Lenovo HPC Bounces Back After IBM Spinoff

When @IBM sold off its System x division to Lenovo Group in the fall of 2014, some big supercomputing centers in the United States and Europe that were long-time customers of @BigBlue had to stop and think about what their future systems would look like and who would supply them. It was not a foregone conclusion that the Xeon-based portion of #IBM ’s #HPC business would just move over to @Lenovo as part of the sale.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Many believed that Lenovo could not hold onto its HPC business, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and #Dell were quick to capitalize on the confusion that @IBM sowed into the market to boost their own HPC divisions. But, as it turns out, the HPC market grew and Lenovo has experience with hyperscalers and a low cost structure – things that IBM did not have – that have allowed the company to stabilize and then grow its HPC business. Even Lenovo seems a bit surprised by how this business has rebounded so quickly after such a tumultuous change.

“We thought back then that there would be concerns that Lenovo would not be able to carry on the HPC mantle that IBM had, and the good news is that it is going much better than we ever were at IBM,” says Scott Tease, executive director of high performance computing at Lenovo. “Not only are we continuing to win the big high profile deals, such as the startup of the Marconi cluster at Cineca in Italy, which is the largest Omni-Path cluster in the world. So we continue to win on those really big ones that IBM used to win. But what is ever better is that we have a lot more success at what we call the run-rate HPC at universities and industry that buy clusters in the $500,000 to $1 million range. We were never as IBM to be cost conscious enough to win these types of deals, but as Lenovo, we are. We still win the big deals, but we have this run rate engine going. We never had that in the past.”

http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/06/28/lenovo-hpc-bounces-back-ibm-spinoff/

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

New, better way to build circuits for world's first useful quantum computers

The research team led by David Weiss at Penn State University performed a specific single quantum operation on individual atoms in a P-S-U pattern on three separate planes stacked within a cube-shaped arrangement. The team then used light beams to selectively sweep away all the atoms that were not targeted for that operation. The scientists then made pictures of the results by successively focusing on each of the planes in the cube. The photos, which are the sum of 20 implementations of this process, show bright spots where the atoms are in focus, and fuzzy spots if they are out of focus in an adjacent plane -- as is the case for all the light in the two empty planes. The photos also show both the success of the technique and the comparatively small number of targeting errors.

Abstract:
The era of #quantumcomputers is one step closer as a result of research published in the current issue of the journal Science. The research team has devised and demonstrated a new way to pack a lot more quantum computing power into a much smaller space and with much greater control than ever before. The research advance, using a 3-dimensional array of atoms in quantum states called quantum bits -- or qubits -- was made by David S. Weiss, professor of physics at Penn State University, and three students on his lab team. He said "Our result is one of the many important developments that still are needed on the way to achieving quantum computers that will be useful for doing computations that are impossible to do today, with applications in cryptography for electronic data security and other computing-intensive fields." #nanotechnology

New, better way to build circuits for world's first useful quantum computersUniversity Park, PA | Posted on June 28th, 2016

The new technique uses both laser light and microwaves to precisely control the switching of selected individual qubits from one quantum state to another without altering the states of the other atoms in the cubic array. The new technique demonstrates the potential use of atoms as the building blocks of circuits in future quantum computers.

The scientists invented an innovative way to arrange and precisely control the qubits, which are necessary for doing calculations in a quantum computer. "Our paper demonstrates that this novel approach is a precise, accurate, and efficient way to control large ensembles of qubits for quantum computing," Weiss said.

The paper in Science describes the new technique, which Weiss's team plans to continue developing further. The achievement also is expected to be useful to scientists pursuing other approaches to building a quantum computer, including those based on other atoms, on ions, or on atom-like systems in 1 or 2 dimensions. "If this technique is adopted in those other geometries, they would also get this robustness," Weiss said.

http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=53621

WDC's SanDisk flashes its vSphere speed-up creds to world+dog

@WesternDigital Corporation’s @SanDisk unit has VAIO-compliant flash caching software and hardware for #vSphere servers.

