Cisco has released a long-distance interconnect designed to simplify workload mobility between data centres. Dubbed “stretched fabric” the technology is part of Cisco’s Application Centric Policy Controller (APIC) which allows switches that form a fabric to be located up to 30 km apart.
The big idea is that the technology can provide better integration of environments spread across multiple data centres.
The stretched ACI fabric behaves the same way as a regular ACI fabric and supports full VMM integration. A VMWare vCenter can operate across the stretched ACI fabric sites with ESXi hosts from sites managed by the same vCenter and Distributed Virtual Switch.
Depending on optical transceivers between the data centres, the data can be stretched further. Cisco’s said that the stretched fabric also requires dark fibre links.
All this simplifies the overall network infrastructure and removes the need for all leaf switches to be connected to all spines.
February 26, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
During the earnings call today CEO Don Mattrick highlighted where he believed the company had made mistakes this year.
“There are a number of things we could have done better this past year. First we had a challenging time implementing our new poker product. And we learned the tough lesson that we needed more adequate testing across consumer segments, geographies and devices,” he said.
“Second, we have big aspirations for our sports brand and view our NFL and Tiger Woods licences as incredible assets. We moved quickly to release NFL showdown to hit the season kick-off but by doing so launched an experience with less features than is typical for a worldwide launch. We believe in the potential of sports and our ambition for the category is bigger than our first product is showing out of the gate.”
“Finally, as a company, we are committed to managing the performance of our products and related cost structure. Local products from Zynga China, including the launch of FarmVillage at the end of Q4, have underperformed and not met our expectations. As a result, we are narrowing our international footprint and have decided to close our operations in China.”
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During its third quarter, Zynga had announced a net loss of $57 million, which followed similar losses in the first and second quarters. Now the fourth quarter numbers are out and the company has lost another $45 million, nearly double the $25 million loss from Q4 2013. All in all, Zynga lost nearly $226 million for the year compared with a total loss in 2013 of nearly $37 million. 2014 was a “year of progress” though, if you ask CEO Don Mattrick.
“2014 was a year of progress for Zynga – we came together as one team and applied more discipline and rigor to our business. In the fourth quarter, we increased mobile bookings to 60 percent of our total bookings mix, expanded our mobile audience with monthly mobile consumers up 87 percent year over year, and grew our core franchise bookings by 35 percent year over year,” he said.
“In 2015, we will focus on three priorities: driving mobile growth, launching more products in more evergreen categories and building on our social legacy. We will deliver a 100 percent mobile-first new product slate featuring new games, with a goal of ending 2015 with more than 75 percent of our fourth quarter bookings coming from mobile. I am excited by the boldness of our 2015 product aspirations – this year we expect to launch between 6 to 10 new games in important categories like Match 3 and Action Strategy. We are building a high performing culture which takes time and while we would like to go faster, we are being methodical and purposeful about our decisions. We have a healthy balance sheet with $1.1 billion in cash and marketable securities which gives us staying power and the ability to invest in our future growth.”
Looking at the rest of the numbers, Zynga’s revenues did climb, year-over-year, from $176 million to $192 million in the fourth quarter, while bookings increased from $146 million to $182 million. For the full year, however, both sales and bookings dipped. Sales fell from $873 million to $690 million while bookings dropped from $716 million to $694 million.
As Mattrick alluded to, Zynga is hoping to boost its bottom line in 2015 with several new products. The talented folks at NaturalMotion are pushing Zynga into the action strategy category with Dawn of Titans, which will use NaturalMotion’s proprietary mobile technology and engine “to create unprecedented mobile visuals, animation and depth-of-gameplay that supersedes anything found today on mobile.” In addition, Zynga is preparing the mobile launch of a modern military strategy game, Empires & Allies, which should be out worldwide in the coming months. Beyond the strategy genre, Zynga also announced a new entry in its core FarmVille brand with a Match 3 category title called FarmVille: Harvest Swap. The game is expected to launch worldwide as a cross-platform mobile and web game this year.
Aside from the disappointing fiscal performance, Zynga also shared the bad news that it’s closing the Zynga China studio. All 71 employees in the Beijing-based studio will be laid off; the company noted that this “will result in an annualized cost savings of $7 million dollars.”
It’s been a challenging time for Zynga as the company continues to adapt its business to mobile. The space is more competitive than ever with giants like Supercell, King, EA and others topping the charts on a regular basis. The good news for Zynga is that it still has $1.15 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of the end of 2014, but the bleeding has to stop. Monthly unique users, monthly unique payers and daily active users were all down again in the fourth quarter. Zynga needs a hit, and fast. Hopefully one of the new titles mentioned above will do the trick.
