Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Google has announced a ‘major refresh’ of its cloud storage options, including Coldline, a new storage class aimed at long-term archival and disaster recovery. The revamped storage classes are multi-regional, for highest availability of frequently accessed data, such as video and business continuity, regional, for data accessed frequently within a region such as data analytics and general compute, Nearline, for infrequent access, and Coldline.

“Whether a business needs to store and stream multimedia to their users, store data for machine learning and analytics or restore a critical archive without waiting for hours or days, Cloud Storage now offers a broad range of storage options to meet those needs,” wrote Kirill Tropin, product manager in a blog post...

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2016/oct/20/google-announces-low-latency-cold-storage-coldline-major-refresh/

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Will Anderson.

Michael Dell took the stage Wednesday to reassure customers that a massive company like Dell Technologies Inc. is best equipped to manage the technological shifts roiling the industry. With cutting-edge developments in virtual reality, cloud computing, data analysis and artificial intelligence seemingly occurring by the week, Dell Technologies can provide the hardware and software to power all those advancements, he said during the opening keynote for Dell EMC World at Austin Convention Center.

It was the first Dell users conference since the Round Rock-based company completed its historic $58 billion acquisition of Boston-based EMC Corp. in September. Since then, the company has initiated layoffs to cut redundant positions in the huge, 140,000-employee company with a combined revenue of $74 billion. It has also raised cash through shedding divisions, such as the sale of its enterprise content business to Canada-based Open Text Corp. for $1.6 billion...

Read more from the source @ http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2016/10/19/michael-dell-size-experience-will-matter-as-tech.html

Grazed from Business Insider. Author: Julie Bort.

Snap, the company that makes the popular app Snapchat, just hired away Jerry Hunter from Amazon Web Services, Snap has confirmed to Business Insider. At Amazon he was responsible for Amazon's data centers globally. At Snap he will be the VP of engineering, reporting to Snap engineering chief Tim Sehn, reports The Information's Tom Dotan, who first reported the news.

Before Amazon, Hunter was running global data centers for another huge tech company. He was the VP of IT for Sun Microsystems which, before it got bought by Oracle, was also a pioneer in cloud computing (although the world didn't call it that back in the day). The interesting thing about hiring a data center expert is that Snap doesn't run it's own data centers. It is, instead, a marque customer for Google's cloud, its App Engine service...

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessinsider.com/snap-jerry-hunter-amazon-data-centers-2016-10

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

You’ve got to give UBS analyst Steven Milunovich major props. During IBM’s earnings call on Monday, he asked whether IBM Watson, the company’s golden child, will run on rival Amazon Web Services—and he was promptly shot down. “No. Watson runs on our cloud, and our technology will run on IBM’s cloud,” IBM chief financial officer Martin Schroeter responded tersely.

Milunovich’s question wasn’t stupid. Just last week, VMware VMW -0.15% , another big Amazon AMZN -0.18% rival, said that its bread-and-butter VMware software will run on AWS, starting next year. Indeed, it seems that most of the world’s most important business software including SAP’s SAP 1.85% HANA databases as well as databases from Oracle ORCL -0.31% and Microsoft MSFT -0.35% , run on AWS...

Grazed from GeekWire. Author: Dan Richman.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a cloud, server and storage company that split from Hewlett Packard in late 2015, laid off an undisclosed number of employees today in North America. HPE spokeswoman Meghan Fintland acknowledged in an email that “previously announced restructuring changes took place today,” including “workforce changes that are part of a company-wide strategy to give HPE the needed workforce to be a more nimble customer and partner-centric company.”

A source with knowledge of the situation speculated this morning that the Seattle offices might be closed. But Fintland said that “HPE will not be shutting its Seattle offices” and didn’t respond immediately to a request for more details on the layoffs. Several HPE employees posted about the layoffs today on Twitter. Here’s a tweet from Vicky Brasseur, a senior engineering manager for HPE based out of Portland:...

