Cohesity pulls in $250 million for its hyperconverged secondary storage

Cohesity, a start-up based in San Jose, California, raised $250 million in an oversubscribed Series D funding round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund with strong participation from strategic investors Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, along with early investor Sequoia Capital and others.

Cohesity specializes in hyperconverged secondary storage. Its hyperconverged appliance consolidates all secondary data and associated management functions on one unified solution, including backups, files, objects, test/dev copies, and analytics.

“My vision has always been to provide enterprises with cloud-like simplicity for their many fragmented applications and data – backup, test and development, analytics, and more,” said Cohesity CEO and Founder Mohit Aron. “Cohesity has built significant momentum and market share during the last 12 months and we are just getting started. We succeed because our customers are some of the world’s brightest and most fanatical IT organizations and are an extension of our development efforts.”

Cohesity said its annual revenues surged 600% from 2016 to 2017. In the last two quarters, over 200 new enterprise customers selected Cohesity, including Air Bud Entertainment, AutoNation, BC Oil and Gas Commission, Bungie, Harris Teeter, Hyatt, Kelly Services, LendingClub, Piedmont Healthcare, Schneider Electric, the San Francisco Giants, TCF Bank, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and WestLotto.

The latest $250 million round brings total funding in Cohesity to $410 million.

“We backed Mohit at his previous firm, Nutanix, and are proud to support him again at Cohesity. The company has a smart and timely vision for radically simplifying secondary data for large customers, which is part of a broader move by enterprises toward hybrid-cloud infrastructure. We believe Cohesity is armed with the right team and product to attack this large and growing market,” said Neeraj Agrawal, general partner, Battery Ventures.

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Lynn Lucas: Secondary Workloads and Data Center Transformation

Commentary from Lynn Lucas, CMO, Cohesity

"We've all seen the transformation of the data center for primary workloads and mission-critical applications, largely founded on the new principles around hyper-converged infrastructure. Nutanix and others are leaders in this area."

"At Cohesity, our CEO, Mohit Aron, was CTO and co-founder of Nutanix, colloquially known as the father of hyper-convergence. He observed that those same principles can be applied to the rest of the data center -- what he termed secondary workloads, that is, backup and recovery, test and development, analytics, files, and objects. "

"For Cohesity, it is all about continuing that transformation of the data center and connecting it seamlessly to the public cloud."

"We are a software-defined solution. We run on hyper-converged appliances, certified both by ourselves, x86, or Cisco UCS or HPE Proliant. So you have your choice. We run and consolidate backup and recovery, first and foremost, giving you an end-to-end solution for this most critical of workloads --and then, with our software platform, allowing you to extend it to the public cloud for test and dev , and also to consolidate on the platform files and objects, other analytics applications, and to use us for replication or even disaster recovery scenarios."

See video:  https://youtu.be/t7OvAZulhjI

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IBM activates 18 new cloud availability zones

IBM Cloud continues to build out its cloud footprint with 18 new availability zones in Europe (Germany and UK), Asia-Pacific (Tokyo and Sydney), and North America (Washington, DC and Dallas, Texas).

An availability zone is an isolated instance of cloud inside a data center region, with independent power, cooling and networking to strengthen fault tolerance.

IBM Cloud already operates in nearly 60 locations. This expansion gives it more capacity and capability in these key centers. Additionally, clients will be able to deploy multizone Kubernetes clusters across the availability zones via the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, simplifying how they deploy and manage containerized applications and adding further consistency to their experience.

IBM also announced several marquee customers for its cloud platform, including ExxonMobil, Bausch + Lomb and Westpac.

"The world's biggest companies work with IBM to migrate them to the cloud because we know their technology and unique business needs as they bridge their past with the future," said David Kenny, senior vice president, IBM Watson & Cloud Platform. "Our continued cloud investment and growing client roster reflect that companies are increasingly seeking hybrid cloud environments that offer cutting edge tools including AI, analytics, IoT and blockchain to maximize their benefits."

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A10 brings container-native load balancing and analytics for Kubernetes

A10 Networks is introducing an automated way to integrate enterprise-grade load-balancing with application visibility and analytics.

The new A10 Ingress Controller for Kubernetes, which integrates with A10’s container-native load balancing and application delivery solution, can automatically provision application delivery configuration and policies. It ties directly into the container lifecycle to automatically update application delivery configuration with the dynamism of a Kubernetes environment. As application services scale up and down, the A10 load balancer is dynamically updated. A10's "Lightning" containerized load balancer also scales up and down automatically with the scale of a Kubernetes cluster.

