VMware Increases Guidance Following Strong Growth In NSX, VSAN And End User Computing

Strong growth in #softwaredefinedstorage, #softwaredefinednetworking technologies and end user computing helped define a strong fiscal first quarter for #VMware. The company also expects its #VMwareCloud on #AWS service to have a successful rollout. The shift towards these latest offerings also helped VMware increase its guidance for all of fiscal 2018.  VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, in response to analyst questions on the company's earnings conference call, said the overall market interest in its upcoming VMware Cloud on AWS service is strong. [Related: VMware CEO: Strong #NSX, #vSAN,# VxRail Growth Drives 2016, AWS Relationship Is Next] "[We were] significantly oversubscribed for the beta slots," Gelsinger said. VMware Cloud on AWS service availability is on-track for mid-2017, Gelsinger said. "Certainly, by VMworld [in August] we'll have a lot more to say about availability," he said. VMware will not announce VMware Cloud on AWS pricing until availability, Gelsinger said. However, he said, pricing discussions have started with beta customers. "We feel confident we're landing well within the marketplace … [It] allows customers to move seamlessly into the cloud experience," he said. Amazon is providing a new hardware footprint on which to run the VMware stack, with VMware managing the entire VMware experience, Gelsinger said. That experience will continue to be dynamic and scalable, he said. "That's part of what's so compelling to customers: They're not giving anything up," he said. More information on VMware Cloud on AWS will be available as it is rolled out, he said. VMware's vSAN software-defined storage technology is growing, with license bookings up by over 150 percent year-over-year, said Zane Rowe, VMware's CFO. The company already has over 8,000 vSAN bookings, he said. Strength in vSAN was significantly enhanced with the April introduction of vSAN 6.6, the first to include native hyper-converged infrastructure security, Rowe said. "We believe that we have the broadest offering in the hyper-converged market, and that vSAN outgrew the competition," he said. VMware's NSX software-defined networking technology is also showing strength. Rowe said NSX license bookings grow by over 50 percent year-over-year, and the company already has 2,600 NSX customers. Gelsinger said that nine of every ten top VMware deals included NSX, with security a key driver of NSX adoption, Gelsinger said. "It continues to be an integral piece of all of our offerings," he said. VMware's end-user computing business also did very well with a 20-percent year-over-year growth in license bookings, Rowe said. It was lead by a healthy growth in both mobile and desktop software sales, he said. VMware recently adjusted its fiscal calendar on January 2017 because of Dell's acquisition of VMware parent company EMC with an abbreviated fiscal 2017. Because of that, the company's fiscal first quarter 2018 results are compared to its fiscal first quarter 2016. That "stub period" of fiscal 2017 year ran from January 1 to February 3. VMware reported revenue for the first fiscal quarter of 2018, which ended May 5, of $1.74 billion, up about 6 percent from the $1.69 billion reported during the comparable quarter in fiscal 2016. That included licensing revenue of $610 million, up 6.6 percent; software maintenance revenue of $974 million, up 9.3 percent; and professional services revenue of $152 million, up 20.6 percent. About half of VMware's revenue comes from the U.S. The company reported GAAP net income of $232 million, or $0.56 a share, up from income of $161 million, or $0.38 a share, reported during the first fiscal quarter of 2016. On a non-GAAP basis, net income for the quarter was $412 million, or $0.99 a share, up from the first fiscal quarter of 2016's $366 million, or $0.86 a share. VMware increased its guidance for the second quarter and for the full fiscal year 2018. Second fiscal quarter 2018 revenue is expected to be between $1.84 billion and $1.89 billion, compared to the second fiscal quarter of 2016's reported revenue of $1.69 billion. The license revenue for the next quarter is expected to be between $695 million and $725 million. Earnings per share, non-GAAP, are expected to hit between $1.11 and $1.14, up from $0.97 reported in the comparable period during fiscal 2016. For the full fiscal 2018 year, revenue is expected to react about $7.61 billion, up from the $6.57 billion reported for all of the fiscal year 2016. That includes licensing revenue of $2.98 billion, up from fiscal 2016's $2.72 billion. The company also expects full-year (non-GAAP) earnings of $4.91 per share, up from fiscal 2016's $4.06 per share.

http://m.crn.com/news/cloud/300086226/vmware-increases-guidance-following-strong-growth-in-nsx-vsan-and-end-user-computing.htm

