicates file data and metadata across SATA drives, allowing for load balancing and resiliency to multiple hardware failures. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and founded in 2007, MaxiScale has $17 million in venture financing from investors NEA, El Dorado Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. Flex software is available now and pricing starts at $6,000 for four nodes allowing up to 32TB of storage. MaxiScale was co-founded by CEO Gianluca Rattazzi, who previously founded Meridian Data, Parallan, P-Com and BlueArc; and CTO Francesco Lacapra, who previously held executive roles at Olivetti, Quantum and BlueArc. Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter.

Broadcom buying Dune Networks for cloud switching

Broadcom has agreed to acquire Dune Networks, a privately held maker of high-speed switch fabrics, for about US$178 million, the companies announced Monday. Its SAND switch fabric can scale up from 10G bps (bits per second) to 100Tbps in total capacity and support individual ports with speeds up to 100-Gigabit Ethernet, according to the company's Web site. Dune was founded in 2000 and sells chipsets for high-capacity network equipment.

It is designed as the heart of switches for data centers, enterprises LANs, and carrier core and edge routers and Carrier Ethernet platforms. By bolstering the company's lineup for data-center networking gear, it will help to meet growing demands for cloud computing infrastructure, Broadcom said. The acquisition, which is expected to close before the end of Broadcom's first quarter ending March 31, 2010, adds another piece to Broadcom's extensive communications chip arsenal. Broadcom will pay mostly cash for Dune, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, and Yakum, Israel. Dune's approximately 100 employees will be integrated into Broadcom's Network Switching Business Unit and the company's main research facility will remain in Israel, said Martin Lund, vice president and general manager of the unit.

The boards of both companies have approved the deal, but it is subject to customary closing conditions. Lund said current Dune CEO Eyal Dagan would report to him. Broadcom acquired another switch fabric maker, Sandburst, in 2006. It plans to keep the XGS Core architecture that came from Sandburst, which is well-suited to metro Ethernet and carrier applications, while turning to Dune to meet the growing demand for switches in massive data centers, Lund said. "The strategic importance of cloud computing, going forward, is so great that we want to make sure we have the best architecture for that," Lund said. Broadcom is based in Irvine, California, but also has facilities in Silicon Valley. For companies building big data centers, Dune's acquisition by Broadcom could eventually mean less expensive network equipment, according to Linley Group analyst Jag Bolaria.

Whereas the XGS Core technology uses a centralized traffic scheduling mechanism, which can handle tens of terabits per second, Dune has a distributed scheduling system that can scale to hundreds of terabits per second, he said. Dune is the world's largest third-party maker of switch fabrics, Bolaria said. "It's probably the most scalable fabric in the market," he added. Most switch makers turn to third parties such as Dune for their fabrics, with Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks the main holdouts that still develop their own, Bolaria said. Broadcom probably has its eye on product development groups within those switch giants as potential customers, Bolaria said. Dune's products may turn more attractive to Cisco and Juniper if they come under the wing of Broadcom, which is much larger and more certain to be around to support major product lines for decades to come, he said.

The cost for those switch vendors to develop their own fabrics is immense, according to Bolaria. "Broadcom is saying, 'We can give you scalability,'" he said. If Cisco and Juniper turn to a third party such as Broadcom and data-center switch fabrics became standardized, the cost of the equipment should go down, he said.

Infoblox, Neustar form alliance

Infoblox and Neustar will announce Tuesday a strategic partnership that allows the two companies to resell each other's DNS products to enterprise customers and hints towards tighter integration of these offerings in the future. Infoblox customers include financial services firms such as VISA, healthcare companies such as Pfizer and government agencies such as the Nevada Department of Corrections. Tools cure IP address-management headaches Infoblox sells appliances that handle DNS, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP Address Management (IPAM) functions for internal corporate networks.

Internal DNS is how employees reach enterprise IP-based applications such as VoIP. Neustar offers the UltraDNS, DNS and load balancing services aimed at helping leading e-commerce sites such as Zappos.com and BuyOnlineNow.com handle external DNS queries without investing in their own global network infrastructure. Now Infoblox will offer Neustar's cloud-based services to its customers, while Neustar will resell Infoblox appliances. "Infoblox is a sales agent for Neustar's services including a global secondary service. External DNS is how Web sites publish the latest information about their DNS and IP address changes to their customers over the Internet. In this particular service, our customers will still use Infoblox as their primary DNS but in terms of the secondary services that is handled by the Neustar cloud," explains Richard Kagan, vice president of marketing for Infoblox. "The nice thing is that it will all be done through a single pane of glass. Neustar already sells a managed internal DNS service. "Think of the Infoblox appliances as offering an extension to our service portfolio that provides internal DNS components," says Jim Leach, vice president of marketing at Neustar.

