12% off Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus Graphics Calculator – Deal Alert

If a graphic calculator is somewhere on your list, consider this 12% discount on the Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus graphing calculator. Building on the hugely popular TI-83 Plus, which is perhaps the best-selling calculator of all time, the TI-84 Plus is completely compatible with its predecessor. From that well-established platform, this new model adds more speed (a processor that’s 2.5 times faster), more memory (24 KB RAM and 480 KB of Flash ROM), an enhanced high-contrast display (eight lines by 16 characters), and more Apps. Newly added “USB on the go” feature lets you share with other calculators, or connect to a PC or presentation tool. Ideal for middle school through college. The TI-84 Plus currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 2,900 customers (read reviews). Save 12% off the regular $100 list price on Amazon, and buy it now for $88. Oh, and it might not hurt to drop this in your cart while you’re there: Ti-84 Plus Graphing Calculator For Dummies. 

This story, “12% off Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus Graphics Calculator – Deal Alert” was originally published by TechConnect.

Source: InfoWorld Big Data

Rackspace Expands Multi-Cloud Security To Microsoft Azure

Rackspace® has announced from Rackspace::Solve that Rackspace® Managed Security for Microsoft® Azure® is now available in early access. This means that companies using Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS)™, Rackspace Dedicated Hosting, and Rackspace Managed VMware® Cloud can now benefit from the additional security protections provided by Rackspace Managed Security to detect and respond to security threats across leading cloud platforms.

With Rackspace Managed Security for Microsoft Azure, Rackspace customers leveraging the Aviator service level of Fanatical Support® for Azure can layer additional active security on their Microsoft Azure cloud platform to identify and respond to advanced cyber threats. Whereas most managed security service providers only notify customers about a breach, leaving it to the customer to respond, Rackspace Managed Security utilizes pre-approved actions to promptly remediate many security issues. This level of security strengthens customers’ environments beyond the operational network and infrastructure security provided by most cloud providers. Rackspace Managed Security also complements the strategic planning, architectural guidance and 24x7x365 operational support available through Rackspace Fanatical Support for Azure.

“In today’s cybersecurity landscape, organizations are no longer asking if they should have a security solution in place, but rather whether they should do it themselves or partner with a trusted managed security service provider,” said Brannon Lacey, general manager of Rackspace Managed Security. “We are proud to extend this security solution to Azure, as it represents the continued growth of our Managed Security capabilities and aligns with the overall Rackspace mission to provide the best expertise and service across the world’s leading clouds.”

Rackspace launched Rackspace Managed Security in September 2015 to help provide greater business resiliency by helping protect customer data and respond to cyber attacks before they are able to impact customers’ businesses. This approach lessens customer burden on budget and in-house expertise. Rackspace Managed Security provides host and network security, 24x7x365 monitoring and response from Rackspace experts in the Customer Security Operations Center (CSOC) as well as compliance assistance guidance to ease the burden of achieving and maintaining compliance.

According to a cloud security survey from ESG, 32% of enterprise cybersecurity and IT professionals said “their organization finds it challenging to monitor cloud-based network traffic patterns to detect anomalous/suspicious behavior. This could be related to monitoring weaknesses and/or skills deficiencies, but either way it makes organizations more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.”¹ Furthermore, 33% of enterprise cybersecurity and IT professionals said “their organization finds it challenging to maintain regulatory compliance while using cloud infrastructure. This certainly restricts organizations’ ability to maximize cloud computing business benefits.”²

“With Rackspace Managed Security, Rackspace addresses and solves for security needs in organizations that use multiple cloud providers. This is particularly a challenge for organizations facing a cybersecurity skills shortage,” said Dan Conde, analyst from ESG Research. “Top challenges for cloud security includes the ability to provision security controls, assessing the security status, monitoring workloads and maintaining regulatory compliance across clouds. As Rackspace expands its security capabilities across multiple cloud platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, they address the security needs and improves the velocity for on-boarding to a multi-cloud world.”

1. Source: ESG Blog, Cloud security challenges, April 2016
2. Source: ESG Blog, Cloud security challenges, April 2016

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Nimbus Data Unveils ExaFlash™

Nimbus Data has unveiled ExaFlash™, a revolutionary new all-flash platform for cloud, big data, virtualization, and massive digital content.

Nimbus Data’s ExaFlash™ Platform is an historic achievement that will reshape the storage and data center industries. It offers unprecedented scale (from terabytes to exabytes), record-smashing efficiency (95% lower power and 50x greater density than existing all-flash arrays), and a breakthrough price point (a fraction of the cost of existing all-flash arrays). ExaFlash brings the all-flash data center dream to reality and will help empower humankind’s innovation for decades to come.

