Hedge fund Elliott Management wants Micro Focus, which bought HPE Software and SUSE Linux, to go private

Hedge fund @ElliottManagement is pushing UK software company @MicroFocus, which merged with @Hewlett Packard Enterprise's software business last year, to sell to a private equity firm, according to people familiar with the matter. Elliott has taken a stake in Micro Focus, said the people, who asked not to be named because the transaction is private. The stake is not quite five percent, which is the automatic disclosure threshold, said the people. Micro Focus has already received inbound interest from several private equity companies, said the people. Elliott has also suggested that Micro Focus carve out and sell Suse Linux, which it acquired as part of a $1.2 billion deal for Attachmate in 2014. Micro Focus's market capitalization is about $5.5 billion. Elliott believes Suse Linux could be sold separately and is being severely discounted within the company. That could be appealing for a private equity firm looking to maximize its investment. Suse is one of the leading distributions of the open source Linux operating system, which is used in many enterprise data centers. It competes most directly with Linux distributions from Red Hat, a publicly traded company with a market cap around $28 billion, and privately held Canonical, which is reportedly considering an IPO. In general, these companies don't sell licenses to use Linux, whose underlying source code is available for free to anybody to use and modify, but sell consulting and support services around it. A Micro Focus spokeswoman didn't immediately respond to comment. An Elliott Management spokesman declined to comment. The news that Elliot has a stake in Micro Focus was previously reported by Bloomberg News. Micro Focus CEO Chris Hsu stepped down last month, less than a year after Micro Focus merged with some HPE software assets in a deal valued at $8.8 billion. Micro Focus also acquired Serena Software for $540 million from private equity firm HGGC in 2016. Micro Focus shares fell the most in more than a decade after Hsu announced he was leaving and year-over-year revenue would be a greater decline than expected.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/12/elliott-wants-micro-focus-hpe-software-and-suse-owner-to-go-private.html

Stiff Competition Could Sink Nutanix Stock

Competitors are quickly encroaching on this tech stock’s market share, despite its impressive top-line growth. Now, through acquisitions and majority control, one competitor controls nearly half the market and has the ability to cut this firm’s market share. Risk of losing market share, when coupled with highly negative margins, unsustainable cash burn, and a soaring stock price mean @Nutanix Inc. ( #NTNX) is this week’s Danger Zone pick.

This detailed market share analysis reveals that, while Nutanix is the market leader, Dell, because of its ownership of VMware, holds the majority of power in the industry.

When Dell, EMC, and VMware market shares are combined, and hardware running NTNX software is excluded, they control 49% of the HCI market. More troubling for NTNX bulls, since Dell bought VMware in 2016, VMWare’s market share has increased at a much faster pace than Nutanix.

With a controlling (and financial) interest in @VMware, @DellEMC could limit Nutanix’s growth potential by promoting its own VMware product in favor of Nutanix’s software. Such a decision would instantly impact NTNX’s top-line, as Dell accounted for 10% of NTNX billings in fiscal 2016 and 2017. More importantly, Dell could inhibit NTNX’s potential market share, which, when excluding Dell hardware, was just 21% in 2017, down from 22% in 2016.

Nutanix provides enterprise cloud software that combines traditional servers, virtualization, and networking hardware/software into one integrated solution, also known as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This market, along with the larger enterprise software market, is highly competitive. @Nutanix ’s main competitors include @VMware ( #VMW), @Cisco ( #CSCO), @DellEMC, @RedHat ( #RHT ), @NetApp ( #NTAP), @Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( #HPE), as well as #publiccloud providers @Amazon ( #AMZN ) and @Google ( #GOOGL ).

https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/02/21/stiff-competition-could-sink-nutanix-stock/amp/

