Here is a question for you. Which is more proprietary? The Nutanix hyperconverged compute, storage, and networking platform or a cloud like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure?

It was a trick question. They are all proprietary, but oddly enough if you mix them together, you can get something that is at least somewhat less proprietary and more broadly useful and therefore with a much larger addressable market. And in the case of Nutanix, if it lets go completely of its own cloud storage, compute and networking and wraps its new Nutanix Central management tools and application and data services around native cloud compute, storage, and networking, it has a chance of creating a universal substrate that spans on premises and cloud without forcing customers to run the Nutanix Compute Cloud stack, called NC2, on those clouds.

This is exactly what Nutanix is hoping to do with an effort called Project Beacon, which was announced at its recent .NEXT 2023 user conference. We sat down with Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix, to find out more about Project Beacon, which is the next and perhaps final expansion and evolution of the Nutanix server-SAN hybrid that debuted way back in 2011 to much fanfare.

Caswell, who came to Nutanix in February 2022, knows his way around virtual compute and storage. He was formerly vice president of product and technical marketing at VMware, NetApp, and Fusion-io and before that co-founder, chief marketing officer, and chief executive officer at hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) pioneer Pivot3, which was acquired by Quantum in July 2021.

Our job is to always be on the lookout for the next platform, and so we have paid close attention since it uncloaked from stealth mode a dozen years ago. The Nutanix platform, which has had more names than Elizabeth Taylor had husbands over the years, had all of the hallmarks of a technology that could go mainstream in a big way, and had VMware stubbornly refused to do virtual SANs for longer, Nutanix may have eclipsed it. But VMware woke up and protected its market and Nutanix has grown more slowly than it otherwise might have.

But as we have pointed out before, Nutanix and all of the HCI players have, for reasons that are often perplexing, had a hard time going mainstream, by which we mean having hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. Soon after founding The Next Platform, we took a stab at trying to understand what was holding HCI back despite its obvious benefits for enterprise customers. After watching Nutanix bleed cash for so many years, in September 2021 we pondered why HCI was not more pervasive given the quality of the Acropolis platform, which is another name for the Nutanix Compute Cloud, or NC2, the latest and hybrid on-premises/cloud incarnation of it. And we also wondered why it was not more profitable after a decade in the market, and thought that maybe being part of the IBM-Red Hat collective could help the Nutanix HCI platform expand to what seemed to be its natural size. We wondered if Citrix Systems and Nutanix should merge, creating a behemoth that could create a big platform to rival those of Microsoft and VMware. We heard rumors about Nutanix potentially being acquired in October 2022 and suggested that only a big cloud would be rich enough to do so. And as 2022 was coming to a close, we just flat out asked if any of the modern storage providers with Nutanix and Pure Storage being the examples could actually make money, or even come close to the booming NetApp and EMC in their respective NAS and SAN markets in the 1990s and 2000s.

This Project Beacon twist is as interesting as it is inevitable, and we have seen it before in other platforms. Here is a good example. Just as the Dot Com Boom was beginning to bust, Vern Brownell, who ran infrastructure for Goldman Sachs, founded Egenera and created its BladeFrame platform and Processor Area Network (PAN) virtualization stack. This was way before VMware came on the scene, but just as server virtualization was taking Unix servers by storm. PAN created what we would call bare metal instances that could be virtualized and partitioned to run workloads, much like hardware partitions on Unix systems. Selling this hardware provide more difficult than anticipated, and seven years later the PAN Manager software was broken free of the BladeFrames and sold as a management tool for the blade server infrastructure made by IBM, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, and NEC. By 2013, Egenera was basically kaput, in this case because all of the blade server makers were creating their own management layer and they had no interest in helping their rivals, particularly Cisco Systems and the converged server-network hybrid code-named California and known as the Unified Computing System, or UCS, that shook up the server market from 2009 through 2013 before settling down.

Dont take the wrong meaning from that comparison, with over 23,000 enterprise customers and $1.3 billion in cash in the bank, we are not suggesting that Nutanix is somehow going to fail. It is just difficult to get competitors with their own vested interests to cooperate, even if it is something that customers want.

And we think that enterprise customers operating at scale do want a unified, managed platform that spans on premises and clouds and we do think that existing Nutanix customers will welcome the Project Beacon effort to provide the same management and control for native compute and storage services on AWS and Azure that are provide for the NC2 stack running on premises or on bare metal instances from those two cloud providers.

