Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

Time	Event
2:09p	2013: The Year IT Becomes Invisible Scott Crenshaw is Senior Vice President of Strategy & Chief Marketing Officer for Acronis, a provider of data availability, accessibility and protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. SCOTT CRENSHAW Acronis It’s time to get serious about getting enterprise IT to “grow up.” Virtualization and cloud have been through the hype cycle, and, moving forward, we’re finally going to see the full potential for more scalable, reliable and cost-efficient IT services. But, with Big Data and BYOD complicating things, IT has a serious task ahead to keep things running smoothly and to keep users from circumventing its control. To do this, enterprise IT has to create services that engage the user with on demand functionality. 2013 will see this starting to happen. 2013 is the year that: IT becomes invisible – Virtualization is a commodity, and it’s everywhere. In fact, the Acronis 2012 Disaster Recovery Index found that 89 percent of U.S. companies surveyed had already virtualized some part of their IT infrastructure. Now, virtualized environments must ensure data is on hand and accessible at all times and from anywhere. Fundamentally, this is about end-point access and guaranteeing a seamless user experience, so users don’t have to think about where things are coming from or navigating tricky data access. 2013 is the year virtualization means invisible IT. Cloud storage becomes a reality – The first generation of cloud development addressed the nuts and bolts of virtualization, application mobility and hardware optimization. The new paradigm of the cloud is availability, access and assurance. A Forrester study has already found that companies can cut costs as much as 74 percent by storing data in the cloud. And, this is only the beginning. 2013 is about making sure the cloud is ready to help sustain your organization’s data storage. Big Data becomes highly available – Big Data is getting bigger and bigger, acting as a main driver for IT spending in the enterprise. To be specific, $232 billion in IT spending through 2016, according to Gartner. The good news is, companies can prioritize data to ensure accessibility and availability for business critical functions, while still preserving costs and resources. This involves a tiered storage strategy, with strategic implementations of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure components. 2013 is the year of getting data-organized to make organizations run more efficiently. The backup market shrinks – The traditional backup and recovery market is a dinosaur. But, new trends like Cloud, Big Data and IT consumerization, are too much for the big guys and laggards to handle (but, shh!, don’t tell them). That’s why the more nimble disruptors will gain share and shrink the market. They’ll do it with disruption, mainly by emphasizing data access and not just security. 2013 is the year of real disruption in the backup market to address new IT realities. The enterprise accepts Apple – Why not? Everyone else has! In fact, 30 million iPads are likely to sell this holiday season, and employees will be working on them whether their companies like it or not. BYOD is here to stay, and, if the enterprise doesn’t adapt, then users will leave IT behind. Enterprise IT must allow users to connect, share and collaborate in a secure environment without limiting their freedom. 2013 is the year we enable the enterprise to be Apple-ready. These developments are permanently changing the enterprise IT landscape. That’s been said many times before, but, this time, it’s true. Today’s user is constantly glued to Internet services that give them instant results. They now expect the same quality experience from IT. And, in 2013, IT can satisfy that demand by being highly accessible, available and secure. 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. (Comment on this)
2:32p	Digital Realty Shows Off Upgrades in St. Louis Digital Realty recently unveiled improvements to 210 North Tucker, a key data center and telecom hub in the St. Louis market. Digital Realty CEO Michael Foust was on hand to show off the more than $30 million in upgrades and improvements, including a 16 megawatt expansion of the building’s power capacity. “We have essentially performed open heat surgery on this building while we have customers in place running their busineses,” said Donough Roche, Director of Sales Engineering for Digital Realty Trust. That effort yielded a recent lease of an entire floor by Contegix, a local colo and cloud services firm. This video runs about 8 minutes. For more coverage, see our Digital Realty Channel. For additional video on data centers, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube. (Comment on this)
2:39p	WAN Technologies Help Data Centers Grow and Evolve To many, cloud computing and WAN utilization can be considered synonymous. More organizations are seeing the direct benefits of moving towards a cloud platform. Whether they’re trying to reduce their internal hardware footprint, or are trying to distribute their data; the data center infrastructure is very much a critical component of the entire process. Business are trying to find ways to better deliver their information and continue to be more competitive in this “cloud-centric” market. WAN technologies continue to evolve as more bandwidth, better underlying infrastructure and optimization all create a more robust connection. As more organizations move to the cloud, they will increase their reliance on data center availability and technologies. This is where data center managers must look to the cloud to help them stay ahead of the curve and continue to offer great technology solutions. The market will continue to grow and some leading data center providers are now actively looking at ways to enter the cloud and WAN markets. Even now, more data centers