Category: News

Grazed from NewYorkTimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

A few years ago, Microsoft appeared to be another tech has-been, having whiffed on its efforts to compete in mobile phones and internet search. Although it is too soon to say whether Microsoft can pull off a full-blown renaissance the way Apple has, the company is firmly back in favor.

Not long after its shares reached another all-time high at the close of regular trading, Microsoft reported on Thursday that its profit in the most recent quarter more than doubled from a year ago. One reason for that jump was the failure of its mobile phone business, which produced big losses for the company in past years, yielding a $1.8 billion tax benefit that Microsoft was able to recognize last quarter…

Businesses today must quickly adapt to the demands of a global economy and workforce. Success is increasingly defined by the ability to optimize and protect the information surrounding people, organizations and devices. To help businesses tackle these challenges and fully embrace the benefits of flexibility and scale that cloud delivers, Citrix today announced extensions to its long-term strategic relationship with Google. Customers will be able to use Citrix Cloud to provision and manage secure digital workspaces, including Citrix Workspace Service, on Google Cloud Platform. Citrix and Google are working together to bring cloud delivery of applications and desktops, and secure cloud-optimized endpoints to their enterprise customers who are increasingly looking to both public and hybrid clouds to solve their business requirements for secure digital workspaces.

Grazed from Government Cloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft and Baidu have signed a deal under which Microsoft’s cloud-computing network will power the Chinese search giant’s autonomous driving project outside of that country’s borders. Baidu earlier this month said Microsoft was among the more than 50 companies pitching in on its open-source Apollo driverless-car program, a bid to jump-start its autonomous-driving program.

Microsoft has taken a back seat in the highly competitive race to develop self-driving cars. Instead of building its own platform to wire the brains of cars or help them see the world around them, the Redmond company has offered its Azure network of on-demand data storage and computing power for other companies to use…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Editorial Staff.

Software giant SAP SE raised its annual revenue outlook and said it would buy back up to a half billion dollars in stock after reporting a better-than-expected jump in sales, lifted by a revamped version of its flagship software. The German maker of applications that run businesses’ finances, manufacturing and personnel is projecting sales of 23.3 billion euros ($26.8 billion) to 23.7 billion euros this year, based on constant currencies.

That’s up about a 100 million euros on both ends of its prior forecast. SAP is about to start a share buyback of up to 500 million euros this year, and it raising its outlook for cloud and software revenue. Shares of SAP fell 0.4 percent to 90.94 euros at 9:26 a.m. in Frankfurt. SAP had lost 2 percent since its first-quarter report April 25, while Germany’s 30-stock Dax Index was largely unchanged as of Wednesday’s close…

Article Written by David Marshall

Interesting news out of Redmond — Microsoft users will now be able to enable nested virtualization (or the ability to run a virtual machine within another virtual machine) in Azure, as this is now a valid deployment option under Microsoft’s new Dv3 and Ev3 series Azure virtual machines (VMs).

The Dv3 and Ev3 series VMs use Hyper-Threading technology found in Intel’s Haswell and Broadwell chip architectures, packing more of a punch in the underlying hardware and allowing it to support larger VM sizes.  The new Dv3 VM sizes are a good balance of memory to vCPU performance, with up to 64 vCPU’s and 256GiB of RAM.  And the newly named Ev3 sizes provide users with more memory to vCPU than the Dv3, so that larger workloads can be run on sizes up to the largest E64 size, with 64 vCPUs and 432GiB of RAM.  And it is that extra power that helps provide for nested virtualization.

By unlocking more power from the underlying hardware, Microsoft has been able to harness better performance and efficiency, resulting in cost savings.  These new Hyper-Threaded sizes are said to be priced up to 28% lower than the previous Dv2 sizes.

What’s the reason for running nested virtualization?

High-Quality Photography

Every real estate listing depends on high-quality photographs to make a sale. It is ideal for those who are considering buying a new property, as they can gain an insight into a home without having to step through the door. For this reason, many homeowners are hiring professional photographers, as they will use the best angles and lighting to showcase a home’s best features. What’s more, there are editing services that will allow homeowners to digitally alter an image to make it more appealing to a potential buyer. Unfortunately, if a listing fails to offer an impressive visual, many home hunters will simply look elsewhere.

• Migration of business applications without re-engineering
  • Applications and workloads can continue to use existing data access protocols when moved to the cloud, eliminating the need to modify applications for cloud native storage, reducing costs by up to 10x and saving time.
• Cloud backup repository with fast retrieval
  • Leverage low-cost, cloud object storage with ObjectBacker^TM storage acceleration for cloud backup, including Veeam^® backup copies and replicas.
• Move Disaster Recovery datacenters into the cloud cost effectively
  • Easily and cost-effectively move disaster recovery datacenters to the cloud, instead of existing DR datacenters where data tends to sit idle for months or years, occupying expensive real estate and incurring high costs for hardware, software, power and cooling.
• Global file server consolidation, replacing traditional on-premises storage hardware
  • Centralize on-premises NAS, SAN or file servers in the public cloud, while simplifying management, increasing flexibility, and reducing costs for file storage.

The ongoing spat between VMware and Nutanix has flared again, with the latter company’s CEO Dheeeraj Pandey hitting Twitter to smack down Lee Caswell, Virtzilla’s veep for Products, Storage and Availability.

This round of the spat between the two appears to have started with a since-deleted Caswell Tweet pointing to this Marketwatch.com story titled “Nutanix is a ‘once-in-a-decade’ opportunity, says Goldman Sachs”.

SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced the latest edition of SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM), which now includes API support to provide two-way integration with third-party software. In conjunction with this news, SovLabs, a leading provider of integration software for cloud management platforms, announced its SovLabs vRA Integration Pack for SolarWinds, consisting of IPAM and DNS integration modules for VMware vRealize Automation based on the new API.

SolarWinds IP Address Manager is a leading tool for helping to eliminate IP conflicts and save IT professionals time when managing IP addresses and DHCP and DNS services. It now features create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functionality to enable two-way integration with third-party software, including automation, orchestration, inventory management, and help desk systems. The API also provides functionality to find, reserve, and release available IP addresses, as well as create, update, and remove DNS entries. Additionally, IT professionals can now create and manage new subnets through the API. These features enable the automation of IP address management with third-party systems and enables IT professionals to manage and monitor their current infrastructure from a centralised web-based console.