The shift from virtualized to bare metal instances for running NC2 in the cloud is an important once, since it lowers the cost of the cloud infrastructure and also allows for the Acropolis hypervisor to be used as a single substrate across on premises and cloudy infrastructure. Otherwise, you have to use the native virtualization on the clouds KVM on AWS and Hyper-V on Azure, or even ESXi on VMware on AWS if you want to do something that will be a very expensive proposition.

Project Beacon is going to be self-funded in a sense because it aims to make the new Nutanix Central cloud management tool span the clouds and on premises application and data services and help customers not only control the whole shebang from one place, but control the exorbitant costs they have on the clouds.

Cost concerns are coming up because money is no longer free, Caswell tells The Next Platform. As the bills have come in, and interest rates are going up, people are now taking a harder look at how they are spending for infrastructure and how they might optimally locate compute and storage. Our latest survey on this workload movement shows that almost all customers have been moving applications across different infrastructure environments, and we expect that to actually increase over time as people start thinking about wheres the best place to locate things given cost, performance, and data sovereignty issues. The issue is a bit like having the kids load the dishwasher after a holiday meal. They just put everything in there, and when you open the door you see that more can fit if you start rearranging things. When it comes to cloud, we are at this optimization stage. It is interesting that Google and Microsoft are talking about optimization, not cost cutting, too.

The heart of the Project Beacon effort is Nutanix Central itself runs in the cloud as a service, and it is not just an instance of the Prism HCI management tool pried loose from the Acropolis stack, but is rather a brand new piece of software that treats application and data services running on Acropolis, Azure, or AWS as peers. Gartner is calling such tools digital platform conductor tools, and we wonder are they thinking train or orchestra? (Probably orchestra.) The point is to have a common view of similar services running on dissimilar end points.

Today, our relevance with the Nutanix stack is to hundreds or thousands of datacenter and edge end points, with some extension out to the cloud, says Caswell. The opportunity of moving up the stack with Project Beacon and Nutanix Central increases our relevance to millions of cloud users.

Now here is the neat bit, which we are going to come back to and get some real data from Caswell when it is ready for publication. With Nutanix Central running application and data services and running N2C on the cloud bare metal instances at AWS and Azure, by applying their own virtualization to them and then overcommitting CPUs and share resources across instances, Nutanix thinks it can cut the cost of providing compute and storage for applications in half compared to loading up Nutanix and running it on stock virtualized, T-shirt sized instances on Azure or AWS.

We are going to be talking to Nutanix and getting the information to explain how this works technically and economically. Half is a big deal.

Excerpt from:
With Project Beacon, Nutanix Opens Up And Reins In Cloud Infrastructure - The Next Platform

Transferring files between macOS and Android devices can be troublesome because of the lack of native support. However, Google's Android team took the initiative to ensure smooth file transfer between a Mac and Android through its dedicated Android File Transfer tool.

Android File Transfer is fairly easy to use, but it can sometimes stop working. You may run into errors like "Could not connect to the device. Try reconnecting or restarting your device." Here are some fixes you should try to solve Android File Transfer issues on Mac.

The first step you should take after connecting your USB cable to both your Android phone and Mac is to update your USB preferences. It may sound like an Android and Windows thing, but it also applies on Mac because Android doesn't use File Transfer mode by default when you connect a data transfer cable.

Instead, you'll have to do it yourself. You'll know if the USB preferences are the cause if you see an error with the title, "Can't access device storage."

After plugging in your cable, open your Android device and swipe down from the top to view the notification shade. Look for Charging this device via USB among the list of notifications and tap it twice to open USB Preferences in the Settings app. Once the page opens, select File Transfer / Android Auto (some Android phones may use the term MTP) under Use USB for.

Steps for changing the USB preferences may vary, but the basic rules are the same.

Once this option is selected, your Android phone will make its internal memory accessible via the USB cable. Hence, you'll be able to browse files and folders from your Android device on your Mac. Remember to keep your Android Phone unlocked throughout the transfer process to avoid further issues.

Suppose you've updated your USB preferences but are still facing issues. Chances are another app is already reading your plugged-in USB devices. In this case, Android File Transfer won't be able to see your files because it has no access to those connected devices.

You can bypass this by closing all apps on your Mac that are accessing your USB devices. Examples include cloud backup apps like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and even some built-in macOS apps like Preview (for macOS Ventura, and the latest). If closing doesn't work, you can force quit an app on Mac.

The key drawback with this method is it can be hard to tell which open apps can read USB on your Mac. Common culprits are cloud backup apps, but if closing such apps doesn't fix the issue, trial and error is your last resort. Close open apps on your Mac one by one and try using Android File Transfer each time to see if that solves it.

Another fix for Android File Transfer issues is to try another USB cable or switch to a different port on your Mac. First, start by troubleshooting your cable. As you may already know, not all USB cables can transfer files. Some are solely meant for charging.

