“An unmanageable mess” is how Paul Gillin, senior editor for Wikibon Inc. and SiliconANGLE Media Inc., described the open-source software community last year. Both proprietary legacies and open-source-native companies have since tried to bring order to the confusion. Now, the open-source community has resolved to pull itself together. “We take seriously that that code runs modern ...

In the beginning, there was open source. Then, various foundations and for-profit businesses evolved from the primordial goo of freely contributed code. Will these powers feed the meritocratic ecosystem that birthed them — or feed upon it? Probably both, according to Christine Corbett Moran, Ph.D. (pictured), NSF astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at California Institute of ...

Non-proprietary, open-source software code is now preferred by most types of businesses and organizations. Inevitably, corporate vendors eyeing this bull market want to make gravy from it. If they play by open source rules, they might succeed; if they try to simply buy their way in, they’ll have to contend with the open source public and its people’s pitchforks. ...

VMware Inc. virtual machines run in an enviable 500,000 data centers. Sometimes their profusion is also their problem; glut can make it hard for information technology  administrators to track and protect virtual machines, according to Sal De Masi (pictured, left), director of the data protection practice at Teknicor Corp. “The largest challenge customers face — not only in the ...

Private and public clouds added to on-premises data centers are breaking the infrastructure environment into pieces. Harried customers want their data protected wherever it lands, which is why some vendors are baking protection into a whole range of products. “We’re really seeing much more of a move toward a source-based data protection,” said Ruya Barrett (pictured, ...

Data protection is on fire these days. Businesses anxious about migrating to foreign, off-premises cloud environments are demanding innovation in backup and recovery. These newfangled services aren’t just for companies all-in on cloud; they can also be a test bed for the cold-footed. “Every time that you modernize production, you must also modernize protection,” said Jason Buffington ...

Software providers face rising demand for as-a-service delivery models. Digital subscription is even cropping up in businesses — like Fender Musical Instruments Corp. — far from the software core. All of these companies now require infrastructure like storage to scale with customers’ whims. “They don’t really know what is going to be the next workload, how their workloads ...

Technology advancements may be too much of a good thing for business environments unequipped to assimilate them. The slow adoption of analytics tech, for example, is primarily due to cultural barriers for 62 percent of companies surveyed in a recent report from SAS Institute Inc. Another 25 percent of businesses say lack of internal expertise and resources is the ...

Companies with cold feet about relocating on-premises applications to the public cloud may need a common denominator to warm them up. For on-prem-to-cloud specialist SkyTap Inc., the go-between is VMware Inc.’s virtual machine technology. “A lot of our customers have applications that they don’t want to touch,” says Roger Frey (pictured, left), vice president of alliances ...

First hyperconverged infrastructure combined software-defined storage with commodity hardware for an on-premises “private cloud.” Now converged infrastructure startup Datrium Inc. wants to go further by mimicking public cloud in on-prem or hybrid environments. Datrium’s mission is “to give customers in this hybrid world a way to bring that kind of infrastructure with the simplicity, scale, performance you ...