The new facilities will be "a seamless extension" of customer facilities where they will be able to shift workloads at will with a few virtualization management console commands. VMware is building commands into its vCloud Director product and the modules in its vCloud Suite to automatically provision a designated virtual machine with networking that connects between the customer's premises and a remote Hybrid Cloud Service data center.

VMware is not about to build a global chain of cloud data centers on the scale of a Facebook or Google. It's more likely to lease space in existing third-party facilities, equip them with its own hardware and software, and operate them as public cloud facilities. CEO Pat Gelsinger said VMware, in making such a move, is not backing away from continued use of channel partners and existing data center partners, which include Bluelock, CSC and AT&T in the U.S. That list formerly included Dell as well, but Dell announced Monday it would no longer try to provide public cloud services.

In an interview after the announcement Tuesday of Hybrid Cloud Service, Gelsinger said that VMware was creating model VMware public clouds in the four data centers -- locations unspecified -- that its many regional service providers could emulate.

As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger explained to partners Feb. 27 in Las Vegas: "We all lose if [enterprise customers] end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud ... Own the corporate workload now and forever."

Maybe the event will even get underway with COO Carl Eschenbach repeating the exhortation he made to partners Feb. 27. Don't get beaten by a competitor "that sells books." He misspoke, of course. What he meant to say was don't get beaten by "a mere bookseller."

It's already known that VMware will say the hybrid cloud will include its own version of infrastructure-as-a-service, a public cloud that customers may turn to if they want to migrate into a large-scale version of what they've already got on premises. As a plus, their existing management tools will see workloads in either place, giving them an extension to their data centers.

That interpretation comes from Forrester Research analyst James Staten, who on March 13 posted a blog reporting what he heard from VMware executives as they told investors what they intended to do next: "Yep, a full public IaaS cloud meant to compete with Amazon Web Services, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, HP Cloud, Rackspace and others."

Under terms of the agreement, USRA, a nonprofit research organization, will operate the computer at the Ames facility. Twenty percent of the system's time will be allocated to universities via a competitive selection process.

The computer system selected for the facility is D-Wave Systems' D-Wave Two. Quantum computing combines the principles of quantum physics, where a bit of matter can exist in two states, with supercomputing processes that manipulate billions of bits of data. A bit can be 0, 1 or both, allowing the computer to test all possible solutions simultaneously.

NASA's interest in quantum computing lies in trying to solve extremely complex problems in areas such as optimizing air traffic control, navigation and communication, and robotics.

That's the gist of a plea issued this week by New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman, who's written to the CEOs of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, urging them to "help crack down on cell phone theft" by making it more difficult for thieves to wipe stolen devices' memory and resell the devices.

"This is a multi-billion dollar industry that produces some of the most popular and technologically advanced consumer electronic products in the world," said Schneiderman in a statement. "Surely we can work together to find solutions that lead to a reduction in violent street crime targeting consumers."

Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung -- plus Motorola, which is owned by Google -- control 90% of the U.S. smartphone market. All four except Google build some type of recovery capabilities into their devices. For Android, there are add-ons available in the Google Play online store.

Such partitions have been considered an ideal ever since workers began bringing their own smartphones into the office, but with many vendors already touting similar technologies of their own, it's not certain that VMware will gain traction in the crowded mobile enterprise management market.

VMware Horizon Mobile is available immediately for the LG Intuition and the Motorola RAZR M. New units will come ready to deploy the Android guest OS, but users who have previously purchased either phone can gain access as well. VMware plans to add support for additional models throughout the year.

IT managers once enjoyed uniform device deployments in which all employees were issued a pre-approved, easily managed device, such as a BlackBerry smartphone. As the bring-your-own device (BYOD) movement flooded the workplace with user-owned iPhones and Android models, however, IT staffers have been challenged to keep the devices secure while also respecting privacy concerns. Due to this tension, analysts have characterized the ability to isolate business data from personal data as the "holy grail" of mobile endpoint management.

When it comes to scale out, EMC was quick to recognize the shifting technology landscape by scooping up Isilon more than two years ago. While Isilon supplied the base technology, quickly becoming the most popular scale-out systems in the market, this year's EMC World demonstrates the EMC influence coming through in a big way. The company is introducing a new version of the OS, oneFS; breaking out of the traditional scale-out usage silos; and positioning modular storage systems such as Isilon to be key components in a new era of software-defined storage and big-data applications. As such, the big news about Isilon at this year's EMC World has nothing to do with new hardware and is all about adding new software features.

As we outlined in this Network Computing column detailing EMC's major software-defined storage product, ViPR, Isilon arrays can be full participants in virtualized, heterogenous storage pools that can include everything from high-performance VMAX and VNX arrays to Atmos private cloud object stores. But it's now clear that Isilon is inheriting other strands of EMC's enterprise DNA as several features of the upgraded oneFS are atypical for scale-out systems.

Sure, big iron like Arista's 7500E Data Center Switch, Broadcom's massively integrated Trident II switch chip, and EMC's high-performance and exceedingly scalable VMAX and VNX arrays still generate plenty of crowds and headlines, but the real focus of development resources, R&D dollars and executive attention is on software. If not eating the world, software is definitely encompassing a greater and greater share of it.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at EMC World, and nothing drove home the point with greater force and clarity than EMC CEO Joe Tucci's admission -- nay, proud affirmation -- of the fact that the storage goliath that rose to dominate its industry on the strength of its powerful and burly hardware now devotes the vast majority of its development resources on software. In response to a question at a media briefing on the effect of hardware commodification and the attendant proliferation of white box storage systems on the company's business, Tucci stated that at most, EMC has a mere 500 engineers developing hardware, out of 12,000 total. Indeed, Tucci claimed the company embraces commodity hardware wherever it can, citing as supporting evidence the fact that EMC makes only one custom ASIC. Chiming in, EMC COO David Goulden reinforced the point, saying, "Our value is in the integration and the packaging." Goulden left unsaid the implication that building a VNX array is easy; making it operate like a VNX array isn't.

"Huawei has no connection to the cybersecurity issues the U.S. has encountered in the past, current and future," Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, 68, told local reporters -- through an interpreter -- while on a visit to New Zealand this week, according to news reports.

Since founding the company 26 years ago, Ren had previously refused to conduct media interviews. But during his visit this week to New Zealand, he agreed to meet with reporters from four of the country's news outlets.

In response to reporters' questions, Ren dismissed allegations that his employees might be colluding with state security services, instead likening the relationship between his company and the Chinese government to that between New Zealand companies and their government, reported Fairfax Media in New Zealand. Furthermore, he said he was confident that his employees would be free to refuse any request from a Chinese intelligence service to spy on a foreign entity.

In a keynote speech at Interop, Facebook VP of hardware design and supply chain Frank Frankovsky reviewed two years of progress at expanding the scope of the project, which now includes open designs for server racks and cold storage designs based on how Facebook handles your old photos.

These designs are geared for very high performance and scalability, but also for energy efficiency. The industry average is that a data center will consume about 1.9 times as much electrical power as actually makes it to a server delivering compute services because of waste in the process, including electrical conversions and air conditioning demands. By minimizing the need for conversions and eliminating air conditioning, Facebook has been able to reduce that factor to about 1.07, Frankovsky said, which translates into an operational cost savings of about 38 percent. The design also reduced the capital expense budget by 24 percent.