ThinkFast: August 30, 2010
“I can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead,” President Obama told NBC’s Brian Williams last night when asked about the growth of the fringe “birther” movement. “There is a mechanism, a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly,” Obama explained.
“I’m making decisions that are not necessarily good for the nightly news and not good for the next election, but for the next generations,” Obama told NBC last night.
59 percent of Americans believe Sarah Palin lacks the “ability to be an effective president,” according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll. Only 26 percent of adults said she would have the ability to be effective, while that number is considerably higher — 47 percent — among Republicans. Only 21 percent of independents said Palin would have the skills to be effective.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is spearheading efforts to build the Park 51 Islamic community center near Ground Zero in New York City,” told a Middle Eastern newspaper that he believed election-year politics had stoked the debate over the project and blamed a ‘tiny, vociferous minority’.” The full interview is available at The National newspaper’s website.
The “consensus among economists” is that the Recovery Act “worked in staving off a rerun of the 1930s,” but other emergency measures implemented by the Obama and Bush administrations played a larger role. The stimulus “was important for confidence,” said Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF, adding, “But fiscal stimulus was the least important of the three planks of the government’s strategy.”
Underwater mortgages “are a massive drag on the economy and it could take years to eliminate the negative equity from many markets.” While many homeowners are paying their mortgages, they are “trapped” and unable to move for better jobs because they would lose money if they sold their homes. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced a program to help homeowners with negative equity.
Government anti-poverty programs now “serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.” Upwards of 50 million Americans on Medicaid and more than 40 million Americans are now receiving food stamps.
And finally: A New York Assembly candidate from Brooklyn has a very convincing character witness — his mom. He sent out a fundraising mailer titled, “My son Doug Biviano wants to protect your PENSION,” which featured nothing but four quotes from his mother and a picture of the candidate and his mom.
ThinkProgress is hiring! Details here.
Cirtas Systems, a cloud storage hardware company, is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing that it has raised a $10 million first round of funding.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company is announcing its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller, a piece of storage equipment that sits in cloud-based data centers. While it sits in an off-site data center, Cirtas has designed the Bluejet technology so that it seems like it is sitting inside the enterprise itself, with fast response to user queries, said Dan Decasper, chief executive of the company.
The startup is attacking a common problem for enterprises. Storage systems are getting so complex that they require the architectural expertise of highly specialized people to solve. The amount of data in corporations is exploding so fast that it’s hard to keep up with storage growth needs. By shifting it to the cloud, or Web-based data centers that can be outside of a company’s physical premises, companies can offload the task to others and reduce costs.
The product is aimed at medium and large enterprises and is available now. By tapping the cloud, the company hopes to solve complex security, performance and compatibility issues that stop companies from using cloud storage. One of the big benefits is that enterprises will be able to move their storage from one cloud service firm to another to get better pricing.
Cirtas said it has completed beta tests at more than a dozen enterprise customers across diverse markets. The company ties together techniques for optimizing networks to work with its virtualized storage arrays so that it can deliver what it calls the world’s first cloud-enabled storage system. The company’s first purchase order has come from beta user Robert Half International.
Cirtas said it can securely encrypt all data in transit to and from the cloud, making sure that only authorized users have access to data. If there is a security breach, the Bluejet technology can prevent data from being read or used, as administrators can control who has access. It can also anticipate storage costs and how they fluctuate. And it can manage data for speedy performance.
Cirtas raised money from New Enterprise Associates; Lightspeed Venture Partners; and Amazon.com, itself a major player in cloud computing through its Amazon Web Services offering. The company plans to use the money to expand its infrastructure and accelerate the adoption of its technology.
Amazon is one of the big advocates of cloud computing, which can give businesses more options and better control over how they purchase data storage. Cirtas’s approach to the cloud is tightly aligned with Amazon’s, said Jeff Blackburn, senior vice president of corporate development at Amazon. He said Amazon was most impressed with the ability of Cirtas to migrate large quantities of data into the cloud in a fast, secure, and cost-effective manner.
Beyond Amazon, Cirtas has also secured a strategic alliance with Iron Mountain, which offers archive services. The Cirtas Bluejet product costs $69,995 per appliance. It is available from a variety of industry resellers. The company said it is making free evaluation systems available to customers.
The company was founded in 2008 by Decasper and Allen Samuels. Its team includes veterans of Citrix, DataDomain, NetApp and Riverbed. Cirtas has 30 employees. Rivals include storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp, Twinstrata, Nasuni, StorSimple and Panzura.
[Pictured at top: Decasper (left) and Josh Goldstein, marketing chief]
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ThinkFast: August 30, 2010
“I can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead,” President Obama told NBC’s Brian Williams last night when asked about the growth of the fringe “birther” movement. “There is a mechanism, a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly,” Obama explained.
