#Dell will pay @TRowePriceGroup a reported $25 million to settle claims that the Round Rock, Texas-based IT giant shortchanged investors when it was taken private about three years ago. Thanks to a T. Rowe Price voting foul-up, the settlement is a fraction of the $200 million @Dell may have been on the hook for. The $25 million settlement came down Wednesday, according to a @WallStreetJournal report. Dell declined to comment to CRN about the settlement.
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--@Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced the second generation of its Elevate Technology Alliance Partner Program, delivering new benefits, “ #NutanixReady” technical designs, and marketing and enablement investments to enable further growth of the partner ecosystem supporting #Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.
After nearly two years of construction, #Google along with a consortium of telecom providers announced the completion of the FASTER broadband cable system that links Japan and the United States. The cable system is the fastest of its kind and stretches nearly 9,000 km across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
http://9to5google.com/2016/06/29/faster-cable-system-google/
SAN FRANCISCO — @Google parent company @Alphabet is adding finance chops and diversity to its board with the appointment of economist @RogerFerguson. Ferguson is the first African American to serve on the board of Alphabet and #Google, marking a major milestone in Google's effort to bring more diversity to the technology industry.
Ferguson will serve on #Alphabet 's audit committee. With his appointment, he receives a $1 million equity grant, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
He joins the board as Alphabet under finance chief Ruth Porat brings greater spending discipline to the Internet giant known for its speculative "moonshot" projects such as self-driving cars and research into aging.
When @Google unveiled a new smart device for the home in May, many commentators online asked the same question: Why wasn’t Nest, #Google ’s smart-home company, unveiling it? Fair question. Acquired in 2014 for $3.2 billion, #Nest brought CEO Tony Fadell, a former @Apple exec who had created the #iPod, and a band of #Apple designers and engineers to #Google. At the time, several publications and pundits said that Nest was bringing to Google not just its devices, but Apple’s sensibility and execution — a blueprint to be the internet giant’s de facto consumer hardware arm.
http://www.recode.net/2016/6/29/12054968/nest-google-home-hardware
@Google, @Apple and @Amazon aren’t just giant tech companies. They’re giant tech companies that use their size to “snuff out competition.”
That’s the charge levied by @ElizabethWarren in a speech the Massachusetts senator delivered today in Washington.
http://www.recode.net/2016/6/29/12060804/elizabeth-warren-apple-google-amazon-competition
In May, @Samsung announced what it describes as the world’s highest capacity microSD card. The #Samsung EVO+ 256GB microSD card has enough space to store more than 55,000 photos, 46 hours of HD video or 23,500 MP3 files and songs. It can be used for phones, tablets, video cameras and even drones. It’s set to be available in 50 countries worldwide. The announcement of Samsung’s new card comes at a time when the amount of mobile content that consumers are creating, consuming and storing on their smartphones and mobile devices is increasing at an exponential rate. The Growing number of connected devices with advanced features, including high-resolution cameras, 4K video filming and faster processors, are fuelling a global ‘content explosion’. The content being created today is richer and heavier than ever, placing a growing strain on device storage capacities which could damage the data and impair user experience.
What: Shares of software juggernaut @Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) have slumped 13% year to date as of market close on June 27, according to data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence. A weak quarterly report in April that showcased the bumpiness of #Microsoft 's cloud transition is partially to blame, as is Microsoft's plan to acquire LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD). So what: Microsoft stock entered 2016 at its highest level since the dot-com bubble more than 15 years ago, so the stock is still up substantially over the past few years.
http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/29/why-microsoft-stock-is-down-13-in-2016.aspx
#11 Key Manufacturers Analysis of International Cloud-based VDI Industry: - @Dell, @Citrix Systems, @VMware, @Moka5, @SecureOnlineDesktop, @HP, @RedHat, @EricomSoftware, @Netelligent, @WorldDesk and @VirtualBridge.
“Deepresearchreports .com announcements on Global Cloud-based #VDI Industry 2016 Market Research Report published in June 2016 from its Computer Equipment Section of its online business intelligence database.” Cloud-based VDI Market is a Professional and in-depth market research on the current state of the Global and China Cloud-based VDI. The report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Cloud-based VDI market analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and by major regions development status (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added development status.
https://www.whatech.com/market-research/it/177129-cloud-based-vdi-market-25-company-profiles-and-competitive-landscape-analysis-report
Several years ago, company officials decided to shift from the hub-and-spoke model to a centralized data center and went looking for the technology they'd need to make the move.
The old infrastructure was based on @Dell 's #PowerEdge #VRTX converged offering, with integrated compute, storage, networking and management software configured to serve branch and remote offices. VRTX is a good product, but it couldn't scale the way BluePearl needed, DePasture said.
Among the products IT officials investigated was @CiscoSystems ' Unified Compute System ( #UCS ) Mini converged infrastructure system. However, at about the same time, #Cisco announced #HyperFlex, the networking vendor's addition to the quickly expanding hyperconverged infrastructure market that was announced in March in conjunction with software partner SpringPath.
HyperFlex comprises Cisco's UCS servers and software-defined storage (SDS) technology created with SpringPath, a startup that Cisco has invested in. It also leverages Cisco's Nexus switches to help create an integrated networking fabric and UCS Manager software.
