Samsung starts mass production of the first 10-nanometre (nm) class 8Gb DDR4 DRAM chips in the industry, the result of advanced memory design and manufacturing technology integration.

According to the company 10nm-class chips bring about improvements in both data rates and power efficiency over previous 20nm-class chips, with 30% better performance, support for data rates up to 3200Mbps and 10-20% less power consumption. In addition, Samsung says 10nm DRAM production can also bring about savings to customers, since the production process improves wafer productivity of 20nm Gb DDR4 DRAM by over 30%.

Dell makes something of loss as it sells its professional services businesses to NTT Data, the IT consulting unit of Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, for $3.06 billion.

Formerly known as Perot Systems, the Dell IT services business was acquired back in 2009 for $3.9bn. Dell was reportedly hoping to make $3.6bn from the sale, but the final price still goes some way in denting the $49bn debt load from the $67bn acquisition of EMC.

The delays affecting the acquisition of Sharp by Foxconn come to an end as the Taiwanese giant agrees on a price for the ailing Japanese company-- $3.5 billion, nearly $900 million less of the original asking price.

The discount is due to the the discovery of "contingent liabilities" at Sharp little more than a day after the original announcement of the sale. However, following weeks of back-and-forth the two companies arrived at an acceptable deal, one Foxconn CEO Terry Gou claims will "unlock Sharp's true potential."

Shareholders from both Western Digital and SanDisk approve of the acquisition of the latter by the former-- a deal complicated just a month back following the exit of Chinese investor Unisplendour Corporation Ltd (Unis).

Initially Unis was to invest $3.78 billion in WD, but the Chinese company got a bad case of cold feet following plans by US Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) to investigate the deal. The lack of Chinese money caused WD to beg for a lower asking price for SanDisk (from $19bn in cash and stock to $15.8bn), one shareholders appear to approve of.

Cisco plans to spend $500 million on the German technology industry-- an investment spread across 3 years and a number of areas, including research, startups and tech professionals.

Dubbed "Deutschland Digital," the investment also covers specific digitisation projects, research projects, an expansion of the non-profit Cisco Networking Academy and venture funding, as well as HR and infrastructure spending. One startup that already benefited from Cisco investment is relayr, a German IoT provider.

Another project funded by the investment is a German Security Centre for Excellence to "build an ecosystem of customers, partners, academia, and start-ups" with a focus on security.

Cisco is the next company to step into hyperconverged solutions as it announces the Hyperflex System. It also acquires "application-defined" hybrid cloud orchestration software developer CliQr.

The HyperFlex system consists of a number of products, the first being the HXData Platform-- a co-development with storage software developer SpringPath using Cisco UCS servers to form a distributed storage system consisting of SSDs and HDs from federated storage clusters.

According to Cisco, the result provides customers with "plug-n-play setup within minutes," with flexible and independent compute, network and storage capacity scaling. In addition it also features data management services such as rapid clones and non-intrusive snapshots, all within a signle distributed, multi-tier object-based data store.