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Thursday, December 20th, 2012
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Open Compute Summit
January 16-17: Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA
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Green Data Center Conference
January 29-31: Marriott La Jolla, San Diego, CA
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TELADATA Technology Convergence Conference
February 7: Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA
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Strata Conference 2013: Making Data Work
February 26-28: Santa Clara, CA
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Datacenter Dynamics Converged
March 11: TBA, New York, NY
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DJR Spring World
March 17-20: Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort, Orlando, FL
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GigaOM’s Structure:Data
March 20-21: Chelsea Piers, New York, NY
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Second Annual Northern California Data Center Summit
April 11: Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA
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Data Center World Spring 2013
April 28-May 2: Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, NV
| Time | Event |
| 1:27p | Cisco To Acquire BroadHop, Dell Buying Credant Two more acquisitions are squeezed into 2012, as Cisco and Dell continue shopping. Cisco to acquire BroadHop Cisco announced its intent to acquire Denver, Colorado-based BroadHop, a provider of next-generation policy control and service management technology for carrier networks worldwide. BroadHop’s widely deployed policy control solutions for mobile and fixed networks will be integrated into Cisco’s Service Provider Mobility Group to support Cisco’s Open Network Environment (ONE) for extensible network programmability. This policy infrastructure will enable Cisco to develop software services to help network operators develop new services. BroadHop has been a key service provider Wi-Fi partner for Cisco. The BroadHop team will be integrated into Cisco’s Service Provider Networking Group, reporting to Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager of the company’s Software and Applications Group. Dell to acquire Credant Dell announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Credant Technologies, an industry-leading provider of data protection solutions to control, manage and secure data sent from endpoints to servers, storage and the cloud. Credant technology supports multiple mobile operating systems allowing companies to confidently embrace the growing BYOD movement. “In today’s work environment data is always in-flight – from work being done on a local PC, being sent via email, stored on a USB drive and saved in the cloud,” said Jeff Clarke, president, End User Computing Solutions at Dell. ”Each one of those experiences represents a potential security risk. As a result, businesses need a data protection strategy that is comprehensive, flexible and easy to deploy. The Credant assets will complement and extend current Dell device security features to make Dell Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision PCs some of the world’s most secure. And when combined with the change in compute behaviors and data in-flight, Dell can now offer a differentiated security proposition based on its own Intellectual Property.” Credant offers security management, lower cost of PC lifecycle maintenance, flexible data protection, easy deployment and provisioning, and high levels of security and protection. Dell’s security services and solutions enable organizations of all sizes to protect their IT assets, comply with regulations and reduce security costs. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed |
| 1:56p | Bright Planet Tries EC2, But Opts for CoSentry’s Cloud Moving to the public cloud doesn’t always work out. This week came news of an example of this, in which data center and cloud computing provider CoSentry won a customer requirement back from Amazon Web Services. Bright Planet is a provider of web data analysis for government, pharmaceutical, and legal customers. Big Planet had been a CoSentry customer for several years, hosting its physical switches and servers with them. Big Planet decided to try out EC2 for a cloud application, but found that EC2 “did not live up to the standards,” according to a release, and moved its virtual platform onto CoSentry’s Secure Cloud offering. “That companies like Bright Planet, who understand and use virtual systems at the highest level, have chosen CoSentry as their provider is all of the evidence we need to know that we made the right choice with our investment in high performance, high security virtual platforms,” said Kevin Dohrman of CoSentry. “After years of using flexible framework, we decided that the path to further growth was to shift to a virtual platform,” said William Bushee, Vice President of Development for Bright Planet. “EC2 was our first attempt, but we found it was far too slow for our purposes. CoSentry’s virtual system, on the other hand, is comparable to their high quality physical system in terms of performance”. The decision by Bright Planet – and the fact that CoSentry issued a release about it – reflects the competitive tensions created by the emergence of public cloud platforms, and the challenge this presents for hosting providers. As cloud computing has gained attention, data center and managed services providers have added cloud offerings to the portfolio. CoSentry looks to serve as a one-source provider of data center, cloud computing, and managed technical services. Here, its ability to offer cloud extended its relationship with Bright Planet, rather than potentially losing that contract or that business to a cloud provider down the line. CoSentry currently offers infrastructure supported by VCE’s Vblock technology. The company recently added 2 data centers, most recently in Lenexa, Kansas . It has facilities in Kansas City, MO, Lenexa, KS, Sioux Falls, SD, Papillion, NE and Omaha, NE. |
