It was nearly five years ago when I last spent time with Urs Hölzle, Google’s infrastructure czar. (His official title is SVP of operations.) It was around that time he introduced me (and several others) to many of the concepts (such as cloud and big data) that are now part of the technology sector’s vernacular. Hölzle was company’s first VP of engineering, and he has led the development of Google’s technical infrastructure.

EMC's Isilon subsidiary announced new network-attached storage (NAS) hardware and software aimed at becoming the infrastructure for business intelligence through big data applications.

Isilon touted two new clustered NAS arrays, the S200 and X200. The arrays are able to use a combination of serial ATA (SATA), serial SCSI (SAS) or solid-state drives (SSDs) in a tiered configuration, affording varying degrees of performance. The arrays use a single name space under which petabytes of data can be stored.

The open source OpenStack cloud project is out with a new release this week codenamed 'Cactus.'

The network has long been king at Interop, the tech conference that will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2011. But networking "has fallen behind" over the past couple of years as a new emphasis on cloud computing and virtualization has taken hold, says Interop general manager Lenny Heymann. But now it's time to put the focus back on the network.

With what appears to be limitless storage options, for many the cloud is an attractive proposition. It offers savings to organisations looking to cut down the premium space they need to store data centres, and it can increase efficiency with data and applications shared over the internet. However, with questions still remaining over its security, how can organisations best utilise this exciting resource?

When you board an aeroplane you’re asked to buckle your seat belt and listen to an important safety announcement. The same is true before you propel your data down the runway and jet it into the cloud.

So, what’s in our safety demonstration:

Google is out to sell the world, and more computing power than most of us can imagine.

The company just announced what it calls “Earth Builder,” a cloud-based mapping service that gives companies secure access to the search giant’s petabytes of geographic data, upon which they can lay their own proprietary information and make maps and global models for internal corporate consumption. The product will be available in the third quarter, though Google is sounding out companies now.