Redis is not only the fastest database, but it has become the most popular among the new wave of applications running in containers. Redis speeds up just about every data interaction between your users or operational systems.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Dave Nielsen, Developer Relations at Redis Labs, will share the functions and data structures used to solve everyday use cases that are driving Redis’ popularity
Monthly Archives: October 2015
Dells finds $67 billion to acquire EMC and create cloud giant
As extensively leaked PC and server outfit Dell today announced it will be acquiring storage giant EMC for $67 billion to create a leading player in the datacentre and cloud industries.
Dell is privately held by founder Michael Dell and VCs MSD Partners and Silver Lake. The combined company will remain private, while VMWare, which is majority owned by EMC will remain separate and publicly traded. This deal is the biggest tech M&A deal of all time and the resulting company will be one of the world’s largest privately held ones. Dell only cost $25 billion to take private, so it’s asking for a big contribution from its equity partners.
As with any massive M&A scale and efficiencies will be major strategic benefits, but the two companies were also keen to stress how much they complement each other, with Dell strongest in the SMB and public sector markets while EMC’s strongest area is blue-chip corporates. In terms of product portfolio the narrative inevitably refers frequently to end-to-end solutions and that sort of thing.
“The combination of Dell and EMC creates an enterprise solutions powerhouse bringing our customers industry leading innovation across their entire technology environment,” said Michael Dell. “Our new company will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security.
“Our investments in R&D and innovation along with our privately-controlled structure will give us unmatched scale, strength and flexibility, deepening our relationships with customers of all sizes. I am incredibly excited to partner with the EMC, VMware, Pivotal, VCE, RSA and Virtustream teams and am personally committed to the success of our new company, our customers and partners.”
“I’m tremendously proud of everything we’ve built at EMC – from humble beginnings as a Boston-based startup to a global, world-class technology company with an unyielding dedication to our customers,” said Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC. “But the waves of change we now see in our industry are unprecedented and, to navigate this change, we must create a new company for a new era. I truly believe that the combination of EMC and Dell will prove to be a winning combination for our customers, employees, partners and shareholders.”
It’s not difficult to spot the customary synergies in this deal. When Dell went private it was primarily to allow a complete strategic overhaul away from the voracious quarterly demands of Wall Street. Fundamentally it wanted to move out of the highly commoditised PC market on which it was founded in the 80s, and into core enterprise IT sectors such as servers.
EMC has been in the enterprise data storage game for even longer, is been threatened by pure play cloud providers and needs to move with the times. Just as with Dell, EMC seems to be betting that removing the rabid short-termism that comes with being a public company will allow it the space to do that and, assuming MSD and Silver Lake remain patient the new company should be able to innovate and compete well in the cloud, virtualization and IoT worlds.
“We are excited and honoured to invest in the outstanding businesses built by Joe Tucci and his world-class management team,” said Egon Durban, managing partner of Silver Lake. “We believe the strategic integration of EMC and Dell will generate unparalleled depth and breadth across servers, storage, virtualization and the next era of converged infrastructure, creating a global technology platform poised for sustained long term growth and innovation in the years to come. We are doubling down and increasing our investment in this differentiated market leader for the next paradigm of enterprise computing.”
The plan is for Michael Dell to run the whole company and Tucci to move on when the deal is done. A deal this size will take a while to get approval and complete, so nothing concrete will happen for a few months yet. But when it does, the cloud market will hopefully be more competitive than ever.
How to Run Microsoft Outlook on Mac
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an Apple fan. My house is an Apple household, complete with two iPhones, an iPad, two MacBook Airs and a mighty iMac. Even with all of that love for Apple hardware and software, I still prefer Microsoft Outlook (specifically for Windows) to Mac Mail. Why run Outlook on Mac instead […]
The post How to Run Microsoft Outlook on Mac appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Dell agrees $67bn EMC deal: An “enterprise powerhouse” or “the walking dead”?
(c)iStock.com/ictor
Tech giants Dell and EMC have announced a definitive agreement worth $67 billion (£43.7bn) which claims to “bring together the industry’s leading innovators in digital transformation, software-defined data centre, hybrid cloud, converged infrastructure, mobile and security.”
Under the terms of the agreement, which will according to the two companies create “the world’s largest privately-controlled, integrated technology company,” EMC stockholders will receive approximately $33.15 per share. Dell also confirmed VMware will remain an independent, publicly traded company.
Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, said: “The combination of Dell and EMC creates an enterprise solutions powerhouse bringing our customers industry leading innovation across their entire technology environment.
“Our investments in R&D and innovation along with our privately-controlled structure will give us unmatched scale, strength and flexibility, deepening our relationships with customers of all sizes. I am incredible excited to partner with the EMC, VMware, Pivotal, VCE, ERS and Virtustream teams and am personally committed to the success of our new company, our customers and partners,” he added.
Joe Tucci, EMC CEO, added: “The waves of change we now see in our industry are unprecedented and, to navigate this change, we must create a new company for a new era. I truly believe that the combination of EMC and Dell will prove to be a winning combination for our customers, employees, partners and shareholders.”
Reaction to the news was mixed. Elliott Management, a large stockholder of EMC, said in a statement it “strongly supports” the deal. “This landmark transaction will create a powerhouse with leading franchises across enterprise IT,” they said. Others were less charitable. Writing for WIRED, Cade Metz described Dell and EMC, along with HP, Cisco, IBM and Oracle, as “the walking dead”, as cloud services and open source moves ever closer to gobbling up legacy software and hardware.
A year ago, EMC announced a raft of merger and acquisition activity, buying open cloud provider Cloudscaling for a figure south of $50 million before buying out all but 10% of Cisco’s stake in data centre firm VCE. EMC pre-announced its third quarter earnings and sales alongside the acquisition news, with adjusted earnings per share and revenue at 43 cents and $6.05bn to $6.08bn, below the FactSet consensus of 48 cents and $6.24bn respectively.
