Dell Australia reports AU$11.49m profit for 2016

#DellAustralia has made its financial results for 2016 available to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), reporting AU$11.49 million in after-tax profit, up AU$1.4 million year on year.

Revenue for the 12 months to January 31, 2017, was AU$268.4 million, up from the 2016 total of AU$245.7 million.

The principal continuing activity of the company was described in the ASIC document as being the facilitator of the "sale of personal computer hardware and peripherals on behalf of a related entity and the rendering of IT consulting services".

http://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-australia-reports-au11-49m-profit-for-2016/

Google and IBM Battle for Quantum Supremacy

Building a #quantumcomputer that can outperform conventional systems on certain types of algorithms looks to be tantalizingly close. As it stands today, #Google and #IBM appear to be the most likely candidates to claim that achievement. Recent proclamations by John Martinis, the lead of Google’s quantum computing research group, suggests the search giant is close to hitting that goal. At a recent meeting of the American Physical Society in March, he laid out a path to building a 49-qubit computer before the end of the year. Martinis believes 49 qubits should be enough to demonstrate quantum supremacy, the term that describes the ability of these systems to run a number of important algorithms, such as Shor’s algorithm, that classical computers are unable to tackle. In Google’s case, the underlying technology is based on superconducting circuitry using aluminum wires. The company has a working nine-qubit system in-house today, and thinks the technology is ready for the next step. In an April 2017 article in MIT Technology Review, Martinis noted: “That process is all working. Now we’re ready to kind of move fast.”

https://www.top500.org/news/google-and-ibm-battle-for-quantum-supremacy/

Deal: Looking for some extra storage? Grab a 128GB Samsung EVO microSD card for $34.99!

If the built-in storage of your phone or tablet is almost full and you have a $microSD expansion slot available, now might be the perfect time to grab the #SamsungEVO 128GB microSD card for $34.99 at Daily Steals! The same item retails for $54.90 at #Amazon and $59.99 at #BestBuy, so this offer will save you a good 20 bucks or about 36%

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Deal-Looking-for-some-extra-storage-Grab-a-128GB-Samsung-EVO-microSD-card-for-34.99_id94540

Silicon-laced diamonds could lead to practical quantum computers

Scientists already believe that #diamonds could be a solid foundation for practical #quantumcomputers. You can use atom-scale defects in diamond to store #quantumbits that hold contradictory data (say, both on and off) in a way that lets you read the data without the risk of changing it. But there's a problem. The most common defect, where nitrogen atoms replace carbon atoms, emits such a broad range of light that it's too inaccurate to be useful. However, a team of researchers may have a way to keep those inaccuracies to a minimum: slip in some silicon, which emits a much narrower range of light. The trick involves whittling down a synthetic diamond until it's just 200 nanometers thick, etching optical cavities into its surface (to increase the brightness of light emissions) and using a special nanoscale implanter to shoot silicon ions into those cavities. You can only inject a limited amount of silicon if you do nothing else, but the team managed to create more silicon-filled defects by blasting the diamond with electron beams (which creates more cavities) and heating the diamond until the holes moved around and bonded with silicon. The more you repeat this process, the more defects you get. The technology isn't ready for prime time. The resulting defects aren't quite in their ideal locations (they're about 50 nanometers off), so they don't emit enough light to maintain the quality researchers would like. This is much better than previous approaches, though, and hints that real, diamond-based quantum computers are within reach.

https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/29/silicon-laced-diamonds-help-quantum-computers/

Ingram Micro provides huge opportunity for resellers to upgrade clients

There could not be a better time to upgrade your clients' technology. Ingram Micro has revealed a golden opportunity for New Zealand resellers, centred around Intel’s new 7th Generation Kaby Lake processors, Windows 10 Pro and some amazing PCs. The remarkable new Intel processors from i3 to i7 offer multiple levels of performance for all applications and budgets, while Windows 10 Pro promises to ‘handle everything you throw at it’ with improved security, productivity and intelligent computing to provide the best computing experience on the planet. The evidence is clear — the new and enhanced features from Intel and Windows deliver incredible experiences that a five year old PC simply cannot handle. There are a host of stunning new attributes like #VirtualReality (VR) that are now possible in conjunction with premium graphics and I/O connectivity, and #IngramMicro affirm the highly anticipated #3DXpoint and #Optane Technology will further boost performance gains, not marginally but in leaps and bounds. With the recent spate of recent cyber attacks around the world like #WannaCry ransomware (among others), security is certainly a hot topic at the moment. #Windows10 Pro boasts a security package that is quite simply unmatched. The team at #Microsoft made innovative investments in security to protect businesses from modern security threats. According to The Total Economic Impact Of Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Study by Forrester Research, June 2016, “By implementing Windows 10 Pro, customers are 58% less likely to encounter ransomware than when running Windows 7. Enhanced cloud infrastructure allows our antimalware researchers to utilise machine learning models to identify and block malware more quickly, improving response time from hours to just minutes.” “15% less IT management in resource time” is also noted in the same Forrester study, while The Ageing PC Effect – Exposing Financial Impact For Small Businesses, published by Techaisle LLC notes the decreased security issue of Windows 10 Pro by 33%. So what does this mean for resellers? Ingram Micro says it is an exceptional opportunity to upgrade clients from yesterday’s technology into the future.

https://channellife.co.nz/story/ingram-micro-provides-huge-opportunity-resellers-upgrade-clients/

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Earnings Face 'Significant Headwinds'

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: #HPE ) reports earnings for the quarter ending April 2017 on Wednesday, May 31, after market close. The analysts expect CEO Meg Whitman to report a dismal quarter, with a YoY decrease in non-GAAP earnings per share (-17%) and a YoY decrease in revenues (-24%). However, the HPE management outlook is much more positive with an EPS YoY average estimate of +2.4%. Management does not provide a revenue projection. The estimated non-GAAP EPS of $0.35 by analysts is a discouraging drop of -17% YoY and lower than the four-quarter earnings per share average through QE January 2017 of $0.49. The HPE management outlook is much more optimistic than the 23 analysts. Hewlett Packard Enterprise management needs to be correct this upcoming quarter to salvage financial performance. Since the restructuring and separation from HP (NYSE:HPQ), beginning with the QE January 2016, non-GAAP earnings per share have been $0.45, $0.61, $0.49, $0.42, $0.41 for the past five quarters, in reverse chronological order. Estimated QE April 2017 earnings per share (non-GAAP): Analyst estimates: $0.35 avg., $0.33 low, $0.38 high, 23 analysts Prior year $0.42 = -17% YoY Prior quarter $0.45 = -22% QoQ HPE management outlook $0.41 to $0.45 = -2% to +7% YoY Non-GAAP and GAAP net earnings and earnings per share have not tracked together for the past five quarters. Non-GAAP earnings per share have averaged $0.48 for the past five quarters, GAAP EPS has averaged $0.40.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4077085-hewlett-packard-enterprise-earnings-face-significant-headwinds

Dell further ties itself to VMware

One of the recurring intrigues surrounding the #DellEMC deal revolves around the fate of #VMware. VMware, the virtualization software tool that powers the cloud by making it possible for multiple operating systems and functions to run on the same virtualized computer, was widely viewed as the crown jewel of Dell's acquisition of EMC last year. While VMware is based in Palo Alto, Calif., it has major operations in Cambridge and Burlington. Questions were asked whether Dell could manage the debt it took on in acquiring EMC. Initial reports set the price at $67 billion, but Dell now says it was just over $58 billion. Either way, a good portion of the funding was borrowed. Selling off VMware – at its current market cap of about $34 billion – would certainly change the math, but so too would losing VMware's future potential contributions. VMware still functions as its own publicly traded company, as it did under EMC, but it is now majority-owned by Dell Technologies. And unlike other parts of Dell's new empire, VMware is growing at 10 percent a year. No cards were shown at the Las Vegas conference. Or were they? From the stage, announcements included integration of #VMware'AirWatch and the #Dell #ClientCommandSuite; a new #DellEMC #VDI holistic desktop virtualization system is powered by #VMwareHorizon; and there's the #VMwareNSX network virtualization and security platform with the #PivotalCloudFoundry platform. Any future buyer of VMware would be deeply involved as a Dell EMC client. And then there were the two deals – one announced just before the event and one just after – involving VMware buying startups, clearly signaling it plans to keep accelerating its growth.

