Monday, January 21st, 2013

Time	Event
12:30p	Rackspace Plans Major Cloud Expansion in UK Rackspace Hosting plans a major expansion of its cloud computing infrastructure in the United Kingdom, and has hired Digital Realty Trust to build a new data center. Rackspace has been experiencing strong growth in its cloud business, as its total server count has grown by more than 10,000 over the past year while revenue has improved 27 percent. In recent years the San Antonio company has expanded the horizons for its cloud computing service, adding infrastructure in Europe and Asia as well as the U.S. Rackspace (RAX) has operated data centers in the UK for years to support its managed hosting business. In 2009 the company opened a new energy-efficient facility in the London suburb of Slough where it was consolidating servers from older facilities. In 2011 the company introduced its cloud offerings for UK customers include Rackspace Cloud Files and Cloud Servers. On Jan. 11 Rackspace signed an agreement with a subsidiary of Digital Realty for a 10 megawatt data center in the UK, with the exact location yet to be determined, according to an SEC filing. Under the terms of the agreement, Digital and Rackspace must agree on a site within the next year, and then determine a data center design. The agreement suggests a new data center build, but appears to allow for development The data center will feature five data halls, which will be built in two phases: a first stage of three data halls of approximately 2 megawatts apiece, and a second stage of two more data halls. The initial schedule calls for one new data hall every 12 months, but Rackspace has the right to adjust that schedule as demand dictates. With the UK deal, Rackspace has continued its practice of leasing “wholesale” data center space to expand its footprint, rather than building its own facilities. In the wholesale data center model, a tenant leases a dedicated, fully-built data center space. This approach is quicker and cheaper than building an entire data center facility. The tenant pays a significant premium over typical leases for office space, but is spared the capital investment to construct the data center. Rackspace has leased significant amounts of wholesale space from DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) in both Virginia and Chicago, and from Digital Realty in Dallas and in Sydney, Australia. Rackspace has also bought land in Oregon for possible expansion of its data center footprint, but say it has not finalized build-out plans. (Comment on this)
1:29p	VC Funding Slipped in 2012, OnApp Kicks Off 2013 In the same week that CB Insights reported that venture capital activity had decreased slightly in 2012, OnApp, Survey Monkey, Zettaset and InsideSales.com raised money to further their cause. Capital Funding falls $28.3 billion CB Insights released a report last week, noting that across 3,267 deals completed in 2012 the $28.3 billion invested was down 7.5 percent and failed to reach the $30 billion mark seen in 2011. The top 5 funds based on activity were rounded out by Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital. The report details which states saw the most activity, and which sectors are hot, such as healthcare and mobile. Speaking at the Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich, Ben Horowitz (jokingly) said that last year Andreesen Horowitz listened to pitches from 2,355 companies, and in the end closed only 24 deals. He went on to state that the companies that made it are those started by “college dropouts with insane ideas going after tiny markets with no way to monetize.” OnApp Cloud management platform company OnApp announced today that it has closed a Series B round of funding, bringing total funding to more than $20 million. With existing investor LDC leading the round, OnApp will use the funding to help roll out a new line of products and services in 2013, as well as expand into new global markets. London-based OnApp products include OnApp Cloud, OnApp CDN, an OnApp Marketplace and OnApp Storage. “In 2010, we set out to build a turnkey platform to make it easy for service providers to create profitable cloud services,” said OnApp CEO, Ditlev Bredahl. “Our customers now run some of the fastest growing cloud services out there, with an average annual growth rate of over 80%. We’ve also seen a new breed of Virtual Service Providers emerge, who are creating a wide range of cloud-based businesses on top of the OnApp Marketplace.” Survey Monkey Web-based survey solutions company Survey Monkey announced it has initiated an $800 million debt and equity recapitalization, led by CEO Dave Goldberg and Tiger Global Management, LLC, at a valuation of approximately $1.35 billion. Google is also becoming a new shareholder. The combined transaction represents one of the largest capital raises by a privately-held US internet company. With a $444 million equity sale completed late last year SurveyMonkey expects to raise an additional $350 million in debt financing. The proceeds from the debt will be used to buy shares from employees and shareholders as well as retire the Company’s existing debt. “This transaction affords us all of the capital benefits of a public offering without the costs and distractions of an IPO and the demands of operating as a public company,” said Dave Goldberg, SurveyMonkey CEO, who has significantly increased his ownership in the company as part of this transaction. “Given SurveyMonkey’s momentum and growth profile, this transaction is an optimal way to reward employees and longtime shareholders with meaningful liquidity while also providing opportunities for Tiger Global, Google Inc. and other new investors who are drawn to our strong business model.” Zettaset Big Data company Zettaset announced that it has closed a $10 million Series B financing round led by HighBar Partners, with additional participation from strategic investor Brocade and Series A investors DFJ and Epic Ventures.  