VMware spinoff Pivotal launches next-gen cloud dev platform

Pivotal, the ambitious big data venture led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz, has finally pulled back the curtain on Pivotal One, a platform for building data-intensive cloud applications. Key elements include Pivotal CF, Pivotal's distribution of the Cloud Foundry PaaS, and Pivotal HD, the company's distribution of Apache Hadoop. Among its selling points: It makes deployment and management of Hadoop -- normally a pain -- a snap. That's one of the ways Pivotal could stack up against the rest of the PaaS competition as interest in Hadoop as a platform continues to quicken. The point of Pivotal One is to allow data services to run with the same elasticity and ease as more conventional cloud-deployed applications on top of Cloud Foundry. The data services can also be scaled out, slimmed down, and upgraded to the latest versions without having to monkey with build scripts or tools like Puppet or Chef.