http://m.wbjournal.com/article/20170529/PRINTEDITION/170529955/1002

DNA storage for data, Microsoft is taking the leap

The problem at hand is "current storage technologies can no longer keep pace with exponentially growing amounts of data," therefore, the solution is " #DNAdatastorage ." Last year, #Microsoft said that it has successfully managed to write and recover data totaling to 200MB in synthetic DNA, now it's ready to have a fully functional DNA storage within next few years. Here's all about it.

https://www.newsbytesapp.com/timeline/Science/7423/43557/dna-storage-is-microsoft-s-solution-for-space-crunch/lite?redirect=1

What’s Next for Big Data? Thinking Beyond Hadoop with Elastic Object Storage

In the last decade, some enterprises struggling with growing data volumes and shrinking big data talent pools, saw public cloud as a way to manage both challenges. Creating a data lake in the public cloud — just pouring all the unstructured data into a single massive collection, then using analytics tools to “fish out” the data a business unit needs — initially seemed like a good idea because it was the least path of resistance. However, that solution, as frequently happens, carried the seeds of its own problems. Storing big data in the public cloud makes it expensive for users, because while sending data to the cloud can be expensive, pulling it out is even more costly. If they try to avoid this by expanding their on-premise #Hadoop compute resources by buying more Hadoop data nodes, they incur higher costs by over-provisioning on their compute resources

Companies have discovered the notion of “data gravity.” As the quantity of data grows, there’s more inertia; it’s harder and more expensive to pull out of the cloud, and as it goes through different iterations and transformations it changes. As such, organizations are trying to avoid having to move data after it’s been stored. They want it to be “hot” from an analytics perspective, then “cold” from a storage perspective. Unfortunately traditional Hadoop deployments don’t give them that flexibility.

In addition, having many smaller data “swamps” only compounds the problem. Users end up with “Hadoop sprawl,” buying and managing many different Hadoop clusters specialized to handle different kinds of analytics – again, incurring high costs, with the added complications of the rigidity of the multiple hardwired clusters and frequent duplication of the data.

Thus, we’re seeing increased demand for open software-defined storage (SDS) that helps to decouple compute and storage, and to reduce Hadoop sprawl. Using SDS — such as the open source object  store Red Hat Ceph Storage — on-premise keeps the data stationary and brings analytics to the data. Being able to use analytics tools and frameworks of choice is extremely important to data scientists who want to use the latest toys available to them, while also keeping their skills razor sharp. Public cloud just can’t keep pace with all the innovation happening in the area of analytics frameworks.

Data can be directly ingested into #SDS solutions from many different data sources, or from a single virtualized data source. The analytics tools, whether #Hadoop or non-Hadoop, are onsite. Customers control the determination of which data streams are higher or lower business value; this way, what one department considers high value can flow to its SDS cluster, while a different department, that places greater value on other data, flows it into its cluster.

The advantages to this approach show up in several ways. The total cost of ownership is lower – no hardwired Hadoop clusters, no data in transit to analytics tools because the tools are in situ, and no overcapacity on compute resources. Companies avoid being locked in, dependent on a single vendor. Furthermore, this approach is flexible and scalable, with the ability to easily support web-scale Big Data analytics projects.

Being able to leverage the industry standard S3A interface helps data scientists connect any analytics tools with an object store natively, allowing for better performance and near linear scale of object storage.

Many companies want self-service analytics on-premise, with the same kind of ease-of-use interface provided by public clouds. The combination of open source SDS with the S3A interface addresses this desire while eliminating the need to blindly go fishing for data.

http://insidebigdata.com/2017/05/26/whats-next-big-data-thinking-beyond-hadoop-elastic-object-storage/

Artificial intelligence o

This week #MapR announced a new solution called Quick Start Solution ( #QSS ), focusing on deep learning applications. MapR touts QSS as a distributed deep learning (DL) product and services offering that enables the training of complex deep learning algorithms at scale. Here's the idea: deep learning requires lots of data, and it is complex. If MapR's Converged Data Platform is your data backbone, then QSS gives you what you need to use your data for DL applications. It makes sense, and it is in line with MapR's strategy. #MapR is the first #Hadoop vendor with an offering that is marketed as what we'd call artificial intelligence ( #AI ) on Hadoop. But does AI on Hadoop make sense more broadly? And what are other Hadoop vendors doing there?

http://www.zdnet.com/article/artificial-intelligence-on-hadoop/

Lenovo returns to profit amid lingering weakness in mobile, data-centre businesses

#Lenovo Group plans to step up the transformation at its underperforming mobile and data-centre businesses after the computer giant swung back in the black in the year to March, rebounding from a loss in the same period last year.

“The group will execute its strategy diligently to drive sustainable profitable growth over time,” chairman and chief executive Yang Yuanqing said in a press conference on Thursday after the market closed.

Shares of Lenovo opened at HK$4.87 but quickly surged in the afternoon after the company reported its results for the financial year to March. They rose 3.7 per cent to close at a four-week high of HK$5.05.

The company, which has operations in more than 160 countries, posted a net profit of US$535 million, compared with a US$128 million loss the previous year.

Revenue was down 4 per cent to about US$43 billion due to lingering weakness at its mobile and data-centre businesses.

Its net profit missed the US$604 million consensus estimate from a Bloomberg survey of analysts while revenue was in line with the market estimate of US$43.1 billion.

https://www.biv.com/article/2017/5/lenovo-returns-profit-amid-lingering-weakness-mobi/

Lenovo Resets to Regain Its PC Crown -- WSJ

HONG KONG -- China's #Lenovo Group is shaking up its operations as it seeks to reclaim the title of global leader in personal computers and shore up its smartphone business. For the first time in four years, Lenovo -- a company that gained acclaim a decade ago for turning around storied U.S. personal-computer maker #IBM International Business Machines Corp. -- slipped from the top spot this year to No. 2 in the personal-computer market, behind rival #HP Inc. Lenovo has also fallen to No. 8 in the number of smartphones shipped globally, from No. 3 when it acquired another U.S. brand, #Motorola, in late 2014. Lenovo's Hong Kong-listed stock has fallen nearly 60% since the Motorola acquisition. Behind Lenovo's woes is a maturing personal-computer market where demand is slowing as consumers increasingly use smartphones and other devices for daily activities including checking the internet. Lenovo also faces fresh challenges from rivals such as #Huawei Technologies Co., which has rolled out its own hybrid laptop tablets. In response, the company is restructuring and installing new management in China to better compete against rivals in a market known for fierce cost-cutting in both personal computers and mobile phones.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/26/lenovo-resets-to-regain-its-pc-crown-wsj.html

Long quiet in Nashville, Dell poised to add local jobs following recent merger

Typically a silent giant toiling away near the Nashville International Airport, #Dell Inc.'s local leaders say the company’s future in Middle Tennessee is bright. Though a merger with Massachusetts-based #EMC in September 2016 cut positions across the two companies, Dell is re-investing in Nashville with 150 job openings expected in the coming months, about 60 of which are newly created positions.

http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2017/05/26/exclusive-long-quiet-in-nashville-dell-poised-to.html

Hyper-converged trashes all-flash: Nutanix out-grows Pure Storage

#Nutanix is racing on to the billion dollar revenue mark for next year with a $100m net loss fuelled quarter of growth. Third fiscal 2017 quarter revenues were $191.8m, beating the year-ago’s $114.7m by 67 per cent. That’s faster year-on-year growth than #PureStorage, which yesterday reported a 31 per cent revenue increase to $182.6m. Nutanix made a net loss of $112m, again beating Pure’s net loss of $62.4m, if that’s the right way to describe it. Both companies are burning tens of millions of dollars a quarter in their relentless drive for growth, hoping investor’s keep hold of their shares on the big-win-jam-tomorrow principle. To put this in context, Rubrik says it has become a hundred million dollar run-rate startup and isn’t that great. Nutanix is saying it's making a hundred million dollar-plus loss a quarter and isn’t that great. What a weird world we live in. There might be a concern centred on losses deepening faster than revenue is rising. Here’s a chart showing Nutanix’s quarterly results and net losses so far:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/26/nutanix_results_to_q3_fy2017/