VMware NSX Load Balancing – Accelerated Layer 4 Virtual Servers

In the previous blog, we investigated the basic feature set of #NSX Load Balancing, some of the business reasons to use it, and deployed an ESG (Edge Services Gateway), the NSX load balancing platform. Today, we are going to setup our first virtual server. When we look at load balancing, it operates at the Transport layer or above of the OSI model and is inclusive of the network layer. In the most basic of terms, Load Balancing looks at a “session” from the transport layer and applies a load balancing algorithm and a NAT policy to the traffic. I put “session” in quotes because we can load balance both TCP and UDP based applications, but UDP does not have a stateful session, but we can still load balance UDP services.

Whenever someone has stated that and given application cannot be load balanced, I first ask them if the traffic can be processed by a NAT at either the client or server end. If the answer is yes, odds are that it can be load balanced with sufficient understanding of the application and the required ports, protocols and persistence to make the application function correctly. This is true with all load balancing platforms, but there are some corner cases where a very specific application proxy is required to function (such as SIP), so engage your partner SE or #VMware #NSX SE for help.  Ultimately you need to combine the knowledge of how the application functions and what it takes to bend the packets in the network to meet those requirements.

http://www.dabcc.com/vmware-nsx-load-balancing-accelerated-layer-4-virtual-servers/

The hyper-converged tech behind Dell EMC’s new 14G PowerEdge

#DellEMC launched the latest generation of its #PowerEdge server portfolio at Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada. The 14th-generation server brings together better compute, scalability and security, answering enterprise client requests for better automation and productivity with simplified lifecycle management, according to Yanbing Li (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of storage and availability at #VMware Inc. “We are very excited to work with Dell very closely on the #14G development and launch it. We are really looking for ‘better together’ opportunities,” Li said. “Coming from my business unit, storage and availability, we are [using] hyper-converged infrastructure solutions on top of the 14G server.” Li spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Dell EMC World about the technology capabilities that VMware is developing in conjunction with Dell Technologies Inc. She shared information about how the company’s focus is on customer requirements. (*Disclosure below.) Customers are influencing technology Leading the storage and availability business unit at VMware, Li is excited about the 14G technology and how it will enhance her work with Hosted Desktop Infrastructure. She believes that this translates to better storage performance and capacity for vSAN, VMware’s software-defined data center product offering. “We [the engineering teams] have been working very closely behind the scenes … aiming to make our solutions available, vSAN software ready for 14G on day zero. We’re really taking advantage of the hardware innovation from the very beginning [until] they are available to our customers,” Li said. VMware recently launched the 6th generation of its flagship product in the storage and availability line, vSAN. The company is on the 6th generation within three years because it is continually improving capabilities and is driven by customers’ demands, Li noted. “[They] have asked us for better performance, better TCO, better security, better operation simplicity. In all these things we’re responding … all our customers are asking us to better improve their experience,” she said. vSAN software powers VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure solution, and according to Li, VMware’s chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger predicts that most companies will be moving to a hyper-converged infrastructure. Hyper-converged is not just compute and storage; it is also layered on a software-defined network, Li explained. Part of Gelsinger’s prediction also included a fully automated management suite to run an end-to-end software-defined data center solution that continuously extends across VMware’s cross-cloud architecture. Going back to the customer, Li spoke about the market demand for a fully-integrated set of services, highlighting that it is too difficult for the average enterprise to adopt services at a point product level. “Our new products suite called VMware Cloud Foundation is an integrated software stack, a turnkey stack, with full lifecycle management work for an on-premise environment, as well as extending into the cloud,” Li stated. In other efforts at the company, Li discussed the mission to create a more inclusive environment. She is part of VMinclusion, which is what she refers to as a business service approach to creating a more inclusive workplace environment. “I’m just dying to see a more diverse crowd at events like this. Clearly, we still have a lot of work to do, but I’m excited to see quite a few of female speakers on the main stage,” she said.

https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/06/01/the-hyper-converged-tech-behind-dell-emcs-new-14g-poweredge-dellemcworld/

