Microsoft is laying off ‘thousands’ of staff in a major global sales reorganization

#Microsoft is poised to layoff thousands of employees worldwide in a move to reorganize its salesforce. A source with knowledge of the planned downsizing told TechCrunch that the U.S. firm would lay off “thousands” of staff across the world. The restructuring is set to include an organizational merger that involves its enterprise customer unit and one or more of its SME-focused divisions. The changes are set to be announced this coming week, we understand. Microsoft declined to comment. Earlier this weekend, the Puget Sound Business Journal, Bloomberg and The Seattle Times all reported ‘major’ layoffs related to a move to increase the emphasis on cloud services within Microsoft’s sales teams worldwide. Bloomberg said the redundancies would be “some of the most significant in the sales force in years.” The reorganization looks to be a result of a change of leadership this past year. Executives Judson Althoff and Jean-Philippe Courtois took charge of Microsoft’s sales and marketing divisions following the exit of long-serving COO Kevin Turner last summer. Althoff, for one, has been public in his criticism of previous sales approaches, and he is keen to make Azure a central part of the focus. At any rate, the time is right for change, historically. The end of Microsoft’s fiscal year typically falls in July, and it recent years it has been a time when the firm has announced headcount reductions. Last year, #Microsoft announced that it would cut 2,850 jobs — including at least 900 from its sales group, according to The Seattle Times — having two months earlier said it would let go of 1,850 staff related to its smartphone business. In July 2015, it made 7,800 job cuts and wrote down $7.6 billion of its #Nokia acquisition.

https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com/2017/07/02/microsoft-is-laying-off-thousands-of-staff/amp/

Video: 7 ADVANTAGES TO RUNNING HADOOP ON ISILON

The rate at which new data is being generated daily is staggering and can be overwhelming for many; every single person on the planet is currently generating 1.7MB of data per minute, which will equate to 44 trillion GB of stored data by 2020! But not all data is created equal… This explosion in data growth does not necessarily result in uniform loads on infrastructure, so when enterprises are selecting a storage solution, they must be able to recognize and adapt to the different growth rates required. Dell EMC’s Isilon Scale-Out Storage Solutions for Hadoop combines a powerful yet simple and highly efficient storage platform with native Hadoop integration that allows enterprises to accelerate analytics, gain new flexibility and avoid the costly activity of deploying a separate Hadoop infrastructure. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key advantages of running Hadoop on Isilon: 1. Scale-Out Storage Platform Multiple applications and workflows within an organization can benefit from scale-out storage by no longer requiring DAS-based Hadoop clusters for their own purposes. Maximum flexibility is provided by Isilon with one large bucket of storage being used for a variety of simultaneous uses, including multiple simultaneous Hadoop distributions. 2. No Single Point of Failure Traditional NameNode configurations present the possibility of a single-point of failure due to the loss of a non-clustered namenodes. With Isilon, we have enabled every node in the cluster to act as both a namenode and datanode, thus resulting in a highly resilient infrastructure. 3. End to End Data Protection Datasets are protected by Isilon’s highly-available architecture, and snapshot and replication capacities, thus offering unprecedented data protection and security. With this in mind, unwieldy copy data backups are not necessary when leveraging Isilon for datasets of any size. Furthermore, the built-in data and hardware protection capabilities of Isilon created two additional benefits that are absent in traditional Hadoop, these include: Namenode redundancy without having to create multiple namenode instances. And dataset data protection against node loss and corruption. 4. Industry-Leading Storage Efficiency There are a dizzying number of storage solutions out there, and with space being a premium (whether it’s digital or physical), choosing the right storage solution must be considered a priority. With Hadoop built natively into Isilon, enterprises can be rewarded with less than 80% storage utilization resulting in industry-leading storage efficiency and lower costs. Isilon’s operating system dedicates a smaller portion of the overall capacity to redundancy which offsets much of the cost benefit of commodity storage, and in some cases, Isilon comes in as less expensive than commodity. 5. Independent Scalability In today’s data driven economy, storage needs often outstrip the demand for compute resources, but adding more servers to “fix” these storage problems often results in underutilized CPU resources. Therefore enterprises need to understand which workloads are storage intensive versus compute intensive. By running Hadoop on Isilon, enterprises have the ability to add compute and storage nodes separately, thus providing customized solutions that can scale with their business easily and cost-effectively. 6. Separation of Compute Nodes from Data Nodes In addition to adding compute and storage separately, compute nodes are separated from data nodes. This unique setup feature of Isilon allows each node to boost performance and expand the cluster’s capacity. For Hadoop analytics, the Isilon scale-out distributed architecture minimizes bottlenecks, rapidly serves big data, and optimizes performance for MapReduce jobs. 7. Multi-Protocol Isilon’s revolutionary infrastructure permits data to be stored in its raw format. This means that it can easily be exported via the wide variety of industry-standard protocols supported by Isilon without copying the data, including NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTP, and HDFS, to name a few. This unique capability enables data to be stored on an enterprise storage platform with existing workflows and standard protocols. See how All Flash solutions have provided lifesaving discoveries:

As the first scale-out NAS platform purpose-built for Hadoop, Isilon has the capability to provide a powerful analytics platform with a huge centralized storage. The integration of Hadoop also reduces the effort associated with disk failures, eliminates the typical 3x data replication for traditional configurations and solves the need for moving and staging data to make it accessible for Hadoop.

