A daily summary of stories in the areas of Big Data, cloud computing and software-led infrastructure from some of the top news sources on the Web.

Business News

Cisco’s Padmasree Warrior is out: Report – Business Insider

COO Gary Moore and president Rob Lloyd have also resigned in the wake of Cisco’s appointment of Chuck Robbins as the new CEO. Both were thought to be candidates for the top job. Robbins has stated that he wants to move to a flatter organizational structure. Warrior is a charismatic and visible outside presents for Cisco – and a rare female top executive in Silicon Valley – but some people said engineers didn’t respect her. She was moved into a “Chief Strategy Officer” role in January, which is usually the first foot out the door.

Biz Break: NetApp CEO departs, incoming Cisco CEO plans shake-up – San Jose Mercury News

Tom Georgens is out and George Kurian, formerly the executive vice president for product operations, is the new interim CEO. The move comes two weeks after Georgens admitted that “we are not satisfied” with the company’s financial performance and that NetApp plans to lay off 500 employees. NetApp said it would search for a new CEO but expressed full confidence in Kurian’s ability to lead the company. Really?

Salesforce acquires Tempo – Business Insider

Tempo is a smart calendaring app that makes scheduling or attendee suggestions based upon what it learns about your behavior. It’ll shut down at the end of next month and re-emerge in some kind of Salesforce skin, although what that will look like is unclear. See alsoSalesforce buys smart calendar, Tempo – The Next Web and Salesforce Acquires Smart Calendar Startup Tempo, App Will Shut Down On June 30 – TechCrunch

Product News

Hardware makers disclose Windows 10 plans – Computerworld

Dell and HP plan to be fast out of the gate, with Dell saying it’ll ship PCs with Windows 10 preloaded on the July 29 release date. BTW, has anyone noticed an “upgrade to Windows 10” icon in their taskbars recently? One appeared on my laptop just yesterday.

Intel cranks up speed of Thunderbolt 3, builds in support for USB – Network World

Looks like a real breakthrough in external device support. “Thunderbolt 3 can transfer data at a whopping 40G bps (bits per second), twice as fast as Thunderbolt 2, which was introduced in 2014.” That means it can transfer a 4K movie from a computer to an external storage device in an amazing 30 seconds. It’s so fast that it can even be used with external graphics cards. However, you need a special cable and Thunderbolt 3 ports at both ends.

Nantero’s carbon-nanotube memory could replace SSDs and DRAM – PCWorld

The company says it has a better technology that’s more durable than flash and almost as fast as DRAM. The secret is carbon nanotubes, which are cylinders made out of carbon. “Nantero’s NRAM operates at the speed of DRAM and is nonvolatile, meaning it can store data. The small size of carbon nanotubes allows more data to be crammed into tighter spaces, and the storage chips will consume significantly less power than flash storage and DRAM. That could bring more storage and longer battery life to laptops and mobile devices.”

Nantero said it’s been working on the technology for 14 years and that commercial availability is still a couple of years away. It doesn’t plan to make any products but rather will license the technology to storage and memory makers. The company also announced that it’s raised another $31.5 million, bringing its total funding to nearly $110 million.

Faster Wi-Fi coming soon to a device near you – PCWorld

“The peak wireless data transfer speeds of the QCA9994 and QCA9984 Wi-Fi chips will reach 1.7G bps (bits per second),” compared to 1G bps for Qualcomm’s current chips. That’s about 1/3 the speed of a USB 3.0 connection, which is considered adequate for external hard drives.

Script tool a Docker shocker blocker – The Register

Docker security head Diogo Mónica says the Docker Bench Security script available on GitHub is designed as a complement and check against the Docker benchmarks released last month. He said this is one in a series of improvements Docker plans to make to the container’s security, which is considered a weak point.

Linux Fedora 22 arrives with faster package management, new features, and polish – PC World

Version 21 saw a major cleaving of Fedora into Workstation, Cloud, and Server editions. This update is more tempered, with “low-level improvements, polish, and some useful new features,” writes Chris Hoffman.

