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Tuesday, December 18th, 2012
- Form factors – With hybrid IT environments, organizations may need a wider range of WAN optimization form factors. It is not uncommon today for organizations to be using a combination of physical data centers, public cloud services, and a virtualized private cloud while having to support remote and mobile workers. Such organizations require a comprehensive WAN optimization solution comprised of physical appliances, cloud editions, virtual editions, and mobile editions. Regardless of selected form factor(s), a good solution will easily deliver performance benefits on a holistic level.
- Scalability – WAN optimization solutions should also be able to scale in response to business growth, including adding more offices and employees or increasing capacity in a private or public cloud. As reliance on the WAN continues and IT environments become more complex, such scalability is critical to meet an organization’s changing needs.
- Multi-tiered optimization- Multi-tiered optimization that spans deduplication, application optimization, transport optimization, and traffic prioritization is the only way to truly maximize performance gains:
- Deduplication removes redundancies from data transmissions
- Application specific optimizations overcome the chattiness of certain application protocols such as CIFS (Common Internet File System) or MAPI (Messaging Application Program Interface)
- Transport optimization technology should optimize traffic across multiple transport protocols, including both TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol)
- Quality of Service (QoS) prioritization ensures fair access for mission-critical applications during periods of congestion - Strategic partners – An often-overlooked consideration are the strategic technology partnerships established by WAN optimization vendors. Choosing a vendor with strategic relationships such as cloud providers, application or storage vendors can offer the tightest integration for higher levels of performance but also provide the best levels of support to help enterprises deploy, manage, and maximize their investment.
- Business value and ROI – According to IDC, organizations can achieve ROI in as little seven months by choosing WAN optimization solutions over major bandwidth upgrades. Even more compelling, is that deploying WAN optimization can result in up to 100 times faster access to critical applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint. That kind of performance improvement results in superlative value for organizations as employees are more productive, collaborative, and efficient, and customers are taken care of in a timely manner. Such as the case with a major retailer who recently realized productivity gains from a WAN optimization deployment that translated to $35 million in increased revenue and a 68-day payback period on their investment.
- Software-Defined Networks. SDN technologies have begun to evolve and make their way into more environments. Physical network have their limitations, such as creating 1-to-1 connections. With SDN, we’re able to do so much more. Truly, there are numerous benefits to deploying SDN within a data center environment. For example, creating a Global Server Load Balanced network for DR and data center high availability becomes easier. SDN tools can be used to manage virtual networks on both a hypervisor and physical network layer, as well as managing traffic flows. By using advanced networking technologies, data centers become more resilient and easier to manage. As more organizations move to a cloud platform, data center operators will have to figure out ways to connect their sometimes very distributed environments. Good traffic flow, user workload management, and controlling multiple data centers are all areas where SDN can help.
- Software-Defined Security. Securing a diverse, sometimes heavily virtualized data center isn’t an easy task. Original security technologies focused primarily on the physical element and there wasn’t a large concern around the cloud or virtual environment. Now, with greater complexity and more users hitting data centers, security vendors were forced to rethink how they utilize security at the data center level. This is where next-generation security and software-defined security comes in. New platforms allow for end-point scanning, advanced access control list (ACL) creation, and controlling – at a software layer – how routes are ported between servers and even data centers. IT consumerization and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) have had their effect on the user, data center and security technologies. Modern security devices can now scan for “rooted” devices, route users to the appropriate internal server based on the type of device that is connecting, and scan incoming and outgoing traffic for data leakage prevention (DLP) purposes.
- Software-Defined Storage. Storage continues to be a vital part of any environment. On the same note, storage, the controllers, shelves and drives themselves can be quite expensive. That’s why planning, sizing and carefully controlling storage is a must for any environment. That said, the conversation around intelligent storage usage has grown over the past couple of years. Now, we’re able to logically segment one physical controller into multiple business units. Even from a compliance perspective, security can be set in such a way that only the appropriate people will see their “virtual controller.” They’ll have their own storage system, but in reality there is actually a larger controller in place supporting numerous business units. Furthermore, storage appliances have become more intelligent and easier to work with on a production scale, allowing live workload migration to become a reality. Site-to-site workload migration and replication is helping organizations use their storage systems more efficiently, and having this type of flexibility in storage system makes the data center much more agile. The ability to quickly replicate data between data center sites will continue to grow as more organizations place their information into the cloud. Providers will be challenged with providing the fastest and most reliable data replication services to help support distributed organizations and their cloud initiatives. Software-defined storage will be at the heart of these types of efficiencies.
