READ MORE: U.S. Closely Eyeing China’s Corporate Hacking Vow, Official Says

“It’s not based on an existing architecture. They built it themselves,” said Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee and creator of the measurement method used by TOP500. “This is a system that has Chinese processors.”

The new machine shows China’s determination to build its domestic chip industry and replace its dependence on imports that cost as much as oil. The world’s most populous country may also try to lessen its reliance on U.S. companies for defense technology and security infrastructure. Supercomputers aren’t major consumers of chips. But being at the heart of the world’s most powerful machines helps processor makers persuade the broader market to consider their technology.

“This is the first time that the Chinese have more systems than the U.S., so that, I think, is a striking accomplishment,” said Dongarra. The Chinese had no machines in the 2001 list, he noted. In the latest, China has 167 entries compared with 165 for the U.S.

Previous supercomputer winners have had processors built on U.S. technology from Intel Corp. — the world’s largest chipmaker — International Business Machines Corp. or a derivative of Sun Microsystems designs.

SEE ALSO: Intel: World Will Switch to “Scale” Data Centers by 2025

The top position was previously occupied by Tianhe-2, built on Intel chips by China’s National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou. That system is now second, according to TOP500.

Sunway TaihuLight’s victory is a particular challenge to Intel’s dominance in computer servers, where it currently controls about 96 percent of the market. It announced a joint venture with a Chinese organization to domesticate some of its technology earlier this year.

Supercomputers are multiple server computers linked together in a way that allows them to process huge data sets and run the most complex calculations. While they’re hugely expensive and relatively rare, they showcase new technologies that often make their way into corporate data centers.

An Intel spokesman declined to comment on the new rankings.

Other chipmakers such as Qualcomm Inc. are working with Chinese organizations to build processors in the country. Technology provider ARM Holdings Plc, whose products are at the heart of most smartphones, is also trying to grab a slice of the Chinese market.

Source: TheWHIR

Peak is seeking bankruptcy protection while it undergoes restructuring as well as financing to pay for its lawsuit with Machine Zone. It recently hired a chief restructuring officer and let go most of its staff, according to the report.

Peak’s bankruptcy is likely to have an adverse effect on its own data center providers, who are its biggest creditors. According to its website, they include Digital Realty Trust, with whom it recently contracted for space in the Dallas and Silicon Valley markets, as well as Equinix, CoreSite, and Interxion.

The managed hosting company has five data centers in the US and one in Europe.

Machine Zone has a $14-million-per-month contract with Peak through next October, but it stopped paying for services starting three months ago, Peak said in the bankruptcy filing. Peak is suing the customer for $100 million, saying the agreement between the two companies does not allow for a premature cancelation.

Peak says it invested $35 million in equipment to host Machine Zone’s applications and that the customer has been using some of Peak’s proprietary technology.

The data center provider has attributed last fall’s outage to a bug in Cisco Systems software.

Original article appeared here: Report: Data Center Provider Peak Hosting Files for Bankruptcy

Source: TheWHIR

RELATED: LinkedIn Deal Means More Microsoft in Digital Realty Data Centers

“We’ve done that kind of analysis in the past and it’s something we’re generally paying a lot of attention to,” she said in an interview in Copenhagen Friday.

The Dane, who took office at the end of 2014, has signaled a willingness to delve more into how merging companies leverage the treasure trove of data at their disposal. Data was one of the key considerations in the review of Facebook Inc.’s takeover of messaging service WhatsApp Inc., even though her predecessor in the end concluded there were no data-usage concerns.

No Problems Yet

Vestager warned earlier this year that even though the regulator hasn’t found a data competition problem yet, “this doesn’t mean we never will.”

James Cakmak, an analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co., said that from a data standpoint, the WhatsApp purchase “warranted greater scrutiny” than the LinkedIn deal.

“LinkedIn has roughly 100 million members in Europe, compared to about 350 million Facebook users in Europe,” he said. “The trajectory of growth of WhatsApp was significantly different to that of LinkedIn.”

Microsoft will acquire LinkedIn for about $26.2 billion, one of the largest technology-industry deals on record, as the maker of Windows and Office software attempts to put itself at the center of people’s business lives. The deal is a way for Microsoft, which largely missed out on the consumer web boom dominated by the likes of Google and Facebook, to sprint ahead in social tools — in this case, for professionals.

READ MORE: Microsoft to Acquire LinkedIn: What You Need to Know

When it announced the deal, Microsoft outlined a vision in which a person’s LinkedIn profile resides at the middle of other pieces of their work life, connecting with Windows, Outlook, Skype, Office productivity tools like Excel and PowerPoint, and other Microsoft products.