Swedish government study advocates tax cut for data centre providers
(c)iStock.com/SorenP
A study by the Swedish government has pushed for a 97% reduction in electricity taxation for data centres in the Scandinavian country by January 2017.
The study, which has been sent to the country’s Ministry of Finance, proposes a 0.005 krona, or USD 0.0006/kWh, pricing for data centres in Sweden as well as a 97% tax cut for data centres and data service providers.
Industries such as manufacturing already enjoy tax breaks on its power and electricity requirements, which the report asserts should extend to the data centre industry. Anne Graf, investment and development director of Swedish data centre hub The Node Pole, is optimistic about potential change.
“It’s been a discussion going on in Sweden for a while, [the government] commissioned this study and the proposal is here now,” she tells CloudTech. “We’re very pleased with what they’ve suggested, which is basically just treating data centres the same way as other industries,” she adds. “It’s also a statement that Sweden is interested in this industry and wants to be a part of it growing, which is great as well.”
The report, the subject area of which has already been examined by Denmark, Finland and Norway, has been in the works since 2014 and has passed through two different governments in opposing political parties.
The submitted study will be examined by the finance ministry before moving into public consultation. Following that, the legislative process will kick in, and Graf estimates the process to take approximately six months. She notes the political ramifications give cause for more optimism.
“We have reason to believe that all parties are for this change,” she explains. “I don’t think this is particularly controversial because it’s not about treating data centres differently in any way; it’s actually about treating them the same way as we treat other industries.”
Companies already utilising the Node Pole include renewable energy firm Hydro 66, bitcoin technology provider KnC Miner, and most famously Facebook, where it all began for Lulea and whose warehouse is claimed to be the most energy efficient computing facility ever built.
The social giant is well on the way to building a second data centre, with eight having been built overall in the past four years. Graf notes: “Facebook’s investment was confirmation for us that we were right in thinking this was a great place for data centres. Their investment was kind of the go-ahead for us to do this in a more public way.
“Facebook has been hugely important not only for the Node Pole but also for the region, both in terms of jobs created and bringing this industry to the attention of Sweden,” she adds.
Regular readers of this publication will note a trend by larger vendors to build data centres closer to their customer base – IBM SoftLayer launched its first Italian cloud data centre in Cornaredo back in June. Despite this, in October research from Synergy found the US (44%) and China (10%) overwhelmingly the most popular global data centre locations.
Graf argues the opportunities the Nordics brings, such as natural energy and lower costs – Hydro 66 claims they can do colocation at half the cost compared to if they were in London – is a good compromise for a few milliseconds of latency.
“I think as both technology advances and the cost of connectivity has gone down massively over the last couple of years, it makes much more sense to move the data to where the power is produced,” she explains. “I think the trend will definitely go towards looking at more efficient solutions, both when it comes to costs and environment, and I think the Nordics is important in that sense.”
Key to that going forward, Graf hopes, is pushing through lower tax legislation in line with other industries. “We’re very happy with how this has developed, but we think that this energy tax message will hopefully mean that more of the really big players will start looking at the Nordics again,” she adds.
Join @_KeyInfo_ at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #IoT #Cloud #BigData #Microservices
SYS-CON Events announced today that Key Information Systems, Inc. (KeyInfo), a leading cloud and infrastructure provider offering integrated solutions to enterprises, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Key Information Systems is a leading regional systems integrator with world-class compute, storage and networking solutions and professional services for the most advanced software-defined data centers. These competencies are tightly complemented by a full suite of data center capabilities, including private and hybrid cloud offerings, connectivity services, colocation facilities and managed services.
Azure Data Lake Store in Private Preview | @ThingsExpo @ScottGu #BigData #IoT #InternetOfThings
Recently announced Azure Data Lake addresses the big data 3V challenges; volume, velocity and variety. It is one more storage feature in addition to blobs and SQL Azure database. Azure Data Lake (should have been Azure Data Ocean IMHO) is really omnipotent. Just look at the key capabilities of Azure Data Lake:
Technology Disruption and the Business By @EFeatherston | @CloudExpo #Cloud
I was recently watching one of my favorite science fiction TV shows (I’ll confess, ‘Dr. Who’). In classic dystopian fashion, there was a scene in which a young boy is running for his life across some barren ground in a war-ravaged world. One of his compatriots calls out to him to freeze, not to move another inch. The compatriot warns the young boy that he’s in a field of hand mines (no, that is not a typo, he did say hand mines). Slowly, dull gray hands with eyes in the palm start emerging from the ground around the boy and the compatriot. Suddenly, one of the hands grabs the compatriot and pulls him into a whirlpool of dirt in the ground, disappearing from sight, lost forever.
Moving Up to Cloud By @OracleCloudZone | @CloudExpo #BigData #DevOps #Microservices
There are many considerations when moving applications from on-premise to cloud. It is critical to understand the benefits and also challenges of this migration. A successful migration will result in lower Total Cost of Ownership, yet offer the same or higher level of robustness. Migration to cloud shifts computing resources from your data center, which can yield significant advantages provided that the cloud vendor an offer enterprise-grade quality for your application.
How to Restore Application Data By @eFolder | @CloudExpo #Cloud #BigData
In recent years, at least 40% of companies using cloud applications have experienced data loss. One of the best prevention against cloud data loss is backing up your cloud data.
In his General Session at 17th Cloud Expo, Bryan Forrester, Senior Vice President of Sales at eFolder, will present how organizations can use eFolder Cloudfinder to automate backups of cloud application data. He will also demonstrate how easy it is to search and restore cloud application data using Cloudfinder.