Here are the week's strays and stragglers we roped for you:

Vodafone India completed its merger with Idea Cellular. The combined entity will be renamed Vodafone Idea. It becomes the largest mobile operator in India followed by Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio.

The Open Container Initiative (OCI) welcomed Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, as a member.

Cloud storage innovator Infinite.io raised $10.3 million in a Series B round.

Alibaba is putting on hold its plans to expand its cloud business in the U.S, according to The Information.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) released its relational database service on VMware. It enables users to set up and operate databases in VMware software-defined data centers (SDDC).

CenturyLink became an Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed service provider partner.

Dfinity, a non-profit building a crypto platform, raised $102 million in an investment led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.

CenturyLink and VMware jointly launched an IT partner group for business and IT leaders, the Catalyst Club.

Rancher Lab’s Project Longhorn, a distributed block storage system for Kubernetes, released version 3.0, available on Rancher 2.0.

Broadcom, NetApp, and VMware demonstrated NVMe over Fibre Channel running on VMware’s cloud computing virtualization platform.

The Linux Foundation Deep Learning Foundation added two new framework projects.

Lenovo and Pivot3 will collaborate on edge computing products for smart city security.

California Telecom partnered with Versa Networks to resell its managed SD-WAN.

Bigleaf Networks joined Microsoft’s immersive collaboration group for startups, which provides sales, marketing, and technical support.

Network monitoring company Nyansa launched a free public dashboard that serves as a repository of network analytics.

Equinix partnered with VMware for private connectivity to VMware Cloud on AWS.

Pivot3 released a ruggedized hybrid cloud platform.

Platform9 added a new capability for its managed Kubernetes platform to enable companies to run nodes in a Kubernetes cluster on Amazon EC2 instances.

VMware extended its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) multi-cloud platform to manage cloud costs, operations, security, and compliance. It also enhanced its intelligence-driven digital workspace platform.

Mellanox demonstrated 25G Ethernet and remote direct memory access on VMware vSphere.

Lacework closed its Series B funding round of $24 million.

Colt Technology launched its SD-WAN service in Asia Pacific and North America and its on-demand network services in Singapore.

Carbon Black released version 8.1 of its application control product, which locks down servers.

Quest Software added support for VMware cloud on AWS in the most recent update of its optimization and data protection platform.

Itential released version 6.0 of its network automation platform with orchestrator and controller data models.

Service assurance company Cenx was awarded a contract for a European Tier 1 operator.

Fortanix’s Self-Defending Key Management Service achieved VMware ready status.

Onica acquired Canadian cloud computing startup TriNimbus Technologies.

Unified analytics startup Databricks partnered with Snowflake Computing to integrate their products.

The National Science Foundation awarded $60 million to the University of Texas at Austin Advanced Computing Center to acquire and deploy a supercomputer.

Wireless sensor and remote monitoring company Monnit Corporation partnered with Cradlepoint for wireless sensor-to-cloud connectivity services for IoT.

AMD released a dual-GPU virtual desktop infrastructure graphics card for data center visualization workloads.

Machine learning and cloud analytics company Cloudera announced general availability of its hybrid cloud data warehouse.

Inseego launched its enterprise-grade industrial IoT device-to-cloud management platform.

Software delivery company Armory raised $10 million in its Series A funding round.

Data security firm Very Good Security raised $8.5 million in its Series A round.

Software company Blue Medora released its hybrid platform operations software for visibility into Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

BehavioSec launched its behavioral biometrics platform for continuous authentication and anti-fraud features.

Webroot partnered with Digital Shadows to integrate their threat intelligence services.

Security startup Indegy closed an $18 million Series B funding round.

Monitoring software service Metricly raised $9 million in a Series A round.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week: