Cloud management company Virtustream is gearing up to launch a blockchain-as-a-service offering, indicating that Dell may be gearing up to take on IBM, Oracle, SAP and AWS, which all have their own blockchain-branded services.

Speaking at Dell Technologies World, the annual conference hosted by Virtustream’s parent company, Dell’s field CTO Adam Robyak told attendees that Virtustream is preparing a new blockchain-based platform offering for customers.

“They’re actually launching something they’re doing, which is their blockchain-as-a-service offering; where they’ll actually host and manage nodes for our customers, whether that’s on your premise or in their cloud.”

This product has not yet been formally announced, so details on it are somewhat scarce. However, it would appear to compete directly with IBM’s blockchain platform offering, as well as similar products from Microsoft Azure and AWS.

Robyak also revealed that Virtustream is also applying blockchain tools to other areas as well.

“One of the other things that they do is they have a huge analytics backend called Megalithics that focuses around performance metrics,” he said. “What they’ve decided to do is extend that into the blockchain world to actually allow customers who need traceability of audit logs for their infrastructure environments to be able to dump that onto a blockchain without the logs having been tampered with.”

“If I just pushed out a hundred VMs, if I just shut down 17 servers, whatever the case may be – having the ability to not only gather those logs, but prove out that they haven’t been tampered with is huge.”

Cloud Pro has approached Virtustream for comment, but had not recieved a response at the time of writing.

Robyak is one of the founders of Dell Technologies’ blockchain steering committee, so a certain level of enthusiasm for the technology is understandable. However, not all of his colleagues share that enthusiasm.

Zulfikar Ramzan, CTO of fellow Dell Technologies-owned brand RSA, blockchain is still not at a sufficient point of maturity to lend itself to enterprise applications, and he pointed out: “Many of the applications that you can solve using blockchain, you can solve using much more basic techniques that are not called blockchain”.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy appeared to share that view at re:Invent 2017, telling press that blockchain lacked “practical use cases” and that “we don’t build technology because we think it’s cool” – before releasing a blockchain service itself late last month.

Acrylic Wi-Fi Home

What we liked

Acrylic Wi-Fi Home is the free version of a professional wireless network analysis tool, but it doesn’t feel like a cut-down program and offers pretty much all the features users would ever need. It provides real-time monitoring of surrounding Wi-Fi networks, is able to scan both the 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands, and supports the latest 802.11ac wireless standards, as well as older b/g/n ones.

It helps that the program has a very smart user interface that mimics the look and feel of Windows 10’s modern apps, even though it’s actually a standard program. You can switch between two different views by clicking the menu button and toggling Advanced Mode on or off. If you leave this setting disabled, the program shows a list of available networks at the top of the screen, with a real-time signal strength graph in the bottom right and a simple star-rating score for the network quality of each network you click on. Flip on Advance Mode, however, and the star ratings disappear in favour of additional tabs that let you view graphs displaying which networks are using which channels.

Acrylic Wi-Fi also lets you personalise its interface. For example, you can change the colours for colour-coded elements and select your own network refresh rate for the real-time monitoring. You can also set the program to launch in Advanced Mode by default, should you prefer. Click the menu, then select Configure for these options and more.

How it can be improved

One thing that slightly annoyed us about Acrylic Wi-Fi Home was the way it forced us to agree to anonymous usage reports on installation. Luckily, there’s a way to opt out of this once the program has been installed – click the menu button and select Configure, then choose your preferred options from the ‘Error reporting’ dropdowns. Assuming you don’t want to spend £30 to unlock the tool’s advanced features, you’ll also need to ignore the frequent encouragements to ‘Go Pro’.

Verdict

It might not have all the features of the Pro version, but Acrylic Wi-Fi Home is generous for a freebie. It’s also well laid out, customisable and very easy to use.