Hadoop Servers Expose Over 5 Petabytes of Data

Improperly configured #HDFS -based servers, mostly #Hadoop installs, are exposing over five petabytes of information, according to John Matherly, founder of Shodan, a search engine for discovering Internet-connected devices. The expert says he discovered 4,487 instances of HDFS-based servers available via public IP addresses and without authentication, which in total exposed over 5,120 TB of data. According to Matherly, 47,820 #MongoDB servers exposed only 25 TB of data. To put things in perspective, HDFS servers leak 200 times more data compared to MongoDB servers, which are ten times more prevalent. A report from Binary Edge from 2015 revealed that at the time, Redis, MongoDB, Memcached, and ElasticSearch servers put together exposed a tota of only 1.1 PB of data.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hadoop-servers-expose-over-5-petabytes-of-data/

Global Cloud Storage Market Key Players - Amazon Web Services (U.S.), IBM Corporation (U.S.), Microsoft Corporation (U.S.) by Forecast to 2023

In this rapidly changing world of technology, cloud storage market is gaining immense popularity owing to its ability to easily integrate with the already existing infrastructure of the enterprise. Cloud storage gateway solution provides features like encryption and compression which adds security to the data. It also allows rapid transfer of data on cloud. As compared to other regions, the cloud storage market in North America is expected to witness a significantly healthy growth is accounted for the highest market share throughout the forecast period. U.S and Canada are anticipated to drive the growth owing to the presence of large number of established players of cloud storage solutions in the cloud storage market. In addition to this, the region also has a well-established infrastructure and higher internet penetration. Moreover, increasing adoption of cloud storage by small and medium enterprises is expected to be a major factor for the growth of cloud storage market. The Cloud Storage Market is growing rapidly over 25% of CAGR and is expected to reach at approx. USD 104 billion by the end of forecast period. Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 30 market data tables and figures spread over 100 numbers of pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on “Cloud Storage Market -Forecast to 2023”. Major Key Players: #AmazonWebServices (U.S.) #IBM Corporation (U.S.) #Microsoft Corporation (U.S.) #VMware , Inc. (U.S.) #HPE nterprise Company (U.S.) #Google, Inc. (U.S.) #Oracle Corporation (U.S.) #Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (U.S.) #EMC Corporation (U.S.) #Dropbox, Inc. (U.S.)

http://www.newsmaker.com.au/news/311964/global-cloud-storage-market-key-players-amazon-web-services-us-ibm-corporation-us-microsoft-corporation-us-by-forecast-to-2023#.WTR8vCNOlnE

Schneider Electric Increases Certainty, Flexibility, Speed of Deployment for Converged IT with Cisco Certification of APC NetShelter SX

ANDOVER, Mass., June 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- #SchneiderElectric, the global specialist in energy management and automation, today announced the #APC NetShelter® SX IT cabinet with Shock Packaging is now certified to ship as a pre-integrated package with #Cisco Unified Computing System ( #UCS ) servers. Through this validation, APC is providing channel partners and customers the assurance of pre-tested, proven converged system compatibility, enabling them to deploy IT faster than ever before. Growing digital demands Today, businesses are facing increased pressure to keep pace with the rapid growth of big data and the Internet of Things ( #IoT ). To support the new demands of these trends, IT environments are becoming highly distributed and converged and must be flexible, easily repeatable and quickly deployable. However, for organizations utilizing Cisco UCS servers, their choice of physical infrastructure support solutions has been greatly limited: until now, pre-racked Cisco UCS servers were authorized for shipment in Cisco R Series racks only. This reduced the ability of organizations to optimize the physical infrastructure in a Cisco UCS converged system, increasing complexity and time to market. It also restricted business for partners.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/schneider-electric-increases-certainty-flexibility-speed-of-deployment-for-converged-it-with-cisco-certification-of-apc-netshelter-sx-300467242.html

Why IBM and Nutanix Entered into a Partnership

#Nutanix - #IBM partnership to facilitate #bigdata analytics In the middle of May, IBM entered into a strategic hardware partnership with Nutanix (NTNX). Under this partnership, Nutanix will build its systems on IBM’s Power servers. In combination with Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud, IBM Power Systems will deliver “a turnkey #hyperconverged solution targeting critical workloads in large enterprises,” according to the companies.

http://marketrealist.com/2017/06/why-ibm-and-nutanix-entered-into-a-partnership/

HPE sheds Nimble Storage employees in San Jose after acquisition

The #flashstorage company is cutting people in several cities across the country, including at its San Jose headquarters. #Nimble #HPE #Simplivity

