from the Masonic in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Lenovo Tech World 2016. Brought to you by Lenovo. Now, here are your hosts. Stu Miniman and John Walls. And welcome back, John Walls, here with Stu Miniman. We continue our coverage here in theCUBE of the Lenovo Tech World gathering here in the Masonic Auditorium in beautiful San Francisco. What a wonderful day it's been so far. Pretty exciting day. Hope we've been able to convey that for you. Joining us now is Brian Connors, who is the Vice President of NextGen Infrastructure and Business Development at Lenovo. Brian, thanks for being with us. Glad to be here. You have taken a look at your portfolio. So your converge, hyperconverge, high performance computing, network business unit, strategic alliance.  Not a lot of free time. That's for sure. Look, what we're doing in Lenovo is really focused on the future. A lot of what I do and our team does around the next generation, really focus on how we can embrace technology and move it to the next generation and help customers and working with our partners to actually accelerate that and disrupt the marketplace. So NextGen IT, your definition of it. NextGen IT is really looking at kind of legacy free. There's a lot of legacy environments out there, but there's a lot of innovative technologies occurring. Take Moore's law. I mean, Moore's law has enabled us to go from discrete computing to virtualization of processing to virtualization of storage and processing to ultimately virtualization of the entire data center. So in the end, really the data center is the computer of tomorrow. So it basically changes everything upside down. So Brian, I see there's two pieces basically of what you're doing. One is there's the technologies that you're using in your technologies, platforms, OEM relationship, and other Nutanix OEM falls under what you do. And then there's the changes happen in the application side and most of the times those two go together. What can you help unpack for us as to how you see that changing world because we know the enterprise changes really slow and the slowest part of change tends to be the applications. Yeah, yeah. So it's very true. I mean, but you look at what's going on in the cloud environment. You look at what's going on in the hyper scale environments where applications born in the cloud applications are becoming more resilient. Their resiliency is not necessarily in the hardware and the platforms. It's in the operating environment and it's in the application development. Sure, look at our relationship with SAP. SAP is mission critical, ERP, in-memory database, analytics. But the HANA Enterprise Cloud is a complete migration to environments and applications that are basically born in the cloud and leveraging cloud technology and large systems to really run enterprise class applications. It's going to take time and there's not everything's going to happen in a public cloud. Enterprise cloud, on-prem and hybrid clouds are very, very important as a consumption and an operational expense, basically, Apex model to really drive utilization. Okay, so why have you guys been so successful with HANA because every infrastructure company out there has a solution for it. So we started HANA, I'd say six or seven years ago, in a kind of a skunkworks project with SAP in Waldorf. We have a development team that sits there with them. They were actually just starting in-memory database. We were in there early. We were in there with our technology at the time I was at IBM. We used a file system, used to be called GPFS, now they call it something else, spectrum scale. But we've embedded that into the environment so you don't have any external sand. So you've got optimized performance, you've got a solution that can scale and we're the leader in SAP HANA appliance and configuration, basically because we're there first and we continue to innovate with SAP over these years to this day. In January, we took that to another level within Lenovo. I really took that relationship to really around the whole go-to-market area. We were just at Sapphire three weeks ago I think it was and we introduced eight terabytes before Intel Nonstra processor support where it was traditionally six terabytes support. We demoed 128 gigabyte dims with Samsung and SAP. So we're in there innovating with them, in their laboratories, physically, in the building involved. So about those kinds of partnerships, because that's not unique, right? Your relationship with SAP. I mean, Red Hat, Juniper, you've got a long list. How does that factor into your philosophical approach to doing business and seeking out those kinds of collaborative efforts? Well, our objective is to be the number one partner in the data center, trusted partner in the data center. And to do that, we have to have trusted relationships with our partners in a very open relationship to do so. So it's neutral. So, you know, the SAPs of the world, the Microsofts of the world, the Juniper's of the world, Nutanix is coming up new in the world. And the Red Hat's of the world are very trusted and very well known in the data center. Our relationship with them is very symbiotic, but we're also not competing with them. We don't compete with them. We don't have a middleware business. We don't have an operating system business. We actually really mold, one in one has to be much greater than two when we come together with these partnerships. But kind of our objective is to be the number one trusted partner in the data center and having trusted mutual relationships with the large trusted partners is very important. So it's a mutual. Yeah, so Brian, you went through that acquisition of the System X. I think a lot of people understood that, you know, moving out of under IBM, moving to Lenovo, there was a lot of opportunity there. What have you seen? Give us kind of the update after 18 months as to those partnerships that you mentioned, you know, middleware, of course, IBM is a strong position. You know, how much of that has come to fruition as you thought and anything that surprised you? I don't know if it was surprising so much, but yeah, it's only been 18 months. It feels like a little longer. But yeah, it was a challenging transition to say the least, especially in the first, say six to nine months. Since then it's becoming much better and customers are starting to adopt and understand who we are. So we're really the same team, same products as we were before. World-class engineering, over 20 some years of engineering capability in the enterprise server market. So that's kind of getting behind us now. Recognition of Lenovo in the data center is something we're going through. Now, what surprised us, I think, is the openness that we have the ability to be as part of Lenovo. Some of the partners before are always been a little timid. We did compete in some areas. Now IBM's a great company. They help and they partner in global business and GTS and other areas with a lot of these partners. But it's a very, very much a co-op