Update: Investors are clearly not enjoying the earnings announcement as Zynga’s stock finished down 5.34 percent today at $2.66. In after hours trading, as of 4:55 PM Eastern, the stock is down 10 percent. By contrast, King, whose sales jumped 20 percent for the year, is enjoying a more than 17 percent boost to its stock in after-hours.
Seagate and Micron have announced that they will join forces to work on projects together over a number of years.
Seagate is better known for its traditional hard disk drive solutions, while Micron has concentrated on solid state disks (SSD) under the consumer brands of Crucial and Lexar.
It therefore makes sense to collaborate on ideas including hybrid devices and developing solutions that work best on a business-by-business basis.
The partnership between Seagate and Micron is nothing new in the storage world. HGST already has a long-term alignment with Intel to work on the SSD elements of its business, while Seagate and Western Digital have both acquired interests through buyouts and mergers.
Toshiba and Sandisk took the idea one step further with a deal that involved co-ownership of a storage device fabrication plant.
The new Seagate-Micron alliance will concentrate mostly on Serial Attached SCSI and SSDs but is likely to expand beyond those parameters to include the possibility of hybrid systems and flash controllers for spindle drives.
Further details are yet to be announced. Meanwhile both companies have been promoting new ranges independently.
Lexar can now boast a ‘stick’ flash drive with a 256GB capacity, along with a new faster SSD drive for gamers, while Seagate has relaunched with a new ‘living’ logo and a range of products including a personal cloud and some even bigger personal hard drives.
Micron has its own deal with Intel to ‘disrupt 3D NAND’ as part of a joint storage venture at its Utah foundry.
Hitachi Data Systems is acquiring business intelligence software maker Pentaho to incorporate analysis into Internet of Things systems it will develop for the healthcare, public safety and other industries.
“Hitachi owns the infrastructure and Pentaho owns the data integration and analytics platform and know-how to harness the value in big data,” wrote Pentaho CEO Quentin Gallivan in a blog post detailing the rationale behind the acquisition. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is a wholly owned subsidiary of global conglomerate Hitachi and focuses on IT and data center support and integration. It has been working to expand into the IoT market, which will generate more than $2 trillion in business for all industries by 2020, according to Goldman Sachs.
Hitachi manufactures a wide range of industrial equipment that could be hooked up to the Internet, such as elevators, power distribution systems, and construction equipment. HDS can use the Hitachi industrial products as components to larger IoT systems it can assemble on behalf of customers.
Already HDS has rolled out vertical-industry systems focused on data and networking, such as for connected cards, that collect and convey operational and diagnostic information back to the user and manufacturer. HDS has also worked with the U.K. to outfit commuter trains with sensors to generate more information about train operations.
The Pentaho software will provide the analysis engine to give customers additional information about the systems, based on the data these systems generate. Pentaho software can work with data from a wide variety of sources, including big data repositories such as Hadoop. Because the software is open source, it can be easily embedded into a larger set of services, according to the company. It was also designed to meet the needs of a range of users of different skill levels, including developers, data scientists and business users.
Sony is expected to use more MediaTek application processors in upcoming Xperia smartphones.
According to Digitimes, the Japanese consumer electronics giant is planning to increase its reliance on MediaTek chips in entry-level and mid-range smartphones this year. There is still no word on high-end products, and it seems Qualcomm’s 800-series parts will continue to power Xperia flagships for the time being.
Sony is also working with a number of Taiwanese ODMs like Foxconn, FIH Mobile, Compal and Arima Communications. The company’s latest Xperia E4 smartphone was in fact outsourced to Arima.
As for Foxconn/FIH Mobile and Compal, they are said to be developing 4G models for Sony, which means they are supposed to cover the mid-range segment. Most of this new models are expected to be based on MediaTek’s new octa-core MT6752 processor, which packs 64-bit Cortex-A53 cores.
The affordable MT6752 has already found its way into a number of Chinese mid-range smartphones, as well big-brand devices like the HTC Desire 826 and Acer Liquid Jade S.
It’s no secret that cloud computing and data analytics are both rapidly expanding areas within information technology. Put them together, and you get a winning combination that’s expected to grow by more than 26 percent annually over the next five years.
That’s according to market-tracking firm Research and Markets, which recently released a new report on the global cloud analytics market.
Increased adoption of data analytics is one of the major drivers in this market, Research and Markets found. More specifically, many organizations are adopting data analytics in order to better understand consumption patterns, customer acquisition and various other factors believed to increase revenue, cut costs and boost customer loyalty.
HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are among the dominant vendors in this arena, the company said in a press release.
Big Data is one of the particularly significant trends in the market, Research and Markets said.
“Cloud analytics deals with the management of unorganized data, which helps organizations access important data and make timely decisions regarding their business,” the company said.
The rates of growth in this arena might actually be much higher than those suggested by the report, said analyst Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research.