Water transports heat 25 times more efficiently than air, but water and electronics don’t mix – hence the prevalence of air cooling in the data center. It’s controlling water’s cooling capability without destroying servers and shutting down systems that’s bedeviled data center services providers, IT managers and technology vendors for decades.
Now, in a proof-of-concept project six years in the making, #eBay, #Dell and #Intel, say they’ve made major strides in channeling the potential of liquid cooling – enabling greater processing power at a fraction of normal power consumption and within smaller a smaller footprint – that could have implications for the hyperscale and web services market.
eBay, of course, defines “at scale” in ecommerce. The world’s largest online marketplace handles more than 1 billion transactions per day and has nearly 95 million active users globally.
In setting out its data center objectives – packing more power at lower cost – eBay made the decision to commit to water cooling in partnership with Dell and Intel. Key to the project is the anti-leakage provisions engineered into the liquid cooling capabilities of Triton (the messenger of the sea in Greek mythology), Dell’s rack-scale infrastructure for hyperscale implementations, combined with a customized 200W Intel Xeon processor E5 v4, which provides significant performance increases over the highest performing Intel Xeon processor on the market today – and generates a lot of heat. The result: according to Dell, Triton’s ability to sub-cool the processor and operate at higher frequencies means it can deliver for similar costs nearly 60 percent greater performance than Intel’s Xeon E5-2680 v4, according to Dell. Compared with average air-cooled data centers, Triton uses 97 percent less cooling power and has a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.02 to 1.03.
http://www.enterprisetech.com/2016/06/29/ebays-billion-daily-transactions-cooled-water/
A recent decision by the Delaware Court of Chancery has caused the defenders of all things corporate America wants from its courts to complain once again of unfair treatment. While their complaints are misplaced in this particular case, they do raise the question of how Delaware values business entities.
First some background is helpful. In re Appraisal of @Dell, C.A. No. 9522-VCL (Del. Ch. May 31, 2016), decided that the stock of Dell was worth $17.62 per share. The critics of Dell argue that was too much, citing the court's own praise for the process used to set the merger price of $13.65 per share. They also point out the court's valuation is substantially above the #Dell market price for a significant period before the merger. Thus, the critics argue that if a fair process and the market itself valued Dell at no more than $13, how could a court know better?
The Dell decision effectively answers its critics by pointing out that the process was still imperfect and that the market price, standing alone, has never been viewed as the "fair value" required by Delaware law. Moreover, if the court was even close to being right in its valuation, then the proponents of the merger got a multibillion-dollar benefit from the merger price. After all, only a very small portion of Dell stockholders involved in the Dell appraisal proceedings will receive the court's $17.62 per share value. All the other stockholders who were cashed out will get much less, leaving the buyout group as the real winners.
When @Dell first started out in the PC business, it turned the market upside down by selling its products direct to end users rather than through the reseller partner channel.
Although it abandoned this model some years ago, enthusiastically embracing a channel-led route to market, many resellers harbour a persistent feeling that the vendor still prefers a direct model.
@BennieduPlessis, channel account manager, says he runs into the objection about #Dell being perceived as a direct vendor quite often, with accompanying mistrust from reseller partners.
“I have seen Dell grow from a direct organisation to a channel-centric organisation,” he says. “And the direct thing comes up a lot.
“How we tackle that is through deal registration. The reseller registers their deals, and they are locked into the CRM tool.”
There are still some direct customers, he points out, and these will be aligned in the CRM system with a specific team. “Partners can still work with the named accounts, collaborating with the account team.
“I facilitate meetings between partners and account managers, and make sure the direct teams treat our partners correctly.”
Any potential conflict, particularly on enterprise accounts, is dealt with quickly, says Dell SA GM Doug Woolley.
“There are 46 customers that make up Dell’s direct large enterprise customers – and about 50% of them have partner activity in conjunction with Dell,” he says.
http://dell.it-online.co.za/?p=588
@Dell, a longtime @RedHat partner—in fact, the first household name IT vendor to hook up with #RedHat more than 20 years ago—may have made bigger headlines on June 28, Day 1 of the #RedHatSummit in San Francisco, than the host company itself.
#Dell 's Red Hat Cloud Solution, now in its fifth generation and built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, has integrated its latest generation #PowerEdge server platforms with powerful new Intel Xeon E5-2600 V4 processors. That additional computing power is helping Dell to accelerate its initiative to move customers new and old to hybrid cloud systems.
Dell Enterprise is focusing a large portion of its efforts on building hybrid clouds for its users, @JimGanthier, vice president and general manager of Dell Engineered Systems, told eWEEK.
http://mobile.eweek.com/cloud/dell-unveils-new-openstack-extensions-at-red-hat-summit.html
@AtlantisComputing, the software house that produced a #VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) offering and then expanded into general virtual server acceleration and on into #hyper-converged appliances, is scaling its product line back to workspace software and hyper-converged appliances, with consequent job losses.
Its current main product technologies are:
HyperScale – general hyper-converged all-flash appliance for server virtualization, ROBO, VDI and database acceleration.USX – pool and abstract all storage (SAN, NAS, Flash, RAM, DAS, Hybrid Arrays, and Public Cloud) and deliver virtual storage volumes to any application.ILIO – VDI accelerator.