Features: 5
Performance: 5
Ease of use: 4
Overall: 5

Homedale

What we liked

Homedale’s big selling point is its simplicity. Information is presented via a clean, unfussy interface with six tabs running along the top of the window, including Adapter Overview (to see information about your device’s wireless adapter), Access Points (to view info about networks in range) and Frequency Usage (for a graphical representation of the channels nearby networks are occupying). Usefully, there’s a built-in Locate Me tool (under the Location tab), which uses Google Geolocation and Open WLAN Map Service data to pinpoint your whereabouts on a Google Map.

Homedale is a portable application – there’s nothing to install, you just unzip the download and run the .exe file whenever you want to use the program. This means that it won’t install any unwanted software on your PC. Plus, you can run it from an external drive, should you need to.

How it can be improved

It’s not necessarily Homedale’s fault, but Windows Defender SmartScreen falsely identifies the program as a potentially dangerous app. It’s definitely safe, though (we verified this at visrustotal.com), so just click ‘More info’, then ‘Run anyway’ in the warning message that opens when you attempt to run the tool for the first time.

Verdict

It might not be as pretty to look at as some of its rivals, but it presents lots of information in a straightforward way and offers some useful extra options, such as its location tool.

Features: 5
Performance: 5
Ease of use: 4
Overall: 5

WiScan

What we liked

WiScan scans both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands (assuming your PC’s adapter supports both) and supplies signal strength, security and other information for all networks found. Tabs at the bottom of the program window let you switch between Beacons (a colour-coded list of all the access points available) and a useful map view of the 2.4GHz or 5GHz channels, which lets you easily see when several networks are crowded together on the same channel. Shortcuts at the top of the window screen provide quick ways to refresh your scan, set a timer interval, report your results and more. You can give access points aliases – ‘main router’, ‘upstairs homeplug’ and so on – for easy identification.

WiScan comes in two versions – a Windows installer and a zip file containing a portable version.

How it can be improved

Like Homedale, the portable version of WiScan may be falsely accused of being malware by Windows Defender, which could put people off – it’s safe to use, though. Unlike Homedale, however, WiScan prefers to present its information in a somewhat garish, amateurish-looking interface. There are a few archaic language choices – ‘beacons’ instead of access points and BSSID instead of MAC address – which can be a little confusing.

Verdict

Extra features are few and far between and some of the interface’s design elements feel a bit clunky, but WiScan is a very easy-to-use free tool for analysing nearby networks.

Features: 4
Performance: 4
Ease of use: 4
Overall: 4

Best of the rest

WifiInfoView

For a basic analysis of the wireless networks around you, this tool (from the ever-dependable NirSoft) may well be all you need. It scans the local area and presents lots of information about the networks it finds, including for SSID, Mac address, network type, channel number and much more. It lacks graphical views and real-time monitoring of some Wi-Fi tools, but includes useful info, such as router make and model.

WiFi Commander

WiFi Commander is notable partly because it’s a Windows Store app, rather than a standard program. But it also caught our attention thanks to its rather cool 3D grid view of nearby networks, which makes it easy to see which channels are the busiest. The downside is that it costs £3.29, but there’s a free trial you can download to see if it’s worth coughing up cash for.

Ekahau Heatmapper

This tool requires a bit of legwork and works best if you have a floorplan of your home. Wander around, clicking your current location on the floorplan to create a ‘heatmap’ showing where your network’s wireless signal is strongest (and weakest). Though free, you have to sign up for emails before you can download it (you can opt out later). Ekahau Heatmapper is very useful but, sadly, it hasn’t been updated in quite a while.

Google has launched a new cloud service called Cloud Composer to help organisations design, create, and manage consistent workflows within Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The service, which is currently in beta, is designed to develop, schedule and monitor enterprise workflows across internal datacentres or multiple clouds.

It offers End-to-end GCP integration, and users can orchestrate their full GCP pipeline through Cloud Composer’s integration within Google Cloud Platform.

It also connects a user’s pipeline through a single orchestration service whether a workflow exists on-premises or in multiple clouds.

“We believe there should be an easy and reliable workflow solution at a platform level, like other cloud services,” said James Malone, Google product manager, in a blog post.