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/06/01/hpe-nimble-storage-acquisition-job-cuts.html

mplifying HPE, Aruba's Share Gains, Cisco Layoffs and Why UCS Customers Should Make The Move To Synergy

Whitman On The Record #HewlettPackardEnterprise CEO Meg Whitman spoke with CRN about the company's plan to simplify and streamline, #Aruba market share gains, #Cisco layoffs and why customers should make the move from Cisco #UCS to Synergy. The discussion with Whitman came after HPE reported adjusted earnings of 35 cents per share on sales of $9.9 billion for its second fiscal quarter ended April 30. The Wall Street consensus was earnings of 35 cents per share on sales of $9.64 billion. HPE revenues, when adjusted for divestitures and without the impact of currency and the Tier 1 server sales decline, would have been up 1 percent compared with the year-ago quarter, according to the company. HPE's core industry standard server business rebounded with sales down 1 percent when adjusted for currency and divestitures. As part of the next step in its transformation into a smaller and faster moving $28 billion company, HPE plans to take out as much as $200 to $300 million in additional costs in the second half of the year. "We are taking a fresh look at the cost structure for the new HPE," said Whitman. "As a smaller company, it should be much easier to spot opportunities to optimize the business, streamline processes and reduce costs."
http://m.crn.com/slide-shows/data-center/300086186/crn-exclusive-hpe-ceo-whitman-on-simplifying-hpe-arubas-share-gains-cisco-layoffs-and-why-ucs-customers-should-make-the-move-to-synergy.htm

Microsoft releases version 2.0 of its deep learning toolkit

#Microsoft today launched version 2.0 of what is now called the #MicrosoftCognitiveToolkit. This #opensource toolkit, which was previously known as CNTK, is Microsoft’s competitor to similar tools like #TensorFlow, #Caffe and #Torch, and, while the first version was able to challenge many of its competitors in terms of speed, this second version puts an emphasis on usability (by adding support for #Python and the popular #Keras neural networking library, for example) and future extensibility, while still maintaining — and improving — its speed. The toolkit originally launched into beta in October 2016 and the team has tested it ever since. Now, the company deems it to be ready for production use. Microsoft technical fellow Xuedong Huang told me that the 1.0 release was very much about open sourcing Microsoft’s internal toolkit and making it available to others. Because it was essentially an internal tool, though, it didn’t support Python for example, even though it’s by far the most popular language among machine learning developers.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/microsoft-releases-version-2-0-of-its-deep-learning-toolkit/

Is EMC’s merger with Dell changing the shape of its converged infrastructure?

#EMC Corp. was known for sandwiching technologies into converged infrastructure before merging with #Dell to form #DellTechnologies Inc. Will it go on creating those systems independently or bring in new ingredients and influences through the merger? The company’s #VxRack System with #FLEX, a converged infrastructure product, provides a hint. “It’s leveraging, really, the best of our software-defined, the best of the server technologies out there — and it’s really leveraging this trend of customers that have started to adopt #HCI [hyper-converged infrastructure], and now they’re ready to go all in,” said Jon Siegal, (pictured) vice president of product marketing at Dell EMC, Dell’s infrastructure group. VxRack FLEX’s makers happily dove into Dell’s wide server portfolio, basing the system on Dell’s 14th generation PowerEdge server, Siegal added. These new servers house processors from Intel’s Xeon Scalable family of processors; Dell’s direct line to pre-released Intel chips boosts the infrastructure stacks above market expectations, Siegal told Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during an interview at theCUBE’s Boston, Massachusetts studio. (* Disclosure below.) On the other end of the VxRack FLEX stack, users can actually generate an on-premise cloud with easy application spin-up through Pivotal Cloud Foundry cloud computing software, Siegal explained.

https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/06/01/is-emcs-merger-with-dell-changing-the-shape-of-its-converged-infrastructure-thecube/

Quest Software creates distribution channel strategy as stand-alone vendor

As #Quest Software forges its way as an independent company, one of the initial steps it has taken is to develop a distribution channel strategy. #Dell sold Quest last year as part of the #DellSoftware Group to private equity firm Francisco Partners and hedge fund manager Elliott Management. Quest, under new ownership, was established as a stand-alone company in November 2016, as was fellow Dell Software Group company #SonicWall. Since then, Quest has focused on growing its channel, with efforts that have included transitioning from a largely one-tier model of direct and indirect business to a two-tier model through partnerships with distributors.
http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/news/450420030/Quest-Software-creates-distribution-channel-strategy-as-stand-alone-vendor