An Atlantis statement says: "To drive long-term profitability in its business, Atlantis will focus its product and go-to-market efforts on offering both software and HCI appliances for the workspace market.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/29/atlantis_retreats_to_core_vdi_software_and_appliance_market/
@CPLANENETWORKS Launches #Red Hat #OpenStack Bundle to Fast-Track Cloud Deployments
Bundle Integrates @RedHat @OpenStack Platform, @Lenovo Servers, @Pica8 Open Switches, #Solarflare I/O Adapters, #CEPH Storage and CPLANE’s OpenStack Networking Platform, with distribution, installation and support by @SYNNEXCorporation.
June 29, 2016 08:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CPLANE NETWORKS, a leading software-defined networking company, today announced that it is once again accelerating the private and hybrid cloud market by offering an OpenStack Bundle to fast-track OpenStack®deployments. The OpenStack Bundle is a fully-integrated cloud solution, including installation support and training, that eliminates the trial and error of building OpenStack clouds. Utilizing industry-leading components, the Bundle allows customers to start quickly with low risk, and easily scale as their cloud demand grows.
Jun 28, 2016 (Marketwired via COMTEX) -- FatPipe Expands Salesforce While Expecting Customer Base to Double
SALT LAKE CITY, UT--(Marketwired - June 28, 2016) - @FatPipe ®, Inc., the pioneer in software-defined networks for wide area connectivity and hybrid WANs, today announced Gartner has positioned FatPipe in @Gartner 's May 2016 Magic Quadrant for #WANOptimization, and recognized #FatPipe as a leader in the #SDWAN market, marking FatPipe's fourth consecutive year in this position.
@JuniperNetworks Inc. is replacing the separate switches and appliances that drive a traditional branch network with all-in-one hardware that does everything through cloud-enabled software.
The #NFX250 Network Services Platform, introduced this week, is a server- router-switch combo that lets companies run software-defined (SD) third-party and customized network services, said Jennifer Blatnik, vice president of cloud, security and enterprise portfolio marketing. Juniper plans to release the SD technology within 30 days.
The NFX250 platform includes Juniper's #ContrailServiceOrchestration software that companies use to deploy virtualized network services and manage their interactions with other components of the branch network. The services run on a Linux-based server.
The platform has software-defined WAN features for monitoring and managing traffic through network links. Running on the platform is Juniper's SRX Series Services Gateways, which includes the vSRX virtual firewall, IP VPN, content filtering and threat management.
@CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE: CTL) announced it has acquired certain strategic assets of the company formerly known as @ActiveBroadbandNetworks, a provider in software-based broadband networking. These assets will help accelerate CenturyLink's efforts to automate its network, move network functions into the cloud and deliver software-defined networking ( #SDN ) and network functions virtualization ( #NFV ) services to its customers.
The company formerly known as Active Broadband Networks, based in Framingham, Mass., uses SDN and NFV technologies to provide broadband edge solutions to service providers, enabling them to deliver a next-generation cloud-based service infrastructure. #CenturyLink 's acquisition of the company's edge platform assets strengthens CenturyLink's ability to virtualize core network functions.
"This acquisition provides us with people and technology resources that will help us continue to develop and implement our platform strategy and integrate SDN and NFV technology into our network," said Aamir Hussain, CenturyLink's executive vice president and chief technology officer. "Moving services into the cloud, particularly at the network edge, is essential as we continue to focus on providing our customers with a wide variety of virtualized network functions that help them more effectively manage their business."
http://www.streetinsider.com/dr/news.php?id=11784177
PORTLAND, Maine, June 29, 2016/PRNewswire/ -- A recent Genpact Research Institute survey shows 81 percent of executives agree that Internet of Things ( #IoT ) adoption will be critical to the future success of their companies, yet only 25 percent have a clear Industrial IoT strategy. @Kepware®Technologies, a software development business focused on industrial connectivity, today announced #Dell as the newest member of its IoT Alliance. The alliance was created to reduce risk and time to market for Industrial IoT hardware and software providers—and help customers fuel their IoT strategies with proven, interoperable IoT solutions.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dell-joins-kepware-iot-alliance-program-300291683.html
ORLANDO, FL--(Marketwired - Jun 29, 2016) - @LightPath Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: LPTH) (" #LightPath ", the "Company" or "we"), a leading vertically integrated global manufacturer, distributorand integrator of proprietary optical and infrared components and high-level assemblies, today announced it has won a $200,000 sub-award from the National Science Foundation for a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research titled "Carbide bonded graphene coating for enhanced glass molding." LightPath is part of the research team led by the primary grantee of Nanomaterial Innovation Limited (NIL), a spin-off from The Ohio State University.
#Graphene has emerged as one of the most intriguing materials for optical applications in recent years due to its natural properties possessing the highest strength and thermal conductivity known to man. Despite these outstanding properties, commercial applications are limited by the difficulty of scaling up graphene fabrication. However, a novel graphene-containing film deposition method developed at The Ohio State University/NIL could help to overcome this challenge and allow graphene to be utilized in a wide variety of applications including precision glass molding.
@EMC recommends – and has customers using – an isolated data center disconnected from the network to keep out threats such asransomware and other types ofcyber attacks. This involves locking down systems used for recovery and limiting exposure to create anair gap between the recovery zone and production systems.
An air gapped device never has an active unsecured connection. #EMC ’s isolated data recovery makes the recovery target inaccessible to the network and restricted from all users who are not cleared to access the it. In most cases, it’s a #DataDomain disk backup system that is off the grid most of the time.
