Virtual Desktop Tools, Server Hypervisors
prnewswire | July 20, 2023
RISC Zero, developer of leading general purpose zero-knowledge (ZK) virtual machine technology, has raised a $40 million Series A. The round was led by Blockchain Capital and joined by seed round lead Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from other notable investors including Galaxy Digital, IOSG, RockawayX, Maven 11, Fenbushi Capital, Delphi Digital, Aglaé Ventures, IOBC, Tribute Labs' Zero Dao, Figment Capital, and Alchemy Ventures.
RISC Zero's mission is to equip developers and infrastructure providers with novel cryptographic tools to power the next generation of trustless, scalable, and decentralized computation; both on and off-chain — allowing them to build solutions that defy common assumptions about the capabilities of blockchains and other federated and cooperative computing systems. Our innovative system enables users to confidently take control of their digital world by ensuring computational integrity and producing indisputable receipts of accurate program execution.
"Imagine a world where data privacy, security, and trust are no longer concerns, where software supply chains are transparent and verifiable, and where a new generation of applications can harness the power of zero-knowledge computing to solve some of the most pressing challenges of the digital age. This is the promise of zero-knowledge computing and the reason we are investing in RISC Zero" - Bart Stephens, Founder and Managing Partner at Blockchain Capital
RISC Zero's ZK Virtual Machine (zkVM) enables developers to build ZK-powered applications with the convenience of conventional programming languages such as Rust and C++. Utilizing advanced features such as continuations, RISC Zero's zkVM can run programs of arbitrary complexity and scope while utilizing off-the-shelf computing platforms — a first in the blockchain industry.
"We're honored to be supported by all of our incredible capital partners and the visionary leaders and teams that have signed on to help us build this revolution in computing capability. We're excited to play our part in building a more open and trusted foundation for the future of the internet." - Brian Retford, CEO & Co-founder
This funding round will enable RISC Zero to bring its Bonsai computing platform to market, supporting rapid application development and deployment in both cloud and decentralized environments. With Bonsai, developers can focus on writing their application instead of worrying about the complexities of proof orchestration and server infrastructure.
AboutRISC Zero
The RISC Zero platform will drive the coming decentralized computing revolution. We are bringing general purpose computing to the zero-knowledge ecosystem – enabling users to trust programs run anywhere, while allowing developers to use the tools they already know and love. Public key cryptography ushered in the modern internet era by fundamentally altering digital trust dynamics. Similarly, zero-knowledge computing will radically alter the way we interact digitally and enable entirely new classes of applications.
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Security, Hyper-V
Cradlepoint | August 02, 2023
Cradlepoint, the global leader in cloud-delivered LTE and 5G wireless network edge solutions, today announced that Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk (RR/CC) has leveraged Cradlepoint to modernize the network infrastructure of one of the largest and most diverse counties in the United States, creating a new paradigm to enhance accessible voting capabilities to eligible voters.
Before 2020, the voting infrastructure and registration processes across Los Angeles County remained widely unchanged from the 1960s. The county recognized the need for a complete voting overhaul — technological and procedural — to address the significant demographic changes impacting equitable voting access. On the technological front, the RR/CC sought innovative, pop-up networking solutions capable of reliably and securely connecting voting technology across widespread and remote locations, while enabling centralized, real-time monitoring and management capabilities.
In November 2020, RR/CC approached their existing connectivity vendor Cradlepoint to test and deploy Cradlepoint’s 5G-optimized Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN) solutions, in the form of NetCloud Manager and E3000 routers, which enabled highly scalable, reliable, and secure pop-up networks across approximately one thousand voting centers during the presidential election. Key solution capabilities and outcomes include:
Centralized network management:With NetCloud Manager, RR/CC’s in-house IT team successfully managed the deployment, configuration, and troubleshooting of each network device from centralized locations, reducing unnecessary complexity and on-site visits to quickly scale networks ad hoc for future election-related initiatives.