The A10 Ingress Controller can run anywhere Kubernetes is deployed, including public clouds (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine (GCP), and private clouds (running VMware and bare metal infrastructure). 

A10 said its solution provides comprehensive application analytics by collecting hundreds of application metrics, thus enabling operations teams to troubleshoot faster, manage capacity planning and also detect performance and security anomalies. The analytics data is available via dashboards on the A10 Harmony portal or via APIs.

“As application teams adopt container and microservice architectures, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for container orchestration,” said Kamal Anand, Vice President of Cloud, A10 Networks. “A10’s Kubernetes solution provides enterprise applications teams with container-native enterprise grade application delivery for their mission-critical applications. With bundled monitoring, traffic analytics and application security, it reduces their operational burden and allows them to focus on core application value.”

“The transition to software containers, micro-segmented application architectures, and DevOps practices is underway, making it imperative that ADCs can be easily included in these applications and orchestrated along with containers by container management software such as Kubernetes,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., senior research director and advisor of cloud and data center research practice for IHS Markit, a global business information provider. “For 2017 we estimated revenue from commercial license of container software at $350 million, with revenue over $1.2 billion forecast for 2022, signaling a strong need for application delivery ecosystems to support containers. A10’s focus on integrating its ADC software Kubernetes container management software answers an important market requirement.”

“IDC finds that enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud-native containers and microservices. A challenge for those enterprises, though, is ensuring that the right application-delivery infrastructure is deployed to facilitate the agility, elasticity, flexibility, security, and scale that production environments require. At the edge of a Kubernetes cluster, the ingress controller provides important functionality – applying rules to Layer 7 routing to allow inbound connections to reach cluster services – and its integration with enterprise-grade application-delivery infrastructure, such as A10’s containerized load balancer and controller, makes considerable sense” said Brad Casemore, Research VP, Datacenter Networks, IDC.

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Foundry.ai raises $67 million for enterprise AI

Foundry.ai, a start-up based in Washington, D.C., announced $67 million in funding for its artificial intelligence (AI) software solutions for large enterprises
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Foundry has launched four businesses to date:

• Vizual.ai, which provides image optimization to web publishers and e-commerce businesses;
• Supplier.ai, which allows enterprises to improve procurement economics through improved vendor selection, pricing and risk management;
• HUD.ai, which empowers go-to-market professionals selling large enterprise solutions to improve the quality and quantity of personalized, high-impact outreach; and
• Curia.ai, which provides advanced decision optimization tools to healthcare provider networks.

"In every global 2000 C-suite and boardroom, someone is asking the question, 'How will AI impact our business?'," said Ned Brody, co-founder of Foundry.ai. "Foundry's new funding will allow us to build a significantly greater number of Practical AI businesses, creating AI solutions that focus on replicable, every-day decision improvements that drive immediate profitability increases."

https://www.foundry.ai/

• Foundry.ai was founded by Jim Manzi, who previously was founder and CEO of Applied Predictive Technologies.

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Italy’s national research network deploys Infinera's Cloud Xpress 2

GARR, Italy’s national research and education network, has deployed Infinera's Cloud Xpress 2, featuring the Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE4), to meet growing bandwidth demands driven by scientific computing applications.

GARR’s network reaches approximately four million users and connects over 1,000 public institutions across Italy with other international networks worldwide.

Infinera said GARR deployed its Cloud Xpress 2 to increase capacity and enable dynamic resource sharing between supercomputing centers operated by the National Institute for Nuclear Physics and CINECA, Italy’s largest supercomputing consortium. The platform enables GARR to deliver 1.2 terabits per second of capacity with low latency between supercomputing centers. Infinera Instant Bandwidth enables GARR to activate additional capacity in minutes, reducing the initial cost of deployment while remaining responsive to bandwidth demands.

“GARR’s high-performance network infrastructure delivers critical services for the Italian academic and scientific community,” said Massimo Carboni, CTO. “It is imperative that our network delivers high capacity and low latency for important supercomputing and research projects using dedicated ultra-fast fiber links. The Infinera Cloud Xpress 2 meets these needs and enables GARR to accelerate service innovation to support the development of these critical projects.”

“Research and education networks deliver substantial amounts of data in real-time transmission and rely on networks with high capacity, scalability and low latency,” said Nick Walden, Infinera Senior Vice President, EMEA. “We are delighted to work with GARR to meet the increasing needs of the academic community and are committed to providing GARR with solutions that satisfy bandwidth demands with efficiency and low latency.”

https://www.infinera.com/products/cloud/

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Splunk to acquire VictorOps for DevOps incident mgt - $120M

Splunk agreed to acquire VictorOps, which offers in DevOps incident management software, for approximately $120 million.