FOSTER CITY, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 29, 2016) -@GridGain Systems, provider of enterprise-grade In-Memory Data Fabric solutions based on #Apache® #Ignite™, today announced the availability of #GridGain Professional Edition 1.6, an in-memory computing platform enabling high-performance transactions that run 1,000x faster than disk-based approaches. The latest version adds native support for Apache® #Cassandra ™, a new ODBC driver, deadlock-free transactions, and the availability of a new hosted web management console. These features enable easy integration with data analytics tools, provide enhanced performance, offer access to a new web-based configuration and management tool for GridGain and Apache Ignite deployments, and add significant database performance improvement for Cassandra users.
With the addition of native support for Apache Cassandra, GridGain extends its native support for accelerating and scaling most popular SQL and NoSQL databases, as well as Apache® #Hadoop ®. Apache Cassandra is optimized to run simple, pre-defined queries on data stored on disk. It does not, however, include an in-memory computing option and does not support transactions. When combined with GridGain, Apache Cassandra users can:
See a 1,000x query speed improvement because data is uploaded from disk into RAMLeverage ANSI SQL-99 compliance to run ad hoc and structured queries with complete ODBC and JDBC supportUse full ACID compliant transactions to read and write data to their Cassandra databaseBenefit from built-in support for Apache® #Spark™, Apache Hadoop, and streaming applications
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @HADOOPSUMMIT -- @Pentaho, a @Hitachi Group Company, today announced “Filling the Data Lake”, a blueprint that helps organizations architect a modern data onboarding process for ingesting big data into #Hadoop data lakes that is flexible, scalable, and repeatable. Data management professionals can now offload the drudgery of the data preparation process and spend more time on higher value-added projects.
According to Ventana Research, big data projects require organizations to spend 46 percent of their time preparing data and 52 percent of their time checking for data quality and consistency. By following Pentaho’s “Filling the Data Lake” blueprint, organizations can manage a changing array of data sources, establish repeatable processes at scale and maintain control and governance along the way. With this capability, developers can easily scale ingestion processes and automate every step of the data pipeline.
“With disparate sources of data numbering in the thousands, hand coding transformations for each source is time consuming and extremely difficult to manage and maintain,” said Chuck Yarbrough, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing at Pentaho, a Hitachi Group Company. “Developers and data analysts need the ability to create one process that can support many different data sources by detecting metadata on the fly and using it to dynamically generate instructions that drive transformation logic in an automated fashion.”
When storage experts were asked, “Which vendor will you spend the most with on storage in 2 years?” the answers were markedly different.
@EMC is still the top storage vendor, but @Amazon jumps from the seventh most strategic vendor to the second. @Microsoft creeps into the top 5 too, landing at number three. @NetApp drops from second to sixth.
“(This data) emphasizes that not only is cloud storage spending growing, but alsothat cloud storage providers are increasingly viewed as strategic suppliers as a growing amount of data and applications are moved into these environments,” says the report’s author, Simon Robinson.A majority of storage is still on premises, but that is shifting too. Respondents said about 70% of their storage currently resides in company owned or leased data centers. That is expected to drop to 58% by next year. Meanwhile, respondents said they have about 7.6% of their storage in the cloud now, growing to almost 17% of their storage in the cloud by 2017.
Though they can be messy at first, tech spinoffs and breakups often end up serving investors well, as the post-breakup companies prove more nimble, agile and focused than the parent companies that preceded them.
Motorola Solutions' ( #MSI ) performance since Motorola's early-2011 breakup is one good example. And there are signs @PayPal (PYPL) is better positioning itself to go after the digital payments opportunities in front of it after splitting from @eBay last year.
#PayPal is a holding in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio. Want to be alerted before Cramer buys or sells PYPL? Learn more now.
Though it's too early to call #HP Enterprise ( @HPE ) a big post-breakup success story, the company does look like it's in better shape than it was when the old HP split last fall. #HPE delivered positive annual sales growth for the first time in five years during its April quarter -- last year's $3 billion purchase of Wi-Fi equipment vendor @ArubaNetworks helped, but so did stronger-than-expected server, storage and organic networking growth.
CHICAGO, June 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- @ServerCentral partners with @Nimble Storage [NYSE: NMBL] to expand its dedicated and shared managed storage offering. All storage options are fully redundant and managed by #ServerCentral, which brings more than 16 years of storage and IT infrastructure experience to customers worldwide.
"We are constantly evolving our storage options based on our customers' requirements. We wanted a strategic partner to help us build a comprehensive offering," said Tom Kiblin, ServerCentral VP of Managed Services. "After evaluating numerous vendors and extensive technology testing, we chose the Nimble Predictive Flash platform for its enterprise-grade features that are cost-effective and scalable as well as its market-leading analytics that provide significant visibility into the entire IT stack."
Research scientists with IBM have discovered a recycling
Research scientists with @IBM have discovered a recycling process to help convert old smartphones and CDs into non-toxic, high-strength plastics.
According to a press statement by #IBM, every year the world generates more than 2.7 million tons of a plastic, known as polycarbonates, to create common household items, such as CDs, baby bottles, eyeglass lenses and smartphones. Over time, polycarbonates decompose and leach BPA, a chemical which potentially damaging effects on the brain.