Consistent enforcement of security policies:NetCloud Manager and E3000 routers enabled the team to take a multi-layered approach to security with policy-based VPN tunneling and certificate-based authentication, keeping sensitive voting data secure to remain compliant with state and federal laws and maintaining the integrity of the democratic electoral process.
Continuous, flexible network connectivity:E3000 routers utilize ethernet, Wi-Fi, and 5G/LTE connectivity to enable multiple transport layers, which keeps voting technology operational across locations, despite any primary network disruptions or failures.
“Los Angeles County recognized the pressing need to modernize our network infrastructure to enhance the accessibility, transparency, and security in the electoral process, but limited IT resources impacted our ability to deploy and manage distributed networks at scale,” said Aman Bhullar, CIO at LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. “Our partnership with Cradlepoint enabled this transformation, helping us to not only accomplish our mission with innovative solutions, but also to set a new standard for widely accessible voting capabilities.”
“In today’s digital world, pop-up connectivity services have become vital to operate in new places and ways, and the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk is a great example of how LTE/5G connectivity and Cradlepoint’s 5G-optimized solutions seamlessly work together to help the office adapt to the modern needs of its constituents,” said Bryan Wood, Sr vice president of sales, North America for Cradlepoint. “We are honored to partner with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk office to ensure eligible voters have access to polling locations, no matter their whereabouts in the county during an election period.”
About Cradlepoint
Cradlepoint enables the freedom to connect people, places, and things that drive more experiences, more ways to work, and better business results — anywhere. The company is a pioneer in Wireless WAN, offering advanced 4G and 5G routers and adapters — controlled through Cradlepoint NetCloudTM. Enterprise businesses and public sector agencies rely on Cradlepoint and its Cellular Intelligence to build a reliable, secure network wherever they need it, connecting fixed and temporary sites, vehicles, IoT devices, and remote employees. Headquartered in Boise, Idaho, Cradlepoint is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) and part of their Business Area Enterprise Wireless Solutions.
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Virtual Desktop Tools, Server Hypervisors
businesswire | July 10, 2023
Opvizor, the leader for independent operational insight and monitoring solutions, has launched a GenAI-based cloud monitoring platform, named Opvizor/Cloud. The new version supports VMware vSphere, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure infrastructure including operating systems along with databases, storage, and network. Opvizor/Cloud, provides users with a single pane of glass to monitor performance, compliance and bottlenecks of their virtualized and multi-cloud environments.
With Opvizor/Cloud, administrators can gain operational insight and with this new understanding optimize their infrastructure and applications, and reduce operational overhead.
With hundreds of customers around the world including Motorola, Porsche, DZ Bank, the State of New Jersey, the Canton of Schaffhausen (Switzerland), and many others, Opvizor has become an industry standard for operational insight and monitoring of virtualized/cloud environments.
The new GenAI capability will use insight and knowledge learned from all existing Opvizor/Cloud customers, as well as public sources to recognize trends, exceptions and faults within the customers' environment. This new GenAI facility supports operation specialists in increasing their understanding of their own environment and make decisions quicker.
"The launch of Opvizor/Cloud provides our customers with a powerful, scalable, and flexible monitoring solution, without the need to provide in-house resources," said Dennis Zimmer, founder and chief technology officer, Opvizor. "Our hosted solution not only reduces the need for investment in physical hardware and associated maintenance costs, but also allows businesses to adapt easily to their changing IT needs. Additionally, new features and early previews are available instantly without the need to redeploy or install patches."
About Opvizor
Opvizor has been a leader in operational insight and performance monitoring for over 10 years, serving hundreds of customers on all continents. Opvizor specializes in performance monitoring, operational insight, log analysis, wasted resource detection, resource forecasting, root/cause analysis, and change configuration management for platforms such as VMware vSphere, VMware Tanzu, VMware Horizon, VMware vSAN, Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Huawei, HPE, NVIDIA, Cisco, Brocade, NetApp, Dell, RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL.