Microsoft said on June 13 its bid for LinkedIn will require regulatory approval in the EU, U.S., Canada and Brazil and that it’s confident of closing the transaction before the end of the year. The company’s press office had no further comment Friday.

LinkedIn’s analytics will help power data tools for Microsoft’s Dynamics, which competes with Salesforce.com Inc. in helping companies manage relationships with their customers.

Salesforce.com was a rival potential bidder for LinkedIn in the process leading up to the acquisition by Microsoft, according to people familiar with the matter.

Source: TheWHIR

The Big Picture

Oracle has been trying to shift more sales to cloud-based products increasingly demanded by corporate customers. The new cloud services made up about 8 percent of the company’s total sales during the quarter.

The Detail

Core cloud revenue is projected to increase 75 percent to 80 percent in the current quarter, Oracle Co-Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz said in a statement. Oracle has a “fighting chance” to be first cloud company to reach $10 billion in core cloud revenue, Chairman Larry Ellison said. Adjusted earnings in the current quarter are forecast at 56 cents to 60 cents a share. Revenue projected to increase 2 percent to 5 percent. All company forecasts are in constant currency. Currency headwinds weighed on results; revenue would have been unchanged with constant currency in fiscal fourth quarter. Net income rose 2 percent to $2.8 billion in the quarter from the year-ago period. New software license revenue in the quarter was $2.8 billion, down 12 percent.

Street Takeaways

“The company’s made a lot of progress in the last two years, and it’s starting to bear fruit. But the cloud still represents less than 10 percent of this company. So, there’s a lot of heavy lifting to go,” said Bill Kreher, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. “All the metrics seem fairly better than we had expected across the board. I think this is one of the cleanest quarters they’ve put up in a long time,” said Joel Fishbein, an analyst at BTIG.

Source: TheWHIR

The integration with Apple News is available to all customers, and Squarespace said customers can create their own branded Apple News channel that is discoverable in-app.

As hosting becomes an increasingly competitive landscape, features like this integration which help customers’ websites get found can be a selling point for an individual or small or medium-sized business user.

Squarespace said this is the first of more Apple News integrations to come. Initially, users can publish images and galleries, videos, audio, text, Twitter and Instagram embedded content and a link back to their Squarespace site.

In April, Squarespace launched Squarespace Domains as a way for it to offer 200 top-level domains to users, competing with other SMB-focused hosting providers.

Source: TheWHIR

The facility is adjacent to the first Google data center in Ireland, launched in 2012 on the company’s campus in Clondalkin, a town 10 kilometers west of Dublin.

Enda Kenny, Ireland’s Taoiseach (head of government, equivalent to prime minister), spoke at the data center opening Thursday, applauding the company’s sizable investment in the country, creating jobs and being a “leader within Ireland’s digital community,” Irish Independent reported.

See also: What Cloud and AI Do and Don’t Mean for Google’s Data Center Strategy

At the event, Ronan Harris, Google’s head in Ireland, addressed the upcoming referendum on Britain’s exit from the European Union and implications the potential Brexit may have for Google’s Irish operations.

“We are going to wait and see what the outcome of the referendum is and then we’ll assess what the British people have decided and the British government then decide to do,” Harris said, according to Irish Times. “At the moment we don’t have clarity on that so we haven’t made any decisions, accordingly.”

While data center expansion is always an ongoing process for Google, the company has been ramping up data center investment this year to support a push to grow its cloud services business. The company announced in March it would add 10 new data center locations that will host its public cloud infrastructure.

Google reported capital expenditures of $2 billion in the first quarter of this year, saying the spending reflected its “investments in production equipment, facilities, and data center construction.”

This expansion push includes both building and leasing data center capacity from third-party providers.

Read more: Google to Build and Lease Data Centers in Big Cloud Expansion

Source: TheWHIR

“We immediately began investigating, and found that the attacker had been able to log in to a number of GitHub accounts,” the blog post says. “GitHub has not been hacked or compromised.”

All users are urged “to practice good password hygiene and enable two-factor authentication.”

While media attention has been focussed recently on a LinkedIn breach from 2012 after social media accounts belonging to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were hijacked, GitHub does not name a breach source, and uses the plural in the announcement. A Tumblr breach in 2013 was recently estimated to have involved 65 million accounts.

GitHub experienced a sustained DDoS attack in 2015, allegedly originating in China.

Source: TheWHIR

System Containers vs. App Containers

Lovell said that Virtuozzo system containers “allows you to have a fully configurable operating system and run your applications” as opposed to app containers which provide a way to run a single application.

