VMware agreed to acquire Uhana, a start-up focused on deep learning and real-time AI in carrier networks and applications. Financial terms were not disclosed.
VMware said it intends to add Uhana’s technology to its own Telco Cloud and Edge Cloud portfolio.
Uhana, which is based in Palo Alto, California, is developing a highly-scalable, low-latency, real-time stream processing and AI platform, deployable in the operator’s private cloud or public cloud infrastructure. It includes a high-performance stream processing engine that ingests subscriber-level network telemetry from a variety of data sources: the radio access network, the core network and optionally even the over-the-top (OTT) application directly, and processes the telemetry to provide real-time, per-subscriber visibility. It also includes an AI engine that discovers and predicts anomalies in the network and/or application, prioritizes them by their estimated impact, infers their likely root causes and automatically recommends optimization strategies for the best subscriber experience.
In a blog posting, Uhana co-founder Sachin Katti writes: “After the deal closes, with the addition of Uhana’s technology to VMware’s Telco and Edge Cloud portfolio, Uhana will further support VMware’s ability to serve the telecom industry and deepen intelligence in the journey to 5G. Uhana’s technology will empower intelligence and analytics for the VMware Smart Assurance and VMware Smart Experience products.”
VMware to acquire Bitfusion for virtualized hard acceleration
VMware has agreed to acquire Bitfusion, a pioneer in virtualization of accelerated compute with a strong focus on GPU technology. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Bitfusion offers a software platform that decouples specific physical resources from the servers they are attached to in the environment. This enables better sharing of GPU resources among isolated GPU compute workloads, even allowing sharing to happen across the network.
For example, the platform can share GPUs in a virtualized infrastructure, as a pool of network-accessible resources, rather than isolated resources per server. Additionally, the platform can be extended to support other accelerators like FPGAs and ASICs. In many ways, Bitfusion offers for hardware acceleration what VMware offered to the compute landscape several years ago. Bitfusion also aligns well with VMware’s “Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device” vision with its ability to work across AI frameworks, clouds, networks, and formats such as virtual machines and containers.
VMware said the acquisition of Bitfusion will bolster its strategy of supporting AI- and ML-based workloads by virtualizing hardware accelerators. VMware plans to integrate Bitfusion into the vSphere platform.
Bitfusion is based in Sunnyvale, California and Austin, Texas.
https://bitfusion.io/
VMware to acquire Avi Networks for cloud load balancing
VMware agreed to acquire Avi Networks, start-up offering multi-cloud application delivery services. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Avi Networks, which is based in Santa Clara, California, delivers multi-cloud application services including a Software Load Balancer, Intelligent Web Application Firewall (iWAF) and Elastic Service Mesh. Avi’s central control plane and distributed data plane deliver application services as a dynamic, multi-cloud fabric which intelligently automates decisions and provides unprecedented application analytics and on-demand elasticity. Avi customers can dispatch services such as load balancing and web application firewall to any application using one centralized interface. Avi technology runs across private and public clouds, and supports applications running on VMs, containers and bare metal. The company claims hundreds of global enterprise deployments, including Fortune 500 companies representing the world’s largest financial services, media, and technology companies.
VMware said it will offer both built-in load balancing capabilities as part of VMware NSX Data Center, and an advanced, standalone ADC. Avi Networks will further enable VMware to bring the public cloud experience to the entire data center—automated, highly scalable, and intrinsically more secure with the ability to deploy applications with a single click.
