In this week’s real-time analytics news: Red Hat offers new OpenShift features, MLCommons released new results for MLPerf Training performance, and more.
Keeping pace with news and developments in the real-time analytics market can be a daunting task. We want to help by providing a summary of some of the items our staff came across each week. Here are some of the news items from this week:
Red Hat announced Red Hat OpenShift 4.8, the latest version of its enterprise Kubernetes platform. Red Hat OpenShift 4.8, based on Kubernetes 1.21 and CRI-O 1.21 runtime interface, simplifies the developer experience while helping expand the use cases and workload possibilities across industries. New features and enhancements include:
- IPv6/IPv4 dual stack and IPv6 single stack support provides applications with interoperability and communications for environments using IPv6 in addition to IPv4. This capability helps provide additional security for applications, including regulatory compliance.
- OpenShift Pipelines now allows users to declaratively define, version, and track changes to their application delivery pipelines alongside their application source code in Git repositories.
- An enhanced developer experience within the OpenShift console, including the ability for Spring Boot developers to code and test locally before sharing the code more broadly.
- OpenShift Serverless functions capability enables developers to create and run functions, on demand, on OpenShift. Available as a technology preview, OpenShift Serverless functions help to simplify, automate, and speed up application development and operations, removing the burden of manual infrastructure provisioning and scaling.
- OpenShift sandboxed containers, based on the Kata Containers open-source project, provide a more secure container runtime using lightweight virtual machines. Available as a technology preview, this adds capabilities for specific workloads that require extremely stringent application-level security.
In other Red Hat/IBM news, it was announced Friday that IBM President Jim Whitehurst is stepping down. Whitehurst was the CEO of Red Hat Inc. when IBM acquired the company in 2018. According to the business press, when Whitehurst was appointed president last year, it was the first time in decades that IBM separated the roles of CEO and president. Analysts noted that his experience in cloud and cognitive software was viewed as a complement to the expertise and background of IBM CEO Arvind Krishna.
Dell Technologies introduced new solutions to help users better manage the convergence of HPC, AI, and data analytics. Specifically, Dell introduced Omnia, developed at the Dell Technologies HPC & AI Innovation Lab in collaboration with Intel and with support from the HPC community. The open-source software is designed to automate the provisioning and management of HPC, AI, and data analytics workloads to create a single pool of flexible resources to meet the growing and diverse demands. The Omnia software stack is an open-source set of Ansible playbooks that speed the deployment of converged workloads with Kubernetes and Slurm, along with library frameworks, services, and applications. Omnia automatically imprints a software solution onto each server based on the use case — for example, HPC simulations, neural networks for AI, or in–memory graphics processing for data analytics — to reduce deployment time from weeks to minutes. Dell is also expanding HPC on-demand services and Dell EMC PowerEdge server accelerator support.
NVIDIA announced it is turbocharging the NVIDIA HGX AI supercomputing platform with new technologies that fuse AI with high-performance computing, making supercomputing more useful to a growing number of industries. The technologies added include the NVIDIA A100 80GB PCIe GPU, NVIDIA NDR 400G InfiniBand networking, and NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage software. Together, they provide the extreme performance to enable industrial HPC innovation. Atos, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo, Microsoft Azure, and NetApp are among dozens of partners using the NVIDIA HGX platform for next-generation systems and solutions.
MLCommons released new results for MLPerf Training v1.0, the organization’s machine learning training performance benchmark suite. MLPerf Training measures the time it takes to train machine learning models to a standard quality target in a variety of tasks, including image classification, object detection, NLP, recommendation, and reinforcement learning. In its fourth round, MLCommons added two new benchmarks to evaluate the performance of speech-to-text and 3D medical imaging tasks. The latest benchmark round received submissions from 13 organizations and released over 650 peer-reviewed results for machine learning systems spanning from edge devices to data center servers. Submissions this round included software and hardware innovations from Dell, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, Google, Graphcore, Habana Labs, Inspur, Intel, Lenovo, Nettrix, NVIDIA, PCL & PKU, and Supermicro. To view the results, please visit https://mlcommons.org/en/training-normal-10/.
Atos launched ThinkAI, which is an offering for organizations using traditional HPC that want to run more accurate and faster simulations thanks to AI applications, and also for those developing AI applications that need more computing power. The ThinkAI solution framework includes “Advise” with industry-contextualized consulting; “Architect” using best-of-breed AI hardware and software via partnerships with Graphcore and NVIDIA, supplemented with Atos’ digital security; and “Accomplish” with end-to-end solution orchestration.
WiteSand announced its launch out of stealth mode. The company has created a cloud-native, multi-tenant solution that provides asset discovery, NAC, wired and wireless provisioning, monitoring, and flow analytics. With WiteSand, all of the functionality that was previously contained within other tools is now available in a single cloud-based interface, and only the physical switches and access points remain on-premises. The solution includes the Network Time Machine, a feature designed to reveal the complete history of events and changes in the network at any point in time. WiteSand achieved this by pairing the power of the cloud with global visibility, correlation, analytics, and AI/ML.
