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Hyperconverged: it’s a word which elicits knowing nods from those in the industry, and looks of panic from those few who haven’t heard of it. Yet hyperconverged infrastructure, bundling in compute, storage, networking and virtualisation in a software-centric architecture, is here to stay, and Massachusetts-based SimpliVity has today announced a deal to put its OmniStack technology on Huawei FusionServer in a new collaboration.

The offering is available on SimpliVity’s all-flash hyperconverged models.

SimpliVity was named as a leader in Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant for integrated systems, which covers hyperconvergence, as well as being cited by Computer Weekly as a challenger in the market earlier this year.

Alongside Huawei, the company has forged technology alliances with Cisco, Lenovo and Dell. The latter, which bought EMC for $67 billion in October last year, to also include VCE and VMware, refreshed its hyperconverged lineup earlier this year, with a ZDNet article at the time noting that “every enterprise hardware vendor is rushing to this fast-growing space.”

This time round, the press materials note that Huawei and SimpliVity are two of the fastest growing IT companies addressing the fastest growing markets with this announcement.

“By combining SimpliVity’s revolutionary hyperconverged technology with Huawei’s servers and strong global footprint, more customers will be able to realise the unique benefits that only SimpliVity delivers,” said Doron Kempel, SimpliVity CEO in a statement. “By providing the most complete hyperconverged solution on the industry’s leading server platforms, SimplIVity is putting customer needs front and centre.”

Writing for this publication back in October, Geoff Smith, senior manager at GreenPages Technology Solutions, mused on the issue of day two for hyperconverged – not the implementation, but when the platform is spinning away in the data centre.

“Adopting hyperconverged as your next-generation technology play is certainly something to consider carefully, and has the potential to positively impact your overall operational maturity,” he wrote. “You can reduce the number of vendor technologies and management interfaces, get more proactive, and make decisions based on real data analytics.

“Hyperconverged platforms can certainly enhance and help mature your IT organisations, but they do provide only part of the story,” Smith added.

You can read more about SimpliVity and Huawei’s collaboration here.

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US tech giant CA Technologies has announced its intent to acquire business automation software provider Automic in a reported €600 million (£505m) deal.

The move is to enhance CA’s European reach, as well as adding automation and orchestration capabilities across its portfolio.

“With the acquisition of Automic, we will deliver automation, scale work flows and business processes while reducing costs and greatly improving accuracy,” said Ayman Sayed, CA Technologies president and chief product officer in a statement. “This level of intelligent automation will give our customers the insights to achieve more agility and realise business value.”

The acquisition plays into various strategic initiatives, with all the buzzwords you’d expect to find bundled in; DevOps, Internet of Things, hybrid, and so on. In other words, though, this means that organisations can automate their legacy SAP and Oracle business processes, as well as other workloads, from finance to job requests, to make organisations more proactive and productive long-term.

Writing for this publication in October, Chris Boorman, Automic CMO, discussed the importance of providing a multi-tenant offering for automation services, which helps enterprises serve multiple departments and clients on a single, shared platform. “In cloud computing, the meaning of multi-tenancy architecture has broadened because of new service models that take advantage of virtualisation and remote access,” Boorman wrote.

“This multi-tenant release automation model helps large enterprises – saddled with slow-moving, legacy infrastructures – to bridge the gap between development teams launching mobile and web-based services almost non-stop, and the operations team who are more concerned with maintaining reliability and continuity.

“A multi-tenant release automation product enables organisations like these to be agile in the back end, and be compliant and scalable in the front office,” Boorman added.

The acquisition is expected to close in Q417 for CA, with financial services firm Foros acting as advisor to the transaction.

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Almost 70% of small businesses in a survey from B2B analyst and reviews firm Clutch say they rely on their cloud storage provider for backups, with only 15% opting for automated services and 12% not bothering at all.

The findings appear as the second of two reports on SMBs and cloud strategy, with the first in November advising that many small firms are risking their security by choosing free storage products.

This time, the warning is around using their providers for backing up data in the cloud. As this publication has examined on various occasions, while the need for backup is rare, it’s always better to prepare for an unlikely event than be caught unawares. If the company was not utilising an automated service and forgot to back it up, then they have no other options.

Clutch recommends Mozy and Carbonite as providers who help with the automation side of backup. “If I put a file in Dropbox, it’s going to be there,” said Mark Estes, regional director of sales at big data firm Qubole. “If I don’t back it up, then Dropbox can’t help me with that.”

The warning comes amidst additional figures from Clutch which show more small businesses are taking the plunge and moving to cloud storage.

