From its humble beginnings as a small startup, Parallels Inc. always envisioned a new way to approach virtualized computing. The story behind Parallels dictates a company filled with dozens of innovative industry firsts introduced with every new product release over the years. This unrivaled leadership in innovation began in 2006 with the introduction of mainstream virtualization on […]
The post The Story of Parallels: A Leader in Virtualization appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Microsoft has recently developed a data center in an extremely unusual place- the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Microsoft has recently unveiled Project Natick, an initiative to bring cloud computing infrastructure to cities that are closer to bodies of water such as the ocean. It is estimate that half of the world’s population lives within 200km of the ocean, so placement of data centers underwater can strategically improve efficiency and response.
In 2015, Microsoft built a capsule filled with pressurized nitrogen that featured a single rack of servers and heat exchangers clamped to the hull in order to regulate the temperature inside. The capsule was submerged 30 feet underwater off of the California coast for 100 days. Such capsules could have their computing hardware replaced every five years; the lifespan of these capsules in 20 years. Microsoft aims to make these under water data centers self-sufficient by utilizing renewable energy to power them. Microsoft is exploring wave and tidal energy.
Microsoft explained that “Project Natick reflects Microsoft’s ongoing quest for cloud data center solutions that offer rapid provisioning, lower costs, high responsiveness, and are more environmentally sustainable…”The vision of operating containerized data centers offshore near major population centers anticipates a highly interactive future requiring data resources located close to users. Deepwater deployment offers ready access to cooling, renewable power sources, and a controlled environment.”
Microsoft stated: “We see this as an opportunity to field long-lived, resilient datacenters that operate ‘lights out’ — nobody on site — with very high reliability for the entire life of the deployment, possibly as long as 10 years.”
Additional comments:
Microsoft spokesperson Athima Chansanchai has commented, “That’s one of the big advantages of the underwater data center scheme—reducing latency by closing the distance to populations and thereby speeding data transmission. Half the world’s population, Cutler says, lives within 120 miles of the sea, which makes it an appealing option…Cooling is an important aspect of data centers, which normally run up substantial costs operating chiller plants and the like to keep the computers inside from overheating. The cold environment of the deep seas automatically makes data centers less costly and more energy-efficient.”
India based global services company HCL Technologies has launched an Internet of Things (IoT) incubation centre in Redmond, the home of Microsoft.
The two vendors will use the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite to create apps for industry and manufacturing and the Life Sciences and Healthcare sector. According to HCL these are the two key high growth vertical markets in which demand for IoT apps will be strongest.
The top three use cases named by HCL will be in industrial automation, remote patient monitoring and fleet management, but there will be a variety of other apps under development. The centre will develop new methods of using real-time analytics, sensory data and rapid co-creation, says HCL.
The Incubation Centre will aim to combine HCL’s skills in engineering and product lifecycle management, systems integration and infrastructure services with Microsoft’s leadership in IoT, it said.
IoT WoRKS by HCL promises to get more performance out of any company’s existing asset investment and create new services with measurable business outcomes. HCL’s offering has three phases, Define, Build and Run, to help design enterprise IoT programmes, develop IoT systems and manage the uptime of enterprise systems respectively.
“Industrial IoT is the next big productivity and revenue generation lever for enterprises worldwide,” said Sukamal Banerjee, EVP & Head of IoT WoRKS’s Business Unit at HCL Technologies.
Last week BCN reported that Microsoft has put its new Azure IoT hub on general availability. It claims the new system will be a simple bridge between its customers’ devices with their systems in the cloud. The new preconfigured IoT offering, when used with the Azure IoT Suite, can be used to create a machine to machine network and a storage system for its data in minutes, it claims.
Microsoft has put its new Azure IoT hub on general availability. In a statement, it claims the new system will be a simple bridge between its customers’ devices with their systems in the cloud. It claims that the new preconfigured IoT offering, when used with the Azure IoT Suite, can be used to create a machine to machine network and a storage system for its data in minutes.
The new Azure IoT Hub promises ‘secure, reliable two-way communication from device to cloud and cloud to device’. It uses the open protocols widely adopted in machine to machine technology, such as MQTT, HTTPS and AMQPS. Microsoft claims the IoT Hub will easily integrate with other Azure services like Azure Machine Learning and Azure Stream Analytics. The Machine Learning service uses algorithms in an attempt to spot patterns (such as unusual activity, hacking attempts or commercial trends) that might be useful to data scientists. Azure Stream Analytics allows data scientists and decision makers to act on those insights in real time, through a system with the capacity to simultaneously monitor millions of devices and take automatic action.
