Academia and Industry Collaborate to Drive UK Supercomputer Adoption

@Hewlett @Arm, @SUSE, and three leading UK universities establish one of the largest Arm-based #supercomputer deployments in the world to advance digitisation of UK economy April 16, 2018 07:45 ET | Source: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company LONDON, April 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE) today announced a collaboration with Arm, SUSE, and three leading UK universities to accelerate the adoption of supercomputer applications in the UK. The partners will jointly develop and deploy one of the largest Arm-based high performance computing (HPC) installations in the world, available to both industry and academia, to build applications that drive economic growth and productivity as outlined in the UK government’s Industrial Strategy. Designed, built and supported by HPE, the deployment will be spread across three sites at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bristol, and the University of Leicester. The installation is due to be completed in summer 2018 and is part of a project known as Catalyst UK which will run for three years. Supercomputers increasingly play a crucial role in digital transformation due to their capability of simulating the physical world and generating actionable insights from vast amounts of data. The economic benefits that can be realised through applications such as artificial intelligence (AI) – for which HPC is a foundational technology – are significant.1 According to a Hyperion Research estimate, every dollar invested in HPC technology is associated with an average $551 in additional revenue and $52 in added profit for private-sector firms2. Catalyst UK to propel Arm HPC ecosystem and exascale computing in the UK To further drive supercomputer adoption in the UK in general, and in the commercial sector in particular, the Catalyst UK programme will cooperate with the UK industry to jointly develop critical applications and workflows to best exploit the Arm system capabilities. The programme will also provide training for researchers, equipping them with the knowledge and skills required to successfully and productively work with Arm-based systems in the future – with a specific focus on exascale computing, i.e. computers that can execute a billion billion calculations per second. “Today’s announcement marks a major step forward in boosting collaboration between the government and business to harness the power of innovation in supercomputing and AI,” said Sam Gyimah MP, Science Minister. “Through our modern Industrial Strategy, AI Grand Challenge and upcoming Sector Deal, the UK will lead the AI and data revolution. Doing so has the potential to increase the UK’s competitiveness in emerging industries around the world, grow our economy and create the high value jobs we need to build a Britain fit for the future.” The key focus of the Catalyst UK programme is to investigate and showcase the potential of Arm-based HPC installations. This is one of the current approaches to overcome the limitations of traditional computer architectures and offer a better price-performance ratio for modern workloads and applications. This includes AI, which needs to process large amounts of data and requires extremely high memory bandwidth, and exascale computing, which requires HPC systems to be hundreds of times faster and more efficient than today’s fastest supercomputers.  The three supercomputer clusters at EPCC, University of Bristol and University of Leicester will in total run more than 12,000 Arm-based cores, hosted by HPE Apollo 70 HPC systems. The clusters at each university will be largely identical, consisting of 64 HPE Apollo 70 systems, each equipped with two 32 core Cavium ThunderX2 processors, 128GB of memory composed of 16 DDR4 DIMMs with Mellanox InfiniBand interconnects. The operating system is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for HPC. Each cluster is expected to occupy two computer racks and consume a total of approximately 30KW of power. Mike Vildibill, VP, Advanced Technologies Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise said: “We are currently seeing an insatiable demand for compute performance, as companies seek to gain intelligent and actionable insights from their data. As we embark on the global race towards more powerful and eventually exascale systems, new approaches and technologies are needed to tackle some of the key challenges in achieving these levels of performance, such as rising energy consumption.    “HPE is excited to work with Arm, SUSE, and other key partners to offer the HPC community a fresh alternative for high performance computing which we believe will stimulate the industry to develop increasingly performant and efficient supercomputing solutions.  By investing in this deployment through the Catalyst UK programme, HPE and our partners will drive both digital transformation and sustainable economic growth through new innovation and scientific discovery.” Drew Henry, senior vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Business Unit, Arm said: “Arm has a long history of close collaboration with industry and academia that has resulted in some very innovative new ideas and technologies. We’re particularly excited now to provide UK researchers and many others greater access to Arm high-performance server technology. The unmatched scalability, high performance, and low-energy consumption of these solutions directly addresses the challenges of large-scale computing and will fuel innovation in cloud, HPC, and AI applications.” Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, CTO at SUSE said: “The open, non-proprietary, and highly collaborative approach to the Catalyst UK programme, enabled by the SUSE Linux operating system and SUSE Enterprise Storage, will be a key factor in the project’s success. Increasing the exposure of open source operating systems and tools to student and other real-world users and workloads will significantly improve and enhance the software available on Arm-based architectures. By building a broad ecosystem with HPE, Arm, and Cavium, that caters to the specific needs important to the UK market, we can help deliver the required knowledge, skills and capabilities that will shape the adoption of HPC and AI technologies in the UK.” About Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a global technology leader focused on developing intelligent solutions that allow customers to capture, analyze and act upon data seamlessly from edge to core to cloud. HPE enables customers to accelerate business outcomes by driving new business models, creating new customer and employee experiences, and increasing operational efficiency today and into the future.

