You can leave your hat on, warbles Rackspace to OpenStack users

Opinion Broadcom has yet to close the deal on taking over VMware, but the industry is already awash with speculation and analysis as to how the event could impact the cloud giant's product availability and pricing.

If Broadcom's track record and stated strategy tell us anything, we could soon see VMware refocus its efforts on its top 600 customers and raise prices, and leave thousands more searching for an alternative.

The jury is still out as to whether Broadcom will repeat the past or take a different approach. But, when it comes to VMware's ESXi hypervisor, customer concern is valid. There aren't many vendor options that can take on VMware in this arena, Forrester analyst Naveen Chhabra, tells The Register.

The Linux Foundation wants to make data processing units (DPUs) easier to deploy, with the launch of the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project this week.

The program has already garnered support from several leading chipmakers, systems builders, and software vendors – Nvidia, Intel, Marvell, F5, Keysight, Dell Tech, and Red Hat to name a few – and promises to build an open ecosystem of common software frameworks that can run on any DPU or smartNIC.

SmartNICs, DPUs, IPUs – whatever you prefer to call them – have been used in cloud and hyperscale datacenters for years now. The devices typically feature onboard networking in a PCIe card form factor and are designed to offload and accelerate I/O-intensive processes and virtualization functions that would otherwise consume valuable host CPU resources.

OpenInfra Berlin OpenInfra still has ideas to share, including an intriguing funding model for open source projects the Foundation discussed at its in-person event last week in Berlin.

The "Directed Funding" initiative – a significant change to how some projects might be funded in the future – is about allowing organizations to fund a specific project rather than seeing their cash spread across projects for which they have no interest.

Jonathan Bryce, CEO and executive director of the OpenInfra Foundation, told The Register this wasn't a case of following a trend in the open-source world that he described as "this kind of pay to play-type scenario."

Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it’s completed a massive migration of its own apps to its own cloud.

The company started thinking about this in 2018 after realising that its many services had each built their own technology silos.

Plenty of those services – among them WeChat, social network, qq.com, games like Honour of Kings and YouTube-like Tencent Video – have tens or hundreds of millions of users. Each service appears to have built infrastructure to cope with peak traffic requirements, leaving plenty of unused capacity across Tencent’s operations.

Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.

As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.

The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

Comment Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take.

Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop.

Cloud-native architectures have changed the way applications are deployed, but remain relatively uncharted territory for high-performance computing (HPC). This week, however, Red Hat and the US Department of Energy will be making some moves in the area.

The IBM subsidiary – working closely with the Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories – aims to develop a new generation of HPC applications designed to run in containers, orchestrated using Kubernetes, and optimized for distributed filesystems.

The work might also make AI/ML workloads easier for enterprises to deploy in the process.

Samsung and Red Hat have pledged to work together on developing software to get the best from emerging memory technologies.

The Korean giant points out that a bunch of storage and memory tech – NVMe SSDs, Compute Express Link, the combination of high-bandwidth memory and processing-in-memory, and data fabrics – all need enabling software if they are to work well with the kind of demanding applications they're promised to, well, enable.

The tech is likely to be used in different tiers, while sharing memory across devices is well and truly on the agenda as part of a renewed push for composable infrastructure.

Red Hat Summit Red Hat has expanded its Red Hat Cloud Services that support the OpenShift application platform, adding new components to help with the development of hybrid applications such as a Service Registry, plus middleware to make it easier to link to cloud database services.

Announced to coincide with the Red Hat Summit in Boston, the new additions to the Cloud Services portfolio come along with updates to some existing components. The idea is to appeal to organizations struggling with the complexities of building applications for a hybrid cloud environment, the company said.

"Customers need solutions that eliminate complexity in their hybrid environments, enabling their application infrastructure to be more resilient, manageable, and observable," Red Hat senior vice president Ashesh Badani said in a statement.

Rackspace Technology is considering selling off at least part of its business following a strategic review, with CEO Kevin Jones admitting that "everything is on the table."

The company disclosed it has already received interest from a potential buyer.

The move was announced during a conference call covering Rackspace's Q1 2022 earnings, where Jones claimed that Rackspace is well positioned as a pure play multi-cloud services company.