- Two-way distributed generation (DG) makes it possible for customers to interconnect their renewable energy systems (e.g., solar and fuel cells) to the grid.
- Advanced telemetry enables autonomous services that can detect issues before they turn into problems.
- New services from third parties provide additional value by optimizing the energy value chain.
- Energy management
- Power management
- Facility management
- Maintenance management
- Scaling machine learning in the cloud
- The looming data scientist crisis
- The big data era needs custom compute
- Addressing the tension between personalization and privacy
- The post-Hadoop era – opportunity next?
- Mobile visualization – ingesting insights on the go
| Time | Event |
| 12:30p | Data Center Links: Leighton Will be CEO of Akamai Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry: Tom Leighton to become Akamai CEO. Akamai Technologies (AKAM) announced that its Board of Directors has elected company Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Dr. Tom Leighton to become CEO of Akamai effective January 1, 2013. He will succeed Paul Sagan who announced earlier this year that he intended to step down as chief executive by the end of 2013. Sagan will become a senior advisor to the company, working with Dr. Leighton on a smooth management transition and company strategy. Dr. Leighton has played a major role in charting the course for many of Akamai’s key product innovations, strategic accomplishments, and he holds numerous patents involving ontent delivery, Internet protocols, network algorithms, distributed computing, cryptography, and digital rights management. ”Akamai is extremely fortunate to have such an outstanding executive with Tom’s business and technology experience to lead Akamai’s next phase of growth,” said Sagan. “He is an innovator with a deep understanding of the shifting landscape in public and private clouds, distributed computing platforms, and Internet security. Tom has earned the trust and respect of our customers, partners, employees, and shareholders through his hard work and vision over the past 14 years. He is supported by a highly experienced management team, and I join in the Board’s unanimous support and confidence in Tom’s ability to continue driving Akamai forward.” VMware Network Virtualization helps iland. VMware (VMW) announced another example of the adoption of network virtualization in the market. iland, a global cloud infrastructure provider and the VMware Service Provider Partner of the Year Global 2012, has taken advantage of VMware network virtualization to reduce operational costs and increase service velocity. VMware network virtualization solutions include the VMware vCloud Suite, which incorporates VMware’s virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio. “As we explored building and delivering new, value-added cloud services, we realized the tremendous flexibility, operational efficiency and time-to-market benefits to be gained through network virtualization,” said Justin Giardina, CTO of iland Internet Solutions. “Just as server virtualization changed the way we delivered compute resources, network virtualization has transformed the way we deliver network services by removing the challenges we faced when bound to the physical network.” HP selected by AllDigital. HP (HPQ) announced that AllDigital, a leading digital broadcasting solutions provider, has selected HP StoreAll Storage to support future business growth, improve cloud storage performance and reduce infrastructure costs. To address rapid growth AllDigital needed a scalable storage solution that could handle unpredictable demand spikes as the business grew to ensure persistent availability of clients’ digital media files. Upgrading to HP StoreAll Storage allowed AllDigital to cost-efficiently manage high-volume, high-quality objects and billions of files for clients via a single storage platform while ensuring around-the-clock system availability. With the HP StoreAll Storage family’s scale-out capabilities, AllDigital manages 300 percent more data than with the previous storage platform while also reducing overall storage costs by approximately 30 percent. “AllDigital needed a storage system that could not only quickly store high-quality digital media files and make them accessible to our clients 24/7, but could easily adapt to changing storage requirements,” said Steve Smith, vice president, Network Services, AllDigital. “HP StoreAll Storage provides the flexibility and performance to allow us to rapidly scale to billions of files and objects without expensive hardware upgrades and maintenance.” Violin Memory selected by Pepperl+Fuchs. Vioin Memory announced it has been selected by Pepperl+Fuchs, a large manufacturer of electronic sensors and the world leader for intrinsic safety and explosion protection technology, to enhance the performance of mission-critical applications, and consolidate applications and databases onto one storage platform. Pepperl+Fuchs worked with partner Christie Data Products to carry out a ‘proof of concept’ with Violin Memory and found that the Violin Flash Memory Array was the best fit regarding the price versus performance ratio, even without database or application tuning. “The combination of low latency, high IOPS and high throughput made Violin Flash Memory Arrays a perfect fit for all workloads including the mixed performance requirements of our newly consolidated infrastructure,” said Helmut Eckstein, manager for global IT/SIS of Pepperl+Fuchs. “Additionally, application consolidation and improved efficiency reduced our total infrastructure costs even further.” |