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/04/16/1471927/0/en/Academia-and-Industry-Collaborate-to-Drive-UK-Supercomputer-Adoption.html

Scale Forever with Software-Defined Storage from SUSE and HPE

No matter your industry, data storage is likely becoming an issue. You need near-real-time access to different kinds of data, and it must be flexible, with intuitive administration and an affordable total cost of ownership. Traditional on-premises solutions are expensive to manage and don’t scale easily. And cloud storage, while attractively priced on entry, can become cost-prohibitive when accessing data at near real time or in high volume. The flexible, clustered design of @SUSE Enterprise Storage means it can scale quickly to massive proportions. Simply add @HPE hardware, and SUSE Enterprise Storage will automatically integrate it and redistribute workloads as necessary. Also, SUSE Enterprise Storage offers node-based pricing (as opposed to per-gigabyte pricing), making it the lowest-priced option for enterprise disk-to-disk backup, as well as other storage tasks.

https://www.suse.com/c/scale-forever-software-defined-storage-suse-hpe/

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

Microsoft, Cisco, HPE and others sign on to open-source licensing initiative

A group of technology giants that includes @CA Technologies Inc., @Cisco Systems Inc., @Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co., @Microsoft Corp., @SAP SE and @SUSE have signed on to an initiative that aims to promote greater predictability in open-source licensing. The initiative relates to open-source software licenses, including the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License, which cover numerous important software projects such as the @Linux Kernel. The release of GPL version 3 stipulates that distributors of open-source code governed by the license should be given the opportunity to correct errors and mistakes in compliance. The thinking is that this new approach allows for license compliance to be enforced in a community where “heavy-handed” approaches to enforcement are “out of place,” Red Hat Inc., which leads the initiative, said in a statement. “The large ecosystems of projects using the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x licenses will benefit from adoption of this more balanced approach to termination derived from GPLv3,” Red Hat explained in a press release announcing the new license-compliance partners. The companies have all agreed to adopt something called the “Common Cure Rights Commitment,” which means they will give distributors of noncompliant software time to “cure” or “reinstate” licenses before taking legal action against them.

https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/03/20/microsoft-cisco-hpe-others-sign-open-source-licensing-initiative/

SUSE Expands Collaboration with Amazon Web Services to Further Accelerate SAP Migrations to Linux on AWS

NUREMBERG, Germany, Feb. 14, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- @SUSE ® today announced the expansion of its relationship with @Amazon Web Services ( #AWS), which allows AWS to resell SUSE #Linux Enterprise Server for @SAP Applications directly on AWS Marketplace. AWS customers running SAP workloads on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications – a leading platform for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA – will get an integrated and streamlined support experience from AWS and SUSE. AWS customers can purchase the SUSE Linux Enterprise solution on demand, paying only for what they use. This expanded collaboration allows SUSE and AWS to meet growing customer demand for the agility and cost benefits of cloud-based business-critical applications.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/suse-expands-collaboration-with-amazon-web-services-to-further-accelerate-sap-migrations-to-linux-on-aws-300598184.html