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Server Hypervisors, Vsphere
prnewswire | August 29, 2023
Napatech™ (OSLO: NAPA.OL), a leading provider of programmable Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) and Infrastructure Processing Units (IPU) used in cloud, enterprise and telecom datacenter networks, today announced the availability of the Napatech's first 400Gbps programmable SmartNIC solutions, leveraging the latest Intel Agilex® 7 FPGAs to deliver best-in-class performance for applications in security, cloud services, network monitoring and recording.
Enterprises and OEMs providing high-performance solutions for network monitoring and recording require NICs with a performance level that matches the high PCI Express (PCIe) bandwidth available in the latest servers such as those based on 4th Gen Intel Xeon® Scalable Processors. The new Napatech NT400 SmartNIC platform, based on the Intel® FPGA SmartNIC N6000-PL Platform, addresses this need through a PCIe Gen 4 16-lane host interface which enables full-duplex 2x100Gbps traffic between network ports and host applications. Similarly, for applications like the 5G packet core in telecom infrastructure that require high-bandwidth inline processing of network data, the NT400 platform sustains a total 400G of traffic over tens of millions of flows.
The NT400 programmable SmartNIC platform includes two QSFP56 network ports, supporting up to 2x200G traffic with the flexibility to configure 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G, 100G and 200G network links. The SmartNIC hardware is complemented by Napatech's portfolio of production-grade software packages, including Link-Capture™ for use cases such as network monitoring and recording, Link-Virtualization™ that provides a virtualized data plane for cloud services and Link-Inline™ for inline applications such as 5G User Plane Function (UPF). These integrated solutions deliver a true "IT experience" whereby the user just installs the card and the software, immediately achieving seamless acceleration of their application with no requirement to directly program the SmartNIC itself.
At the core of the NT400 platform is the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA F-Tile chiplet, which incorporates a configurable, hardened Ethernet protocol stack for supporting rates from 10G to 400G. Napatech chose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for a host of reasons, including scalability options that allow support for five different configurations that meet various price, performance, power and feature goals, tailored to specific customer applications and use cases. The F-Tile features are critical in enabling the NT400 to operate within the space and power limitations of standard servers deployed in network appliances, data centers and edge locations.
"As the networking landscape continues to evolve, SmartNICs emerge as the predominant growth catalyst in the expansive NIC market, poised to reach $3.3 billion annually by 2025" said Manoj Sukumaran, Principal Analyst for Datacenter Compute and Networking at Omdia. "High bandwidth programmable Ethernet adapters require very fine optimization in hardware and software to ensure deterministic and predictable processing time and making them suitable for real-time networking applications. Napatech is among the very few vendors who could provide highly optimized SmartNICs and software solutions leveraging FPGAs from vendors like Intel, and deliver highly efficient network offload capabilities" he added.
"The NT400 platform represents the latest generation within our portfolio of SmartNIC solutions," said Jarrod Siket, Chief Marketing Officer at Napatech. "We will deliver multiple SKUs based on this platform, providing products with memory configurations as well features like time synchronization and management ports that are precisely tuned to the requirements of our customers' applications, all packaged with the applicable production-grade software."
"We are delighted to see Napatech choose the Intel Agilex 7 FPGA for their leading-edge SmartNIC solutions," said Mike Fitton, Vice President Programmable Solutions Group and General Manager, Network Business Division at Intel. "The combination of our FPGAs, which deliver high performance, and power efficiency plus a rich feature set for the most demanding applications, together with Napatech's production-grade hardware and software, helps ensure that customers can deliver leading solutions for a wide range of enterprise and telecom applications."
About Napatech
Napatech is the leading supplier of SmartNIC solutions used in cloud, enterprise, and telecom datacenters. Through commercial-grade software suites integrated with high-performance hardware, Napatech accelerates network infrastructure and security workloads to deliver best-in-class system-level performance while maximizing the availability of server compute resources for applications and services.
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