Sorry, Amazon, But Microsoft Is The World's #1 Cloud Vendor--Here's Why. CLOUD WARS

#Amazon Web Services is one of the truly great success stories of the past decade—superb vision, brilliant execution, outstanding people, and a hockey-stick growth rate that most enterprise-tech vendors can only dream about. But life’s not always fair, and while #AWS and its supporters can make some good points about how and why it’s the biggest of the big dogs in the cloud, the simple truth is that #Microsoft is able to offer corporate customers more cloud innovation across more parts of those customers’ businesses—and can drive more business value for those customers via the cloud—than Amazon can.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/06/01/sorry-amazon-but-microsoft-is-the-worlds-1-cloud-vendor-heres-why-cloud-wars/?c=0&s=InTheCloud

VDI deserves another look based on Dell EMC VDI Complete

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure ( #VDI) is well known to be a vastly underutilized technology in enterprise. A large majority of the market has long been aware of the potential benefits but has been waiting on the technology to mature. The new #DellEMC VDI Complete offering announced recently at Dell EMC World 2017 was a big reminder of how far this technology has most recently progressed and why it is time for a revisit.

http://www.cio.com/article/3199031/cloud-computing/vdi-deserves-another-look-based-on-dell-emc-vdi-complete.html

Hedvig packages software-defined storage with HPE servers to deliver a scale-out, hybrid cloud storage offering

#Hedvig unveiled on Thursday a new offering bundled with Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( #HPE ) to enable rack-scale infrastructure aimed at enterprises building private, hybrid and multi-datacenter clouds. The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform combines Hedvig software-defined storage with HPE Apollo 4200 servers and is available in 48- and 96-terabyte configurations. The pretested, validated solution is a rack-scale infrastructure designed for private, hybrid, and multi-datacenter cloud solutions. Joint customers benefit from improved time-to-market and lower the costs associated with data-driven, digital business services. The initial solution is available on Apollo 4200 servers, with Apollo 4500 and ProLiant server variants to follow. The joint Hedvig-HPE solution offers multi-protocol support to collapse disparate tiers of storage to unify block, file, and object interfaces in a single platform. Eliminate the need for disparate SAN, NAS, and object storage and collapse traditional tiers by selecting workload-optimized servers. It also fine-tunes data services such as replication, deduplication, and compression on a per-application basis and seamlessly provision storage from any hypervisor or container system.  The offering also delivers native, multi-site replication for active data across any cloud by replicating data across any private or public cloud site, and building highly available infrastructures that allow seamless failover of applications, even among different public cloud providers. “Our customers — including some of the largest Fortune 50 companies — have requested we develop end-to-end solutions with HPE,” said Avinash Lakshman, CEO and founder of Hedvig. “Partnering with HPE Pathfinder and HPE Complete teams allowed us to integrate Hedvig quickly with HPE hardware and meet these customer requirements. Our partnership with HPE and resulting collaboration on this solution is yet more validation of the increasing momentum we’re seeing in software-defined storage.” The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform delivers the architecture needed to store, manage, and protect data in dynamic, cloud-based environments. Hedvig software-defined storage builds on HPE workload-optimized servers to enable enterprises to grow and tailor data services in lockstep with changing business requirements. “We are proud to support Hedvig as an HPE Complete partner as it expands to new markets,” said Milan Shetti, CTO of the Data Center Infrastructure Group at HPE. “Hedvig’s mission to create highly scalable and flexible storage for cloud infrastructures aligns with our vision for hybrid IT. Together we will better serve large enterprises worldwide.” Building on significant initial enterprise demand for the joint solution, the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform simplifies the management of data across hybrid IT infrastructures. With the availability of the platform through HPE Complete, customers benefit from the full HPE suite of hardware, software, and services to build rack-scale infrastructure to provide multi-petabyte with private cloud storage for VMware vSphere, XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Linux KVM; hybrid cloud storage-as-a-service, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform; and container storage for Docker, microservices, and DevOps. This is the initial joint solution since Hedvig announced its strategic investment from Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, HPE’s venture investment and partnership program. Now through HPE Complete, customers can purchase perpetual and subscription licenses to Hedvig in addition to receiving support for the solution directly from HPE and the HPE partner ecosystem. HPE Complete combines best-in-class third-party branded products with the added reliability of HPE’s interoperability assurance for a complete validated solution — all via one HPE purchase order. By 2021, more than 30 percent of enterprise datacenter storage capacity will be deployed on software-defined or hyperconverged architectures. The expanded relationship with HPE helps meet this demand, giving customers and members of the Hedvig CloudScale Partner program access to world-class HPE hardware and Hedvig software in pretested, supported products. The HPE Complete and Hedvig joint solution will be generally available from Monday, with pricing starting at $115 per terabyte per year plus associated HPE hardware costs.