competition area. Being legacy-free, being very open as Lenovo, being a hardware platform provider and a solution provider, really started to open up a lot of buys. We have partnerships and capabilities at levels of the companies that we never had imagined. But you also have to look at what's happened in the industry. We're really the open one. Some of our competitors are starting to close things up and starting to get a lot more competitive with some of the partners that we have. I won't go through in detail, but if you start to look at what's happening, we're starting to look pretty shiny as well. And as long as we continue to deliver great products, great solutions, and have our customer base, we'll be successful. And how much of a competitive advantage is that for you, do you think? Or is that your calling card in a way? I mean, kind of a differentiator in the fact that you're maybe moving one way and you feel like some of the market is maybe a large chunk of the market's moving another? We got a couple of competitive advantage. A few competitive advantage. A is our products and our people and our capability. I think that's our number one. Number two, we have a company who wants us to become number one. There's no competing technologies or product. They want us to become number one. Three is we are, we're very strong in emerging markets. China is an example. We're kind of global and local in that respect, right? And so, probably the final one is we ship, I don't know, maybe the latest number, maybe 100 million things a year. So our supply chain capability is bar none, awesome. I mean, we have capability and cost benefit to help our customers. HPC is a business I'm having, I have right now. It was kind of, we were on a limited fringe a lot in my old role, with big systems. We are very strong in big systems again. You'll see us have one of the top 500 capabilities in the ISC show in Frankfurt next week with a partnership with Intel, stronger partnership with Intel. But we're also winning higher education. In North America, we're hardly losing in relations because we have a cost profile that is much lower than we had in the past because we have the capability of an infrastructure that is scale, much bigger scale than we had as a hardware company before. So down the road then, if you could give us vision inside your crystal ball here right now, let's just talk about the big picture and talk about next gen IT and kind of where do you think you're going? Where is it going? And what do you think the next wave might be? So first, this is an evolution without a doubt. As I said, you go back and you look at how VMware came on the scene in what, 2005 maybe, or maybe a little earlier than that. And we had virtualization 10, 15 years earlier in mainframes and things, right? So it's evolved, but it's white, it's white. With the capability we now have in our servers, it's becoming very, I'll call server-centric. Server-centric means compute-centric. We don't have to have specialized hardware to run storage, to run, even networking in the future, we have a lot more virtualization capability. So it's kind of coming home to where we are. And as long as we continue to deliver, Moore's law is tapering off, but the amount of capability in the processor, and now we can really innovate on the software element of this data center operating environment, we're going to start to see the movement of not only consumption, more and more consumption, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and public cloud, but also the data center itself being a lot more elastic as a software-defined data center. I just want to hitch up. I've heard of this a few times, the references to Moore's law, obviously, about computing power and tapering off, you say. I mean, is it possible that technology kind of renders that obsolete at some point because it becomes impossible to continue to develop at that rate, considering how sophisticated the technology is? The development can continue, it's physics right now. It's obviously down to physics and how small those lines can be. One of the large areas of innovation right now for us is going to be in machine learning and deep learning, taking that capability and actually applying it to be more analytical in nature, HPC-like, and also in energy efficiency. If you look at the density that we're getting with some of the servers, it was not too long ago that Intel said that the maximum wattage of the processors will be 80 watts. We're up to 100 and it's 35, 160. It's not going to, with Moore's law kind of slowing down, it's not going to get any lower in power. So we have other innovations that we can go do in the data center to really drive efficiency in the data center and cost of operations, which is basically very, very big. So last question I had for you. You talked about just the massive scale that Lenovo has. From a technology standpoint, though, is there kind of cross-pollination? You've got the core from the System X, great history of innovation over the years, but how does being in Lenovo change, or does it change the engineering and the culture at all? Yeah, well, I came kind of full circle because I was in the PC business for most of my career. I started in kind of the second generation of PC in IBM and Volca. And then it separated, and we saw the difference. We had a little different mindset on it. A mature enterprise mindset. But as we've come back together, looking at IoT, you look at some of the announcements that were made here today and the devices with angle. You just look at about the amount of data and source of information that can come off of that. And what we can learn as we look at machine learning, deep learning, capability in the infrastructure. The infrastructure, you'll hear, infrastructure, we want to be invisible, but it has to be operational. It has to be reliable. It has to be resilient. And with the amount of data being created and the amount of information coming in, we're learning it firsthand. We're going to show it at Supercomputer next week, the 3D. We have a big, large partner in Germany who's one of our biggest water cool supercomputers. And they've done a 3D room, basically a physical room. We're going to show that to customers' capability with one of our 3D goggles there to actually give them a virtual reality of what's happening. It's actually the core mantle of the earth, actually going in and deep diving from a science standpoint. So we're applying it, not just a game and everything else. It's being applied to real visualization and visual analytics. Well, you're bringing it to life. There's no question about that technology, bringing all kinds of... So that's a good example, probably, of what we're doing. Brian, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. Congratulations on a great launch today with a number of fantastic products. I certainly wish you all the best down the road at Lenovo. Very good. Thank you very much. Appreciate being here. The Cube continues here from San Fran, right after this.