This announcement represents WDC inheriting a two year #SanDisk - @VMware partnership to make use of SanDisk’s acquired FusionIO PCIe flash hardware and software. There are two products:

FlashSoft 4 software for VMware vSphere 6Flash Virtualization System, a flash-based hardware and software product incorporating FlashSoft v4

FlashSoft is caching software taking advantage of a server’s flash drive. Its version 4 leverages a Western Digital and VMware VAIO co-design partnership for vSphere 6.

FlashSoft v4 is the result, we’re told, of a two year co-operative design project by Western Digital and VMware, with FlashSoft 4 software using VMware vSphere’s APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO), providing, WDC SanDisk claims, “the highest level of usability and performance with vSphere 6.”

Ravi Swaminathan, Data Center Solutions Business Unit VP and GM at Western Digital Corporation, went into hype mode in his canned quote, saying: “These new product innovations resulted from the deep ongoing engagement between our companies and are expected to greatly enhance virtual machine performance. We look forward to expanding possibilities of the new architecture to continue delivering high-value solutions for our customers.”

“New innovations”? Umm, we didn’t know there were any other kind of innovations.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/28/wdc_sandisk_vsphere_speedup/

Dell Promises 'Seamless' Deal Registration For Partners On First Day After EMC Merger

@Dell is urging channel partners to sign on with @EMC 's Business Partner Program, and promising that deal registration and sales coverage will be seamless from the first day the two IT giants are merged, but partners' expectations are slightly less optimistic.

In a letter to partners Tuesday, @MariusHaas, #Dell chief commercial officer and president of enterprise solutions, said the company is "driving to maintain the partner and customer experience you have come to expect today, and at the onset of day one, provide seamless deal registration and intact sales coverage plans."

"I do not think it will be seamless," said a top executive at one large #Dell and #EMC solution provider, who did not want to be named. "Nothing in life ever is."

http://m.crn.com/news/channel-programs/300081182/dell-promises-seamless-deal-registration-for-partners-on-first-day-after-emc-merger.htm

Graphenea, NanoXplore Inc., GrollTex, Raith America and More Slated to Present at the Graphene World Summit 2016

@SmithersApex, a company of The @SmithersGroup, pleased to announce that the @NanoXplore, @Graphenea, @Graphene3DLabs, @GrollTex, @Haydale, @RaithAmerica Inc., and more will present at the #GrapheneWorldSummit. Taking place September 19-20, 2016 in San Diego, California, the conference will bring together the scientific, commercial and investment communities in order to forge new partnerships and exchange ideas in pursuit of the successful development and commercialization of #graphene.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160628006165/en/Graphenea-NanoXplore-GrollTex-Raith-America-Slated-Present

Catalogic Adds Oracle and SQL Integration, EMC Unity Storage, Amazon S3 With Latest Release of Its Flagship Copy Data Management Platform, ECX 2.4

WOODCLIFF LAKE, NJ--(Marketwired - Jun 28, 2016) -  #CatalogicSoftware, the leading provider of software-defined copy data management (CDM), today announced the release of ECX 2.4, the newest version of its award-winning software platform. This release delivers significant capabilities by adding #Oracle and #SQL application aware integration, support for #EMCUnity storage, native support for #Amazon Web Services ( #AWS ) and deepening integration with popular DevOps tools. ECX 2.4 includes several other significant features that expand the capabilities of the platform for new and existing customers. 

As the market's only independent "In-Place" CDM solution, ECX is designed to leverage the snapshot and replication technologies of the existing storage and virtual infrastructure in a customer environment. This in-place CDM approach has significant advantages over alternatives in that it requires no additional infrastructure for the customer to purchase and manage, and leverages the existing production environment rather than requiring the creation of new copies of data. This advantage is especially powerful in database environments where the databases need to remain online and accessible continuously, and there the data volumes make the creation of extra copies untenable. 

