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. 

Data Center Links: May 11, 2017

Between company conference season and a lot of M&A activity recently, it is hard to keep up with the news.  Here are a few things I found interesting:

• Facebook breaks ground on 1M sq ft Altoona data center.  Because Iowa is the best place for data centers.... Facebook broke ground on its fourth building in Altoona - a 1 million square foot data center. With this building the Facebook data center campus will total 2.5 million square feet.

• Cisco acquires AI company MindMeld.  Just like many years ago when you had to keep a running list of who Cisco was buying, they are keeping a fast pace in 2017. Making it their third acquisition in two weeks Cisco dives deeper into AI by buying MindMeld, a San Francisco company that has developed a conversational platform based on natural language understanding (NLU). The NLU functionality will be integrated with Cisco's Spark platform. MindMeld, besides being on my own 'cool tech' list, has been recognized as one of the top companies leading the AI revolution.
• Could Cisco possibly acquire Nutanix, vArmour or SnapRoute next?

• Cray launches Supercomputers built for AI.  Cray has launched new CS-Storm supercomputers that are purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads.  New CS-Storm 500GT and CS-Storm 500NX systems leverage NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, which foster "up to 187 TOPS (tera operations per second) per node, 2,618 TOPS per rack for machine learning application performance."   I'll take two.  :)

• NVIDIA GPU conference.  AI, self-driving cars, healthcare, Volta GPU platform, deep learning software tools.....   Too many to mention; check it out here.

• Microsoft debuts Cosmos DB. At the Microsoft Build 2017 developer conference Microsoft introduced Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database with five consistency choices. As a superset of DocumentDB Cosmos models include Strong, Bounded Staleness, Session, Consistent Prefix, and Eventual. 

• Apple announces $1B data center expansion in Reno. 9to5Mac reports that the Reno city council approved Apple's proposal for a $1 billion expansion to its existing data center. 

Data Center Links: March 03, 2017

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

• C3 IoT updates platform, adds machine learning, closes new financing. It was a big week for enterprise Internet of Things company C3 IoT. The company announced "Version 7 of its enterprise software platform for big data, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, with new tools and enhancements." The new edition will be out Q1 2017 and feature advanced capabilities spanning five elements of the C3 IoT Platform – data science tools, artificial intelligence algorithms, application development tools, edge analytics, and platform administration. On Thursday C3 IoT said that it has raised a Series E financing round at a $1.4 billion pre-money valuation, led by Breyer Capital.

• Faction granted patent for work on hybrid and multi-cloud networking.  Enterprise-class IaaS cloud provider Faction announced that it has been awarded USPTO Patent #9,571,301 for its hybrid and multi-cloud technology. This technology powers its Faction Cloud Bloc and Faction Internetwork eXhange (FIX) product sets. Faction says its patent details how physical resources that may be hosted within a data center or colocation site can connect to one or more cloud providers a creating seamless, single pool of resources. The Denver based company, formerly known as Peak, also raised $11 million earlier this year to continue growing the company.

• JP Morgan software does in seconds what took lawyers 360,000 hours.  Hard to beat that for a headline. Bloomberg reports that a piece of software called COIN (Contract Intelligence) interpreted commercial loan agreements that previously consumed 360,000 hours of work each year by lawyers and loan officers. 

• Nimble introduces Multicloud storage service. Nimble announced Cloud Volumes, an easy to manage multi-cloud storage service that lets an enterprise use public cloud for compute and Nimble Cloud Volumes for storage capacity. Nimble explains that data protection is flexible and cost effective, as customers only pay for changed data, not for additional full copies. 

• Asetek signs product development agreement.  Liquid cooling company Asketek announced that it has signed with a 'major player in the data center space' for a development agreement that has been in the works for several years. Asetek says the goal of the agreement is to have "products in the market before year-end and resulting revenue to have significant impact on Asetek's future data center business."