Teradata, once famous for massaging huge classical databases so Wal-Mart, say, could stock just so many navy blue whatevers, has teamed up with Hortonworks, the months-old Yahoo-spun off open source Apache Hadoop supporter, so they can push Hadoop-leveraging Big Data analytics together.

The old-line Big Data house already has an alliance with Cloudera, the first-to-market Hadoop commercializer, and if Teradata customers are absolutely positive they want Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution they can get it from Teradata.

However, Teradata’s new non-exclusive alliance with Hortonworks, which can out-credential its rivals, will give it more of an air of authenticity since a lot of the guys involved in getting Hortonworks off the ground built Hadoop for Yahoo, the code’s originator, and the code that now underpins Facebook, Twitter and eBay.

Anyway, Cloudera’s also in bed with Oracle.

The industry’s newest pair is supposed to do joint R&D, support and marketing and deliver integrated enterprise architectures that tackle all aspects of Big Data processing including a set of reference architectures for data-crunching Hadoop clusters.

Teradata sees volumes of raw data being poured into Hadoop then passed to the Aster Data SQL-MapReduce analytics widgetry Teradata bought last year for refining and moving on to a Teradata Database where normal people, well, relatively normal people can consume it and draw inferences.

Having being collaborating for a while, they already have connectors for Hadoop to Aster and Hadoop to Teradata’s Database as well as back again so Hadoop can store data.

The pair said “businesses will be able to quickly load and refine multi-structured data” – such as weblogs, text and customer interaction data – “some of which is being discarded today, for discovery and analytics.”

Teradata takes the position that Hadoop, over and above being crotchety to set up, deploy and manage, has confused everybody.

Tasso Argyros, co-president of what is now Teradata Aster, blogged that “It is usually not clear what use cases apply to traditional technologies versus new; how to reconcile existing technologies with new investments; and what type of projects will provide the highest ROI versus a long and painful failure. Teradata and Teradata Aster…want to earn the trust to advise our customers on how to use complementary solutions, like Hadoop – and make sure that the total solution works and reliably succeeds in tackling big business problems.”

He says, “Our goal is to NOT let even one enterprise customer fail with a Big Data project. We have enough collective experience to guide customers to avoid failed projects and traps.”

This is where Hortonworks comes in. It’s supposed to explain the role of Hadoop in the data center, and how Hadoop technologies can bring value to the enterprise.

The New York Times observes that the alliance “to the extent that it adds credibility and exposure to both Teradata and Hortonworks it is likely to lead to a thinning out of the number of different players, and squelch the likelihood that different and incompatible types of Hadoop will evolve” since enterprise customers want a stable and open Hadoop.

Hortonworks has previously projected that in five years or less more than half the world’s data will be stored in Apache Hadoop.

By the way, Hortonworks, which has designs on being the Hadoop market leader – and the tie-up with Teradata should broaden its customer footprint – confirmed that its initial CEO Eric Baldeschwieler, the former VP of software engineering for the Hadoop team at Yahoo, has been replaced by COO Rob Bearden, previously COO of both SpringSource and JBoss, two successful (and ultimately acquired) commercial open source companies, who was handling Hortonworks’ business side.

He’s supposed to be good at making open source operations ultimately turn a buck.

Baldeschwieler is now CTO and Baldeschwieler’s hires, VP of engineering Mark Himelstein and VP of customer support Marko Nicosia, are reportedly gone.

According to GigaOm the start-up has collected $50 million in VC backing, a number we couldn’t get it to confirm.

Microsoft has got Hortonworks helping with its Hadoop-relieved SQL Server 2012 and Hadoop on Azure.

A Tel Aviv start-up called Porticor that’s just hit the radar says it’s got a way to secure the cloud, any cloud. Fancy that, a trustworthy cloud.

And Porticor delivers its data encryption solution to IaaS and PaaS users through the cloud in minutes. Fancy that.

It’s supposed to solve the biggest challenge for data encryption in the cloud – storing keys.

It promises that a user’s data encryption key will never be exposed and that it can deliver data security across virtual disks, databases, distributed storage and file systems.

All this wonderfulness, called the Porticor Virtual Private Data (VPD) System, a combination of the start-up’s Virtual Appliance and Virtual Key Management Service, comes complements of its patent-pending homomorphic split-key encryption technology, which is supposed to increase security by an order of magnitude through hosted key management.

It’s supposed to be the industry’s first solution to combine data encryption with patented key management in defense of critical data in public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

Users can supposedly kiss good-bye traditional data security solutions that require costly software licenses and create operational overhead.

Porticor’s widgetry is a cost-effective virtual appliance that requires no encryption or key management experience to encrypt customers’ entire data layer with a proven AES 256-bit encryption algorithm.

The start-up expects the breakthrough to mitigate concerns about adopting the cloud.

VPD may best be compared to a Swiss bank. Entry to a Swiss lockbox needs two keys: one in possession of the bank, the other in possession of the owner.

That’s what Porticor does. It takes a patented split-key approach. Each data object, such as a disk or file, is encrypted with a unique key that’s split in two: a master key and a specific key. The master key is common to all data objects of one application and remains the possession of the application owner and is unknown to Porticor.

The second, “specific” key is different for each data object and is stored by the Porticor Virtual Key Management Service. As the application accesses the data store, Porticor uses both keys to dynamically encrypt and decrypt the data.

When the master key is in the cloud, it is said to be homomorphically encrypted – even when in use – and can never be seen in the cloud.

