Microsoft and Oracle expand interoperability partnership to Canada to help joint customers run their mission-critical workloads

Oracle announced this week continued expansion of its cloud interoperability partnership with Microsoft to help joint customers worldwide run their mission-critical workloads across Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Its new interconnect location means enterprises can now build workloads that seamlessly interoperate between Microsoft and Oracle cloud regions in Canada. This interconnect builds on an existing partnership announced in June of 2019.

The partnership has received a huge amount of interest, as 80 percent of enterprises use a combination of Microsoft and Oracle software to run their businesses. 

As cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, and businesses rely on multiple cloud providers, the partnership makes managing companies’ most important cloud workloads significantly easier. These workloads include financial planning, inventory, sales applications – and their underlying databases.

The expansion will give more customers direct, fast and highly reliable network connectivity between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, while providing first-class customer service and support that enterprises have come to expect from the two companies. This multi-cloud solution delivers the performance, easy integration, rigorous service level agreements, and collaborative enterprise support that they need to simplify their operations. 

Simply put, the Oracle-Microsoft partnership means cloud services run by the two providers will interoperate as if they were part of a single cloud, making it easier for customers to run their mission-critical workloads across the two clouds.

“The global demand for running applications and databases in multi-cloud environments continues to accelerate,” said Clay Magouyrk, senior vice president of engineering, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  “With the new interconnect, our Canadian customers can now take advantage of a nearly seamless cloud integration between the world's largest enterprise cloud providers, Microsoft and Oracle.”

The two companies are putting customers first by enabling them to run full-stack applications side-by-side across clouds, or one part of a workload within Azure and another part of the same workload within Oracle Cloud. 

For example, using the interconnect makes it possible to connect Azure services like analytics and AI to Oracle Cloud services like Autonomous Database. Together, Azure and Oracle Cloud offer customers a one-stop shop for all the cloud services and applications they need to run their entire business.

From a technical perspective, the interconnect means less latency or delay, which enables better data transfer and application interaction between clouds. It also supports a broader spectrum of workloads, using resources available on both sides. Accenture recently performed testing on the performance of the interconnect and confirmed that the solution offers customers low latency and high ease of use.

Microsoft and Oracle plan to make the direct interconnect available in additional regions, including on the US West Coast, in a US Government specific region, in Asia, and in the European Union. Earlier this year, Oracle and Microsoft created an interconnect in Ashburn (North America), Azure US East, and in London (United Kingdom).

Pivot3 improves resilience for large-scale HCI deployments with AI and automation capabilities

Pivot3 announced addition of  artificial intelligence (AI) and automation features to its Acuity software to address the data protection challenges often faced in large-scale hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments. These capabilities provide resilience for large multi-petabyte environments, allowing customers who experience catastrophic hardware failures to recover, while ensuring high-availability with auto-healing, quick node rebuild and intelligent monitoring and analytics.

At the core of Pivot3's Acuity software platform is the Pivot3 Intelligence Engine. The Intelligence Engine comprises many advanced data- and performance-management capabilities, including its market leading Business Policy Management feature. This enables customers to map business objectives to resource management through simple policies. 

Pivot3 uses AI and machine learning to understand application performance, protection and security requirements and to make real-time system changes so SLAs are met. The Intelligence Engine also monitors system health and performs predictive maintenance to ensure maximum system availability. This automates time consuming systems administration and maintenance tasks to reduce operating expenses and to allow organizations to scale without adding additional IT resources.

Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine now includes a suite of new auto-healing capabilities. Designed to automate human decisions and tasks, the new features replace manual recovery processes by automatically adding a node back to a cluster once it has recovered from a failure. Pivot3 has also introduced a quick node rebuild feature to reduce repair times up to 90 percent and to eliminate the need for a time-consuming full node rebuild, lowering the risk of a second failure.

Other enhancements to the Intelligence Engine include intelligent automation, AI and analytics for proactive system health, configuration optimization and support. These additional system analytics and diagnostics provide customers with improved system health and performance and the ability to automatically share information to Pivot3’s Support Cloud. 

Proactive system monitoring flags events in real-time with on-alarm dispatch to Pivot3 Support and provides daily status reports. New AI and machine learning techniques analyze phone-home data and alert the customer to options if a system is not in compliance with best practices.

“Customers are increasingly required to manage massive amounts of data generated by video surveillance, both for long term retention and for analysis with video analytics,” said Ben Bolles, vice president of product management, Pivot3. “The sheer scale of the infrastructure needed to support these use cases presents new resilience challenges, and organizations are increasingly concerned about capturing, protecting and capitalizing on this mission-critical data. Pivot3 is meeting this growing challenge with new automation and intelligence capabilities to provide customers with peace of mind, knowing their system is resilient, secure and always available.”

“With the real-time system monitoring, Pivot3 Support now alerts my team to unforeseen failures and provides remediation,” said Jeremiah Francis, director of information technology at Financial Advocates. “Additionally, receiving daily system health and configuration status reports allows us to ensure our system is running at peak performance; we can now more easily resolve potential points of failure and optimize for success.”