Software-defined storage products: 2017 Products of the Year finalists

The #softwaredefinedstorage products selected as finalists in Storage magazine and SearchStorage's 2017 Products of the Year competition reflect the latest trends in #flash, #cloud and #container technologies. The finalists include a mix of new and updated software-defined storage products, and many support performance-boosting nonvolatile memory express ( #NVMe) #flash technology and extended cloud and container storage options. To be eligible in the Products of the Year competition, a software-defined storage product must run on standard servers with no dependencies on the underlying hardware. Finalists in the category include software that pools and centrally manages storage, file systems, object stores and software powering hyper-converged infrastructure. Software-defined storage products that made it through the finalist cut include the following: DataCore Software SANsymphony PSP6 Update The PSP6 upgrade of DataCore Software's SANsymphony storage virtualization product enhanced REST API integration with more than 200 new operation methods. It also lets customers use the Kubernetes PersistentVolume API to orchestrate deployment, operations and scaling of containerized applications. The update optimized the product's parallel I/O capabilities to improve performance. Elastifile Cloud File System The distributed Elastifile Cloud File System (ECFS) can pool server-based flash storage and present it to applications through a global namespace, enabling any server in the cluster to directly access files. ECFS uses a distributed metadata model and enables linear performance scalability. The product supports global deduplication, compression and snapshot shipping, and its CloudConnect feature lets customers tier colder data to cloud-based object storage. PRO+ Content E-Zine Storage startup trends: Vendors to watch in 2018 E-Zine Dell EMC acquisition: The deal of the century a year later 360 Guide IT industry trends: Six major vendors chart new courses Excelero NVMesh 1.1 Excelero's NVMesh software virtualizes NVMe-based storage, pools the capacity of the SSDs and uses Remote Direct Memory Access networking to connect them. Any Linux-based host server running the NVMesh block client can access the virtual block volumes to enable applications to get the latency, throughput and IOPS of local NVMe. Excelero's Remote Direct Drive Access technology disaggregates storage from applications to save server CPU for the applications. Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform 3.0 The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform supports scale-out block, file and object storage on premises and in public clouds, and manages the storage as a single pool. New FlashFabric technology adds tiering capabilities between two different classes of SSDs, whether SAS or SATA, NVMe-based PCI Express (PCIe) or 3D XPoint. Other new features include AES 256-bit software-based encryption for data in use, in flight and at rest, and CloudScale plugins for Red Hat products, Veritas OpenStorage Technology and VMware vSphere. IBM Spectrum Scale 4.2.3 IBM enhanced its Spectrum Scale clustered file system -- based on the company's General Parallel File System -- in areas such as cloud data sharing, NVMe, audit logging and general usability. IBM also beefed up support for iSCSI, Hadoop Distributed File System and OpenStack object storage. Pivot3 Acuity HCI Platform 2.1.1 Pivot3's Acuity hyper-converged infrastructure platform added policy-based management with quality of service to enable customers to provide more resources for high-priority applications. The software update also enables the system to take greater advantage of NVMe-based PCIe flash storage to reduce latency and improve performance. Qumulo File Fabric Qumulo File Fabric (QF2) runs on premises and in the public cloud, and it claims to provide billion-file capacity. QF2 gives customers programmatic access to features and administrative settings through a programmable REST API and includes cloud-based monitoring to proactively detect disk failures. Additional capabilities include real-time analytics down to the file level, snapshots to the directory level and continuous replication. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 Red Hat's commercially supported open source Ceph distribution added a lightweight NFS interface to the Ceph Object Gateway, letting users access the same object storage data via NFS or Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) API. Compatibility with the Hadoop S3A file system client enables big data analytics applications -- such as Apache Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, Presto and Spark -- to read and write data from the Ceph object store. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 also introduced an option to deploy Ceph in containers. Scality Ring7 Scality stood out among the software-defined storage products for steps it took to unite its scale-out file system and object store, and enable users to access the same data from either protocol. Ring7 supports versioning and replication for object and file storage; data encryption; secure write once, read many (WORM) change control; and cross-region replication to Scality Ring and Amazon's S3 cloud object storage for disaster recovery. SUSE Enterprise Storage 4 SUSE's Enterprise Storage 4, the company's commercially supported Ceph distribution, added support for the Ceph file system, or CephFS, to round out its unified block, object and file capabilities. The software update enabled long-distance replication for block storage and multisite object storage replication to improve disaster recovery. SUSE also enhanced cluster orchestration through open source Salt configuration management software, improved the graphical user interface to ease management and expanded hardware choice with support for 64-bit ARM processors. WekaIO Matrix The WekaIO Matrix scale-out parallel file system is designed to pool server-based flash SSDs for high-performance workloads and tier cold data to object storage in public and private clouds. Matrix presents the local flash storage as a single global namespace to host applications, and the software extends the namespace beyond the flash pool to offload colder data to less expensive S3-compliant and OpenStack Swift-compliant object storage. 