This mathematical technique lets Porticor do key-splitting and key-joining without knowing the key. It only knows the encrypted form of the keys.

By leaving one encryption with the customer Porticor differs from cloud encryption solutions that put customer encryption keys in the hands of a security vendor or cloud provider.

The widgetry complies with SOX, HIPAA, PCI DDS and GLBA, and reportedly solves the issues raised by the EU Data Protection and the US Patriot Act.

Porticor’s VPD system is available now. No download is required. It is deployed in the cloud and managed from Porticor’s customer portal. Pricing starts at $27.50 a month per Porticor Virtual Appliance for testing and very small production environments. The largest production environments run $411 a month. It comes with or without configuration for those who like to muck around but then setup takes longer.

It supports Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), where Porticor’s virtual appliance would logically go alongside the user’s application servers so the data never leaves the VPC unencrypted. Users can also snapshot their EBS disks, which are also encrypted.

Red Hat is reportedly offering the Porticor widgetry in its Cloud Foundation.

Porticor, which got started in 2010, is backed by $1 million A round from Glilot Capital. CEO Gilad Parann-Nissany said the company is working with Fortune 1000s.

SeaMicro, the ambitious start-up that has been building so-called microservers out of low-power Intel Atom chips, has started building microservers out of low-voltage quad-core Intel Xeon chips using the same architecture its Atom systems use.

The development is called the SeaMicro SM10000-XE. Needless to say, it’s the first fabric-based Xeon microserver ever made.

It’s also supposed to be the most energy-efficient, highest-density, highest-bandwidth Xeon server now available, period.

A single SM10000-XE replaces 32 dual-socket servers, but draws half the power and takes up a third the space without any changes to operating systems, applications or management tools.

It eliminates layers of Ethernet switches, server management devices and expensive load balancers.

Because it’s Xeon-based it can run heavyweight scale out workloads while the Atom-based SM10000-HD is meant for the highly parallel workloads found in the web tier. That means that microservers can capture a bigger piece of the data center. SeaMicro says the microserver will go mainstream running Apache Hadoop, real-time analytics, Java apps, PHP, Memcached and NoSQL.

The widget is built around the Xeon E3-1260L based on Sandy Bridge architecture and Samsung’s new low-power 1.35V Green DDR3 DRAM memory. Since it’s breakthrough, Intel and Samsung were both at its launch Tuesday when SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman announced it was shipping in volume.

Microservers are all about density, space and power. The Xeon E3-1260L has a 45W TDP envelope, providing 30% better performance per watt than processors from Intel’s previous generation, and SeaMicro has invented a new technology called TIO, short for Turn It Off, that lets it power-optimize the parts by turning off unnecessary CPU and chipset functions.

The chip’s four cores run at 2.4GHz CPU core. The clock can be throttled to 3.3GHz with Intel’s Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 and it’ll support eight threads with Intel Hyper-Threading Technology.

The SM10000-XE contains 64 CPUs for 256 2.4GHz cores in a 10U or 1,024 cores in a standard rack. It delivers 10 gigabits of bandwidth to each quad-core processor, which SeaMicro says sets a high watermark for bandwidth per unit compute.

It supports up to 32GB of DRAM per socket for a system total of 2.04TB.

The processors are tied together by SeaMicro’s Freedom Supercompute Fabric, which delivers 12 times the bandwidth per unit compute of a traditional server.

The XE also supports up to 16 10-gigabit Ethernet uplinks or 64 one-gigE uplinks. And unlike other microservers, it can support up to 64 SATA hard disks or solid-state disks without reducing computational density.

SeaMicro’s boards are Spartan in their minimalism consisting of only the processor, Samsung’s DDR3 and SeaMicro’s new Fabric ASIC, reportedly the industry’s first second-generation fabric ASIC, capable of supporting both large cores like the Xeon’s and small cores like the Atom’s.

SeaMicro figures eventually it’ll be able to design systems using Atoms and Xeons together in the same enclosure.

The XE’s austerity derives from SeaMicro’s Input/Output Virtualization Technology which reduces the component count, shrinks the motherboard and reduces power, cost and space.

The Freedom Supercompute Fabric is built of multiple Freedom ASICs working together, creating a 1.28 terabits a-second fabric that ties together 64 of the power-optimized mini-motherboards at low latency.

Samsung’s small high-density 30nm Green DDR3 is supposed to achieve more than a 70% power savings over 1Gb 1.5V 50nm class DDR3, improving SeaMicro’s TCO.

The SM10000-XE lists for $138,000 for a base configuration.

CompSec, which works with the US intelligence community, has adopted the widgetry in mission-critical applications to deliver huge amounts of compute power to remote and hard-to-access locations. It says it “greatly reduces response times, provides faster and more in-depth analysis, and helps to advance their mission.”

Mozilla is also on board. Matthew Zeier, director of IT infrastructure and operations, says that between the Atom boxes and the Xeon boxes “SeaMicro is able to meet the computational needs of our entire data center while driving down operating expenses by saving us power and space. We are a very happy customer.”

Intel has previously acknowledged that microservers could represent 10% of the server market by 2016. Its data center unit general manager Jason Waxman explained Tuesday that that forecast included both Atom and Xeon widgetry. Intel may be somewhat conservative considering the Xeon chip SeaMicro is using costs less than $300.

SeaMicro expects the next Atom generation to move chipset functions into the SoC, which will save more power and give it more real estate for processors.

SeaMicro rival Calxeda is building ARM chips into microservers.