http://wwpi.com/2017/06/01/hedvig-packages-software-defined-storage-with-hpe-servers-to-deliver-a-scale-out-hybrid-cloud-storage-offering/

NetApp CEO Kurian On Turning Corner On Growth, Competing With Dell EMC And Fending Off Pure Storage

#NetApp is on a roll. The company last week reported its second consecutive quarter of revenue and profit growth driven by its successful transition from legacy technologies such as its old 7-mode storage operating system to new strategic focuses on all-flash storage technology, its modern #OnTap operating system, and its hybrid cloud strategy. NetApp CEO George Kurian sat down with CRN to discuss his company's transformation, as well as look at what's coming with NetApp's upcoming technology plans and its September Insight conference. One topic was off-limits. Kurian declined to discuss NetApp's acquisition of two small vendors: Immersive Partner Solutions, a developer of software to validate multiple converged infrastructures through their lifecycles, and PlexiStor, a provider of software that turns off-the-shelf servers into high-performance converged infrastructure offerings with persistent memory technologies. For more on how NetApp has turned the corner and on what to expect in the near future, turn the page.

http://m.crn.com/slide-shows/storage/300086136/crn-exclusive-netapp-ceo-kurian-on-turning-corner-on-growth-competing-with-dell-emc-and-fending-off-pure-storage.htm?itc=hp_slideshow

Fast-growing Silicon Valley ‘unicorn’ Rubrik expanding to Lawrence

#Rubrik — a rapidly-growing, cloud data company based in Palo Alto, Calif. — is launching a new office in Lawrence and plans to hire up to 20 area engineers. The firm partnered with the Bioscience & Technology Business Center at the University of Kansas to create the Rubrik Center for Excellence. The center will house a data lab and technical support facility with locally-recruited staff. Rubrik creates data backup and recovery software. Founded in 2014 and already with nearly 400 employees, Rubrik reported that its annual run-rate is approaching $100 million in three years. In May, the firm raised $180 million in a Series D investment round at a valuation of $1.3 billion, qualifying it as a “unicorn,” or firm valued at more than $1 billion. Gerry Garwood, Rubrik regional sales manager for Kansas and Missouri, said that the new office on the KU campus will afford the company access to high-caliber talent. “We are thrilled to establish the Rubrik Center for Excellence, which will serve the greater Kansas City metropolitan area and provide support to our global customer base that spans more than 25 countries across five continents,” Garwood said in a release. “Inspired by the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, we expect the Rubrik Center for Excellence adjacent to the University of Kansas in Lawrence to become a hub for research, innovation and training in the Midwest.” The Bioscience & Technology Business Center is a partnership among the City of Lawrence, Douglas County, University of Kansas, and the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce to support bioscience and tech firms. To foster growth, it provides bioscience and tech firms modern labs, office space, business counseling and connections to key partners.

http://www.startlandnews.com/2017/05/fast-growing-silicon-valley-unicorn-rubrik-expanding-lawrence/

Vectra Collaborates With VMware to Deliver Visibility Into Hidden Cyber Attacker Behaviors Throughout Virtualized Environments

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- #Vectra Networks, the leader in automating the hunt for in-progress cyber attacks, today announced it will be leveraging the capabilities of #VMware #NSX ® to accelerate the detection and mitigation of hidden cyber attackers in virtualized data centers, allowing for the mitigation of advanced threats close to the source in order to minimize potential damage.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vectra-collaborates-with-vmware-to-deliver-visibility-into-hidden-cyber-attacker-behaviors-throughout-virtualized-environments-300466919.html