Hey, how are you doing? I'm Xinhuan. I work for Intel. Today, I will talk about the cool features of WebAssembly Microronetime for IoT and embedded devices. In this topic, we will talk about why WebAssembly is great for IoT, the one more project history in the status, the features of this project, and then we will give more details about the interpreters ahead of time compiler and the loader, execution in place, source debugger, application framework, and the give a quick start. WebAssembly was created for improving the web application performance. And nowadays, it is viewed as an important technology for much larger scope. The Watson has several great features which are extremely useful for IoT space. First, the Watson is a compilation target for multi-frontend languages, which enables more developers in the IoT programming. The isolation with Watson sandbox and a small footprint is especially useful for those embedded devices. High performance, portability, and the standardized embedding API make it possible to create unified application framework over heterogeneous devices. Finally, the SMD and multi-threading features can work for heavy computing scenarios such as AI and image processing. With these features, it can help IoT systems to overload computing among cloud, edge, nodes in a flexible way. The application development for embedded devices can be independent to those base formula, the innovation can be greatly accelerated. The sandbox can even enable third-party application runs on your devices. The Watson is also good for automation applications because of its good time determinism. Let me give a quick introduction about the project background. The Walmart was open sourced by Intel in May 2019. It was originally created for some internal usage, including cloud and embedded. So it was designed targeting small footprint, high performance, and great adaptability. Walmart was transferred to Bicode Alliance in November 2019 as one of the initiating projects. And in 2021, the open governance model and the technical steering community was established. Walmart has active community and broad adoptions by commercial products and open source projects already. The usage is cover smart contract, IoT, service match, trusted computing, mini app, etc. To have all the content displayed, so from this page, I turned off the camera. And the features of Walmart, Walmart has full support for the WebAssembly MVPs back and also provided aggressive support for the post-MVP features. And Walmart supports interpreter, including fast and class commode, ahead-of-time compilation and just-in-time compilation. Walmart is a C-based implementation, and the compilation is based on LRVN. Walmart has a very small binary size and memory consumption. The VM core only has 60K kilobytes for LT mode and 90K for interpreter mode. And to run a simple hello world, it only needs a 3K memory. It has a near-lady performance with LT and JIT. Also, the faster interpreter provides very good performance as well. The ahead-of-time module order to enable the LT for multiple environments and the execution in place can have the compiled module directly loaded from the flash. It has LT-oriented wasa-application framework and the API also support remote application management. It supports libc-wazee, libc-beauty-in, multi-thread, multi-module, SMD, and the API for embedding, resource debugging, and application management. The Walmart already provided good support for different CPU architectures such as x86, ARM, MIPS, ARC, extensor, and RISC-5. And regarding to the operating system, it has been ported to Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, Difer, RDOs, things, Vixworks, RT-Strat, and OpenArters. Walmart has three building blocks, VMware Core, Application Manager, and Application Framework. These three blocks are separated and self-contained. So if you want, you can build your own application framework and the management on top of the VMware Core. Inside the VMware Core, we have several components. So from the bottom is a shared library used by the VMware Core, including the memory allocator, some util library APIs, and the platform porting layer. And then is the native-lib engine, including native-lib invoker, native-lib manager, thread manager, and the libc supporting with the beauty mode and the wazzy mode, and the libc supporting for pthread. Then we have two engines. One is the interpreter engine and the JIT LTE engine. In the right side is the application framework. We already supported a few APIs, such as Timer API, the inter-application communication, pop-sub mode, and request-response mode, and also sensor API, and the API based on little VGL, which provides the 2D graphic interface. The application manager will provide a communication service to remote, so you can install, uninstall, and query the existing apps through the application manager. The interpreters. The VMware now supports fast interpreter and clask interpreter. The clask interpreter is stack-based. It has a smaller average bytecode, and it's based on stack operation, so as well as we have the overhead and a smaller memory usage, and the fast interpreter is a registry file based. It extended the bytecode in memory, so during loading the wassen, it will precompile the wassen opcode to the extended bytecode. It will have a larger bytecode size, but it provides extremely faster execution speed, and also consumes more memory. So here is a measurement on CoreMark workload. So the score reported by CoreMark, the fast interpreter is almost three times of the clask interpreter, but the memory consumption wise, the fast interpreter consumes more memory than the clask interpreter. The fast interpreter will do precompilation from wassen to extended bytecode. Here is the procedure. So in the left side, we can see a few WebAssembly codes. So basically we just load the local variables into stack, and the add opcode will load the appearance from stack, and push the result into the stack, then add with another constant one, then set the result into variable zero. So we compile the two extended bytecodes, so we use a different way to store the appearance, so it's called slot, and we have a three-slot category, one for the const, one for the local variables, and another one is for the dynamic appearance. So after calculating the slots for each appearance, so in the new extended bytecode, actually the slot ID is following the opcode, so the first two are the operands to be operated, the second one is the result, either the slot to store the results. So after the conversion, so we can have a six original wassen code becomes two extended bytecodes. The ahead-of-time combination in the loader, the WAMER supports LOT compiler WAMER-C, so you can use WAMER-C to compile wassen module to ahead-of-time module, which is already in native instructions. The WAMER module loader enable LOT module running in various target environments such as Linux, Windows, accessibility environments, such as Intel, S-Jax, and even in the MCU, micro-country units. So with the ahead-of-time combination, we actually have a multiple path for deploying the LOT module. First one, you can just distribute the wassen bytecode and do the compilation on the target. So if you are running on Linux or Windows, you can do that. Or you can use the cloud-based distribution. So you can have a WAMER-C on the cloud. So before distributed to any specific target, you can compile it in the cloud. Or you can directly do the compilation in your development environment, so you can distribute the LOT module together with the software package. The execution in place for LOT module, or we can call it XIP. XIP supports execution of an LOT compiler module from Flash. That will reduce the memory usage by loading the module into DRAN. To use the XIP feature, you will use the parameter provided by WAMER-C when compiling the LOT module. So you will enable indirect mode and disable LVM in transects. So to support the XIP, actually there are some special data in the WAMER. The major goal is to avoid patching the module for calling functions in the host, because normally when you're loading LOT module, you need to patch the calling places. So in the LOT module, we designed a map in the module, which is from the function index to the symbol name. And also the call in the module to function hosted in the runtime environment is through index. And in the runtime, we have a map from the symbol name to function address. Also, when