For many customers, running #Hadoop on #DellEMC #Isilon represents an optimal balance of scalability, availability, and performance while reducing the operational expenses associated with the maintenance of Hadoop clusters. And while there is no one-size fits all, Dell EMC’s Isilon solutions seem to tick many more boxes than our competitors thus equipping your business with the tools to handle data growth and scale accordingly and affordably. Visit our website here to see all of our Isilon hardware options.

http://emeablog.emc.com/me/7-advantages-to-running-hadoop-on-isilon/

3-year-old Rubrik copies data in an instant in the cloud, valued at $1bn

#Rubrik raised $180 million recently to take on billion-dollar giants like #EMC and #Hitachi, among other storage companies. When four technocrats come together to start up, a technologically profound and disruptive company like Rubrik happens. Bipul Sinha, Arvind Jain, Soham Mazumdar and Arvind Nithrakashyap joined hands to put together a technology that can pull data of an organisation from public and private clouds in an instant, making a CTO’s life a lot easier. The founders have managed to raise $292 million in less than three years of their startup being in operation, thanks to this novel idea that has disrupted the backup and recovery business. Until now, organisations were dependent on expensive software applications sitting on legacy IT for data backup and recovery. And even these could pull out data only in silos and did not offer multiple data copies.

https://m.yourstory.com/2017/07/startup-rubrik-data-storage-emc-hitachi/

Liz Matthews Explains How Dell Technologies Wants to Drive Human Progress

Last but not least of my tête-à-têtes during this year’s International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, I had the opportunity to take a deep dive into one of the most buzzworthy tech rebrands in recent memory: multinational computer technology company #Dell s transformation into #DellTechnologies. The company, known as Dell at the time, bought storage provider #EMC for $60 billion in 2015, in what was believed to be the largest technology acquisition in history. In a reflection of these newly-joined forces, the company crafted a new brand architecture and identity in 2016, complete with reworked copywriting, new visual language and iconography. I sat down with Liz Matthews, Senior Vice President of Brand and Creative of the newly renamed Dell Technologies, to discuss her work articulating the company’s verbal and visual brand purpose amid this monumental change.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aaronkwittken/2017/07/03/liz-matthews-explains-how-dell-technologies-wants-to-drive-human-progress/?c=0&s=ShopTalk

Global Enterprise Storage Systems Market 2017- Oracle, Panasas, SGI Corporation, Intel, Seagate, Integrated Device Technology

The worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Market report is an in-depth research on the current situation of the Enterprise Storage Systems industry. The research study of Global Enterprise Storage Systems Market 2017 offers a strategic assessment of Enterprise Storage Systems market. The industry report focuses on the growth opportunities, which will help the Enterprise Storage Systems industry to expand operations in the existing markets globally. Firstly, Enterprise Storage Systems Market report introduces a basic overview of the Enterprise Storage Systems industry, which includes Enterprise Storage Systems definitions, applications, classifications and Enterprise Storage Systems industry chain structure. Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems market analysis is provided for the international market including Enterprise Storage Systems industry competitive analysis, Enterprise Storage Systems market development history and major sectors development status on Enterprise Storage Systems industry scenario.

Global Enterprise Storage Systems Market 2017: Competitive Landscape and Key Vendors

1 #IBM
2 #HewlettPackardEnterprise
3 #EMC Corporation
4 #Dell
5 #Buffalo
6 #Isilon Systems
7 #3PAR
8 #Hitachi Data Systems
9 #LSI Corporation
10 #NetGear
11 #Overland Storage
12 #Oracle
13 #Panasas
14 #SGI Corporation
15 #Intel
16 #Seagate
17 Integrated Device Technology
18 #Western Digital
19 #Lenovo

https://dailyhover.com/global-enterprise-storage-systems-market-2017-2/

Toshiba chip unit sale could be pushed through in next two weeks

The ongoing legal battle over the sale of Toshiba’s valuable chip unit could be resolved as soon as July 14. In response to Western Digital’s injunction request, Toshiba has filed an Opposition that will be heard by the Superior Court of California. If the Opposition is upheld then a deal for the company could finally be pushed through. Toshiba had hoped to tie up a deal by the end of June, but an injunction request from company partner Western Digital prevented any sale from being finalised. It was reported in June that the company had given shareholders until the end of the month to decide on a potential buyer. But the last minute request from Western Digital scuppered that plan. All of this comes in an effort to make up the $18 billion it needs pay off huge loans it has accrued. The nature of the sale has seen the Japanese government heavily involved, with emphasis being placed on keeping the firm within the country. It had been previously thought that while INCJ is based in Tokyo, the consortium contained investments from US chipmaker Western Digital. However, that report was was debunked after it was reported that it was made up of KKR, SK Hynix, the Development Bank of Japan along with the aforementioned Bain Capital. It was also believed that #Foxconn had put together an offer for the chipmaking business with #Apple, #Dell, #Google, #Microsoft and #Cisco. #Toshiba ’s financial woes are largely connected to its failed nuclear unit Westinghouse. Acquired in 2006, an ill-advised purchase in 2015 has led to massive scandal and loses for its parent company. Last month Westinghouse filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Toshiba is attempting to split from the company. Since revealing its financial turmoil a number of investors have shown an interest in Toshiba’s technology businesses