Tableau released version 2021.2 of its platform. Updates include new versions of Ask Data and Explain Data, tools that enable users with natural language processing, and two new integrations with Salesforce. Those integrations include Ask Data for Salesforce, which helps Salesforce users ask any question in Tableau CRM using natural language and semantic search, and Einstein Discovery for Salesforce Reports, which auto analyzes data from Salesforce reports quickly and thoroughly to explore and identify the most important insights, surfacing them with charts and explanations that are easy to understand.
In related news, Dremio announced the debut of a native Dremio connector in Tableau, available with the release of Tableau 2021.2. The native connector extends Tableau’s support of Dremio and enhances ease of use and accelerated time-to-insight by allowing customers to perform BI workloads directly on the data lake.
Lakeside Software introduced a new Lakeside Digital Experience Cloud application, Lakeside Assist. Lakeside Assist is designed specifically for the enterprise L1/L2 helpdesk to holistically improve staff efficiency, reduce first contact resolution (FCR) times, and dramatically boost the digital employee experience. Lakeside Assist provides the help desk with intelligent analytics and automation capabilities in a single-pane of glass, accelerating time to resolution, as well as time to value. Assist runs as a stand-alone app or tightly integrated with ServiceNow.
VUNO Inc. announced a partnership with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., to incorporate its AI-powered chest X-ray diagnostic solution, VUNO Med-Chest X-ray, into Samsung’s premium mobile digital X-ray system, GM85. The AI integrated X-ray suite is slated to debut in Korea and other major markets around the globe later this year. This is one of the latest extensions of VUNO’s ambition to leverage the full potential of AI to better orchestrate clinical workflows by empowering medical service providers to deliver patient-focused care.
Other real-time analytics news:
Forward Networks announced enhancements to the Forward Enterprise platform that will help security professionals identify, contain, and prevent security incidents. The three new features enable security engineers to determine the blast radius of compromised devices immediately, create an always up-to-date zone-to-zone security matrix, and simplify efforts to remediate cybersecurity vulnerabilities (CVs).
BeyondMinds announced it has earned ISO 27001:2013. The certification, which is an international standard, further validates the security and integrity of BeyondMinds’ solutions and its ability to protect sensitive and proprietary corporate data, including financial information, intellectual property, and employee and customer details. BeyondMinds is among only a handful of Enterprise AI providers to be granted this certification.
Teradata announced new capabilities for Vantage on Microsoft Azure. Enhancements include easier modernization of cloud data analytics infrastructure, enhanced security, additional embedded analytic functions from the Vantage Analytics Library, and expanded reach with new region and deployment option for Vantage on Azure (DIY) in the Azure China Marketplace.
IBM announced new hybrid cloud AI-powered automation software for communications service providers (CSPs) to help deliver on the promise of 5G, including zero-touch operations, reduced costs, and the rapid delivery of innovative services to customers. Using IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation, CSPs can use AI-powered automation to stand up and manage networks quickly, in a wide range of environments, and is engineered to scale new services in days rather than months.
Vecow announced its partnership with AI chipmaker Hailo to launch their next-generation AI solution, Vecow’s ABP-3000 AI computing system. Vecow’s ultra-slim AI solution features the compact Hailo-8 AI accelerator module, enabling breakthrough performance and AI inference capabilities at the edge.
G-Core Labs launched a new service: renting dedicated servers, or Bare-Metal-as-a-Service. This solution allows for a ready-to-use, physical service to be deployed within minutes, which can then be used in combination with other services to build a flexible cloud infrastructure.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zerto. The acquisition expands HPE GreenLake and helps the company deliver on HPE Storage’s shift to a cloud-native, software-defined data services business.
Alluxio announced the availability of version 2.6 of its Data Orchestration Platform. This new release features an enhanced system architecture enabling AI/ML platform teams using GPUs to accelerate their data pipelines for business intelligence, applied machine learning, and model training.
SingleStore announced that SingleStore Managed Service is available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This distributed SQL database supports transactions and analytics; handles structured, unstructured and semi-structured data; and works in public clouds, on-premises environments and hybrid deployments.
TigerGraph announced that it has expanded its partner ecosystem in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Specifically, the company has added an array of global systems integrators, technology vendors, and fulfillment companies to its partner roster.
News in brief:
Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute announced the establishment of a new research division dedicated to AI engineering and named Matthew Gaston as the new division’s director.
Algorithmia has been selected by Raytheon Intelligence & Space to support the team’s development of the U.S. Army’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) program.
JFrog announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Vdoo Connected Trust Ltd. (“Vdoo”). Vdoo’s team and JFrog will seek to deliver a complete DevSecOps solution to secure the full software packages lifecycle.
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. announced DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB, a new, fully-managed database as a service (DBaaS) offering in partnership with MongoDB.
If your company has real-time analytics news, send your announcements to [email protected].
In case you missed it, here are our most recent previous weekly real-time analytics news roundups:
