The AI boom has encouraged everyone and their uncle to launch a data center business. But spinning up a data center isn’t easy.

Even if you solve the problem of securing the GPUs, network switches, and storage, you still have to get everything configured, running and be able to cater to customers’ various needs. Getting getting a data center ready to provide cloud-computing services AI inference and training services can take months of work. And the longer you take to get to market, the higher the cost of having all those precious GPUs sitting idle.

Network automation startup Netris claims it can make that problem disappear for neoclouds. The company provides software that runs on network switches, and it also offers a platform that connects to switches to help neocloud operators reduce the time it takes to go live by automating setup, configuration and operations. The platform also provides network abstraction, so hardware configurations can be changed as required, and it isolates servers and resources at the hardware layer so neoclouds can serve multiple customers (multi-tenancy).

If that sounds like a solution to an obvious problem, you’re not wrong. Until recently, data centers were largely the domain of large infrastructure operators like Equinix, NTT, Digital Realty, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, or Google. Those companies pretty much solved network setup, configuration and multi-tenancy for themselves by hiring ranks of engineers or building the automation themselves. Small neocloud businesses rarely have such resources at their disposal.

“As a GPU cluster operator, you need to make configuration changes to every link, every day. At traditional data centers, they were using something called SDN [software-defined networking] to do this, but SDN is falling short, because it’s a software technology,” Netris’ CEO Alex Saroyan told TechCrunch. “For AI, software is not okay, because the amount of traffic is so high, everything must be hardware accelerated. So you need something like SDN, but completely hardware accelerated. This is what we do, and this is what what we’ve been doing for eight years.”

Saroyan said Netris’ platform is vendor-agnostic, compatible with networking equipment and standards used at data centers, both for Nvidia and AMD’s servers.

The startup’s promise has found many believers, one of which is Nvidia. Two years ago, the chipmaking giant was so impressed by a demo of Netris’ technology that it recommended the company to several customers. Today, Netris is live at more than 35 GPU clusters around the world (about a million GPUs total), operated by the likes of Lightning AI, Foxconn, Visionbay, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Tensorwave, Telus, and others.

To build on that momentum, Netris has now raised $15 million in a Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

Notably, there’s no AI at work here. Saryoan said the company only uses algorithms it had developed previously for running and configuring automation and operations.

“We started way before AI. We understood the challenge early on, and we started developing this algorithm early on. AI is not deterministic, right? Sometimes it likes to do things on its own. It’s good for creative work, but for changing many thousands of switch configurations, you don’t need to be creative. You need to be very persistent and repeatable.”

a16z partner Guido Appenzeller is joining the company’s board. Looking forward, Netris aims to use the funding to hire more engineers and sales staff, add support for more hardware vendors, and implement more functionality in its algorithm.

If you’re over seeing announcements about Amazon’s Prime Day sale and Amazon’s own on-sale devices, I can’t blame you. It’s everywhere these days, and every website is trying to replicate the sale. If you’re feeling like you want to escape from the Amazon ecosystem grind, though, I’ve got an idea (and a sale!) for you.

One of the biggest markets Amazon has changed is book shopping. (I’ll always miss my beloved Borders bookstores.) If you’d like to get your reading experience away from Amazon, you can put the Kindle deals down and start shopping for a whole different e-reader. There’s an excellent option for you that offers a better price for a color screen, comes with page-turner buttons, and can double as a digital notebook.

What gadget is that, you may wonder? It’s the Kobo Libra Colour, and it’s not the only e-reader the brand has on sale.

The Best Color E-Reader Deal

The Kobo Libra Colour is my favorite color e-reader. It has a colorful 7-inch screen with an adjustable warm front light, and 32 GB of storage to hold hundreds of books. I really like Kobo’s e-readers, and you’ll get all the features you’d find on a Kindle: a dedicated store to buy e-books, a membership (Kobo Plus, starting at $8 a week) you can join to get access to a library of e-books and audio content, and the ability to add library books right onto the device.

But what I especially like about the Kobo Libra Colour is how many more features you get for a price similar to the Kindle Colorsoft. Both have color screens, but the Libra Colour has page-turner buttons and a thicker side with said buttons, making it easy to hold and control your pages (no more rapidly tapping around your screen to find your page). I also love that if you purchase the Kobo Stylus 2 ($70), it can double as a digital notebook. I really like that you can annotate your books on the page with Kobo, which Kindle doesn’t allow you to do.