Now IBM scientsits from the company’s Almaden lab in San Jose, California, have discovered a new, one-step chemical process that converts polycarbonates into plastics safe for water purification, fiber optics and medical equipment.
@Raritan ®, a leading provider of intelligent data center management and rack power distribution, will be showing at the @Cisco Live conference its solution portfolio for high-performance data centers, such as those built on #Cisco's Unified Computing System ( #UCS ) blade servers, Cisco #Nexus switches, and other components of the Cisco data center platform.
"Data center managers are looking for simple and reliable solutions to power their equipment and configure and manage their infrastructure from anywhere," says David Wood, Director-Power Business at Raritan. "Our intelligent rack power distribution units(iPDUs) not only power equipment in cabinets reliably and efficiently, but they also tell us how healthy data centers are performing and enable us to make changes remotely. It's all the little things in our PDUs – the easy-to-find color chassis, SecureLock™ power cords, remote power control, and an open API – that add up to make a big difference in flexible configuration, automation and deployment."
Wood will be discussing the Raritan iPDU's open API in his talk--"Introducing Raritan Flex Config and Zero Touch Deployment, the easiest way to leverage your PDU infrastructure" – on Tuesday, July 12, at 5:30 pm in the Cisco Live show floor theater.
Searching #Google using the phrase "speed test" has become a common practice for internet users looking to double check their Mbps rate, typically by surfacing a link for the free web product provided by analytics firm Ookla. To take advantage of the common behavior, @Google appears to be building its own internet speed test function right into search. That way, when someone types "check internet speed" into the search box, Google can do it for them. The feature may be in response to @Netflix 's new Fast.com website, which lets you check your internet speed by just typing in the URL and waiting a moment.
The search engine test was first noticed by Twitter user Pete Meyers, who posted a screenshot of the feature and unearthed a Google Support webpage detailing how it works. The page says Google relies on Measurement Lab to perform the tests. The organization, which was founded in 2009 and studies global internet performance, is composed of academic researchers, industry professionals, and Google employees Vint Cerf and Stephen Stuart. We don't have any images of what Google's speed test actually looks like, as the feature does not appear to be widely available just yet.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/28/12055442/google-search-internet-speed-test-netflix-fast-ookla
When @IBM sold off its System x division to Lenovo Group in the fall of 2014, some big supercomputing centers in the United States and Europe that were long-time customers of @BigBlue had to stop and think about what their future systems would look like and who would supply them. It was not a foregone conclusion that the Xeon-based portion of #IBM ’s #HPC business would just move over to @Lenovo as part of the sale.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Many believed that Lenovo could not hold onto its HPC business, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and #Dell were quick to capitalize on the confusion that @IBM sowed into the market to boost their own HPC divisions. But, as it turns out, the HPC market grew and Lenovo has experience with hyperscalers and a low cost structure – things that IBM did not have – that have allowed the company to stabilize and then grow its HPC business. Even Lenovo seems a bit surprised by how this business has rebounded so quickly after such a tumultuous change.
“We thought back then that there would be concerns that Lenovo would not be able to carry on the HPC mantle that IBM had, and the good news is that it is going much better than we ever were at IBM,” says Scott Tease, executive director of high performance computing at Lenovo. “Not only are we continuing to win the big high profile deals, such as the startup of the Marconi cluster at Cineca in Italy, which is the largest Omni-Path cluster in the world. So we continue to win on those really big ones that IBM used to win. But what is ever better is that we have a lot more success at what we call the run-rate HPC at universities and industry that buy clusters in the $500,000 to $1 million range. We were never as IBM to be cost conscious enough to win these types of deals, but as Lenovo, we are. We still win the big deals, but we have this run rate engine going. We never had that in the past.”
http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/06/28/lenovo-hpc-bounces-back-ibm-spinoff/
SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - June 28, 2016) - The #OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization ( #NFV ), today announced that @Lenovo has joined as a Platinum member to advance open source NFV. The company joins 20 existing Platinum members, including @AT&T, @Brocade, @ChinaMobile, @Cisco, @Dell, @EMC, @Ericsson, @HewlettPackardEnterprise, @Huawei, @IBM, @Intel, @JuniperNetworks, @NEC, @NokiaNetworks, @NTTDOCOMO, @RedHat, @SUSE, @TelecomItalia, @Vodafone, and @ZTE.
#Lenovo is a global Fortune 500 company and one of the leading companies driving innovative consumer, commercial, and data center technology. With a portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services, the business spans PCs (including the legendary Think and multimode YOGA brands), workstations, servers, storage, networking, smart TVs and a family of mobile products such as smartphones, tablets and apps. A longtime supporter of open source and open networking, Lenovo continues to deepen its investment by working with projects such as OpenDaylight, OpenStack and now, OPNFV.
http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/lenovo-joins-opnfv-project-as-platinum-member-2138221.htm
The research team led by David Weiss at Penn State University performed a specific single quantum operation on individual atoms in a P-S-U pattern on three separate planes stacked within a cube-shaped arrangement. The team then used light beams to selectively sweep away all the atoms that were not targeted for that operation. The scientists then made pictures of the results by successively focusing on each of the planes in the cube. The photos, which are the sum of 20 implementations of this process, show bright spots where the atoms are in focus, and fuzzy spots if they are out of focus in an adjacent plane -- as is the case for all the light in the two empty planes. The photos also show both the success of the technique and the comparatively small number of targeting errors.