OpenEBS Certified With Red Hat OpenShift, StackPointCloud, and IBM Cloud

In the twelve months since open sourcing, @OpenEBS has become the most liked project of its type on @GitHub with a substantial contributor and user community. Users are now talking at meet-ups around the world about how they use OpenEBS to simplify and improve the storage of important data created by #microservices, whether running in enterprise #datacenters or on the #cloud.   This success has not gone unnoticed by partners that use @Kubernetes in their solutions.   Today @MayaData, the company behind @OpenEBS, has announced partnerships with @RedHat @OpenShift and @StackPointCloud, two of the leading Kubernetes based management platforms now available. OpenEBS was certified by both partners and now is an available default option for storage for the leading orchestration solution Kubernetes; OpenEBS runs on Kubernetes to provide storage to Kubernetes. Importantly, OpenEBS can run in conjunction with underlying shared storage to provide better control and performance while extending the life of existing shared storage systems. Technical leads from StackPointCloud and the OpenEBS community are doing two online Hangout / AMA sessions to demonstrate OpenEBS on StackPointCloud serving Jenkins and other workloads on Friday Feb 16, 2018.  

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openebs-certified-with-red-hat-openshift-stackpointcloud-and-ibm-cloud-672729373.html

​Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 is ready for testing

Everyone wants a safer operating system, and that's @Red Hat 's main goal in its just-released Red Hat Enterprise @Linux ( #RHEL) 7.5 beta. RHEL 7.5 Beta is designed to provide a consistent foundation across the #hybrid #cloud. It also offers key new and enhanced features around security and compliance, platform efficiency, and manageability. The newest member of the RHEL 7 family supports not just x86 chips but also @IBM Power, IBM System z, and ARM as well. For security, besides being a leader in the fight against #Meltdown and #Spectre, Red Hat is introducing the following security features in RHEL 7.5: Security improvements and usability enhancements for cloud and remotely hosted systems that can more securely unlock Network Bound Disk Encrypted devices at boot-time. This eliminates the need for manual intervention in an often inconveniently timed boot process. The integration of Red Hat Ansible DevOps Automation with OpenSCAP. This makes it easier to automate compliance issue remediation. It also enables administrators to more efficiently scale policies across servers and clouds. Compliance improvements for accurate timestamping and synchronization needs with the addition of failover with bonding interfaces for Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP). Besides making RHEL more secure, Red Hat is also seeking to improve storage capacity by introducing virtual data optimizer (VDO). This is a technology derived from Red Hat's acquisition of Permabit assets. It's designed to reduce data redundancy through inline deduplication and compression. The bandwidth and storage, which can be saved by VDO, is little short of amazing. Red Hat claims that, in a RHEL 7.5 primary storage environment, VDO can increase effective capacity by up to six times. This frees up existing storage and reduce the costs associated with offsite data replication. These savings, extended to public cloud block storage, can reduce storage footprints by up to 83 percent, helping to reduce the hourly cost for active storage and the monthly costs of storing snapshots. This will really help you to get the most from your existing storage services.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-enterprise-linux-7-5-is-ready-for-testing/

Red Hat takes different path in app design as enterprise scales out

The year-long embrace of the @Kubernetes container orchestration management system across the enterprise culminated in @Amazon Web Services Inc.’s announcement last month of its @Elastic #Container Service for the #opensource storage platform. The announcement was not a major surprise, given the news in August that AWS would be joining the #CloudNativeComputingFoundation, but it was well received by developers at the recent AWS re:Invent conference in Austin, Texas, nonetheless. One major reason for the positive response is that Kubernetes has increasingly become a significant element in the design and deployment of applications. For open-source companies like Red Hat Inc., this will be a key focus as the container revolution marches boldly into 2018. “Kubernetes has been the single biggest driving force to shift all enterprise architecture from scale up to scale out. That has created a whole number of ripple effects in how applications are designed within the enterprise,” said Steve Watt (pictured), chief architect of emerging technologies at Red Hat.

https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/12/27/red-hat-takes-different-path-in-app-design-as-enterprise-scales-out-kubecon/

