He described a future where children could use apps like WeChat to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers. All of these technologies would require huge amounts of data storage, which in turn could generate business for Huawei, he added.

Read more: When Users Die, Yahoo Japan Deletes their Account and Offers Funeral Arrangements

Ho also referred to a scene in “The Matrix” where a character downloads the ability to fly a helicopter.

“That kind of data download volume exceeds current levels,” he said. “In the future storage will need to exceed 15,000 Zettabytes so this is a huge increase.”

Post-Human Society

In Silicon Valley, high-tech companies like Google have discussed long-term planning for a post-human society, while Calico and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have both raised the prospect of immortality. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has long held the goal of transporting humanity to colonies on other planets.

But it is rare for established Chinese technology firms like Huawei to make business preparations based on the intangible possibilities facing the species. Ho said science fiction films helped spur his team to consider new product lines.

“A lot of science fiction has prompted me to have this type of thinking – in science fiction we’ve seen some terrible worlds where technology destroys human society,” he said. Ho described a film in which a character — apparently an AI persona — absorbs ideas from books then launches an attack on humanity. “There’s a very interesting film where Mr Wong has a task of downloading books, he also has a task of printing books and later he kills human beings. Therefore we need better safety technology.

“We need authentication, better tech protection and remote defense – we are developing all of these now.”

Source: TheWHIR

The decision to use public cloud along with its own data centers represents something of a departure for Salesforce. The cloud PaaS of Salesforce’s subsidiary Heroku is based on AWS, but most Salesforce core services are run out of the company’s data centers.

The Salesforce IoT Cloud has been in beta testing for select customers since it was announced, and Bosworth told the WSJ that it will launch in the second half of 2016.

Read more: Former EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes Joins Salesforce Board

At the time of the announcement, Salesforce chairman and CEO Mark Benioff said: “Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers. The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time 1:1, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success.”

As the largest public cloud vendor, AWS offers a managed IoT cloud platform supported by tools like the recently announced Bsquare IoT developer software stack.

Source: TheWHIR

Read more: Rackspace Brings Signature Fanatical Support to AWS

The OpenStack growth is hardly surprising, given the emphasis Rackspace has placed on it over the past several years, even prior to announcing its expanded partnership with Red Hat in February. Rackspace continues to develop its OpenStack cloud, most recently through a partnership with cloud optimization startup AppFormix.

Rackspace bought back $68 million in shares in the quarter. Its stock was up roughly $0.80 or 3.5 percent to 23.35 on the New York Stock Exchange mid-afternoon following the report.

Analysts confidence in predicting Rackspace should be tempered by the company’s somewhat unexpected twists and turns over the past few years. Morgan Stanley analysts set a share price range of $40 to $12, with a base of $26 for the company following the report.

Rackspace also recently decided to re-assign 90 employees from its public cloud department, and also updated its OnMetal Cloud Server line.

Source: TheWHIR

There are two Dockers. There is the Docker container, which is a standard, open source way to package a piece of software in a filesystem with everything that piece of software needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, etc. There is also Docker Inc., the company that created the open source technology and that has built a substantial set of tools for developers and IT teams to build, test, and deploy applications using Docker containers.

In the sense that a container can contain an application that can be moved from one host to another, Docker containers are similar to VMs. Docker argues that they are a more efficient, lighter-weight way to package software than VMs, since each VM has its own OS instance, while Docker runs on top of a single OS, and countless individual containers can be spun up in that single environment.

Another big advantage of containers is portability. Because containers are standardized and contain everything the application needs to run, they can reportedly be easily moved from server to server, VM to VM (they can and do run in VMs), cloud to cloud, server to laptop, etc.

Google uses a technology similar to Docker containers to power its services, and many of the world’s largest enterprises have been evaluating and adopting containers since Docker came on the scene about two years ago.

Read more: Docker CEO: Docker’s Impact on Data Center Industry Will Be Huge

RightScale offers a Software-as-a-Service application that helps users manage their cloud resources. It supports all major cloud providers, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, and IBM SoftLayer, and key private cloud platforms, such as VMware vSphere, OpenStack, and Apache CloudStack.

Its entire platform consists of 52 services that used to run on 1,028 cloud instances. Over the past seven weeks, the engineering team containerized 48 of those services in an initiative they dubbed “Project Sherpa.”