Nexius Software-Focused Subsidiary Targets Cisco and Ericsson

#Nexius wants to use its expertise in network software to take on vendor heavyweights like #Cisco and #Ericsson. The company, which supplies telecommunications network deployment services, is launching a subsidiary called B.Yond to focus on software. B.Yond’s goal is to provide a more flexible, software-based approach to meet network demands.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/nexius-software-focused-b-yond-subsidiary-targets-cisco-and-ericsson/2017/05/

Global Hyper-converged Integrated System Market 2017 - Scale Computing, Pivot3, Maxta Inc, Nimboxx Inc

The #Hyperconverged Integrated System Market 2017 examines the performance of the Hyper-converged Integrated System market, enclosing an in-depth judgment of the Hyper-converged Integrated System market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Hyper-converged Integrated System market in the present as well as the future prospects from various angles in detail. The Global Hyper-converged Integrated System Market 2017 report includes Hyper-converged Integrated System industry volume, market Share, market Trends, Hyper-converged Integrated System Growth aspects, a wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis, manufacturing capacity, Hyper-converged Integrated System Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.

Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Hyper-converged Integrated System Market 2017:

1 #Vmware Inc 2 #Nutanix Inc 3 #Simplivity Corporation 4 #Scale Computing 5 #Pivot3 6 #Maxta Inc 7 #Nimboxx Inc 8 #Cisco Systems, Inc 9 #Gridstore, Inc

Hyper-converged Integrated System Market Analysis: By Product

VMware
KVM
Hyper-V

Hyper-converged Integrated System Market Analysis: By Application

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Server Virtualization
Data Protection
Remote Office/Branch Office
Cloud

At the beginning, the report covers the top Hyper-converged Integrated System manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on topographical regions.

Further, the Hyper-converged Integrated System report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Hyper-converged Integrated System industry, Hyper-converged Integrated System industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Hyper-converged Integrated System Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.

To Buy Complete Report Click Here: market.biz/report/global-hyper-converged-integrated-syste...

The Hyper-converged Integrated System research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Hyper-converged Integrated System market revenue worldwide.

Finally, Hyper-converged Integrated System market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.

http://www.openpr.com/news/552591/Global-Hyper-converged-Integrated-System-Market-2017-Scale-Computing-Pivot3-Maxta-Inc-Nimboxx-Inc.html

Talend becomes the first Big Data integration provider to support Cloudera Altus

#Talend, a global leader in cloud and #bigdata integration software, announced it is working with #Cloudera as the first integration provider to support Cloudera #Altus, a newly released Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that simplifies running large-scale data processing applications in the public cloud. Companies can use combination of Altus and Talend technology to reduce overall data management costs, accelerate, and simplify hybrid, on-premises, and cloud big data projects. Today’s announcement was made in conjunction with Talend’s participation in the 2017 Strata Data Conference, taking place this week at the ExCeL London convention center. “We’re excited about Altus because it allows companies to deploy big data projects dramatically faster with far less operational support,” said Michael Pickett, vice president, Business Development and Partner Ecosystems, Talend. “Talend is extending this value proposition by making it incredibly easy to build and seamlessly deploy intelligent data pipelines onto the Altus platform.” The initial Altus service targets foundational data transformation and processing workloads while minimizing cluster management and operations. Altus provides users with familiar tools packaged in an open, unified, enterprise-grade platform service that delivers common storage, metadata, security, and management across data sets. The service allows enterprises to easily spin up/spin down Cloudera clusters without the steep learning curve often associated with cloud. “Talend’s partnership with us is making it easy for thousands of data sources to be made available on the Altus platform and to simply execute data pipelines against those ingested data sets,” said Tom Pinckney, Head of Business Development, Cloudera. “By integrating with Altus, Talend is ensuring that our joint customers can seamlessly get up and running on the Cloudera platform – speeding their time to value. This is a big win for customers who will now have the ability to quickly and easily build and run elastic data pipelines on the trusted Cloudera distribution that feeds complex BI, data science, and real-time applications.” Using Talend’s simple, intuitive, user interface, developers can build intelligent data pipelines on the Altus platform and leverage all its capabilities for managing and monitoring big data applications in the cloud. Using Talend, Cloudera customers can transparently build big data integration jobs that can run both on-premises and in the cloud. For #AmazonWebServices customers, Cloudera Altus translates into added value, making it easier for organizations to add big data to their existing cloud data management infrastructure.

http://sdtimes.com/talend-becomes-first-big-data-integration-provider-support-cloudera-altus/

Integrating Oracle Database and Apache Hadoop

#Oracle #BigData Connectors is a suite of software that integrates #Apache #Hadoop with Oracle Database. Organizations can use Apache Hadoop for data acquisition and initial processing, then link to enterprise data in Oracle Database for integrated analysis.

https://www.oracle.com/database/big-data-connectors/index.html

Cloudera’s PaaS Targets Big Data Workloads Running in the Cloud

Enterprise cloud company #Cloudera’ s new Platform-as-a-Service ( #PaaS ) aims to make it easier to run big data workloads in the cloud. The product, #Altus, is initially available on #Amazon Web Services ( #AWS ) but will expand to support other public clouds including #Microsoft #Azure, the company said.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/clouderas-paas-targets-big-data-workloads-running-cloud/2017/05/

Pure Storage flash lineup could be billion-dollar baby

Neither goal is assured, but both seem possible following #Pure ’s first-quarter earnings report Wednesday. The vendor reported $183 million, up 31% from last year. It cut losses only slightly to $62 million compared to $64 million a year ago, but execs claim spending decreases in the second half of the year, along with revenue growth, should bring it past break-even for the first time. Pure forecast revenue of $214 million to $222 million this quarter and from $975 million to $1.025 billion for the year. That annual prediction includes a second-half surge in revenue and Pure will have to hit the midpoint of its annual revenue to achieve the $1 billion goal.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/blog/Storage-Soup/Pure-Storage-flash-lineup-could-be-billion-dollar-baby

NetApp pockets Plexistor, nonvolatile memory software

#NetApp CEO George Kurian disclosed the #Plexistor acquisition during the Wednesday night earnings call. NetApp did not include the acquisition in its press release or filing with the SEC, and provided no financial details. Plexistor, which developed software that uses nonvolatile memory as primary storage, fits into NetApp’s strategy of trying to dominate in flash and other emerging storage technologies.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/blog/Storage-Soup/NetApp-pockets-Plexistor-nonvolatile-memory-software

Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage S3 Backup Target for IBM Spectrum Protect 3.x

#DellEMC® #ElasticCloudStorage ( #ECS™) is a #softwaredefined, #cloudscale, #objectstorage platform that combines the cost advantages of commodity infrastructure with the reliability, availability and serviceability of traditional arrays. With ECS, any organization can deliver scalable and simple public cloud services with the reliability and control of a private-cloud infrastructure. ECS provides comprehensive protocol support for unstructured (Object and File) workloads on a single, cloud-scale storage platform. With ECS, you can easily manage your globally distributed storage infrastructure under a single global namespace with anywhere access to content. ECS features a flexible software-defined architecture that is layered to promote limitless scalability. Each layer is completely abstracted and independently scalable with high availability and no single points of failure. Any organization can now realize true cloud-scale economics in their own data centers. #IBM #Spectrum Protect can leverage it's support for the #AWS #S3 API to support using Dell EMC ECS as a backup target.

http://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/gsd/solutiondetails.do?solution=54323&expand=true&lc=en