More than a quarter of survey respondents said they began using their storage services over the past year. According to the research, the majority (42%) of businesses polled, who have a maximum of 500 employees, said they spend between $51 and $250 each month on cloud storage, with 26% opting for between $251-$1000 and 9% more than $1000.

“It’s…just a natural maturing of the product,” said Jacob Ackerman, chief executive of SkyLink Data and Horizon Businesses Services.

“Once technology starts invading the personal lives of non-IT people in business, the technology is more accepted. It takes a level of acceptance and a level of comfort – people are comfortable with it now.”

The survey polled 293 small to medium businesses in total.

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Cloud storage provider Box has announced its Q317 financial results, with revenue hitting a record $102.8 million (£81.3m), an increase of 31% on the same time last year.

Billings in the third quarter was $112.4m, up 26% from this time last year, while GAAP operating loss was at $37.8m, lower than expected. The company says it is on track to achieve positive free cash flow by the end of Q4, while its guidance has been raised to $397-$398m, up from $394-$396m.

“Our results this quarter were driven by our best-in-class retention rate, strong sales execution, and increased adoption of our newer products,” said Dylan Smith, co-founder and CFO of Box in a statement. “We also demonstrated significant progress in cash flow from operations, driving a year-over-year improvement of more than $10 million, and bringing us closer to achieving positive free cash flow in the current quarter.”

Highlights for the company in the most recent quarter included a new strategic partnership with Google, working with Facebook to help integrations for its Facebook Workplace product, as well as growing its paying customer base to more than 69,000 businesses, including Hertz, Southwest Airlines, and the US Department of the Treasury.

“The need for Box is clear,” Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box told analysts, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Today, business content is spread across separate legacy systems, on-premises storage, disparate collaboration and workflow tools, and sync and share solutions. Every year enterprises spent tens of billions of dollars on content management technology that are no longer innovating, simplifying their competitive environment.”

Taking a question on what Box’s product will broadly look like in a couple of years, Levie noted that some of the company’s customers have 600 million objects stored in the platform. “The kind of capabilities that you’ll continue to see on our platform are things around advancing our governance solutions, advancing our enterprise content management capabilities, advancing our workflow options,” Levie said.

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Cloud storage provider Box has announced its Q317 financial results, with revenue hitting a record $102.8 million (£81.3m), an increase of 31% on the same time last year.

Billings in the third quarter was $112.4m, up 26% from this time last year, while GAAP operating loss was at $37.8m, lower than expected. The company says it is on track to achieve positive free cash flow by the end of Q4, while its guidance has been raised to $397-$398m, up from $394-$396m.

“Our results this quarter were driven by our best-in-class retention rate, strong sales execution, and increased adoption of our newer products,” said Dylan Smith, co-founder and CFO of Box in a statement. “We also demonstrated significant progress in cash flow from operations, driving a year-over-year improvement of more than $10 million, and bringing us closer to achieving positive free cash flow in the current quarter.”

Highlights for the company in the most recent quarter included a new strategic partnership with Google, working with Facebook to help integrations for its Facebook Workplace product, as well as growing its paying customer base to more than 69,000 businesses, including Hertz, Southwest Airlines, and the US Department of the Treasury.

“The need for Box is clear,” Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box told analysts, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Today, business content is spread across separate legacy systems, on-premises storage, disparate collaboration and workflow tools, and sync and share solutions. Every year enterprises spent tens of billions of dollars on content management technology that are no longer innovating, simplifying their competitive environment.”

Taking a question on what Box’s product will broadly look like in a couple of years, Levie noted that some of the company’s customers have 600 million objects stored in the platform. “The kind of capabilities that you’ll continue to see on our platform are things around advancing our governance solutions, advancing our enterprise content management capabilities, advancing our workflow options,” Levie said.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the launch of a new series of instances for its cloud infrastructure, both expanding current instance families and creating new categories.

At Re:Invent in Las Vegas today, Andy Jassy, AWS chief executive, announced XL and 2XL segments for its T2 series of instances, which are aimed more at the simpler workload, as well as I3, the next generation of its high I/O instances, C5 for more compute intensive workloads, and R4 for memory intensive workloads.

Two new services at opposite ends of the spectrum were also introduced; Amazon Lightsail, which caters to customers who want to spin up a virtual private server with the minimum of fuss, as well as F1 instances which cater to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and more sophisticated hardware acceleration. Additionally, Elastic GPUs, which allow GPUs to be attached to all instances, were also unveiled.

Picture credit: Screenshot

“If you look at these instances, nobody else has even half of these,” said Jassy, moments before announcing a bunch of new instances. “Having this number really matters for customers. We’re constantly reinventing our instance families.”