we load a module, we need to build a function table in the memory that map the function index to the point. So we also provide recommendations for the development working flow. So basically, if you want to build some product with a good IDE, you probably can have your own IDE based on either Eclipse or VS Code with your IDE plug-in. And the two chains, including the SDK, header files, library, wasm, two-chain, and the WAMER LOT compiler, sometimes you want to pack it in a darker image. Then on the development environment, you can have a simulator. So when you finish the coding, you can directly load the build wasm into simulator. The simulator will have all the API supported. So even those API are totally different implemented with the target environment, but the simulation can be no problem. So when you finish the development building and the simulating, you can load the wasm binary into a target environment. So in the target environment, you can see the API library is supported, and then it has a runtime and a loader. Here is a demo for showing the source debugging of WebAssembly applications. We already have a VS Code opened here, and if you see source codes are already written in the VS Code, let's start with source codes. Go to the extension view configuration dialog for setting the parameters. Here we can see we have a darker image installed locally. All the building two chains are installed in the dark image. Click the build to start the building process. When it is finished, we can see the generated wasm file and lt file here. Then go to the extension view. Start debugging. We can see breakpoints around. Go to another breakpoint. We can also see the variables and the values in the debug view. That's it. The Wanmer VM Code provides APIs for building customized application framework. Normally, this API, including help the native word, calls the wasm functions. Also, help the wasm word calls the native APIs. In the right side diagram, these two interface provide the intercommunication between two words. The Wanmer already provides a synchronized application programming model, which is very useful for the IoT devices. In this model, it can support multi-applications and intercommunicated through the queue and messaging. Every wasm application has its own sandbox and a thread. They have a running loop and a posting message to others. Every application has a system-defined callback onInit and onDestroy. Those are executed by the application framework. It also supports the remote application management. You can install, install, and uninstall the applications from remote. Here is the sensor API and a sample. Let's have a look into the sample first. In the function onInit, we define a sensor object. The sensor object is initiated with a calling sensor open. The name of the sensor, the parameter, and the sensor event handler. We will configure the sensor frequency of the sampling and others. When the sensor event arrives, the sensor event handler callback will be triggered. You can get all the sensor data from the parameters of this function. When this application is uninstalled, the onDestroy will be executed by the framework. In the right side, there is the internal architecture. Basically, we have two words working together. A number of functions will be called when the board is initialized. The sensor framework will initialize the active physical sensors one by one. That will create some sensor nodes in the memory. When some applications in Watson try to open a sensor, it will eventually call the native API Watson sensor open. That will create a client node linked to the sensor. Then data is read. Repeatedly sample the sensor and post the event to each client attached to this sensor. The event will be turned to calling the onSensor event Watson function inside the library. The library will find the caller and call the event's callback. Let's look at another sample here, which demonstrates the inter-app communication in PubSub model. Even it can support the WebAssembly communicate with the remote devices. The next site is the source code for the Subscriber. Simply, it just calls the API Subscriber event in the onInit. The first parameter is the topic of the event, alert overheat. The second parameter is the callback for the event handling. The right side is the source code for the publisher application. It just creates a repeated timer in the onInit. Every second, the timer one update function will be triggered. And in the function, it just posts the event on alert overheat with a calling API published event. Some IoT devices may have touchscreen designed. You can program Watson apps to provide graphic user interface. The one provided two samples with a little video, which is a 2D graphic user interface library. In the right side, the above one is the Watson app runs on Linux with a simple direct-media layer. The one below is the same Watson binary runs on the STM32 board with a physical touch LCD. The two samples demonstrated, you can either build the little video 2D library into the host software or build it into the Watson bytecode as part of the application. Now, let's have a quick start. On Wammer, there are a few steps. First one to set up the building environment. So you can follow the command below to get all the building tools environment available. Then download Wammer repository from the GitHub. Then start to build the mini product for runtime and also run the Watson module on that. Build the mini product I-Wassam. You can follow the command here. It will generate a binary file I-Wassam. Then follow the commands here to build the Watson module from source code. Then use the I-Wassam to load the generated Watson module and then run it. In the picture in the right side, so we can see the output from the Watson module. The hello world is printed and also print the Watson micro runtime. To use the AOT compiler, first you will need to download and build LLVM. Then build the Wammer AOT compiler, Wammer C. So when Wammer C is available, you can use the Wammer C to compile the Watson module into AOT module. Then you can just use the I-Wassam generate in previous page to run the AOT module here. If you have some interest to try the Wammer, here we show some basic usage. How to load a Watson binary and call into the Watson function from your host software. In the right side, basically you will first initialize the Watson runtime by calling the Watson runtime init. Then load the Watson binary into memory. Then you probably will register some native APIs. So those APIs can be called by the Watson applications. Then you load the buffer into a module. Then you will call the Watson runtime instantiate to create an instance of this module. Now you are able to call the function inside the Watson applications. First you need to find out the handle to this function by the symbol name, which is a fib here. Then you can create an execution environment by defining some stack size. Then you will call the Watson runtime call Watson into the target function. The parameter will be the execution environment and the function handle. The parameters you want to pass into the Watson function, which is in array. If the function failed, you will be able to get the failure from calling Watson runtime get exception. In the other direction, we may need to call native functions from the Watson module. It is very easy in one way. In the runtime, you just register a number of native functions by calling Watson runtime register. Each element in the array for registration contains the function symbol name, the native function address, and the function signature. The one has extended the signature a bit to make the process much simpler. On the right side, the signature letter star means the parameter is a pointer in the Watson module. So the runtime will do the address space conversion. The letter tiles must follow the star, means the length of the buffer pointed. So the runtime can do the boundary check. The letter dollar means the parameter is a string in the Watson world. There are more useful reference links listed here. Such as build the source code in Watson binary, embed warmer, the warmer head files, build warmer, export native API to Watson, and the basic sample. It is all for the topic WebAssembly Microruntime. I would recommend you to download warmer and try it out. If you have any problem, you can post an issue in the GitHub. I'm sure your issue will be answered very quickly. Thank you. Bye.


