DC/OS Open Source Project Gets Underway

A new open source project has gotten underway to develop a Data Center Operating System for running containers and distributed apps in production.

The DC/OS project, which is derived from Mesosphere's Datacenter Operating System, the 100 percent open source DC/OS offers powerful capabilities for container operations at scale and single-click, app-store-like installation of 20+ complex distributed systems (called DC/OS "services"), including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra and more.

DC/OS is an evolution of the Apache Mesos technology originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009. Mesos was inspired by the types of systems that manage datacenter resources for companies such as Microsoft and Google, and simplifies the work of managing data centers and the process deploying modern datacenter-scale applications. It works essentially by aggregating data center resources -- tens of thousands of servers in its largest deployments -- into a single logical computer on which many workloads (Docker containers, Hadoop, Spark and Kafka, to name a few) can run simultaneously.

Backers of the project said DC/OS will let every company deploy the automated infrastructure that powers applications at some of the world's largest technology companies. More than 60 partners are backing the DC/OS project, including Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Microsoft.

"The world needed a better architecture for all modern apps, not just containers," said Florian Leibert, CEO & Co-Founder of Mesosphere. "DC/OS represents a major industry transformation, delivering today's enterprises an open source datacenter-scale operating system that pools compute resources into what looks like one big computer, running containers, microservices, big data systems and other components of modern applications with ease. The open source community has come together around DC/OS to deliver an amazing ecosystem of products and datacenter services."

"DC/OS is the inevitable next step for Apache Mesos," said Benjamin Hindman, Co-Creator of Mesos and Mesosphere Chief Architect and Co-Founder. "Organizations that run Mesos quickly discover they need all of the components we've built into DC/OS. DC/OS will democratize large-scale distributed systems and the applications they power, building on the work of the Apache Mesos kernel. By open sourcing DC/OS we're enabling organizations of all sizes to harness the same computing infrastructure as the Twitters and Apples of the world."

"Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments are the new reality," said Ihab Tarazi, CTO of Equinix. "We see DC/OS as a critical part of the true hybrid cloud. Equinix is home to 1,100 network providers across 145 datacenters in 21 countries and we will be using DC/OS to form the foundation for an open source ecosystem that innovates around multi-cloud and IoT. We believe that DC/OS, combined with other initiatives like Open Compute, will drive rapid innovation in the manageability, performance, security, and reliability of modern applications in hybrid environments."

The project also includes DC/OS Universe, an app-store with an open catalog of services built to run on DC/OS. The DC/OS Universe simplifies packaging and delivery of its services for use in datacenter and cloud environments and provides a low-friction distribution path for ISVs that is analogous to app stores on desktop and mobile devices.

https://dcos.io/

Mesosphere Raises $73M for its Containerized Data Center OS

Sunday, March 27, 2016    No comments

Mesosphere raised $73.5 million in a Series C round of financing backed by strategic partners, including Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Also participating in this round are previous Mesosphere investors Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Fuel Capital, as well as new investors A Capital and Triangle Peak Partners. This brings Mesosphere’s total funding to nearly $126 million.

Mesosphere's data center operating system (DCOS) is used for building, deploying and running containers and distributed systems in production. The solution also includes:

• Marathon: a production-grade container orchestration system, which is a standard part of the DCOS.
• Velocity: The newly launched developer agility and CI/CD platform for the DCOS, which leverages open source tools like Jenkins to make it possible for development teams to go from source code to production with ease and speed.
• Infinity: a big data and real-time analytics platform, which harnesses open source services such as Spark, Cassandra and Kafka so enterprises can easily build world-class analytics into their businesses.

http://www.mesosphere.com

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Diamanti Raises $12.5 Million Appliance Built to Track Linux Containers

Diamanti (previously Datawise.io) , a start-up based in San Jose, California, emerged from stealth to unveil its converged appliance built to address the infrastructure problems that developers and operators face when deploying containers in production. The solution’s software-defined controls, which Diamanti has contributed to Kubernete’s open source project, empower developers to specify their network and storage resources and service levels. The appliance includes network and storage innovations that deliver guaranteed performance levels with 10X latency and throughput improvements. It also plugs seamlessly into existing infrastructure and is simple to deploy, manage, and scale for operators.

"Diamanti was founded to solve network and storage challenges in Linux containerized environments,” said Jeff Chou, Diamanti co-founder and CEO. “Diamanti’s guiding philosophy is that solving IO challenges demands converged networking and storage."

“Our vision is to enable enterprises to deploy containerized applications quickly, knowing with certainty how they will perform and that they will work off the shelf in an open ecosystem,” said Chou. “We fast track containers to production by automating their most challenging networking and storage operations.”

