Tag: Quantum

Quantum appoints new global channel boss

Quantum has announced the appointment of James Mundle as its new global channel chief as the storage provider firm looks to continue expanding its channel partner program.

Mundle will be responsible for Quantum’s global partner strategy, programmes and execution and will be the company’s executive advocate for its worldwide channel partners.

Quantum chief revenue officer Elizabeth King said: “James brings a wealth of experience to Quantum, including success developing unique solutions bundles for partners, enhanced partner compensation models, partner contribution analytics, and innovative approaches to channel programs that have had a real impact on the market. He will play a pivotal role as we continue to enhance the Quantum Alliance Program and extend our leadership delivering compelling and innovative solutions that address the challenges of explosive video and unstructured data growth.”

Beta distribution goes the way of Betamax

Beta Distribution has crased owing £36 million according to a recently filed administrator’s report.

Deloitte was appointed as administrator for the failing distributer in October, and it declared that Beta did not have enough money to cover debts owed to unsecured creditors.

“We do not think that the companies have sufficient property to enable a distribution to be made to unsecured creditors,” the letter said.

Beta reported a £186 million turnover in its last financial year ending 31 March 2017  but owed over £14 million to trade creditors, and three million to the tax man.

Back up kit worth over a billion

emcboxThe market for customised backup appliances reached $1 billion worldwide in the fourth quarter of last year.

This market represents standalone disk products that use software, disk arrays, server engines, and more specifically data coming from backup software.

IDC said that the market for this kind of kit rose by four percent in 2014 and generated revenues of $3.26 billion.

Annual capacity in 2014 rose by 42.8 percent compared to 2013 to a staggering 2.68 exabytes.

Liz Conner, a research manager at IDC, said reasons for the rise in revenues included better software, data tiering, file sharing, data analytics and more investment in integrated systems.

In the fourth quarter, top of the storage pile was EMC with 63.8 percent market share, dwarfing the other players Symantec (11.5%), IBM (6.7%), HP (4%) and Quantum (2.3%).

 

Boffins make quantum leap

Wallpaper-quantum-leap-32404651-1280-720UC Santa Barbara’s physics professor John Martinis has come up with a “major milestone” towards quantum circuitry.

The team has apparently worked out a way to self-checks for errors and suppress them, preserving the qubits’ state and imbuing the system with some semblance of reliability.

Keeping qubits error-free, or stable enough to reproduce the same result is one of the major hurdles for boffins on the forefront of quantum computing.

Julian Kelly, graduate student researcher and co-lead author of a research paper that was published in the journal Nature wrote that one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing is that qubits are inherently faulty. If you store some information in them, they’ll forget it.

Unlike classical computing, in which the computer bits exist on one of two binary  positions, qubits can exist at any and all positions simultaneously. They hide in various dimensions and play with cats apparently.

This is called “superpositioning” and it gives quantum computers their phenomenal computational power, but it is also this characteristic which makes qubits prone to “flipping,” especially when in unstable environments.  It hard to process information if it disappears.

The error process involves creating a scheme in which several qubits work together to preserve the information. To do this, information is stored across several qubits.

If we build this system of nine qubits, which can then look for errors, they are responsible for safeguarding the information contained in their neighbours, he explained, in a repetitive error detection and correction system that can protect the appropriate information and store it longer than any individual qubit.

“This is the first time a quantum device has been built that is capable of correcting its own errors,” said Fowler. For the kind of complex calculations the researchers envision for an actual quantum computer, something up to a hundred million qubits would be needed, but before that a robust self-check and error prevention system is necessary. Well, let’s see, eh?

Google gets into Quantum Lolcats

OgleSearch engine Google has decided that it wants to get into the business of working out if cats are potentially alive or dead.

It has created a research team led by physicist John Martinis from the University of California Santa Barbara to build new quantum information processors based on superconducting electronics.

Dubbed the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, the whole thing is a  collaboration between Google, NASA Ames Research Centre and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) to study the application of quantum optimisation related to artificial intelligence.

The idea is that by having an integrated hardware group, the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimisation and inference processors based on recent theoretical insights as well as our learnings from the D-Wave quantum annealing architecture.

It will also be able to have someone who can feed and stroke the cats, which may or may not be alive.

Google has become more interested in artificial intelligence in recent years, probably because human intelligence seems to be suffering in the US as the nation stops teaching science in favour of a theory that someone’s invisible friend created the universe 6,000 years ago.

In January, Google bought privately held artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies, which says it all, really.

 

Boffins may make a quantum breakthrough

fatter catA team of boffins at the University of Chicago has announced it has developed a way to observe, control, and manipulate the behaviour of a single electron with the help of lasers.

In terms of quantum physics, this is a way of telling if Schrodinger’s cat is really dead or alive, or just has escaped the box and is asleep on a soft bed somewhere.

An electron is an elementary subatomic particle that is a fundamental constituent of matter, having a negative charge. It is found in all atoms and acts as the primary carrier of electricity in solids.

To manipulate a single electron at the quantum level the researchers used a laser light in ultra-fast pulses which in turn managed the quantum state of an electron inside a nanosecond defect, which is naturally found in diamonds.

The method used was also able to observe and track the properties of the single electron, as well as how the electron changes over a set period of time.

David Awschalom, who led the project, said that his research was a precursor for creating and developing semiconductor “quantum bits” and other microscopic technology and molecular powered computing which would increase computer speeds dramatically.

It would also mean that scientists will finally be able to find that pesky cat.

Quantum creates channel cloud services

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeData management firm Quantum said it has introduced a new channel programme.

The programme – aimed at managed service providers (MSPs) and value added resellers (VARs) offer a cloud back up service using Quantum’s virtual dedupe appliances and vmPro back up software.

The programme uses capacity based, all software subscriptions services which lets VARs and MSPss brand, market and sell Backup as a Service (BaaS).  The offering scales as revenue grows and so Quantum thinks that reduces up front capital hardware expenses.

The programme includes online sales and pre-sales training at no charge; customisable matering material; free access to Quantum software for trial and demonstration and technical and support training.

Quantum signs up Arrow as distie

Arrow logoData management firm Quantum Corp said it has recruited Arrow Electronics as a distributor in EMEA.

Its logic is that it wants to provide better support for its VARs and to recruit VARs in new markets.

Jesper Trolle, VP for Arrow enterprise said: “We look forward to helping Quantium’s reseller partners grow business through our pan-European presence, our data centre enterprise experience, and in customer training.”

That will include big data management, he said.

Quantium said: “Arrow’s pan-EMEA reach will provide strong support for continued expansion into new market and help us drive further growth in our existing markets.”

Arrow (tick: ARW) releases its Q3 results at the end of this month.