African political thought is something which is not taught very much in the universities of the world. There's not even very much taught in African universities, and certainly in the North Atlantic there are only two places where you can take dedicated courses in African political thought. One is at Columbia University, it's taught by Professor Madami, and one here at SOAS taught by myself, but it's a daunting task. Don't forget there are 55 different countries in Africa, and even if you take out the five North African countries and you concentrate on sub-Saharan Africa, you're looking at a huge welter of national experiences, a huge welter of different aspirations that come out of different backgrounds. To talk about a single Africa is almost impossible. But what binds the southern countries of Africa, that is those countries that underneath the North African tip of Africa, is a colonial experience. Every single sub-Saharan African country was colonized with the exception of Ethiopia, and the Italians tried quite hard to colonize that country and were only very temporarily and partially successful. Ethiopia also stands out in the sense that it has had a very, very long history and it has a written language, the old language of geese, and you can still buy bibles from black marketeers in different Ethiopian cities, written in geese, which was the language of the priests, something like Latin in medieval Europe. And the five third Ethiopia was also a Coptic Christian nation, with probably the oldest liturgy in the Christian world, older than that of Roman Catholicism, makes that country very unique with very unique traditions. And yet it has participated in the whole discourse of what it means to be African, what it means to be an African political creature, and what it means to be an African state in today's international relations. So much so that the headquarters of the African Union are located in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, but when you're looking at the formation of African political thought there was in fact a very great deal of synergy, a very great deal of discussion and debate among black leaders the world over, not only from Africa but from the African diaspora. In the 20th century this made itself felt in a whole series of Pan-African Congresses. There were a number of these, they were held in different parts of the world, but chiefly in London and Paris, one in New York, but the most famous one was in 1945, held in Manchester. And to that particular Pan-African Congress came people like Kwame Nkrumah, the future Prime Minister of Ghana, Kenyatta, the future Prime Minister of Kenya, and you also had luminaries, intellectual luminaries from the black Afro-American experience, people like Webb Dubois, you had conservative people like Hastings Bander who would later become the first Prime Minister of Malawi, but they all came together in Manchester. And 1945 was a pivotal date because the whole idea of independence, the whole idea of liberation, the whole idea of what was going to happen to Africa after the end of World War II, that became paramount in their discussions. Under what ethos would Africa become independent? And Ghana was the first country to become independent in 1957. There was a whole slew of others from 1960 onwards and then the process of independence of freedom from colonial rule continued. There were some die-hard colonial regimes that held on. For instance it took Portugal until 1975 and it took a coup in Portugal engineered by young officers to persuade that country to let go of its colonies, the major ones being Angola and Mozambique. White minority regimes held sway in Rhodesia until 1980 and it became independent as Zimbabwe. And of course apartheid in South Africa lasted as long as 1990 and after the release of Nelson Mandela there were four years of quite fraught and difficult negotiations until the first majority rule elections were held in 1994. There are still all kinds of problems in Africa to do with independence. It took Eric Treer until the early 1990s to gain independence from Ethiopia. It took South Sudan only extremely recently to gain independence from Sudan. And there are still unresolved questions what to do about Somaliland. Should that be a country with independence of its own or a main part of Somalia? What about the vexed question of what used to be called Spanish Sahara? Does that get independence from Morocco? So there are questions of internal African colonialism which have yet fully to be resolved. But the whole idea that somehow Africa has now come into its own independent enough to make a statement in the world speaks to two kinds of political thought. First of all what kind of political thought governs each individual African country and what kind of political thought does Africa speak to when it's addressing the outside world? How does an independent series of African nations address the international relations of a very very vexed late 20th and 21st century? What you have when you look at the Manchester Conference of 1945 and the first real slew of independences from 1960 onwards is a period of only 15 years. That's an extremely short time. Europe itself was still recovering from the war throughout those 15 years and in the 1960s of course Europe undertook a renewal of a very conspicuous nature, the whole youth rebellion, the whole Beatles rock and roll phenomenon, the whole idea of a new generation finding its own feet not tied to the rationing, the poverty, the post-war recovery ethos of most of Europe that began to break loose at the same time as Africa began to break loose. So there's new political thought all around the world in Europe that led to the student uprisings of 1968. It led to the free speech movement at Berkeley and in American campuses round about the same time. It meant a world in which thought was new and sought to renew the world. The role of Africa, the place of Africa in this renewal of thought and trying to put fresh ideas on the table is the subject of this particular course. So it's not Africa in isolation. What you do have is two major contributions on the part of Africa to political thought, certainly in those early post-independence years. You had a sense particularly in the French-speaking countries of a certain negritude to use the words of those who'd gone to Paris to study and who fell underneath the sway of French philosophical movements, French thinkers such as Jean Poisartre, the whole existential circle, the idea that there could be a major contribution to world culture through African culture. The whole black is beautiful ethos that was then celebrated in song by people like Nina Simone. That whole idea of black is beautiful made a major contribution to the idea of Africa with pride. In other parts of Africa there was very very much the idea that indigenous thought, thought that had stemmed from African traditional values, could be married to the post-war social democratic values and socialist values that were beginning to find their feet in expression and in terms of new legislation and new social projects in Europe. The idea that there was a communalism, a shared experience that one could derive from the past, marry it to the present to carry the nation forward into the future and that the binding force, the cohesion of these ideas past, present, leading to the future could put nations on the map and nowhere perhaps was this more pronounced than in Zambia where there were some 70 different ethnic groups speaking 70 separate languages yet bound together in the statehood that married traditional thought, Christian values, social democratic values and British Labour Party values to do with the construction of a welfare state while all at the same time resisting the encroachments of white minority regimes immediately to the south. Week by week we'll be exploring all of these different strands of thought coming from Africa and discussing the contribution that they have made and can make to the world of international thought and to the world of international relations.


