Google Cloud Expands to Asia-Pacific

The Google Cloud Platform has added support for two Asia Pacific zones, including local language tools and the developer console in Japanese and traditional Chinese.

Google Cloud is now available from its asia-east1-a and asia-east1-b data centers.

Google Cloud Platform is a set of compute, storage and big data products that allow developers to build on top of the same infrastructure and technology that powers Google.

Google said local developers across Asia Pacific will now experience better performance and lower latency.

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2014/04/cloud-platform-expands-support-to-asia.html

In December 2013, Google announced the opening of two data centers serving the Asia-Pacific region:  Changhua County, Taiwan, and Singapore.

The new data center in Changhua County, Taiwan is located on 15 hectares of land.  The facility represents a total long-term investment of US$600 million. It features a nighttime cooling and thermal energy storage system.

The new data center in Singapore is located on 2.45 hectares of land in Jurong West and is Google's first multi-story facility.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/changhua-county/
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/singapore/

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Microsoft Updates Azure Capabilities

Microsoft recapped the series of updates to is Azure cloud services over the last 10 days.  These include:

Web Sites: SSL is now included at no additional charge in standard tiers. Up to 500 websites can be hosted in a single standard tier hosting plan.  Azure web-sites run in VMs isolated to host only specified web applications (for predictable performance and security isolation).  The user can scale-up/down the number of VMs either manually or using our built-in AutoScale functionality.  The pricing for standard tier web-sites is based on the number of VMs.
A Traffic Manager and Java support were added as well.
Virtual Machines: Support for Chef and Puppet extensions, Basic Pricing tier for Compute Instances
Virtual Network: General Availability of DynamicRouting VPN Gateways and Point-to-Site VPN. This allows individual computers to be connected to a Virtual Network in Azure. The DynamicRouting VPN Gateway in a Virtual Network will now carry the same 99.9% SLA as the StaticRouting VPN Gateway.
Mobile Services: Preview of Visual Studio support for .NET, Azure Active Directory integration and Offline support;
Notification Hubs: Support for Kindle Fire devices and Visual Studio Server Explorer integration
Storage: General Availability release of Read Access Geo Redundant Storage
Active Directory Premium: General Availability release
Scheduler service: General Availability release
Automation: Preview release of new Azure Automation service

http://www.microsoft.com

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Dell'Oro: NFV Report Sees Gradual Adoption

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is positioned as the catalyst for a new generation of network equipment, however, Service Providers will follow a gradual, evolutionary path, says Shin Umeda, Vice President of Dell'Oro Group.  A newly published NFV report from Dell'Oro looks a the metrics to watch in this emerging market sector.

In this video, Shin Umeda discusses the firm's first NFV Advanced Research report including:

0:31 - What's in the report
1:12 - Is NFV having a commercial impact today?
2:03 - Which market segments will be impacted by NFV first?
2:48 - Anticipated shifts in the vendor landscape due to NFV.

See 3-minute video:   http://youtu.be/GA6xANnb_kw

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Ericsson Joins NYU Wireless' 5G Project

Ericsson announced a partnership with New York University's Polytechnic School of Engineering to develop 5G technologies.

The NYU WIRELESS program, which was launched by the university in 2012, combines wireless, computing, and medical applications research. It includes more than 20 faculty members and 100 graduate students from the NYU School of Engineering Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and the NYU Langone School of Medicine.  Ericsson has now joined the program as an affiliate sponsor.

"We are pleased to have Ericsson join the NYU WIRELESS industrial affiliate program and welcome its participation," said Professor Theodore (Ted) Rappaport, NYU WIRELESS Director and founder. "Our students will benefit from working alongside this global innovator and leader in network infrastructure technology and wireless services." Rappaport holds the David Lee/Ernst Weber Chair in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the NYU School of Engineering, as well as appointments at Courant and the department of Radiology at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Last year, NYU WIRELESS completed its move into 13,500 square feet of world-class research space on the grounds of the NYU School of Engineering in downtown Brooklyn.

http://www.ericsson.com/news/140415-nyu-wireless-and-ericsson-join-forces-to-speed-development-of-5g-mobile-technology_244099437_c

• Other companies participating in NYU Wireless include AT&T, Huawei, Intel, L3, National Instrument, NSN, Samsung, and Qualcomm.

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Intel's Data Center Revenue Hits $3.1 billion, up 11% YoY

Intel reported first-quarter revenue of $12.8 billion, operating income of $2.5 billion, net income of $1.9 billion and EPS of 38 cents.

Q1 Key Business Unit Trends

• PC Client Group revenue of $7.9 billion, down 8 percent sequentially and down 1 percent year-over-year.
• Data Center Group revenue of $3.1 billion, down 5 percent sequentially and up 11 percent year-over-year.
• Internet of Things Group revenue of $482 million, down 10 percent sequentially and up 32 percent year-over-year.
• Mobile and Communications Group revenue of $156 million, down 52 percent sequentially and down 61 percent year-over-year.
• Software and services operating segments revenue of $553 million, down 6 percent sequentially and up 6 percent year-over-year.

