Mark Striegl Talks About Manny Pacquiao’s Influence, Training with Brandon Vera

Wazzup Pilipinas!

ONE Championship bantamweight standout Mark “Mugen” Striegl (14-2) is set to face Brazil’s Rafael Nunes (10-1) when the promotion returns to the Mall of Asia Arena on Friday, December 2 for ONE: Age of Domination. Streigl, 28, joined ONE Championship in 2015 and was recently named one of the hottest prospects in Asian MMA.

The Filipino-American stalwart splits his training between Evolve MMA in Singapore and the high-altitudes of Baguio City for his next matchup and says mixed martial arts is getting really big in the Philippines.

“Baguio is one of the best places to train in the Philippines because it’s high altitude. It’s 5,000-feet above sea level. It’s great for strength and conditioning,” said Striegl. “Manny Pacquiao also trained in Baguio in the past for some of his biggest fights. It’s been fantastic for my training.”

Striegl made his ONE Championship debut in April of 2015, defeating American Casey Suire impressively by first round submission. In his second bout months later however, he fell to Filipino-Australian prospect Reece McLaren.

Since his last bout, Striegl has been hard at work preparing for his return, training with none other than ONE Heavyweight World Champion Brandon “The Truth” Vera.

“Here in Manila I’ve been fortunate enough to train with Brandon Vera and AJ Matthews. Mark Munoz also came through one time so I got to pick his brain a bit,” said Striegl. “There are so many good gyms to work with in Manila. MMA is getting really big in this country. I’ve just been jumping around and training with Brandon and it’s been great.”

A well-rounded mixed martial artist with strengths in both striking and grappling, Striegl is one of the country’s top combat sports athletes. He began his career competing for various MMA promotions across Asia before landing a roster spot in ONE Championship last year.

As someone who has seen the rise of MMA as a sport in Asia, Striegl can’t help but feel in awe of the tremendous growth of combat sports in the region and credits a majority of it to eight-division boxing world champion Manny Pacquiao.

“MMA is getting really big in this country, thanks to ONE Championship. There’s a deeply embedded combat culture in this country with boxing. There are a lot of gyms all around and so many good places to train and so many good people to work with,” said Streigl.

“One of the greatest fighters of all time, Pacquiao, is a legend here and pretty much all over the world. He has put the Philippines on the map as far as fight sports are concerned. He’s a true global icon and one of my inspirations.”

During his time in Manila, Striegl says he just recently met Pacquiao for the first time in person. Pacquiao is training for his highly-anticipated return to boxing against WBO welterweight champion Jessie Vargas this November 5. He is also a full-time politician who owns a seat at the Philippine senate.

“I went to one of [Pacquiao’s] senate hearings and met him afterwards,” said Striegl. “Super nice guy, super down to earth guy. Just a humble, nice guy and I think that’s why he has so many fans. He’s the people’s champ. Everyone can relate to him.”

Pacquiao’s unique style, Striegl says, is something he tries to emulate in the MMA cage. And just like Pacquiao, Striegl aims to bring a world title back to the Philippines.

Against Brazil’s Nunes this December, Striegl has the opportunity to get back on the right track in his pursuit of ONE Championship gold. It won’t be easy, but Striegl says by channeling his inner- “Pac-Man”, he hopes to be able to make his people proud by becoming a world champion.

“One thing I love about Manny’s fight style is that he’s an action-packed fighter. He just keeps going and going and moving forward. That’s something I try to do in my fights,” said Striegl.

“You’ll never see me in a boring fight. I always press the action, I always come forward. I’m not a point fighter. Sometimes I put myself at risk by doing that but it’s better than being a point fighter, like a Floyd Mayweather-style kind of fighter.

“My goal when I entered this sport was and is to win a world championship title for the Philippines and bring it back here to Manila. That’s what I think about and it’s been my goal since I was young.”

Hitachi Data Systems Introduces New, Enhanced Flash Storage Lineup

Wazzup Pilipinas!

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501), today announced new systems and software designed to deliver better customer experiences and return on investments. Powered by the next generation of Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) and backed by a 100% data availability guarantee, the expanded Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) lineup delivers performance, resiliency and workload scalability beyond what is offered by other platforms.