“We have a lot of work to do in kind of educating the market that there is a difference between the two,” he said. “Obviously all these businesses are looking at the app container wave that’s happening at the moment. There’s still a big need for system containers that could offer a lot more flexibility than Docker.”

RELATED: Do Containers Render Virtualization Obsolete For Web Hosting?

“What we have as a challenge is to reinsert ourselves into the conversation again around containers and show that there are multiple ways of running an application,” he said.

Revamped Partner Program

In addition to the education and marketing component, Lovell said part of his role as Virtuozzo CEO is to reengage partners with a completely refreshed partner program.

Traditionally, Lovell said Virtuozzo focused on partnering based on pricing and volume. “What we’re doing now is a much more practical approach to work with partners much closer,” he said, helping partners with marketing campaigns and go-to market strategies “rather than just shipping them software and expecting them to make it work as well as we think it can.”

While becoming more engaged with existing partners is part of the strategy, Lovell said that Virtuozzo is also looking for new partners.

“The hosting market is so large. From your kind of shared smaller hosting companies, managed hosting, enterprise hosting. There are plenty of different companies which can use this technology to attract different customers. It’s about us looking at different deployment models,” he said.

As an independent business, Virtuozzo now has its own R&D, support, sales and marketing engines, Lovell said. With this independence, Virtuozzo will be able to be a lot more agile and act on partner feedback a lot more quickly.

“Within the Parallels group originally people where designated to certain products. The split of resources was somewhat easier than it sounds. Obviously we had to rebuild the support team from scratch. We had to hire in development as well because there was obviously shared development in some areas.”

“So we’re bringing some fresh blood into the corporation as well and a fresh look at things. Because the problem with any business if it’s been in existence for some time, it tends to get a little stale.”

“My role on one hand is to lead the business, enable it to be independent,” Lovell said. “The second is to give it the energy to bring in a team to change the way Virtuozzo perceives, to make it relevant now and hopefully to make it successful.”

Refreshed Roadmap

At the end of June, Virtuozzo will be launching Virtuozzo 7. Following that launch, Virtuozzo will be releasing a DevOps orchestration tool which will give customers lifecycle management of their development environment, Lovell said. Towards the end of the summer Virtuozzo will release a standalone version of its software-defined storage.

“So even if you’re not using any of the Virtuozzo products themselves, you can still use the storage product,” he said.

Lovell said Virtuozzo is focused on tailoring the products to the “use cases of today and what service providers are looking at.”

“It’s really about action rather than talk. We’ve separated the business; we’ve done that. We’ve brought in a team; we’ve done that. We’re building a new partner program. We’re doing these things piece by piece,” he said. “We want to win back the trust and now inject some energy into not only putting ourselves in a position here [where we’re] attracting customers to service providers but we’re also helping those service providers build and grow.”

Source: TheWHIR

In April a report indicated that Cinven had put HEG up for sale with a €1.7 billion ($1.9 billion) sticker price, and also mentioned Hellman & Friedman among firms that might be interested. That price puts HEG’s multiple to earnings of €140 million at just over 12 times, which is comparable to GoDaddy’s multiple, and significantly higher than competitors Rackspace and Endurance International Group.

Strato was acquired by Deutsche Telekom in 2009 for €275 million ($310 million). One of Reuters’ sources said it has core earnings of around €30 million and its enterprise worth is about a quarter as much as HEG.

Potential bidders for HEG would have to consider the value of both its mass market and managed hosting businesses, according to the report.

Deutsche Telekom announced intentions to double its business cloud revenue by 2018 and become the leading cloud platform provider for businesses in Europe when extending a partnership with Huawei to include public cloud a year ago. Adding HEG’s customers, products and team would be a significant move towards that goal.

Source: TheWHIR

Hoffman sat down for a great interview with Backchannel to discuss his plans, and speculated (a little bit) on what LinkedIn would look like in a decade.

“Let’s just focus on artificial intelligence. What if we could offer every member a personal assistant for their career? Members could ask: what are the skills that are going to be really important to me in three to five years? What is the best way to develop those?” he told Backchannel. “Which courses both here and across the internet would be the right ones to do? Which would be the people in my network at one, two and three degrees that I should connect with? Which LinkedIn groups are the most valuable for doing that?”

He said that while LinkedIn those kinds of discussions were hypothetical looks at the future, at Microsoft they become something they can work for in the near-term, based on both the technologies and platforms Microsoft already has. Hoffman even admitted that, from the beginning, one of the dreams LinkedIn had was integration across Outlook. Now that dream is a lot closer to reality.

Original article appeared here: LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman plans to take on larger role in Microsoft

Source: TheWHIR