Commvault scale-out appliance gunning for Rubrik and Cohesity

@Commvault is launching a #HyperScale all-in-one appliance providing a #scaleout platform for its data protection and management services, taking on competing offerings from the likes of @Rubrik and @Cohesity. Company CEO, chairman and president @BobHammer said there is a concerted and ongoing move to scale-out cloud-like infrastructure in enterprise data centres and this will become the dominant architecture. All-in-one or #hyperconverged appliances are easier for customers to deal with than multiple platform components, and suppliers will move to service-level agreement outcome-based technology as cloud-style computing ideas take hold. Legacy data protection approach The HyperScale Appliance provides data protection and management, reimplementing Commvault's functionality in a scale-out architecture. It integrates compute, storage, networking, virtualisation, backup and recovery, full lifecycle data management, orchestration, automation and analytics into a single platform. Advertisement This runs in the data centre, and also in remote and branch offices. It is cloud-like in operation and use, and also bridges to the public cloud, primarily using it as another tier of storage for the overall secondary storage pool provided by the appliance. Commvault says the appliance integrate with storage arrays, hypervisors, applications and the full range of cloud provider offerings. Hammer told us; "It's a state of the art appliance with more functionality at lower cost than the competition. ... it's the real deal," and should interest both enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs). All-in-one, scale-out appliance approach to data protecvtion The competition referred to is twofold; scale-up systems from Data Domain and others, and scale-out systems from Rubrik and Cohesity. The HS1300 appliance is based on a IU 2-socket Fujitsu 2530 M4 rack server fitted wth a 2TB of flash, 4 x 3.5-inch SAS disk drives and 10GbitE networking. The 2530 runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Gluster Storage, with Windows 2016. Gluster provides scale-out capabilities, load-balancing across nodes, deduplication and erasure coding. This is 4+2 erasure coding, meaning the system can lose a disk, multiple disks or a full node and recover. The system has high availability and disaster recovery capabilities. It is sold on a subscription basis with support and hardware refresh - next-generation refresh every three years - supplied over the lifetime of the appliance’s deployment. Commvault HyperScale Appliance The mimimum configuration is three nodes. The disk drive capacities are 4, 6, 8 or 10TB in size and there are four 3-node configurations: 4TB drives and 48TB raw, 32TB usable, 6TB drives and 72TB raw, 48TB usable, 8TB drives and 96TB raw, 64TB usable, 10TB drives and 120TB raw, 80TB usable. Some 33 per cent of raw capacity is used up by the erasure coding. These nodes can be scaled out in a Gluster grid to 20 - 30 usable PB of capacity, meaning racks of appliance nodes, think up to 128 nodes. Multiple grids can be managed from one central console. Check out the HS1300 tech specs here. There is a software-only version for running on a customer's own hardware which meets a validated reference design. Included suppliers are Fujitsu, Cisco, Lenovo, HPE, Super Micro Computer, Huawei and Dell-EMC. This software could run in the public cloud but that is not CommVault's marketing intention, with Hammer saying: "It's not a core component of how we're going to market with this [appliance]." When the cloud is used as a storage tier, then, because of the way objects are stored, Commvault says the appliance enables cloud compute. We understand machine learning technology is being developed to fight ransomware and other malware infestation attacks. Commvault's HyperScale Software and HyperScale Appliance are available directly through Commvault or through its channel. Competition It sees scale-out data protection and management competition from suppliers like Rubrik and also Cohesity. Commvault's chief communications officer Bill Wohl said that part of the Rubrik/Cohesity appeal was simplicity, but maintained: "If you want to serve the enterprise you must be comprehensive, and not limit customers. "And for their claims that we are complex, our new user interface means those issues are way behind us now (note our achievements in both the Gartner MQ and the Forrester Wave where our user interface plus powerful orchestration were strengths)." Wohl claims his firm's appliance supports features that enterprises need and which he claims its newer competitors lack, including: Fibre Channel SAN support is necessary because of the large investments that have been made by enterprises for storage and is a must for secure and fast data transport, Native copy data to tape, whch has an air-gap advantage in this era of malware/ransomware attacking online data, Support for UNIX which still runs much of the critical systems in an enterprise, Using array-level snapshot and replication support for faster recovery and avoiding network speed constraints and security weaknesses, Array-level snapshots to reduce the virtual machine stun or quiescing effect of closing virtual disks to take a snapshot. Hammer said: "Rubrik's moment in the sun – when they had no competition – is now over, with the launch of Commvault HyperScale." Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha responded: "I see that Commvault has recognized Rubrik as a serious disruptor in the data management market including backup/recovery/DR/archive on premises as well as in the cloud. We are rip-and-replacing Commvault in the largest of the enterprises regularly and doing numerous multimillion-dollar deals. "Their nervousness shows when Bob is making a statement such as 'Rubrik's day in the sun is over...' and singling Rubrik out as their main competition. "As far as their new offering is concerned, this is again a legacy architecture with Commvault's 20+ year old software and Red Hat distributed storage(Gluster open source storage software) put together in a Commvault branded box. This is no differnt that Commvault + Isilon distributed storage (that they sell today) in a box. You might reckon that Rubrik has a converged architecture with a single software that does all the functions and scales-out natively and infinitely. Commvault's new offering is essentially an old wine in a new bottle all over again and haven't we seen this kind of a response from a legacy incumbent against a fast growing upstart that is disrupting legacy vendor's business.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/17/commvault_scaleout_appliance/