In fact, Constellation Research predicts an annual growth rate of closer to 46 percent until 2020, he said.
Early-arriving cloud companies like Salesforce “had great reporting, but they didn’t necessarily have great analytics,” Wang said.
It’s for that reason that challengers such as Actuate have popped up, he noted.
“More and more, because of the size and complication, we’re seeing analytics move to the cloud,” Wang said.
ARM has snaffled up Dutch Internet of Things (IoT) company Offspark.
The move is designed to improve ARM’s security credentials for IoT offerings.
Offspark is the creator of PolarSSL, a widely used protocol for IoT security products, and ARM hopes that the combined companies can offer a one-stop shop for IoT developers.
Krisztian Flautner, ARM’s IoT manager, said: “PolarSSL technology is already deployed by the leading IoT players.
“The fact that those same companies also use ARM Cortex processor and software technologies means we are now able to provide a complete bedrock solution for the industry to innovate from.”
The product will be renamed ARM Mbed TLS, but will remain open source, reports Tech Week Europe.
Paul Bakker, CEO of Offspark, added: “Security is the most fundamental aspect in ensuring people trust IoT technology and that is only possible with a truly tailored solution.
“Together, ARM and Offspark can provide security to the edge of any system and we look forward to working with our partners to help them deliver some exciting new projects.”
Developers will be able to license the technology for commercial use as well as embedding it into future ARM products.
Last week the company released the ARM Cortex-A72 processor, a 64-bit effort offering support for Android 5.x Lollipop and incorporating the big.LITTLE architecture that prioritises jobs to different processor cores based on their computational requirements.
A message on the Offspark website indicates that it has been taken down and redirects to ARM.
Qualcomm and TSMC have reportedly worked out overheating issues on the Snapdragon 810.
Qualcomm never publicly admitted that the chip experienced the problems to begin with, but the rumour mill has been in overdrive for a while. Leaked LG Flex 2 benchmarks also suggested that something could be wrong, since the chip failed to impress.
The problem apparently caused the Snapdragon 810 to overheat at peak clocks and throttle, compromising performance. Such problems surfaced in some mobile devices in the past, namely the Nexus 4, but were the result of poor design decisions, not chip faults.
The latest rumors from China suggest that Qualcomm and TSMC managed to resolve the throttling issue. The info was apparently leaked to a Chinese analyst by a TSMC insider, but the reports are rather vague. The source said the revised Snapdragon 810 is expected to go into volume production by mid-March.
If true, this means the “fixed” chip is still not available for integration and may have an effect on product launches over the next few weeks, namely on devices which are expected to launch at the Mobile World Congress next month.
Health insurer Anthem Inc, which has nearly 40 million U.S. customers, has confirmed that hackers had breached one of its IT systems and stolen personal information relating to current and former consumers and employees.
The No. 2 health insurer in the United States said the breach did not appear to involve medical information or financial details such as credit card or bank account numbers.
The information accessed during the “very sophisticated attack” did include names, birthdays, social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and employment information, including income data, the company said.
Anthem said that it immediately made every effort to close the security vulnerability and reported the attack to the FBI. Cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc FEYE. said it had been hired to help Anthem investigate the attack.
The company did not say how many customers and staff were affected, but the Wall Street Journal earlier reported it was suspected that records of tens of millions of people had been taken, which would likely make it the largest data breach involving a U.S. health insurer.
Anthem had 37.5 million medical members as of the end of December.
“This attack is another reminder of the persistent threats we face, and the need for Congress to take aggressive action to remove legal barriers for sharing cyber threat information,” U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement late Wednesday.
MediaTek had announced a new development platform, as part of its MediaTek Labs initiative.
The LinkIt Connect MT7681 platform is based on the MT7681 SoC, designed for simple and affordable WiFi-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The company also released a software development kit (SDK) and hardware development kit (HDK) for the new platform.
The HDK includes the LinkIt Connect 7681 development board, which features the MT7681 chipset, micro-USB port and pins for various I/O interfaces. The chipset can be used in WiFi station or access point modes.
In station mode, the chip connects to a wireless access point and communicates with web services or cloud servers, which means it could be used to control smart thermostats. However, in access point mode, the chipset can communicate with devices directly, for example to control smart plugs or light bulbs using a smartphone.
“The world is rapidly moving towards connecting every imaginable device in the home, yet developers often have to spend too much effort on making their products Wi-Fi enabled,” said Marc Naddell, VP, MediaTek Labs. “The MediaTek LinkIt Connect 7681 platform simplifies and accelerates this process so that developers can focus on making innovative home IoT products, whatever their skill level.”
MediaTek Labs was launched in September 2014 and its goal is to promote a range of innovative MediaTek platforms, namely frugal devices such as wearables, IoT and home automation hardware.
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