“Worldwide storage demand continues to escalate, and with it, the need to increase data center efficiency, achieve scale with consistent performance, maintain simplicity, and reduce cost,” stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder of Nimbus Data. “Our vision is unencumbered by conventional thinking, and ExaFlash’s ground-breaking achievements reflect that vision.”

The ExaFlash Platform incorporates a novel architecture that enables virtually infinite scalability, from terabytes to exabytes, as one centrally-managed all-flash system. With ExaFlash, data flow is decoupled from metadata and management is centralized, operating completely out-of-band. This provides one interface and one pane-of-glass for all administration. There is no data network between the storage arrays themselves, so performance truly scales in lock-step with capacity and with consistent latency. Multiple storage protocols, including block, file, and object, can operate simultaneously using Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand networks, eliminating storage “islands”.

The building blocks of the ExaFlash Platform are ExaFlash Arrays, a new family of all-flash system that sets new records for energy efficiency, capacity, connectivity options, and rack space density. Unlike off-the-shelf servers, ExaFlash Arrays are precision-engineered for maximum efficiency and performance. ExaFlash Arrays draw 95% less power per terabyte than competing designs by eliminating irrelevant components and minimizing CPU utilization through intelligent hardware-offload engines. ExaFlash Arrays also incorporate ultra-dense flash drives to deliver up to 50x the capacity in the same rack space as competing alternatives. ExaFlash Arrays are available in sizes ranging from 50 TB to 4.5 PB and feature the latest 32 Gb Fibre Channel, 100 Gigabit Ethernet, and EDR InfiniBand connectivity. ExaFlash Arrays feature dual active-active controllers, redundant power and cooling, and hot-swappable components for always-on availability and easy serviceability.

The all-new ExaFlash Operating System is powerful, API-driven storage and data management software for the ExaFlash Platform. The ExaFlash OS provides a single pane-of-glass administration interface for total control. It also provides support for all major storage protocols, including block, file and object protocols, simultaneously. Using the API, storage administrators can automate every conceivable storage task centrally. Inline variable deduplication and compression maximize storage utilization, and real-time checksums ensure data integrity.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Denodo Recognized As A Visionary In The 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant For Data Integration Tools

Denodo has positioned Denodo as a Visionary in its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. According to Gartner, “The biggest changes in the market from 2015 are the increased demand for data virtualization, the growing use of data integration tools to combine ‘data lakes’ with existing integration solutions, and the overall expectation that data integration will become cloud- and on-premises-agnostic” (August 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools).

Data virtualization has achieved broad recognition as an agile method of data integration for organizations frustrated with long, repetitive, and expensive methods of physically moving data such as ETL (Extract, Transform and Load).

Data virtualization is a virtual data layer that combines disparate data from a variety of source systems into complete, connected information and then presents that information to business users through applications and reporting solutions. Data virtualization has grown to become a critical part of modern data architectures. This is due to its flexible approach and ability to quickly integrate new data sources and to provide the information in real-time to business users.

“We believe that Denodo’s furthest placement in the visionaries quadrant for completeness of vision demonstrates that our approach to data virtualization is the most complete in this quadrant,” said Ravi Shankar, chief marketing officer at Denodo. “Version 6.0 of the award winning Denodo Platform accelerates fast data strategy with breakthrough performance in big data, logical data warehouses, and operational scenarios; facilitates solution adoption with data virtualization in the cloud; and expedites the use of data by business users with self-service data discovery and search. Denodo’s customers are benefiting from shorter time, fewer resources, and lower cost to solution.”

The Denodo Platform serves critical enterprise roles including:

• CIOs and CDOs in supporting new business models, digitalization initiatives, strong ROI from reduction in resources and integration costs. Denodo also accelerates analytics initiatives resulting in more timely insights, increased revenue and operational excellence.
• Enterprise, data, and solution architects in exploiting modern data architectures such as logical data warehouse, logical data lake, and data as a service in support of analytical and operational initiatives.
• Business users by accelerating the decision making process through dynamic adaptation to business requirements, agile data delivery, trusted insights, and self-service data discovery capabilities.
• Developers by providing Denodo Express edition for expediting POCs, ease of use, and configuration of the product and advanced optimization techniques such as dynamic query optimization.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Informatica Positioned As A Leader In Gartner’s Magic Quadrant For Data Integration Tools

Informatica has announced that Gartner, Inc., a leading IT research and advisory firm, has positioned Informatica as a Leader in its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. For the third consecutive year, Informatica is positioned the furthest and highest on the completeness of vision and ability to execute axes, respectively. Additionally, Informatica has demonstrated its leadership in the data integration market by being a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools for 11 years in a row. In this year’s Magic Quadrant, published August 8, 2016, Informatica is positioned the furthest and highest than ever before.

