Category Archives: France

OVH claims integration of TimeSeries PaaS with Sigfox IoT cloud

France-based ISP turned cloud operator OVH has announced that its TimeSeries platform service is now integrated with the IoT simcloud service provided by IoT specialist Sigfox.

The fine tuning of the two services was announced at the CES 2016 show in Las Vegas, where the two service providers demonstrated showed how the OVH TimeSeries platform as a service (PaaS) can analyse and act on data being fed in from 7,000 sensors connected to the Sigfox IoT.

OVH claimed that machine-learning algorithms within the TimeSeries service can identify patterns and automatically trigger actions in response to the perceived situation. Having started as an ISP in Roubaix, France OVH has evolved to become a cloud service provider in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Finland.

In November BCN reported how it has launched a public cloud service in the UK with customisable security as protection against cyber attacks becomes a major selling point alongside open systems mobility. It recently expanded its offering into the US and Canada. It currently has 220,000 servers in 17 data centres but claims it will have opened 12 new data centres by 2018.

The new integration means that now companies can use OVH’s PaaS TimeSeries application programming interfaces to retrieve data. This frees companies from having to build and manage their own databases, it claims.

The integration and demo at CES will help companies to understand the entire value chain of the Internet of Things, according to OVH CEO Laurent Allard. “A turn-key system for storing and managing data and hosting business applications makes it much simpler, quicker and cheaper to get running with the IoT,” said Allard.

In other news, Sigfox has also announced a pilot programme with the French postal service company La Poste. The two companies are collaborating to invent a new of online postal.

The Domino programme aims to automate the ordering of parcel pickup and delivery via Sigfox’s IoT network. A regional rollout will start in the first half of 2016.

Criteo to build giant private big data platform on Huawei servers

datacentre cloudPerformance marketing specialist Criteo has chosen Huawei to supply 700 servers for its new Hadoop Cluster data centre in Pantin, Seine St Denis, near Paris.

Huawei won the tender after its FusionServer RH2288H V3 impressed in a strict comparative study, it says. The servers were chosen for their abundance of high-capacity disks, which give the Criteo data centre a better storage density and cut energy consumption by 10 per cent, it claims.

The new Hadoop platform of Huawei servers will boost Criteo’s processing performance by 30 per cent, it’s claimed. In the first stage of the project, the 700 machines in the Paris data centre outperformed Criteo’s Amsterdam data centre, in terms of computing power and storage, even though the Dutch site has 1,200 servers at its disposal, according to Criteo’s Senior Engineering Manager for Infrastructure Operations, Matthieu Blumberg.

“This is the biggest private Hadoop platform in Europe as of today,” said Blumberg, “Huawei has undeniably good ICT solutions and extensive knowledge of Big Data. We were really impressed.”

As a result, Criteo now plans to install up to 5,000 servers, taking up 350 square meters of rack space, at its Pantin data centre. The total power consumption will rise to 2 MW as the power of the Huawei server estate grows, according to Blumberg.

“We are proud to have built this partnership with Criteo: this is the kind of project we love to develop,” said Robert Yang, Head of the Huawei France Enterprise Business Group.

IBM, Nvidia, Mellanox launch OpenPower design centre to target big data apps

IBM has set up another OpenPower design centre in Europe to target big data and HPC

IBM has set up another OpenPower design centre in Europe to target big data and HPC

IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox are setting up another OpenPower design centre in Europe to target development of high performance computing (HPC) apps based on the open source Power architecture.

The move will see technical experts from IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox jointly develop applications on OpenPower architecture which take advantage of the companies’ respective technologies – specifically IBM Power CPUs, Nvidia’s Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform and Mellanox InfiniBand networking solution.

The companies said the move will both advance development of HPC software and create new opportunities for software developers to acquire HPC-related skills and experience.

“Our launch of this new centre reinforces IBM’s commitment to open-source collaboration and is a next step in expanding the software and solution ecosystem around OpenPower,” said Dave Turek, IBM’s vice president of HPC Market Engagement.

“Teaming with Nvidia and Mellanox, the centre will allow us to leverage the strengths of each of our companies to extend innovation and bring higher value to our customers around the world,” Turek said.

The centre will be located in IBM’s client centre in Montpellier, France and complement the Jülich Supercomputing Center launched in November last year.

IBM has been working with a broad range of stakeholders spanning the technology, research and government sectors on Power-based supercomputers in order to satisfy its big Power architecture ambitions. The company hopes Power will command roughly a third of the scale-out market over the next few years.

Orange confirms Cloudwatt acquisition

Orange has confirmed it will acquire Cloudwatt

Orange has confirmed it will acquire Cloudwatt

Orange confirmed this week that the company has finalised an agreement to acquire all remaining shares of Cloudwatt, the cloud services provider it set up with the French government.

In January the company confirmed it had entered into discussions to buy the firm, in which Orange had the largest stake; Thales owned 22 per cent and Caisse des Dépôts 33 per cent of Cloudwatt.

“By acquiring Cloudwatt, Orange will strengthen its enterprise cloud services offering – a major focus of its “Essentials2020″ strategic plan,” Orange said in a statement.

“The technologies and services offered by Cloudwatt complement Orange’s own portfolio and represent an opportunity to accelerate the deployment of a sovereign public cloud both in France and in Europe.”

Through Caisse des Dépôts, the French state paid €75m for its share of Cloudwatt and spent another €75m to help set up Numergy (co-founded by SFR and Bull) through the French government’s ‘Project Andromeda’ in a bid to provide locally-hosted competition to US-based cloud service providers.

Reports earlier this year suggested a potential merger between Numergy and Cloudwatt was in the works in late 2014, however, now that Atos owns Bull and Numericable owns SFR, it’s thought a potential deal would have been too awkward for shareholders to accept.

The acquisition will see Orange integrate all of Cloudwatt’s employee into its operations (likely the company’s Business Services division).