Abstract:
The era of #quantumcomputers is one step closer as a result of research published in the current issue of the journal Science. The research team has devised and demonstrated a new way to pack a lot more quantum computing power into a much smaller space and with much greater control than ever before. The research advance, using a 3-dimensional array of atoms in quantum states called quantum bits -- or qubits -- was made by David S. Weiss, professor of physics at Penn State University, and three students on his lab team. He said "Our result is one of the many important developments that still are needed on the way to achieving quantum computers that will be useful for doing computations that are impossible to do today, with applications in cryptography for electronic data security and other computing-intensive fields." #nanotechnology
New, better way to build circuits for world's first useful quantum computersUniversity Park, PA | Posted on June 28th, 2016
The new technique uses both laser light and microwaves to precisely control the switching of selected individual qubits from one quantum state to another without altering the states of the other atoms in the cubic array. The new technique demonstrates the potential use of atoms as the building blocks of circuits in future quantum computers.
The scientists invented an innovative way to arrange and precisely control the qubits, which are necessary for doing calculations in a quantum computer. "Our paper demonstrates that this novel approach is a precise, accurate, and efficient way to control large ensembles of qubits for quantum computing," Weiss said.
The paper in Science describes the new technique, which Weiss's team plans to continue developing further. The achievement also is expected to be useful to scientists pursuing other approaches to building a quantum computer, including those based on other atoms, on ions, or on atom-like systems in 1 or 2 dimensions. "If this technique is adopted in those other geometries, they would also get this robustness," Weiss said.
http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=53621
@WesternDigital Corporation’s @SanDisk unit has VAIO-compliant flash caching software and hardware for #vSphere servers.
This announcement represents WDC inheriting a two year #SanDisk - @VMware partnership to make use of SanDisk’s acquired FusionIO PCIe flash hardware and software. There are two products:
FlashSoft 4 software for VMware vSphere 6Flash Virtualization System, a flash-based hardware and software product incorporating FlashSoft v4
FlashSoft is caching software taking advantage of a server’s flash drive. Its version 4 leverages a Western Digital and VMware VAIO co-design partnership for vSphere 6.
FlashSoft v4 is the result, we’re told, of a two year co-operative design project by Western Digital and VMware, with FlashSoft 4 software using VMware vSphere’s APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO), providing, WDC SanDisk claims, “the highest level of usability and performance with vSphere 6.”
Ravi Swaminathan, Data Center Solutions Business Unit VP and GM at Western Digital Corporation, went into hype mode in his canned quote, saying: “These new product innovations resulted from the deep ongoing engagement between our companies and are expected to greatly enhance virtual machine performance. We look forward to expanding possibilities of the new architecture to continue delivering high-value solutions for our customers.”
“New innovations”? Umm, we didn’t know there were any other kind of innovations.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/28/wdc_sandisk_vsphere_speedup/
@Dell is urging channel partners to sign on with @EMC 's Business Partner Program, and promising that deal registration and sales coverage will be seamless from the first day the two IT giants are merged, but partners' expectations are slightly less optimistic.
In a letter to partners Tuesday, @MariusHaas, #Dell chief commercial officer and president of enterprise solutions, said the company is "driving to maintain the partner and customer experience you have come to expect today, and at the onset of day one, provide seamless deal registration and intact sales coverage plans."
"I do not think it will be seamless," said a top executive at one large #Dell and #EMC solution provider, who did not want to be named. "Nothing in life ever is."
@SmithersApex, a company of The @SmithersGroup, pleased to announce that the @NanoXplore, @Graphenea, @Graphene3DLabs, @GrollTex, @Haydale, @RaithAmerica Inc., and more will present at the #GrapheneWorldSummit. Taking place September 19-20, 2016 in San Diego, California, the conference will bring together the scientific, commercial and investment communities in order to forge new partnerships and exchange ideas in pursuit of the successful development and commercialization of #graphene.
WOODCLIFF LAKE, NJ--(Marketwired - Jun 28, 2016) - #CatalogicSoftware, the leading provider of software-defined copy data management (CDM), today announced the release of ECX 2.4, the newest version of its award-winning software platform. This release delivers significant capabilities by adding #Oracle and #SQL application aware integration, support for #EMCUnity storage, native support for #Amazon Web Services ( #AWS ) and deepening integration with popular DevOps tools. ECX 2.4 includes several other significant features that expand the capabilities of the platform for new and existing customers.
As the market's only independent "In-Place" CDM solution, ECX is designed to leverage the snapshot and replication technologies of the existing storage and virtual infrastructure in a customer environment. This in-place CDM approach has significant advantages over alternatives in that it requires no additional infrastructure for the customer to purchase and manage, and leverages the existing production environment rather than requiring the creation of new copies of data. This advantage is especially powerful in database environments where the databases need to remain online and accessible continuously, and there the data volumes make the creation of extra copies untenable.
"Today's release of ECX 2.4 delivers deep integration for both Oracle and SQL, allowing our customers to leverage their existing infrastructure to further expand their ability to eliminate copy sprawl, while dramatically improving their capabilities to deliver fresh copies of key databases to those functions and business units that demand them," commented Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic. "At the same time, we are delivering huge advancements in ECX's capabilities for both Hybrid Cloud and DevOps -- two key modernization initiatives that our customers are pursuing."
