The rumors are swirling that there is interest in Nutanix being sold or taken private. A number of reports appeared at the end of the week last week noting that discussions had been taking place with private equity investors about buying up outstanding shares in the company to take it off of Wall Street. The value of Nutanix today is reported to be about $6 billion, which is down from the valuation last year of over $9 billion but also much better than the $3.1 billion that was reported as late as June of this year. Though no companies have been mentioned in the rumors specifically there is a lot of interest in the hyperconverged infrastructure pioneer should they decide to be taken over. Max, you’ve worked a lot with Nutanix and you know the market. What’s going to happen here?
0:31 | NVIDIA Founders Donate for AI at OSU
NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang and his wife Lori have donated $50 million to Oregon State University to facilitate a new innovation complex. The research center will focus on artificial intelligence and materials science. The Huangs are both graduates of OSU and a portion of the funds donated are expected to go toward building a new supercomputer on campus. Tom, is this just goodwill? Or is there more to the donation?
Read More: Nvidia’s founding couple donates $50M for AI computing at alma mater Oregon State University
3:18 | Infinidat Boosting Capacity and Security
Infinidat is boosting their drive capacities. The block storage company said that they have moved to using 20TB disk drives in their arrays and that has increased their capacity by 70%, up to a maximum of 17.28PB after factoring in compression. For comparison the previous maximum capacity was around 10PB. The increase in space has also allowed the high end B4320 array to have a separated space for Infinidat’s immutable storage area used for uncompromisable backups to be used in security incidents. Max, is this space increase going to help potential Infinidat customers?
Read More: Infinidat ups capacity and cyber resiliency
5:25 | Keysight CyPerf Powering All The Testing
There were several news stories that popped up this week about new initiatives that all had a common theme. The first was news that Keysight would be partnering with F5 and AMD to show off how 5G can scale to terabit scale during MWC Las Vegas. The second is that Intel demonstrated a 5G testbed during Innovations show back in September. The third story invovled CyberRatings.org discussion a new round of firewall testing for both enterprise and data center. The common theme here? Keysight is providing the software that will power all this testing. CyPerf is the chosen test suite in every case. Tom, why is CyPerf getting put to work in all these different scenarios?
Read More: Stage 2 incorporates an enhanced SON that further optimizes performance and energy consumption
9:13 | Intel Reducing Staff at Habana Labs
Habana Labs is laying off about 100 employees. The AI chip startup, which was acquired by Intel in 2019, has been growing inside of Intel until the news this week. The news comes as a report of wider headcount reductions was released to Bloomberg, mostly due to the slowdown in the PC market. The number of employees being reduced at Habana is around 10% of their total workforce. Max, is Intel feeling some of the heat of the wider market trends? Or was Habana just too big?
Read More: Intel’s Habana Labs lays off 10% of workforce
12:16 | Cerebras Using AI for DoE Nuke Tests
Shall we play a game? The US Department of Energy is leveraging Cerebras for some heavy-duty AI gaming. The plan is to use the waferscale chips to predict the results of reliability tests on the US nuclear weapons arsenal. Due to the global bans on testing the majority of this work has been done by computers for a number of years. With recent advances in AI and data modeling there is now the opportunity to reduce the complex and time consuming calculations needed to provide data and instead use advanced algorithms to provide the necessary results. Cerebras, which demonstrated this technology at AI Field Day 3, will be testing it with the government to see how well they can handle the mountain of data produced by the simulations. Tom, are we reaching a new phase of AI-driven data collection here?
Read More: Waferscale, meet atomic scale: Uncle Sam to test Cerebras chips in nuke weapon sims
16:06 – Nutanix Looking For A Buyer?
The rumors are swirling that there is interest in Nutanix being sold or taken private. A number of reports appeared at the end of the week last week noting that discussions had been taking place with private equity investors about buying up outstanding shares in the company to take it off of Wall Street. The value of Nutanix today is reported to be about $6 billion, which is down from the valuation last year of over $9 billion but also much better than the $3.1 billion that was reported as late as June of this year. Though no companies have been mentioned in the rumors specifically there is a lot of interest in the hyperconverged infrastructure pioneer should they decide to be taken over. Max, you’ve worked a lot with Nutanix and you know the market. What’s going to happen here?
Read More: Nutanix explores sale after receiving takeover interest – WSJ
Read More: Nutanix for Sale, and the Only Buyer Might be a Big Cloud
25:32 | The Weeks Ahead
Oracle Cloud World, October 17-20, 2022
CXL Forum at OCP Summit October 18-20, 2022
Tech Field Day 26, October 19-21, 2022
Storage Field Day 24, November 2-4, 2022
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