"Today's release of ECX 2.4 delivers deep integration for both Oracle and SQL, allowing our customers to leverage their existing infrastructure to further expand their ability to eliminate copy sprawl, while dramatically improving their capabilities to deliver fresh copies of key databases to those functions and business units that demand them," commented Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic. "At the same time, we are delivering huge advancements in ECX's capabilities for both Hybrid Cloud and DevOps -- two key modernization initiatives that our customers are pursuing." 

http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/catalogic-adds-oracle-sql-integration-emc-unity-storage-amazon-s3-with-latest-release-2138049.htm

Kentik Introduces Post-Hadoop Network Traffic Analytics

@Kentik, the network traffic intelligence company, today announced the release of significant enhancements to #KentikDetect, its big data network analytics solution. New features include multi-dimensional traffic analytics, enabling access to billions of possible analyses operating on trillions of instantly accessible data records, new traffic flow visualizations, and support for network performance metrics.

"Kentik is the first network traffic analytics solution built from the ground up on a big data platform, offered both as a multi-tenant SaaS as well as an on-premises deployment," said Avi Freedman, Kentik CEO. "Our latest enhancements illustrate the power of the Kentik platform to deliver analytics capabilities previously unavailable to anyone but webscale giants. In 15 minutes, customers can get from registration to production use of big data analysis that goes beyond Map/Reduce and streaming analytics-based approaches, with no appliances or software deployment required."

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kentik-introduces-post-hadoop-network-traffic-analytics-300291106.html

Nutanix CMO After Risque Conference Stunt: I Will Resign If It Happens Again

Executives from hyper-convergence startup @Nutanix have apologized for a marketing stunt widely criticized as sexist that took place at a company event last week, with its chief marketing officer vowing to resign in the event of a recurrence. #Nutanix

Last Tuesday evening at the Encore resort in Las Vegas, Nutanix held a poolside party for some 2,500 attendees of its second annual .NEXT customer conference. The party featured bikini-clad female Encore staff members waving light wands and greeting guests while sitting on a small Ferris wheel near the entrance.

The fact that the Ferris wheel was also adorned with the Nutanix .NEXT logo led some to call out the San Jose, Calif.-based startup for a display they deemed offensive and sexist after photos began circulating on Twitter. 

http://m.crn.com/news/virtualization/300081170/nutanix-cmo-after-risque-conference-stunt-i-will-resign-if-it-happens-again.htm

Pepperdata Diagnoses Troublesome Hadoop Clusters With Complimentary Health Check

Many organizations use @Hadoop to gain competitive advantage, but because of the very nature of distributed systems, there are inherent performance limitations that even the most advanced #Hadoop users will inevitably encounter. @Pepperdata, the world’s experts in the performance of distributed systems at scale, today announced the availability of #HadoopHealthCheck, a complimentary, expert assessment that evaluates and diagnoses Hadoop clusters of 100 nodes or more, and provides full visibility into current cluster conditions. With the Hadoop Health Check program, organizations can easily determine how to improve their current Hadoop operations by solving the innate limitations of distributed systems with automated, policy-based prioritization and active management in their 

http://insidebigdata.com/2016/06/27/pepperdata-diagnoses-troublesome-hadoop-clusters-with-complimentary-health-check/

Apache™ Hadoop® Distributions Now ODPi Runtime Compliant

-@ODPi, a nonprofit organization accelerating the open ecosystem of big data solutions, today announced that the #Apache™ #Hadoop® distributions products from #Altiscale, #ArenaData, #Hortonworks, #IBM, and #Infosys are now ODPi Runtime Compliant. This ensures that their distributions provide big data application vendors a consistent set of base level expectations as defined by ODPi Runtime specification.