Kobo recently raised its prices, so you’re not getting as much of a discount as you used to. But that’s also why I’d jump on this sale now, so you don’t have to pay the new price tag instead of the cheaper one.

Another On-Sale Kobo

Looking for something a little cheaper, and aren’t married to a color screen? Kobo’s Clara BW is also on sale.

The Clara is smaller than the Libra Colour, with just a 6-inch black-and-white screen, but it has an adjustable warm front light. It’s similar to the Kindle Paperwhite in that sense, but it’s the size of the basic Kindle. It’s not on as big a discount as the Paperwhite, so that one is a better buy if you’re open to any black-and-white e-reader, but if you’re looking for a cheaper way to get out from under Amazon’s boot, this is a great option.

from the pettiest-administration-ever dept

It’s absolutely irritating to be living under the thumb of an administration filled to the brim with facile subservients who think they’re the biggest and best people to ever walk the earth. It’s a bunch of boys pretending to be men, right up until they have to talk to the boss, at which point they return to their innate yes man positioning.

It’s even worse that this entire government pretends to be the biggest badasses around (DEPARTMENT OF WAR! SOCIAL MEDIA BLOODSPORT!). Everyone knows it isn’t, but everyone in this administration pretends otherwise. It’s the pettiest, weakest presidency we’ve ever endured, continually propped up by lackeys who think we’re fooled by its manliest-of-the-men facade. Even the most tentative jab will reveal the facade is mostly balsa and rice paper.

But even if this government is loaded with weak men and weak-willed men who serve/worship them, it still has a considerable amount of power. That allows it to perpetually punch down, targeting the people least likely to fight back.

This is the level of “government” this abhorrent death cruise of a presidency delivers on a daily basis: the multiplied force of the federal government being brought to bear against a single human being who dared to criticize a foreign politician. Yes! You are reading that correctly!

This isn’t even the normal pettiness directed at critics of this government. This is the administration getting all heated up because someone Trump likes (so long as they remain in their country) got besmirched by a solitary migrant seeking asylum in this country.

The Trump administration detained a Colombian immigrant this week in Phoenix after he spoke out against a Trump-endorsed candidate in his home country’s upcoming presidential election.

Franklin Humberto Coral Garrido, a progressive online activist known as Beto Coral, is a supporter of President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, a leftist who has clashed with President Trump. He has publicly criticized Abelardo De La Espriella, a right-wing candidate backed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Coral was arrested by immigration authorities on Tuesday, the same day Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a memo determining that he was deportable from the United States.

That’s all it takes to get on Trump’s radar. And, apparently, that’s all it takes for bitch boy Rubio to fire up his MS Office Suite to compose a memo making this single person a priority for immigration officers. It’s even stupider that it first appears. Not only was Rubio prompted (most likely by his boss) to write this memo authorizing Coral’s detention, but he told his underlings this was justified entirely by Coral’s decision to utilize the rights afforded to him by the US Constitution:

“Coral Garrido has used his presence in the United States to conduct political activity in support of the Petro government” and has advocated against a candidate for president, Mr. Rubio wrote, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The New York Times.

That is not an arrestable/detainable offense! Like it or not, MAGA bigots, constitutional rights are given to US residents, even if they’re not currently citizens. There’s a very good reason for that — one that will never be fully appreciated by the MAGA faithful until they travel outside of this country and are subjected solely to local laws like cane beatings, summary executions, etc. for things that would at least get you a nominally fair trial in the US. The memo written by Rubio says things it definitely shouldn’t say, like this guy needs to be detained because he engaged in free speech.

Whether this is a leading indicator or just the tip of the ICEberg hardly matters. What does matter is that the government isn’t allowed to do this. And criticism of a foreign presidential hopeful should never form the basis for arrest or detention. Our freedom to criticize our own government is enshrined, cherished, and treated with the utmost respect (for the most part) by our court system. We — and by that I also mean any person currently residing on US soil — should be doubly free to criticize foreign governments without fear of reprisal.

But reprisal is all this government has. It can’t win hearts and minds, nor does it care to. It likes Stockholm Syndrome and the beaten dog dynamics of Trump’s relationship with his political appointees. It doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. The problem here is that the administration believes “not caring” is the same thing as “being right.” For now, though, rights still matter. Rubio’s proactive toadying doesn’t wish the Constitution into the cornfield. And if natural-born Americans think this administration won’t come after them if they displease Trump, they’re wrong. We’re only 18 months into this presidency that has already compared mild dissent to outright terrorism and insurrection. It’s not going to stop just because it’s run out of outspoken migrants to detain.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, beto coral, bigotry, dhs, free speech, ice, marco rubio, mass deportation, state department, trump administration

Typically, when you’re sitting on a plane on the tarmac, you switch your phone to flight mode while you’re sitting through yet another “quirky” (boring) safety video. You’ll watch some inflight entertainment, read the airline magazine if you get really desperate, and wonder if anyone ever buys those random watches for sale in the “duty free” section. Then, finally, upon landing, you’ll be connected back to the Internet and you’ll finally feel like you can breathe again.