Schneider Electric brings out its initial integrated rack with immersed, liquid-cooled IT for data centers

Schneider Electric, alongwith Avnet and Iceotope, announced on Monday  creation its commercially-available integrated rack with chassis-based, immersive liquid cooling. Optimized for compute-intensive applications, the solution combines a high-powered GPU server with Iceotope's liquid cooling technology to increase energy efficiency. 

Avnet integrates the liquid-cooled server with Schneider Electric's NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure system for simple deployment into data centers or edge computing environments. The system is EcoStruxure Ready since the solution is available with next generation data center management software, EcoStruxure IT Expert, and digital service EcoStruxure Asset Advisor. 

This liquid-cooled solution is ideal for applications such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning algorithm training development, where high compute demands more energy use. In a recent report published by Gartner, liquid cooling was identified as a technology to watch. 

The parallel-processing power of Graphical Processing Units, known as GPUs, makes them efficient processor for a growing number of applications including AI, big data analytics, data mining, and more. The chips are increasingly power dense with thermal design power ratings reaching 400 watts or more. 

This makes traditional data center air-cooled architectures impractical, or costly and less efficient than liquid-cooled approaches where the server is partially submerged in a dielectric fluid. 

Liquid cooling delivers efficiency removing the need for air conditioning, while offering the same processing power with less energy. It is also silent as it does not include industrial drone from fans and pumps; delivers resilience as all components are in a sealed module that resists dust and smoke; and comes in a compact size to offer smaller and more flexible footprint.

Analyst Henrique Cecci advised data center operators "maximize cooling energy efficiencies by employing modern liquid cooling solutions1." Liquid cooling offers greater efficiency, lower operating costs, smaller footprint, increased reliability, and nearly silent operation despite the high-power density of the GPUs. Avnet, Iceotope, and Schneider Electric plan to expand the offering as demand grows by welcoming other server OEMs into the partnership. 

"Schneider Electric is committed to making data centers more sustainable and liquid cooling is a very compelling approach," said Kevin Brown, CTO and SVP of Innovation, Secure Power, Schneider Electric, who is presenting on liquid cooling at the Gartner conference. "This latest development marks a significant step toward industrializing chassis-based immersion solutions which offer the efficiency and effectiveness of tanks based solutions while providing the compatibility and serviceability of more traditional, 'direct-to-chip' liquid-cooling designs.  Given the growth of compute-intensive applications, we believe this approach is very promising."

New Matillion Data Loader release delivers speed and simplicity of data integration

Matillion announced Matillion Data Loader, a free Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data integration solution that empowers data analytics professionals and business users to load and migrate data with a powerful and scalable product.

Matillion products reduce time to value for cloud data analytics projects with data integration and data transformation solutions for Amazon Redshift, Snowflake and Google BigQuery.

With Matillion Data Loader, data professionals can use a low-friction solution to replicate data from data sources into a CDW using a code-free, wizard-based pipeline builder; monitor jobs with a dashboard view of pipeline runs and data volumes; save on infrastructure, resources, and DevOps costs, using technology built to leverage the speed and scale of the cloud; and upgrade to handle advanced data transformation, integration, and orchestration needs with Matillion's top-rated ETL solution

"Exploding data volumes and the rapid shift toward data democratization mean enterprises have increasingly diverse data analytics needs across teams. A flexible data analytics platform should ensure companies can address simple use cases, sophisticated analytics projects, or both at the same time, without the inherent complexity of other tools," said Matthew Scullion, CEO of Matillion. "Matillion Data Loader works by itself to deliver low-friction data loading but also works with Matillion ETL as a platform to join and transform data sources for analytics. This is a far better option than having to choose between solutions that are either quick and simple or functional and complex."

Denodo Platform now available on Google Cloud Platform marketplace offering data delivery through data virtualization

Denodo announces availability of the Denodo Platform through Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace, making it easier for organizations to transition data to Google Cloud to accelerate cloud data analytics and data lake initiatives. 

As a subscription-based offering, the Denodo Platform on GCP Marketplace provides a true enterprise-scale data management solution for real-time data integration without the cost and complexity associated with traditional data replication. 

As organizations increasingly move data and processing to the cloud, and as data residing across multiple cloud repositories becomes a reality, there is a growing need for faster, more agile data integration methods like data virtualization. 

The Denodo Platform integrates on-premise data sources such as relational databases, data warehouses and CSVs; cloud data sources (Big Query, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Bigtable, Apigee and more), SaaS applications, such as Salesforce, to deliver a standards-based data gateway making it quick and easy for users of all skill levels to access and use data.

Denodo's easy-to-use tools allow data engineers and integrators to quickly prepare integrated data sets for analysts to use in their GCP-based analytical sandbox, while Denodo's dynamic data catalog allows data stewards tag and categorize data assets for easy discovery.

The Denodo Platform delivers accelerated performance by leveraging MPP processing with Spark, Impala, and Presto, in Big Data scenarios, together with a dynamic data catalog so that users can easily find the data that they need. 