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/450432330/Software-defined-storage-products-2017-Products-of-the-Year-finalists

Global Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Market by Size, Type and Application and Focuses on top Key Players: IBM (US), CLoudian (US), DataDirect Networks (DDN) (US), Dell EMC and others

Market Overview of Global Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Industry: This report gives us an overview of the Global Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Market which is classified on the basis of product and its various applications. It also mentions the key area where the demand for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage products is going to have.  Also based on the type of the product the market is divided into various sections such as what are the current trends also, what are the end-users and the technology. Download Sample PDF Copy of this Report: https://www.reportsmonitor.com/request-sample/?post=502078 The various products in the Global Distributed File Systems and Object Storage market along with their numerous applications are also examined in the report. It gives researchers a well-charted map as to where the potential investments need to be done. Also, there are some precautionary factors to be looked at to have an idea of which market route to take.  It also mentions the various insights and parameters which will help propel the growth of the Distributed File Systems and Object Storage market and bring to forth the various opportunities available in the market. This Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Market Report scrutinizes the competition subtitles and keeps you in the forefront. It offers an in-depth analysis of the different verticals which brings to the spotlight the working of the Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Market. It provides a guiding light in helping you make well-informed business decisions by presenting before you a complete overview and a comprehensive detail of the market. It also explains meticulously the key product area and their future. Scope of the Report The Distributed File Systems and Object Storage market is characterized by constant technological innovation to keep pace with the changing industrial needs. This Market report provides a detailed analysis of worldwide markets for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage from 2012-2017 and provides extensive Industry forecasts 2017-2022 by top Key manufacturers analysis, region, Types,  and Market segment by Applications. This report focuses on markets for #DistributedFileSystems and #ObjectStorage from 2012-2017  the Following top players: #IBM (US), #CLoudian (US), #DataDirect Networks (DDN) (US), #DellEMC (US), #HitachiData Systems (US), #Caringo (US), #NetApp (US), #Panasas (US), #RedHat (US), #HGST (US), #SUSE Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Market segment by Types, Local Storage, Shared Storage Market segment by Applications, IT and Telecom, Banking, Government, Retail, Education, Other The Report can be customized according to your needs. Contact our expert team today along with your requirements: https://www.reportsmonitor.com/make-enquiry/?post=502078 Key Question for this Market Report What are the most important aspects driving the worldwide Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Market? What are the necessary trends impacting the build-up of the worldwide Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Market? What is going to the industry size as well as growth rate be in 2022? Who will be the key manufacturers in this particular Market space? What are the trending factors influencing the Market shares in next few years? Access Complete report with TOC: https://www.reportsmonitor.com/global-distributed-file-systems-and-object-storage-market-size-status-and-forecast-2022-2/ We at Reports Monitor provide an in-depth analysis and key data on the specific Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Market you are looking for. Our Reports are thoroughly researched and a valuable source of guidance for companies and individuals looking for information for the same.

http://www.satprnews.com/2017/11/28/global-distributed-file-systems-and-object-storage-market-by-size-type-and-application-and-focuses-on-top-key-players-ibm-us-cloudian-us-datadirect-networks-ddn-us-dell-emc-and-others/

Analyzing SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.0

#SUSEEnterpriseStorage 5.0 was announced at SUSECON in September, and is expected to be released in late October 2017. It's built upon the foundation of the #Ceph #opensourceproject. @SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.0 has scalability upgrades (from terabytes to petabytes) and can use off-the-shelf storage systems. It's a software-defined storage ( #SDS ) solution for enterprises that can support workloads requiring bulk and large data. It's based on enhancements to the Ceph file system, #CephFS, and SUSE claims a performance boost of more than 200 percent over the previous version. Ceph is an open source project focused upon "transforming IT infrastructure" and making it possible to support "vast amounts of data." Ceph is supported by the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS), which provides applications with object, block and file system storage in a single unified storage cluster.

https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2017/10/05/analyzing-suse-enterprise-storage-5.aspx?m=1

Google Goes Tit for Tat With Amazon On Cloud Pricing

Last week, Amazon made a huge change in how it charges businesses for its cloud services, saying it would start to bill on a per-second basis starting Oct. 2 instead of by the hour. Now rival Google is also going to per-second increments, but is making the change effective immediately. In theory, smaller price increments could cut costs for some customers who don't use a full minute, or full hour, of the computing capacity they have paid for. Amazon Web Services, Google (GOOGL, +2.38%), and Microsoft have leapfrogged each other on pricing and new cloud computing features for several years now. So this is just the latest chapter in that saga as they fight to get businesses to put more of their data and run more of their software on their respective clouds.

#Google and #Microsoft started offering per-minute cloud computing in 2013 while #Amazon (AMZN, +1.30%), the largest and oldest of the cloud providers, held fast to per-hour pricing until now.

Google's new price model is for its basic computing units (which it calls virtual machines, or VMs) as well as its container engine and a few other offerings. And the price covers all VMs whether they run #WindowsServer, #RedHat #Linux or #SUSE Linux operating systems. Amazon's per-second pricing applies only to Linux, not to Windows. Google's pricing on "persistant disk" storage attached to these VMs has been billed per second for quite some time.