"In the first quarter we saw solid growth in the data center, signs of improvement in the PC business, and we shipped 5 million tablet processors, making strong progress on our goal of 40 million tablets for 2014," said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. "Additionally, we demonstrated our further commitment to grow in the enterprise with a strategic technology and business collaboration with Cloudera, we introduced our second-generation LTE platform with CAT6 and other advanced features, and we shipped our first Quark products for the Internet of Things."

http://www.intel.com

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CERN Data Center Deploys Red Hat Virtualization

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Technical Account Management services across nearly 600 servers in its Geneva data centre.

Red Hat said its Enterprise Linux is running some of CERN's most critical applications, including the Large Hadron Collider Logging Server and the central financial and HR systems for CERN's members of personnel and 11,000 users. CERN also runs Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in its cutting-edge LHCb experiment, which focuses primarily on identifying the differences between matter and antimatter.

The infrastructure is comprised of physical two-socket servers and is virtualized using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on Dell PowerEdge M610 servers (with Intel Nehalem or Ivy Bridge processors with between 96 GB and 256 GB RAM per server) and a Brocade FC8 SAN with a NetApp data storage system. The infrastructure is designed for high availability and is built to be completely redundant, a critical feature for CERN as control system downtime almost always results in data loss.

http://www.redhat.com

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Red Hat Builds OpenStack Cloud Momentum

Proof-of-concept deployments for Red Hat’s OpenStack hybrid cloud offerings are now underway with customers around the world, including at The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Midokura (a Japanese company developing SDN solutions), Australia's National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, and Portugal's Universidade do Porto.

At its Summit 2014 event this week in San Francisco, Red Hat said it has achieved significant momentum for its OpenStack-powered solutions for building hybrid clouds. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, currently available in version 4.0, delivers an integrated and optimized foundation for building OpenStack clouds, bringing together trusted Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat’s OpenStack technology.

“We're thrilled by the early momentum behind Red Hat’s OpenStack-powered offerings since general availability in July of last year. We’ve seen OpenStack move from an enterprise promise to enterprise reality, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure have emerged as industry-leading offerings for secure, scalable private clouds. These customer successes underscore the value Red Hat is offering through a solution engineered together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenStack, as well as establishing the standard for the largest OpenStack partner ecosystem to provide an open alternative to customers' private cloud needs," stated Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualization and OpenStack, Red Hat.

http://www.redhat.com

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Motorola Solutions to Sell Enterprise Business for $3.5 Billion to Zebra Tech

Motorola Solutions will sell its Enterprise business for $3.45 billion to Zebra Technology in an all-cash transaction.

Zebra Technologies, with 2013 sales of $1.0 billion, specializes in barcode and enterprise printing, asset tracking, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, and motion and location sensing. The company is based in Lincolnshire, Illinois.

Motorola’s Enterprise business generated 2013 pro-forma sales of approximately $2.5 billion (excluding sales of its iDEN products).  The business unit supplies mobile computing and advanced data capture communications technologies and services.

After the sale, Motorola Solutions will continue to manufacture, design, integrate and deliver voice and data communication solutions for government and public safety customers worldwide.

“Our Enterprise business is an ideal fit for Zebra,” stated Greg Brown, Motorola Solutions chairman and CEO. “This transaction will enable us to further sharpen our strategic focus on providing mission-critical solutions for our government and public safety customers. Upon closing of the transaction, we intend to return the proceeds to our shareholders in a timely fashion.”

http://www.zebra.com/
http://www.motorolasolutions.com/

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Riverbed's SteelFusion 3.0 Targets Branch Converged Infrastructure

Riverbed Technology announced a new version of its branch converged infrastructure solution that centralizes data in the data center and delivers local performance and nearly instant recovery at the branch.

Riverbed SteelFusion 3.0 (formerly known as Riverbed Granite) fuses branch servers, storage, networking, and virtualization infrastructure into a single solution.

Key features include:

• 6x performance gain in the branch with a new high-end appliance. With a 6x performance gain over the previous high-end SteelFusion appliance, the new SteelFusion 1360P appliance ensures users get faster, local performance for storage-intensive workloads like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and CAD/CAM applications.
• 3x increase in data-capacity at the data center with a new higher capacity controller appliance. Higher capacity on the storage delivery controller, the SteelFusion Core 3000, means storage admins can now support up to 100TB consolidated data, a 3x improvement over the previous high of 35TB supported. This enables scalability for global enterprise companies looking to consolidate their data and applications.
• Enhanced recovery innovation. A new predictive pre-fetch capability on the converged appliance, the Branch Recovery Agent further reduces recovery time from major outages. This ensures employees can remain productive with constant access to applications and data, despite major disasters.
• Simplified operations. Server, virtualization, and backup administrators will see an improved scale-out architecture with pooled management of storage delivery controllers. A new recovery agent for the converged appliance makes it simpler and faster for administrators to recover a branch from a major outage.
• NetApp and EMC integration. Support for NetApp cluster mode and EMC VNX2 snapshots continue seamless integration advancements to ensure SteelFusion integrates seamlessly with data center SAN infrastructure to provide backup consolidation.

“With more and more branches and data, organizations are struggling with the cost and inefficiency of managing islands of infrastructure – servers, apps and storage – outside the datacenter. Riverbed developed the first solution that delivers all the benefits of converged infrastructure found in the datacenter, such as performance, security, scalability, better disaster recovery, and manageability, but optimized for the unique requirements of the branch,” said John Martin, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage Delivery at Riverbed.

http://www.riverbed.com

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