"Our members represent all key roles in the big data ecosystem -- Apache Hadoop distros, ISVs, system integrators, solution providers and end users -- and have brought their real-world experience in helping to align enterprise demands with the developer community," said John Mertic, director of program management for ODPi. "Having Altiscale, ArenaData, Hortonworks, IBM, and Infosys declare compliance with the ODPi Runtime Specification is a strong step toward simplifying and standardizing the big data ecosystem to accelerate the delivery of business outcomes."

ODPi's work complements the Apache Software Foundation and helps companies use Apache Hadoop more effectively. The organization's aim is to develop a cross-industry standard that enables developers to easily write applications that sit on top of big data stacks, lowering the costs of interoperability across systems.

http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/apache-hadoopr-distributions-now-odpi-runtime-compliant-2137749.htm

MapR, Microsoft make announcements at Hadoop and Red Hat summits

Today, at @HadoopSummit in San Jose, CA, #MapR announced its new #SpyGlass initiative, designed to help customers have greater administrator productivity and more sophisticated cluster management. The first installment in this initiative is an operations monitoring solution - in effect a full blown log analytics platform - that stiches together #ElasticSearch, #OpenTSDB, #MapR-DB, #Kibana and #Grafana to provide cluster operations dashboards, on both PC/laptop and mobile form factors (including phone and tablet).

No clustermuck
The dashboards contain information on node infrastructure, #YARN, #MapReduce, storage/CPU utilization as well as data for each of several services running on the cluster. In providing this functionality, the package ends up being MapR's answer to Cloudera Manager andApache Ambari, as much as it is a machine analytics engine for the cluster.

The package, which is slated for release in early August, is customizable, allowing individual components to be swapped out for other visualization products on which the customer may be standardized. Alerting features are coming in the future and while the package is currently focused on log analytics for MapR clusters themselves, my take is that broadening of the platform to a more general log analytics solution is a possibility as well.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/mapr-microsoft-make-announcements-at-hadoop-and-red-hat-summits/

ASE Selects NetApp to Develop New Cloud Management Offerings

@NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced that ASE has leveraged its existing partnership with the vendor to develop two new cloud management offerings based on NetAppPrivateStorage ( #NPS ) and #NetAppStorageGRID® Webscale solutions. As one of Australia's top-10 most trusted cloud providers, ASE sought to offer customers new ways to manage their data in a public cloud with a simple and straightforward web portal.

Now, with a data centre network spanning the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, ASE supports over 200 companies ranging from small to medium enterprises to some of the world's largest corporate organisations. These corporations include First Wave, EzyPay, AW Edwards, Silver Trak Digital, and several global media companies.

http://m.digitaljournal.com/pr/2988271

Nimble Storage Selects Cokeva for Repair Services

@Cokeva, Inc., the premier provider of repair services for the service industry, announced today that @Nimble Storage, the leader in predictive flash storage solutions, has chosen #Cokeva to provide engineering services in support of the company's reverse logistics supply chain. #Nimble

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nimble-storage-selects-cokeva-for-repair-services-300291000.html

An Exciting Innovation In Big Data: A New Cloudera Director Plugin For VMware VSphere

There is an exciting new development in the big data space!  #VMware is collaborating with #Cloudera to jointly develop a new Plugin for the @Cloudera Director management environment to deploy and manage Cloudera’s software on to #vSphere.

For those who are not familiar with it, Cloudera Director is an enterprise-grade tool for deploying and managing Cloudera Distribution including #Hadoop (CDH) in cloud environments.  The #ClouderaDirector Plugin for vSphere will now extend that capability to vSphere based environments running on premises.  Cloudera and VMware are together focused on developing this tool as the main way to deploy CDH instances to the vSphere platform. Here is a picture of the architecture showing the position of the Plugin within the overall Cloudera deployment landscape. Using the Web User Interface to Cloudera Director, you can now provision several CDH clusters and several Cloudera Manager instances onto virtual machines on vSphere. At provisioning time, Cloudera Director calls the vSphere APIs first and then calls Cloudera Manager (CM) to do the actual installation of the CDH software.