are finding new delivery models and services which not only help customer agility, but also drive additional revenue. Enhanced connectivity. Software-defined technologies have helped the data center become more distributed and robust. Multiple data centers across the country can span one logical network connection and deliver cloud services with very little latency. This type of advancements truly brings data centers closer together and creates numerous options for the customer. The ability to build a “business-in-a-box” becomes much easier since one single data center provider can effectively support the entire global organization. More bandwidth, better WAN optimization and more cloud platforms all translate into more opportunities for the data center provider community. With better links between sites, more data centers can open up their environments to a broader range of customers. New cloud services. Expansive data center resources mean new cloud services, whether data center providers are acting as hosting solutions for various cloud options or  building entirely new cloud platforms for private, public or even community access. Right now, data center cloud architecture is on the rise. Just take a look at the recent cloud architect job trends. There are a lot of cloud options for data centers to dive into. Backup and recovery have been popular, as have been cloud offerings. Data centers are now trying to ramp up their WAN presence by increasing bandwidth and improving the underlying hardware.  Cloud hosting, deployment and implementation services are definitely ways that data center environments can continue to help the industry grow – and generate additional revenue in the process. Better DR and recoverability. The increase in bandwidth and WAN control has given rise to cloud-based disaster recovery (DR). Data center providers can effectively, remove single points of failure by quickly replicating data over the WAN to hot or standby sites. Many organizations, especially in light of recent natural disasters, are looking heavily into business continuity. WAN optimization and faster links into the data center have created feasible and affordable disaster recovery methodologies for more organizations. DR and business continuity operations aren’t cheap. However, they have come down in price as the demand has gone up and the competition has increased. Now, organizations have the option of replicating vital VM or server information into the cloud. Then, in the event of an emergency – the data center provider can spin up VMs to allow an organization to connect into the data center. Using WAN optimization and calculate bandwidth utilization, users can continue to work even though their primary data center is down. Greater data center elasticity. With improvements in the WAN and cloud models, data centers have been able to focus on growth and expansion. Now providers are able to open more branch data centers to support more users. Internet and WAN speeds have increased as ISPs and providers try to keep up with demand. IT consumerization has created a “data-on-demand” end-user who requires connectivity and availability at almost all times. Not only can a data center utilize greater bandwidth resources, they can support more users and control the connections more granularly. All of this results in an expanding business model where data center providers can grow and provision new customer resources quickly. For example, a data center provider can offer burst WAN speeds during peak times – a travel agency for instance – so that the company can meet the demands of the visiting customer. Then once the peak times are over, the provider can dynamically de-provision those resources and return them to the pool. This creates a more robust and more elastic data center capable of supporting more users at any given time. Cloud computing will continue to provide great benefits for those organizations which fit the cloud model. At the heart of it all sits the data center which provides connectivity and data delivery for many cloud components. Now, more than ever, data center administrators must look to WAN technologies to help not only optimize their offerings, but to increase the benefits of working with a WAN-based, cloud ready environment. (Comment on this)
3:24p	If You Like the Internet, Don’t Knock Down That Building This view of the rooftop power and cooling infrastructure at the 511 Building shows the property’s proximity to the Metrodome, with the Minneapolis skyline as a backdrop. (Photo: The 511 Building). The digital infrastructure that drives electronic business in a major city often keeps a low profile. Often, the property owners like it that way. But sometimes a data hub needs to make its presence felt. That was the case in 2012 for the owners of the 511 Building, the primary telecom hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “The Minnesota Vikings apparently thought the building was so unimportant that the organization briefly considered tearing it down to make way for the new football stadium,” the StarTribune reported earlier this month. “That all changed with the threat of a lawsuit by the building’s owner, Timeshare Systems, and the public disclosure of the building’s actual purpose: It is Minnesota’s largest Internet communications hub. Converging on the 511 Building are about 70 different data networks, ranging from AT&T and Verizon to Bemidji’s Paul Bunyan Telecom.” The 511 Building is a 270,000 square foot building adjacent to the Metrodome. Once the region’s technology community spoke up, the plans to relocate the tenant were promptly abandoned. Some sources told the StarTribune that the cost tor replace the telecom hub might rival the cost of building a new stadium. For more background, check out the StarTribune report as well as an earlier story from Minnesota Public Radio. (Comment on this)

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