Red Hat Releases Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Stack

#RedHat executive Irshad Raihan recently spoke to me about a software package -- Red Hat Hyper-Converged Infrastructure ( #HCI ) -- that the company put together to address the needs of enterprises using #hyperconverged systems. This package is made up of previously available Red Hat products. Red Hat's HCI is completely open source and production ready. It's designed to address "… challenges by integrating compute and storage together on a single server, making it a well-suited solution for low-footprint remote or branch office installations and edge computing." It has the following components: Red Hat Virtualization. The company's KVM-based virtual machine software platform. Red Hat Gluster Storage. The company's storage virtualization technology. The company describes this as "highly scalable software-defined storage that can be converged on the same hardware as Red Hat Virtualization hosts, removing the need for additional compute infrastructures and simplifying deployment." Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat's Linux distribution. Ansible by Red Hat. An IT automation framework recently acquired by Red Hat. Ansible is designed to provide "automated installation and configuration from a central point."

https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2017/06/27/red-hat-releases-hyper-converged-infrastructure-stack.aspx?m=1

Latest Red Hat Ceph Storage Release Expands Versatility as Object Store

#RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat #Ceph Storage 2.3. This release, based on Ceph 10.2 ( #Jewel ), introduces a new Network File System ( #NFS ) interface, offers new compatibility with the #Hadoop #S3A filesystem client, and adds support for deployment in containerized environments. These improvements expand the product’s versatility as an #objectstorage platform, offering the ability to support big data analytics and serve as a common platform for file-based workloads. This release marks the latest milestone in Red Hat’s mission to provide highly elastic, flexible storage that can be optimized to suit a variety of workloads across any size of enterprise deployment.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170606005523/en/Latest-Red-Hat-Ceph-Storage-Release-Expands

Dell EMC targets telecom market with OpenStack solutions for scaling applications

#Dell ’s acquisition of #EMC may have jump-started the hardware titan’s enterprise cloud efforts, but it was open source development platforms that helped pave Dell’s path to customers in new markets, including telecommunications. Many of Dell’s customers were vocal about wanting some sort of open-source cloud platform on which to build those enterprise solutions, said Armughan Ahmad (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of solutions and alliances at #DellEMC.

For those customers Dell turned to #OpenStack, an #opensource software platform for cloud computing.

“OpenStack puts a very big differentiation forward,” said Ahmad. “Our customers are telling us in a very, very clear way, and the channel partners who are here, that they’re looking looking for Dell EMC to really provide open-source-based solutions in telecom markets.”

Ahmad spoke to Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. He spoke about Dell’s merger with EMC and the resulting entry into the enterprise market, what area of that market Dell is focusing on and what the company’s strategy is surrounding open-source-based solutions. (Disclosure below.)

