Microsoft made a splash in the application container market this week with its purchase of Deis, a company that helps customers manage clusters of containers.The move is significant for a number of reasons. First of all, it shows Microsoft’s commitment to supporting Linux containers and specifically its willingness to invest in making it easier for customers of its Azure cloud platform to use containers at scale. Microsoft is also seemingly giving customers multiple options in how they can use and manage containers in the Azure cloud. Choice for end users is always a good thing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New estimates out this week from Synergy Research suggest that in the cloud computing market the big and getting bigger, and that in order to compete in this market, scale is key.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Battle of the clouds: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform + Synergy Research
Synergy Research data shows that 68% of the cloud market is served by hyperscale vendors, which means if you don't have scale, it's tough to compete. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the 18 months since the company split from its sister consumer business, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been in an almost constant state of refining its strategy.The company backed out of the public cloud market; sold off its Enterprise Services Business to competitor CSC for $8.5 billion; dealt other “non-core” assets to Micro Focus in an $8.8 billion deal; and dumped its OpenStack and Cloud Foundry development efforts off to Suse. HPE also bought all-flash storage vendor Nimble storage for $1 billion last year and snapped up hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Simplivity for another $650 million in January.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the 18 months since the company split from its sister consumer business, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been in an almost constant state of refining its strategy.The company backed out of the public cloud market; sold off its Enterprise Services Business to competitor CSC for $8.5 billion; dealt other “non-core” assets to Micro Focus in an $8.8 billion deal; and dumped its OpenStack and Cloud Foundry development efforts off to Suse. HPE also bought all-flash storage vendor Nimble storage for $1 billion last month and snapped up hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Simplivity for another $650 million in January.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the 18 months since the company split from its sister consumer business, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been in an almost constant state of refining its strategy.The company backed out of the public cloud market; sold off its Enterprise Services Business to competitor CSC for $8.5 billion; dealt other “non-core” assets to Micro Focus in an $8.8 billion deal; and dumped its OpenStack and Cloud Foundry development efforts off to Suse. HPE also bought all-flash storage vendor Nimble storage for $1 billion last month and snapped up hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Simplivity for another $650 million in January.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Alpha Vertex is a year-old New York City startup with an ambitious agenda: It wants to create a graph database of global financial knowledge.CTO Michael Bishop says the goal is to use predictive modeling to help companies judge risk and investors get insight on what drives the market. To do so has required the company to build a massive technical back-end that uses some hottest emerging technologies. Two of the most important are Google’s cloud-based machine learning algorithms and IBM’s OpenWhisk, a serverless or Function-as-a-Service platform.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Serverless explainer: The next-generation of cloud infrastructure +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The first thing to know about serverless computing is that "serverless" is a pretty bad name to call it.Contrary to the vernacular, the technology that has burst onto the cloud computing scene in the past two years still does in fact run on servers. The name serverless instead highlights the fact that end users don’t have to manage servers that run their code anymore.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Serverless computing in practice | This company runs its app without managing servers or virtual machines +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are three things that are certain in life: Death, taxes and volatility in the free cloud storage market. Yes, it turns out free cloud storage comes with a price: putting up with a fickle market. Network World has a running list of the best places in the cloud to find free storage. Many vendors offer their services on a freemium basis, meaning an introductory cloud storage offering, typically of 5 GB is free, with additional storage costing a variety of prices. But businesses don’t typically like to give away their services for free. So, these offers change frequently.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon today released Connect, a contact center as a service offering hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud.The move represents AWS attempting to jump into a burgeoning market for cloud-based contact center software, while continuing to push AWS into the enterprise communications market. Just last month AWS announced Chime, a cloud-based Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) offering.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform | This is not the sort of publicity Avaya was seeking +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Will that new couch fit in my living room? How about that table, is it too big for the space?
In the old days you would have to break out a tape measure to see if furniture fits or just imagine it’s coloring in the room. But thanks to advancements in augmented reality, you can now see exactly it will look like in your home before you buy it.