The keynote presentation focused on the notion that, to quote one of the slides, ‘with AWS, it can feel like you have been given superpowers.’ Tempting as it may be to scoff, the stats and citations kept flooding in: more than 1000 launches in 2016, compared to 159 in 2012 and 24 in 2008; acknowledgement of the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant ranking and particular the analyst firm’s view that AWS had ‘several’ times the size of the next 14 providers combined; the thousands of systems integrators and ISVs on board, as well as companies “born or reborn in the cloud.”

So what were these superpowers? One was ‘supersonic speed’, which relates to the greater breadth and depth of AWS’ services, while another focused on ‘immortality’; how businesses can survive and thrive long term by keeping pace with emerging technologies.

Perhaps the most interesting of the lot was the second supposed superpower, ‘x-ray vision’. Here we saw practically the only instance of competitor-bashing. When Jassy described the importance of “the ability to see through the handwaving and bombast”, a picture of Oracle’s Larry Ellison briefly appeared.

“In the old days, because it was so hard and so expensive to test and experiment, you would get these old guard leaders who stand up and make wild claims…and you had no ability to find out what was real,” said Jassy. “In the cloud that’s not the case. That ship has sailed – kind of like an America’s Cup ship.”

Talk about converting your own touchdown. But this led onto an interesting piece around analytics. AWS has also launched Amazon Athena, an interactive query service which aims to make data analysis in Amazon S3 simpler. Athena is designed for more ad-hoc analytics, and Jassy noted the new release complements Redshift and EMR, the firm’s other products in the space.

From analytics begat a discussion on machine learning, with AWS announcing a variety of new tools aimed at developers. Amazon Rekognition, as the name may suggest, focuses on image recognition, while Amazon Polly looks at text to speech capabilities and Lex is the natural language processing which powers Amazon Alexa, now available as a general service.

As is the way of such events, customers were ferried on and off the stage, from energy provider ENEL, who is aiming to move to ‘cloud only’ through AWS as well as using its IoT service, and Workday, who has confirmed it is using AWS as its preferred public cloud supplier. The latter follows the announcement yesterday that shipping carrier Matson has gone all-in, shutting down its four on-premises data centres in the process.

Again, the sheer amount of choice to prospective customers was emphasised, from infrastructure, to enterprise apps, to hybrid. Perhaps the last word should be given to William Fellows, vice president of 451 Research. He argues in the analyst firm’s latest note that 2017 will see the emergence of ‘AWS+1’ as an operating principle. This ‘blended cloud’ model would ensure the CIO and CFO can demonstrate “value, choice, and flexibility”, the company added.

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Say hello to UpCloud. The Finland-based cloud provider has secured €4 million (£3.4m) in a series A funding round, and is looking to expand its team with the proceeds.

The startup, which was founded in 2011, currently has four data centres in Chicago, Frankfurt, Helsinki, and London, and was recently named by Deloitte as one of the top three fastest growing technology firms in Finland.

UpCloud aims squarely at the ‘cost-effective, high performance’ space, and is naturally bullish about its funding and future opportunities. “Our goal is to offer developers the most high performance cloud infrastructure resources and the best tools to control and manage them on a global scale,” a blog post from Antti Vilpponen, CEO, and Joel Pihlajamaa, CTO and founder, read. “With the funding, we are able to accelerate many things towards this goal; opening of new data centres and offices, but also hire great people to our team.”

Regular readers of this publication may recognise the name. The company was ranked highly in a benchmark report from Cloud Spectator back in March, scoring 95 out of 100 and coming second only to 1&1. In comparison, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer scored 76 between them with scores of 27, 27, and 22 respectively.

How was this so? By focusing on performance as well as price, measuring vCPU, memory, and block storage capabilities, Cloud Spectator came to the conclusion that the smaller players provided better value for money. “When it comes to price performance, we see many smaller players find an advantage by offering high-performance infrastructure at a very competitive price,” Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator, told this reporter at the time, adding that he expected to see further consolidation, as the likes of Verizon, HP, and Dell, exited the cloud infrastructure space.

All good news for UpCloud then, whose aim is to become the ‘de facto global European alternative in the high performance cloud space’, according to the company.

The funding round was led by Inventure, a Nordic venture capital firm.

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Swedish data centre operators are to enjoy a vastly reduced electricity tax rate for providing their services after Sweden’s parliament confirmed new legislation.

The move will see the rate for data centres in Sweden move to 0.005 krona, or 0.00054 US dollars per kWh, as of January 1 2017 at a 97% cut.

Last year, a government-led study advocated the move, arguing that the data centre industry should be on an equal footing to the likes of manufacturing, which already has tax breaks on its power and electricity requirements built in. Speaking to this publication at the time of the report’s release Anne Graf, then investment and development director at data centre hub The Node Pole, noted her belief that all stakeholders were for the proposed changes – with the recent decision proving her assertions right.