“I’m making decisions that are not necessarily good for the nightly news and not good for the next election, but for the next generations,” Obama told NBC last night.
59 percent of Americans believe Sarah Palin lacks the “ability to be an effective president,” according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll. Only 26 percent of adults said she would have the ability to be effective, while that number is considerably higher — 47 percent — among Republicans. Only 21 percent of independents said Palin would have the skills to be effective.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is spearheading efforts to build the Park 51 Islamic community center near Ground Zero in New York City,” told a Middle Eastern newspaper that he believed election-year politics had stoked the debate over the project and blamed a ‘tiny, vociferous minority’.” The full interview is available at The National newspaper’s website.
The “consensus among economists” is that the Recovery Act “worked in staving off a rerun of the 1930s,” but other emergency measures implemented by the Obama and Bush administrations played a larger role. The stimulus “was important for confidence,” said Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF, adding, “But fiscal stimulus was the least important of the three planks of the government’s strategy.”
Underwater mortgages “are a massive drag on the economy and it could take years to eliminate the negative equity from many markets.” While many homeowners are paying their mortgages, they are “trapped” and unable to move for better jobs because they would lose money if they sold their homes. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced a program to help homeowners with negative equity.
Government anti-poverty programs now “serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.” Upwards of 50 million Americans on Medicaid and more than 40 million Americans are now receiving food stamps.
And finally: A New York Assembly candidate from Brooklyn has a very convincing character witness — his mom. He sent out a fundraising mailer titled, “My son Doug Biviano wants to protect your PENSION,” which featured nothing but four quotes from his mother and a picture of the candidate and his mom.
ThinkProgress is hiring! Details here.
Cirtas Systems, a cloud storage hardware company, is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing that it has raised a $10 million first round of funding.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company is announcing its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller, a piece of storage equipment that sits in cloud-based data centers. While it sits in an off-site data center, Cirtas has designed the Bluejet technology so that it seems like it is sitting inside the enterprise itself, with fast response to user queries, said Dan Decasper, chief executive of the company.
The startup is attacking a common problem for enterprises. Storage systems are getting so complex that they require the architectural expertise of highly specialized people to solve. The amount of data in corporations is exploding so fast that it’s hard to keep up with storage growth needs. By shifting it to the cloud, or Web-based data centers that can be outside of a company’s physical premises, companies can offload the task to others and reduce costs.
The product is aimed at medium and large enterprises and is available now. By tapping the cloud, the company hopes to solve complex security, performance and compatibility issues that stop companies from using cloud storage. One of the big benefits is that enterprises will be able to move their storage from one cloud service firm to another to get better pricing.
Cirtas said it has completed beta tests at more than a dozen enterprise customers across diverse markets. The company ties together techniques for optimizing networks to work with its virtualized storage arrays so that it can deliver what it calls the world’s first cloud-enabled storage system. The company’s first purchase order has come from beta user Robert Half International.
Cirtas said it can securely encrypt all data in transit to and from the cloud, making sure that only authorized users have access to data. If there is a security breach, the Bluejet technology can prevent data from being read or used, as administrators can control who has access. It can also anticipate storage costs and how they fluctuate. And it can manage data for speedy performance.
Cirtas raised money from New Enterprise Associates; Lightspeed Venture Partners; and Amazon.com, itself a major player in cloud computing through its Amazon Web Services offering. The company plans to use the money to expand its infrastructure and accelerate the adoption of its technology.
Amazon is one of the big advocates of cloud computing, which can give businesses more options and better control over how they purchase data storage. Cirtas’s approach to the cloud is tightly aligned with Amazon’s, said Jeff Blackburn, senior vice president of corporate development at Amazon. He said Amazon was most impressed with the ability of Cirtas to migrate large quantities of data into the cloud in a fast, secure, and cost-effective manner.
Beyond Amazon, Cirtas has also secured a strategic alliance with Iron Mountain, which offers archive services. The Cirtas Bluejet product costs $69,995 per appliance. It is available from a variety of industry resellers. The company said it is making free evaluation systems available to customers.
The company was founded in 2008 by Decasper and Allen Samuels. Its team includes veterans of Citrix, DataDomain, NetApp and Riverbed. Cirtas has 30 employees. Rivals include storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp, Twinstrata, Nasuni, StorSimple and Panzura.
[Pictured at top: Decasper (left) and Josh Goldstein, marketing chief]
Next Story: HP launches fancy touch-based desktops and an app store for touch apps Previous Story: Google beefs up Apps security to win cloud customers
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