Only, this time, you forgot to set your plane on flight mode. You’re sitting at 30,000 feet, and… your phone has signal? You’re online, and you’re getting notifications and emails just like you’re on the ground. You’ve accidentally discovered that your flight has an on-board cell tower.

Connection

When you’re cruising on a passenger airliner, you would typically expect to see little to no cellular signal by sheer virtue of altitude and speed. For one thing, you’re blasting past at immense speed and not staying in any one coverage zone for very long at all. Meanwhile, while you’re probably within 10 kilometers or so, vertically speaking, cell towers generally have their antennas aimed at the ground, not the sky. There simply isn’t much signal available, and you’re zooming around a bit too fast to hang on to any cell tower before it’s disappeared out of range.

Some airlines have gotten around this problem by providing on-board Internet connectivity over WiFi. The aircraft features an uplink to one of various satellite networks that provide Internet access, and that is provisioned to customers in the cabin over a WiFi router with a captive portal. Typically, for some painful charge in double digit US dollars, you can purchase a few hours of access to your emails and the Web, often with quite shaky connectivity.

However, there is sometimes a way to dodge the painful fees for onboard WiFI, while still getting online. A handful of airlines have equipped some of their fleets with cellular connectivity via a system called AeroMobile. They still rely on a satellite uplink for Internet access, and these planes generally still have onboard WiFi as well. However, if you happen to switch your phone out of flight mode, you might notice it connecting to a cell tower onboard—the AeroMobile picocell, in fact. Your phone connects to this tiny cell tower over cellular data links—originally 3G, later 4G or 5G depending on the hardware onboard—instead of WiFi. You escape the airline’s captive portal and data charges, instead paying your home carrier for data and whatever fee you normally get billed for international roaming. The ability to do this depends on your home mobile carrier, too, and whether they have an agreement with AeroMobile.

AeroMobile’s service depends on customers actually switching out of “Flight Mode” in order to allow the phone to use its cellular radios to connect to the picocell onboard the aircraft. Credit: AeroMobile

AeroMobile has been around for a long time now, first demonstrating its hardware with GSM and GPRS data links on aircraft as far back as 2005. The company’s voice and data offerings have stepped up over the years as mobile technology has moved on, albeit often some years behind the state-of-the-art in the cellular world. The first planes with 3G didn’t fly until 2015, well over a decade after the technology was becoming established on the ground. As a subsidiary of Panasonic Avionics, AeroMobile-equipped aircraft communicate with a range of satellites that Panasonic has access to over Ku-band and L-band links. In recent years, the company has been developing the capacity for its aircraft to seamlessly switch between links to geostationary and low-earth orbit satellites, with the former offering the best coverage, and the latter Eutelsat OneWeb satellites offering much reduced latency and higher link speeds. Ultimately, user experience depends on flight route, local conditions, and other factors; speeds and reliability can vary from good to spotty on any given day. There’s also the fact that, on any given flight, tens or hundreds of other users may be trying to get online over the same link, which can quickly dry up what little bandwidth may be available in some black spots on the world map with poor satellite coverage.

If you’re flying soon, it’s still unwise to rely on in-flight internet connectivity. Whether you’re hooking up over WiFi or cellular, there are still often issues with coverage, or with systems being inoperative on certain flights and at lower altitudes, even on airlines with the best-equipped fleets. You’re also unlikely to regularly get high enough speeds for comfortable streaming, so you’re better off downloading The Thick Of It prior to take-off rather than trying to watch it live off a server while you’re scooting over downtown Astana. However, now and then, when you’re lonely and high above this marbled sphere, you might be just able to hang out on Discord and flirt with a few friends back home thanks to Panasonic and a steady link to the satellites above. Have fun up there.

Banks aren’t short on AI ambition. Across the industry, there are almost weekly announcements about new deployments, new partnerships, and new capabilities.

But amidst the lofty pronouncements, not enough attention is given to building the underlying architecture that makes any of it sustainable.