According to the Gartner report, “Data integration remains central to enterprises’ information infrastructure.” The report continues to say, “Enterprises pursuing frictionless sharing of data are increasingly favoring tools that are flexible in that they can be designed once for delivery across multiple platforms, mixed architectural and broad deployment without significant rework.”

The authors of the Gartner report note that, “the biggest changes in the market from 2015 are the increased demand for data virtualization, the growing use of data integration tools to combine ‘data lakes’ with existing integration solutions, and the overall expectation that data integration will become cloud- and on-premises-agnostic.”

The report projects that “the growth rate is above the average for the enterprise software market as a whole, as data integration capability continues to be considered of critical importance for addressing the diversity of problems and emerging requirements. The total market revenue is expected to be about $4 billion in 2020 (see ‘Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2013-2020, 2Q16 Update’).”

The report’s authors say “Leaders in the data integration tool market are front-runners in the convergence of single-purpose tools into an offering that supports a full range of data delivery styles. Additionally, they have recognized the growing affinity between data and application integration, and are haltingly approaching location-agnostic deployments (that are not limited only to cloud or on-premises, but can be deployed beyond specific location). They are strong in establishing data integration infrastructure as an enterprise standard and as a critical component of modern information infrastructure. They support both traditional and new data integration patterns to capitalize on market demand. Leaders have significant mind share in the market, and resources skilled in their tools are readily available. These vendors recognize and design to deploy for emerging and new market demands, (to a large degree) often providing new functional capabilities in their products ahead of demand, and by identifying new types of business problem to which data integration tools can bring significant value. Examples of deployments that span multiple projects and types of use case are common among Leaders’ customers. Leaders have an established market presence, significant size and a multinational presence (directly or through a parent company).”

“Informatica is focused on providing customers with solutions that enable them to leverage the new era of data and put great data at the center of everything they do in order to make their businesses more successful,” said Amit Walia, executive vice president and chief product officer, Informatica. “We believe that the positioning of Informatica as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools further validates our dominance and leadership in data integration for a hybrid world, across on-premises, big data and cloud. We feel that our recognition in this report reflects the unmatched breadth and depth of Informatica’s metadata-driven data management offerings, for any user, any style and any speed of data integration, and for all data, big or small, structured or unstructured. The 2016 Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools represents Informatica’s best positioning yet in this arena and we believe we continue to set the pace for data management innovation and customer success.”

Informatica offers the most comprehensive set of solutions focused on enterprise data integration across on-premise, big data, cloud and hybrid integration environments, spanning from departmental to big data solutions. The Informatica Intelligent Data Platform takes away the complexity of accessing, transforming and unifying any type of data from disparate underlying sources, and delivering it to any business system or user at any latency. With Informatica, business users can quickly discover and prepare data for their needs using self-service tools with the assurance that the data is complete, clean, relevant, timely and trusted. At the same time, IT is able to deliver even complex data integration projects up to five times faster than traditional hand-coded methods.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

New R extension gives data scientists quick access to IBM's Watson

Data scientists have a lot of tools at their disposal, but not all of them are equally accessible. Aiming to put IBM’s Watson AI within closer reach, analytics firm Columbus Collaboratory on Thursday released a new open-source R extension called CognizeR.

R is an open-source language that’s widely used by data scientists for statistical and analytics applications. Previously, data scientists would have had to exit R to tap Watson’s capabilities, coding the calls to Watson’s APIs in another language, such as Java or Python.

Now, CognizeR lets them tap into Watson’s so-called “cognitive” artificial-intelligence services without leaving their native development environment.

“Data scientists can now seamlessly tap into our cognitive services to unlock data that lives in unstructured forms like chats, emails, social media, images, and documents,” wrote Rob High, vice president and CTO for Watson, in a blog post.

Red Hat Positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant of Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant

Red Hat, Inc. has announced that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the August 2016 x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure Magic Quadrant. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, companies around the world are building a foundation for future technologies while integrating with existing technologies with an open, scalable, and high-performance virtualization infrastructure.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrants are based on rigorous analysis of a vendor’s completeness of vision and ability to execute. According to Gartner, “About 80% of x86 server workloads are virtualized, but virtualization technologies are becoming more lightweight, supporting more workloads and agile development. Price, modernization and specific use cases are driving enterprises to deploy different, and often multiple, virtualization technologies.”

