Metacloud’s Steve Curry: We Need a Better Cloud Storage Model

The popularity of cloud storage is growing rapidly, and few would deny that open source technology is driving individual and business users to the clouds in droves. Yet enterprise adoption decisions are often hindered by competing technologies for public and private clouds. Often, it is less a question of open or closed source and more an issue of service and cost.



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MediaFire’s Derek Labian: Cloud Storage Is an Everyday Need

Security and privacy concerns may be far outweighed for many users by the convenience and appeal of the cloud, but users need to view cloud access as more than just another storage utility on the desktop. That’s according to Derek Labian, CEO of cloud storage service MediaFire. Instead, cloud users need to focus on cloud performance and application functionality, Labian suggests.



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Coverity’s Zack Samocha: Software Quality and the Open Source Advantage

Software quality is a topic close to most developers’ hearts, whether they work with open source or proprietary code. Assessing quality, however, isn’t always a simple matter. As a result, several efforts have sprung up to tackle the challenge, including the Coverity Scan project. Coverity began work in 2006 on the open source project, which is a joint endeavor with the Department of Homeland Security.



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AlienVault’s Barmak Meftah: Time to Put Hackers on the Defensive

As CEO of AlienVault, Barmak Meftah faces enemies every day who play out their attacks from faraway lands using seemingly unbeatable weapons. One of the weapons AlienVault uses with the support of the open source community is a global report called the Open Threat Exchange that tracks threats to computer networks. The results make it possible to identify trouble spots and take corrective action.



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Treasure Data’s Hiro Yoshikawa: Taking the Open Road With Big Data

Businesses and government agencies are in a race to gather, quantify and clarify an ever-increasing stream of data. Housing the bits and pieces of their digital treasures can be just as much of a problem as deciding whether to trust traditional relational platforms or adopt more flexible databases designed to handle unstructured data.



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Nexenta’s Lockareff and Powell: Software-Only Storage for Everyone

In the cloud storage competition for customers, a battle is raging over innovative software-only storage systems and wannabe innovators still hawking yesteryear’s legacy hardware solutions. Dollars and performance are the battlefield stakes. Nexenta, an open source provider of software-defined storage solutions, is waging the fight with its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor.



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Tokutek’s John Partridge: Open Source Is Vested in Big Data

Ask Tokutek CEO John Partridge what makes open source such a snug fit for the database industry and for Big Data, and he’ll tell you it is the decision-making by engineers that use open source. “For people who for whatever reason really need to access the latest technology, most purchasing decisions today are made by very capable engineers,” Partridge said.



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Coraid’s Suda Srinivasan: Public Cloud vs. Private vs. Having It All

Cloud storage technologies and Big Data are driving rapid industry growth. Cloud storage developed around three models: Infrastructure as a Service; Platform as a Service; and Software as a Service. Merging with these cloud service models are technologies providing cloud computing space and backup services. Don’t forget to factor in options such as public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud.

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Couchbase’s Bob Wiederhold: Riding High on Big Data With NoSQL

NoSQL might well be called “the little database engine that could.” It is quietly proving it is on track as Big Data transitions to cloud-based data storage and management. NoSQL is increasingly considered a viable alternative to relational databases, but it is still a relatively small category in a growing world of database technologies.

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Shutterstock’s Chris Fischer: Making the Most of Open Source’s ‘Huge Tech Edge’

Shutterstock has a nearly insatiable appetite for data storage. From its inception, the company — a global provider of licensed photographs, vectors, illustrations and videos — refused to pay higher prices just to stuff its storage needs into somebody else’s cloud. Instead, the almost 10-year-old operation built its own server farm and created its own cloud software system at home.

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