For fifteen years, U.S. internet companies have been allowed to operate in Europe thanks to a "safe harbor" agreement that allowed companies to declare themselves compliant with European data-protection standards.
Politico reports that arrangement is now in disarray after a court struck down the agreement, which is causing all kinds of internet companies to scramble, although
Microsoft, for one, reassured Azure and Office 365 customers that it had a solution already in place.
IBM ACQUIRES CLEVERSAFE TO SCALE ITS PUBLIC CLOUD INTO THE EXABYTES IBM continues to buy, rather than build, the components it needs to catch up to public cloud providers.
SiliconAngle notes that it picked up Cleversafe this week for what was likely several hundred million dollars in order to give its SoftLayer cloud service a pretty compelling storage product.
WAR STORIES: FIVE YEARS OF BUILDING INSTAGRAM Structure 2015 speaker Mike Krieger
posted an interesting recap of the past five years of Instagram, focusing on the scaling and engineering challenges behind one of the world's most popular apps. I was particularly struck by the challenges Krieger and his team faced migrating Instagram into Amazon Web Services once its growth became viral, and then out of AWS after it was acquired by Facebook.
DELL IS IN TALKS WITH EMC OVER POSSIBLE MERGER We've been waiting for some news out of the EMC Federation for a few months now, as the group tries to figure out the future of EMC, VMware, and Pivotal, but the
Wall Street Journal brought news (subscription required) of an interesting development this week: Dell is considering the acquisition of EMC (or at least some of its assets) that it would finance in part by spinning off all or some of VMware. Michael Dell would lead the new organization, and the deal sent EMC's stock up nearly five percent at the close of trading Thursday.
TECH UNICORN GETS COLD SHOULDER AS PURE STORAGE DROPS BELOW IPO PRICE One company that would face upgraded competition from a Dell-EMC deal would be Pure Storage, which had the unfortunate timing of going public this week as the rumors swirled. Shares in the company opened below its IPO price,
Forbes reported, and they closed Thursday at $15.93, still below the IPO price of $17, as investors appeared lukewarm about the prospects of the flash storage company.
FACEBOOK, BIG SWITCH TEAM ON OPEN SWITCH STACK We've long been big fans of the Open Compute project and the amount of open-source innovation it has brought to datacenter hardware, and so a partnership between Facebook and Big Switch to introduce their own open-source network operating system called OpenNetLinux is worth noting.
The Platform takes a closer look at the announcement, which follows a similar imitative from HP.
