Databricks has partnered with Google Cloud to deliver its platform to businesses around the world.

Under the partnership, organisations can now use Databricks to create a lakehouse capable of data engineering, data science, machine learning, and analytics on Google Cloud’s global, scalable, secure and elastic network.

Databricks on Google Cloud will integrate with Google BigQuery’s open platform and will leverage Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), therefore enabling customers to deploy Databricks in a fully containerised cloud environment for the first time.

According to Databricks, increasingly, Kubernetes and containers are the de facto orchestration system for enterprise workloads and applications running in the cloud.

Databricks on Google Cloud is built on GKE, Google Clouds secure, managed Kubernetes service, to support containerised deployments of Databricks in the cloud.

By adopting GKE as an operating environment, Databricks is able to leverage managed services for security, network policy, and compute and as a result, provide customers with increasing business value through Databricks analytics, AI, and ML capabilities.

Additionally, with GKE, Databricks increases its agility and the ability to accelerate the release of new features, quickly, at scale, and at lower cost.

Furthermore, Databricks states, with this integration businesses can extend their existing Databricks lakehouse capabilities, now running on Google Cloud, and can cross-leverage Google BigQuery for analytics, ultimately simplifying their data investments, increasing usage, and creating new, data-driven business models and opportunities.

According to the company, tight integration of Databricks with Google Clouds analytics solutions gives customers the ability to extend AI-driven insights across data lakes, data warehouses, and multiple business intelligence tools.

Furthermore, pre-built connectors integrate Databricks with BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Looker and Pub/Sub to unlock AI-driven insights, enable intelligent decision-making, and ultimately accelerate digital transformations through data-driven applications.

Under this new partnership, the two companies will continue to support the open source community, encourage open innovation and collaboration, making it easier for joint customers to build on open-source technologies.

Members of the joint ecosystem of partners have already committed to ensure integrations with Databricks on Google Cloud, including Accenture, Cognizant, Collibra, Confluent, Deloitte, Fishtown Analytics, Fivetran, Immuta, Informatica, Infoworks, Insight, MongoDB, Privacera, Qlik, SADA, SoftServe, Slalom, Tableau, TCS and Trifacta, among others.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says, “Businesses with a strong foundation of data and analytics are well-positioned to grow and thrive in the next decade. We’re delighted to deliver Databricks lakehouse for AI and ML-driven analytics on Google Cloud.

“By combining Databricks capabilities in data engineering and analytics with Google Cloud’s global, secure network and our expertise in analytics and delivering containerised applications we can help companies transform their businesses through the power of data.”

Databricks CEO and cofounder Ali Ghodsi says, “This is a pivotal milestone that underscores our commitment to enable customer flexibility and choice with a seamless experience across cloud platforms.

“We are thrilled to partner with Google Cloud and deliver on our shared vision of a simplified, open, and unified data platform that supports all analytics and AI use-cases that will empower our customers to innovate even faster.”

Western Digital’s composable OpenFlex flash storage system now supports Kubernetes storage, courtesy of Linbit’s LINSTOR software.

OpenFlex is a physical chassis, containing SSDs or disk drives, which is addressed as an NVMe target device. It’s basically an NVMe-oF JBOD (Just a bunch of drives) and needs additional software to link it to containerised environments.

Manfred Berger, WD’s senior manager for business development, platforms, said in a statement: “With Linbit’s LINSTOR software added to our OpenFlex offering, the software-defined-storage solution combines the advantages of SDS systems, Linux OS features and composable hardware so that organisations have the confidence they need in their Kubernetes environments.”

Philipp Reisner, Linbit CEO, said: “With the open-source LINSTOR we bridge the gap between the workload orchestrator (Kubernetes) and the efficient OpenFlex storage devices from Western Digital. In combination delivering high-performance block storage at a very attractive price point.”

LINSTOR is configuration management system for storage on Linux systems. The software use the Linux LVM tool to manage logical volumes and/or ZFS ZVOLs on a cluster of nodes. Linbit has developed a Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) storage construct for Linux and LINSTOR uses this to provide block storage devices to users and applications.

LINSTOR sees WD’s OpenFlex Composable Infrastructure as an NVMe-accessed storage pool from which it can allocate space to DRBD. OpenFlex has a REST Open Composable API which is used by LINSTOR to do this.

That’s the downstream aspect sorted. On the upstream side there is a LINSTOR Operator to deliver DRBD capacity to Kubernetes. It installs DRBD in Kubernetes environments, thus linking OpenFlex and Kubernetes, and manages Kubernetes satellite and controller pods.

Samsung and VMWare are to collaborate on an extended 5G partnership, which will help telcos accelerate the rollout of their 5G networks across the globe.

The partnership will see VMWare optimise Samsung’s portfolio of products from Core to Edge to RAN for both containerised network functions (CNFs) and virtualised network functions (VNFs), using VMware Telco Cloud Platform.

“With innovative and open 5G networks beginning to transform the landscape, Samsung sees the value in delivering carrier-grade solutions with VMware that help CSPs easily embrace cloud native technology and efficiently deliver our network functions and services across their 5G networks with automation,” said Wonil Roh, senior vice president and head of Product Strategy and Networks Business at Samsung Electronics

The extended partnership represents a continuation of the pairs existing working relationship.

As part of the partnership, the companies have been working together at Samsung’s lab to optimise and accelerate the readiness of Samsung’s various VNFs and CNFs, such as vRAN, 5G Core, MEC, Management, and Analytics, with the VMware Telco Cloud Platform.

“The infrastructure supporting 5G will depend on virtualised and containerised network functions delivered from software-defined telco and edge cloud platforms,” said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager, Telco and Edge Cloud Business Unit, VMware.

“We are thrilled to be working with Samsung to deliver carrier-grade solutions that leverage the VMware Telco Cloud portfolio to help CSPs seize this 5G moment and transform themselves into leading technology innovators.”