It can all be managed under the Infoblox [graphical user interface.]" Infoblox also will resell Neustar's services for external bi-directional DNS and global load balancing. "These are the kinds of things that most organizations are hard-pressed to [deploy their own] infrastructure for," Kagan says. "For those capabilities, the UltraDNS cloud is authoritative." Meanwhile, Neustar will resell Infoblox appliances to its customers that are looking to upgrade their internal DNS capabilities. Neustar and Infoblox did not announce any special offerings that would marry their products together, but Leach said "we do see ourselves doing some enhanced services through joint development." The Infoblox/Neustar alliance comes at a time when Neustar's UltraDNS services face additional competition from DNS software vendor Nominum, which announced a cloud-based service called SKYE in September.

Acadia gets cloud-computing venture rolling in Asia

Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware hope to soon sign the first Asian customers for their cloud-computing partnership and Acadia joint venture. The partners also established a joint-venture company, Acadia, which will build, operate and then transfer data centers based on Vblock to customers. "We have some number of customers that we've agreed on between the three companies and we're calling on them now. On Tuesday, the three companies announced a broad partnership, the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, that will develop integrated cloud-computing products called Vblock Infrastructure Packages including servers, networking, storage and virtualization software for data centers.

In fact, a few of them have already reached a handshake level with us and we believe they will become early adopters of Vblock and of this new entity that we're bringing out, called Acadia," said Steve Leonard, president of EMC Asia-Pacific and Japan, during a phone interview. As with much of the overall partnership itself, specific details of how Acadia will operate or what its Asian operations will look like have yet to be determined. The three partners are counting on the combination of highly integrated products and Acadia, as a single entity that ties all three companies together, to win over Asian customers looking to replace their legacy data centers with a virtualized computing environments. The companies are still searching for a CEO to head the venture, which is expected to employ 130 people worldwide when it's up and running. Under the BOT model, suppliers finance and build a project and recoup their investment from cash flows generated by the completed project over an agreed period of time. Traditionally, the build, operate and transfer (BOT) model has been used as a way to finance the construction of large infrastructure projects, such as power stations and highways.

While Acadia's BOT services will offer financing for customers, the joint venture is also meant to meet customer demand for accountability when building complex systems that use products from different companies. "We've found the feedback from customers has been overwhelmingly positive," said Andre Smit, managing director of data center sales at Cisco Asia-Pacific, saying the partnership between the three companies gives them "end-to-end vendor accountability."

Undercover 1.5 ousts iPhone thieves with push notifications

It's 2 AM. Do you know where your iPhone is? What if you want an app devoted to recovering a stolen iPhone or iPod Touch-one that has a few more tricks up its sleeve? Well, maybe you do, thanks to MobileMe's "Find my iPhone," but what if you're not a MobileMe subscriber?

That's exactly what Orbicule's Undercover for iPhone is. Our iPhones are now smarter, faster, stronger, better, and able to let third-party apps do more than ever. We've already covered this app and its Mac OS X cousin, back when push notifications were little more than a bullet point on a wish list, but times have changed. Back in the 1.0 days, when Undercover was just a wee lad, you had to fool your iPhone's captor into launching the app before it was able to transmit its location. You can make the messages as enticing as you want-say, by having them pretend to be a notification from your bank account. Not an easy task: Thanks to App Store policy, apps cannot change their names or icons, and I'm guessing that all but the thickest criminals knew better than to launch an application called "Undercover." Now you have the ability to send push notifications with any message of your choosing directly to the iPhone-yes, just like MobileMe. But the comparisons end there.

If the crook chooses to view the push notification, Undercover will launch, disguised either as a game that's taking its sweet time to load or loading any Website of your choosing, such as the aforementioned bank's. While the thief is distracted, Undercover will be happy to save the device's GPS coordinates and IP address to Orbicule's Website. They'll also be sent directly to any police officer you've contacted to work on the case and registered in Orbicule's Undercover Center. Each time that Undercover launches, it will save a new set of coordinates that you can view in Google Maps. Orbicule has made a video to demonstrate this killer feature. You could use Find My iPhone to collect live GPS information from MobileMe and log a record of GPS coordinates via Orbicule, submitting it all to the police.

It looks as though this app could be used not only as an alternative to Find My iPhone, but a nice companion app as well. It's still far from perfect, at least until (or unless) Apple can be made to change their iPhone app policies to let third-party apps like Undercover do a little more. It requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later. Undercover for the iPhone costs $5 and works on all iPhones and iPod touches.