| 1:44p | Prepare Your Network for Hyperconvergence with WAN Optimization Miles Kelly is senior product marketing director for Steelhead WAN optimization appliances and Granite appliances at Riverbed Technology.  MILES KELLYRiverbed Convergence started in the late 1990s when Internet Protocol (IP) became the “de facto” standard for communication. Today, convergence means streamlined voice, video, and storage delivery via an enterprise network. Hyperconvergence is the predicted future state of an enterprise network that follows the adoption of modern computing initiatives including consolidation, cloud computing, mobility (including Bring Your Own Device -BYOD), and unified communications. The hyperconverged network not only presents new opportunities for end users and IT, but also creates new challenges for network and application performance and management. One of the major challenges of hyperconvergence is the ability for a network to scale to meet the surge of end users, devices, and overall network traffic. In a research note titled “Plan Now For the Hyperconverged Enterprise Network” authored by Bjarne Munch, David A. Willis and published in May 2012, Gartner predicts that by 2014, up to 80 percent of end-user traffic will move to the wide area network (WAN). WAN optimization with quality of service (QoS) is increasingly becoming a must-have technology to allow networks to thrive in a hyperconverged world, delivering the speed end users expect and the scale and control network professionals require. Choosing the Right Technology InvestmentsWhen faced with bandwidth limitations, many organizations re-cable or upgrade bandwidth as a first plan of action. However, bandwidth upgrades can be costly and time-consuming, and do not easily scale or ensure the necessary performance for business-critical traffic. As a result, more organizations are choosing to deploy WAN optimization solutions that not only provide a scalable framework that can easily integrate with an enterprise’s existing infrastructure, but also ensure a consistent end-user experience. As a result, employees are more productive and collaborative with efficient access to critical business applications. Choosing the right WAN optimization solution can be challenging, especially due to data growth and more end users distributed over greater distances. There is no one-size-fits-all option. And a good investment decision is one that meets an organization’s needs today and tomorrow. Key considerations for choosing the right WAN optimization technology include form factor, scalability, integration, support, and value to name a few. Below is each in detail: As hyperconvergence comes to the modern enterprise, WAN optimization is becoming essential to managing the corresponding explosion in end users, data, and devices. A well planned, strategic WAN optimization solution deployment will allow organizations to extend optimization to every user, application, and location in the world. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. |
| 2:05p | Software Defined Technologies Bring Data Centers Closer Together  Software-defined technologies can help bring distributed data centers closer together by helping control and manage data. (Photo: ServerCentral) With the evolution of cloud computing, virtualization, and IT consumerization – managers have had to re-think how they approach their business and IT needs. A big part of the technological push has been the growth in software-defined technologies. This doesn’t only include virtualization. We’re now able to use complex hardware systems to their fullest capacity. Instead of creating one physical NIC, for example, an administrator is able to create hundreds of vNIC instances from one network component. This type of innovation has helped bring distributed data centers closer together by helping control technologies, management, and of course the data workload. There’s a bit of a grey area as far as what can technically fall under the “software-defined” category. The reality is that this technology shares similarities between virtualization and other cloud components. Still, there are a few major technologies to be aware of in terms of their effects on the current data center environment. More organizations are moving their environments into a cloud, and thereby utilizing data center resources and providers. From a data center perspective, administrators must use technologies which not only simplify the data transmission process, but also ease management. Software-defined tools are created to better utilize underlying components whether they are storage, networks or security. As the demand continues to rise, don’t be surprised if more software-defined technologies make their way into the data center. IT managers and business executives will continue to look for ways to use technology to help them align ever-changing IT needs with evolving business goals. |
