Today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced its next-generation HPE Modular Smart Array (MSA), the HPE MSA Gen 6. Designed to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) focus on growing their business, this entry-level hybrid-flash storage solution aims to deliver performance and automation without breaking the bank.

Tech spending is limited for most SMBs. With MSA Gen 6, HPE says SMBs can get the most bang for their buck with an updated entry storage solution. 

Able to secure their most valuable data while also making it easily accessible to employees, the HPE MSA Gen 6 also allows users who run on-demand businesses to manage their distributed applications and workloads easily.

A slew of updates to HPE MSA help satisfy the SMBs’ needs, including:

• Hands-free tiering that delivers workload efficiency with improved performance and lower latencies
• MSA Data Protection Plus (MSA DP+), which spans all drives to improve overall system efficiency
• Enhanced MSA Health Check tool to eliminate common causes of downtime 
• HPE Cloud Volumes Backup integration to provide users a low-priced route to cloud-based data protection

“HPE has continually built on and refined the MSA product family for six generations, focusing on the balance between performance and affordability, as well as looking at the simplicity and customer experience,” said Chris Powers, VP and GM for Big Data and Collaborative Platform Development and HPE. 

“HPE MSA is helping SMBs by delivering the performance and automation they need to keep their businesses running. We take pride in providing our customers with a reliable and fast solution at an affordable price so that their businesses can serve their clients efficiently,” Powers continued.

Sky Cumming, product manager at Dicker Data, an IT distributor and HPE channel partner, added, “The HPE MSA is ideal for the clients we serve whose businesses require a reliable, simple and low-cost storage solution that can match today’s workloads, and scale as their performance and capacity needs grow.”

Cumming continued, “The auto tiering capabilities provide the performance needed to power their applications, and the archive storage provides a flexible enterprise-grade storage solution at an entry-level price point. The new HPE MSA Health Check tool protects against attacks and predicts failures before they happen so small businesses can focus on making their business thrive without an IT headache.”

The HPE MSA Gen 6 is now available for order through channel partners starting under $7,000.

Salesforce sold all of its 2.8 million Zoom shares in the second quarter, according to a regulatory filing published by the SEC.

The company invested a whopping $100 million in the video-calling software vendor’s IPO last year and has more than tripled its investment since then. 

When Salesforce invested last year, Zoom made its public market debut at $36 a share. At the time, the head of Salesforce Ventures John Somorjai said the company’s goal was to remain as a long-term investor in Zoom. However, the Salesforce lasted less than a year, though it remains unclear when exactly in the second quarter Salesforce exited its position as an investor in Zoom.

The use of Zoom’s video-calling software skyrocketed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and its stock price has continued on an upward trend ever since.

Zoom’s lowest closing price during the quarter was on April 7 at $113.75 per share, while on June 25 it closed at its highest price, $259.51 per share, a 620% leap since its IPO. However much Salesforce did make should be included in Salesforce’s upcoming earnings report.

Salesforce dumped its 2.2 million remaining shares of Dropbox during the quarter too. Closing prices during the quarter were between $17.70 per share and $23.65 per share, suggesting Salesforce gained 12.6% on its Dropbox investment since the company’s 2018 IPO.

Salesforce is no stranger to investing in software companies and helping them accelerate growth as they debut on public markets. Most recently, Salesforce owned stakes in Dropbox, Lyft, SurveyMonkey, Twilio and Zoom. The company still retained 11% of its shares in SurveyMonkey at the end of the second quarter, though it’s the only holding Salesforce listed.

The Federal Communications Commission approved Google’s request to use part of a U.S.-Asia undersea telecommunications cable on Wednesday, April 8. Google previously warned that without approval from the FCC, the company would likely face significantly higher prices to carry traffic by other means. The FCC will allow Google to operate the segment for the next six months, pending a final disposition of the license application.

Google thanked the FCC for approving its request in a recent statement, noting that “dedicated global network deployment and operations [teams are] continually increasing capacity to meet the needs of our users, and that includes our subsea cable system.”

Google agreed to operate a portion of the 8,000-mile Pacific Light Cable Network System that runs between the United States and Taiwan. The company teamed up with Facebook to help pay for the construction of the telecommunications link, but U.S. regulators blocked its use.

This blockage forced Google to confront regulators earlier this year, telling them it has “an immediate need to meet internal demand for capacity between the U.S. and Taiwan, in particular, to connect Google’s Taiwan data centre to Google data centres in the United States and to serve users throughout the Asia-Pacific region.”