Nick Vanders, oh that's right, you were on the sheet here, good, cloud bursting. Yes. So you were on the keynote yesterday. Yesterday, it seems like a blur, things are going crazy around here, that's for sure. So VMware, I mean we just had them on here, let's talk about VMware for a minute, so we just an opening question.  Is that scare HP or not? I mean, because you have a lot of virtualization going on within HP. Yeah, we're the number one partner with VMware, there's more VMware that lands on HP servers than any other server in the marketplace. So, very good relationship, and does it scare us? You know, I've heard this question multiple times, is consolidation, does that scare you? No, because we actually broke through a lot of backlogs for IT organizations as they solve consolidation problems. Does virtualization scare us because we'll sell less servers? No, we're actually selling more servers now than we ever did before, and lots of them running VMware. And there's, while there's a lot of virtual machines going out there, there's still a lot of physical machines going out there as well, you know. So, it's a combination. It's more efficient, still complexity that needs to be kind of abstracted away. I mean, Intel did not lose steam by cloud. I mean, they're growing because of cloud, so. Yeah, I think to a large extent, when I talk to businesses, they have so many projects that are on the back burner because they don't have enough infrastructure or manpower people in order to implement the ideas. There is no shortage of ideas. And if we can break through some of those backlogs by making infrastructure more efficient, making people more efficient, and that's where cloud comes into play, and you know, push button, deploy an application, well, let's get our customers, our clients, focused on their business instead of, you know, worrying about the infrastructure. We just want to deploy it. Right, so virtualization is the first stage in that journey. It's an on-premise dynamic, and customers are battling that at different phases. Now we get to cloud. Yeah, takes it to a whole new level. Yeah, take me through that progression, right? Because virtualization is predominantly a VMware, you know, dominated world, right? But HP can infuse themselves in the discussion to kind of enable customers from virtualization to cloud. So, when I think about cloud and what customers really want, is they want to deploy a service, an entire service immediately now, and businesses say, you know, I want to deploy a service, and it might be a multi-tier, multi-node application, so it's server storage, infrastructure, VMs, physical machines, and they want to deploy it because they want to get their service out into the market and collect checks, right? And VMware produces VMs, it's great and we leverage those, but what we do with HP, we have an offering called HP Cloud System, and it is the most integrated, complete solution for building a private cloud or for a service provider, building a public cloud, and then even working across a hybrid cloud environment, and it does exactly that, you know, that the IT organization, the IT resources just turns into a pool of resources, and we expose, IT exposes a service catalog to the business, and they can deploy a Microsoft Exchange system, they can deploy a invoicing system, they can deploy an ad campaign, just pick it for service, hit go, and it reaches in and powers on infrastructure and deploys it. And when it hits threshold X, Y, or Z, it bursts over into the public cloud, right? Yeah, and that's what I demonstrated yesterday, is we now, with Cloud System, have the capability to automatically, when you run out of resources to be able to reach out to a service provider, in the case of the demonstration I did yesterday, we reached out and grabbed resources from a service provider by the name of Savis, and pulled in virtual machines from Savis into that service. So, and again, the business wasn't looking for the customers that I'm working with wasn't looking for a VM, they were looking for their advertising campaign, which needs two VMs for a web tier and two physical machines for a database tier, we hit go while I was on stage, and it deployed two VMs from Savis, two physical machines from the local resource pool, knitted them together, installed the software, and brought it up. So, we did a case study on Zynga, and the a-ha moment for those guys was the ability for right scale to help them kind of have a cohesive hold between on-premise and cloud, right? So, you guys have the orchestration, the automation, the framework to kind of bridge those two together, right? Right, so what we do with Cloud System is we've even integrated a policy engine so that when you define your application, you might define attributes for it, like the, you know, it's a medical system, the database, do not allow it go on to the public cloud, or inside of that policy engine, you've got rules based on cost, based on locality to customers, based on compliance and, you know, HIPAA rules and such like that. So then when you deploy a service, it can look at all the resource pools available, be they service provider or private, and pull together those resources and then hand it back to the customer as a running service. So, I'm a retailer, and I want to run my web tier, I can put that up in the cloud, but I keep my database tier on-premise. Sure, you can do that, absolutely. And another use case that I actually ran into with one of our POC customers is they expanded into a new market, just use an example, Singapore, and they don't have a data center in Singapore, but so they wanted to deploy their services into Singapore for the clientele that they have there. Well, click, go, you're done, right? You're paying for it as you use it, and that's, you know, the power that you get with a hybrid cloud environment where you've got intelligence across all of this as well is get the resources where you need them, when you need them, and both private and public. So, Patrick Har yesterday on stage at one of his keynotes talked about HP building their own public cloud by the summer, does that, so then the option becomes, I can burst over to Amazon to Savis, or by the way, burst over to HP, and it has levels of performance and availability that maybe differentiates it versus the existing public cloud. Yeah, we already out in the marketplace with HP Enterprise Compute Service as a cloud offering that you can pay for by the drink. And Patrick's probably alluding to other things that's not in my department, the public cloud services that HP has. I'm developing a solution that allows our customers or service providers to build a public cloud, but yes, we tap into HP as a public cloud with this. It's agnostic, it will be agnostic. And to service providers, and those service providers can use HP cloud system or use their own homegrown technology, maybe using operations orchestration and server automation, we'll tap into those because we've got a connector that'll be available later on this year, a connector where you just translate between cloud system and whatever service provider API that is out there in the marketplace. Right, and then you can manage that from a single pane of glass? Single pane of glass, and that's nice, because now you're deploying a service, I can deploy it and it'll land on top of Hyper-V, VMware, physical machines, or virtual machines from a cloud provider. And HP as a service provider, we just introduced local bursting yesterday as well. And what that means is I can burst, but I'm not going to actually go out to a service provider. You burst locally? Locally, HP's going to have extra capacity on site at the customer site and burst into that and you pay for it as you use it, and that helps out those customers that say, and there's a few of them that come to me and say, I cannot put anything in the cloud based on my regulations, based on the industry that I'm in. So the best definition I've heard of for cloud is it's a cloud if you don't have to pay for it upfront. And that could be the business unit. You know, think of the consumer, right? The business unit doesn't have to pay for it, they pay for it as they consume it, right? Now the IT department obviously has to make some investment, but you guys are saying we're going to put equipment on site and you pay for it as you use it. Yes, and so we'll put equipment on site and the customer would put a fixed amount of equipment on site and we'll add, let's say, 20% extra to that and they can tap into that as needed and they pay for it as they use it. And so that's a good definition for cloud. When IT presents a private cloud to their end users, they're charging for it as they use it. So it's kind of an internal cloud, pay for it as you use it as well. Yeah, yeah. So you just look at the customer as the business unit that way, right? Yeah, yeah. It still tries to hold. You always just kind of put a circle around a different organization as the quote unquote service provider.  