At this week's Ignite tech conference in Orlando, Microsoft (MSFT, +0.79%) took another route to price cuts by announcing Amazon-like reserved computing instances that give customers discounts (of up to 72% of of list price) if they lock into using those computing resources for one- or three-year periods.

http://fortune.com/2017/09/26/google-matches-amazons-price-change/

SUSE Software-Defined Storage Leverages Open Source to Break Proprietary Lock-in and Reduce Customer Costs

PRAGUE, Sept. 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- (SUSECON 2017) -- The power of storage solutions has always resided in the software, and #SUSE® #softwaredefinedstorage is giving customers more flexibility and choice than traditional storage appliances provide. It allows them to meet their growing storage needs more securely and cost effectively using industry-standard hardware and open source-based software-defined storage solutions. Accordingly, SUSE today introduced SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 with enhanced ease of management, improved performance and expanded features including new disk-to-disk backup capabilities for enterprise customers. "Every generation of enterprise infrastructure innovation is now being built on open source," said Gerald Pfeifer, vice president of Products and Technology Programs at SUSE. "SUSE is expert at both contributing to and using upstream innovation to create enterprise-grade, secure solutions that can be combined with other technologies to best address customer needs. This approach applied to software-defined storage delivers highly scalable solutions that radically reduce storage costs in terms of both capital and operations expense." Gartner analysts noted in a recent Cool Vendor report, "It has become painfully evident that storage capacity demands, and expectations for far more rapid provisioning of that storage, have far outpaced the ability of [infrastructure and operations] teams' capabilities. Far-more-automated systems are required to restore a sense of balance, that is, storage solutions that offer much greater scale, but also much more automation."* SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 The latest release of SUSE's intelligent software-defined storage management solution, SUSE Enterprise Storage 5, will enable IT organizations to accelerate innovation and reduce costs by efficiently transforming their enterprise storage infrastructures. It is based on the Luminous release of the Ceph open source project, and it is ideally suited for compliance, archive, backup and large data storage. Large data applications include video surveillance, CCTV, online presence and training, streaming media, X-rays, seismic processing, genomic mapping, and computer-assisted design. Backup and archive applications include Veritas NetBackup, Commvault and Micro Focus Data Protector, along with compliance solutions such as iTernity. SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 is the first commercial offering to support the new BlueStore backend within Ceph. This follows SUSE's first-to-market support for iSCSI and CephFS in previous versions of SUSE Enterprise Storage. Customer benefits of this release include: The ability to service environments that require higher levels of performance through the new BlueStore native object storage backend. SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 offers up to double the write performance of previous releases, coupled with significant reductions in I/O latency. The ability to free up capacity and reduce data footprint via BlueStore-enabled data compression. Increased disk space efficiency of a fault-tolerant solution through enablement of erasure coding for replicated block devices and CephFS data. Lowered operational cost with an expanded advanced graphical user interface for simplified management using the next generation openATTIC open source storage management system. Simplified cluster management and orchestration through enhanced Salt integration. Production support of the Network File System (NFS) Gateway exporting CephFS and enabling users on a client computer to access files over a computer network. Production support for the Network File System (NFS) Gateway exporting the RADOS object gateway (RGW) and enabling legacy file applications that need a filesystem interface to access cloud native Amazon S3 or Swift data. A technical preview of Ceph's ability to export a file system to CIFS/Samba for heterogeneous connectivity. Disk-to-disk backup in SUSE Enterprise Storage SUSE Enterprise Storage now offers an efficient and flexible disk-to-disk backup solution that is scalable, self managing, fault tolerant, always on and easy to upgrade. SUSE Enterprise Storage delivers these capabilities without the costs typically associated with high-end functionality. Inexpensive industry-standard hardware running open source software lets customers avoid the high prices and vendor lock-in of proprietary solutions. SUSE Enterprise Storage also beats the cost of enterprise open source alternatives as well as commercial offerings with an innovative licensing model that avoids per-gigabyte storage costs. In addition, the need for a separate deduplication device (a sophisticated device usually associated with proprietary solutions that is designed to reduce the overall storage volume by eliminating duplicated data) is eliminated through advanced backup software that provides deduplication services. SUSE is certified with leaders in enterprise backup software, including Commvault and Veritas, all of which feature built-in deduplication. In a recent total cost of ownership comparison of disk backup solutions, software-defined storage in general and SUSE specifically came out on top. According to IT Brand Pulse, "The cost data says SUSE is the clear value leader led by best-in-class pricing model which includes support in the software license and, unlike others where license costs are front-loaded, the cost of a software is spread out evenly over the five years." SUSE Enterprise Server 5 will be available in the fourth quarter. For more information, visit www.suse.com/storage. *Gartner, "Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2017," Dave Russell, Arun Chandrasekaran, Julia Palmer, Raj Bala, Alan Dayley, Pushan Rinnen, Garth Landers, 12 May 2017. About SUSE SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 20 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed – today and tomorrow. For more information, visit www.suse.com. Copyright 2017 SUSE LLC. All rights reserved. SUSE and the SUSE logo are registered trademarks of SUSE LLC in the United States and other countries. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/suse-software-defined-storage-leverages-open-source-to-break-proprietary-lock-in-and-reduce-customer-costs-300525236.html

