GigaSpaces Version 15.0 set to operationalize and optimize machine learning; gain actionable insights from data

GigaSpaces announced this week availability of GigaSpaces Version 15.0, including InsightEdge Platform and XAP, to operationalize and optimize machine learning with the required speed, scale, accuracy and management tools. GigaSpaces Version 15.0 powers machine learning operations (MLOps) initiatives, helping enterprises maximize the business value derived from big data. 

Deploying machine learning models in production remains a major challenge for many enterprises. The Gartner Accelerate Your Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Journey Using These DevOps Best Practices says that, “according to the 2019 Gartner CIO Survey, AI and ML continue to be viewed as the No. 1 game-changing technology by CIOs. However, most organizations underestimate how long it will take to move AI and ML projects into production.”

GigaSpaces delivers fast in-memory computing platforms for real-time insight to action and extreme transactional processing.  With GigaSpaces, enterprises can operationalize machine learning and transactional processing to gain real-time insights on their data and act upon them in the moment.  

The always-on platforms for mission-critical applications across cloud, on-premise or hybrid, are leveraged by organizations across various verticals, including financial services, retail, transportation, telecom and healthcare. GigaSpaces offices are located in the US, Europe and Asia.

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 simplifies integrating AI workloads with the organization’s core infrastructure, accelerating machine learning deployment and enabling enterprises to more readily experience the business benefits of machine learning models.

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 introduces a new enterprise-grade monitoring and administration tool, Ops Manager, that provides visibility into the components of systems running models including logs, inputs, outputs and exceptions, using different performance visualization techniques. 

The Ops Manager enables continuous monitoring of machine learning pipelines, starting at the cluster level and drilling through to individual services so users can maintain accurate data models and ensure that problems are resolved before they affect overall performance. 

The new AnalyticsXtreme Batch Indexing included in GigaSpaces InsightEdge Version 15.0 optimizes and automates data access and storage with the added ability to move data between the more frequent (cold data) access and infrequent (archive data) access tiers on data lakes and data warehouses.  

The performance of ML models is enhanced since frequently accessed cold data can be retrieved 80 times faster directly from data lakes and processing costs are reduced as data access patterns change. 

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 also provides a native smart space client in Kubernetes that supports remote CRUD operations, task execution, and event-driven analytics providing high throughput and fast serialization, as well as automatic load balancing. Writing and updating of data without a predefined schema allows easy changes to the data model, while ensuring compatibility with JDBC and BI tools so code can be integrated more reliably and faster with lower administrative overhead.

“Machine learning is becoming an essential component of mission critical applications to optimize operations and deliver superior real time customer experiences,” said Yoav Einav, VP product at GigaSpaces. “GigaSpaces Version 15.0 provides enterprises with the machine learning model management capabilities, speed and scale that they need to accelerate their machine learning and artificial intelligence journey.”

New HPE multi-national survey shows that 86 percent of IT leaders embrace adoption of as-a-Service

Nearly nine-in-ten (87 percent) IT decision makers (ITDMs) report that their organizations have started to implement as-a-Service (aaS) solutions or have already completed the process, yet seven in ten (71 percent) ITDMs are concerned about keeping up with the changing aaS landscape, according to the HPE “2019 As-a-Service: Driving Change Report”. Furthermore, three-quarters (75 percent) of all ITDMs surveyed expect their organization to move toward full adoption of aaS solutions in less than five years.

The report surveyed over 1,000 ITDMs at companies of all sizes (from 50 employees to 10,000+) across the U.S., Germany and the UK to explore the future opportunities and impact of aaS consumption models. 

“Businesses of all sizes are embracing as-a-Service models to unlock innovation and agility and lead disruption rather than become a victim of it,” said Phil Davis, president of hybrid IT for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “As-a-Service elevates the role of IT decision makers, allowing them to become true service brokers who focus on strategic initiatives and revenue growth. As this survey data shows, the market clearly views as-a-Service as the future but are looking for a new and better approach to realize a consistent cloud experience, across public, private and the edge.”

Executives recognize the critical need to modernize IT to support future business growth and competitive advantage. aaS solutions will be very important for their company’s future (58 percent), competitiveness (55 percent) and growth (53 percent).

Three quarters of ITDMs agree that at their organization, data is siloed between public and private clouds (77 percent) and admit that data silos are a key challenge (75 percent) for their businesses. About two-thirds (66 percent) state they agree that data migration to the public cloud is currently stalled at their organization.

Younger ITDMs are more fearful that their jobs will become obsolete due to aaS. The survey findings show only about a quarter of ITDMs 55 and older (23 percent) are concerned that aaS adoption is making their job obsolete, compared to almost two-thirds (60 percent) of 22-34-year-olds. For both age groups, many (67 percent) ITDMs are concerned about new generations of digital natives having an advantage over their experience as it relates to aaS adoption.