IT firm gets Scality object storage to boost S3-based offerings

The deployment of #objectstorage has allowed it to make savings of 90% in terms of total cost of ownership, the company said. #BlueChip operates from three datacentres in Uxbridge, Poole and Leeds and has around 400 customers that range from small to medium-sized enterprises. It offers file hosting, managed IT and cloud services based on its #HP, #Cisco and #EMC hardware infrastructure. #Scality

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450419552/IT-firm-gets-Scality-object-storage-too-boost-S3-based-offerings

Nutanix revenue, relationships grow

#Nutanix ’s success selling #hyperconverged software depends largely on how well it both competes with and partners with the large server vendors. Nutanix revenue beat expectations last quarter, after giving a disappointing forecast three months ago. Its revenue of $192 million increased 67% and smashed its guidance of $180 million to $190 million for the quarter. The hyper-convergence vendor still lost $112 million – up from $46.8 million a year ago – despite the increase in sales, but still has $350 million in cash and investments. Nutanix also had a higher forecast than Wall Street expected, guiding for $215 million to $220 million.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/blog/Storage-Soup/Nutanix-revenue-relationships-grow

Pure Surges, NTAP Rising, Debating HP, More iPhone Delay Rumors

#Pure Storage surges 12% as price targets rise on the storage vendor's big quarterly earnings beat, #HP slips even though it had what it calls a "breakthrough quarter," #NetApp gets some newfound respect, and #Apple's iPhone gets some more rumors of production delays

http://www.barrons.com/articles/tech-today-pure-surges-ntap-rising-debating-hp-more-iphone-delay-rumors-1495734427

IBM to Sell Use of Its New 17-Qubit Quantum Computer over the Cloud

#IBM has created a 17- #qubit #quantumcomputer and is making plans to timeshare the machine with other companies via cloud computing. While this is an important step, it isn't quite enough to make quantum computers truly competitive compared to #supercomputers. What will it take to bring quantum computing into the commercial realm—and how long until we get there? Classical computing has been around for many years and has completely transformed the human race. Near instant communication between any two individuals used to be a dream. The idea of large calculations being done faster than you can blink was unimaginable. The concept of free information and education was too much for any University to handle. But it comes as no surprise that, now that these concepts are a reality, we've become dependent on them. This dependence places pressure on the industry to produce more powerful devices with every passing year. This was not an issue in the past since silicon devices were easy to scale down. But, with transistor gates as small as one-atom thick, shrinking may no longer be possible. Silicon, the building block of modern semiconductors, is already being phased out by Intel and future devices using feature sizes of 7nm and smaller will instead be made from materials such as Indium-Gallium-Arsenide (InGaAs).
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/ibm-to-sell-use-of-its-new-17-qubit-quantum-computer-over-the-cloud/

Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3 Achieves Certification as an Enterprise Storage Solution for SAP HANA®

#Huawei today announced that it’s all flash storage #OceanStor #Dorado V3 is now certified by #SAP as an enterprise storage solution for the SAP HANA® platform. OceanStor Dorado V3 with two controllers supports up to 18 SAP #HANA® nodes, and additionally leveraging OceanStor Dorado V3 with SAP HANA supports customers by offering outstanding performance and reliability. Customers can choose OceanStor Dorado V3 for their SAP HANA-based core data processing platforms. Leveraging Huawei's best practices related to SAP® software in industries, OceanStor Dorado V3 can improve the efficiency of a system running SAP software by at least 30%, with the data query time shortened to the microsecond level, expediting online data transactions and real-time analytics. SAP HANA is a real-time database based on in-memory computing, providing a data platform for transactions, business analytics, predictive analytics, planning and business processing. SAP HANA is extensively applied to manufacturing, finance, public service and many other industries. Customers are challenged in terms of surging data volume, increasing performance requirements, as well as storage efficiency. An end-to-end high-performance real-time computing platform can help them meet these challenges. OceanStor Dorado V3 can support two times more SAP HANA nodes than a traditional storage system with the same capacity, enabling SAP HANA nodes to scale up and out more flexibly. OceanStor Dorado V3 is equipped with such value-added features as HyperMetro gateway-free active-active design, remote replication and lossless snapshot. The HyperMetro active-active solution supports business availability. The consistency groups in remote replication support consistency of disaster-recovery data among SAP applications. Lossless snapshot implements rapid construction of an SAP development and test system. The multiple reliability patents of Huawei flash media help extend the service life of flash media by three times. "The certification of our enterprise storage solution for SAP HANA is further proof of Huawei's dedication to providing customers with better data services, with data reliability and processing efficiency placed on top," said Meng Guangbin, President, IT Storage Product Line, Huawei. "SAP is a long-term strategic partner of Huawei. We hope to further our partnership with SAP and continue offering customers access to a new, innovative data-service experience." The certification signified a milestone in the cooperation between Huawei and SAP. Taking advantage of SAP's extensive and professional experience regarding platform and enterprise solutions as well as market insight, Huawei intends to work together with SAP to develop a series of solutions based on SAP HANA. These solutions will be designed to provide real-time data processing and insight capabilities, targeted at enhancing operational efficiency and accelerating digital transformation.
http://www.huawei.com/en/news/2017/5/OceanStor-DoradoV3-SAP-HANA

Intel Dominates Global Enterprise-Grade SSD Shipments in Q1

Global shipments of enterprise-grade SSDs for the first quarter of 2017 grew against seasonal headwinds by 3-4% compared with the prior quarter to reach around 6 million units, says DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce. For the same quarter, enterprise-grade SSDs also represented more than 10% of the total #SSD product shipments worldwide. Currently, U.S.-based #Google, #Facebook and #Microsoft and China’s #Baidu, #Alibaba and #Tencent all have voracious appetite for server systems as they are providing their services via their growing network of data centers. These companies therefore are contributing substantially to the global demand for enterprise-grade SSDs. “Compared with other end applications for #NANDFlash, enterprise-grade SSDs have exhibited strong and dramatic demand growth and will continue to do so this second quarter,” said Alan Chen, senior research manager of DRAMeXchange. #Samsung with its #3DNAND SSDs is quickly catching up to Intel in shipment market share Looking at the competition among first-tier SSD makers, Samsung has quickly captured a significant chunk of the enterprise-grade market with its competitively priced and high performing 3D-NAND SSDs. Samsung’s global market share for enterprise-grade SSDs came to 25% in this first quarter, making the company the second largest supplier worldwide and a major rival to the leader Intel. #Intel, while being the leader enterprise storage solutions, has been feeling the pressure from Samsung. Before the first quarter of 2017, Intel had fallen behind in its development of 3D-NAND SSDs. The company had to offer products that were not as cost competitive as Samsung’s because they were based on older memory manufacturing technologies. To attract customers, Intel not only lowered prices but also emphasized that its SSDs complement its server processors. After persevering into the first quarter of this year, Intel was able to ship its 3D-NAND products in greater volumes. The company’s global market share in enterprise-grade SSD segment therefore returned to above 40% for the first quarter. Third-place Western Digital controls over 20% of the enterprise-grade SSD market owing to its acquisition of SanDisk Western Digital’s shipments of enterprise-grade SSDs has been on the rise since the SanDisk acquisition, and the company became the third-largest supplier worldwide in the first quarter of 2017 with a market share of more than 20%. SanDisk’s product lines have benefited considerably from its parent company’s expertise in enterprise storage as well as the larger client base. At the same time, Western Digital also integrated into its portfolio some specialty products that SanDisk has worked on in the past several years. Following Intel, Samsung and Western Digital are smaller SSD suppliers with respective shipment market shares of less than 5%. Factors that put these smaller competitors behind include the quality of their NAND Flash chips, lack of know-how in developing SSD controller chips and inexperience with the client sampling process. However, Chen pointed out that the competition in the enterprise SSD market is just heating up, and the top three suppliers will face significant challenge in maintaining their dominance. The fast maturation of 3D-NAND manufacturing goes together with SSD suppliers’ consensus that they need to tap into the demand in the enterprise market. Therefore, smaller brands and later market entrants are highly motivated to catch up and put pressure on the leaders. From the aspect of memory architectures and product offerings, Intel during this year’s first half will be shipping mostly enterprise-grade SSDs using 3D-NAND MLC chips. As for the more cost-competitive enterprise products using 3D-NAND TLC chips, Intel will formally release them at the beginning of this third quarter. Samsung, which has been edging close to Intel in the market share ranking, already has more than 80% of its enterprise-grade SSD shipments comprised of products using 3D-NAND TLC chips. With regard to other SSD suppliers, only Micron has started to ship enterprise-grade 3D-NAND SSDs. The rest of the competitors are expected to still mainly offer 2D-NAND products for this year. In terms of the overall market share, DRAMeXchange projects that 3D-NAND products will account for over 50% of the enterprise-grade SSDs shipped worldwide this year.
http://ein.iconnect007.com/index.php/article/104463/intel-took-first-place-in-enterprise-grade-ssd-shipments-worldwide-for-q1/104466/?skin=ein

