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Today’s topics include Dell’s decision to sell its software unit to two private equity firms, China’s success in the supercomputing race, LG’s introduction of the K3 budget smartphone and the container orchestration technology built into Docker Engine 1.12.
Dell is selling its software business to two private equity firms as the company continues to shed assets ahead of its massive $67 billion acquisition of data storage market leader EMC.
Officials with Francisco Partners and Elliott Management on June 20 confirmed they are buying Dell’s Software Group for an unspecified amount, though the New York Times said estimates are in the $2 billion range.
The software business includes everything from data analytics and security software to systems and information management, data protection and performance monitoring. John Swainson, president of Dell Software, said in a statement that the company had “built a robust portfolio of software solutions that help make the lives of customers easier.”
China is now the world’s dominant player in the global supercomputing space. The country kept its position atop the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers with a new system that not only is markedly faster and more efficient than the previous No. 1 supercomputer—also from China—but also is powered by processors designed and manufactured in China.
In addition, China now has more supercomputers on the list—167—than the United States, with 165. This marks the first time in the more than two decades that the list has been kept that the United States is not home to the largest number of supercomputers.
No-contract cellular carriers Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA are now offering the $80 LG K3 budget smartphone to their prepaid customers, giving them another choice in their always-expanding Android handset lineups. Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA are the first U.S. carriers to start selling the LG K3, according to the companies.
The new handset features a 4.5-inch Full Wide VGA In-Plane Switching touch-screen display, a Qualcomm 210 MSM8909 1.1GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of memory, a 1,940mAh rechargeable battery, 8GB of on-board storage and a microSD slot that supports external storage cards up to 32GB.
At its DockerCon show in Seattle, Wash., on June 20, Docker announced Docker Engine 1.12, which directly integrates container orchestration technology that previously had to be acquired and implemented separately. Docker first announced the Swarm orchestration technology in February 2015 as a stand-alone project, requiring separate installation.
“Prior to Docker 1.12, users would have had to download Docker Swarm, set it up on their own and that would be the same scenario for any other third-party container orchestration tooling,” Scott Johnston, COO of Docker Inc., told eWEEK. “By building Swarm orchestration directly into Docker Engine, we’re making it self-configuring, with self-discovery and, in the near term, self-healing as well.”
With the integration of Swarm into Docker Engine, Docker developers have managed to remove much of the complexity and make it easier for users to deploy multicontainer applications across a cluster.