Data Center Links: August 24, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• Apple to build data center in Iowa.  The Des Moines Register reports that Apple will build a data center in Waukee, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines. Following large data center builds from Microsoft and Facebook in the Des Moines area, and Google in Council Bluffs, Apple will fulfill project 'Morgan' in a newly annexed portion of Waukee.  My thoughts? Smart move by Apple (Iowa=awesome location), data center hub in the making (enormous build-outs by Microsoft, Facebook and Google in Iowa), and good for Waukee (there is already another totally awesome data center in town). #iowa  #iowabrag

• Druva nets $80 Million Funding round.  Cloud data and protection management company Druva announced $80 million of growth equity funding Tuesday, bringing their total raised to around $200 million. Funding was led by Riverwood Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and most other existing venture investors. Druva said they will use the funds to "dramatically accelerate research and development, expand go-to-market efforts worldwide, and lead the industry in redefining how enterprises protect, manage, and use their data."

• Microsoft Acquires Cycle Computing. Microsoft announced it is acquiring Cycle Computing, a leader in HPC cloud computing orchestration. Microsoft says it will integrate the Big Computing capabilities from the CycleCloud product into Azure. 

• Microsoft launches Brainwave for real-time AI. At the 2017 Hot Chips Symposium in Cupertino Microsoft announced Project Brainwave, a new deep learning acceleration platform. Leveraging a large FPGA infrastructure inside of Microsoft, the new platform is built with three main layers: a high performance, distributed system architecture, a hardware DNN (deep neural network) engine synthesized onto FPGAs, and a compiler and runtime for low-friction deployment of trained models.

• Databricks secures $140 million. Unified Analytics Paltform company Databricks announced it has received $140 million in a Series D funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks has raised $247 million to date, and will use the new funds to accelerate the investment in making artificial intelligence achievable for enterprise organizations with its Unified Analytics Platform. 

• Red Hat, Microsoft simplify containers for hybrid clouds. Red Hat and Microsoft announced an alliance expansion, with a new initiative aimed at enabling enterprises to more easily adopt containers. The companies say this includes "native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure, and SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift." 

• ORNL readies facility for 200 Petaflop Supercomputer. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is getting a data center ready for its Summit supercomputer, which is expected to deliver 200 petaflops - which is about twice as powerful as the world's current leader in computer performance. The data center includes a new 20 megawatt power and cooling plant and an expanded central energy plant for the campus. 

Primary Data Nets $40M, Launches DataSphere 2.0

Primary Data announced a $40 million funding round and released version 2.0 of its DataSphere software platform.

After receiving an initial $50 million in 2013 the company will use the new funds to continue build out its sales team and business. The $40 million funding was split between $20 million led by Pelion Ventures and a $20 million line of credit.

DataSphere is the company's enterprise metadata engine for bringing machine learning into data management by sitting in between enterprise applications and on-premise storage and cloud storage, providing metadata driven data placement, tiering and protection service.

"Automating data management through an intelligent data fabric that spans different types of storage is critical to enabling enterprises to fully leverage their data while finally solving storage complexity,” said Blake Modersitzki, Managing Director at Pelion Venture Partners. “With DataSphere, Primary Data is leading the industry in bringing intelligence to data management across the enterprise and into the cloud, and we are proud to invest in the transformation Primary Data is delivering for its innovative customers.” 

The version 2.0 release of DataSphere brings many new features for bringing intelligence into data management. With the selection of data objectives the new release now provides deep control capabilities with Objective Expressions. DataSphere says version 2 enables parallel performance and support for multiple clouds, and adds support for SMB 2.1 and 3.1, as well as Active Directory. 

Chief Scientist for Primary Data Steve Wozniak said, “DataSphere 2.0 makes it simple for enterprises to finally automate how data is managed by using the intelligence that has been sitting right there in your metadata all along.”

Primary Data also noted that it continues to expand its partnerships with Amazon AWS, Cloudian, Google, Scality, NetApp and VMware to help joint customers get the right data to the right place at the right time.

Primary Data was recently listed in the Gartner 2017 Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies. 

Data Center Links: August 1, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• FORTRUST acquired by Iron Mountain.  For approximately $128 million Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM) has acquired Denver data center business FORTRUST. Iron Mountain president and CEO William L. Meaney said, “We continue to see opportunities to expand our business through strong organic growth, new development and acquisition. Together with our existing data centers and completion of the first phase of our Northern Virginia data center campus next month, this acquisition will strengthen the foundation of a long-term growth engine and help accelerate the growth in our Adjacent Businesses.”

• Vertiv sheds ASCO to Schneider Electric. For a $1.25 billion all-cash transaction Schneider Electric has acquired the ASCO Power Technologies from Vertiv, formerly Emerson Network Power.   

• Cray partners with Seagate for ClusterStor.  The two companies have agreed to offload the Seagate ClusterStor HPC array product line to Cray for an undisclosed amount. Cray will continue to support and enhance the product line and to support customers going forward. Cray said it looks to add more than 100 Seagate employees and contractors as a part of the deal. "In 2012 Cray became our first OEM and has continued over the years to be our largest and most strategic ClusterStor partner. Today’s announcement is really the perfect evolution of that continuing, special partnership in HPC," said Ken Claffey, vice president and general manager, Storage Systems Group at Seagate.

• Red Hat acquires Permabit assets.  Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) announced that it has acquired Permabit Technology (the assets and technology anyway). Permabit is a software provider of data reduction technologies such as deduplication, compression and thin provisioning.  Red Hat also recently won two CODiE awards: one for Red Hat 3scale API Management and one for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

• Azuqua nets $10.8 million.  In a series B round led by Insight Venture Partners cloud application connectivity provider Azuqua received $10.8 million to scale sales, marketing and engineering teams. The Seattle based startup says it looks to connect "business functions and SaaS apps across organizations, automating and radically increasing productivity in mission-critical processes by connecting information across departments such as marketing, finance, sales, and operations.