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/06/an-exciting-innovation-in-big-data-a-new-cloudera-director-plugin-for-vmware-vsphere.html

Bharti Airtel deploys Cloudera platform to gain customer insights

NEW DELHI: @BhartiAirtel Tuesday deployed #Cloudera Enterprise to build a 360-degree view of their customers in India, and to leverage customer data to execute multichannel campaigns and influence buyers in a highly competitive market.

US-based Cloudera is a provider of secure data management and analytics platform built on #Apache #Hadoop and open source technologies.

Telecom service providers are one of the the world's biggest aggregators of consumer information and use insights to tailor-made their offerings as per subscribers' behavior.

Operators are using Cloudera Enterprise to securely bring together user, network, device, business and social data to drive customer intimacy, improve network performance and drive new revenue streams, the telco said in a statement.

"As part of our digital journey at Airtel, our main focus is on providing the best customer experience with our new Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics platform, powered by Cloudera," Harmeen Mehta, Group CIO for Bharti Airtel said.

Mehta said that the company is now able to gain an even greater technical edge, empowering marketers with intelligent data and analytics to make better decisions and improve the entire customer lifecycle with customized offerings.

http://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/bharti-airtel-deploys-cloudera-platform-to-gain-customer-insights/52952421

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

The Beginning of the Universe? Quantum Computer Could Simulate Particle Physics

For the first time, scientists were able to simulate the beginnings of the universe through a #quantumcomputer.

According to the researchers, this is the first full simulation of a high-energy physics experiment and could shed light on many hidden aspects of the universe, from how quarks bind together into protons and neutrons to how the universe came to be after the Big Bang.

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/24382/20160628/beginning-universe-quantum-computer-simulate-particle-physics.htm

Diamanti believes appliances can simplify containers for the enterprise

Once or twice a decade, the IT industry reaches an agreement that an emerging technology is the next big thing—and containers are clearly the next big platform for applications. For most enterprises, it's not a matter of "if" containers make it into production, but "when" containers make it into production.

I wrote earlier this spring about Red Hat's unique opportunity to make money by simplifying open source for the enterprise. And, as the #RedHat Summit in San Francisco opens this week, it's clear that simplicity is still what is missing around containers. The container market is still very much the Wild West in terms of emerging open source (#Kubernetes, DC/OS, #Docker SWARM) and commercial platforms (#Azure Container Service, #Amazon #Lambda).

It's also a tough market for buyers to decipher as they place their architecture bets.

As organizations evolve their architectures beyond virtual machines, and look for better ways to embrace the new container form factor, they're also looking for a little simplicity. One startup that hopes to crack the code on open source monetization and simplification of containers in one fell swoop is Diamanti. I spoke with Diamanti vice president of products, Mark Balch, to learn more about the hardware innovation that's happening around containers, the network and storage barriers that have challenged container operations, and the company's latest efforts around Red Hat's OpenShift.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/diamanti-believes-appliances-can-simplify-containers-for-the-enterprise/

FLASH STORAGE AND THE FUTURE OF THE DATA CENTER

Flash-based storage, which has long been established in the consumer market—think mobile phones and laptops—is now making significant inroads in the enterprise, where it’s quickly becoming preferred over hard-disk drives owing to the improving cost-to-performance ratio. Thus, although hard-disk-drive storage will remain a data center staple thanks to the relatively low costs to store and access cold data, it has become clear that any organization not considering flash storage for active data will be left behind.

In other words, we are now in the age of flash storage.

Where Does Flash-Based Storage Make Sense?

When cost was prohibitive to widespread flash=storage implementation, IT management needed to outline specific, stringent implementation plans to justify the cost. Even then, there was usually a power struggle between teams on where flash storage should be deployed: Should the database team get it? What about the virtualization team? Now that flash storage solutions are so much more affordable, organizations that are exploring how best to use them should look for wherever there is a need for greater performance.

http://www.datacenterjournal.com/flash-storage-future-data-center/