You can test the cable by connecting it to a different device. You can also try using a different cable to see if it works. We highly recommend using the official cable that your Android device came with first. Smartphone companies include quality USB cables that can perform file transfer and charging.

Besides the cable, another possible problem source is the port on your Mac or Android phone. If either port is faulty, no file transfer will take place. Since Macs come with more than one port, try using another one. You won't have that option on most Android devices, so connect your phone to a different computer to check if the USB port functions correctly.

When you're using Android File Transfer to move files between Android and Mac, you may run into issues such as cache problems or conflicting resources. They're hard to spot, but can be to blame if the app was previously working and has now stopped for no obvious reason.

If you've tried everything until now and are still facing issues, try uninstalling the app and then reinstalling it. We recommend using AppCleaner to completely delete the software from your system rather than simply dragging it into the Trash. This might give you a fresh start free of transfer troubles.

Sure, it sounds like a clich, but there's a reason why restarting fixes most smartphone problems. And it's not just phones; this applies to other devices and even software programs. In a nutshell, it does so by clearing your system's memory and refreshing resources.

If the source of your problem is conflicts among accumulated temporary files and cache data, preventing Android File Transfer from working as expected, this will give you a fresh start. Restart your Android phone first, then try again. If the issue is not fixed, restart your Mac, and try transferring files again.

According to the team behind Android File Transfer, it supports macOS 10.7 and higher. If you're using older versions without official support, that may be why the tool is not working. So first, start by updating your Mac software to ensure you're running the latest version.

Also, download Android File Transfer from the official site and install it to ensure you have the tool's newer version. The last piece of the puzzle is to update your Android phone.

Generally, we recommend keeping your software up-to-date as a matter of course. Software updates can improve security, patch existing bugs you may be experiencing, and enhance the overall experience by including new features.

If nothing worked, it might be time to try another method for transferring your files. Android File Transfer is not actively maintained, so try other tools if your issues persist.

We recommend OpenMTP, which is open-source and free. Another alternative is to use cross-platform cloud storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox if you have stable unlimited internet connectivity.

See original here:
Android File Transfer Not Working on Your Mac? Here Are 6 Fixes to ... - MUO - MakeUseOf

Lets not forget about the good old computer. Heres how to download TikTok videos onto your PC or Mac:

Direct Download If youre browsing TikToks website and come across a video youd like to keep, click the Share button and then Copy Link. Then, open a new tab and paste the link. After the page loads, right-click on the video and select Save video as to download it to your computer.

Vidloder on Computers If the direct download doesnt work, Vidloders website can assist. Simply paste the copied TikTok video URL into Vidloders search bar on their website and press Download. The video will be saved onto your computer.

Downloading TikTok videos can be straightforward or slightly complex, depending on the device youre using and the specific videos privacy settings. However, with this information and Vidloder at your disposal, you should be able to handle it with ease.

Here is How to Download Videos from TikTok in general:

Before you can become a pro at downloading TikTok videos, you have to start at the beginning, and that means finding the right video. Whether youre a longtime TikTok user or youre new to the platform, youre in for a treat. The fun, short-form videos that make up TikToks content span a wide array of categories everything from comedy to cooking, fashion, education, and beyond. Start exploring the platform, and youll be sure to find a video that catches your eye.

Now that youve gotten your feet wet in the sea of TikTok, its time to find a video that youd like to keep for posterity. With the sheer volume and variety of content available, you could spend hours just scrolling through and enjoying the clips. You could stumble upon a mouth-watering recipe, a must-try DIY craft, or a hilarious prank. Whatever tickles your fancy, once youve found that perfect video, tap on it to play.

Once you have your chosen video open, the next thing you need to do is grab the link to it. Youll find the Share button on the screen, which is quite easily identifiable its an arrow pointing to the right. Tapping this button will conjure up a new menu full of various options, and the one youre interested in is Copy Link. Selecting this option will swiftly copy the URL of the video to your devices clipboard. Its a simple process, similar to copying and pasting text, but in this instance, its a video link youre dealing with.

With the video link securely stored on your clipboard, youre now ready to download the video. This is where you use the app Vidloader. Vidloder is a highly reliable video downloading tool available for free online. Navigate to the Vidloder website via your preferred web browser.

Once on the Vidloder homepage, youll notice a box thats asking for your video link. Simply tap in this box, and your device will offer you the option to paste the link you previously copied. After pasting the link, all you need to do is hit the Download Now button. Vidloder will then swing into action, processing your video. This usually takes a few moments, but once its done, Vidloder will provide you with a download link for the video.

