Friday, January 4th, 2013

Time	Event
1:00p	The Cloudy Horizon for 2013: 10 Predictions What’s ahead in cloud computing for 2013? It’s a big topic, and many industry executives and pundits have offered their predictions about how cloud will evolve in the year ahead. Here’s our roundup of 10 the cloud predictions we think will be worth watching in 2013. 1. Cloud Will Blur Boundaries of Facilities and Operations Many data center services providers have entered the cloud arena. Cloud is a complimentary offering to colocation. There will remain straight colo plays, but those with a heavily regional focus will add cloud to the portfolio, if they haven’t already. A lot of companies are recognizing that cloud is an integral piece in a larger strategy, so they’ll seek service providers that can provide cloud in addition to colo space or dedicated hosting. 2. It’s All About Hybrid Cloud and Multiple Clouds There were a lot more “mixed” deals in 2012. In 2013, Customers will get smarter about what should reside in the cloud and what shouldn’t, as well as use cloud more effectively for things like bursting during known periods of traffic spikes. They’ll also leverage multiple clouds more affectively. Cloud management specialist Rightscale said that 87% of its compute under management is multi-cloud usage, one data point suggesting an increasing percentage of users using multiple clouds. Cary Landis, NJVC senior architect, Cloudcuity AppDeployer and Virtual Global CEO sees a convergence occurring this year. “The lines between platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud services brokerages will blur into a conceptual operating system for the ‘Web as a platform’—providing tools to allow users to take advantage of multiple cloud solutions at once, and bringing the cloud closer to the end user in more meaningful ways,” said Landis. 3. Cloud Brokerages Increased use of multiple clouds requires improved ways to manage and access this multi-cloudinfrastructure. Quite a few predictions see the importance of cloud brokerages heightening in 2013. “Though still nascent, next year I expect to see some (cloud) service brokers emerge,” said George Watt, VP of Corporate Strategy at CA Technologies, in a blog post. ”While it won’t become the dominant model in 2013, I do expect that organizations will – consciously or subconsciously – begin preparing for that it.” Kevin Jackson, NJVC vice president and general manager, cloud services, agrees. “The new role of cloud services brokerages will be further defined and evolve over the next five years to provide niche services to organizations moving to the cloud, but also realizing that their specific IT needs will require the use of more than one cloud services provider,” said Jackson. (Comment on this)
1:30p	Disaster Recovery Is Not Business Continuity Jarrett Potts, director of strategic marketing for STORServer, a provider of data backup solutions for the mid-market. JARRETT POTTS STORServer A common theme in the world of data backup is the confusion of business continuity with disaster recovery. When it comes to protecting your data, it’s important to understand that these are two different concepts. The misunderstanding of the terms could result in organizations being left at a significant risk due to inadequate planning. According to IBM in 2011, of the companies that had a major loss of business data, 43 percent never reopen, 51 percent close within two years and 6 percent will survive long-term. Let’s be honest. In a disaster, few people care about the definition of terms. However, one sure way to get through the chaos of losing data and facilities is to know the difference between recovery and continuity. What’s the Difference? Disaster recovery is a subset, a small part of overall business continuity. It is the process of saving data with the sole purpose of being able to recover it in the event of a disaster. Disasters in IT range from minor to major: the minor loss of an important set of data to the major loss of an entire data center, though recovery of the corporate database may take the same herculean effort as the reconstruction of the company’s infrastructure. From the point-of-view of panic, pain and pressure, the range in size of a disaster—either minor or major—could arguably be very similar. A great example is Hurricane Katrina. In 2005, most of the city of New Orleans was underwater, without power and without some of the basic resources for humans to even live. There were many companies that kept off-site copies of their data, so that in the event of a disaster they could recover the data. What they did not plan for was the inability to get that off-site data to their secondary site. In one case, the company kept all of its data on off-site tapes that were kept in a secure location. The only problem was that the company staff could not physically travel to the site to retrieve its tapes. DR: Secondary Sites The root of disaster recovery is that data is kept in a secondary site, and plans are made on how that data will be recovered so that the business can access it again. One item to note is that the data is not accessible during the disaster. It must first be recovered, and the speed at which the data is recovered is solely dependent on the planning, infrastructure and processes that are set forth and tested. On the other side, business continuity typically refers to the management oversight and planning involved with ensuring the continuous operation of IT functions in the case of system or enterprise disasters. The elements necessary for successful business continuity include the plant (location), staffing and equipment, as well as the actual data recovery procedures. Business continuity is a completely different process. First, it is not data centric; it is business centric. The whole point of business continuity is to continue to do business during a failure or disaster. In basic terms, it means that when a failure or disaster happens, that data is still accessible with little to no downtime. Typically, business continuity is a combination of hardware and software technologies that keep data in two different places at the same time. For example, if the production server in one building goes down, the data and the application are “failed over” to a second system that the application can then use. Usually, the application only pauses and users do not even know there was a problem. What this really means is that you must have the infrastructure to support it. The most common example is clustering. Clustering allows the replication of data between multiple systems thus enabling you to have that data accessible from a secondary source in the event of some failure. Active/active clustering is a great