| 2:30p | Data Center Modernization: From Smart Data Centers to Enterprise Smart Grids The evolution of the modern data center has taken place on numerous levels. Now, data center managers are looking for ways to optimize their environments and gain an upper hand on cost management. One of the biggest ways to create a more robust environment while still controlling costs is to examine how power consumption is being used within a given environment. Data Center Modernization examines a very important topic: Efficient power management and how to create a smart data center. By looking at various power options and utilizing smart grid infrastructure, data center managers can not only see costs saving, but they’ll also see their power utilization efficiency become more robust. So what makes a smart grid? The following are three capabilities that are the cornerstones of the smart grid: With more data demands in the industry, there will be more reliance on data center environments. Administrators will have to ensure that their infrastructure stays energy efficient, sustainable and most importantly, agile. In creating such an environment, there are four key components to consider: Working within a data enter environment, administrators must have access to real-time data. Furthermore, they have to understand this information and be able to act up on it. This type of proactive approach will simplify the data center management process by examining everything from power consumption to data center facility metrics. Download Data Center Modernization, a white paper from ABB, to see how advanced capabilities can really help an environment control their grid technologies. |
| 4:30p | HPC News: Cray, NVIDIA Win Supercomputing Contracts Cray and NVIDIA land multi-million deals in high performance computing (HPC) engagements: Cray awarded $39 million Supercomputer contract Cray announced it has been awarded a $39 million contract from the North-German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) to deliver a distributed Cray XC30 supercomputing system. HLRN is an alliance amongst seven states in Northern Germany and the new supercomputer will be operated from the Zuse Institute Berlin and Lebniz University in Hannover. At these two sites the Cray XC30 will act as one combined system, providing universities and research centers in the northern states of Germany with a powerful petascale computing resource. “Researchers in Northern Germany will soon benefit from a significant increase in computing power as a result of procuring the new HLRN-III system from Cray,” said Prof. Dr. Thomas Rung, head of the Scientific Board of the HLRN. “The Cray XC30 offers a flexible computing architecture that will fulfill our need for advanced supercomputing technologies now and into the future. This is an exciting moment for the scientific community across the northern states of Germany.” Previously code-named Cascade, the Cray XC30 features the new HPC-optimized Aries system interconnect, a new Dragonfly topology that frees applications from locality constraints, and the ability to incorporate a variety of processor types including the Intel Xeon processors. The multi-phase $39 million contract will have the majority of the system delivered and put into production in 2013. NVIDIA wins DARPA contract NVIDIA announced that it has been awarded a contract worth up to $20 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to research embedded processor technologies that could lead to dramatic improvements in the ability of autonomous vehicles to collect and process data from on-board sensors. As a five year contract the money will fund research for processors that are 75-times more energy efficient than current embedded solutions. The goal is to enable surveillance and computer vision systems in ground and airborne vehicles to collect and analyze vastly more data than can be processed today in real time. “The technologies developed with this program can transform the capabilities of embedded systems, making autonomous vehicles more practical and intelligent,” said Steve Keckler, senior director of Architecture Research at NVIDIA. “This research will help NVIDIA continue to advance mobile computing for both government and consumer applications.” The NVIDIA program, known as Project Osprey, will research low-power circuits and extremely efficient architectures and programming systems that enable 75 gigaflops per watt, using process technologies as advanced as 7 nanometer (nm) compared with today’s 28-nm process. |
| 4:33p | Data Center World Spring 2013 Join more than 1,000 data center and facilities management professionals from around the globe at the AFCOM Data Center World Spring 2013 conference from April 28 – May 3, 2013 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada. Data Center World is both an educational conference and an expo for data center and facilities management professionals, which provides real-world solutions, vendor-neutral education, peer-to-peer networking and access to technology service providers. Topics included: data center management, facilities management, emerging technology, disaster recovery, and colocation. The event also offers enhanced networking opportunities to ensure quality peer contacts based on industry, geography, and technology interest. For further details, visit the Data Center World website. Early bird registration ends March 1. To register visit the conference website. Venue Mandalay Bay Las Vegas AFCOM has reserved a special discounted room rate for Data Center World attendees at Mandalay Bay-Las Vegas. Attendee Discount Code: SAFC13 / Exhibitor Discount Code: SAFC13B