Microsoft launched the Azure IoT Suite in September 2015 with a pledge to guarantee standards through its Certified for IoT programme, promising to verify partners that work with operating systems such as Linux, mbed, RTOS and Windows. Microsoft claims its initial backers were Arduino, Beagleboard, Freescale, Intel, Raspberry Pi, Samsung and Texas Instruments. In the three months since the IoT Suite’s launch it has added ‘nearly 30’ more partners, it claims, notably Advantech, Dell, HPE, and Libelium.
“IoT is poised for dramatic growth in 2016 and we can’t wait to see what our customers and partners will continue to build on our offerings. We’re just getting started,” wrote blog author Sam George, Microsoft’s partner director for Azure IoT.
Barracuda has recently released its new Essentials for Office 365 offering. In the past, I would get questions from customers about wanting to back up Office 365 to be able to control it themselves and not rely on Microsoft. I unfortunately never had much to tell them. You’re option was to go through Microsoft. Barracuda is now offering single email recovery without recovering the entire mailbox, associated attachments recovery, and conversation recovery. Barracuda has heard customers and delivered on those requests in a great way. If you’d like to hear me discuss Office 365 in more detail, check out a webinar I recently did.
Would you like to hear more from David around Office 365? Download his webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality“
By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies
Last week, Parallels was lucky enough to be invited on to Microsoft’s Redmond, WA campus and chat about virtual machines! We had a wonderful time playing with their fantastic studio, talking about virtual machines, Parallels Desktop for Mac, our advanced networking features, and our Visual Studio plugin. Check out our video on Channel 9, and some behind-the-scenes […]
The post Behind the Scenes with Channel 9 appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Microsoft has released details of a new pilot project for an undersea datacentre designed to cut power costs with free water cooling.
Project Natick, which connects the undersea module using giant steel tubes linked by fibre optic cables, could also use turbines to convert tides and currents into electricity to power the computing and comms equipment. The new sea bed data centres could also improve cloud response times for users living near the coast.
A prototype was placed on the sea bed off the coast of California in August 2015 as art of an investigation into the environmental and technical issues involved in this form of low power cloud service. Microsoft researchers believe that economies of scale through mass production would cut deployment time from two years to 90 days. The project is the latest initiative from Microsoft Research’s New Experiences and Technologies (NExT) which began investigating new ways to power cloud computing in 2014.
In the 105 day trial an eight foot wide steel capsule was placed 30 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean near San Luis Obispo, California. The underwater system had 100 sensors to measure pressure, humidity, motion and other conditions but the system stayed up, which encouraged Microsoft to extend the experiment to run data-processing projects from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.
In the next stage of the research, Microsoft said, it will create an underwater data centre system that will be three times as large. This will be built in partnership with an alternative energy vendor. The identity of the trial partner has yet to be decided, but the launch date is mooted for 2017 at a venue either in Florida or Northern Europe, where hydro power is more advanced.
This “refactoring” of traditional methods will help fuel other innovations even if it doesn’t accomplish its goal of establishing underwater data farms, according to Norman Whitaker, MD for special projects at Microsoft Research and the former deputy director at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “The idea with refactoring is that it tickles a whole bunch of things at the same time,” said Whitaker.
Microsoft manages more than 100 data centres around the globe and is adding always looking for new venues to support its raid expansion. The company has spent more than $15 billion on a global datacentre system that now provides more than 200 online services.
Microsoft has announced new co-authoring features for users of Office Mobile and Office Online who store their files with cloud services such as Box, Dropbox and Egnyte. Tighter integration with these services means that files can be worked on ‘natively’ as they reside in the cloud service, without users having to come out of their office application.
The new options come nearly a year after the Cloud Storage Partner Program (CSPP) was launched in February 2015, when Microsoft invited cloud storage providers to connect their services to Office Online and Office for iOS. “Today, we’re adding real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents stored in partner cloud services, extending our Office for iOS integration to all partners in the CSPP and enabling integration between Outlook.com and cloud storage providers Dropbox and Box,” wrote Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft’s corporate VP for the Office team.
Instant co-authoring with Office Online is now available for users with documents stored in Box, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox and Egnyte. Koenigsbauer also invited all Microsoft’s CSPP partners to integrate their storage services with Office for iOS so that users can designate these partner cloud services as ‘places’ in Office, as is possible now with Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. The new changes mean that users can browse for PowerPoint, Word and Excel files on their preferred cloud service from within an Office app without having to interrupt their train of thought by coming out of the application.