Is it, they're really kind of getting to this hybrid cloud model first and then over time they figure out to the extent they want to move to cloud. It's kind of a let's date before we get married type situation from an adoptions profile standpoint. Well, I believe and we believe at HP that there isn't an endpoint of everybody going to public cloud or everybody going to private cloud or IT, traditional IT infrastructure disappearing. We think it's going to be a balance across those because there's pluses and minuses for each of those. And we're going to see customers invest in private cloud and be able to invest in getting resources from the public cloud as well. And the scary thing that people have run into that prevent them from doing this is each come with their own management system. Each come with their own, you know, you'd have an army of people taking care of traditional IT, your private cloud and your public cloud. That's where we've simplified things and we're investing on management across all of that, transparent bursting across all of that. You just say, give me an app and it'll grab it from the right resource pool based on the service levels and the attributes that you need so that you can get best of all of those. Now, where are customers in adoption? Well, everybody has traditional IT, I would say. I'd say about 70, 80% of people of the activity is in actually private cloud arena. People are trying to, the IT organizations are trying to turn themselves into a private cloud in the infrastructure space qualification there. And then there's a good uptake of infrastructure as a service public cloud. In the software as a service space, I'd say there's a lot more going on in the public cloud software as a service space. So, you know, we can slice and dice the cloud market quite granular here if you wanted to. And so does cloud burst, do I need to be an HP customer today or can I slide this in as a module or a solution that kind of enabled me to get to cloud over time? So what you can do today is connect up with HP or our partners and get a cloud system inside of your data center and that gives you a private cloud in your data center and it can be Greenfield, new system or we can pull in existing equipment, pull in your equipment that you bought from us in the past and build out a private cloud. And then when you're ready, you can flip the switch and just start reaching out. That cloud system will automatically reach out and grab resources from service providers. I did the demonstration that I've done, for instance, to burst out to a service provider is in a technical preview today where we have certain customers in POC environments today using it and that'll go general availability later on this year. So it'll be just part and parcel general availability for the product and then you just sign up with the service provider, register with them and then it appears in cloud system and you burst away. I want to ask you a couple of questions about one strategy and then what your goals are for this year. I'll say it's a growing market, it's good to see the cloud thing fully come into pick it up or HP, have that come together. So what's the strategy and then what's your goal for the next year just on the business side? So strategy, I think kind of describe that a little bit is we're trying to provide our customers with a simplified view to IT across traditional private and public environments and drive it to make it dead easy, really simple to tap into any of those options in the marketplace. That's absolutely strategy and we're doing that by implementing cloud system offerings like cloud system into the marketplace and we're fueling that with converged infrastructure, the best servers, the best storage and the best networking in industry. Our strategy includes being very heterogeneous at the same time because we know every customer that we talk to has got a heterogeneous environment so we want to tap into that. Now for goals. Say tactics, we'll just go down the kind of the hoshin planning of HP, that's a strategy with some of the tactics that you got to do to make that happen because it's complicated. It's complicated so a lot of it is, well some of it is education there's, well you tell me, is there a, when you talk to a customer or clients in the industry, is there a common definition of what cloud is? I was just in a session. Yeah, lower costs. Yeah, lower costs. Lower labor, lower costs. Faster agility, yesterday I was in a group and there was disparate opinions as to what cloud is. Is it software as a service, infrastructure as a service? Is it private cloud? Is it public cloud? Many people actually just lock into cloud equals public cloud. And, There's an on-premise component. I mean I was thinking public cloud has been out there and it's different. You know, VMware wasn't really involved much in that and all the Citrix has been, but the private is where the action is, hybrid is where the action is. So what we're interested in knowing is where you see the customers, they got to have some on-premise. Obviously they will always have on-prem stuff. So what is the, how do they get to that middle ground? Is it because they have partnerships? Is that why hybrids so? Well definitely partnerships. We announced a cloud agile program for instance, yesterday as well, where we're partnering up with many service providers in the industry, so HP as a service provider, but also we're open. Many other service providers, I think we announced a partnership with Verizon and others in the cloud space, their cloud providers, their private cloud hosters, public cloud providers. So we're working with them to enhance their market reach through our- But your cloud out there only has a shingle because it's still unknown and people are preferring online providers for cloud, which is the multi-tenancy issues we've solved, but ultimately the channel will be both direct cloud for HP and partnership, right? Absolutely. So that's kind of out there, indirect, indirect if you will. The question that I want to ask is, how are you looking at, as a utility standpoint, the security side? Obviously we ask this question all the time around security with the hacks that RSA was just compromised at the token stuff and PlayStation House has been documented for months now. That's a concern. So how is the utility of the cloud dealing with the security? Is it a do-over? Dave Vellante and I always talk about that. You know, what's the paradigm there? So you need to, when we put in a private cloud solution, for instance, we don't much think about mission-critical security, absolute multi-tenancy, keeping applications separated from the cells and data separated from one app status, separated from the other apps data. For instance, with our three-par storage, and I think we just had David Scott previously talking here, we can take a, down at an infrastructure level, we can take a three-par storage array and divide it up and make it a multi-tenant environment with multiple customers running on the same device and you have complete separation between those. Now we have to do that with every aspect of infrastructure and then bring that up to the cloud level so that the entire service is multi-tenant. And that's, so we're investing on the component levels and at the cloud level as well. And when do we get multi-cloud? Multi-cloud, right? So that if I need to, well, you have everyone kind of runs out and builds their cloud, but federation is always going to be better. Cloud providers getting bursting to other cloud