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/toshiba-chip-unit-sale-could-be-pushed-through-in-next-two-weeks/039475

Workplace Computing Devices Market is expected to grow 4.37% in Cloud Computing Industry 2016-2020 Covering Key Players Lenovo, HP, Dell

HTF Market Intelligence released a new research report of 72 pages on title ‘Global Workplace Computing Devices – Procurement Market Intelligence 2016-2020’ with detailed analysis, forecast and strategies. The study covers key regions that includes Americas, APAC, EMEA and important players such as #Lenovo, #HP, #Dell etc.

http://www.military-technologies.net/2017/07/03/workplace-computing-devices-market-is-expected-to-grow-4-37-in-cloud-computing-industry-2016-2020-covering-key-players-lenovo-hp-dell/

Volkswagen buys D-Wave quantum computers which sell for $15 million each

Martin Hofmann, VW’s chief information officer, told New York Times that the investment in quantum computing technology is a sign of things to come. “For us, it’s a new era of technology,” he said. #VW is claimed to have used a #DWave computer to steer the movements of 10,000 taxis in Beijing simultaneously, optimising their routes and reducing congestion, according to the report in NYT. While some expressed scepticism over the test, many computer technology experts agree that binary computing systems will not be capable of keeping up with the colossal growth in both the volume of data and the requirements for processing it. #Quantumcomputing, which some say might be the solution, is still in the experimental stage and there are many challenges to overcome, never mind the fact that no one understands anything about it.

https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2017/07/02/volkswagen-buys-d-wave-quantum-computers-which-sell-for-15-million-each/13227/

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Aren’t the Only Cloud Innovators Around

When it comes to data center expertise, many tech professionals would say that #Amazon, #Google, #Microsoft, and yes, #Facebook are driving most of innovation. These companies design much of the hardware and software that they run in their own massive data centers. There's no arguing with that perception, but make no mistake: The big cloud players don't have a monopoly on data center disruption, according to Al Sadowsky, research vice president for 451 Research. Instead, a raft of other, smaller players are doing their bit to make data centers more efficient, more adaptable, and easier to manage.
That's important to remember, because while many corporate applications are moving to a public cloud like Amazon (AMZN, -0.71%) Web Services or Microsoft (MSFT, +0.82%) Azure, we are still early in the cloud era and many businesses still want to control their own infrastructure for some jobs.

Sadowski cites the work that Equinix (EQIX, +1.87%)is doing with its home-grown data center management software. This software gives customers a view into how their workloads are operating and the physical conditions at the various Equinix facilities. Equinix operates about 179 data centers around the world used by many customers.