In its response to Google’s statement, the Justice Department agreed that without temporary authority, “Google would likely have to seek alternative capacity at significantly higher prices.” 

With this approval, Google has also agreed to diversify its interconnection points throughout Asia and will continue establishing network facilities capable of delivering traffic to its ultimate destination, the department added.

After an influx of new users pushed Zoom’s market cap as high as $42 billion, its stock price has since dropped nearly 14.5% as of Monday, April 7. While the teleconference app faced a surge in popularity last month, it now faces concerns over its privacy and security. Several major organizations and school systems across the nation have begun discouraging and, in many cases, outright banning Zoom. 

The New York City Department of Education is one of many school systems that’s banned Zoom completely. The department oversees the country’s largest public school system and has encouraged its staff members to move away from Zoom as soon as possible. The department suggested its staff members consider similar platforms, including Microsoft Teams.

The New York City Department of Education isn’t the only organization discouraging the app’s use. In an email dated March 28, SpaceX told employees it would disable access to Zoom immediately. 

“We understand that many of us were using this tool for conferences and meeting support,” SpaceX shared in the email. “Please use email, text or phone as alternate means of communication.”

The coronavirus outbreak has revealed a myriad of privacy and security issues for Zoom users. The most notable incidents have been “Zoom bombings,” in which uninvited attendees access Zoom meetings to harass participants. These bombings highlight an educational gap among users, as many are using online meeting software for the first time. 

The unaware users were leaving their meeting open to bombers by posting their meeting IDs in public areas and faking to password protect their meetings. Unfortunately, Zoom’s meeting ID format appears to worsen user errors, as researchers found that hackers could use an automated tool to find unprotected meetings and essentially “war dial” Zoom meetings. 

In a recent statement, Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom said the company “takes user privacy, security, and trust extremely seriously” and is “working around-the-clock” to improve user security. Yuan also said, “We recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s — and our own — privacy and security expectations.”

IBM has officially deployed an accelerated timeline for its coronavirus Call for Code and published three coronavirus-related Call for Code starter kits.

Each starter kit includes a comprehensive guide to help developers create apps to alleviate the problems people and communities are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We have learned how passionate developers are about solving the world’s most pressing issues, and how Call for Code’s infrastructure gives developers, data scientists, students, and subject matter experts the infrastructure they need to move from ideation through implementation,” said Daniel Krook, CTO of Call for Code. “Publishing developer-friendly starter kits has been key to help get developers up-and-running fast.”

Introducing three coronavirus starter kits

IBM has officially deployed an accelerated timeline for its coronavirus Call for Code and published three coronavirus-related Call for Code starter kits.

Each starter kit includes a comprehensive guide to help developers create apps to alleviate the problems people and communities are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We have learned how passionate developers are about solving the world’s most pressing issues, and how Call for Code’s infrastructure gives developers, data scientists, students, and subject matter experts the infrastructure they need to move from ideation through implementation,” said Daniel Krook, CTO of Call for Code. “Publishing developer-friendly starter kits has been key to help get developers up-and-running fast.”

Introducing three coronavirus starter kits

Crisis communication: Coronavirus has prompted many people to seek answers about symptoms, testing sites and the status of their communities. This starter kit comes equipped with a preloaded virtual assistant that understands and responds to common COVID-19 questions and scans COVID-19 news articles using Watson Discovery.

Remote education: While we may be in the midst of a pandemic, the edification of our youth must continue. Many schools and universities nationwide have shifted to online instruction to ensure the safety of themselves and their students. The remote education kit provides a set of IBM Cloud- and Watson Services-backed open-source tools related to remote education.

Community cooperation: We may be practising social distancing, but there is a growing interest in enabling cooperation among communities. More than ever, neighbours are offering to combine grocery runs and assist those around them. This kit enables the rapid deployment of applications that empower communities to continue working together.

IBM is continuing to develop a wide ecosystem of partners and tech providers in hopes of helping participants round out their solutions. Some of these partners include Altran and Bank of China.

Tarush Verma, client leader and AVP at Altran, said: “Altran will help fight this pandemic by creating innovative solutions for the Call for Code Global Challenge including chatbots and other applications based on the new COVID-19 developer starter kits.”

IBM reported it’s received upward of 1,000 registrations in a single day. Many of those applicants were individuals on the front lines, at-risk individuals and experienced coders who want to share their experiences and contribute to creating meaningful solutions. 

The initial submission deadline for this year’s Call for Code is now April 27. IBM will announce the three best solutions on May 5. Those teams will then work alongside IBM to have their solutions released into the “real world.”

To participate in this year’s Call for Code, visit the Call for Code site here.