providers for additional capacity. Yeah, whether it be dual rights or just, I mean, to hedge your bets, right? And no one, you can get data in the cloud, but you can't always get it out, right? It's the Hotel California problem, right? We heard that yesterday. Yeah, and so how does that, cloud is not magic. It doesn't allow you to just ignore IT best practices, right? You need HA, you need no single point of failure, right? So ideally you can spread it across and federate it. And that's a multi-cloud story. How far off are we from that? Obviously got to walk before you run. Obviously got to walk before you run, right? But how far, is that years, days, weeks, months? Well. By summer? With what I talked about and what I demonstrated to be able to burst out to a service provider, you know, we'll put a single service provider into our catalog and then shortly thereafter we'll be two, three, four, five different service providers and you'd be able to burst from a single system to be able to burst some of your resources to one service provider, another set of your resource to another service provider so you're not putting all your eggs in one basket, per se. And actually I've worked with one of the customers that I was dealing with is that was their policy. They worked and said, we want to be a POC customer on your bursting and here's my list of service providers I want to burst to because I want to have, if something goes wrong here, I've got a backup plan to go there. I want to ask you one final question before we wrap up to kind of close out. Share with the folks out there your vision of the next five years. Obviously, this is kind of a utility step. We're kind of in the weeds of some, you know, cloud, because you have to deal with the day to day. But step back, look at the 20 mile stair and say, you know, where are we in five years? Right now, commonly we talk about internally within HP, we're actually at like stage zero of the cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud and cloud infrastructure and cloud capabilities. And we're putting a lot of great stuff in the marketplace, but there's a lot of evolution that needs to come, a lot of investment that has to come, especially in the software space to glue this together, to manage this holistically as a single unit to tie back into traditional IT processes, to evolve traditional IT processes into, you know, cloud compatible IT processes. So I think it's technology is one piece of it. Processes really, really, really, really need to change over the next two, three, four, five years in order for cloud to really break free and take off. Okay, Nick Vanderspiep, director of IIS Strategy at DHP. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE and joining us. Appreciate the knowledge. Cloud is at the beginning stage zero and it will grow. Great opportunity for everybody involved, developers, companies, the big companies and also the white spaces that are available. And that's exciting time. Thanks so much, appreciate it. Thank you.


I like the fact Gearbox are seemingly nerf in the wedding invitation by buffing other snipers. Today we take a look at another sniper which has just been under receiving end of a massive damaged buff and while the effects are utterly crazy, check this out people.  So the Krakatoa is a Maliwan sniper rifle which hasn't seen much loving since the game has been released. To be honest as a sniper I rarely even shot because of its low damage well it's low damage prior to the buff especially compared to other snipers in the game and I said this a while back snipers in this game for the most part are pretty useless yes there are a certain few that stand out and which you can add to your build but for the most part snipers in this game don't really act like the weapon type they represent over the past month though Gearbox have no doubt taken this into account and brought us some amazing new snipers including a sniper which lets be honest everyone thought would be nerfed soon that being the wedding invitation as well as buffing other snipers and yes after the latest hotfix the wedding invitation hasn't been touched but other snipers have been brought up to par with it which is actually reassuring in my opinion I like the fact Gearbox ain't nerfing all these great weapons but instead are bringing other weapons up to par with them and today guys we take a look at one of a few weapons that received that massive damage buff now I will state this isn't just snipers that received buffs many weapons did some of which I have tested an absolute monster so videos will come on them but today is about a Krakatoa so this Maliwan sniper acts like a sniper in my opinion limited ammo but it makes the most of it it's new stat card you can see on the screen now the best variant I have having 9293 damage which doubles up when my sentinel is active so this sniper received a crazy damage buff taking it from a damage stat of around 1 to a 4.25 giving it the greatest damage buff in recent hotfixes I believe besides the lub and outcome guys is a sniper which is on par with the best weapons in this game without doubt and you guys saw at the start of the video how quick this thing kills gravewood here's another clip of me not waiting around I will also add this build I am using within this video on my zane isn't really set up to help damage wise with snipers this could be even more powerful people with a correct build 100% while worth state though is as a sniper should it absolutely eat through ammo because you have so much fun with it you forget and find yourself low almost all the time this is where I do think the wedding invitation has the slight edge although both are kind of equal in terms of damage output the wedding invitation has the ability to give you back that precious ammo upon hitting a crit shot so if I had to take one of the two I'd definitely take the wedding invitation but this is still up there in terms of damage output it's unpowered with it no doubt about it now what I believe gearbox have done here is add a weapon into the game which is basically almost unpowered with an invitation due to the fact you can't farm the wedding invitation anymore and I've seen many people in the worldwide web complain about this fact of missing the opportunity in getting a wedding invitation so what they're doing is they're buffing up the snipers which are on par with it so go out people and farm this thing now this does drop from the rampage upon fromethia within the forgotten basilica but I won't lie to you I farmed him for hours getting only a couple none being the role I wanted within the same time I saw many more drop at the catagora ball so this thing is a regular world drop from other places too which in my opinion will be way more efficient than farming the rampager I mean his immune stages in that battle just make it super long in my opinion probably the level or two threddy farm is the best way in getting this for sure guys because that is the most efficient let's you know fine in the game right now so yes people the kurakatoa is definitely up there with the best weapons in the game now dps wise absolutely no doubt about it now I do series to look forward to all the builds made surrounding this thing I have one on the way which certainly benefits both this the wedding invitation even a firestorm which I will have a video on coming soon well yeah guys this is now in my opinion I must get weapon I mean if you insert to this no matter what platform you play on you can always join my discord as you may know I do have dedicated trading sections for all platforms someone there will have this and someone there will trade with you my discord is linked within the video description by the way so do come join but on that note we have come to the end of the video this has been the review of the newly reformed kurakatoa sniper rifle an absolute monster of a weapon now guys I hope you enjoyed the video I really do if you did leave a like really helps out if you're new around here want to see more boardlands be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video upload you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button well guys thanks as always for stopping by hopefully enjoyed video and hopefully I will see you on that next one