DDN Delivers Production-Level Performance for Machine Learning at Scale

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 25, 2017 — #DataDirectNetworks ( #DDN ) today announced that large commercial #machinelearning programs in manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, medical research and natural-language processing are overcoming production scaling challenges with DDN’s large-scale, high-performance storage solutions. Machine learning projects often stumble in the transition from proof of concept to production scale, which can introduce significant production delays in rapidly developing markets where time is of the essence. For machine learning applications at scale, DDN delivers up to 40X faster performance than competitive Enterprise scale out NAS and up to 6X faster performance than Enterprise SAN solutions, while providing faster results against more types of data using a wide variety of techniques. It also allows machine learning and deep learning programs to start small for proof of concept and scale to production-level performance and petabytes per rack with no additional architecting required. “The high performance and flexible sizing of DDN systems make them ideal for large-scale machine learning architectures,” said Joel Zysman, director of advanced computing at the Center for Computational Science at the University of Miami. “With DDN, we can manage all our different applications from one centrally located storage array, which gives us both the speed we need and the ability to share information effectively. Plus, for our industrial partnership projects that each rely on massive amounts of instrument data in areas like smart cities and autonomous vehicles, DDN enables us to do mass transactions on a scale never before deemed possible. These levels of speed and capacity are capabilities that other providers simply can’t match.” With storage appliances that can start at a few hundred terabytes and grow to ~10 PB in a single rack, DDN’s machine learning customers can scale from test bed to production ramp and beyond in a single platform. DDN solutions are enabling customers to leverage machine learning applications to speed results and improve competitiveness, profitability, customer service, business intelligence and research effectiveness, including: Smart cities planning for tourism via a city government and academic research cooperation; Fraud detection for wire transfers and credit card transactions at a large U.S. bank; Digital assistant/natural-language processing at a Fortune 100 SaaS provider; Route optimization, pricing and informed consumer metrics for autonomous vehicles; and Near real-time affinity marketing and fraud detection for online payments. DDN storage allows machine learning algorithms to run faster and to include more data than any other system in the market, which enables researchers to accelerate algorithm testing, decrease development/refinement times and ultimately decrease time to market for the “learned” results – a significant advantage in today’s competitive markets. “The uniqueness of DDN’s architecture enables The University of Miami to save data being generated constantly from literally millions of sensors to address the entire storage needs for a smart city with up to 15,000 residents,” Zysman added. “Equally impressive, we can do all that without impacting our other research, computations and simulations that are going on at the same time.” As huge amounts of processing power and large data repositories have become more affordable, a rich environment for the advancement of machine learning and deep learning has emerged. Machine learning applications are being created and implemented across a wide range of processes, replacing or improving human input, and addressing problems that previously were not undertaken because of the sheer volume of the data. “To be successful, machine learning programs need to think big from the start,” said Laura Shepard, senior director of product marketing at DDN. “Prototypes of programs that start by using mid-range enterprise storage or by adding drives to servers often find that these approaches are not sustainable when they need to ramp to production. With DDN, customers can transition easily with a single high-performance platform that scales massively. Because of this, DDN is experiencing tremendous demand from both research and enterprise organizations looking for high-performance storage solutions to support machine learning applications.”

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/ddn-delivers-production-level-performance-machine-learning-scale/

HPE, Microsoft Azure Offer Cohesity Secondary Storage

Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( #HPE) customers now have new purchasing option for their secondary storage workloads powered by #Cohesity's platform. Meanwhile, businesses wishing to scale those workloads to the cloud have a new option courtesy of #Microsoft 's cloud. The enterprise secondary data storage startup today announced it had inked a deal with HPE to offer its storage management software bundled into a single #hyperconverged offering. It includes HPE Proliant servers and network switches and Cohesity's software, enabling businesses to consolidate their non-business critical storage workloads. Regarding the HPE partnership, Patrick Rogers, vice president of Product Management at Cohesity, said his company's technology "brings the benefits of secondary storage consolidation and simplification to HPE enterprise accounts. Today, enterprise data centers are forced to use purpose-built products for backup, file services, test/dev [and] analytics workloads."

http://mobile.datamation.com/cloud-computing/hpe-microsoft-azure-offer-cohesity-secondary-storage.html

Cisco Canada makes major presidential switch

A double whammy at #Cisco Canada! First, Bernadette Wightman, the Canadian president, is departing Cisco Canada. According to sources, her contract was completed and she is now looking for another opportunity. CDN has also learned that high profile #Dell executive Rola Dagher is the new president of Cisco Canada. Her start date has yet to be announced, but it could coincide with the start of the Cisco Canada’s fiscal year. Dagher, has more than 25-years of experience in both the vendor and channel community. She was the Vice President & GM, #DellEMC Infrastructure Solutions Group. This was a unique role for Dagher as she had U.S.-market responsibilities but also dot lined into Dell EMC Canada president Kevin Peesker. Wightman plans to work with Dagher in a transitional phase and then plans to return to her home in the U.K. Dagher’s departure is a big blow to Dell EMC and a major win for Cisco Canada. Dagher has been at Dell since 2012 and has been promoted three times during that stint. She recently got promoted to her current role from leading the Enterprise Solutions area for Dell Canada. The well respected and highly likable Dagher has some solid channel experience with CompuCom Canada for a year and with Bell Canada for 15 years. Scott Harper, vice-president of strategy & alliances at Softchoice, has known and worked with Dagher for several years and applauded the hire. “We were excited to hear the news this morning for Rola, for Cisco Canada, and for the channel. Rola has proven to be instrumental in personally building partner relationships during her time at Dell-EMC, and we couldn’t be happier to have someone so intimate with the channel and Canadian market to be in this position,” Harper said.

http://www.computerdealernews.com/news/cisco-canada-makes-major-presidential-switch/54632

Cohesity Joins Hewlett Packard Enterprise Complete Program to Deliver Hyperconverged Secondary Storage Solutions to Enterprise Customers

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - May 25, 2017) - #Cohesity, the pioneer of #hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced a pre-configured, certified scale-out storage solution that spans both on-premises and public cloud infrastructures. With this innovative solution, more customers will realize the efficiency and value of secondary storage consolidation. #HPE will resell Cohesity's software combined with its own enterprise-class servers and network switches starting immediately through the worldwide HPE Complete program, following a pilot program that began last December
http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/cohesity-joins-hewlett-packard-enterprise-complete-program-deliver-hyperconverged-secondary-2218441.htm

Microsoft Is Said to Be Eyeing Another Cybersecurity Buy

#Microsoft has agreed to acquire cyber security firm #Hexadite for $100 million, Israeli financial news website Calcalist reported on Wednesday. Hexadite, headquartered in Boston with its research and development center in Israel, provides technology to automate responses to cyber attacks that it says increases productivity and reduces costs for businesses. Microsoft officials declined to comment. Officials at Hexadite could not immediately be reach for comment. Investors in Hexadite include #HewlettPackardVentures, and venture capital firms TenEleven and YL Ventures.Microsoft said in January it plans to continue to invest more than $1 billion annually on cyber security research and development in the coming years. Israel has already benefited from that investment.
http://fortune.com/2017/05/24/microsoft-cybersecurity-hexadite/

