eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Today’s topics include VMware’s plan to use encryption to secure virtualization, AMD Fellow Phil Rogers’ jump to rival chip maker Nvidia, why Intel is building up its data center business, and NetApp’s hybrid cloud product line expansion.
VMware is working on new encryption technology to improve the security of virtual networks and the application workloads that run on them.
Although encryption has been in use in various forms for a long time, VMware is aiming to use it more extensively inside data centers.
Martin Casado, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Networking and Security business unit, says making encryption easily usable has been challenging.
However, Casado also said that network virtualization might hold the key to making pervasive encryption more usable since it’s already a distribution platform.
Advanced Micro Devices is continuing to see employees heading for the door. In September, Jim Keller, the chief chip architect, left the company to pursue other opportunities.
Just weeks after Keller’s departure was made public, AMD officials announced that the company plans to cut another 500 jobs as part of a restructuring effort.
Now AMD has lost Phil Rogers to Nvidia. He was an AMD Fellow and one of the drivers of the company’s heterogeneous computing strategy.
Intel is continuing to rely more on its data center business and other newer product segments to help offset the continued sales declines in its PC processor unit.
However, even the Data Center Group—which saw revenues hit $4.1 billion in the third quarter—had continued weakness in the enterprise segment, though that was offset to some degree by growth in the cloud business.
What the quarterly financial numbers show is a company that is adapting to the rapid changes that are roiling much of the tech industry, with the growing importance of not only the cloud business, but other areas such as memory and the Internet of things.
NetApp, long one of the world’s leading storage hardware and software providers, has been repositioning itself for the last year or so as a technology provider for the “data fabric.”
As new technology trends start, established companies need to change direction to address them. NetApp’s Data Fabric strategy involves positioning the $6 billion company as a global data management provider.
It’s been focusing on storage and data management for more than a generation, but now it’s connecting everything to cloud services that customers prefer today.