| 2:30p | Data Center Links: Pulsant Acquires ScoLocate Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry: Pulsant acquires Scottish Colo provider. UK data center company Pulsant announced it has acquired Scotland colocation provider ScoLocate. Making Pulsant’s 10th data center, the Edinburgh facility features 75,000 square feet of space and is home to over 30 telecommunication carriers. With its own expansion recently north of London Pulsant will have a European data center footprint with 240,000 square feet, over 4,000 racks, and more than 3,00 public and private sector clients. “ScoLocate is a fantastic acquisition for Pulsant – and a great fit in terms of culture, customer-centric approach and facilities,” said Mark Howling, CEO of Pulsant. ”Not only does it support our business growth in Scotland, it also adds to our UK data centre presence by adding outstanding network connectivity and additional capacity. At the same time, it provides us with a strong team of like-minded, highly skilled individuals who are experts in supporting data centre services. This moves us further towards our goal of being the data centre services partner of choice for UK businesses.” CentriLogic expands in Hong Kong. Canadian IT provider CentriLogic announced that it has extended its global expansion program with the development of a new data center in Hong Kong. The Tier III facility will be used to provide local and international customers with CentriLogic’s full suite of Co-Location, Managed Services, Cloud Computing, and Hybrid Hosting solutions. In addition to offering CentriLogic’s full suite of solutions, the data center will provide customers with N+1 redundancy in all aspects of the infrastructure, high availability, advanced security, and state-of-the-art green technologies with no single points of failure. “Many of our North American and European customers are expanding their global operations into the Asia-Pacific area and will require CentriLogic to continue supporting their worldwide IT infrastructure” commented Robert Offley, CentriLogic’s President & CEO. “Our investment in Hong Kong will serve as a gateway for direct access to the many growing businesses and opportunities present throughout the rest of Hong Kong, Greater China, and the remaining APAC territories, while also supporting the immediate needs of our existing customer base.” CoSentry facility earns Energy Star certification. CoSentry announced that it was recently awarded Energy Star certification for its National Data Center in Papillion, Nebraska. The certification was achieved through design specifications that included 99.9999 percent uptime and efficiency ratings 50 percent greater than traditional data centers. In addition to taking advantage of Midwest three-season free cooling, the facility also employs advanced monitoring of all power and cooling equipment that gives operators a real-time look into the data center efficiencies, and trends are examined on a daily basis to verify that all equipment is performing as efficiently as possible. “Achieving Energy Star certification is incredibly exciting for us” said Scott Capps, the facilities manager for the National Data Center. “Not only is it an award that that demonstrates our commitment to low cost, low impact energy usage, but it also puts us in an excellent position to continue our LEED certification process.” |
| 2:52p | Third Key to Brokering IT Services Internally: Create Your Own Menu of Services Dick Benton, a principal consultant for GlassHouse Technologies, has worked with numerous Fortune 1000 clients in a wide range of industries to develop and execute business-aligned strategies for technology governance, cloud computing and disaster recovery.  DICK BENTONGlasshouse In my last post, we outlined the second of seven key tips IT departments should follow if they want to begin building a better service strategy for their internal users: figure out what it costs. That means developing a cost model to determine the cost per deployable unit of your compute and storage resources (you can read about the first step, knowing what you’ve got, here). The next step, which we’ll explore today, is to create your own menu of services. You must identify what services you will offer in small, medium and large packages or in a standard, advanced and premium class. Just like an L.L. Bean catalog, this is a service catalog of your offerings, including what sizes and what styles are available in each offering. To compete with the public cloud provider (PCP), the internal cloud provider (ICP), or IT department, needs to be able to offer a Web-based capability for consumers to peruse the available offerings, and to select the offering and quantity of their choice. This requires two things of the ICP. The first is an understanding of what end users really want. The second is figuring out how to package these needs into easily recognizable and adequately differentiated service offerings. Setting Up the CatalogThe first of these is often the hardest. Historically, IT has tended to build what they it was needed, with marginal input from the user community. Few organizations would have had discussions outside the developer community on growth projections, traffic analysis and response time requirements. This has resulted in an IT design founded on a “just in case” philosophy. The IT design team ensures that, to the best of their capabilities, the configuration they design and deploy will have a substantial safety factor to ensure they can meet their own (limited) perception of the needs of the organization. This often results in a gold-plated configuration: high-end storage systems when SATA2 drives would suffice; dedicated servers instead of virtual machines: low density virtualization instead of pooled high density environments. The permutations (and expenses) are endless. Fortunately, the internal provider is typically going to be serving the developer community rather than the legacy application environment. This means that the partnership is often within the borders of IT, albeit with some aggravation among the various contentious tribes internally. Unfortunately, the developer is drawn to the PCP by the quick availability of infrastructure, platform and storage. Developers