SUSE to Showcase Open Source Innovations That Are Transforming Businesses at SUSECON 2017 in Prague

Keynotes from Fujitsu, HPE, Microsoft, SAP and SUSE headline global end-user conference Sept. 25-29  NEWS PROVIDED BY SUSE Sep 12, 2017, 13:10 ET NUREMBERG, Germany, Sept. 12, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- SUSE®, the open, open source company, today announced sponsors, keynotes and breakout session details for its upcoming SUSECON 2017 global end-user conference, to be held Sept. 25-29 in Prague, Czechia. SUSECON brings together end users with experts from SUSE, its partners and open source communities in a unique environment where they can dive into the open source technology and innovation that is transforming businesses today. The conference will showcase the latest developments in enterprise-grade software-defined infrastructure with in-depth sessions on key technology topics such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Container as a Service (CaaS), NFV, software-defined storage and software-defined networking, along with showing leading Linux, OpenStack and Ceph-based solutions. Important and rising software-defined infrastructure technologies will be covered, including emerging leaders Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. SUSE is leveraging Kubernetes for CaaS solutions that enable IT and DevOps professionals to more easily deploy, manage and scale container-based applications and services. SUSECON will also feature a preview of SUSE's upcoming PaaS solution, built on Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. "For SUSE, there's more to 'open' than just the code," said Michael Miller, SUSE president of Strategy, Alliances and Marketing. "It's about how we do business, how we engage in our communities and projects, how we partner, and how we provide choice at all different levels of the architecture to enable customers and partners to build best-of-breed solutions and avoid vendor lock-in. At SUSECON, customers experience all of that. Most of all, they see how they can make room for innovation that will help them keep pace in their markets and carry them into the future." Keynote speakers in Prague will include: Abby Kearns, executive director, Cloud Foundry Foundation Kozo Otsuka, CTO, MIS – Central Europe, Fujitsu Gary Thome, VP and chief technologist, Software-Defined Infrastructure and Cloud Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise KY Srinivasan, partner director, Enterprise Open Source Group, Microsoft Stefan Weitland, chief product owner for SAP Cloud Platform, and Martin Fassunge, chief product owner, SAP Cloud Platform Internet of Things, SAP Nils Brauckmann, SUSE CEO Michael Miller, SUSE president of Strategy, Alliances and Marketing Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE CTO The SUSECON 2017 session catalog features more than 150 hands-on, tutorial, case study, future outlook and business overview sessions that dive deeply into technology innovation and the future of IT infrastructure. Session highlights include: DevOps in Daily Business: SUSE Manager as a Deployment Platform. Two Years of Successful OpenStack Operation within the BMW Group: Insights and Experiences. What's Next with #SUSE #LinuxEnterprise ? #SoftwareDefinedStorage, the Way of the Future. #SUSECON2017 sponsors include #Fujitsu, #HewlettPackardEnterprise, #Microsoft and #SAP as cornerstone sponsors, with platinum sponsors #Cisco, #Huawei, #IBM, #Intel and #Lenovo. Gold sponsors are #AmazonWebServices, #Arm, #Cray, #CyberArk, #DellTechnologies , #Infosys, #SaltStack, #Supermicro and #Wipro. For more information about SUSECON, visit www.susecon.com.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/suse-to-showcase-open-source-innovations-that-are-transforming-businesses-at-susecon-2017-in-prague-300518062.html

Microsoft's second Windows Server 2016 test build runs Linux distributions

On Aug. 8, #Microsoft began rolling out its second Insider test build for #WindowsServer 2016.  Windows Server Insider Build #16257 for #WindowsServer2016 makes Windows Subsystem for #Linux (WSL), plus several Linux distributions -- #Ubuntu, #OpenSUSE, and #SLES -- available on Windows Server. (According to Microsoft's documentation, WSL was available on Windows Server 2016 as of Insider build 16215 and higher, but today's post is the first time Microsoft highlighted its availability on Server.) Testers can run node.js, #Ruby, #Python, #Perl, #Bash, and other related scripts and tools. Currently, however, WSL doesn't support persistent Linux services like daemons and jobs.