For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar. |
| 4:43p | TELADATA Technology Convergence Conference TELADATA’s 2013 Technology Convergence Conference will take place on February 7 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Philip Ross of the Cordless Group will deliver the conference keynote, titled Emerging Technologies and the Future Workplace and will discuss how innovation in technology affects the people and activities that shape the modern work environment and how work is performed in smaller, more dynamic, thinner real estate as cloud migrations continues. The keynote will also focus on Real Time Real Estate (RETRE) by highlighting early adopters of workplace innovation from around the world. Philip Ross is CEO and founder of the Cordless Group, as well as CEO of Unwired and Unwork.com which all focus on work-place innovation and the physical and behavioral changes in this space. Ross is also author to three global bestselling books on the future of work and the workplace. “This vision of ‘real time real estate’ with other emerging technologies from smart devices to future cloud-enabled visions will change the paradigm of how, where, and when work takes place,” said Philip Ross. “The Technology Convergence Conference provides a collision of ideas around the future of real estate and technology, and a great forum for debate and discussion of key emerging technologies.” Venue Hyatt Regency Santa Clara Additional hotels, speaker information and registration details can be found at www.teladatatcc.com.
For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar. |
| 4:51p | GigaOM’s Structure:Data GigaOM’s Structure:Data will convene March 20-21 on Pier Sixty at The Chelsea Piers in New York, NY. The focus of the event will be the technical and business opportunities spurred by the growth of big data, including storage needs, data analysis and the uncovering of new revenue opportunities. Featured topics include: Venue Pier Sixty at The Chelsea Piers (map) New York, NY 10011 (+1) 212-336-6100 Register by December 21 for an additional $100 off our early-bird rate (save a total of $600).
For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar. |
| 5:01p | Second Annual Northern California Data Center Summit CapRate Events, LLC presents its second annual Northern California Data Center Summit on Thursday, April 11 in Santa Clara, CA. CAPRATE Events is a digital media firm specializing in business-to-business and commercial real estate events. More than 2,200 senior-level executives attended and participated in conferences and webinars during its first year of operation. Venue Telephone registration/questions: Ronnie Niederman | 212-873-3484 |
| 5:12p | Datacenter Dynamics Converged Datacenter Dynamics Converged will host its New York event on March 12, with a special focus on “When disaster strikes: The New York Post-Mortem.” DCD Converged will examine how the data center industry responded in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and how it will shape the future of the data center market, globally. This will be an opportunity for data center operators and end-users to share their experiences with their peers. The agenda will also cover the many moving parts of the cloud in new ‘Cloud Mechanics’ sessions that focus on the convergence of IT and Facilities; from application behaviors to “Data Center as a Service” and other topics. The venue is not announced and registration is not open at the time of this publication. For more information, visit Datacenter Dynamics Converged – New York.
For more events, please return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar. |
| 6:00p | Data Center Cartoon Caption Contest – A Winner! It’s not Friday, but we have some humor news. A few weeks ago, we published a cartoon about Kip and Gary and “pizza box” servers. See below for the cartoon. We had many funny suggestions, but we forgot to announce the winner. So hearty “PUEpperoni” congratulations to Colton Brown of Dupont Fabros for his winner: “It’s the secret to achieving a PUEpperoni of 1.032″ As the winner will receive their caption in a signed print by Diane. Thanks to all our readers for their humorous caption suggestions. Voting is still open on the cartoon from last Friday, “Snowman Surprise” and two captions are tied at the moment! And for the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. |
| 7:47p | Top 10 Data Center Images of 2012
In 2012 we saw a welcome focus on the hidden beauty of data center technology, with server farms featured in glossy books and photo spreads from acclaimed photographers. Data Center Knowledge has been a pioneer in taking readers inside these amazing facilities with photo tours, as we’ve spent the last seven years bugging data center operators to share images with our readers. We continue the tradition with our Top 10 Data Center Images of 2012. |
Click to enlarge.
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