In today’s digital economy, it is critical that customers receive information in real time and that businesses recognize maximum cost-efficiency from their operations. To meet these needs, the new SVOS 7 has been engineered with an improved flash-aware I/O stack and selectable data services:

·         Quality of Service (QoS): Enables predictable performance for a consistent user experience. Data reduction services can be dedicated to workloads for more predictable response times as data levels grow.

·         Adaptive data reduction: Provides deduplication and compression for 2:1, 5:1 or greater capacity savings. SVOS 7 can offload compression to Hitachi flash modules (FMDs) for more scalable data reduction than other flash arrays.

·         Cloud tiering for all-flash VSP F series: Transparently moves files to private or public cloud storage, reducing data center footprint and enabling lower, more predictable storage costs for superior IT efficiency.

SVOS 7 is available on all new and existing Virtual Storage Platform G series and F series systems. Existing customers can take advantage of SVOS 7 and its deduplication and compression features through a nondisruptive upgrade.

For businesses that need to drive IT consolidation and support both open-system and mainframe applications, HDS is offering two new high-end VSP models. The all-flash VSP F1500, built on new high-density FMDs with raw capacities of up to 14TB, delivers over 4.8M IOPS and up to 40PB of effective flash capacity. It scales to 576 FMDs, providing up to 2304 extra cores for handling data reduction and enabling superior price and performance value.

For businesses looking to transition to all-flash over time, HDS offers the new VSP G1500, which offers 4.8M IOPS - a 20% improvement over VSP G1000.

VSP G1000 customers can upgrade to VSP G1500 via a data-in-place, nondisruptive migration. This simplifies the transition to the more powerful VSP G1500 platform and reinforces the HDS commitment to protecting our customers’ investments.

In conjunction with the release of SVOS 7 and the enhanced VSP lineup HDS is upgrading its management stack to simplify data management. New versions of Hitachi Storage Advisor, Automation Director and Infrastructure Analytics Advisor enable customers to more easily implement new SVOS 7 functions and reduce IT operational costs and complexity.

Supporting Quotes:

“The industry is moving to flash and the introductions of our new SVOS, FMD and VSP technologies dramatically expand the reach of flash technology and make it more accessible to our customers as the look to reduce overall costs,” said Bob Madaio, Vice President, Infrastructure Solutions Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems.

“Our customers are not only looking for increased efficiency, productivity and scalability, but also the guarantee of a support system for the longevity of the investment,” said Robert Fletcher, Dept. Lead Systems Engineering and Production, Drei-Banken-EDV, GmbH.

“In today’s market, we are seeing serious pressure for companies to embrace Digital Transformation, particularly due to its ability to deliver improved operations, processes and customer experience,” said Marty Sos, Senior Director, General Manager, HDS and Networking Business Units, Arrow ECS. “With its expanded VSP lineup and enhanced software capabilities, Hitachi Data Systems is helping us accelerate the customer journey to Digital Transformation.”

“The latest enhancements to Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) from Hitachi Data Systems are game changers. With the accelerated flash engine in the new SVOS 7 offering, customers can intelligently manage data access to deliver lower latency, greater efficiency and improved uptime,” said Dan DiTucci, Cloud Chief Technologist, Continental Resources. “Furthermore, with deduplication and compression combined with direct cloud connect via Data Migrator to the Cloud (DM2C), our customers can achieve best-in-class total cost of ownership.” 

Short+Sweet Finale and Gala Night is Here

Wazzup Pilipinas!

Now that the culminating and last part of the Short+Sweet festival 10-minute plays is here, I guess it is needless to say that we should take every effort to watch them before you totally miss the opportunity to be enthralled and amazed by these amazing and talented individuals who played their corresponding significant roles in every presentation.

Actors, actresses, directors and even those individuals who prepared their wardrobes, props or even the ones who did their make-up, all contributed to complete the overall look and output of the play.

It is also an awesome task to come up with an engaging play that could capture the interest and admiration of the audience. We salute everyone involved especially the organizers of the Short+Sweet Manila. More power to you all!

I am so proud to be their media partner and I'm looking forward to continuing to support them throughout the years.

Short+Sweet will have STUDENT DISCOUNT for groups for this FINALE WEEK.

Original price- 550 pesos.
STUDENT DISCOUNT for groups:
For a group of 10 students - 450 pesos
For a group of 20students and above- 400 pesos.
* Student id required upon entrance.


Contact Vaish- 09188770011 for tickets.