@Kentik, the network traffic intelligence company, today announced the release of significant enhancements to #KentikDetect, its big data network analytics solution. New features include multi-dimensional traffic analytics, enabling access to billions of possible analyses operating on trillions of instantly accessible data records, new traffic flow visualizations, and support for network performance metrics.
"Kentik is the first network traffic analytics solution built from the ground up on a big data platform, offered both as a multi-tenant SaaS as well as an on-premises deployment," said Avi Freedman, Kentik CEO. "Our latest enhancements illustrate the power of the Kentik platform to deliver analytics capabilities previously unavailable to anyone but webscale giants. In 15 minutes, customers can get from registration to production use of big data analysis that goes beyond Map/Reduce and streaming analytics-based approaches, with no appliances or software deployment required."
Executives from hyper-convergence startup @Nutanix have apologized for a marketing stunt widely criticized as sexist that took place at a company event last week, with its chief marketing officer vowing to resign in the event of a recurrence. #Nutanix
Last Tuesday evening at the Encore resort in Las Vegas, Nutanix held a poolside party for some 2,500 attendees of its second annual .NEXT customer conference. The party featured bikini-clad female Encore staff members waving light wands and greeting guests while sitting on a small Ferris wheel near the entrance.
The fact that the Ferris wheel was also adorned with the Nutanix .NEXT logo led some to call out the San Jose, Calif.-based startup for a display they deemed offensive and sexist after photos began circulating on Twitter.
Many organizations use @Hadoop to gain competitive advantage, but because of the very nature of distributed systems, there are inherent performance limitations that even the most advanced #Hadoop users will inevitably encounter. @Pepperdata, the world’s experts in the performance of distributed systems at scale, today announced the availability of #HadoopHealthCheck, a complimentary, expert assessment that evaluates and diagnoses Hadoop clusters of 100 nodes or more, and provides full visibility into current cluster conditions. With the Hadoop Health Check program, organizations can easily determine how to improve their current Hadoop operations by solving the innate limitations of distributed systems with automated, policy-based prioritization and active management in their
-@ODPi, a nonprofit organization accelerating the open ecosystem of big data solutions, today announced that the #Apache™ #Hadoop® distributions products from #Altiscale, #ArenaData, #Hortonworks, #IBM, and #Infosys are now ODPi Runtime Compliant. This ensures that their distributions provide big data application vendors a consistent set of base level expectations as defined by ODPi Runtime specification.
"Our members represent all key roles in the big data ecosystem -- Apache Hadoop distros, ISVs, system integrators, solution providers and end users -- and have brought their real-world experience in helping to align enterprise demands with the developer community," said John Mertic, director of program management for ODPi. "Having Altiscale, ArenaData, Hortonworks, IBM, and Infosys declare compliance with the ODPi Runtime Specification is a strong step toward simplifying and standardizing the big data ecosystem to accelerate the delivery of business outcomes."
ODPi's work complements the Apache Software Foundation and helps companies use Apache Hadoop more effectively. The organization's aim is to develop a cross-industry standard that enables developers to easily write applications that sit on top of big data stacks, lowering the costs of interoperability across systems.
Today, at @HadoopSummit in San Jose, CA, #MapR announced its new #SpyGlass initiative, designed to help customers have greater administrator productivity and more sophisticated cluster management. The first installment in this initiative is an operations monitoring solution - in effect a full blown log analytics platform - that stiches together #ElasticSearch, #OpenTSDB, #MapR-DB, #Kibana and #Grafana to provide cluster operations dashboards, on both PC/laptop and mobile form factors (including phone and tablet).
No clustermuck
The dashboards contain information on node infrastructure, #YARN, #MapReduce, storage/CPU utilization as well as data for each of several services running on the cluster. In providing this functionality, the package ends up being MapR's answer to Cloudera Manager andApache Ambari, as much as it is a machine analytics engine for the cluster.
The package, which is slated for release in early August, is customizable, allowing individual components to be swapped out for other visualization products on which the customer may be standardized. Alerting features are coming in the future and while the package is currently focused on log analytics for MapR clusters themselves, my take is that broadening of the platform to a more general log analytics solution is a possibility as well.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/mapr-microsoft-make-announcements-at-hadoop-and-red-hat-summits/
@NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced that ASE has leveraged its existing partnership with the vendor to develop two new cloud management offerings based on NetAppPrivateStorage ( #NPS ) and #NetAppStorageGRID® Webscale solutions. As one of Australia's top-10 most trusted cloud providers, ASE sought to offer customers new ways to manage their data in a public cloud with a simple and straightforward web portal.
Now, with a data centre network spanning the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, ASE supports over 200 companies ranging from small to medium enterprises to some of the world's largest corporate organisations. These corporations include First Wave, EzyPay, AW Edwards, Silver Trak Digital, and several global media companies.
http://m.digitaljournal.com/pr/2988271
@Cokeva, Inc., the premier provider of repair services for the service industry, announced today that @Nimble Storage, the leader in predictive flash storage solutions, has chosen #Cokeva to provide engineering services in support of the company's reverse logistics supply chain. #Nimble
There is an exciting new development in the big data space! #VMware is collaborating with #Cloudera to jointly develop a new Plugin for the @Cloudera Director management environment to deploy and manage Cloudera’s software on to #vSphere.