Youre now just one step away from having your chosen TikTok video saved onto your device. After clicking on the download link provided by Vidloder, your device will ask you to save the file. Choose the location where youd like to store the video, and then tap either Save or Download. Once this final step is completed, youll have the video downloaded and stored in your chosen location.

Originally posted here:
Elementor #99416463 - The Island Now

Airbyte, which supplies an open source data integration platform, today announced its first premium support offering for Airbyte Open Source. Until now, Airbyte provided support to its users through its communitySlackandDiscourse platforms. The premium support plan offers one business day response time for Severity 0 and 1 issues, two business days response time for Severity 2 and 3, one week response time for pull request reviews, and an ability to request a Zoom call.

Data intelligence supplier Alation has hired former Peloton CFO Jill Woodworth as its CFO, and David Chao, formerly VP and Head of Product Marketing at DataDog, joins as Chief Marketing Officer. Alation has opened new offices in London, UK, and Chennai, India. The new Chennai office will host more than 160 employees from across engineering, product, finance, and HR teams.

Alluxio has published a Presto Optimization Handbook, downloadable here; Presto being a distributed query engine for data analytics. For customers using Trino (formerly PrestoSQL), check out The Trino Optimization Handbook here.

CTERA has expanded its relationship with Hitachi Vantara. This concerns Hitachis announcement of Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) reaching end-of-life. CTERA provides a migration path by introducing CTERA Migrate for HDI, a turnkey solution that replaces HDI and preserves the existing storage repository investment. Its part of the CTERA Enterprise Files Services platform.Theres more info in this blog.

Data lakehouse supplier Databricks is buying Okera, an AI-centric data governance platform. It says Okera says it addresses data privacy and governance challenges across the spectrum of data and AI. It says it simplifies data visibility and transparency, helping organizations understand their data, necessary in the age of LLMs, and to address concerns about their biases. Okera offers an AI-powered interface and self-service portal to automatically discover, classify, and tag sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII). Okera has been developing a new isolation technology that can support arbitrary workloads while enforcing governance control without sacrificing performance.

Nong Li, Okera co-founder and CEO, is known for creating Apache Parquet, the open source standard storage format that Databricks and the rest of the industry builds on.

DDN says its sold more AI storage appliances, like the A1400X2, in the first four months of 2023 than it had for all of 2022, partly due to the broad enthusiasm for generative AI. Dr James Coomer, SVP of Products, said: The trillions of data objects and parameters required by generative AI cannot be fulfilled without an extremely scalable and high-performance data storage system. DDN has been the solution of choice for thousands of deployments for organizations such as NASA, University of Florida, and Naver.

Helmholtz Munich, part of Germanys largest research organization, the Helmholtz Association, is a DDN customer. It has has four fully populated SFAES7990X systems that span a global namespace, and an SFA NVMe ES400NVX system with GPU integration for faster data throughput with direct datapaths between storage and GPU for its intensive AI applications. Case study here.

Professor Tom de Greef ofthe Eindhoven University of Technology expects the first DNA datacenter to be up and running within five to 10 years. New files will be encoded via DNA synthesis. Another part will contain large fields of capsules, each capsule packed with a file. A robotic arm will remove a capsule, read its contents and place it back. De Greefs research group developed a microcapsule of proteins and a polymer and then anchored one file per capsule. The capsules seal themselves above 50 degrees Celsius, allowing the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) read process to take place separately in each capsule. In the lab, it has so far managed to read 25 files simultaneously without significant error.

Each file is given a fluorescent label and each capsule its own color. A device can then recognize the colors and separate them from one another. A robotic arm can then select the desired file from the pool of capsules in thefuture.

A research paper appeared in the journal Nature Nanotechnology under the title DNA storage in thermoresponsive microcapsules for repeated random multiplexed data access. DOI: 10.1038/s41565-023-01377-4.

IBM Storage Fusion HCI System caching accelerates watsonx.data queries, watsonx being the upcoming enterprise-ready AI and data platform designed to apply AI across a business. IBM watsonx.data is delivered on-prem with an appliance-like experience. Watch a video about it here.

Web3 storage supplier Impossible Cloud has certified its first German datacenter, located in Frankfurt, with plans to handle client data beginning June 1.

Informatica has announced the launch of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) on Google Cloud in Europeto address data sovereignty and localization concerns. There are new capabilities for IDMCincluding security features to control access to security assets and master data management enhancements for financial services and ESG compliance. Informatica has more product integration on Amazon RedshiftwithInformaticas no code/no setup software as a service (SaaS) AI-powered cloud data integration-free directly from the Amazon Redshift consoleand industry certifications for financial services, healthcare and life sciences.