Home décor retailer Pottery Barn has released a new app named 3D Room View that will implant a virtual three-dimensional image select furniture pieces on a smartphone or tablet screen, allowing the customer to get an augmented reality view of what the couch, seat, table, lamp or chair will look like in the room.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The cloud is full of free storage, if you know where to look.From Box to DropBox, Google to Apple, there’s plenty of free storage to be had in the cloud. Many companies use free cloud storage as a way to entice users into their clouds in hopes that they will pay more for additional storage.Below, in alphabetical order, are 18 free cloud services – but a word of warning: The market for free cloud storage is volatile and offers from these vendors can change frequently, including being eliminated with little or no warning.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: 7 ways to supercharge your personal cloud storage+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A handful of hosted Microsoft services, including Office 365 SaaS apps, OneDrive cloud storage and xBox Live platforms experienced an outage on Tuesday into Wednesday, according to Microsoft and services that track outages.DownDetector.com found that Office 365 had elevated reported error rates on Tuesday afternoon ET. It’s unclear which Office 365 services or how many users were impacted though.Microsoft confirmed on its @xBoxSupport Twitter account that customers were having trouble signing into the service on Tuesday evening ET. As of Wednesday morning ET, Microsoft reports that its OneDrive cloud storage system is experiencing error rates with some customers not being able to sign into the service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As IBM welcomes an estimated 20,000 developers, customers and partners to Las Vegas this week for its InterConnect conference, a running theme throughout the three-day show is providing application builders with cognitive and analytical tools based off the company’s Watson platform.+MORE FROM NETWORK WORLD: How IBM wants to bring blockchain from Bitcoin to your data center | IBM + Red Hat = An open source hybrid cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenStack and storage teams are partnering to integrate their products and in doing so are creating a compelling hybrid offering for open source-minded customers.The announcement came at IBM’s InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, where an estimated 20,000 developers, customers and IBM partners are gathering.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How IBM wants to bring blockchain from Bitcoin to your data center +The crux of the partnership is that customers who use Red Hat’s OpenStack private cloud platform and Ceph Storage product will now be able to run both of those in IBM’s cloud. Don Bulia, a general manager in IBM’s cloud division says the idea behind the partnership is that Red Hat customers would be able to extend their Red Hat-based environments into the IBM public cloud, which will run the same management and software tools they have on premises.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At its InterConnect conference in Las Vegas this week, IBM is announcing new features for its open source cloud-hosted blockchain service in an attempt to bring this distributed database technology from its initial use of powering Bitcoin to a broader market, including the financial services industry.Blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continually growing list of records that can be verified using hashing techniques. Vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are attempting to commercialize it by offering customers a platform for hosting their own implementations. Analysts say the market to do so is just emerging.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The future of networking is in a white box | How to get the most out of data and services in a multi-cloud world +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
On Wednesday night into the early morning hours of Thursday Microsoft reported that its Azure cloud customers had difficulty provisioning storage resources, including in its Eastern US region.The service disruption had a domino effect that impacted many other services too, including its cloud-based SQL database platform. The issue was first reported at 21:50 UTC and was resolved by about 6:00 on Thursday.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What the AWS outage can teach us about WAN deployments +“Due to a incident in East US affecting Storage, customers and service dependent on Storage may have experienced difficulties provisioning new resources or accessing their existing resources in the region,” Microsoft reported on its Azure health status page. Other services impacted include: Azure Media Services, Application Insights, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Data Factory, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Cache, Azure Search, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hubs, Azure SQL Database, API Management and Azure Stream Analytics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At the Google NEXT cloud conference last week the company announced new Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) in which customers receive a reduced rate on virtual machine rentals in exchange for signing a one or three year contract.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 10 Ways Google improved its cloud at its big NEXT conference +It’s not a completely novel concept because Microsoft offers enterprise agreements and Amazon Web Services has Reserved Instances, which are a similar concept.One of the main arguments Google made was that its CUDs are more flexible than competitors though. Users don’t have to commit to a specific virtual machine instance type for three years, the company said. Instead, they just estimate how much aggregate virtual compute and/or memory they will use over the life of the contract. CUDs are in beta in Google’s cloud, you can read more about them here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google cloud is seen by analysts as an up and comer. Company executives will even admit that the past few years Google has not had everything it needs to compete for enterprise customers in the IaaS public cloud market against Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and even IBM.But they will also tell you that Google is ready now.+MORE FROM NETWORK WORLD: Google Cloud President of Customers talks courting enterprises, competing with Amazon and Microsoft +Last week Google held NEXT, its user conference where the company introduces new cloud features and users get to learn about the cloud platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Happy Pi Day! Here at Network World we take the holiday seriously. In years past we have provided tips of how to celebrate the 14th day on the third month of each year. (Pi is 3.14, so 3/14 is Pi Day, if you’re not in the know).Well, this year we decided to do something a little different: The first ever Network World Pi Day Challenge. The premise is simple: Recite the most digits of Pi. Winner gets to pie the loser in the face. Multimedia editor Keith Shaw and I have been training for weeks, memorizing digits five at a time.The competition was intense, but we acted rationally and recited our digits. But who knows more?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s that time of year again: Pi Day! Image by Flickr/kok_sexton Pi enthusiasts around the world wait each year for March 14 to celebrate the mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Check out our tried and true tips for celebrating Pi Day, and be sure to check out our past year’s coverage for even more ideas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brandon Butler