Today's Windows Server Insider build also includes the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) , which enable Windows 10 client users to remotely manage and administer Windows Server Insider builds. (Testers need Windows 10 Fall Creators Update build 16250 or higher to use RSAT.)

According to today's blog post about the new test build, Delivery Optimization is now the downloader used by Windows Update for Windows Server, the way that it is on Windows 10 client since the Anniversary Update. This optimization can provide peer-to-peer bandwidth optimization between Windows Server machines if users so desire.

A list of known issues for Build 16257 is included in Microsoft's blog post.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-second-windows-server-2016-test-build-runs-linux-distributions/

SUSE and Supermicro Enter Global Partnership to Provide Solutions for Mission-Critical Workloads, Software-Defined Data Center and Embedded Linux

NUREMBERG, Germany, and SAN JOSE, Calif., July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- SUSE® and Supermicro have entered into a global partnership that will provide innovative new enterprise IT solutions based on #Supermicro hardware featuring #SUSE #OpenStack Cloud, SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE #Linux Enterprise Server for #SAP Applications, and embedded Linux. SUSE and Supermicro are responding to market demand to provide converged solutions. For the first of multiple planned joint solutions, Supermicro and SUSE have done the complex work of integrating OpenStack into a market-ready offering. Built on SUSE YES Certified hardware, this all-in-one private cloud solution is a validated reference architecture, leveraging Supermicro's Green Computing with best performance per watt, dollar and square foot. This converged cloud and storage solution provides customers a streamlined installation of a production-ready Infrastructure as a Service private cloud with scalability from one rack to many, based on the customer's needs. "Supermicro's NVMe-enabled OpenStack hardware with SUSE's proven enterprise software suite maximizes compute performance," said Michael McNerney, vice president, Software Solutions and Infrastructure, at Supermicro. "Combined with space-efficient SimplyDouble storage you get unparalleled block and object services to deliver a scalable cloud datacenter infrastructure. When maximum performance is required, our 1U Ultra SuperServer with 10 hot-swap NVMe drives provides unbeatable storage throughput." Phillip Cockrell, SUSE vice president of Worldwide Alliance Sales, said, "Supermicro's hardware offerings and partner ecosystem teamed with SUSE's OpenStack cloud and software-defined storage solutions will provide significant value in a very cost-competitive market. These solutions harness the innovation of open source with the backing and support of global providers Supermicro and SUSE. They are supplanting traditional, more-expensive cloud and storage solutions, giving customers more choice and flexibility to meet their business objectives and better serve their own customers."

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/suse-and-supermicro-enter-global-partnership-to-provide-solutions-for-mission-critical-workloads-software-defined-data-center-and-embedded-linux-300489632.html

Micro Focus posts pre-HPE Software borg numbers

Its the last set of results it'll post before its $8.8bn spin merge deal with #HPESoftware, and the UK's #MicroFocus is keen to show it has a clean bill of health. The software company reported unaudited revenues of about $1.38bn for year ended 30 April 2017, up 10.9 per cent from about $1.25bn on year ended 30 April 2016. Not taking takeovers into account, revenues last year dipped 0.9 per cent. "Mergers and acquisitions continue to be a key component of our strategy," exec chairman Kevin Loosemore explained, rather obviously. Aside from the #HPE Software deal, #MicroFocus has also acquired #Serena, #GWAVA Inc, #OpenATTIC and some assets from #OpenStack #IaaS and #CloudFoundry #PaaS over the year, it said. Overall, the #SUSE Portfolio trickled up to 22 per cent of revenue (from 20.4 per cent) while the Micro Focus Portfolio fell to 78 per cent from 79.6 per cent last year. Adjusted operating profit for Micro Focus was $539.4m, up from $453.7m. Before tax profit was $196.3m, up from $195.4m. Under the $8.8bn software business spin merge deal with HPE Software, Micro Focus paid the tech giant $2.5bn cash plus a 50.1 per cent stake in the merged organization, worth $6.3bn.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/12/micro_focus_results/

SUSE CaaS Platform Rides Growing Container Interest

The container-as-a-service ( #CaaS ) movement gained a new entrant, with #SUSE unveiling its aptly-named CaaS Platform. The offering includes a development and hosting component for container-based applications and services. SUSE said the service supports organizations either containerizing existing applications directly or those using a microservices architecture. The platform uses #Kubernetes for orchestration, its own #MicroOS operating system, and Salt as a basis for configuration.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/suse-caas-platform-rides-growing-container-interest/2017/06/