http://fortune.com/2017/06/30/cloud-data-center-innovations/

Dell EMC publicly recommits to Nutanix partnership

WASHINGTON D.C. – At the #Nutanix .NEXT event here, #DellEMC and Nutanix jointly took the stage to publicly reassure customers and partners that the relationship between the two companies remains on solid footing, despite the complications created since Dell’s merger with EMC and the onboarding of EMC and #VMware ’s own #hyperconverged portfolio. The close relationship between Dell and Nutanix began in June 2014, with the announcement that they would partner to create an XC series of appliances sold by Dell, which would put the Nutanix software together with Dell hardware. For Dell, which was aggressively building out its software-defined storage strategy around multiple partnerships with leading vendors in the space, this was a deal of significance. At the same time, the Nutanix announcement was just one of four such partnerships Dell announced that day. For Nutanix, however, this was a deal of SIGNIFICANCE. The company was much less well known then than it is today, and the partnership with Dell provided a public validation for the marketplace that was arguably of as great or greater value than the revenues that would flow from the OEM agreement itself. The Dell XC series has been successful, and those revenues for both parties have been considerable. Dell’s acquisition of EMC and the EMC hyper-converged portfolio brought clear tensions to the relationship however, particularly after the introduction of the #VxRail appliance, jointly developed by #EMC and #VMware, in early 2016. VxRail, unlike the short-lived #VSPEXBlue appliance that it replaced, was an immediate success. More ominously, it was also targeted at much the same market as the #Dell #XC series. In November 2016, #DellEMC announced that the VXRail would become the priority offering in the VMware market, while the XC series would be focused on customers using #Microsoft ’s #HyperV and Nutanix’s #AHV hypervisors. That led many analysts and tech publications – including this one – to wonder whether the Dell EMC-Nutanix relationship would wind down, as many successful such relationships, including Dell’s own relationship with EMC in the last decade, had in the past. That brings us to today. “Every single XC customer, every analyst, all keep asking – ‘what’s the future of the Dell XC series with Nutanix,’” Nutanix President Sudheesh Nair asked rhetorically to the .NEXT audience in the Thursday evening keynote. Chad Sakac, President, Global Systems Engineering, at Dell EMC, then addressed the audience, and provided a flat reaffirmation of the relationship from the Dell EMC perspective. “Our partnership is strong, it’s good, it’s growing,” Sakac told the audience. “It’s based on something Michael Dell believes and I believe, that customers want choices. We have to deepen our commitment to that every single day.” Sakac discussed the issue with ChannelBuzz in much more detail. “The story here is a simple one,” he said. “The question that everyone hears today is ‘What’s the state of the partnership?’ It would be disingenuous to say the relationship doesn’t have more complications now than it did before. Pre-merger, when Dell heard ‘HCI’, the answer was ‘XC!’ Now our portfolio centred around the VMware stack has also grown like wildfire.” Sakac also noted that the issues raised around Nutanix by the Dell EMC merger were hardly unique. “The merger created questions about a whole set of ecosystems,” he said. “Pre-merger, there was a very strong Dell-Red Hat partnership. We have continued to go down that path. People have continued to ask about our position on the Azure stack, because there is certainly a different dynamic with VMware and EMC and Microsoft. We have demonstrated that we will not only be there with Microsoft, but with a very deep integration.” Sakac indicated that the future of the relationship had been discussed by the two sides. “The original question that I asked Dheeraj [Pandey, Nutanix’s CEO] was this – ‘Do you see this as a market that is exciting, but in its earliest days, where the name of the game is to excite customers on the path of simplification?’ “If they said no, that every customer decision for HCI was a battleground choice, we would have gone down a different path,” Sakac said. “But they believed, as we do, that our job is to build simplicity for the customers. It’s not a zero-sum game. We are in the earliest days of adoption. When we made the strategic decision to continue the partnership, it was based on this strategic realization that the HCI market is not a zero-sum game.” Sakac said that his number one rule of business is that you don’t punch your customer in the face. “Customers are happy that the partnership is solid,” he said. “My second rule of business is that you don’t punch yourself in the face. Our revenues with Nutanix have grown year over year over year. A year ago, a third of our HCI customer base was Dell XC customers. Today, a third of our HCI customer growth is still Dell XC customers, even with our very strong growth elsewhere. We and Nutanix are having an amazing Q2 together. It would be strategically silly for us to cut off our nose to spite our face.” Sakac also clarified Dell EMC’s positioning of XC. “We see customers with two strong architectural approaches,” he said. “One is where VMware is standard, and there we lead with our VMware aligned stacks. The other is customers who want a more horizontal HCI, and XC can be appropriate there. And for those customers who just want a small appliance, we will still offer XC.” Sakac emphasized that their entire portfolio including XC is necessary given the expanding state of the market. “It is the official Dell Technologies strategic position that software defined software models are ready for the majority of x86 workloads,” he stated. “It’s not ready for all of them. There are still ones that need specific data services. But it is ready for the majority of workloads. Anyone who still says today that HCI is reserved for non-mission critical workloads is missing the mark. The reason is hybrid clouds. They have to run on a very simple infrastructure. HCI is the simplest, with CI being a close second. People want HCI because of that simplification.”

http://www.channelbuzz.ca/2017/06/dell-emc-publicly-recommits-to-nutanix-partnership-22029/

Virtustream CEO: We Are Betting Big On Deep Integration With VMware, Pivotal, Dell EMC

#Virtustream CEO Rodney Rogers said the company has a growth strategy in place that emphasizes deep integration with #VMware, #Pivotal and the #DellEMC hardware portfolio, and is aimed at making Virtustream the top company in the market for mission-critical public cloud. In a recent blog, Rogers laid out his growth vision for Virtustream, saying scaling the business and expanding into new vertical markets would be the company's driving ambition and would be fueled by tighter relationships with other key members of the Dell Technologies family of companies, namely VMware and Pivotal.  Virtustream was folded into the unified Dell EMC partner program earlier this spring, and the company has a goal of reaching $1 billion in bookings this year. [Related: CRN Exclusive: Michael Dell On Partner Sales Growth, Fighting Public Cloud Lock In And The IoT 'Explosion'] Already this year, Virtustream has launched a cloud offering for the health-care and life sciences market, and it is drawing itself more tightly to VMware's cloud infrastructure to address the market for hybrid cloud deployments, Rogers wrote. Rogers added that the company is also "working on deeper integration between our enterprise cloud IaaS offering and Pivotal Cloud Foundry," Dell Technologies' open-source cloud development platform. The company also plans to offer a "Virtustream Edition" of Dell EMC's Enterprise Hybrid Cloud that will be based on a Dell EMC converged infrastructure appliance and have the ability to work across enterprise private clouds, the Virtustream public cloud, as well as service provider clouds that use Virtustream's management and orchestration software, he wrote. Virtustream earlier this month said it had teamed up with Pivotal Cloud Foundry to enable the rapid deployment of cloud-native applications, and that the duo's first customer would be Dell Technologies itself. "Our ambition is to be the leader in the market for running mission-critical applications in the cloud," Rogers wrote. "This is precisely where we see the market headed." For solution providers able to key in on the cross-sell opportunities presented by Virtustream and the Dell EMC portfolio, the sky is the limit, said Dan Serpico, CEO of FusionStorm, a San Francisco-based solution provider that works with Dell EMC. "We see a tremendous opportunity with Virtustream and see them as very well integrated with both Dell EMC and VMware," Serpico said. "They're really working collaboratively with our sales teams, and we're genuinely excited about it."
http://m.crn.com/news/cloud/300088116/virtustream-ceo-we-are-betting-big-on-deep-integration-with-vmware-pivotal-dell-emc.htm

