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February 10, 2020

Storage and Networking Bytes: 3D XPoint Lawsuit

(Petr Bonek/Shutterstock)

Intel and Micron are being sued for a portion of the royalties they earn from sales of the 3D XPoint memory-class storage technology they co-developed for a time and brought to market as separate products in 2017 and 2019, respectively.

According to a January story in Computer Business Review, the lawsuit was filed in Michigan bankruptcy court in 2018 by the creditors of Energy Conversion Devices (ECD), the research outfit founded by Stanford Ovshinsky, the inventor behind the breakthrough in the development of the material chalcogenide, which drives the 3D X-point mechanism.

Ovshinsky, who died in 2012, had done the core work behind chalcogenide in the 1960s, and in 1998 he signed a contract with a Micron lawyer to commercialize the technology. The deal involved licensing the chalcogenide technology to Ovonyx, a company that Ovshinsky founded. ECD would go on to sub-license the technology, but ECD maintained certain rights to the technology.

When ECD went bankrupt, Micron acquired the assets. In July 2015, the lawsuit asserts that Micron licensed Ovonyx’s technology to a new entity, called Ovonyx Memory Technology. This event violated certain rights of the creditors of Energy Conversion Devices, according to the CBR story. Intel and Micron deny doing anything wrong, and are defending the lawsuit.

Computational Storage Startup Gets $20M

NGD Systems last week announced that it raised $20 million to help it develop computational storage technology that eliminates the need to move data around for machine learning and AI workloads. The Series C round, which was led by MIG Capital, is expected to bolster development of NGD’s NVMe-based computational storage drive.

NGD is one of a handful of companies seeking to popularize computational drives, which essentially bring CPU processing power directly to the storage device, thereby reducing the need to move data over the network. NGD says this technique enables edge devices to run data analytics, including AI and ML, instead of moving the data to centralized clusters.

“Pioneering companies like NGD Systems are sending a clear message to the data storage industry — there is a better way to handle the petabytes of data that all organizations must contend with to process AI and ML workloads and that is computational storage,” Richard Merage, CEO of MIG Capital, said in a press release.

Dynatrace Gives Davis More Smarts

Application performance management software developer Dynatrace made a series of announcements last week at Perform, its annual user conference, which was held in Las Vegas. Chief among the announcements was improved support for Kubernetes in Davis, which is the name of the Massachusetts company’s explainable AI engine. With support for the “full stack” of Kubernetes components and metrics, Dynatrace makes it easier for customers to deploy containerized environments and clusters.

Customers using Dynatrace to track customer interactions with their digital properties will be interested to know that Davis also gains support for new metrics like revenue trends, customer conversions, and churn. These features, along with improved integration to analytics tools like Adobe Analytics, bolsters a company’s’ ability to act upon vital user data.

Finally, by integrating with third-party mobile app components, Davis is able to give companies more insight into how their customers are interacting online.  This feature, coupled with Dynatrace’s AI techniques, is able to give companies the “who, what, where, when, and why” to important customer questions.

“With our new enhancements, our radically different approach to infrastructure observability just got a whole lot better,” Steve Tack, Dynatrace’s SVP of product management, said in a press release.

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Storage and Networking Bytes — January 17, 2020

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