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Tencent Cloud slaps googly eyes on a monitor, says it can care for oldies

It's called 'i-Care' and it screams 'I don't, actually'

Laura Dobberstein Fri 1 Jul 2022 // 06:33 UTC

Tencent Cloud has released an odd robot-adjacent device designed to provide telemedicine services.
The effort is called i-Care and is the result of a tie up with USA-based IT services Millennium Technology Services (MTS)'s subsidiary Invincible Technology. The two companies set out to create "a digital solution that aims to improve patients' experience and quality of life as well as draw patients, families and caregivers closer than ever."
"Customers' habits and expectations have evolved dramatically over the last few years across various industries including the medical and healthcare field, driven by the further emergence of digital technologies and cloud computing," said Tencent Cloud in a canned statement.

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Microsoft postpones shift to New Commerce Experience subscriptions

The whiff of rebellion among Cloud Solution Providers is getting stronger

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 29 Jun 2022 // 06:47 UTC

Microsoft has indefinitely postponed the date on which its Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs) will be required to sell software and services licences on new terms.
Those new terms are delivered under the banner of the New Commerce Experience (NCE). NCE is intended to make perpetual licences a thing of the past and prioritizes fixed-term subscriptions to cloudy products. Paying month-to-month is more expensive than signing up for longer-term deals under NCE, which also packs substantial price rises for many Microsoft products.
Channel-centric analyst firm Canalys unsurprisingly rates NCE as better for Microsoft than for customers or partners.

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China's clouds slow server buying – US clouds and Facebook may, too

Hyperscalers have ordered more than they need, and the ripples are nasty

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 29 Jun 2022 // 04:44 UTC

The world's server market will grow in 2022 – but more slowly than in the past – and could dip further, according to analyst firm TrendForce.
Supply chain issues are, unsurprisingly, one reason for predicted modest growth. Shanghai's COVID lockdowns, for example, mean China's server makers have struggled to open, and get the parts they need.
The likes of Dell and HPE were hurt by those lockdowns, but TrendForce feels they'll recover.

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IBM’s first cloudy mainframes scheduled to launch this week

It’s not IaaS, it's reserved for test and dev – and will feed the golden goose that is the z/OS ecosystem

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 29 Jun 2022 // 01:45 UTC

IBM has quietly announced its first-ever cloudy mainframes will go live on June 30.
Big Blue in February disclosed its plans to provide cloud-hosted virtual machines running the z/OS that powers its mainframes. These would be first offered in a closed "experimental" beta under the IBM Wazi as-a-service brand. That announcement promised "on-demand access to z/OS, available as needed for development and test" with general availability expected "in 2H 2022."
The IT giant has now slipped out an advisory that reveals a “planned availability date” of June 30.

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VMware reveals vSphere-as-a-service – but not the price

Cloudy vSphere+ can manage multiple on-prem environments but not VMw-powered public clouds … for now

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Tue 28 Jun 2022 // 15:30 UTC

VMware today revealed details about Project Arctic, the vSphere-as-a-service offering it teased in late 2021, though it won't discuss pricing for another month.
VMware's thinking starts with the fact that organizations are likely to run multiple instances of its vSphere and VSAN products, often in multiple locations. Managing them all centrally is not easy.
Enter vSphere+ and VSAN+, which run in the cloud and can control multiple on-premises instances of vSphere or VSAN. To make that possible, users will need to adopt the Cloud Gateway, which connects vSphere instances to a Cloud Console.

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Intel is running rings around AMD and Arm at the edge

What will it take to loosen the x86 giant's edge stranglehold?

Tobias Mann Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 14:30 UTC

Analysis Supermicro launched a wave of edge appliances using Intel's newly refreshed Xeon-D processors last week. The launch itself was nothing to write home about, but a thought occurred: with all the hype surrounding the outer reaches of computing that we call the edge, you'd think there would be more competition from chipmakers in this arena.
So where are all the AMD and Arm-based edge appliances?
A glance through the catalogs of the major OEMs – Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Inspur, Supermicro – returned plenty of results for AMD servers, but few, if any, validated for edge deployments. In fact, Supermicro was the only one of the five vendors that even offered an AMD-based edge appliance – which used an ageing Epyc processor. Hardly a great showing from AMD. Meanwhile, just one appliance from Inspur used an Arm-based chip from Nvidia.