Read more from the source @ http://www.geekwire.com/2016/struggling-keep-pace-cloud-hewlett-packard-enterprise-cuts-staff/

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Editorial Staff.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. expects pure e-commerce operators to face ‘tremendous challenges’ as the web giant seeks to tap more growth from transforming China’s $4.5 trillion traditional retail industry. China’s largest e-commerce company plans to upgrade retail businesses and improve efficiency across product manufacturing, distribution and service, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang said in an e-mailed letter to shareholders on Thursday. The company is working with partly-owned Suning Commerce Group Co. and Intime Retail Group Co. to integrate the online experience with brick-and-mortar shopping.

Alibaba has highlighted trillions of dollars in Chinese household savings as a key driver of growth, with the company pledging to keep investing in business and geographical expansion, even if it drags on earnings in the short-term. The company is also looking overseas for growth, as Chairman Jack Ma targets serving 2 billion consumers and supporting 10 million profitable business around the world in 20 years...

Read more from the source @ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-13/alibaba-sees-tremendous-challenge-for-pure-e-commerce-business

Grazed from NetworkAsia. Author: Editorial Staff.

Ericsson and Equinix have developed a joint offering for enterprises to deliver the “true benefits” of hybrid cloud and multi cloud adoption. The offering leverages the Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) and Apcera platform from Ericsson. The initial target enterprises will be finance and insurance companies in South East Asia and Oceania to help solve their challenges on data compliance and regulation and at the same time give the agility that enterprises need.

The finance and insurance industry have strict compliance regulations on data and this brings limitations for them to deploy a multi-cloud strategy. Ericsson and Equinix’s joint offering will address this challenge by enabling enterprises to deploy any application on any cloud infrastructure with high performance and secure connections that meet compliance regulations...

Grazed from ITechPost. Author: Victor Thomson.

At an event in Dublin, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the company's Azure Cloud will become the first artificial intelligence supercomputer. Microsoft explained on the company's website how its Azure cloud computing offering will bring a new wave of apps based on AI technologies. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are defining the next generation applications powered by the cloud. Following this emerging trend, Microsoft is building the first AI supercomputer on its Azure cloud platform.

According to ZDNet, in order to achieve this goal, Microsoft is going beyond the traditional CPU architecture, building cloud processing power based on GPUs. GPUs can be scaled so that banks of GPUs can process tasks in parallel, so they best fitted for dealing with high workloads. The traditional approach of using individual machines with ever faster CPUs is reaching its limits...

Grazed from FierceCMO. Author: Patrick Gorman.

Google has rebranded its cloud computing business as Google Cloud and renamed its Google Apps for Work offering in a move aimed at boosting its standing in the cloud business ecosystem. Google Cloud will include all Google Cloud Platform offerings, machine learning tools and APIs, enterprise Maps APIs, as well as Android phones, tablets and Chromebooks that access the cloud. Google Cloud will also include Google Apps for Work, which will now go by the name G Suite and includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Hangouts, Google Slides, Google+ and Google Forms.

“Google Cloud is more than products – it is also how we work alongside companies in an engineering-centric way,” Google Cloud SVP Diane Greene wrote in a blog post announcing the rebrand. “Because digital transformation and moving to the cloud are technical processes, we have customer engineers, customer reliability engineers, site reliability engineers and product engineers supporting our customers as they migrate, deploy and evolve...

Grazed from ITechPost. Author: Victor Thomson.

The Amazon could computing division Amazon Web Services has just announced a new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance type. Dubbed P2, this new Amazon cloud service is taking advantage of Nvidia high-performance GPUs in order to offer massive computing performance.

According to Hot Hardware, Nvidia GPUs help Amazon avoid the inherent limitation and bottlenecks of the current CPUs and architecture. By adding Nvidia GPUs in its cloud architecture, Amazon is able to enhance the performance of its cloud computing services. Jeff Barr, Amazon's Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, explains in a blog post on the AWS website that the GPU scales out instead of up...