VictorOps, which is based in Boulder, Colorado, offers incident management software that features automated alerting, centralized information, and essential documentation.

“The combination of machine data analytics and artificial intelligence from Splunk with incident management from VictorOps creates a ‘Platform of Engagement’ that will help modern development teams innovate faster and deliver better customer experiences,” said Doug Merritt, President and CEO, Splunk. “This gives on-call technical staff an analytics-driven platform to monitor issues, resolve incidents and continuously improve. We are thrilled to welcome the VictorOps team to the Splunk family as we extend Splunk’s vision of using data as the backbone of IT.”

“We founded VictorOps to give teams a naturally collaborative way to quickly resolve incidents,” said Todd Vernon, CEO, VictorOps. “By combining VictorOps incident management capabilities and the Splunk platform, organizations will be able to quickly resolve and even help prevent issues that degrade customer engagement. We look forward to joining Splunk and working together to help solve these complex challenges facing every Development and DevOps team.”

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Huawei showcases Intent-driven Networking at CEBIT 2018

Huawei is showcasing Intent-Driven Network (IDN) solution for vertical industry sectors at this week's CEBIT 2018 fair in  Hannover, Germany.

"The integration of the Internet into industries has brought the first wave of digital dividends and continues to penetrate into global industrial markets. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will set off another round of digital economy growth," said Kevin Hu, President of Huawei's Network Product Line. "Huawei hopes to drive in-depth integration of ICT infrastructure, AI, and industry-specific production systems through its IDN solution, thereby accelerating digital transformation across industries and contributing to the business success of industrial customers."

Huawei said its goal with intent-driven networking is to enable enterprise customers to leverage automation for launching new services. For the financial industry, Huawei is showing IDN in ultra-large cloud data centers. A single data center network cluster system can elastically scale to support 100,000 servers.

For high-performance AI computing, Huawei's IDN solution features an Ultra-High-Speed Lossless Ethernet AI Fabric, which leverages unique congestion scheduling to shorten AI training times.

For government and enterprise campus networks, Huawei's IDN solution provides full-lifecycle cloud-based management and an open platform. These offerings enable online planning, rapid deployment, elastic scaling, and on-demand provisioning while also greatly improving the Internet access experience of network-wide users by leveraging Big Data analytics and AI.

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AT&T brings FirstNet equipment and plans to its retail stores

AT&T is bringing FirstNet mobile plans and devices into its 5,300 retail stores across the country.

This lets verified first responders sign up for FirstNet service under a personal account. AT&T and FirstNet said some EMS, fire and law enforcement agencies don’t provide their personnel with wireless service plans or devices.  Verified personnel will be able to sign up as Subscriber Paid Users or become Agency Paid Users

“FirstNet is for every responder. Whether you are a career or volunteer member of the public safety community, FirstNet is your network,” said FirstNet Authority CEO Mike Poth. “The launch of the Subscriber Paid offer shows that FirstNet is doing exactly what it’s designed to do – support our first responders when and where they need it. Now, in communities across America, we can help ensure that this groundbreaking technology quickly gets into the hands of any first responder to help them save lives and protect communities.”

• The FirstNet network core is built on physically separate hardware from the AT&T network. It provides first responders with their own separate, nationwide broadband network and it is being certified by the First Responder Network Authority. The packet core forms the basis for the unified, interoperable and nationwide communications system.

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MACOM intros Non-Linear Transmission Line (NLTL) comb generators

MACOM introduced a portfolio of Non-Linear Transmission Line (NLTL) comb generators optimized to meet the demanding performance requirements of radar transceiver, VSAT and microwave radio applications.

MACOM said its new MLPNC Series comb generators feature the lowest phase noise in the industry, which is expected to significantly improve the overall performance of RF multiplier modules. The devices also feature a variable low input power profile (18 – 24 dBm) that relaxes the power requirements on power amplifiers and reduces overall power consumption. MLPNC Series comb generators also enable higher harmonic power at higher frequencies, in contrast with SRD-based comb generators whereby output power rapidly rolls off above 20 GHz.

“With the launch of our MLPNC Series comb generators, MACOM has again pushed the boundaries of RF device performance while simultaneously helping to simplify our customers’ frequency synthesizer designs,” said Graham Board, Senior Director of Product Marketing, MACOM. “We believe that our NLTL comb generators deliver best-in-class phase noise performance with useable harmonics up to 50GHz. MACOM’s Combs are MMIC-based so they are more reliable and repeatable than SRD based solutions. As a further advantage we offer both surface-mount and connectorized solutions.”

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