Wikibon report questions ‘breakthrough technology’ claims for 3D Xpoint memory chips

Ears must be burning at chip giants #Intel Corp. and #Micron Technology Inc. in the wake of a new report by #Wikibon Chief Technology Officer David Floyer (pictured) that dismantles the grandiose claims the two companies have been making about their jointly developed #3DXPoint memory chip technology. 3D XPoint was announced nearly two years ago with considerable fanfare by the developers, who claimed the technology is 1,000 times faster and 1,000 times more durable than negative-AND, or NAND, technology and 10 times denser than dynamic RAM, thanks to a manufacturing process called 3D stacking, in which layers of memory are stacked on top of each other to improve density. 3D XPoint has been positioned as a sort of crossover technology between flash storage and system memory. In addition to its speed and durability advantages, 3D XPoint is nonvolatile, meaning that data isn’t lost in the event of a power failure, and it consumes considerably less power than alternatives. Floyer didn’t buy the claims about 3D XPoint two years ago, and he isn’t buying it now. In a technical evaluation posted on Wikibon.com, the veteran analyst says 3D XPoint offers only nominal performance improvements over 3D NAND, an evolution of the 28-year-old NAND technology, but at a dramatically higher price. “There is little differentiation between 3D XPoint and 3D NAND for use as storage,” Floyer writes. “Serial performance is a wash. Endurance is a wash … The price difference is overwhelmingly in favor of 3D NAND, and will increase as vendor are investment in 3D NAND fabs and research turns into very high volume later in 2017.” 3D XPoint- and 3D NAND-based products only began shipping in the last few months, making evaluation at enterprise scale difficult, but Floyer was able to run a side-by-side comparison between Intel’s 3D XPoint-based 32GB Optane Series PCIe M.2 Memory Module and the Toshiba Corp.’s 3D NAND-based XG5 M.2 2280 solid-state disk drive. Off by a factor of 250 Rather than being 1,000 times faster than the alternative, the 3D XPoint module was able to eke out, at best, four times the performance. While its endurance was demonstrably better, Floyer notes that life expectancy can always be improved by adding more storage. Given that the cost per terabyte of the Intel module is roughly six times that of the 3D NAND alternative, customers can easily match the 3D XPoint endurance claims and still pocket a significant savings, he writes. How about Intel’s and Micron’s claims that 3D XPoint will displace DRAM in many applications? Floyer is dubious. The performance benefits can be equaled by slightly expanding main memory and using it as cache in front of 3D NAND storage. Such a configuration “will be cheaper and perform better than Hybrid DIMMs using 3D XPoint for almost all applications,” he concludes. Not that the developers’ efforts have gone to waste. Floyer complements Intel for the groundwork work it did on the NVM Express logical device interface specification in preparation for XPoint. However, he expects the payoff of that work will be in the form of much faster multiprocessor computers that use 3D NAND. The analysis is a classic example of the resilience of established technologies in the face of so-called breakthrough alternatives. Given the huge investments chipmakers have already made in NAND, they have more to gain by evolving that technology than by replacing it. In Floyer’s view, the race is already over. “The areas of uniqueness claimed for 3D XPoint will be addressed adequately and at much lower cost by DRAM, 3D NAND and innovative non-volatile combinations of both,” he writes.

https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/06/29/wikibon-report-slams-3d-xpoint-breakthrough-technology-claims/

Can VMware exploit its VRealize refresh?