Cisco UCS and MemSQL: Real-Time Data Warehouse for the Enterprise

Real-time analytics on live data and the ability to analyze data at scale, are key for any digital organization. Acting on insights in the moment helps deliver contextual user experiences, identify new sources of revenue, and prevent costly expenditures. To become a responsive data-driven business, organizations must address current data latency challenges. These challenges are commonly found across three general areas: Three Data Latency Challenges and Solutions Slow data loading: Loading data, moving past batch processing, and receiving analytics responses in real time remains out of reach for too many businesses. A real-time data warehouse reduces extract, transform, and load (ETL), combining transactional and analytical workloads into a single system. Lengthy query execution: Operational insights must be readily available for in-the-moment decisions. A data warehouse that delivers a fast query response can deliver insights whenever the application or users require it, ultimately providing a differentiated service or identifying opportunities. Low concurrency: Digital business assumes a large-scale use of data across an entire business or customer base. As more users engage and interact with data, the response time for those interactions must maintain a consistent experience. A scalable data warehouse will help ensure that data and user growth will not negatively affect the operational system. Real-Time Data Warehouse for the Enterprise #MemSQL on #Cisco #UCS Integrated Infrastructure for #Big Data and Analytics is built to address these challenges. MemSQL provides a scalable, real-time data warehouse platform for high-performance applications that require fast, accurate, secure, and always available data. MemSQL scales linearly to millions of events per second while analyzing petabytes of data for insights. MemSQL also enables fast ingestion and concurrent analytics needed for sensor systems, recommendation systems, and use cases that require instant, actionable insights

http://blog.memsql.com/cisco-real-time-data-warehouse/

Google’s AI-Building AI Is a Step Toward Self-Improving AI

Reaching the technological singularity is almost certainly going to involve #AI that is able to improve itself. #Google may have now taken a small step along this path by creating AI that can build AI. Speaking at the company’s annual I/O developer conference, CEO Sundar Pichai announced a project called #AutoML that can automate one of the hardest parts of designing deep learning software: choosing the right architecture for a neural network. The Google researchers created a machine learning system that used reinforcement learning—the trial and error approach at the heart of many of Google’s most notable AI exploits—to figure out the best architectures to solve language and image recognition tasks. Not only did the results rival or beat the performance of the best human-designed architectures, but the system made some unconventional choices that researchers had previously considered inappropriate for those kinds of tasks. The approach is still a long way from being practical, the researchers told MIT Tech Review, as it tied up 800 powerful graphics processors for weeks. But Google is betting that automating the process of building machine learning systems could help get around the shortage of human-machine learning and data science talent that is slowing the technology’s adoption. It’s not the only one. Facebook engineers have built what they like to call an “automated machine learning engineer,” according to Wired. It’s also called AutoML and can choose algorithms and parameters that are most likely to solve the problem at hand. Last summer, the AutoML challenge saw teams go head-to-head to build machine learning “black boxes” that can select models and tune parameters without any human intervention. Even game designers are in on the act—the team behind the hit game Space Engineers has used some of their profits to set up a team of experts to design AI able to optimize its own hardware and software. While this kind of automation could make it easier for non-experts to design and deploy AI systems, it also seems to be laying the foundation for machines that can take control of their own destiny. The concept of "recursive self-improvement" is at the heart of most theories on how we could rapidly go from moderately smart machines to AI superintelligence. The idea is that as AI gets more powerful, it can start modifying itself to boost its capabilities. As it makes itself smarter it gets better at making itself smarter, so this quickly leads to exponential growth in its intelligence. Generally, the so-called “seed AI” is envisaged as an artificial general intelligence (AGI), a machine that is able to carry out any intellectual task a human could rather than being a specialist in a very specific area, like most of today’s algorithms are. The systems being worked on today are clearly a long way from AGI, and they are directed at building and improving other machine learning systems rather than themselves. Outside of machine learning, self-modifying code has been around for a while, but it would likely be far more complex to deploy this technique to edit neural networks. But creating algorithms able to work on machine learning code is clearly a first step towards the kind of self-improving AI envisaged by futurists. Other recent developments could also feed in this direction. Many AI researchers are trying to encode curiosity and creativity into machine learning systems, both traits likely to be necessary for a machine to redesign itself in performance-boosting ways. Others are working on allowing robots to share the lessons they’ve learned, effectively turning them into a kind of hive mind. Doubtless, it will be a long time before any of these capabilities reach the stage where they can be usefully employed to create a self-improving AI. But we can already see the technological foundations being laid.
https://singularityhub.com/2017/05/31/googles-ai-building-ai-is-a-step-toward-self-improving-ai/