Roundup: Platfora, Opscode

Here's our review of more new from the cloud computing and "big data" sectors:

BookRenter Chooses Opscode to Automate Infrastructure - Cloud infrastructure automation specialist Opscode, Inc., announced last week that BookRenter, the largest and fastest growing textbook platform, is successfully using Hosted Chef to rapidly spin up additional servers and handle application updates and editing without manual interference. BookRenter also will use Hosted Chef to build the capability to launch a mirror site in a separate datacenter in a matter of minutes, a preemptive move in the event of any kind of outage at its primary datacenter. Launching the textbook rental category in 2006, BookRenter’s mission is to make education more affordable and accessible for university and K-12 students and institutions. The company allows students to rent textbooks for up to 80 percent off the retail price by providing them with the best price, highest quality books and most flexible rental experience.

Platfora Raises $5.7 million for Hadoop Analytics - Platfora, a startup focused on generating effortless insights from big data, has raised $5.7 million in Series A funding to expand and accelerate development of its analytics platform for data stored in Hadoop. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and General Partner Scott Weiss is joining the board. In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. intelligence community, also participated in the funding round. “Businesses are increasingly looking to Hadoop, rather than traditional databases, to store their fast-growing datasets,” said Ben Werther, founder and CEO of Platfora. “We transform Hadoop from promising back-end technology into an effortless, interactive and beautiful way for business users to get rapid insight and answers from any sized dataset, even those with petabytes of information.”