Sysadmin blog #VMware 's #VRealize suite for management and orchestration recently received its bi-annual refresh for #hybridcloud wranglers. The vRealize brand is at the core of VMware's cloud play. It's also a meaningless bit of marketing jibber-jabber that VMware slaps in front of a swatch of products that share no connection whatsoever. Channeling a mid-aughties #Microsoft System Center, vRealize is trying to become a real boy. Amid the flailing and punches thrown at rivals, however, a general direction of movement can be discerned. First, let's look at what's in vRealize. The products sharing the moniker consist of vRealize Air, vRealize Automation ( #vRA ), vRealize Business ( #vRB ), vRealize Code Stream ( #vRCS ), vRealize Hyperic ( #vRH ), vRealize Infrastructure Navigator ( #vRIN ), vRealize Log Insight ( #vRLI ), vRealize Network Insight (vRNI, or Vernie to its friends), vRealize Operations ( #vROps ), vRealize Orchestrator ( #vRO ). Fantastic. The VMware #vCloud suite, the brand that makes the most sense to provide someone with what they need to build a cloud, consists [PDF] of the ESXi hypervisor, the vSphere server, vRA, vROps and vRB. #VMware says #NSX and #VSAN are optional, but I say leaving NSX out of any VMware private cloud makes you a crazy person. If you want to play in the clouds, you're going to be playing at scale, and you don't play at scale these days without some means of making your networking easy. I'd also argue that the vFabric Data connector (software that helps with database virtualization) is a must, as is vRNI. Actually, I'm increasingly leaning toward saying that vRNI is essential for any VMware deployment, but that's a conversation for another day. Next I start asking questions about how exactly one plans to stand up a cloud without orchestration, making vRO likely to be required. So vRealize products are critical to making a VMware-based cloud. Some of them are included in the vCloud suite, which is a bundle of products packaged together into a single SKU to make it easier to sell. Of course, you'll still need to go buy additional vRealize products to make it work. VMware also offers a vRealize Suite, which is closer to containing all the pieces needed for a proper cloud: vRA, vRB, vRLI, vRIN, vRO and vROps. No NSX, however, and no vRNI. This is my sad face. Despite VMware's terrible packaging, with the latest updates to the vRealize suite VMware finally has all the pieces needed to offer a proper hybrid cloud. Building it, however, is not going to be cheap and will devolve into a licensing nightmare that would make Microsoft proud. Capable products Despite the griping about the packaging, the nerds VMware has chained up in their Palo Alto dungeon have responded well to the snacks thrown over the roof by the suits. vROps 6.6, recently soft-launched by VMware and expected to actually be something we can all enjoy in time for VMware's annual VMworld conference, contains multiple goodies. The two bits that really matter are that vROps now has VSAN management capabilities, vRA plays nice with NSX and – most important of all – that VMware has embraced the recipe-based future. Configuration management tools (read: Puppet) are now first-class citizens. I smell a pending acquisition. VMware has also decided that having a functioning marketplace for its cloudy offering is perhaps a good plan, and slowly but surely it is assembling all the pieces necessary to build an Infrastructure Endgame Machine. It took them long enough. Now we just have to beat them about the ears with a herring until they figure out how to put it all together into an easily consumable package. Or a shrubbery shows up. Whichever happens first. It's easy to dismiss the updates to the vRealize products, but this would be a mistake. Despite the griping above, 2017's revamp of assorted vRealize products, NSX, VSAN, Photon and vSphere are collectively amazing. Yes, it is true that no individual product in VMware's portfolio has accomplished a wow factor update. VMware has no vMotion-class surprises for us, not even their upcoming Bromium-like App Defence. Despite the lack of wow factor, VMware's 2017 products have received a spit-and-polish update that takes a lot of the concepts VMware had been tinkering with beyond the science project stage and delivers solutions ready for mainstream use. VMware's 2017 lineup is to VMware's 2015 products what Office 2010 was to Office 2007. I don't say this lightly. I like yelling at VMware and telling them to solve ease-of-use issues. It gives me something to do on Slack when I'm bored. VMware has the technology. Now it has to decide if it wants to actually do something useful with it

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/30/vmware_vrealize_rejigged/

Kinetica Gets $50M for Converged GPU Analytics

#Kinetica "s bold plan to build a #converged real-time analytics platform that uses #GPU s and in-memory techniques to power existing #SQL queries alongside deep learning algorithms got a big boost today when it disclosed a $50 million Series A investment from venture capitalists. The use cases for Kinetica‘s technology have evolved over time. It was initially incubated by the US Army and the NSA to build a system capable of tracking terrorist movements in real time, using data from drones and signals intelligence. After changing its name from GIS Federal and moving from Virginia to San Francisco, the company expanded into the enterprise market, and one of its first customers was the US Postal Service, which uses Kinetica to track and analyze the movement of about 200,000 vehicles at one-minute intervals. Kinetica’s capability to speed SQL queries on top of superfast GPU processors has always been one of its main calling cards. It’s what led customers to use its database, dubbed GPUdb, to speed up slow Tableau or Qlik queries, or to provide a real-time analytics layer on top of Hadoop. But last year’s introduction of user defined functions paved the way for Kinetica users to integrate machine learning and deep learning libraries, including TensorFlow, Caffe, and Torch, into the platform. “We’re evolving as a company as well as technology,” Kinetica Co-Founder and CEO Amit Vij tells Datanami. “We’re becoming a converged platform that enables an enterprise to use a single unified technology to access a relational database and run various complex algorithms, analytics, and BI.” An ‘Apple’ Experience The idea is positioning GPUdb as single platform that can execute a wide range of analytic workloads that today are loosely referred to as “big data analytics.” Or in Vij’s words, it’s about “creating an Apple experience” for his customers.