Diamanti has contribute its FlexVolume code to Kubernetes. This contribution automates IO configuration based on user-defined requirements. Diamanti's scheduler contribution enables the Kubernetes scheduler to factor storage and networking requirements when placing workloads, leveraging a declarative model for developers and container administrators.

“Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise, built including Kubernetes and Docker technologies, accelerates containerized application development for our customers,” said Ashesh Badani, VP and General Manager Openshift Group, Red Hat. “Diamanti’s network and storage contributions to the community give users further choice in how they deploy performance applications at scale. We look forward to continued collaboration with Diamanti to drive industry adoption of containers.”

Diamanti also announced $12.5 million in funding. Backers include CRV, DFJ, GSR Ventures, and Goldman Sachs.

http://www.diamanti.com

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VMware Posts Q1 Revenue of $1.59 Billion, Announces Stock Repurchase

VMware posted Q1 revenue of $1.59 billion, an increase of 5% from the first quarter of 2015, or up 6% year-over-year in constant currency. GAAP net income for the first quarter was $161 million, or $0.38 per diluted share, down 17% per diluted share compared to $196 million, or $0.45 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2015.

VMware also announced its intention to repurchase up to an aggregate of $1.2 billion of its Class A common stock through December 31, 2016 in the open market, subject to market conditions.

“Q1 was a good start to 2016. We made solid progress with our strategic goal of building momentum for our newer growth businesses and in the cloud,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. “We continue to see momentum across our portfolio of growth products and businesses, including NSX, Virtual SAN and End-User Computing.”

http://www.vmware.com

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Citrix Hits Q1 Sales $826 Million, up 9% YoY

Citrix achieved revenue of $826 million, compared to $761 million in the first quarter of fiscal year 2015, representing 9 percent revenue growth. Net income for the first quarter of fiscal year 2016 was $83 million, or $0.54 per diluted share, compared to $29 million, or $0.18 per diluted share, for the first quarter of fiscal year 2015.

“I am very pleased with our performance this quarter on both the top line and bottom line,” said Kirill Tatarinov, chief executive officer for Citrix. “The progress we made in refocusing the company - simplifying our portfolio and sharpening our message – is starting to pay off."

Some highlights:

• Product and license revenue increased 10 percent;
• Software as a service revenue increased 17 percent;
• Revenue from license updates and maintenance increased 6 percent;
• Professional services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, product training and certification, decreased 12 percent;
• Net revenue increased in the Americas region by 14 percent, increased in the EMEA region by less than 1 percent, and decreased in the Pacific region by 8 percent.

http://www.citrix.com

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ServiceNow Sees 44% YoY Growth for Enterprise Cloud Services

ServiceNow, which offers enterprise cloud services, reported Q1 total revenues of $305.9 million, an increase of 44% year-over-year.

There was a GAAP net loss of $333.3 million, or loss of $2.06 per basic and diluted share, compared to a GAAP net loss of $58.1 million, or loss of $0.38 per basic and diluted share, in the first quarter of 2015.

“We’re off to a strong start with our best first quarter ever,” said Frank Slootman, president and chief executive officer, ServiceNow. “Strong upsells and traction with our emerging products were two key growth vectors during the quarter. We now have 249 customers each paying us more than $1 million in annualized contract value, an increase of 48% year-over-year,” said Michael Scarpelli, chief financial officer, ServiceNow. “We also landed a record 13 upsells in the quarter each with an annualized contract value greater than $1 million.”

http://www.servicenow.com

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F5 Networks' Quarterly Sales Were Up 2% YoY

F5 Networks reported revenue of $483.7 million for its second quarter of fiscal 2016, up 2 percent from $472.1 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2015. GAAP net income was $75.4 million ($1.11 per diluted share), compared to $85.7 million ($1.18 per diluted share) in the second quarter a year ago. This result reflects the jury verdict and other associated costs with that patent litigation during the quarter.

Excluding the impact of this patent litigation expense, stock-based compensation and amortization of purchased intangible assets, non-GAAP net income was $114.0 million ($1.68 per diluted share), compared to $115.3 million ($1.59 per diluted share) in the second quarter of last year.

“Given the backdrop of a continued difficult macro and spending environment, I was pleased with our execution, as we delivered revenue within our guided range while maintaining solid profitability.” said John McAdam, F5 President and Chief Executive Officer. “In addition, sales of our Better/Best software bundles, Virtual Editions, and Silverline subscription services all grew during the quarter as customers continued to embrace hybrid strategies and venture into public and private clouds.

http://www.f5.com

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Mellanox Posts Record Q1

Mellanox reported record Q1 revenue of $196.8 million, up 11.2 percent, compared to $176.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2015. GAAP gross margins of 64.2 percent in the first quarter compared to 70.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015. There was a GAAP net loss of $7.2 million, compared to net income of $43.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2015.