They only migrated 670 cloud instances to Docker containers. That’s how many instances ran dynamic apps. Static apps – things like SQL databases, Cassandra rings, MogoDB clusters Redis, Memcached, etc. – wouldn’t benefit much from switching to containers, Miller wrote.

The instances running static apps now support containers running dynamic apps in a hybrid environment. “We believe that this will be a common model for many companies that are using Docker because some components (such as storage systems) may not always benefit from containerization and may even incur a performance or maintenance penalty​ if containerized,” he wrote.

As a result the number of cloud instances running dynamic apps was reduced by 55 percent and the cloud infrastructure costs of running those apps came down by 53 percent on average.

RightScale has also already noticed an improvement in development speed. Standardization and portability containers offer help developers with debugging, working on applications they have no experience with, and flexibility in accessing integration systems. Product managers can check out features that are being developed without getting developers involved.

“There are certainly more improvements that we will make in our use of Docker, but we would definitely consider Project Sherpa a success based on the early results, Miller wrote.

Original article appeared here: RightScale Cuts Own Cloud Costs by Switching to Docker

Source: TheWHIR

Microsoft Azure continues to lead in terms of the number of physical locations its customers can choose to host their virtual infrastructure in. Twenty-four Azure regions are available today, and, including the upcoming Korea regions, the company has announced eight more that are underway.

While ahead of the competition in global reach, in Korea Microsoft is catching up to Amazon, whichlaunched a Seoul cloud region in January. Today, there are nine Azure regions in Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, and Japan, and two in Australia.

Google, which has fewer dedicated cloud data center locations than both of its largest competitors in the space, has only one in Asia, a three-zone region in Taiwan.

After a brief slowdown in data center spending in 2015, the big three cloud providers have ramped up cloud data center construction this year.

Microsoft reported a 65-percent increase in data center spend year over year in the first quarter. Google said in March it would add 12 new data center locations to expand its cloud infrastructure. Amazon increased capital spending by 35 percent in the first quarter and attributed a big portion of the increase to investment in AWS.

The new Azure data center region will be located in Seoul, Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for cloud and enterprise, wrote in a blog post announcing the plans.

He also announced that new data centers hosting Azure and 365 have come online in Toronto and Quebec City,Microsoft’s first cloud data centers in Canada.

Original article appeared here: Microsoft to Launch Cloud Data Centers in Korea

Source: TheWHIR

Read more: Bigcommerce Ecommerce Platform Raises $50 Million to Expand Reach

The company says it has processed over $9 billion in sales through its platform. This includes sales by thousands of mid-market brands using BigCommerce Enterprise, as well as relative household names Camelbak and Toyota, all of which joined the company in the past year.

GGV Capital is based in both Silicon Valley and China, and it has an extensive history with software and ecommerce companies, including Alibaba and Square. Managing partner Jeff Richards will join the BigCommerce board of directors, where he will join CEO Brent Bellm, who joined the company in June. The company also formed a partnership with 2Checkout in July to enable transactions between international currencies.

“We believe we are still in the early innings of a massive global shift from offline to online retail, with mobile and younger demographics driving the trend,” said Jeff Richards. “BigCommerce and its competitors have brought hundreds of thousands of merchants online in the past few years, but there are millions left to come online – and today’s shopper shops online first.”

BigCommerce has raised $155 million to date. A recent report by aheadWorks put BigCommerce at 0.5 percent of the Alexa top 1 million websites.

Source: TheWHIR

Read more: Obama Names 12 Members to New Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity

Security analysts may need help, given the explosion in data available. IBM says the average organization sees over 200,000 pieces of security event data each day, and enterprises spend $1.3 million and nearly 21,000 hours just on false positives. The company also notes that the 75,000 items in the National Vulnerability Database, the 10,000 security research papers a year, and 60,000 security blogs published each month challenge analysts to move at the speed of information.

The looming problem is that they may not have an easy time hiring help, as studies have indicated that cybersecurity skills are in short supply.

“Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cyber security jobs by 2020, we’d still have a skills crisis in security,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, General Manager, IBM Security. “The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime. By leveraging Watson’s ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations, and knowledge to security professionals, bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cybersecurity analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training.”

Read more: IBM Cloud Unit CTO Retires, Watson Fails to Impress at CES

In addition to Watson’s training, UMBC announced it will create an Accelerated Cognitive Cybersecurity Laboratory in collaboration with IBM Research.

Cybersecurity may be the niche Watson needs to get out there and get a job in the real world, after failing to impress at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Source: TheWHIR