Despite the changes ahead and apprehension from younger ITDMs, about nine-in-ten (87 percent) of all respondents agree that aaS adoption will advance their career and envision a shift in their roles from day-to-day IT support toward more of a business strategist role. Globally, seven-in-ten ITDMs say aaS adoption will make their role within their organization more important (72 percent) and give them more control over data (70 percent) and budget (71 percent).

Check Point brings to market its serverless security technology for cloud workload protection

Check Point announces on Monday a new serverless security technology for cloud workload protection (CWPP) and security posture management (CSPM), delivering continuous serverless security with improved run time protection and application hardening.

Protego, an Israeli startup, provides a serverless security technology that prevents malicious attacks on serverless functions in run time, and prevents vulnerable code from being deployed into production.

Check Point will be integrating serverless security technology into the Infinity architecture, its consolidated security solution to support networks, mobile, endpoint, IoT and cloud environments.

The rapid adoption of serverless computing technologies such as AWS Lambda, is challenging existing cloud and application security paradigms. The move to cloud native applications, bears many inherent vulnerabilities and potential misconfigurations that require extending security solution to protect functions and code.

The Check Point CloudGuard platform provides consistent and comprehensive cloud security for all assets in public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud environments. The solution is now extended with serverless security providing the CISO with full visibility, control and complete security coverage of all serverless estate with a click of a button. 

Protego’s technology integrates out-of-the-box with the broadest set of CI/CD frameworks so DevOps teams ensure that only compliant functions are deployed to production. In addition, customers rave the new technology for its innovative IAM hardening capabilities and minimal performance impact in protecting serverless run time environments.

 “On their journey to cloud transformation, organizations require a new security paradigm to protect against 5th and 6th generation of cyber attacks” said Dr. Dorit Dor, Check Point’s VP Products. “By incorporating serverless security into our market leading CloudGuard portfolio, and leveraging our comprehensive platform for cloud security and compliance, we deliver unprecedented protection across multi-cloud and hybrid environments”

The transaction is expected to close by this year, and the technology will be integrated into the Infinity architecture in the first quarter of next year.

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.

Cloudera Data Platform now available on Microsoft Azure; helps decide on analytic function both in the cloud or on-premises

Cloudera announced on Wednesday that the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) powered by Microsoft Azure. CDP is an integrated data platform that is easy to secure, manage, and deploy. 

Now available on Azure, it delivers self-service analytics with a consistent Azure experience and enterprise-grade performance across hybrid environments with the granular security and governance policies that IT leaders demand. 

CDP is an integrated data platform that is easy to deploy, manage, and use.  By simplifying operations, CDP reduces the time to onboard new use cases across the organization. It uses machine learning to intelligently autoscale workloads up and down for more cost-effective use of cloud infrastructure.

CDP manages data in any environment, including multiple public clouds, bare metal, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. With Cloudera's Shared Data Experience (SDX), the security and governance capabilities in CDP, IT can confidently deliver secure analytics running against data anywhere. CDP is a new approach to enterprise data, anywhere from the edge to AI.

CDP on Azure includes Cloudera's Shared Data Experience (SDX), which makes it easy to create a secure data lake in hours instead of weeks and replaces tedious scripting with 'set it and forget it' convenience. With CDP on Azure, organizations can speed time to value for data engineering, data warehousing, and machine learning. 

Cloudera leverages Azure infrastructure services such as Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) to run high performance analytics with increased availability and durability; Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to deploy infrastructure as code in Azure, ensuring rapid, consistent, and repeatable deployment of CDP services; and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to scale up or down depending on the analytics workload to meet service level agreements (SLA) and take advantage of the benefits of cloud bursting.

"For enterprise IT, this means that delivering speed and agility is now just as important as security and governance when it comes to enterprise data management and advanced analytics,” said Mick Hollison, chief marketing officer of Cloudera. “CDP, powered by Microsoft Azure, provides IT with an integrated data platform to work at the speed of business with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance for any type of data."

"Cloudera customers choose Azure because of the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a global, hybrid cloud offering using their favorite tools and frameworks," said Arpan Shah, General Manager, Azure Marketing, Microsoft. "I am excited to have the Cloudera Data Platform available on Azure."

Cloudera Data Platform is available for preview on Azure.

Qumulo boosts HPE Apollo Gen10 lineup, making unified hybrid cloud unstructured data storage and real-time insights possible

Qumulo announced Monday global availability of a new line of fully integrated file storage solutions on the highly performant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Apollo 4200 Gen10 servers. The new solution provides enterprise organizations scalable, software-defined file storage with deep data visibility into unstructured data workloads that scale-across on-premise, hybrid and cloud environments.

HPE Apollo Gen10 addresses storage-centric workloads while adapting to future requirements with a superior hardware system architecture that is data-secure by design throughout the product lifecycle. 

