LinuxGram

AT&T has joined OpenStack.

It’s the first US telecom service provider to sign up for the free Rackspace-NASA-spawned open source cloud initiative.

AT&T CTO John Donovan said AT&T has been participating in OpenStack for more than a year and has contributed a blueprint for a potential new function in OpenStack focused on transactional task management.

Donovan said the OpenStack IaaS is housed on dedicated infrastructure in AT&T data centers in Dallas, San Diego and Secaucus, New Jersey to start. The company means to more than double the number of centers with open source capabilities this year.

Evidently AT&T is using OpenStack – or elements of it – underneath a new commodity-style cloud for developers called Cloud Architect that’s presumably intended to compete with Amazon Web Services et al.

The widgetry is supposed to offer “cost-efficient access to highly flexible, integrated computing and application development services.”

Donovan blogs that “developers need the reliability and stability of our differentiated cloud too, but first and foremost, developers need flexibility, affordability and speed in turning up new services.”

Cloud Architect is supposed to provide a “powerful set of options and configurations.” Donovan says developers will be able to set up public and private computing instances or choose to build from the ground up with AT&T’s bare metal or dedicated server options.

“Soon,” he said, “complicated configurations will be a thing of the past. AT&T Cloud Architect will bring you an automated, standardized and fast way to pick, provision and deploy servers over the web within minutes or hours, not days.” There will evidently be a menu of storage, network and monitoring options to choose from along with 24/7 support for a monthly subscription fee. The infrastructure itself will be priced hourly or monthly.

Cloud Architect, part of AT&T’s Hosting Service, is supposed to available sometime in the “coming weeks” – GigaOm suggests that means a couple of weeks from now – and AT&T is promising to expand the developer-centric service throughout the year.

AT&T is proposing to offer CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat and Windows Server and at some point down the road a complete API framework.

AT&T’s sudden bid to cultivate developers evidently ties in with the fact that they’re the ones who produce apps for AT&T’s mobile broadband customers and that integrate with AT&T’s billing system. AT&T is planning an HTML5 App Store. Among other things it’s promising tools for the Internet-accessible U-verse TV service.

General Electric must have gotten the memo from McKinsey’s research arm calling Big Data the “next frontier” and promising untold riches to those who unlock its secrets.

The company is going to pour a reported billion dollars over the next three years into a new global software headquarters that it’s moving into San Ramone in San Francisco’s East Bay where it will build the “Industrial Internet,” a sub-category of the Internet of Things and create intelligent connect systems to harness Big Data.

It means to hire 400 more software architects, engineers, biz dev and user experience people, presumably folks who don’t want to cross the bridge to Silicon Valley proper.

The center will be run by former Cisco VP Bill Ruh who joined GE in February as global technology director. He and his team will “connect and align” GE’s existing ~5,000 software engineers developing widgetry for GE customers.

Ruh said in a canned statement that the goal “is to develop a new generation of intelligent systems that can predict and respond to changes. These digital offerings will harness and automatically analyze the petabytes of data that are generated by industrial equipment to help our customers get the most value from their assets. All of this activity will occur on the ‘Industrial Internet,’ a living network of intelligent machines and systems.”

Ruh said, “At the San Ramon center, our architects and engineers will collaborate with our global experts from multiple industries to combine our decades of experience with infrastructure equipment and marry them with software solutions. We believe that our expertise across many industries will allow us and our customers to accelerate digital innovation and deliver unprecedented results.”

GE CTO Mark Little imagines. “On any given day, one of our software experts could be working on a clean energy project, while at the same time contributing to a program that improves the delivery of health care.” Evidently the techniques are the same.

GE can already monitor the health of locomotives on the rails and patients in hospitals. Now it wants to suck out the data and analyze it. In this GE might have to compete with such as IBM but GE presumably knows its own jet engines, wind turbines and refrigerators best. GE aims to elbow its way to the front of the line and presumably it will sell more of its wares in the process.

Design work on the new center is underway with construction starting later this year. Employees will begin moving in around the middle of next year.

GE has opened two large software operations over the past two years, an Advanced Manufacturing and Software Technology Center near Detroit that employs nearly 1,000 GE IT folk who develop software for GE’s internal operations and an Information Security Technology Center near Richmond, Virginia.

The company already sells upwards of $2.5 billion a year in software, representing about 1% of its total sales.

Wednesday it said it would buy rail management software house RMI on undisclosed terms.

Amazon unveiled its ballyhooed Android tablet at a press conference in New York Wednesday morning and priced it at $199, a highly aggressive and potentially disruptive price point that is likely to prove less than it costs to make.