“With the aforementioned features and others outlined below, Cloud Composer delivers a single managed solution to create and manage workflows, regardless of where they live, and gives you the portability to take these critical pieces of infrastructure with you if you migrate your environment.”

Google said the service was a “starting point” and a number of features are planned for the future including additional Google Cloud regions, Airflow and Python version selection, and autoscaling.

Cloud Composer and Airflow have support for BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Pub/Sub. The Airflow GCP documentation includes specifics on how to use the operators for these products.

Malone said an earlier alpha program gave access to hundreds of users and feedback from the helped improve the product.

“At Blue Apron, our data workflows need to operate flawlessly to enable on-time delivery of perishable food. Cloud Composer helps us orchestrate our pipelines more reliably by allowing us to author, schedule, and monitor our workflows from one place using Python,” said Michael Collis, staff software engineer at Blue Apron.

There will be a consumption-based pricing structure for Cloud Composer that includes virtual CPU per hour, Gb per month and GB transferred per month as the cloud data orchestrator is based on several Google Cloud platform components.

Image: Shutterstock

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has confirmed the company’s intentions to integrate machine learning technology into all of its products, highlighting four main areas in which the company is actively working on integrating the technology.

Speaking to press and analysts at Dell Technologies World 2018, Gelsinger talked about several areas in which VMware is already using machine learning,as well as teasing the introduction of ML to its vRealise management suite.

“I really see that we’ll be putting AI and ML essentially into our product line everywhere. We’ll find ways to simply bring more intelligence,” Gelsinger said. “You’ll see us making announcements later this year, where we’ll be adding AI and machine learning into our vRealise suite, because that benefits us for workload placement. And actually, that’s been a pretty good area where machine learning has demonstrated some quite dramatic results.”

VMware is already using AI and ML in various areas of its business, Gelsinger revealed, including using it in vSAN to optimise disk performance and predict failure rates, in AppDefense to automatically flag suspicious VM behaviour and in VMware Skyline.

“If you’re in a place that making any kind of forward-looking view, machine learning seems to be demonstrating very good results in a variety of these areas,” Gelsinger said.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been major focus areas for Dell at this year’s conference. Many of its new data centre products have been positioned as being particularly suited to these tasks, and the company has even built machine learning into its new PowerMax storage array to automatically optimise performance.

IDC has revealed that only 10% of European businesses are ready to implement multi-cloud infrastructure, with the majority of businesses sticking to one cloud vendor.

In fact, the company’s report revealed that 80% of businesses are stuck between a hybrid and fully cloud-based infrastructure, while the remaining 10% have made no headway at all.

Over a third of European businesses have no plans to extend their infrastructure beyond their current suppliers, although the UK industry would appear to be more open to changing vendors, with 29% saying they anticipate migration in the next 12 months.

“Virtually all European enterprises will soon use multiple cloud services,” Giorgio Nebuloni, research director, European Multicloud Infrastructure at IDC. “The smart ones are already actively planning for those services to be benchmarked, price-compared, and selected against each other based on the workload need.’

However, those that are lagging behind need to make some substantial changes to their business model.

Nebuloni explained that for businesses to see the benefit to using multiple cloud vendors, they must ensure they have a single point of control in their organisation that can ensure software and services stay aligned. They also need the skillsets, processes, and data centre infrastructure in place before they can evolve.

The cloud is not a one size fits all scenario and different workloads suit different environments, both on public and private clouds and it’s not necessarily the right strategy to focus on the big vendors – the entire market must be explored.

“While the perception of multi-cloud infrastructure as an end goal certainly resonates with European organizations, there remains uncertainty over what a multi-cloud strategy looks like and how this strategy should be disseminated within an organization,” said Michael Ceroici, research analyst, European Multicloud Infrastructure, IDC.

“Elements from infrastructure technology, aligning cloud vision between different business lines, and internal cloud expertise all play a part in facilitating successful multi-cloud endeavours.”