Data Center Links: September 21, 2017

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

• Toshiba sells Flash Memory Chip Unit for $18 Billion.  The bidding seems to be over, as Bloomberg reports that a group led by Bain Capital has acquired the chip unit from Toshiba for 2 trillion yen ($18 billion). The Bain consortium includes backing from Toshiba, as well as Japanese and other overseas companies. It was noted that financial support was added from Apple, Dell, SK Hynix and Japan's Hoya Corp.  

• Vexata launches with $54 million venture funding. After years in stealth Silicon Valley company Vexata launched, backed with $54 million from Mayfield, Intel Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and Redline Capital. The company also announced its Active Data Fabric, a software-defined all-solid-state data storage infrastructure that enables extreme performance at scale for Tier 1 applications in enterprise or cloud data centers. 

• How the Internet kept humming during 2 hurricanes.  A nice recap of stories from recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida and the facilities (and people) that maintained data centers throughout them. 

• Cray 'Theta' Supercomputer used to map brain function. What do you use to face such a daunting task as mapping connections of 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections? Call on the Intel-Cray 9.65 petaflops supercomputer housed at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. With tera and petabyte scale datasets the Theta supercomputer along with an advanced software platform utilizes data mining, graph analytics and machine learning to meet the challenge.  Very cool stuff.

• TigerGraph nets $31 million.  Graph database startup TigerGraph (formerly GraphSQL) announced its first product Tuesday, and a new $31 million Series A funding round. The company says it has "built the first native parallel graph databased platform using proprietary technology that yields performance up to 100 fold compared with other graph platforms."  

• Comcast acquires Stringify. Comcast has acquired IoT automation service company Stringify. Stringify has been named an IoT company to watch, and I'm not sure if this is a story for the data center, other than I can't help to think there is something making this deal significant...  at the intersection of content and things....      edge... ?

• IBM claims top spot for Blockchain technology. A Juniper Research study ranked IBM as the number one player in blockchain technology, leaving Microsoft and Accenture trailing in second and third places respectively. Customer project stories for blockchain with IBM include Maersk, London Stock Exchange, and AIG. 

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.

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: December 7, 2016

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

1. Equinix buys Verizon data centers.  I 'think' I saw this one coming... but the biggest player in the industry just got bigger.  Just 5 years after Verizon paid $1.4 billion to acquire Terremark, it has sold 24 data centers to Equinix for $3.6 billion. It seems hard to top this asset sale, but I guess we'll see what 2017 brings. I liked Equinix co-founder Jay Adelson's link to the 1998 story about Equinix as a Cisco-backed upstart.  
2. HPE and Schneider Electric partner on Micro Data Centers. HP Enterprise and Schneider are partnering to deliver a complete pre-fab solution for drop-in-place modular data center. I always liked the previous respective versions of a modular solution that were offered, but this partnership makes sense (targeting the edge and IoT, etc).  Bonus points for not referencing the solution as a 'virtual data center'. Last week Schneider launched the next generation of its EcoStruxure architecture and platform.
3. Cray and Microsoft partner for deep learning.  At the 2016 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference this week Cray announced the results of a deep learning collaboration between Cray, Microsoft, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) that expands the horizons of running deep learning algorithms at scale using the power of Cray supercomputers.  Research at CSCS utilizes the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on a Cray XC50 with more than 1,000 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators. 
4. Dell EMC and VMware launch new Hyper-converged systems. Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation Dell launched the VxRack SDDC as a turnkey hyper-converged solution for both traditional and cloud-native workloads. The total lifecycle offering is built on Dell PowerEdge servers and VMware infrastructure software (vSAN, vSphere, and NSX) and VMware SDDC Manger. 
5. Micron announces 8TB SATA SSD. Micron launched a 8TB Enterprise 5100 series solid state drive this week with random write performances up to 74k IOPS. 

Cray Jaguar - 1 Petaflop!

Next Monday, the Top500 list comes out for the second half of 2008. I am not involved with super computers at all, but the geek in me loves to follow who has the fastest computer in the world. eWeek.com reports that the Cray Jaguar is set to top the IBM Roadrunner in the #1 position. The XT Jaguar now offers a performance of more than 1 quadrillion calculations (1 petaflop) per second.

"The Cray XT Jaguar system now boasts of 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors, along with 362 terabytes of system memory and a 10-petabyte file system. Jaguar also now offers 362 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and an I/O bandwidth of 284 gigabytes per second."

The supercomputer belongs to the DOE and resides at their Oak Ridge National Laboratory. See their press release here.

The Washington Post also has an article (with picture!) here.