It’s certainly not going to fatten up Amazon’s profit margin any unless, of course, it’s less of an iPad rival than a buttress for the Amazon ecosphere, a device for consuming the 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, magazines, apps, games and other things Amazon sells. Somebody compared it to a vending machine and that apparently is the way Amazon thinks of it.

Apple’s cheapest iPad goes for $499 and HP proved the allure of cut-rate price when it staged a $99 fire sale on its disowned app-lacking Touchpad.

In the aftermath of the announcement, CNBC toyed with the idea of Amazon wresting control of Android from Google. And it could play havoc with the pricing of other Android tablets.

Amazon’s gismo is 33% smaller than the iPad. It’s Wi-Fi only and there’s no camera or microphone although it will stream music while one browses and downloading videos while one reads a book. It’s said to be good only for two-finger touch.

The 14.6 ounce seven-inch widget, called the Kindle Fire, comes with a cloud-accelerated web browser called Silk that lives partially on Fire and partially on EC2 where it leverages the cloud’s raw computational horsepower, persistent connections and time-tested heuristics as well as Amazon’s peering relationships with major Internet service providers.

This dynamically determined labor-dividing “split browser” architecture is supposed to speed page requests relative to network conditions, page complexity and cached content and provide an overall faster browsing experience considering a typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 different domains and latency on wireless connections is typically high.

Amazon calls Silk “revolutionary” and a boon to battery life.

The Android operating system Amazon is using is supposed to be highly customized so Fire’s UI is distinct. Amazon integrated its own Android app store, not Google’s.

Amazon’s so-called Whispersync technology now synchronizes movies and TV shows as well as libraries, last page read, bookmarks, notes and highlights across a range of devices and platforms. Amazon says, “When you get home, switch to your big screen TV. Your movie will be right where you left it.”

The package offers free Amazon Cloud storage and backup for Amazon digital content. It’s unclear if it extends to somebody else’s content. Doesn’t sound like it.

The full color LCD touchscreen displays 169 pixels an inch and employs IPS (in-plane switching) technology, similar to the widgetry as used on the iPad, for an extra-wide viewing angle. It’s Gorilla Glass-coated.

The dingus is based on a 1GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor with 512MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage.

Made by Quanta, the same people who make RIM’s poorly selling Playbook, there’s a family resemblance.

The device is supposed to start shipping November 15 but pre-orders can be placed now, at least in the US. It comes with a free one-month subscription to Amazon’s $79-a-year Prime service with its streaming video and free two-day shipping.

Amazon also added three black and white e-reader Kindles priced from $79 to $149. The $99 Kindle Touch has a touch screen. The high-end Kindle Touch 3G comes with free 3G. They are 30% lighter, 18% smaller and turn pages 10% faster.

Amazon’s stock closed at $229.71 Wednesday and slipped to $222.44 Thursday. Apple, which had been over $400 early in the week, went from $397 Wednesday to $390.57 Thursday. Part of Apple’s problem this week was talk – unsubstantiated, contradicted and never definitively run to ground – that it was cutting back on Q4 iPad production by 25%.

Two-year-old Pure Storage, the latest flash start-up, shook off its cloak of invisibility Tuesday and showed off a reportedly oversubscribed $30 million C round for its all-flash enterprise array technology.

That makes $55 million altogether.

The new money was put in by Samsung, the largest flash maker, as well as Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and angel investors.

The infusion is meant to accelerate engineering, operations and go-to-market activities for the start-up’s shiny new flagship product, the Pure Storage FlashArray FA-300 Series, the first all-flash enterprise storage array.

It’s supposed to be 10x faster and offer 10x more space and power efficiency than disk-centric arrays at a lower per-gigabyte price, including, Pure says, performance disks, flash retrofits and flash/disk hybrids.

The company says the widgetry is designed to keep up with the performance of the modern data center, which has shot passed the capabilities of traditional disk storage.

Pure uses deduplication to keep down the cost of flash, reportedly delivering up to 20x inline data reduction. It brags that it is the industry’s first inline deduplication and compression to deliver consistent sub-millisecond latency.

Early adopter Matt Kesner, the CIO of Fenwick & West, a law firm, said, “The FlashArray has reduced our data between 50% to 90% on a variety of workloads, ranging from VMware virtual machines to Microsoft Exchange and SQL, as well as reduced our physical storage footprint far beyond our expectations.”