The Node Pole, which is to be acquired by Vattenfall and Skellefteå Kraft, two of Sweden’s largest energy companies, has among its clientele renewable energy provider Hydro 66 – who claims it can offer colocation at half the cost compared to if they were based in London – and most famously Facebook, whose expansions in Lulea have been well documented.

Sweden’s natural climate and relative close proximity for European customers makes it an attractive proposition for potential customers, and according to Peter Ericson, chairman of the Node Pole, this latest development adds to the mix.

“This parliamentary decision sends a clear message that Sweden is serious about becoming the green home of the internet and taking global cloud service leadership over the short and long term,” said Ericson in a statement. “The combination of low electricity prices, a competitive tax rate and the abundance of renewable energy provides a case for a long-term investment climate that is extremely competitive.”

The break will apply to new and existing data centres which exceed ‘at least a 0.5 [megawatt] capacity, measured as installed effect excluding cooling facilities’, according to the press materials.

Read more: Swedish government study advocates tax cut for data centre providers

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Managed cloud services provider Rackspace has announced it is to open a data centre in Germany, citing the strict data protection laws in the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) region as key to the move.

While it is Rackspace’s first foray into continental Europe in this manner, the company will join a host of other players in Frankfurt, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and IBM. Alibaba announced a similar move earlier this week, alongside expansions in Australia, Japan, and the Middle East.

“With the opening of our data centre in Germany, we can provide the highest level of availability, security, performance and management, and also help our customers address data protection requirements by providing them with multi-cloud deployment options,” said Alex Fuerst, who heads up Rackspace’s DACH operations. “As the demand for managed services increases in the German-speaking region, companies of all sizes in all vertical are embracing multi-cloud approaches to IT, so that each of their workloads runs on the platform where it can achieve the best performance and cost efficiency.

“More and more of those companies are turning to Rackspace expertise and support for their critical IT services and data,” Fuerst added.

It has been a busy few months for Rackspace, who with the new German site will now have 12 data centres worldwide. Back in August, it was confirmed that the company was to be acquired by private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $4.3 billion, with the deal approved and signed off earlier this month. Writing in a blog post at the time, CEO Taylor Rhodes said that the company’s board was “mindful that Rackspace faces a big opportunity as the early leader in the fast-growing managed cloud services industry.”

The new data centre is expected to become operational by mid-2017.

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Enterprise data centre provider Aegis Data argues in its latest note that utilising artificial intelligence (AI) could be key in winning the battle for sustainable data centres.

“There’s no escaping the reality that as more connected devices and technology trends sweep the market, more demands will be placed on the data centre to provide the high-powered servers and cooling systems required,” said Greg McCulloch, CEO of Aegis. “But in the pursuit of guaranteeing performance, it is having an accumulative effect on the global share of data centre emissions… it’s not an understatement that the industry needs to take immediate action and AI may just be the solution in order to help achieve more sustainable results.”

For data centre providers, PUE (power usage effectiveness) figures have traditionally been the name of the game for sustainability, dividing energy for the whole facility by the energy for the facility’s IT equipment and aiming for an ideal score of 1.0.

Back in April 2015 this reporter attended the opening of a new Rackspace data centre (below) in West Crawley, which had an impressive 1.15 PUE rating; the average was nearer 1.7 with Rackspace admitting themselves their target was 1.25. The data centre utilised other natural benefits, including cooling using natural air – a feature that was tailor made for the UK – while the design was donated to the Open Compute Project.

Picture credit: Rackspace

It was pretty impressive stuff all round. Yet not everyone agrees that PUE is the way forward. Professor Ian Bitterlin, chair of the British Computer Society’s data centre group on server lifecycle, told E&T last year that “improving server effectiveness is the only way to improve data centre effectiveness”, and that people are erroneously putting PUE as a data centre ‘goodness’ metric.

As far as Aegis is concerned, the work Google is undertaking by putting its DeepMind technology in its data centres – and experiencing a 15% energy efficiency improvement in the process – is on the right lines, but not without its flaws. “[AI is] a technology that’s very much in its infancy, and if it is to overtake human interaction in the data centre, then it must be rigorously researched and tested to guarantee performance,” said McCulloch. “But once this hurdle is overcome, AI has the ability to provide a comprehensive visualisation, automation and monitoring process that can envision the necessary power, cooling and energy requirements needed.

“With the wide range of operations that occur in a data centre, the ability to eliminate human error and have an ‘always on’ approach will go a long way in helping reduce energy consumption,” added McCulloch.