Monday, December 12, 2016

Google Opens Massive Data Center in the Netherlands

Google announced the opening of its newest data center in Eemshaven, the Netherlands. The facility is 100% powered by renewable energy.

https://plus.google.com/+alphabetir/posts/HpBA1UYwV9h



  • In September 2014, Google broke ground for the data center in Eemshaven, saying it planned to invest EUR 600 million in the facility.  The target date for opening was late 2016.

Stratoscale Cloud Infrastructure Software Supports AWS + On-Prem Strategies

Stratoscale released the latest version of its cloud infrastructure software, enabling enterprises to transition towards a hybrid and AWS-based strategy. Stratoscale's Symphony transforms any x86 server into elastic, usable and consumable cloud capacity that is AWS compatible.

“Cloud-native applications are rapidly becoming the standard, driving enterprises to build AWS-driven strategies for applications and data. The adoption of an ‘all-in’ cloud strategy, however, presents significant challenges as enterprises re-evaluate existing infrastructure and applications. Moving workloads between environments requires a detailed long-term plan and significant investments and adjustments,” explained Ariel Maislos, Stratoscale’s founder and CEO. “As a part of this migration process, Stratoscale Symphony 3 offers a unique value by transforming the data center into a hybrid and AWS-compatible environment.”

Highlights of Stratoscale Symphony 3:

Object Store
Stratoscale Symphony 3 now offers unified and durable cloud-driven storage in which object storage resides side by side with block storage on the same hyperconverged infrastructure. Symphony’s software-defined storage allows admins to shift resources between the different storage types without the need to manage multiple siloed storage solutions, offering the sought-after scalability, agility and flexibility.

Kubernetes-as-a-Service
Symphony’s container service now offers a fully managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service that removes the operational barriers of adopting a container-based strategy by reducing the need for skilled and experienced talent as well as the life-cycle overhead of Kubernetes. Symphony’s Kubernetes services offer direct access to Kubernetes GUI, enabling enterprises to leverage existing practices and minimize the learning curve.
Symphony is responsible for keeping the cluster up and running according to the defined size and providing network access to the cluster endpoints and nodes maintenance. Administrators can now easily monitor their cluster health and usage.

AWS Region
Symphony now enables business units to leverage the same AWS DevOps tools they adopted for cloud-native application and implement them for on-premises workloads. By creating an AWS Region in the enterprise data center, teams can modernize apps and deliver them in a short time, ensuring a high level of portability and alignment with the AWS cloud vision.
Symphony offers EC2, EBS, S3 and VPC services with additional AWS compatible services to be introduced in the near future.

Application Catalog
Symphony’s application marketplace includes more than 130 pre-packaged stacks of a wide variety of enterprise applications. With a single click users can install and deploy the entire application stack. Pre-set automated configurations reduce the operational complexity, boosting agility and shortening time-to-market.

http://www.stratoscale.com

Stratoscale Secures $27M for Hyperconverged Software

Stratoscale, a start-up based in Herzeliya, Israel, secured $27 million in Series C financing for its distributed data center operating system.

Stratoscale's hardware-agnostic Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) solution that offers a holistic data center experience. Its rack-scale architecture aims to transform standard x86 servers into a hyper-converged infrastructure for cloud services while supporting both containers and virtualization on the same platform.  Stratoscale’s true “plug and play” architecture supports OpenStack and Docker.

Qualcomm Ventures joined the Series C financing round with participation from all existing investors. Stratoscale has now raised over $70 million in funding over the past three years that is dedicated to support global expansion of the company.

“Today’s data center managers are looking to Stratoscale to help them more effectively manage their technology infrastructure. To help us scale globally, we are proud to have the support and investment from Qualcomm Ventures,” said Ariel Maislos, CEO of Stratoscale. “This investment enables us to accelerate our adoption in the market and expand operations more quickly to meet the demand for an all-inclusive data center cloud offering that is scalable and efficient. We continue to deliver on the promise of what data centers should be without the burden of being locked into legacy infrastructure that doesn’t grow with your business.”

http://www.stratoscale.com

NeoPhotonics Samples 100G CFP-DCO Coherent Transceiver

NeoPhotonics has initiated sampling of its Coherent CFP-DCO module as part of its ClearLight Coherent Module platform introduction, which uses 16nm Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) and is capable of achieving single wavelength 100 and 200 Gbps transmission over Datacenter Interconnect through Long Haul transmission distances.

NeoPhotonics said its ClearLight CFP-DCO platform is based on optical components with performance capabilities that have already been proven in high volume production. These include a high power tunable laser having the narrowest linewidth and the lowest power consumption in the industry, a low insertion loss modulator capable of higher order modulation, a high responsivity receiver and a low power consumption digital signal processor.

The first release 100Gbps version uses a standard 100GE or OTU-4 interface which can plug directly into existing 100G CFP client-side slots to extend the range and capacity for metro and DCI applications. The module incorporates standard hard decision staircase forward error correction for interoperability, as well as proprietary soft decision forward error correction for high performance applications. A 200Gbps version utilizing 16-QAM is based on the same platform and utilizes the same high volume, proven coherent optical components.