Since telecom is an area of the enterprise market in which Dell EMC is aggressively pursuing market share, Ahmad went a bit further in explaining Dell’s position here. “When you take a look at telecom and it’s moving from 3G to 4G to now 5G coming on, it’s really going to be the applications and how those applications become scale-out versus just infrastructure becoming scale-out,” he explained.

Gaining market share by acquisition and adoption

Dell never had a desire to create its own open ecosystem, choosing instead to merge with EMC to immediately gain the infrastructure created by that company, according to Ahmad. Dell also never sought to build its own version of the OpenStack platform, choosing instead to adopt Red Hat’s version of OpenStack.

These acquisitions and adoptions quickly made Dell a player in the enterprise market by essentially purchasing market share, Ahmad explained.

“We’ve always stood by Red Hat OpenStack-based solutions to say, ‘Hey, if they’re number one in OpenStack markets and they’re already tuning that, why can’t we tune our infrastructure solutions the exact same way?'” Ahmad said. “We feel that our differentiation at Dell EMC really then ends up becoming our tested, validated offerings — so that customers don’t really have to worry about the infrastructure layer or even the software layer.”

https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/05/04/dell-emc-answers-enterprise-demand-open-source-cloud-solutions-redhatsummit/

Red Hat and AWS Extend Strategic Alliance to Package Access to AWS Services Within Red Hat OpenShift

#RedHat and #AWS Extend Strategic Alliance to Package Access to AWS Services Within Red Hat #OpenShift Unique offering will allow customers to deploy AWS services from within Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform both on-premises and in the cloud Alliance will also bring closer product alignment to enable new AWS services to be available with Red Hat Enterprise #Linux faster than ever May 02, 2017 08:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company and the world’s leading cloud computing provider (NASDAQ:AMZN), announced an extended strategic alliance to natively integrate access to AWS services into Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Through this unique offering, Red Hat will make AWS services accessible directly within Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, allowing customers to take advantage of the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud whether they’re using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on AWS or in an on-premises environment. Customers will be able to seamlessly configure and deploy a range of #AWS services such as #Amazon #Aurora, Amazon #Redshift, Amazon #EMR, Amazon #Athena, Amazon #CloudFront, Amazon #Route53, and #Elastic Load Balancing with just a few clicks from directly within the #RedHat #OpenShift console.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170502005673/en/Red-Hat-AWS-Extend-Strategic-Alliance-Package

Lenovo DSS-G software-defined storage solution to be more channel-friendly

Today at #Lenovo’ s Accelerate Partner Forum in Orlando, Lenovo is announcing the availability of #IBM’ s #SpectrumScale [DSS-G]  #softwaredefinedstorage solution on Lenovo’s System x3650 M5 server. Lenovo’s first organic High Performance Computing [HPC] storage offering, the Lenovo DSS-G follows up the GPFS Storage Server, but is likely to have a much more significant channel presence. “With this, we are taking standard Lenovo organic storage, and putting the Spectrum Scale software stack on top of it for performance-centric applications,” said Scott Tease, Executive Director of HPC at Lenovo. The solution’s strength lies in its leveraging of the DSS-G’s declustered RAID, where the RAID rebuild activity is spread across many disks to greatly speed up the rebuild. “What makes DSS-G unique is that it doesn’t depend on a hardware RAID controller to manage RAID.” Tease said. “These are expensive and proprietary, and have traditionally been the bottleneck. By doing RAID control in the software, you get much higher performance and scalability. We can now look at RAID arrays of hundreds of drives, rather than 10 drives managed in a single array.” The Lenovo DSS-G is a pre-integrated, easy-to-deploy rack level offering. It features Intel Xeon processors, Lenovo D1224 and D3284 12Gbps SAS storage enclosures and drives, and software and networking components designed to maximize choice, and which includes #RedHat Enterprise #Linux support. “In the future we will provide even more options, and a lower price point going forward,” Tease said. “Customers will have a choice of JBOD, and the SSD they want to put into it, as well as the connectivity, and the solutions will be supported by one part number from beginning to end. With Lenovo Scalable Infrastructure [LeSI], we are leveraging our server and cluster experience to reduce the complexity of deployment in this type of solution.” Tease also said the Lenovo DSS-G is only the first of a series of software-defined solutions using the same exact building blocks. “This is the first solution of an entire family of things in the future,” he said. In May, Lenovo will release a #SUSE Enterprise Storage version, the DSS-C, designed for interaction with Lenovo scale-out #HANA solutions. Later this year, distributed storage architectures for Red Hat #Ceph Storage and Intel Lustre EE will also become available. The Lenovo DSS-G is likely to be a much better channel product than the GPFS Storage Server. “This can start off with a single 2U JBOD, which is perfect for the channel,” Tease said. “Before we had to start with a minimum of four big JBODs, which wasn’t ideal for the channel. Being able to start with these smaller building blocks makes it a far more approachable solution for the channel.” It also means a significantly lower price point – in the neighborhood of $150,000. The result, Tease said, is that about half of these could be sold through partners.

