Grazed from InfoQ. Author: Dylab Raithel.

Ocado Technology announced a new approach to handle their 500,000+ customer base and their pool of email requests through a partnership with Google and its Cloud Platform (GCP). The work focuses on automating email categorization using TensorFlow and its Python APIs hosted on the GCP.

Ocado decided the email pool classification is a good candidate for production-scaled machine learning and automation, specifically, natural language processing (NLP). The workflow adopted by many support-centers is for people to manually process the email queues in a consistent and reliable manner. This doesn’t scale well if the business grows quickly or if the overall customer support volume requires an ever-growing support staff. This can lead to increased response latencies and increased customer dissatisfaction…

On Tuesday, Rackspace officially launched early access of VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) on Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware, following the company’s initial announcement from VMworld Las Vegas.

This single-tenant private cloud enables customers to conveniently transition or extend their on-premises VMware workloads into a hosted VMware environment at Rackspace and eases hybrid cloud adoption by utilizing the same VMware virtualization and software-defined technology that customers use in their datacenters.

6WIND Virtual Accelerator software solves common hypervisor bottleneck problems that limit the adoption of NFV, data center virtualization and network appliance virtualization on Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) servers. It is installed on the KVM hypervisor to provide accelerated virtual switching and networking features to offer an alternative to SR-IOV or PCI passthrough that break virtualization. With 6WIND Virtual Accelerator, Network Operators can cost-effectively transition from legacy hardware to software-based applications leveraging OpenStack networking.

At VMworld 2016 Europe, eG Innovations, a leading IT performance management software provider, announced that it has joined the Nutanix Elevate Technology Alliance Partner Program and completed the Nutanix Ready validation for AHV, Hyper-V, and vSphere running on Nutanix.

eG Innovations delivers performance-monitoring solutions for Nutanix cloud-based environments, helping enterprises and service providers monitor their network, server, virtualization, storage and application tiers from a single pane of glass. eG Enterprise offers broad coverage including support for 180+ common applications, 10+ virtualization platforms and 10+ operating systems.

The Nutanix enterprise cloud platform is being used by thousands of customers to run business critical applications and servers. If and when performance issues arise, IT teams often struggle to determine where the problem lies: is it in the network, or the server or the virtualization tier, or storage, or due to the applications? This is where eG Innovations’ technology comes in.

Cohesity, the pioneer of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced it will provide enterprises with Coldine, Google Cloud Platform’s newest storage class of service for highly cost-effective data archival and recovery. Google Cloud Storage Coldline, which offers the lowest monthly cost to store data on Google’s cloud infrastructure, can be easily registered and assigned via Cohesity’s policy-based administration to any data protection workload running on Cohesity DataPlatform.

The new support for the Coldline storage class further expands the choice of cloud storage offerings that Cohesity customers can use for a hybrid cloud data protection strategy. Cohesity’s vendor-agnostic hyperconverged secondary storage platform seamlessly connects with Google Cloud Storage Coldline to provide a cost-effective approach to long-term data retention and disaster recovery. The additional cloud service integration for Cohesity DataPlatform will drive greater opportunities for both Cohesity and Google to help companies overcome secondary storage challenges.

National IT infrastructure and cloud services provider TierPoint, with 39 data centers across 20 US markets serving 5000 customers, announced that the company has joined the AWS Partner Network (APN) and is offering AWS Direct Connect dedicated high-speed connectivity to Amazon Web Services (AWS) via TierPoint’s Seattle data center. 

VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a strategic partnership to build and deliver a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud offering that will give customers the full software-defined data center (SDDC) experience.  This alliance brings together two leaders in Enterprise IT, VMware as the leader in the private cloud market with vSphere on-premises, combined with Amazon AWS, the leader in the public cloud.  Together, the pair will allow customers to deliver a vSphere-based cloud service running on AWS, a service that will make it easier for customers to run any application, using a set of familiar software and tools, in a consistent hybrid cloud environment.

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 HostReview. Author: Kevin Castle.

The CEO hears it incessantly from his/her CIO in their weekly C-suite board meeting: “We need to get competitive and create a strategic architecture around our cloud computing technology.” Then, the landslide of questions begins: Public or private cloud adoption? A hybrid? Cloud migration? And what to do about effective integration?

These and related questions are increasingly becoming a challenge for not just the IT executive, but the corporate chief is finding himself or herself intimately involved in making decisions about the company’s technology direction. According to a Forbes piece: “Close to two-thirds (62 percent) of 500 mid-market executives say their company’s C-suite leaders have ‘some’ level of involvement in the adoption of next generation technologies.”…

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