example. If your mail application goes down on the production server, the replicated copy on the secondary server takes the load and the application stays up and people still have access. Continuity is Broader Regarding business operations and management of the staff and facilities, continuity represents a much larger scope of maintenance than the recovery of just the data and equipment. Most companies come from a practical analysis of how long recovery will take. During the planning process for recovery reality starts to set in. Time factors to get back in operation count heavily toward what must get recovered first. The matter of time to recovery introduces these business continuity questions: What do we need recovered first to stay in business? What do our customers need to remain assured of our stability? What do our business partners require to continue order, fulfillment and delivery? What do our vendor relationships insist upon to work with us? Prioritization of what to recover first points to the more important analysis of these business relationships and how they line up. Every corporate entity lives with different ordering lists that determine their ability to remain in business. Recovery of data may well be the only issue that the bulk of IT managers and C-level officers have time to address. It’s a good start, but not the whole story. You must understand the “what” and “how” in order to get your data back in operation. During that recovery planning, these same managers and officers will run into the continuity questions. The better the recovery system in terms of reliability, scope and scalability, the better the chance of stepping up to the continuity issues. The more feeble and antiquated your recovery planning, the more certain corporate failure at continuing business as usual during a disaster. 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)
2:00p	North Carolina’s Data Center Corridor: From Fiber to Servers Scott Millar, President of the Catawba County Economic Development Corporation (EDC), is working with local towns in North Carolina to package sites for data center use. (Photo: Rich Miller) HICKORY, N.C. – For Catawba County, the fiber came first. Now come the servers and the data centers. Catawba County which is about an hour’s drive north of Charlotte in western North Carolina, might seem an unlikely technology hub. But it was an early beneficiary of the Internet boom, as manufacturers of fiber optic cabling became the region’s largest employers in the late 1990s. Commscope and Corning each employ more than 1,000 workers here, placing them among the region’s largest employers. “We made 40 percent of the world supply of fiber optic cable in 2000,” said Scott Millar, President of the  Catawba County Economic Development Corporation (EDC). “We want to position ourselves at both ends of the spectrum. Commscope and Corning make the fiber, and at the other end of the spectrum there are the data center folks. We want to continue to build clusters (of technology companies). Data centers are a logical extension of that.” In 2006, the Catawba EDC began courting the data center industry, building upon interest in Google’s decision to build a new facility in nearby Caldwell County. The county joined industry groups like AFCOM and the 7×24 Exchange, attended major conferences, hosted an event for data center site selection specialists, and created a web site to market local properties online. Apple Alters the Equation That effort paid off in 2009 when Apple selected Maiden, a small town in Catawba County, as the site for a major data center to host infrastructure for its iCloud and iTunes services. The company has built a 500,000 square foot data center, and is nearing completion on two enormous solar arrays and a large fuel cell plant to provide on-site power for its thousands of servers. “For this region, it validated everything,” said Millar. “Google was seen as an anomaly. When Apple comes in, it puts the stamp of the total on North Carolina, on Duke Energy, and particularly on this corridor. If you’re a CEO, you have to consider North Carolina. We’ve had almost everyone look out here.” In October, Catawba County officials announced that Bath & Beyond will build a $36.8 million data center in Claremont, N.C. The company will locate the data center in the 48,000 square foot Center Point shell building in the Claremont International Business Park. Building on Regional Gains The corridor referenced by Millar is the “NC Data Center Corridor” in western North Carolina, which includes representatives from Alexander, Burke, Caldwell, Catawba and Iredell counties. It clearly also extends to Cleveland and Rutherford counties, which have also attracted major projects from Facebook, Walt Disney, AT&T and Wipro. The arrival of these facilities, along with the existing mega-projects from Apple and Google, reinforce that the state’s data center industry extends well beyond its traditional roots in Research Triangle Park. Now Millar says the region will try to compete on multi-tenant projects. “What we been successful with a single user enterprise guys,” he said. “Now that we’ve been validated by Apple, we want to attract colos, disaster recovery facilities and regional banks. “I think there’s still some hesitancy about data centers,” he continued. “If you’re in New York or New Jersey, this seems like a backwater. But you can do free cooling, and your cost structure is a whole lot lower.” Shovel-Ready Project Sites Millar says Catawba has lost out to neighboring counties on some recent opportunities, but is working to change that. It is packaging two sites – the Power Center at Maiden and the North Carolina Data Campus in Conover – for rapid deployment of new data centers. “I think our stumbling block for a while was that we didn’t have a product ready to go,” said Millar, referring to prepared sites. “Apple came because we had product and were ready to go. But now we’ve sold out of our product, so now we have developed the Power Center in the North Carolina campus and were back out there. We think that speed to market is a key.” Catwaba County also has an intriguing resource in its Eco-Complex located just north of the Apple site, which captures methane from the county landfill. The site also includes a dimensional lumber plant that provides wood for palletes, and the county is working with GE on a biomass gasification of the wood pulp from the facility. Millar said the Eco-Complex could have a total generation capacity of 10 megawatts – 4 megawatts from the landfill methane, 4 megawatts from the gasification, and 2 megawatts from composting of “bio sludge.” (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2013/01/04 [Calendar]

Next Day >>