MSP-focused data protector N-able announced revenues of $99.8 million for Q1 this year, up 9 percent year over year, with a $3.5 million profit, lower than last years $5.1 million. Its subscription revenues were $97.4 million, another 9 percent rise. This is becoming a fairly predictable business revenue-wise.

Serene Investment Management-owned Nexsan has surpassed its aggressive Q1 earnings target for its SAN and file storage product line. This includes E-Series, Unity, and the Assureon Data Vault. We dont know what the target was. Serene bought Storcentric and thus Nexsan in February this year for $5 million in a DIP loan, retaining key employees and leaders as it restructured the business. Prior Nexsan owner StorCentric filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2022 and looked for a buyer.

Update. Storcentrics Drobo operation closed down at the end of January, as its website indicates;

Scale-out filesystem supplier Qumulo has announced integration with the Varonis Data Security Platform and introduced its new Snapshot-Locking capability to protect customers against ransomware. The Varonis Data Security Platform provides real-time visibility and control over cloud and on-premises data and automatically remediates risk. Its behavior-based threat models detect abnormal activity proactively and can stop threats to data before they become breaches. Qumulos Snapshot-Locking feature uses cryptographic protection, where only the customer has access to the cryptographic key-pair required to unlock the snapshot.

Rakuten Symphony is partnering with Google Cloud to provide its Symcloud SDS K8s data management and persistent storage for Google Anthos Distributed Cloud offerings. Symcloud SDS releases will be aligned with GDCs Anthos releases. Symcloud SDS is available through the Google Marketplace.

Pre-registration has opened for the SmartNICs Summit for its second annual event. It will occur on June 13-15 at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. We are now seeing the full impact of SmartNICs. They offload overhead from CPUs and make solutions more scalable, said Chuck Sobey, Summit General Chair. Distributed compute power is essential to handle the demands of incredibly fast emerging applications such as ChatGPT. SmartNICs Summit will help designers select the right architectures.

Storage analyst firm DCIG has named StorMagic SvSAN a global top five HCI solution. The 2023-24 DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors HCI Software Solutions report evaluates offerings from 11 rising vendor HCI software solutions to provide IT decision makers with succinct analysis of the markets HCI solutions.

Synology tells us the BC500 is available for sale in the US as of May 10. The TC500 is still slated for June 14, and MSRP is $219.99 for both models. The BC500 should be available from retailers soon, and also just launched on its web store.

Originally posted here:
Storage news ticker May 12 Blocks and Files - Blocks and Files

In context: Protecting a Zip archive with a password can be a quick, easy way to secure sensitive or potentially dangerous data uploaded to a cloud storage server. However, when the cloud belongs to Microsoft, you cannot count on your files being safe from external tampering.

Microsoft will decrypt, open, and scan protected Zip archives uploaded to the company's cloud servers in search of potential computer threats. Security researcher Andrew Brandt recently discovered the issue while trying to share malware samples with other researchers through SharePoint.

One of the zipped archives Brandt used to move malware files around the cloud got flagged by Microsoft's online service as a security threat. Brandt protected the archive with the password "infected." He said that he shared the malware through a private cloud storage bucket and that now it is useless. The available space for sending colleagues samples is shrinking, Brandt said. He fears the issue will impact the ability of malware researchers to do their job.

Brandt said that Microsoft's policy to scan protected archives for dangerous threats is understandable for average users. However, this "nosy, get-inside-your-business" way of handling things is troublesome for security professionals.

Experts say that Microsoft's ability to scan inside password-protected files isn't related to any brute-force cracking techniques. The company is likely employing a list of commonly used passwords, or it's simply checking users' email messages for information about a password needed to decrypt a shared Zip archive. Redmond also seems to employ its forced scanning techniques on SharePoint and Microsoft 365 cloud accounts.

While Microsoft checks protected files without asking users' permission first, Google manages the issue seemingly less intrusively. The company says it doesn't scan password-protected archives, though Gmail can flag an encrypted attachment, and the Google Workspace service prevents sending protected Zip archives altogether.

ZipCrypto, the symmetric encryption scheme included in standard Zip specifications, is known to be seriously flawed. As the recently rediscovered invasive policy with Zip files highlights, trying to hide sensitive data within an encrypted archive doesn't provide any meaningful protection anymore. In contrast, other archive formats or encryption algorithms like AES-256 should be more robust even against Microsoft's "nosy" scanning attempts in the cloud.

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Microsoft can open and scan password-protected Zip archives in the ... - TechSpot