“Many enterprises are looking for an open alternative to proprietary virtualization solutions to obtain better efficiencies and interoperability, and to bridge their traditional infrastructure to cloud-native workloads using OpenStack or other platforms. As the only company included in the Visionaries quadrant, we believe Red Hat’s Magic Quadrant position reinforces our continued innovation, momentum and strong vision for an open, high-performance virtualization alternative,” said Gunnar Hellekson, director of product management, Linux and Virtualization, Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is an open infrastructure and management platform for servers and workstations with robust security capabilities. It is built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technologies, and enables customers to virtualize both traditional and cloud-native applications. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is the open alternative. It offers a high-performing, fault-tolerant, and more secure platform for mission-critical, virtualized Linux and Windows environments. Red Hat reduces the cost and complexity of proprietary virtual machines (VM) through improved economics, interoperability, and agility of virtualization. Backed by Red Hat’s certified ecosystem of software and hardware partners, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers unparalleled performance, scale, and flexibility to support a broad range of critical workloads.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Nimbix Expands Market Presence In Cloud-based Machine Learning

Nimbix has announced a significant increase in their presence in the machine learning market space as more customers are using their JARVICE platform to help address the need for an easier, more cost efficient way of working with machine learning.

Using JARVICE to manage their machine learning process, customers are able to leverage JARVICE’s turnkey workflows, reducing time to deployment from weeks to hours. Built on NVIDIA GPU’s for optimal neural network training, Nimbix’s per-second billing also enables their customers to capture the best economics for the neural network evaluation phase of machine learning.

Experienced machine learning developer, Hugh Perkins, author of the popular open source OpenCL libraries DeepCL and cltorch, is an avid user of the Nimbix cloud. Perkins chose to work with Nimbix in addressing machine learning due to the powerful platform API, industry-leading selection of GPUs, superior-performance and economics.

“Nimbix is a breath of fresh air,” said Perkins. “The per-second billing, spin up times of seconds, and the availability of high end GPUs, make Nimbix an awesome choice for machine learning developers.”

The Nimbix cloud platform is democratized and developer-friendly, allowing users to monetize their trained neural networks in the application marketplace. Democratizing machine learning APIs will distribute the power of neural networks to smaller organizations, allowing for more breakthroughs in life sciences, IoT, automotive, and more.

“The Nimbix Cloud was a great choice for our research tasks in conversational AI. They are one of the first cloud services to provide NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs that were essential for computing neural networks that are implemented as part of Luka’s AI,” said Phil Dudchuck, co-founder at Luka.ai.

Nimbix provides on-demand and scalable compute resources that enable organizations to run large-scale HPC workloads in the cloud. High Performance Computing (HPC) allows scientists, developers, and engineers to solve complex science, engineering, development, big data, and business problems using applications that require high compute capabilities. Nimbix’ growing number of integrated cloud services allows organizations to increase the speed and effectiveness of research by running high performance computing in the Nimbix Cloud.

“The Nimbix Cloud, powered by JARVICE, is an ideal platform for machine learning applications as it provides access to true supercomputing GPU and FPGA-based accelerated computing with large amounts of memory is paramount for training deep neural networks ,” said Leo Reiter, chief technology officer at Nimbix. “The high performance execution of the Nimbix Cloud is key to delivering timely results to our end users.  We are continuing to improve JARVICE by allowing our customers to utilize the platform to democratize these resources and provide a processing API to help add cognitive features to any application seamlessly and cost-effectively.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Microsoft Named A Leader By Gartner

Gartner has positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant in the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute in the IaaS market. Microsoft is the only vendor recognized as a leader across Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions for enterprise cloud workloads. Register here to download the full report.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Rootstock Appoints BT Partners To Represent Its Cloud ERP Solutions

Rootstock has announced that BT Partners has been appointed to help manufacturers and distributors learn about, buy, and implement Rootstock’s Cloud Manufacturing ERP software. For 30 years, the Chicago provider of technology-based business consulting services has been helping manufacturers and distribution organizations improve the ways their businesses operate with ERP and financial software solutions. 

“With Rootstock’s Manufacturing and Distribution Cloud ERP, a manufacturer or distributor can reduce its IT operational costs by outsourcing hardware and software maintenance and support to the cloud provider and get their ERP solution up and running faster,” emphasizes Todd Perlman, president of BT Partners. “With its ERP built on the Salesforce platform, Rootstock customers leverage investment in their Salesforce platform by integrating it seamlessly with other Salesforce cloud applications.”

“Today, Cloud ERP buyers need to be cautious,” adds Pat Garrehy, CEO of Rootstock Software. “Not all ERP systems are developed from a manufacturing core, especially those residing in the Cloud.  Some vendors begin with accounting software while others start out in maintenance or human resources. Rootstock’s core functions have been architected based on the needs and environment of supply chain-based organizations. Our solution is extended and enhanced by BT Partners’ technical architects as they are leaders in their field and familiar with the global governance, data management and complex integrations necessary for manufacturers to be successful.”

BT Partners is experienced in working with manufacturing and distribution companies with complex inventory and shipping needs. BT Partners will assess ERP utilization and review processes and identify needs that are not met now or are emerging soon. BT Partners is focused on developing recommendations for optimizing clients’ investments and managing the implementation process.

Source: CloudStrategyMag