Global Software Defined Storage Sds Market 2017 – Hewlett Packard, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft

The Software Defined Storage #Sds Market 2017 examines the performance of the Software Defined Storage Sds market, enclosing an in-depth judgment of the Software Defined Storage Sds market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Software Defined Storage Sds market in the present as well as the future prospects from various angles in detail. The Global Software Defined Storage Sds Market 2017 report includes Software Defined Storage Sds industry volume, market Share, market Trends, Software Defined Storage Sds Growth aspects, a wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis, manufacturing capacity, Software Defined Storage Sds Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.  Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Software Defined Storage Sds Market 2017: 1 #HewlettPackard 2 #DellEMC 3 #Cisco 4 #IBM 5 #Microsoft 6 #Intel 7 #VMware 8 #Lenovo 9 #Huawei 10 #SUSE
http://heraldanalyst.com/global-software-defined-storage-sds-market-2017-hewlett-packard-dell-cisco-ibm-microsoft/

Software-defined storage on the march, says SUSE expert

Initial deployments of software-defined storage ( #SDS) are primarily focused on the storage of unstructured data, according to Larry Morris, senior product manager at #SUSE #Linux. This was because most customer data was unstructured data, and unstructured data was also growing much more rapidly than structured data, he told iTWire in a detailed interview. The Germany-based SUSE announced its software-defined storage product back in 2014 and Morris, who in an earlier life designed proprietary storage systems with #HP, said some examples of use cases where SUSE Enterprise Storage was deployed included disk-based back-up where the software-defined storage solution was used to store the back-up data. "Other use cases are storage for large files such as medical images or video surveillance data; archival data that has not been accessed in a while and is migrated from primary storage systems; and on-premise cloud storage using a SUSE Enterprise Storage #Amazon #S3 -compliant interface," he said.

http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/storage/77837-software-defined-storage-on-the-march,-says-suse-expert.html

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/

Broadcom Begins Shipping Its 9400 MegaRAID Controllers

#Broadcom Limited announced today that it is shipping its new #NVMe /SAS/SATA #TriModeSERDES #MegaRAID family of controllers the 9400 series. The new 9400 series of MegaRAID controllers are all about performance, data protection, and power efficiency. The announcement today is aimed at OEMs, system integrators, and storage manufacturers.

Broadcom refers to the 9400 series as the world’s fastest NVMe/SAS/SATA Tri-Mode SERDES MegaRAID family of controllers. The numbers they give are over 1.7 million IOPS, making the ideal use cases as all intensive cloud scaling, web services, business intelligence and OLTP applications used within traditional and hyper-converged server platforms. The 9400 series support up to 16 internal and external ports on a single chip. And with power consumption starting at just 10 watts, the 9400 series is one of the most efficient RAID controller card in its class.

Features include:

Up to 16 internal or 16 external or internal NVMe/SAS/SATA ports with power consumption at less than 1.1W per portSupport of up to x8 PCIe lanes at transfer rate up to 8.0 GT/s per laneDesigned to support 8GB of cache based memoryBuilt upon PCI Express 3.012Gb/s HDD/SSD data transfer ratesHigh-speed DDR4 memory interface, improving NVMe hardware RAID system performanceCertified by Broadcom to support up to 24 NVMe, 1024 SSDs or 1024 HDDsCertified Broadcom OS Support for #Microsoft Windows, #VMware, #Linux ( #SuSE, #RedHat), and #FreeBSD

Broadcom is the market leader in NVMe/SAS/SATA Tri-mode SERDES storage technology. Broadcom is helping its customers transform their data centers by enabling them to take full advantage of flash and disk-based storage performance.

Availability

OEM volume shipments are available today for the new Tri-Mode family of high-sequential performance12Gb/s NVMe/SAS/SATA MegaRAID solutions.

http://www.storagereview.com/broadcom_begins_shipping_its_9400_megaraid_controllers

SUSE Enterprise Storage: A Frugal Solution for Large Data

One of the biggest challenges facing IT departments currently is Large Data and the storage capacity it requires. Storing files of this size if often expensive and as IT departments struggle to do more with less budget, low-cost alternatives are now much in demand. This paper looks at how #SUSE #EnterpriseStorage solutions can provide you with cost-effective, enterprise-grade storage for your Large Data files that contains all the built-in efficiencies of #Ceph.

http://www.idgconnect.com/view_abstract/43475/suse-enterprise-storage-a-frugal-solution-large-data