Box is now used by 41 million consumers and 54,000 paying businesses, including 55% of the Fortune 500. Among the new features offered are real time co-authoring between Box and Office Online and the integration of Box with Office for iOS and Outlook.com. Users can make concurrent, real time edits to content secured in Box including Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Box, an early member in the Cloud Storage Partner Program, has introduced a new application for Windows 10 and integrations with both Office for iPad and iPhone. DropBox and Egnyte both also announced real time co-authoring the ability to collaborate across Powerpoint, word and Excel using documents stored in the cloud.
Microsoft has announced that it will give non profits groups $1 billion worth of cloud services in a in a three year charitable scheme designed to ‘advance the public good’ and solve some of the world’s toughest problems.
The majority of the provisions will be free or discounted cloud services, namely Azure computing power and data storage and Office 365 corporate programmes and other products. The voluntary groups, charities and non-profit organisations will have a global spread, according to Microsoft President Brad Smith, writing on the company blog.
Other beneficiaries will include universities that qualify for free Azure services. There is also a plan to invest in organisations that supply Internet connectivity to the developing world. The goal of the new program is to make 20 investments in 15 countries, Smith said.
Initially Microsoft aims to serve 70,000 non profit organisations over a three year period beginning immediately. The target is to increase Azure’s use at research universities and achieve a 50% extension on an existing programme that already reaches 600 academic institutions.
Microsoft’s new philanthropic arm and its business development unit are to collaborate on ‘white space’, investing time and money in order to make use of unused television airwaves, aggregating the frequencies to create the networks for Internet connectivity.
In an example of how the new scheme could work, Microsoft has funded Kenyan organisation outfit Mawingu (the Swahili word for cloud) which provides Internet connectivity to schools and small businesses in areas without electricity supplies. Microsoft CEO Nadella visited Mawingu in July to as part of the publicity for the release of Windows 10.
The news comes a month after Microsoft rebranded its charity work as Microsoft Philanthropies and CEO Satya Nadella is currently at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The timing of the announcement could raise the profile the company’s cloud service businesses. Academia, a key segment branding software and tools among students and educators, is dominated by Microsoft rivals Apple and Alphabet, according to Bloomberg.
“The most fundamental way we advance our mission is through technology that reaches people through the market,” said Smith, “part of the history of the company was to make sure our technology was reaching everybody.”
The ‘snooper’s charter’ could neutralise the contribution of Britain’s digital economy, according to a representation of US tech corporations including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo.
In a collective submission to the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill Joint Committee they argue that surveillance should be “is targeted, lawful, proportionate, necessary, jurisdictionally bounded, and transparent.”
These principles, the collective informs the parliamentary committee, reflect the perspective of global companies that offer “borderless technologies to billions of people around the globe”.
The extraterritorial jurisdiction will create ‘conflicting legal obligations’ for them, the collective said. If the UK government instructs foreign companies what to do, then foreign governments may follow suit, they warn. A better long term resolution might be the development of an ‘international framework’ with ‘a common set of rules’ to resolve jurisdictional conflicts.
“Encryption is a fundamental security tool, important to the security of the digital economy and crucial to the safety of web users worldwide,” the submission said. “We reject any proposals that would require companies to deliberately weaken the security of their products via backdoors, forced decryption or any other means.”
Another area of concern mentioned is the bill’s proposed legislation on Computer Network Exploitation which, the companies say, gives intelligence services legal powers to break into any system. This would be a very dangerous precedent to set, the submission argues, “we would urge your Government to reconsider,” it said.
Finally, Facebook and co registered concern that the new law would prevent any discussion of government surveillance, even in court. “We urge the Government to make clear that actions taken under authorization do not introduce new risks or vulnerabilities for users or businesses, and that the goal of eliminating vulnerabilities is one shared by the UK Government. Without this, it would be impossible to see how these provisions could meet the proportionality test.”
The group submission joins other individual protest registered by Apple, EE, F-Secure, the Internet Service Providers’ Association, Mozilla, The Tor Project and Vodafone.
The interests of British citizens hang in a very tricky balance, according to analyst Clive Longbottom at Quocirca. “Forcing vendors to provide back door access to their systems and platforms is bloody stupid, as the bad guys will make just as much use of them. However, the problem with terrorism is that it respects no boundaries. Neither, to a greater extent, do any of these companies. They have built themselves on a basis of avoiding jurisdictions – only through such a means can they minimise their tax payments,” said Longbottom.