invariably require (or would like to have) multiple generations of their test/development environment, and that need drives the internal IT storage administrator and the system admin staff to distraction. And to rub salt into the wound, the developers are probably already using Amazon, so you are now in the unenviable position of having to compete against Amazon with a MUCH smaller and far less scalable environment. But there is hope. First, you will probably not be allowed to cross-charge for your services, giving the internal provider the advantage that services appear “at no cost” to the profit center’s bottom line. Of course, there may well be monthly reports of consumption and, at the end of the year, there will no doubt be a cross-charge; however, day-to-day, the internal provider doesn’t require a credit card to get resources, but the PCP does! Tailoring Your OfferingsSecondly, the public cloud provider usually has a wide variety of services to choose from. Some might say a dazzling array, while others might see it as a confusing mish-mash. You can build an advantage here by tailoring your offerings to your organization’s immediate needs without worrying about how it will impact every other organization in North America. In fact, with virtualized compute environments, you can offer to build your service offerings in a “Lego block” approach, by offering the consumer the ability to select compute power by number of CPUs, memory (performance) in 4 or 8 gigabyte chunks and storage in configured gigabytes. In addition, you can offer backup and disaster recovery services simply as a multiplier of the production CPU, memory and storage. This means it is your provisioning process that uses the quantity attribute, allowing you to effectively configure-to-order while eliminating the complexity of service offerings by putting the quantity into the order and provisioning process. The public cloud provider often creates small, medium and large packages, and the internal cloud provider can do this, too; however, while this is competitive among PCPs, it is not going to give the internal cloud provider a competitive edge. Configure-to-order can provide you with something few of the public cloud provider can effectively do. This approach can also dramatically simplify your monitoring and reporting efforts because your basic deployable resource unit is inherently manageable through native software and utilities provided by your platform vendor. While you may not need a layer of complex and expensive orchestration software to do this task, such software can make pseudo-invoicing a feasible early objective. In our next post, I will look at the terms and conditions needed in a service level agreement to formalize your “promise” to the consumer and their options for exception and recourse. 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. |
| 3:17p | Windstream To Open Third North Carolina Data Center  This overview of Compass Datacenters’ prototype shows the company’s approach to data center design, featuring a main data hall with no columns. (Image: Compass Datacenters). Windstream Hosted Solutions will be the tenant in a new enterprise-class data center being built by Compass Datacenters in Durham, North Carolina, the companies said this week. Scheduled to open in 2013, the new facility will be the third in the Raleigh-Durham area, as customer demand for cloud computing solutions and managed services continues to grow. Compass and Windstream previously teamed on a data center project in the Nashville market. The 22,000 square foot facility in Durham will be expandable to 88,000 square feet, and will be built as a Tier III facility. Designed as modular for easy capacity expansion as needed it will feature 2500 kVa of utility capacity (with expansion available), 360 tons of cooling, and redundant OC-192 10 Gbps circuits connecting each center to multiple Windstream core POP sites with fully redundant peering. “Windstream is committed to providing the personalized service businesses demand, ranging from point managed solutions such as managed security or storage to the complete delivery of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),” said Kip Turco, Windstream senior vice president of data center operations. “The Raleigh-Durham market is a critical area of growth for Windstream, and our new Durham data center will provide customers with the highest level of services and reliability.” The company recently announced completion of an enterprise-class data center in McLean, Virginia as the suburban Nashville facility. Windstream has SSAE 16 compliant enterprise data centers across the U.S. to serve the growing demand for cloud computing and managed services. |
| 3:25p | DJR Spring World Disaster Recovery Journal’s Spring World Conference will be held in Orlando, FL on March 17-20. The conference is dedicated to business continuity. DRJ is proud to present its 48th conference. The agenda is includes networking opportunities, sessions, workshops, exhibit hall tours, product demonstrations and much more. Spring World 2013 seeks to provide multiple learning opportunities. For more information and registration, visit the DJR Spring World website. Venue Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort 1000 W. Buena Vista Drive For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar. |