http://www.channelbuzz.ca/2017/04/lenovo-dss-g-software-defined-storage-solution-channel-friendly-21070/

Enterprise storage for modern workloads - Introducing the the new Red Hat Gluster Storage

What’s new? You’re invited to a launch event introducing #RedHatGluster Storage 3.2. Hear from industry analysts, customers, partners, and #RedHat experts how breakthrough innovations in #softwaredefinedstorage can provide highly elastic, cost-effective storage for your enterprise applications.

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/events/enterprise-storage-modern-workloads-introducing-new-red-hat-gluster-storage

Lenovo, Red Hat Team Up to Deliver NFV Infrastructure to Telcos

Lenovo is teaming up with #RedHat as it looks to build tightly integrated and open systems for the telecommunications industry, and is looking at network virtualization as a key part of the effort. At the recent Red Hat Summit, #Lenovo officials unveiled its Open Platform @Lenovo (OP@L) to create open infrastructure that will run Red Hat's software stack for network-functions virtualization ( #NFV ), an emerging technology that is playing a key role in telco initiatives to create more agile, programmable and scalable networks to address changing customer demands. At the same time, Lenovo also joined the Open Platform NFV ( #OPNFV ) consortium, which is developing an open, carrier-grade platform enabling members to develop solutions and services using NFV. Company officials said the move will help Lenovo advance its telco ambitions and give it a greater presence in the burgeoning NFV market.

http://mobile.eweek.com/networking/lenovo-red-hat-team-up-to-deliver-nfv-infrastructure-to-telcos.html

NVMe Brings Performance to Software-Defined Storage

TORONTO—NVM Express ( #NVMe ) has begun to gather steam in the market, with many vendors releasing NVMe SSDs over the past year or so, while the supporting ecosystem has matured. In the meantime, @SamsungElectronics Co., Ltd. and @RedHat are collaborating to give the emerging technology an extra push. At the recent #RedHat Summit, #Samsung announced its NVMe (SSD) Reference Design platform, which can be used with Red Hat #Ceph Storage, a software-defined storage platform. Red Hat Ceph/Samsung Reference Architecture is essentially a recipe to build unified storage for enterprise IT or cloud environments that handle transactional databases, machine-generated data and unstructured data.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330028

Dell Unveils New OpenStack Extensions at Red Hat Summit

@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

Lenovo Joins OPNFV Project as Platinum Member

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

Q&A: Dell Cloud Exec On Red Hat Partnership, Co-Existence With EMC Software-Defined Product Lines And Competition With HPE

@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.

http://m.crn.com/slide-shows/cloud/300081169/qa-dell-cloud-exec-on-red-hat-partnership-co-existence-with-emc-software-defined-product-lines-and-competition-with-hpe.htm

Samsung's Reference Design Will Be Used with Red Hat Ceph Storage (RHT)

@SamsungElectronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced that its #NVMe (SSD) Reference Design will be used with #RedHat #Ceph Storage, a software-defined storage ( #SDS ) platform, in a new high performance Ceph Reference Architecture by #Samsung .