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Cloudflare's outage was human error. There's a way to make tech divinely forgive

Don't push me 'cos I'm close to the edge. And the edge is safer if you can take a step back

Rupert Goodwins Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 09:30 UTC

Opinion Edge is terribly trendy. Move cloudy workloads as close to the user as possible, the thinking goes, and latency goes down, as do core network and data center pressures. It's true – until the routing sleight-of-hand breaks that diverts user requests from the site they think they're getting to the copies in the edge server.
If that happens, everything goes dark – as it did last week at Cloudflare, edge lords of large chunks of web content. It deployed a Border Gateway Protocol policy update, which promptly took against a new fancy-pants matrix routing system designed to improve reliability. Yeah. They know.
It took some time to fix, too, because in the words of those in the know, engineers "walked over each other's changes" as fresh frantic patches overwrote slightly staler frantic patches, taking out the good they'd done. You'd have thought Cloudflare of all people would be able to handle concepts of dirty data and cache consistency, but hey. They know that too.

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Small in Japan: Hitachi creates its own (modest) cloud

VMware-powered sovereign cloud not going to challenge hyperscalers, and won't be repeated beyond Japan

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 06:27 UTC

Updated Hitachi has taken a modest step towards becoming a public cloud provider, with the launch of a VMware-powered cloud in Japan that The Register understands may not be its only such venture.
The Japanese giant has styled the service a "sovereign cloud" – a term that VMware introduced to distinguish some of its 4,000-plus partners that operate small clouds and can attest to their operations being subject to privacy laws and governance structures within the nation in which they operate.
Public cloud heavyweights AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba also offer VMware-powered clouds, at hyperscale. But some organizations worry that their US or Chinese roots make them vulnerable to laws that might allow Washington or Beijing to exercise extraterritorial oversight.

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AWS sent edgy appliance to the ISS and it worked – just like all the other computers up there

Congrats, AWS, you’ve boldly gone where the Raspberry Pi has already been

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 24 Jun 2022 // 07:57 UTC

Amazon Web Services has proudly revealed that the first completely private expedition to the International Space Station carried one of its Snowcone storage appliances, and that the device worked as advertised.
The Snowcone is a rugged shoebox-sized unit packed full of disk drives – specifically 14 terabytes of solid-state disk – a pair of VCPUs and 4GB of RAM. The latter two components mean the Snowcone can run either EC2 instances or apps written with AWS’s Greengrass IoT product. In either case, the idea is that you take a Snowcone into out-of-the-way places where connectivity is limited, collect data in situ and do some pre-processing on location. Once you return to a location where bandwidth is plentiful, it's assumed you'll upload the contents of a Snowcone into AWS and do real work on it there.

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ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power

The catch: It hooks up to desktop-as-a-service and runs Android – so while it looks like a laptop ...

Laura Dobberstein Fri 24 Jun 2022 // 00:45 UTC

Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE has announced what it claims is the first "cloud laptop" – an Android-powered device that the consumes just five watts and links to its cloud desktop-as-a-service.
Announced this week at the partially state-owned company's 2022 Cloud Network Ecosystem Summit, the machine – model W600D – measures 325mm × 215mm × 14 mm, weighs 1.1kg and includes a 14-inch HD display, full-size keyboard, HD camera, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. An unspecified eight-core processors drives it, and a 40.42 watt-hour battery is claimed to last for eight hours.
It seems the primary purpose of this thing is to access a cloud-hosted remote desktop in which you do all or most of your work. ZTE claimed its home-grown RAP protocol ensures these remote desktops will be usable even on connections of a mere 128Kbit/sec, or with latency of 300ms and packet loss of six percent. That's quite a brag.

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