News Precis#5 – 1 May 2020

News Precis#5 – 1 May 2020

Chris EvansNews, Opinion

Here are some interesting news, articles and other things from the last few weeks as I digest some of the stories in my RSS, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds. Totally coronavirus free.

Technology

  • Google cancels I/O 2020. The annual developer event will not take place, even as a virtual event. Not surprising when no-one in the SV area can get into the offices. Working from home on a webcam will not suffice as a replacement for quality event content.
  • Storj announces Tardigrade enterprise distributed storage. We looked at Storj a couple of years ago. The idea is to spread data across multiple redundant storage drives in encrypted slices. Now we have an enterprise version that’s touted to be in line with AWS S3 resiliency. Whilst I think the technology is sound, the idea of corporate data spread across anonymous drives will no doubt be sending security and compliance teams into apoplexy.
  • ICANN halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry. This really makes sense. We have to be careful that the Internet doesn’t become a totally commercial enterprise and this is definitely what would happen here. Good move.

Vendors

  • Rancher Raised $40 million Series D. Rancher Labs gets another $40 million to fund Kubernetes management solutions. Kubernetes is a current hotness, with lots of traction and noise.
  • VMware releases vSphere 7 & Tanzu. While we’re talking Kubernetes (take a drink if you must), VMware finally announced vSphere 7 and Tanzu, a suite of solutions that integrate containers into the vSphere platform. Be prepared to stand up a lot of hardware and software in your data centre to get things going…. We discussed Tanzu and Project Pacific last year.
  • SMR technology used in many hard drives. It turns out that vendors have been using SMR without making this clear to consumers. Yours truly adds some comment to this post, with this follow-up showing SMR (or not) in various WD drives.
  • NetApp acquires CloudJumper. I found this a little head-scratching after we saw the sunsetting of NetApp NKS and the announcement of Astra. Things are clearly evolving within the NetApp cloud team, but I’m not entirely sure what the direction is…

And Finally….

  • Bill Gates steps down from the Microsoft Board. Who could have imagined this day would come? But surely it had to, as Bill makes a continued transition away from a company that looks very different from the one he co-founded. Although he’s been a giant in the industry, not everything was smooth sailing and the company undoubtedly exploited it’s monopoly. Still, without Bill we might not have had Clippy, so it’s not all bad.
  • Azure delays due to sleepy employee. Whoops, who knew that the public cloud still involved humans?

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