The company says the FlashArray is plug-compatible with existing virtualization, database and cloud-oriented infrastructures. It also claims the reliability of a true enterprise array.

CEO Scott Dietzen, who used to be CTO of Zimbra, expects the array to be “profoundly transformative.”

Performance disk storage is calculated to be worth $20 billion a year.

Pure Storage is pointed at high-performance workloads, including server virtualization, desktop virtualization (VDI), database (OLTP, real-time analytics) and cloud computing. It promises active/active high availability including clustered controllers that share storage without doubling cost and enterprise-class scalability from tens to hundreds of terabytes of storage within a single array.

The FlashArray and its tightly coupled software, the Purity Operating Environment, were architected from the ground up to take advantage of solid state flash memory, but the real trick is in the barrier-breaking economics.

Purity implements RAID-3D, a new form of RAID designed to protect against the unique failure modes of flash. RAID-3D implements three layers of independent parity, protecting against multiple drive losses, flash bit errors and variability in flash performance.

The thing is also supposed to install in 10 minutes.

The company’s got evaluation arrays. It says, “At a conservative 5:1 data reduction ratio, the market price for a full high-availability solution is below $5/gigabyte useable. At 10:1 reduction, the Pure Storage solution is about half the price of disk, and decreases with higher levels of data reduction.” It’s got a tool that potential customers can use to determine their own data reduction ratio on its web site.

Competitors, and there’s at least a handful of them, include Violin Memory, which has $160 in equity financing, another $150 in debt financing and expects to see revenues of $100 million this year.

Some of the NASA boys mean to get a piece of this promising OpenStack action that they helped create at NASA on the taxpayers’ dime.

Former NASA CTO Chris Kemp has started a company called Nebula after his NASA project that will field a customized turnkey OpenStack hardware appliance that’s supposed let businesses – and I quote – “easily, securely and inexpensively deploy large private cloud computing infrastructures from thousands of inexpensive computers with minimal effort.”

It claims the widget will shift the fundamental economics of computing.

Its black box is supposed to be able to configure a private cloud in minutes, even the massive clouds that used to be the private preserve of, well, NASA, that are capable of handling Big Data and running Big Analytics.

Nebula’s thinking IaaS and PaaS, as well as petabyte-scale storage, which will need software support, and partnerships with Hadoop and NoSQL concerns.

Its widget can control 20 compute and storage nodes. Customers are supposed to buy clutches of them at a time to stick between racks of commodity servers. No hint of pricing yet.

Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram, the star-kissed Google early investor crew, have sprinkled their peculiar brand of angel dust over the start-up. It’s also gotten venture financing from the redoubtable Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners, but won’t talk about the size of bankroll. Kemp claims he turned down a king’s ransom.

According to John Doerr, Kleiner’s top partner, “Nebula will disrupt and democratize cloud computing. As original creators of OpenStack, this team has the unique expertise to deliver simplicity, scale, speed and low cost for enterprise cloud computing.”

The start-up even managed to get an atypical canned quote out of Bechtolsheim, who reached into his past and said, “Nebula embracing OpenStack today is similar to Sun embracing Berkeley Unix in the 1980s. Proprietary systems did not have a chance against open platforms. I see Nebula as the company that will bring OpenStack to the private enterprise cloud.”

Of course, somewhere in this whole thing there’s a slot for Andy’s Arista Networking 10GB switches.

Besides supporting garden-variety commodity servers, Nebula will support Facebook’s stripped-down energy-efficient Open Compute servers expected to start trickling out soon as motherboards from Synnex, the ODM.

Nebula will eventually certify reference architectures as Open Compute-compliant. Otherwise the reference architecture of the “hardware failure-tolerant” scale-out architecture is a Dell PowerEdge C server. Apparently HP will follow. Dell just launched an OpenStack effort of its own.

Product trials reportedly with energy, finance, biotech and media companies are expected to begin in Q4. Apparently Nebula is going to chase the Big Data folks like the American healthcare industry, Europe’s public sector and retail. One might expect optimization depending on use case like the genome.

Nebula’s co-founders include engineering VP Devin Carlen, the former CTO of Anso Labs, which wrote the Nova code to power NASA’s Nebula cloud, now OpenStack’s compute piece.

Nebula will compete against that other new OpenStack start-up Piston Cloud Computing run by Joshua McKenty, the cloud architect on NASA’s Nebula cloud infrastructure, which just got $4.5 million from Hummer Winblad, True Venture and Divergent Ventures as well as the newly Citrix-bought Cloud.com. But that’s just in its own backyard.