| 3:37p | ICE, NYSE to Merge: What About the Data Centers?  The long main hallway of the NYSE Euronext data center provides a sense of the immense scale of the 400,000 square foot facility in New Jersey. (Photo: Rich Miller) In the latest consolidation among stock exchanges, The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) will acquire NYSE Euronext for about $8.2 billion, the two companies said today. NYSE Euronext operates the New York Stock Exchange, as well as a global network of data centers powering its shift to an electronic trading platform. That includes two immense, starte-of-the-art data centers that NYSE Euronext has built in New Jersey and London. What will the ICE acquisition mean for these facilities? It’s an important question, as a joint bid for NYSE Euronext last fall by ICE and NASDAQ OMX raised the specter of a data center consolidation that might close one of the major financial data centers in New Jersey. The dynamic of today’s deal is very different, as there’s less overlap in the data center footprint of ICE and NYSE. ICE has a primary data center in Chicago and a backup facility in Atlanta, while NYSE EuroNext has major “liquidity centers” in Mahwah, N.J. and Basildon, England. The presentation accompanying today’s announcement mentioned “rationalization of technology platforms,” but also noted ICE’s intent to “build liquidity centers and connectivity,” suggesting the NYSE data center infrastructure is seen as a key asset going forward. NYSE Technologies, the technology arm of NYSE Euronext, said it has no additional comment for the moment. Here’s some additional background from DCK’s coverage of NYSE Euronext’s data center infrastructure: NYSE’s Data Fortress Powering the Financial Cloud: There are few data centers in the world that are more difficult to get into than the new NYSE Euronext facility in Mahwah, New Jersey. The huge building features extremely strong access control, a substantial security perimeter, and is built to survive … well, just about anything. “It is more robust than your typical structure,” said Steve Rubinow, Chief Information Office at NYSE Euronext, who said the data center “can withstand levels of punishment – both man-made and natural – that other facilities might not withstand.” The 400,000 square foot data center has been engineered for security, speed and reliability to support its mission as the nerve center for the NYSE”s electronic trading operations. Closer Look: NYSE EuroNext’s NJ Data Center: The NYSE Euronext data center in Mahwah, New Jersey serves as a bridge between the New York Stock Exchange’s history as the nation’s oldest trading floor, and a future in which the majority of trading volume will be driven by computers. The halls of the facility are lined with street signs bearing the names of streets in downtown Manhattan, which provide a connection between Wall Street and the data center, and also create a navigational grid for staff within the 400,000 square foot building. Closer Look: The NYSE Basildon Data Centre: Over the last several years, NYSE Euronext has opened a series of data centers in major global financial hubs. These “liquidity hubs” provide the infrastructure for the NYSE to handle the huge growth in demand for colocation for low-latency trading, which has surged as trading activity has shifted to electronic exchanges. In this video, NYSE Technologies provides an overview of the operations at its liquidity center in Basildon, England. |
| 4:11p | Data Center Conferences in 2013 As we turn the page of the calendar one final time this year, we at DCK are thinking about all the cool and interesting events in the industry for next year. So we’ve updated our events calendar with the latest news (that we could gather) from the “conference circuit” and added it to our Events Calendar channel. We continue to update throughout the year. Here’s what we have so far. Please let us know if there are other conferences in the first half of the year that you’d like us to add! Pack your bags! There are a plethora of events in the data center industry in 2013. |
| 7:23p | Top 5 Data Center Cartoons of 2012
This time of the year is the season for “Best of 2012″ and “Top Stories” postings. We thought that our readers might enjoy a re-cap of the antics of their favorite cartoon characters, Kip and Gary, and have a bit of a chuckle at the year’s best cartoons! For those who are not familiar, Data Center Knowledge runs a “Friday Funny” cartoon, created by Diane Alber, and asks our readers to submit funny captions. You can see more of Diane’s work on KipandGary.com We have assembled the cartoons that folks submitted the most caption suggestions for this year. The number one winner was the “tall cabinets” cartoon above. Enjoy! In this comic, Kip and Gary get a random cabinet that goes all the way to the ceiling. I’m not sure what they are going to do with it.
“It’s something you don’t think about very often, but there are some cases where the raised floor can’t take the weight load that you are putting in the cabinet. When you’re relocating cabinets and your floor buckles, sending all your IT equipment crashing to the floor … it’s not a good situation!
Kip has decided he is going to try and achieve two goals at once – exercising and saving energy. We’re just not sure how successful he is going to be. There’s more, click to the Next Page. |
| 7:31p | Uptime Institute Symposium 2013 Uptime Institute Symposium 2013 is planned for May 13-16 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The event focuses on the Global Digital Infrastructure Evolution and draws a large number of data center industry luminaries. The agenda and speakers list are available at the Uptime conference website. Symposium 2013: Global Digital Infrastructure Evolution will feature three tracks: Digital Infrastructure Investment, Finance and Business Strategy. Today’s executives must be able to measure, benchmark and improve the efficacy of their organizations’ Digital Infrastructure investments in often wholly new ways. This track will focus on providing executives with the tools and methodologies to gather data across the various, often disparate, divisions and disciplines within their organizations to make better decisions. Data Center Management and Operational Excellence. This track will focus on management best practices, benchmarking and buying trends. The speakers in this track will help data center and IT operations staff avoid infrastructure downtime, run operations efficiently, and improve capacity planning accuracy. Data Center Design Innovation. This track constitutes deep technical engagement and dialogue with design professionals, facilities managers and corporate real estate executives on groundbreaking case studies, product innovations and design advances. Venue For more information and registration, visit the Uptime Institute Symposium website. For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar. |
Click to enlarge cartoon.
Click to enlarge.
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