"Our new ClearLight CFP-DCO 100G pluggable Coherent transponder represents a powerful new platform product for NeoPhotonics, and we are pleased to initiate sampling to customers," said Tim Jenks, Chairman and CEO of NeoPhotonics. "This exciting new product is made possible by our Advanced Hybrid Photonic Integration technology, coupled with the latest advances in 16 nm Coherent DSPs, and provides our customers with a flexible, high performance pluggable coherent module for their high speed networks," continued Mr. Jenks.

http://www.neophotonics.com

AT&T Activates First Open ROADMs with Ciena and Fujitsu

AT&T recently activated a 100 Gbps wavelength in its production network in the Dallas area that uses Open ROADM-compliant technology. Specifically, AT&T connected 2 high capacity IP/MPLS routers with transponders and ROADMs provided by Ciena and Fujitsu.

Open ROADM project is a project underway with the backing of AT&T and a goal of driving faster innovation and open software control for the Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) used in optical transport networks. An Open ROADM Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) defines interoperability specifications for Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADM). Included are the ROADM switch as well as transponders and pluggable optics. Specifications consist of both Optical interoperability as well as YANG data models.

In a blog posting, Andre Fuetsch, President of AT&T Labs and CTO, said the newly installed ROADMs support full software control according to the published Open ROADM specification. NetConf/YANG APIs are used for controlling and managing the optical network. The 100G wavelength was provisioned using an SDN ROADM Controller developed by Fujitsu and integrated into the AT&T ECOMP architecture.

http://about.att.com/innovationblog/open_roadms
http://openroadm.org/home.html

AMD Outlines Strategy for GPU-Accelerated Machine Learning

AMD outlined its strategy to accelerate the machine intelligence era in server computing through a new suite of hardware and open-source software offerings. Plans include new AMD Radeon Instinct GPU accelerators for deep learning inference and training.

Along with the new hardware offerings, AMD announced MIOpen, a free, open-source library for GPU accelerators intended to enable high-performance machine intelligence implementations, and new, optimized deep learning frameworks on AMD's ROCm software to build the foundation of the next evolution of machine intelligence workloads.

"Radeon Instinct is set to dramatically advance the pace of machine intelligence through an approach built on high-performance GPU accelerators, and free, open-source software in MIOpen and ROCm," said AMD President and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su. "With the combination of our high-performance compute and graphics capabilities and the strength of our multi-generational roadmap, we are the only company with the GPU and x86 silicon expertise to address the broad needs of the datacenter and help advance the proliferation of machine intelligence."

http://www.amd.com

Inphi Completes Acquisition of ClariPhy

Inphi completed its previously announced acquisition of ClariPhy Communications for $277 million plus the assumption of certain liabilities.

"By finalizing the ClariPhy acquisition we achieve an important milestone in offering a platform for optical networking customers," said Ford Tamer, President and CEO of Inphi Corporation. "The ClariPhy coherent DSP complements Inphi TiA, driver, optical PHY and silicon photonics components to provide system OEM and module customers high-performance and low-power platform solutions. We believe this will provide customers with faster time-to-market, proven quality, and competitive cost."

IHS estimates the total available market for 100G & 200G coherent optical network hardware will grow at 18% CAGR, from $3.2 billion to $7.4 billion, between 2015 and 2020. This growth will be driven by several concurrent, powerful tailwinds: the current optical super cycle, a growing and expanding SAM (serviceable available market), opportunities in regions such as China and with new markets such as Cloud.

http://www.inphi.com

Inphi to Acquire ClariPhy for Coherent DSPs

Inphi, which supplies high-speed data movement interconnects, agreed to acquire ClariPhy Communications, a provider of ultra-high-speed systems-on-chip (SoCs) for multi-terabit data, long haul and metro networking markets for $275 million in cash as well as the assumption of certain liabilities at the close.

ClariPhy is one of only three merchant suppliers of coherent DSP technology. The company is based in Irvine, California.

On the product front, following closing, Inphi expects to be able to offer customers (1) coherent DSP, TiA, drivers for long haul, and metro, (2) direct detect PAM DSP-based solutions for DCI edge between data centers, and (3) NRZ and PAM short reach solutions for inside data centers. On the component front, following closing, Inphi expects to be able to offer TiA, driver, silicon photonics, coherent DSP, PAM and NRZ physical layer devices.

“With the acquisition of ClariPhy, we are completing our product portfolio as the leading component and platform supplier for optical networking customers,” said Ford Tamer, president and CEO of Inphi.  “The ClariPhy coherent DSP complements Inphi TiA, driver, optical PHY and silicon photonics components to provide system OEM and module customers high-performance and low power platform solutions.  Following closing, we expect to have platform offerings for long haul, metro, DCI edge, and intra-data center applications. We believe this will provide customers with faster time-to-market, proven quality, and competitive cost.”

http://www.inphi.com
http://www.clariphy.com

BMC Names Peter Leav as its New CEO

BMC Software named Peter Leav as President and Chief Executive Officer, replacing Bob Beauchamp, who continues to serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors and will play a key role going forward.

Leav joins BMC from Polycom, where he served as President and CEO for the last three years.Previously, he also served at NCR and Motorola.

"BMC is an iconic software company that has served the world's largest and most successful enterprises for over 35 years. I am excited to lead the company as we continue to grow, innovate and drive success for our customers, partners and employees in the years ahead," said Leav. "I thank Bob Beauchamp for his leadership and many contributions over the past 28 years and am delighted that Bob will continue as our board chair."

http://www.bmc.com