It’s all about taking what was complex and difficult, and making it simple and easy, Vij says.

“It feels like organizations are having to duct tape five to 10 technologies that were loosely created on different release cycles and then spend several months, if not several years trying to put it into production,” Vij says, “and it’s still batch oriented and they don’t get real time results for their company.”

Hadoop was supposed to be that central platform for big data analytics, Vij acknowledges, but for whatever reason, it hasn’t worked out. “Hadoop is still fundamentally a good file system,” he says. “But [the Hadoop solutions] weren’t created to be an in-memory database, whereas that was our sole purpose when we first started.”

Hadoop is still good, Vij continues. “For organizations that have massive amounts of data, it’s an excellent place to store data and have the data lake,” he says. “We integrate with Hadoop, and we’re a fast layer that can be architected…on top to provide that real-time analytics for specific problems.”

Broad GPU Appeal

Kinetica today sees three primary use cases for its in-memory, GPU-accelerated relational database.

The first one is providing location-based analytics, which is applicable across industries and the government. The second one is speeding up OLAP queries submitted by users of BI tools. The third is the newest and involves incorporating the latest machine learning and deep learning algorithms into the data analytics workflow.

Vij elaborated on how deep learning and AI approaches will mesh with the Kinetica platform:

“If you have a multi-billion row dataset in Kinetica, you’re going to run various database filters and aggregates and create your training data set,” he says. “You take this new data set formulated by the database, and create a trained model within Google TensorFlow. And now you can execute that model against a table within Kinetica or a new materialized view that’s created.”

One Kinetica customers is a bank that’s using this approach to power its daily financial risk exposure calculations. They were using a combination of tools, including models written in Python and executed on Spark, but they were only able to work on a subset of the data.

“We enable this organization to do this all in real time and operate on the entire data corpus,” Vij says. “Because there’s a reduced amount of complexity in installing and working with our technology, organizations in turn need less personal. You don’t need a PhDs that’s expert in Hadoop and another one on Spark and another in ML. You can condense all of that.”

Analytics Looking Forward

The Series A investment of $50 million was co-led by Canvas Ventures and Meritech Capital Partners. Vij says the company plans to use the resources to fuel engineering, sales, and marketing initiatives. On the engineering front, the company plans to bolster its SQL compliancy, work on further integrating machine learning and AI into the platform, and push deeper into the cloud.

Vij says the biggest bottleneck at this point is getting NVidia GPUs into its client data centers. That’s why the recent adoption of GPUs by cloud providers has been such a good thing for Kinetica’s business model.

“With our smaller customer, the folks who can’t afford an IBM Netezza, SAP HANA, or OracleExadata, many times they start out on one to two servers on the cloud,” Vij says. “Things have definitely evolved.”

https://www.datanami.com/2017/06/29/kinetica-gets-50m-converged-gpu-analytics/

Tintri Cuts IPO Price In Latest S-1

Storage technology developer #Tintri made a cut in its expected IPO share price. Mountain View, Calif.-based Tintri had been widely expected to go public on Thursday but instead filed an S-1 document detailing a price cut. A Tintri spokesperson told CRN that the company could not comment on what happened to its IPO beyond what was stated in the company's latest S-1.  Tintri's S-1 filing said it plans to offer 8.5 million shares of common stock with an anticipated initial public offering price of between $7.00 and $8.00 per share, raising $59.5 million to $68 million. Earlier, the company's expected offer was 8.7 million shares at between $10.50 and $12.50 per share. That would have raised $91.4 million to $108.8 million. [Related: IPO-Bound Tintri's S-1 Shows A Fast-Growing Channel Company That's Looking To Pare Down Its Losses] Other storage tech companies that have gone public in the past few years are seeing their shares trade close to their IPO price. #Hyperconverged infrastructure developer #Nutanix in late September went public with an initial price of $16 per share, which climbed as high as nearly $47 but is now back in the $19 range. #Allflash storage vendor #PureStorage in October 2015 also hit the public markets at $16 a share and now sits at under $13 per share. Both Pure Storage and Nutanix have market caps north of $2.5 billion. #Nimble Storage had its IPO in mid-December 2013 with an opening price of $21 per share and a first-day close of nearly $34 per share. Share prices peaked in February 2014 at almost $53 per share before sliding to the $7 to $9 per share range for all of 2016. #HPE acquired Nimble Storage early this year for $12.50 per share. Also, the IPO plans of at least one hot storage startup, hyper-converged infrastructure vendor SimpliVity, were squashed when Hewlett-Packard Enterprise acquired it. The delay in Tintri's IPO and the fall in its IPO price lead to several questions about a company whose technology is actually quite innovative, said John Woodall, vice president of engineering at Integrated Archive Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based solution provider and Tintri channel partner. "I wonder if someone is going to pick Tintri up," Woodall told CRN. "Tintri has some really good intellectual property. It's not a question of there being no value here." Woodall said Tintri is strong in its granular management of storage, particularly with its granular insight into virtual machine storage, in a way few vendors are. "Tintri has a very good niche around virtualized management," he said. "In an area where simplicity is getting more important, Tintri stands out." However, lowering its IPO price instead of just pushing its IPO to a later date raises a red flag, Woodall said. "It doesn't leave me with a good feeling as to what the outcome will be," he said. "We'll have to wait and see what happens."

