Daily Tech Briefing: May 13, 2014

At a recent event, IBM executives unveiled “Elastic Storage,” new technology designed to address the needs of businesses and service providers that are overwhelmed by the growth of data being generated through both traditional means, and newer venues like social media, mobile and video.

The goal of Elastic Storage is to create a way for businesses to quickly and efficiently store, access and analyze all the data that is coming in, no matter what the source. This new software-defined storage was originally developed for IBM’s famous Watson artificial intelligence project.

Red Hat is collaborating with NetApp on a new reference implementation of OpenStack. The new reference architecture will combine Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 and NetApp storage.

What’s more, Red Hat and NetApp are also collaborating on a potential new OpenStack project called Manila. Red Hat officials explained that the goal of Manila is to do for shared file system storage what Cinder has done for block storage.

The OpenStack Foundation recently announced the debut of the OpenStack Marketplace, which is meant to be a resource to help organizations understand the complexities of OpenStack cloud technologies. This is the continuation of many efforts to help expand the open-source cloud platform’s market share.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, explained that the Marketplace will have multiple categories based on an organization’s consumption model for cloud services, such as infrastructure-as-a-service vendors and OpenStack distributions, consultants, training and compatible drivers.

Finally, there have long been rumors that Sprint plans to merge with T-Mobile, and recent news seems to support this notion. The Wall Street Journal reported that sources are stating that T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is insisting on a 1 billion dollar breakup fee in the merger contract if federal regulators reject the deal on the grounds it is anti-competitive or violates antitrust laws.