Samsung’s NVMe Reference Design platform, together with Red Hat Ceph Storage, can deliver a highly scalable, more efficient TCO reference architecture that supports unified storage for enterprise IT or cloud environments in handling transactional databases, machine-generated data and unstructured data.

The combined storage solution – referred to as the Red Hat Ceph/Samsung Reference Architecture – can be used as is or customized for a specific data center environment with an easier migration path, and can offer positive TCO impact. It can be deployed in an OpenStack environment to support the bandwidth, latency and IOPS requirements of high performance workloads and use cases, such as distributed MySQL databases, telco nDVR content retrieval and financial services.

“The data center community will appreciate the importance of the Red Hat Ceph/Samsung Storage Reference Architecture, as the harvesting of data analytics becomes a priority for businesses that want to better understand their customers and stay ahead of their competition,” said Jim Elliott, corporate vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. “Data-driven companies in search of performance optimization in an OpenStack environment can benefit from the high performance offered by Red Hat Ceph Storage software and our NVMe Reference Design as a compliment to existing capacity-optimized infrastructure,” he added.

http://www.streetinsider.com/dr/news.php?id=11769180

Understanding Ceph and Its Place in the Market

Last month, the #Ceph community released its first set of bug fixes to the 10.2 Jewel release with version 10.2.1. This is good news, but what is Ceph? Ceph is a software-defined distributed object storage solution. Originally developed by Inktank in 2012, the solution was later acquired by #Red Hat, Inc., in 2014. It is open source and licensed under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

In the world of Ceph, data is treated and stored like objects. This is unlike traditional (and legacy) data storage solutions, where data is written to and read from the storage volumes via sectors and at sector offsets (often referred to as blocks). When dealing with large amounts of large data, treating them as objects is the way to do it. It is also much easier to manage. In fact, this is how the cloud functions—with objects. This object-drive model enables Ceph for simplified scalability to meet consumer demand easily. These objects are replicated across an entire cluster of nodes, giving Ceph its fault-tolerance and further reducing single points of failure.

Last year, the Ceph community released the support for an Erasure Coded pool. This means that instead of duplicating data objects and consuming doubles or multiples of the original data, through the concept of Erasure Code, the object gets fed through an algorithm where it is re-computed with additional padding to handle data inconsistencies or failures. This does come at a bit of a performance cost. Anyway, Ceph has also been designed to self-heal and self-manage. All of this happens at a lower level and is transparent to the user or a client application.

http://m.linuxjournal.com/content/understanding-ceph-and-its-place-market

Net Vendor Midokura, Optional Performance Accelerator for Dell's Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Platform, Raises $20.4M

Software network virtualization specialist #Midokura announced a $20.4 million funding round this week as uptake of its network virtualization platform gains momentum.

The Series B funding round announced Wednesday (June 8) brings the networking startup's funding total to $44 million. Participating in the round were Japanese financial technology company #Simplex Inc. along with existing investors Innovation Network Corporation of Japan and Midokura board member Allen Miner.

San Francisco-based Midokura is targeting the enterprise network virtualization market and its ability to automate most functions on public, private and hybrid clouds along with emerging application container and other micro-services deployments.

The company said it would use the funding to advance development of its enterprise MidoNet network virtualization platform to support growing demand for micro-services and support for devices and sensors linked via the Internet of Things. The company also said it expects to expand product development while strengthening its development team.

The networking startup is attempting to capitalize on steady industry adoption of #OpenStack and application container orchestration platforms. Emerging micro-services infrastructure would require greater network virtualization and deployment of software-defined networks ( #SDN ), the company asserted in a statement announcing the funding round.

http://www.enterprisetech.com/2016/06/09/net-vendor-midokura-raises-20-4m/