China's Lenovo returns to profit as supply shortages extend to batteries

China's #Lenovo Group Ltd (0992.HK), the world's largest personal computer (PC) maker, reported a return to profit on Thursday but said rising component prices could pressure its bottom line this year as supply shortages extend to batteries. Profit reached $535 million in the year to March on revenue that fell 4 percent, just missing analyst estimates. The news sent Lenovo shares up as much as 6 percent in Hong Kong trade. The result comes as Lenovo navigates a PC market that has shrunk markedly since the advent of tablet computers. According to researcher Gartner, global PC shipments fell for the 10th consecutive quarter in January-March, dipping below 63 million units for the first time since 2007. Lenovo's annual shipments fell 1 percent versus a market decline of 3 percent, with its share rising 0.4 percentage point to a record 21.4 percent. Revenue in its PC and smart devices unit - which makes up 70 percent of the total - fell 2 percent. The company blamed the declines on transition in its smartphone and data center businesses, as well as on a difficult macro environment and component supply constraints.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN18L0DT

3 Reasons Apple Should Not Pay $90 Billion For Adobe Systems

#Apple has $250 billion in cash. Does that mean it should acquire #Adobe Systems? As an Adobe shareholder, I think that is a terrible idea. (I have no financial interest in Apple securities). To be sure, Apple has a growth problem. Its 2016 revenues fell about 8% from the year before -- a far worse performance than Adobe's 23% 2016 revenue growth. And it has never in the past used acquisitions as a way to solve such problems. Instead, Apple has innovated -- taking a chunk of the MP3 player market with its iPod, the smart phone market with the iPhone, and the tablet business with the iPad.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2017/05/24/3-reasons-apple-should-not-pay-90-billion-for-adobe-systems/?c=0&s=StockWatch

Salesforce Chairman & CEO Marc Benioff and Dell Technologies Chairman & CEO Michael Dell on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” Today

Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC EXCLUSIVE interview with #Salesforce Chairman & CEO @MarcBenioff and #DellTechnologies Chairman & CEO @MichaelDell on CNBC's "Closing Bell" today. Following is a link to the interview on CNBC.com:http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000621513. All references must be sourced to CNBC. KELLY EVANS: WELCOME BACK. JUST MINUTES AGO SALESFORCE ANNOUNCED A STRATEGIC AGREEMENT WITH DELL TECHNOLOGIES WHERE DELL WILL EXPAND THE USE OF SALESFORCE'S CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT OR CRM PLATFORM. IN A CNBC EXCLUSIVE WE ARE NOW JOINED BY SALESFORCE CEO MARC BENIOFF AND DELL TECHNOLOGIES CEO MICHAEL DELL. WELCOME TO BOTH OF YOU. THIS IS A VERY CROSS COUNTRY TYPE OF INTERVIEW HAPPENING HERE. IT IS WONDERFUL AND WE'LL MAKE SURE WE CAN KIND OF KEEP THINGS MOVING AROUND. BUT, MARC, LET ME JUST ASK YOU FIRST WHAT IS SO KEY TO YOU ABOUT THIS AGREEMENT? MARC BENIOFF: WELL, I THINK, YOU KNOW, EVERY COMPANY IS GOING THROUGH A DRAMATIC DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TODAY, BUT I DON'T THINK ANY IS GOING THROUGH A BIGGER TRANSFORMATION THAN DELL. LOOK, THERE'S NO CEO WHO HAS DONE A BETTER JOB OF THAT THAN MICHAEL DELL. HE TOOK HIS COMPANY PRIVATE. NOW HE HAS ACQUIRED EMC. HE HAS CREATED THIS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGY COMPANY AND THAT'S WHY I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SALESFORCE AND DELL. EVANS: MR. DELL, WHAT WILL THIS ALLOW YOUR CLIENTS TO DO OR YOUR CUSTOMERS TO DO NOW THEY COULDN'T PREVIOUSLY? MICHAEL DELL: SO, ACROSS DELL TECHNOLOGIES WE HAVE ALMOST 40,000 SALES PEOPLE AND ABOUT 200,000 CHANNEL PARTNERS, AND WE'RE ENABLING ALL OF THEM WITH THE SALESFORCE TOOLS AS WE HAVE REALLY FOR OVER A DECADE, AND NOW WITH THE COMBINATION OF DELL AND EMC AND VMWARE AND PIVOTAL AND VIRTUSTREAM AND RSA AND SECUREWORKS AND BOOMI, WE CREATED THIS NEW COMPANY, DELL TECHNOLOGIES AND SALESFORCE IS A FANTASTIC PARTNER. EVANS: MICHAEL, IS IT FAIR TO SAY THAT YOUR ETHOS, THAT THE COMPANY'S ETHOS AT THIS POINT IS VERY MUCH A BET ON THE PRIVATE CLOUD IN CONTRAST TO THE PUBLIC CLOUD SERVICES THAT AMAZON AND GOOGLE OFFER? DELL: WELL, YOU KNOW, MARC IS BUILDING A CLOUD, YOU KNOW, LARGELY POWERED BY DELL TECHNOLOGIES. WHAT WE SEE IS THE CLOUD IS ACTUALLY NOT A PLACE, BUT RATHER A WAY OF DOING I.T. SO YOU'RE SEEING THIS MULTI-CLOUD WORLD EMERGE WHERE THERE'S CERTAINLY A PUBLIC CLOUD, THERE'S SOFTWARES AND SERVICE, THERE'S MANAGED SERVICE, THERE'S HYBRID CLOUD, ON PREMISE. THERE'S NO QUESTION WE ARE THE LEADER IN INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS. SO, YOU KNOW, WE'RE SELLING MORE SERVERS AND MORE STORAGE AND MORE SOFTWARE DEFINED DATA CENTER, MORE VIRTUALIZATION, YOU KNOW, THAN ANYONE ON THE PLANET. THIS CLOUD AS AN OPERATING MODEL IS BEING DEPLOYED BROADLY. MARC IS DOING IT, THE PUBLIC CLOUDS ARE DOING IT, AND NOW YOU'RE SEEING THE SOFTWARE DEFINED DATA CENTER COME INTO LARGE COMPANIES AND EVEN SMALL COMPANIES. WE HAVE A PRODUCT THAT'S $25,000, THAT STARTS AT ZERO MONEY DOWN, THAT WE CHARGE MONTHLY FOR. IT IS A CLOUD IN A BOX. SO, AGAIN, WE THINK OF CLOUDS NOT AS A PLACE BUT AS A WAY OF DOING I.T. ONE THAT MARC VERY MUCH PIONEERED. EVANS: MICHAEL, ALL THE SAME, I DO RECALL YOU TOLD OUR JON FORTT NOT LONG AGO YOU THINK THE PUBLIC CLOUD IN SOME WAYS IS TOO EXPENSIVE. I THINK YOU ACTUALLY SAID YOU COULD SAVE SNAPCHAT SOME MONEY, AND I'M SURE THEY ARE NOT THE ONLY ONES. IS THAT THE CASE? BECAUSE WE ALL KIND OF THINK OF THESE CLOUD SERVICES AS SUCH A CHEAP INCREDIBLE OPPORTUNITY? BUT ARE COMPANIES FINDING THEY CAN DO IT CHEAPER IN-HOUSE? DELL: WE ARE SEEING A BOOMERANG AND REPATRIATION EFFECT AS COMPANIES RUN TO THE CLOUD WHAT THEY REALIZE IN THE PUBLIC CLOUD IS THAT NOT ALL WORK LOADS ARE APPROPRIATE. I'M CERTAINLY NOT SAYING THERE IS A ROLL FOR THE PUBLIC CLOUD, THERE IS, BUT IT'S A MULTI-CLOUD WORLD. YOU WILL HAVE SOFTWARES AS SERVICE. WHEN YOU MODERNIZE AND AUTOMATE THE ON PREMISE INFRASTRUCTURE, AND PARTICULARLY WITH A SOFTWARE DEFINED DATA CENTER, USING THE LATEST TOOLS THAT WE HAVE, WE'VE HAD MANY CUSTOMERS TELL US THAT THAT INFRASTRUCTURE IS LESS THAN HALF THE PRICE OF A PUBLIC CLOUD FOR THE PREDICTABLE PART OF THE WORK LOAD, WHICH FOR MANY CUSTOMERS IS 85-TO-90%. MARC, HIMSELF, AS HE WENT TO GO BUILD OUT HIS CLOUD, HE FOUND THAT WAS LESS EXPENSIVE TO BUY EQUIPMENT FROM US THAN TO PUT IT ALL IN THE PUBLIC CLOUD. AND MANY CUSTOMERS ARE FINDING THE SAME THING. EVANS: MARC, I WAS JUST GOING TO ASK YOU ABOUT THAT. JUST A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO YOU SAID THAT YOU WERE PUTTING DELL INSIDE A LOT OF YOUR OFFERINGS. WHY IS THIS A FURTHER STEP? SO TALK – YOU CALL THIS AN AGREEMENT, BUT I DON'T KNOW. YOU ARE WORKING TOGETHER A LOT, MARC. IS THERE MAYBE SOMETHING MORE? IS THIS A BUDDING ROMANCE HERE? A BROMANCE? BENIOFF: WELL, YEAH, MICHAEL AND I DEFINITELY LOVE EACH OTHER. BUT I'LL TELL YOU SOMETHING THAT WHAT MICHAEL SAID IS 100% RIGHT, WHICH IS THAT WHEN YOU ARE RUNNING A COMPANY LIKE SALESFORCE, YOU NEED A LOT OF RELATIONSHIPS TO BUILD A GREAT COMPANY. AND DELL HAS BEEN A CRITICAL, CRITICAL RELATIONSHIP FOR US TO BUILD OUR OWN INFRASTRUCTURE. OF COURSE, WE HAVE A PHENOMENAL RELATIONSHIP WITH AMAZON, WITH AWS. WE HAVE A PHENOMENAL RELATIONSHIP WITH IBM USING SOME OF THEIR CLOUD SERVICES AND WATSON. THAT HAS BEEN AN AI RELATIONSHIP, AN AI ALLIANCE WITH US THAT'S BEEN REALLY IMPORTANT. WHEN YOU LOOK AT SOMEBODY LIKE DELL, WHAT'S POWERFUL HERE FOR US IN THE UNITED STATES, WE RUN OUR OWN DATA CENTERS, WE NEED THIS INCREDIBLE CAPABILITY THAT MICHAEL OFFERS. NOT JUST IN COMPUTING, BUT ALSO IN STORAGE AND SO MANY OTHER KEY AREAS, NETWORKING, ON AND ON. IT'S ALL MADE POSSIBLE BY THIS INCREDIBLE COMPANY THAT HE HAS PUT TOGETHER AND THIS IS TRANSFORMATIONAL FOR OUR INDUSTRY. AND THAT IS WHY I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT DELL AND THAT'S WHY I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT DELL AND SALESFORCE COMING TOGETHER TO CREATE A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, NOT JUST FOR DELL BUT ALSO FOR ALL OF OUR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF CUSTOMERS. EVANS: MARC, THE INTERESTING THING RIGHT NOW, AND AS MICHAEL HAD PUT IT, SORT OF MOVING INTO A MULTI-CLOUD WORLD, THERE ARE A LOT OF CUSTOMERS WHO JUST WANT A LOT OF THESE DIFFERENT OPTIONS TO PICK FROM. AT THE SAME TIME, AND I FOUND IT KIND OF HILARIOUS THAT CLOUD COMPUTING WON THE PREAKNESS ON SATURDAY, IT DOES FEEL LIKE WE'RE AT THE TOP OF A BIT OF A HYPE CYCLE WHEN IT COMES TO ALL OF THESE OFFERINGS. SO, WHAT SETS THIS – YOU CALLED IT A TRANSFORMATIONAL DEAL – WHAT SETS THIS AGREEMENT APART FROM THE OFFERINGS ALREADY IN PLACE ACROSS THIS INDUSTRY? BENIOFF: WELL, YOU KNOW, SALESFORCE JUST TURNED 18. AND YOU KNOW THAT THIS YEAR WE'RE PASSING $10.3 BILLION IN REVENUE. WE JUST REPORTED OUR RESULTS LAST QUARTER, GROWING 25% FOR THE QUARTER. AT THIS GROWTH RATE, NO SOFTWARE COMPANY HAS EVER GROWN FASTER. AND WHAT MADE THAT POSSIBLE IS CLOUD COMPUTING. NOT THE HORSE. BUT THE IDEA THAT COMPANIES DON'T HAVE TO BUY THE SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE AND CAPABILITIES TO GET GOING QUICKLY. THE REALITY IS MICHAEL HAS A PHENOMENAL OPPORTUNITY INFRONT OF HIM TO HELP SO MANY COMPANIES, NOT JUST OURS, BUT SO MANY COMPANIES BE SUCCESSFUL. BUT THAT MEANS HIS SALES, HIS SERVICE, HIS MARKETING NEEDS TO BE DEPLOYED RIGHT NOW AND HE NEEDS TO CREATE CUSTOMER SUCCESS RIGHT NOW. WE ARE GOING TO HELP HIM DO THAT. EVANS: UNDERSTOOD. THIS WASN'T EASY TO PULL OFF THIS KIND OF – YOU KNOW, WE HAVE CALIFORNIA, WE HAVE TEXAS, WE HAVE NEW YORK. GENTLEMEN, THANK YOU ALL FOR JOINING US TODAY. MARC BENIOFF AND MICHAEL BELL.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/24/cnbc-exclusive-salesforce-chairman-ceo-marc-benioff-and-dell-technologies-chairman-ceo-michael-dell-on-cnbcs-closing-bell-today.html