Google rolls out ‘My Account,’ a new dashboard that promises better privacy and security controls – VentureBeat

“Among the new features, My Accounts includes a step-by-step Privacy Checkup and Security Checkup so that people can better understand how their data is being used, and where they may be vulnerable. There’s also an ‘Ads Settings Tool’ to help refine the ads you see based on your searches, which can be handy no doubt it your kids spend all day searching for One Direction news and you really, really don’t want to see any One Direction ads.”

Cloud Foundry takes first steps into Azure – The Register

Microsoft announces “public preview of open source Cloud Foundry for Microsoft Azure.” That means the real thing won’t be here for a while still, but those of us who have watched Microsoft for some time continue to find this company’s sudden embrace of open source to be incredible.

SanDisk speeds up CloudSpeed Eco, raises capacity – The Register

New Cloud Speed Eco 2 SSD holds up to 2TB of data, but at some sacrifice of write speed. The 800GB Cloud Speed Eco is priced at $1,045 on Amazon. No word on pricing of the new product.

ARM hopes to extend battery life of IOT devices with new chip design – Computerworld

New design almost doubles battery life, executives say. A light bulb using this chip, a battery and a solar cell could potentially last for years.

Trends & Analysis

Google cloud strategy focuses on analyzing big data – Computerworld

Brian Stevens, vice president of cloud platform at Google, says the company isn’t chasing Amazon but will instead focus on its strength, which is analytics. “It’s not about catching up to [Amazon],” he said. “It’s about doing things in a new cloud way.” The company believes its expertise in using analytics for its own business will make it a leader in analytics in the public cloud.

MongoDB ahead of Cassandra and Couchbase for scalability – Computing News

“The research, carried out by benchmarking and performance-testing firm United Software Associates (USA Inc)…used an equal mix of reads and updates in its workload and found that MongoDB provided over 1.8 times greater throughput than Cassandra and nearly 13 times greater throughput than Couchbase. In another workload, which consisted of 95 percent reads and five percent updates, MongoDB again came out on top, with more throughput than Cassandra and Couchbase.” This looks like an important boost for MongoDB, which has a reputation for being hard to scale. The company has acknowledged that this is a problem and vowed to fix it.

Who should get the blame in IRS breach? – Computerworld

Good look at the funding, politics and user experience issues that frustrate security professionals. The IRS has been knocked for cutting its security budget, but it says that was part of an outsourcing initiative and that actual funding wasn’t reduced significantly. I thought the more interesting angle in this article was how the agency needs to balance accessibility with security. The IRS wants taxpayers to use this website for self-service, but if its security procedures are too onerous, then users will be scared away. It’s a delicate balance.

Why IT Shops Are Going For All-Flash Datacenters

Craig Nunes, HP’s vice president of marketing for the storage division, practically quotes David Floyer word-for-word in explaining why HP believes all-flash data centers are practical right now. Timothy Prickett Morgan links to Floyer’s December essay on “Evolution of All-Flash Array Architectures” in tribute.

Red Hat CEO: Public cloud “obscenely expensive at scale” – TechRepublic

Jim Whitehurst says that for predictable workloads, private cloud is far cheaper. Public cloud providers charge a premium for handling unexpected spikes in activity.

Review: Vmware 6.0: Faster, smarter, more resilient – Computerworld

Tom Henderson raves about the new VMware 6, saying it’s easier to install, much faster than previous versions and supports remote VMs without a hitch. VMware now also comes with an internal certificate authority, which makes single sign-on much easier. VMware 6 is rock solid, Henderson wrotes. There were no major bugs and only a couple of minor annoyances in his tests.

56 MEEELLION credentials exposed by apps say infosec boffins – The Register

Many app developers ignore the instructions that federated identity providers like Google, Facebook and Twitter provide, in the process exposing user credentials to eavesdroppers, say University of Darmstadt researchers.

IT Teams Not Fully Prepared: Randstad Technologies Reveals Millennial Workforce Is Driving Corporate IT Strategies – PRNewswire

The good news is that two-thirds of IT organizations are preparing for the demands by the millennial workforce for better support for mobility and collaboration. The bad news is that one-third aren’t.

How a hybrid cloud enabled a location-agnostic workspace – ZDNet

Egnyte for Google Apps enables a strategy, design, and technology consultancy to empower a smoothly running distributed workforce.