http://m.crn.com/news/storage/300088061/tintri-cuts-ipo-price-in-latest-s-1.htm

Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure Revenues Grew 14.9% to $8 Billion in First Quarter of 2017, According to IDC

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew 14.9% year over year in the first quarter of 2017 (1Q17), reaching $8 billion. #DellTechnologies #HPE #DellEMC #Cisco

Cloud IT infrastructure sales as a share of overall worldwide IT spending climbed to 39% in 1Q17, a significant increase from 33.9% a year ago. Revenue from infrastructure sales to private cloud grew by 6.0% to $3.1 billion, and to public cloud by 21.7% to $4.8 billion. In comparison, revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 8.0% year over year in the first quarter of the year. Private cloud infrastructure growth was led by Ethernet switch at 15.5% year-over-year growth, followed by storage (excluding double counting with servers) at 10.0% and server at 2.1%. Public cloud growth was led by storage, which after heavy declines in 1Q16 grew 49.5% year over year in 1Q17, followed by Ethernet switch at 22.7% and server at 8.7%. In traditional IT deployments, server declined the most (9.3% year over year), with Ethernet switch and servers declining 4.4% and 6.1%, respectively.

"After a weak performance during 2016, storage purchases for cloud IT environments had a strong rebound in the first quarter, driving the overall growth in this segment," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director for Enterprise Storage at IDC. "Overall, the first quarter set a strong beginning of the year for the cloud IT infrastructure market. With positive dynamics in purchasing activity by hyperscalers across all technology segments we expect a strong year ahead for the fastest growing public cloud segment. And as end users continue to embrace the benefits of private cloud infrastructures, spending in this segment will also expand."

From a regional perspective, vendor revenue from cloud IT infrastructure sales grew fastest in Canada at 59.1% year over year in 1Q17 off a small base (overall cloud IT infrastructure market in Canada was just under $100 million in 1Q17), followed by Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) at 18.7%, Japan at 15.3%, the United States at 15.1%, Middle East & Africa at 13.2%, Western Europe at 8.9%, Latin America at 7.8%, and the Central and Eastern Europe at 7.2%.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170629006381/en/Worldwide-Cloud-Infrastructure-Revenues-Grew-14.9-8

Toshiba Debuts Quadruple-Level Cell 3D Flash

#Samsung isn't the only semiconductor company that's upping its 3D flash game. #Toshiba America Electronic Components this week announced the latest advance in #BiCSFlash, the company's #3DNAND flash technology, setting the stage for higher-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) and flash-based arrays for the data center. Claiming an industry first, Toshiba unveiled its new 4-bit-per-cell, quadruple-level cell (QLC) 3D flash memory chips. Compared to the preceding 3-bit-per-cell, triple-level cell (TLC) technology's die capacity of 512Gb, or 64GB, from Toshiba, the newer, 64-layer QLC BiCS Flash memory technology yields a record-breaking die capacity of 768Gb or 96GB. Using a stacked architecture comprised of 16 dies, Toshiba claims it can deliver 1.5TB of flash-storage capacity in a single package, another record.

http://mobile.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-technology/toshiba-debuts-quadruple-level-cell-3d-flash.html

AT&T Passive Optical Network Trial to Test Open Source Software

#ATT is set trial 10-gigabit symmetric passive optical network technology ( #XGSPON ), tapping its growing virtualization and software expertise to drive down the cost of next-generation PON deployments. The carrier said it plans to later this year conduct the XGS-PON trial as part of its plan to virtualize access functions within the last mile network. Testing is expected to show support for multi-gigabit per second Internet speeds and allow for merging of services onto a single network. Services to be supported include broadband and backhaul of wired and 5G wireless services

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/att-passive-optical-network-trial-to-test-open-source-software/2017/06/

The Future of Network Design Is White Box, AT&T Says

When it comes to building #telecom infrastructure, the #whitebox trend isn’t going away anytime soon, according to an #ATT blog. This approach to universal customer premises equipment ( #uCPE ) sees service providers increasingly disaggregating network hardware and software. Using hardware and software from different vendors provides a “more open, flexible, and cost-effective alternative to traditional proprietary, integrated networking equipment,” the blog says

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/att-future-networks-white-box/2017/06/

Microsoft to acquire cloud management company Cloudyn

#Microsoft will acquire Israeli cloud-management tool company #Cloudyn, the software giant said Thursday in a blog post.

While Microsoft did not disclose Cloudyn's price tag, it said the acquisition fits in with its efforts in cloud-based services for businesses. Cloudyn's tools already work with Microsoft's #Azure cloud platform.

https://www.cnet.com/au/news/microsoft-will-acquire-cloud-management-company-cloudyn/