Pushing Intel Optane Potential: RAID Performance Explored

#Intel 's #Optane Memory is finally shipping, but many can't get past the idea of cache in a high-performance computer, or the steep system requirements. Optane Memory delivers SSD-like performance when you pair it with a hard disk drive, and for some tasks, it offers better performance than a low-cost SSD. Still, some users just want the fastest possible storage system, and caching isn't the best option. Today we examine one option that combines three Optane Memory SSDs together in a RAID 0 array to create a large volume for installing an operating system and a few programs. After our initial article, I've read many reader comments about Optane Memory. It's obvious the name alone causes confusion. Optane "Memory" is actually a storage device. It gets confusing when you add in the fact that the Optane product family has two consumer cache devices and an enterprise-focused add-in card SSD, and then the terminology associated with building an Optane Memory (cache) array on your 200-series chipset. I'm confused, and I wrote it. For this article, we're not worried about creating the caching array that preloads the high-speed device with frequently-accessed data. We are simply using three Optane devices together, forgoing the special software, and just muscling through the workloads with brute force. Optane's 3D XPoint (the physical chips) are all muscle. We can summarize the comments in our first Optane article by simply saying the caching product is only slightly faster than a high-performance SSD. That's kind of true, but it's a sandbagged product. The Optane Memory SSD with 32GB and 16GB of capacity uses either one or two channels. I suspect it's a single-channel device, but Intel will neither confirm nor deny the controller specifications. If we go with my theory, this Intel single-channel controller beats your 8-channel NAND-based SSDs easily. Over time, we'll see more of Optane's capabilities, but for now, we should think of it as a whole new class of memory. You may not see it now, but Intel will soon have an advantage in the SSD game. For the last several years, all the SSD companies have played catch up with Samsung. Samsung currently has the most advanced NAND flash, and the advantage is so great that its TLC NAND often outperforms competing MLC NAND. Samsung's 3D NAND is like a college football team playing a high school football team. If that's the analogy, then Intel's Optane Technology is NFL caliber. I think Optane is off to a great start. We should all remember that the early SLC-based prosumer SSDs were slower than a modern SD card when they first came to market. Over time Optane will get faster, larger, and cheaper. What we want is for Intel to mass produce it, make it cheap, and then give us the highest performing devices at an affordable price. If you think that's going to happen soon, then you don't know Intel. Don't look for low-cost consumer Optane-based SSDs anytime soon, but RAID allows you to game the system if you take on a little risk. Modern SSDs use a form of internal RAID to increase performance. A single NAND die is fast, but it takes many working together to reach the high levels of performance we associate with SSDs. Larger capacities increase the likelihood of more parallel transactions (to a limit). This has both positive and negative side effects. Over time, the capacity of the NAND die increased, and the number of physical chips in the SSDs decreased. That's why many modern SSDs are slower than older models with the same capacity. Optane changes the game entirely. Intel hasn't given us an affordable prosumer Optane SSD, yet, so we're going to make one using a combination of hardware and software you may already have.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-raid-report,5060.html