“We are pleased to report the fourth consecutive quarter of record revenue. Our profitability grew 37.2 percent year-over-year. During the quarter we closed the acquisition of EZchip Semiconductor Ltd. We see great promise in the combination of EZchip’s intelligent processors, and Mellanox’s leading interconnect technology. We believe the combined company can deliver compelling value to current and future customers,” said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies.

“We recorded strong growth in our Ethernet business, supported by adoption of our 40 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. We are seeing strong interest in the Spectrum product line and expect revenues to accelerate in the coming quarters. Tests demonstrate superior performance, costs, resiliency, and power of Spectrum compared to alternative products. We are pleased to see our InfiniBand business grow year-over-year. We see additional hyperscale entities deployed InfiniBand in their data centers.”

http://www.mellanox.com

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Ericsson Names Executive Team

Ericsson announced the following leadership line-up, effective 01-July-2016:

Hans Vestberg, President and CEO (since 2010)

Jan Frykhammar, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Head of Group Function Finance & Common Functions. Frykhammar currently holds the position as Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Head of Group Function Finance (since 2009)

Arun Bansal, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Network Products. Bansal currently holds the position as Head of Business Unit Radio (since 2014) - new member of the ELT

Per Borgklint, Senior Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer and Head of Business Unit Media. Borgklint currently holds the position as Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Support Solutions (since 2011)

Bina Chaurasia, Senior Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer and Head of Group Function Human Resources (since 2010)

Ulf Ewaldsson, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Group Function Technology (since 2012)

Niklas Heuveldop, Senior Vice President, Chief Customer Officer and Head of Group Function Sales. Heuveldop currently holds the position as Head of Global Customer Unit AT&T - new member of the ELT

Chris Houghton, Head of Region North East Asia (since 2015) - new member of the ELT

Fredrik Jejdling, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Network Services. Jejdling currently holds the position as Head of Region sub-Saharan Africa (since 2013) - new member of the ELT

Anders Lindblad, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit IT & Cloud Products. Lindblad currently holds the position as Head of Business Unit Cloud & IP (since 2014) - new member of the ELT

Nina Macpherson, Senior Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Head of Group Function Legal Affairs (since 2011)

Helena Norrman, Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer and Head of Group Function Marketing and Communications (since 2014)

Jean-Philippe Poirault, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit IT & Cloud Services. Poirault currently holds the position as Head of Consulting and Systems Integration - new member of the ELT

Rima Qureshi, Senior Vice President, Head of Region North America and Chief Strategy Officer. Qureshi currently holds the position as Senior Vice President, Head of Group Function Strategy and Head of M&A (since 2014)

Charlotta Sund, Senior Vice President and Head of Customer Group Industry & Society. Sund currently holds the position as Head of Region Northern Europe and Central Asia (since 2014) - new member of the ELT

Elaine Weidman-Grunewald, Head of Group Function Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility - new member of the ELT

In addition to the ELT members Ericsson today also announces the following appointments effective July 1, 2016:

Peter Laurin, Head of Region Northern Europe and Central Asia. Laurin currently holds the position as Head of Global Customer Unit Vodafone

Jean-Claude Geha, Head of Region sub-Saharan Africa. Geha currently holds the position as Head of Business Line Managed Services

Gustav Brismark, Chief Intellectual Property Officer and Head of IPR & Licensing. Brismark currently holds the position as Vice President, Patent Strategy and Portfolio

The following individuals will leave the Executive Leadership Team effective July 1, 2016:

Magnus Mandersson, Executive Vice President (since 2011) and Head of Segment and Business Unit Global Services (since 2010). As of July 1, 2016, Mandersson will hold the position as Head of Segment Global Services, Executive Vice President and Advisor to the CEO.

Jan Wäreby, Senior Vice President and Head of Group Function Sales (since 2014). Wäreby will retire from Ericsson as of November 30, 2016.

Anders Thulin, Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Head of Group Function Business Excellence and Common Functions (since 2013). Thulin will leave the company as of July 1, 2016, to pursue opportunities outside the company.

Angel Ruiz, Head of Region North America (since 2010). Ruiz will continue with the company as Chairperson of regions North and Latin America.

Mats H. Olsson, Senior Vice President and Head of Ericsson Asia-Pacific (since 2013). Olsson will leave Ericsson as of July 1, 2016.

http://www.ericsson.com

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