HPE’s new technology, called silicon root of trust, allows enterprise organizations to be confident that nowhere in the supply chain were modifications made to hardware platforms. Coupled with FIPS 140-2 encryption-at-rest, the new Gen10-based platforms deliver innovation for secure, enterprise file storage.

The joint solution provides ultra-dense rack-scale file storage, low total cost of ownership (TCO) in a 2U chassis, and configurations optimized for performance, mixed workloads, and active archive. Geographically dispersed environments can leverage continuous replication to move data between data centers and the public cloud.

The file storage market is growing rapidly to process, analyze and store massive unstructured data sets. Analyst firm IDC reports that the scale-out file storage market will become an US$11 billion market by 2022, up nearly two times from previous forecasts.

“Global enterprises are increasingly looking to scalable file storage to address their massive unstructured data processing, analytics and retention demands,” said Amita Potnis, Research Director, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC.

“By delivering our scale-across file storage technology as software, Qumulo provides customers an unprecedented level of choice, freedom and flexibility. Our software model enables customers to benefit from the world’s most capable and simple-to-manage file system, while at the same time, taking advantage of the significant advancements from HPE in security and predictive analytics to prevent infrastructure problems before they happen,” said Bill Richter, CEO of Qumulo. “Qumulo’s file storage, delivered on the Apollo Gen 10 platform, offers companies the best of both worlds. I’m delighted that the partnership with HPE delivers on our joint promise of innovation and customer success.”

“The powerful combination of HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 servers, together with Qumulo’s hybrid cloud file storage, effectively addresses the growing unstructured data needs that enterprises are facing,” said Patrick Osborne, vice president and general manager for big data, analytics and scale-out data platforms at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.. By sharing our vision of the intelligent data platform, we provide the ability to scale and manage billions of files with instant control at lower costs and high performance on-prem, in the cloud, or spanning both, now and into the future.”

Teradici broadens support for Hyperconverged Infrastructure offerings with HPE SimpliVity

In an effort to provide a more streamlined and flexible option to reduce the complexity in delivering services from various data center and cloud combinations, Teradici expanded its support for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions. 

With this expansion, Cloud Access Software can better offer organizations a single interface for remote desktops that can be deployed across the combination of widely used on-premises, private, or public clouds that works best for them.

With Cloud Access, users get the software, tools, and support to migrate legacy applications, as-is, to the cloud or datacenter of their choice; deploy, manage, and access virtualized workspaces from any combination of private or public data centers; and, manage and optimize existing PCoIP endpoints & hardware (including PCoIP Remote Workstation Cards). 

It also scales business effortlessly and improves administrative efficiency by automatically provisioning remote workstations, managing cloud compute costs and brokering PCoIP connections to remote Windows or Linux workstations, from a single console.

Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures are now a reality for many enterprises, offering a practical solution to provide desktops for remote employees, improve data security, and prepare for disaster recovery.

Teradici Cloud Access Software and its included Cloud Access Manager simplifies the configuration and deployment of remote desktops, regardless of physical location. 

Valued for its high security and reliable performance in even the most demanding use cases, Cloud Access Software can provide Windows or Linux desktop access from a wide variety of on-premises data centers and private clouds utilizing HPE SimpliVity, KVM, Nutanix AHV, or VMware ESXi; from public clouds (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure); or combinations of the above, all utilizing a single, simple interface that reduces the support required from enterprise IT teams.

HPE SimpliVity is designed to simplify the delivery of virtual machines at scale, enabling IT administrators to back up, clone, and restore virtual machines quickly, easily and cost effectively, without requiring specialized skills. 

The ability to use Cloud Access Software within an HPE SimpliVity solution provides an option that supports Teradici PCoIP technology, renowned for its efficiency, security, and visual fidelity in delivering virtual desktops and workstations to a variety of devices, including PCoIP Zero Clients, thin clients, and software-defined endpoints. 

For those who already have Teradici technology deployed in other data centers or as part of their public or private cloud deployments, this further simplifies the addition of the HPE SimpliVity platform to their technology stack.

“We see a wide diversity of cloud computing needs, based on each organization’s infrastructure and business requirements,” said Ziad Lammam, vice president of product management for Teradici. “Our aim is to reduce complexity and provide the flexibility to deploy virtual desktops across whatever hybrid or multicloud implementation works best for our customers. Ensuring that Cloud Access Software is easy to deploy across a wide range of HCI solutions is a key initiative to meet those customer needs.”

“Teradici has recently joined the HPE Technology Partner Program as a Silver Tier member, and Teradici Cloud Access Software has now been validated with HPE SimpliVity and ProLiant Servers,” said Carl Shanahan, WW Sr. Program Manager, HPE Technology Partner Program. “HPE is committed to innovating new solutions and enabling mutual growth together with our partners to solve our customers’ biggest business problems. Together we can offer our customers our latest validated technology to accelerate innovation and deliver business value.”