Google Cloud customers who deploy the Denodo data virtualization product can realize easy access to a wide breadth of data by connecting, combining and consuming data from a variety of data sources, including Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, and other Google Cloud data sources, to provide a more data-driven approach to advanced real-time analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to help make better business decisions.

The offering also enhances BigQuery support that provides native connectivity and pushdown optimization to enable customers to process massive workloads with better query efficiency. The Denodo Platform’s ability to deliver real-time data access with BigQuery cloud-native APIs enables easy data movement between existing on-premises and cloud data sources and cloud storage.

BigQuery can be leveraged as a high-performance caching database for the Denodo Platform in the cloud. This supports advanced optimization techniques like data movement (data shipping), which enables multi-pass executions based on intermediate temporary tables. Users can leverage utility-based pricing through a number of offerings on the GCP Marketplace. They can start small and scale as needed.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduces Kubernetes-based platform for bare-metal and edge to cloud deployments

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the HPE Container Platform, its enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container platform designed for both cloud-native applications and monolithic applications with persistent storage. 

With the HPE Container Platform, enterprise customers can accelerate application development for new and existing apps – running on bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure, on any public cloud, and at the edge.

The new platform addresses requirements for large-scale enterprise Kubernetes deployments across a range of use cases, from machine learning and edge analytics to CI/CD pipelines and application modernization. 

IT teams can manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with multi-tenant container isolation and pre-integrated persistent storage. Developers have secure on-demand access to their environments so they can develop apps and release code faster, with the portability of containers to build once and deploy anywhere.

The HPE Container Platform is built on proven innovations from HPE’s acquisitions of BlueData and MapR, together with 100 percent open source Kubernetes. This next-generation solution dramatically reduces cost and complexity by running containers on bare-metal, while providing the flexibility to deploy on virtual machines and cloud instances. Customers benefit from greater efficiency, higher utilization, and improved performance by “collapsing the stack” and eliminating the need for virtualization.

The HPE Container Platform is a turnkey solution that uniquely addresses these challenges, with BlueData software as the control plane for container management, the MapR distributed file system for persistent data with containers, and Kubernetes for container orchestration. 

This approach extends benefits of containers beyond cloud-native microservices-architected applications, providing the ability to containerize non cloud-native monolithic applications with persistent data storage.

The HPE Container Platform modernizes non cloud-native monolithic applications without re-architecting them, elevating the experience to modern cloud standards; provides the ability to build applications once and run them anywhere, bridging the gap between on-premises, public clouds and the edge; improves productivity for developers and delivers new code releases faster, with simplified Kubernetes deployment and multi-cluster management; and ensures enterprise-class security, performance, and reliability at lower cost, with bare-metal containers and data persistence.

This offering complements existing HPE services to assist customers with container strategies, application modernization, and hybrid cloud deployments. HPE Pointnext provides advisory and consulting services built upon experience from over one thousand hybrid cloud engagements, with expertise and best practices from the acquisitions of Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie.

HPE Container Platform software can be ordered early next year, along with advisory, consulting, deployment and support services from HPE.

HPE, Cray release comprehensive HPC and AI offerings optimized for exascale computing on premises, in the cloud, or as-a-service

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced Thursday that it will deliver comprehensive high-performance computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) portfolio for the exascale era, which is characterized by explosive data growth and new converged workloads such as HPC, AI, and analytics.

The addition of Cray Inc., which HPE recently acquired, bolsters HPE’s HPC and AI solutions to now encompass an end-to-end supercomputing architecture across compute, interconnect, software, storage and services, delivered on premises, hybrid or as-a-Service. Now every enterprise can leverage the same foundational HPC technologies that power the world’s fastest systems, and integrate them into their data centers to unlock insights and fuel new discovery.

Digital transformation is driving new data-intensive workloads and real-time analytics operating at an unprecedented scale. New software, compute, interconnect, and storage capabilities are required for customers to unlock the potential of their data and accelerate innovation. 

HPE delivers solutions for any experience from single, small systems all the way to exascale-class supercomputers with tailored software, interconnect and storage capabilities. This includes solutions for modeling and simulation in weather forecasting, manufacturing and energy sectors, and AI and big data analytics in precision medicine, autonomous vehicles, geospatial imaging and financial services.

nCorium, KIOXIA America, EchoStreams come together to deliver high-performance storage platform based on PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs

nCorium, in collaboration with KIOXIA America, Inc.(formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corporation, and EchoStreams Innovative Solutions Inc. announced a new storage acceleration platform. 

Based on nCorium’s second-generation, near-memory acceleration engines, KIOXIA’s PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs and EchoStreams’ FlacheStreams Storage Server, this fully integrated solution is designed to perform storage functions in-line and stripe data to local or remote flash storage.

Applications such as high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence, deep learning, data analytics, computer-aided engineering, climate modeling, and entertainment rely on parallel file systems to achieve high-throughput storage they require. 

As disk drives in parallel file systems are rapidly replaced by high-bandwidth SSDs, the processing capabilities of traditional architectures simply fail to keep up. nCorium’s storage acceleration platform delivers improved capabilities by offloading compute-intensive functions to the near memory acceleration engines called nCorium Compute in Memory Modules (nCIMMs).