Memory-Like Storage Means File Systems Must Change

The term #softwaredefinedstorage is in the new job title that Eric Barton has at #DataDirect Networks, and he is a bit amused by this. As one of the creators of early parallel file systems for supercomputers and one of the people who took the #Lustre file systems from a handful of #supercomputing centers to one of the two main data management platforms for high performance computing, to a certain way of looking at it, Barton has always been doing software-defined storage. The world has just caught up with the idea. Now Barton, who is leaving Intel in the wake of the chip giant ceasing its commercialized Lustre business, wants to help diversify and commercialize the file system that is at the heart of DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine ( #IME ) burst buffer, and so he has taken the job of chief technical officer for #SDN at the high performance storage company. Barton has spent a career that spans more than three decades on the bleeding edge of high-end storage, starting in 1985 with co-founding #MeikoScientific, a maker of parallel #supercomputer s based on transputers (remember those?) rather than ordinary vector or single-threaded processors as we know them. Lawrence Livermore National Lab stepped up and bought one of the Meiko Computing Surface clusters rather than the Connection Machine from Thinking Machines. The Computing Surface needed a file system, and Barton tells The Next Platform that Meiko was so short of staff that he had to write the parallel file system, obviously called PFS, himself. “I didn’t know quite what to do,” Barton recalls. “Solaris had this lovely virtual file system concept, and I thought I could just stripe a file system across other file systems and that will be it. I had one file that I used as the namespace and other file systems where the data was striped across.” This sounds simple enough, but getting a namespace to scale and therefore provide access to data chunks both large and small across the multiple nodes that comprise a parallel file system is a tricky business, indeed. That is why the Lustre file system was born, and that is why #IBM, #SGI, #SunMicrosystems and others also spent a fortune developing parallel file systems over the decades when supercomputer was new and cool.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/05/24/memory-like-storage-means-file-systems-must-change/

Cohesity and Lenovo Global IT Team Up to Bring Software-Defined Secondary Storage to China Market

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - May 24, 2017) - #Cohesity, the pioneer of scale-out, software-defined secondary storage, today announced that it received #Lenovo Global IT Certification. In addition, Lenovo will deliver Cohesity's advanced solution to customers in Greater China. Lenovo worked with Cohesity for over a year to test its scale-out secondary storage platform, and already adopted Cohesity for internal use in its own production environments. Based on this experience, Lenovo will develop optimized offerings based on the specific and unique needs of China customers.  Lenovo initially chose Cohesity after a successful internal IT deployment to manage data protection and NAS filer use cases. Cohesity's platform runs in Lenovo internal IT supporting production systems, and has received the "Lenovo Global IT Certified" stamp. We plan to bring the revolutionary secondary storage platform to other customers in Greater China and beyond. To move the business forward, we will begin to educate local specialists and set-up demo labs across China. "Cohesity's product is both a disruptive and innovative solution for Lenovo," said Lenovo ITS Director PengCheng Zhang. "We see a substantial opportunity to simplify data protection and NAS use cases." "Enterprises will benefit from the radical efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Cohesity's secondary storage platform combined with our hardware platforms and software-defined infrastructure ecosystem," said Lenovo's George Gao. "We are excited to bring the benefits of 'Silicon Valley innovation' to our large and growing customer base." "Lenovo is the most successful and forward-thinking systems provider for enterprise IT in China, and we look forward to leveraging their institutional knowledge and deep understanding of the China customer base to enable more companies to benefit from Cohesity's powerful approach to secondary storage," said Cohesity Head of Corporate and Business Development Vivek Agarwal. "Working with Lenovo will allow us to continue our rapid expansion into different markets across the world, as well as at home in the United States."

http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/cohesity-lenovo-global-it-team-up-bring-software-defined-secondary-storage-china-market-2218166.htm

HPE Enhances Entire Storage Portfolio For Flash, Intro's New 3Par 9000 Family

#HPE on Wednesday expanded its entire portfolio of #allflash storage arrays and added new data protection capabilities and cloud connections to its midrange and enterprise 3Par family. The enhancements mean significant opportunities for HPE's channel partners through whom the majority of its storage sales flow, said Brad Parks, HPE's director of products and solutions for storage and big data.  "We're bringing out a complete end-to-end flash lineup for SMBs to the enterprise to MSPs to generate new business opportunities for our partners," Parks told CRN. "And we're adding new data protection that will help partners tackle the rearchitected of storage for customers' flash-centered data centers." [Related: 9 Things Partners Need To Know About HPE's $1B Acquisition Of Nimble Storage] The biggest change to HPE's storage line-up is the addition of a new 3Par 9000-series. Unlike last year's introduction of the 3Par 8000 series, which was focused on basic capacity consolidation, the new 9000 series is aimed at bridging midsized and higher-end storage requirements for customers hitting performance and scale limits, Parks said. New to HPE is the 3Par StoreServ 9450 which provides all-flash performance to scalable and multi-tenant environments. Parks said the 3Par 9450 offers an 80-percent boost in performance over the previous 3Par midrange systems, with close to 2 million IOPs at less than 1 millisecond of latency. It scales to up to 6 petabytes of capacity. "It competes with the Dell EMC VMAX 250F midrange array," he said. It delivers the same performance and scalability at half the cost per IOP." #HPE also updated the #3Par 20000 enterprise arrays with new hardware and cache. Parks said the new 20000 series competes well against the new #DellEMC #VMAX 950F. The introduction of the HPE 3Par 9000 series fills a huge gap between the 8000 and 20000 series, said Dhruv Gulati, executive vice president of business development and sales at Inpixon, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based solution provider and HPE channel partner. "There's a big gap between them from a cost point-of-view," Gulati told CRN. "It can be 50 percent or more. Customers get the controllers they need with the 8000, but want more direct-attach capability. And customers are really asking for more all-flash capacity." For customers looking to the cloud for data protection, HPE introduced StoreOnce CloudBank as a way to add low-cost protection via AWS or Azure public clouds or on-premises object storage. Parks said StoreOnce CloudBank, when integrated with 3Par storage, brings the cost of cloud-based storage to about $0.001 per gigabyte per month. Data protection on the HPE 3Par all-flash storage systems was further enhanced with a new Express Restore feature for the HPE Recovery Manager Central, or RMC, data protection application. With Express Restore, RMC can provide up to 15 times faster data recovery from on-premises or off-premises StoreOnce repositories, Parks said. RMC also can now be integrated with Veeam Explorer as well, he said. HPE is also celebrating its acquisition last month of Nimble Storage by integrating the line into the HPE price list and offering HPE training and certification, Parks said. "We're starting with the entry-level SKUs, and will bring in the rest of the line over time," he said. "We want to help channel partners take advantage of the comprehensive portfolio of Nimble Storage and 3Par systems." HPE is also working to integrate Nimble Storage's Infosight analytics platform into the HPE storage line, although there is no date for this to be complete, Parks said. "We're not announcing anything at this time, but it's one of the next things on the roadmap," he said. HPE also introduced two new models of its HPE MSA entry-level hybrid flash and disk storage platform.

http://m.crn.com/news/storage/300085741/hpe-enhances-entire-storage-portfolio-for-flash-intros-new-3par-9000-family.htm?itc=most_pop