For those who are not familiar with it, Cloudera Director is an enterprise-grade tool for deploying and managing Cloudera Distribution including #Hadoop (CDH) in cloud environments. The #ClouderaDirector Plugin for vSphere will now extend that capability to vSphere based environments running on premises. Cloudera and VMware are together focused on developing this tool as the main way to deploy CDH instances to the vSphere platform. Here is a picture of the architecture showing the position of the Plugin within the overall Cloudera deployment landscape. Using the Web User Interface to Cloudera Director, you can now provision several CDH clusters and several Cloudera Manager instances onto virtual machines on vSphere. At provisioning time, Cloudera Director calls the vSphere APIs first and then calls Cloudera Manager (CM) to do the actual installation of the CDH software.
NEW DELHI: @BhartiAirtel Tuesday deployed #Cloudera Enterprise to build a 360-degree view of their customers in India, and to leverage customer data to execute multichannel campaigns and influence buyers in a highly competitive market.
US-based Cloudera is a provider of secure data management and analytics platform built on #Apache #Hadoop and open source technologies.
Telecom service providers are one of the the world's biggest aggregators of consumer information and use insights to tailor-made their offerings as per subscribers' behavior.
Operators are using Cloudera Enterprise to securely bring together user, network, device, business and social data to drive customer intimacy, improve network performance and drive new revenue streams, the telco said in a statement.
"As part of our digital journey at Airtel, our main focus is on providing the best customer experience with our new Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics platform, powered by Cloudera," Harmeen Mehta, Group CIO for Bharti Airtel said.
Mehta said that the company is now able to gain an even greater technical edge, empowering marketers with intelligent data and analytics to make better decisions and improve the entire customer lifecycle with customized offerings.
@Dell says its latest enterprise software-defined storage effort with @RedHat will co-exist with software-defined products that will be brought in with the pending acquisition of storage giant @EMC, and will be more flexible than #RedHat solutions offered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. #HPE
@JimGanthier, #Dell vice president of engineered solutions and cloud, told CRN the new Dell DSS 7000 object storage server for Red Hat's Ceph 2 open-source, software-defined storage platform underlines Dell's commitment to offering customers a wide variety of product options, and will be slotted into Dell's product portfolio alongside #EMC's #ScaleIO, #Isilon and #ElasticCloud Storage solutions.
Ganthier also argued that the new Dell-Red Hat Ceph line emphasizes the difference between Dell's "heterogeneous" strategy and HPE's strategy of "just trying to make it work."
The DSS 7000 is a high-capacity object storage server for Ceph environments. It's designed for scale-out cloud data centers, putting 90 3.5-inch drives in one 4U chassis, and delivering up to 720 TB of capacity, according to Dell. Dell is set to acquire data storage giant EMC in a more than $62 billion merger expected to close before the end of October.
What follows in an edited excerpt of CRN's conversation with Ganthier.
For the first time, scientists were able to simulate the beginnings of the universe through a #quantumcomputer.
According to the researchers, this is the first full simulation of a high-energy physics experiment and could shed light on many hidden aspects of the universe, from how quarks bind together into protons and neutrons to how the universe came to be after the Big Bang.
Once or twice a decade, the IT industry reaches an agreement that an emerging technology is the next big thing—and containers are clearly the next big platform for applications. For most enterprises, it's not a matter of "if" containers make it into production, but "when" containers make it into production.
I wrote earlier this spring about Red Hat's unique opportunity to make money by simplifying open source for the enterprise. And, as the #RedHat Summit in San Francisco opens this week, it's clear that simplicity is still what is missing around containers. The container market is still very much the Wild West in terms of emerging open source (#Kubernetes, DC/OS, #Docker SWARM) and commercial platforms (#Azure Container Service, #Amazon #Lambda).
It's also a tough market for buyers to decipher as they place their architecture bets.
As organizations evolve their architectures beyond virtual machines, and look for better ways to embrace the new container form factor, they're also looking for a little simplicity. One startup that hopes to crack the code on open source monetization and simplification of containers in one fell swoop is Diamanti. I spoke with Diamanti vice president of products, Mark Balch, to learn more about the hardware innovation that's happening around containers, the network and storage barriers that have challenged container operations, and the company's latest efforts around Red Hat's OpenShift.
Flash-based storage, which has long been established in the consumer market—think mobile phones and laptops—is now making significant inroads in the enterprise, where it’s quickly becoming preferred over hard-disk drives owing to the improving cost-to-performance ratio. Thus, although hard-disk-drive storage will remain a data center staple thanks to the relatively low costs to store and access cold data, it has become clear that any organization not considering flash storage for active data will be left behind.
In other words, we are now in the age of flash storage.
Where Does Flash-Based Storage Make Sense?
When cost was prohibitive to widespread flash=storage implementation, IT management needed to outline specific, stringent implementation plans to justify the cost. Even then, there was usually a power struggle between teams on where flash storage should be deployed: Should the database team get it? What about the virtualization team? Now that flash storage solutions are so much more affordable, organizations that are exploring how best to use them should look for wherever there is a need for greater performance.
http://www.datacenterjournal.com/flash-storage-future-data-center/
