News & Analysis, RadiSys, Sanctum, SDN, Virtualisation

Radisys and Sanctum create SDN solution to lost revenue

Network Function VirtualisationService accelerator Radisys is working with software defined networking (SDN) specialist Sanctum Networks to create a carrier-class cloud service that can support communication service providers (CSPs) worldwide.

The SDN cloud was built by combining Sanctum’s Jupiter SDN Controller with Radisys’ FlowEngine Intelligent Traffic Distribution System. Together they aim to create a software defined infrastructure powerful enough to identify, provide and support instant network service offerings with complete visibility.

Using this foundation, the partners say, CSPs will have a much better chance of redefining and improving the subscriber experience and guaranteeing a better of level of service. Software defined networking will also create more options for new over the top services for mobile telcos looking for new revenue streams, the collaborators claim.

The cloud is built on Sanctum’s intelligent SDN orchestrator and FlowEngine’s programmable data plane processor. The system can optimise service delivery in real-time as demands change and also unifies data across many silos, claims Joseph Sulistyo, director of product management and strategy, Radisys. Success hinges on how enthusiastically the network administrators take to the system and get the full use out of it, according to Sulistyo. “Sanctum Networks has developed a well-designed user interface and dynamic network programming model,” said Sulistyo.

Mobile telcos need somebody to remove the complexity of cloud service delivery in real-world deployments, explained Nazneen Shaikh, vice president of product management at Sanctum Networks. “CSPs can improve service visibility into their network, while ensuring carrier-grade reliability, scale and performance,” said Shaikh.

The billing, network and application data at many mobile operators is all over the place, according to Ravi Palepu, senior director of global telco solutions at revenue management specialist Virtusa. “As a consequence many telcos are either losing revenue by under billing, or losing customers by over billing,” said Palepu, “anything that unifies the data could help telcos identify where they are losing money.”

acquisition, colocation, Datacentre, Digital Reality, M&A, News & Analysis, Telx

Digital Realty completes acquisition of colocation rival Telx for $1.9 billion

datacentreGlobal data centre operator Digital Realty has completed the acquisition of colocation provider Telx in a deal valued at $1.886 billion. Telx will now operate as Digital Realty’s colocation and connectivity line of business.

Funding the acquisition doubles Digital Realty’s footprint in the colocation business and gives it a new interconnection platform, explained William Stein, Digital Realty’s Chief Executive Officer. Digital Realty raised gross proceeds of approximately $1.9 billion of debt and equity capital to fund the Telx acquisition, after settling its forward equity sale transactions with each of its forward counterparties to issue 10.5 million shares and receive $714 million.

Further funding was provided when subsidiary Digital Delta Holdings issued $500 million of 3.400 per cent Notes and $450 million of 4.750 per cent Notes. In August it raised $250 million by closing its underwritten public offering of 10 million shares of 6.350 per cent series I Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Stock.

Stein said the vendor is looking to blend its technical real estate expertise with a more expansive global reach as customers demand new products and services.

“The combination of Digital Realty’s and Telx’s portfolios of data centres and capacity gives customers the platform they need to grow and compete in a data-driven world.  Our focus will give them the ability to scale on a global basis,” said Stein. The company is now so big that nobody can compete with it, he argued. “This acquisition creates unrivalled choice and value, when and where our customers need it,” said Stein.

cloud security, Internet of Things, IoT, KDDI, Kii, News & Analysis

Kii and KDDI say their joint platform will make IoT safe on cloud

Secure cloudJapanese telco KDDI is working with Internet of Things (IoT) cloud platform provider Kii to create a risk averse system in which enterprises can develop mobile apps.

The KDDI cloud platform service (KCPS) is described as a mobile back end as a service (mBaaS) offering that uses Kii’s software to create mobile and IoT apps on a private network. The two companies have worked together on ways to apply cloud disciplines for efficient sharing of resources, contained within the confines on an Intranet environment. The object of the collaboration is to allow companies to develop machine to machine systems, without exposing them to the public cloud while they are in development.

According to KDDI, the KCPS uses the telco’s Wide Area Virtual Switch to integrate a number of different virtual network layers with Kii’s software. Together they create a new level of fast connections across the Intranet. KCPS also provides a service environment for intranet-conscious customers who need high standards of security and enterprise functions without resorting to the public Internet, according to the vendor.

KDDI claims this is the first instance in which both Intranet and Internet services can work seamlessly with any mobile application developed on the KCPS platform.

KDDI’s application development support will allow developers to build better quality, lower priced applications in a short period of time, it claims. The platform is designed to help developers manage application development, devices and data, while providing essential features like push notifications and geo-location information. KCPS should be compatible with mobile apps on Android and iOS, according to KDDI.

“As the IoT gains mass acceptance, we see tremendous value helping mobile app developers get more IoT devices into the hands of consumers,” said Kii CEO Masanari Arai, “our collaboration will use the cloud to build the backend support of these apps in Japan.”

Uncategorized

Redis Functions and Data Structures By @DaveNielsen | @CloudExpo #Cloud #BigData #IoT #API

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

read more

acquisition, Datacentre, Dell, EMC, hybrid cloud, M&A, News & Analysis, VMware

Dells finds $67 billion to acquire EMC and create cloud giant

Dell office logoAs 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.

outlook vs. mac mail, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 11, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Run outlook on mac, run windows on mac, windows outlook on mac, windows program on mac

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.

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

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.

read more

The cloud news categorized.