The new funding will be used to further research and development as well as expand sales and marketing to meet increasing demand from enterprise customers. Zettaset produces a distribution-agnostic management platform, where software automates, secures and accelerates Hadoop deployments. “Enterprises of all sizes are demanding robust and secure turn-key solutions for their production, mission-critical environments,” said Zettaset President and CEO Jim Vogt. “Zettaset is the only vendor providing a comprehensive, software-only solution for cluster management that can be deployed across a wide variety of operating systems, Hadoop distributions, and file systems, transparently integrating Big Data into existing environments. This funding enables us to further serve our enterprise base and more effectively address this exploding market opportunity.” InsideSales.com InsideSales.com announced it has completed a $35 million Series B round of financing led by U.S. Venture Partners and joined by existing investor Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. The company provides cloud-based, sales automation and predictive analytics for inside sales professionals. In the last year, InsideSales.com has grown over 100 percent in sales, and 120 percent in employee count. In that same timeframe, the U.S. Patent Office awarded InsideSales.com three patents of its many pending applications. “We are leading the revolution of companies adopting the inside sales way of sales,” said David Elkington, InsideSales.com founder and CEO. “Our technology is fundamentally changing the way people think about and interact with their prospects and customers. We apply science and statistics to sales, increasing productivity and results for our customers. This funding will help us keep up with the demand in the market, add needed capacity, and to continue to innovate new solutions and technologies that will drive our customers success and growth.”   (Comment on this)
2:00p	Need for Speed: Violin Memory Acquires GridIron Violin Memory announced  it has completed the acquisition of application acceleration company GridIron Systems.  GridIron solutions accelerate he performance of a wide range of enterprise applications including online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehouses, virtualization and big data analytics. “The acquisition of GridIron Systems complements and expands Violin Memory’s strategy of offering memory-based solutions that accelerate business critical applications while optimizing IT infrastructures,” said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. “The expanded talent, technology and intellectual property position Violin Memory at the forefront of the ongoing transformation of enterprise data centers to memory-based architectures.” The acquisition of GridIron adds intellectual property for SAN-based caching and application acceleration to Violin’s portfolio of Flash Memory Array solutions.  GridIron products are well suited for the markets Violin targets, such as virtualization, big data and business critical applications.  Both companies are privately-held, and business, engineering and operations units have been successfully integrated. GridIron co-founder Som Sikdar has over 20 patents and has helped found Finisar, Force 10 Networks. “GridIron’s patented algorithms enable dramatic application acceleration in data center SAN environments by non-intrusively learning about input/output (I/O) access patterns and caching an application’s active dataset,” said Som Sikdar, founder and CTO of GridIron Systems. “By combining GridIron intellectual property and Violin Memory Array technologies, we can deliver solutions that will allow companies to transform the way they deploy and manage applications in their data center.”     (Comment on this)
2:30p	Roundup: Open Compute Summit 2013 Attendees to the Open Compute Summit IV converse at the Avnet booth. (Photo by Colleen Miller.) Last week’s Open Compute Summit produced a steady stream of news, as activity picks up on the open hardware movement. Here’s a look back at our coverage of the event and news announcements: Rackspace: We’ll Fill Data Centers With Open Compute Gear – From this point forward, all new servers added to the Rackspace Cloud will run on Open Compute hardware, one of the largest commitments to hardware designs based on the Open Compute Project. “Every expansion for our cloud business will be 100 percent Open Compute hardware,” Rackspace chief operating officer Mark Roegnik said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. Facebook Builds Exabyte Data Centers for Cold Storage – What do you do with an exabyte of digital photos that are rarely accessed? That was the challenge facing Jay Parikh and the storage team at Facebook. The answer? A dedicated data center at its Prineville, Oregon campus that could house older photos in a separate “cold storage” system that dramatically slash the cost of storing and serving these files. The facility has no generators or UPS systems, but can house up to an exabyte of data. Scenes from Day 1 of Open Compute Summit – The first day of the Open Compute Project Summit IV drew a crowd of 1,900 hardware and technology professionals to the Santa Clara Convention Center. Here’s a photo gallery of the first day. Open Compute: Momentum Builds for Open Hardware - Perhaps the best sign of the progress made by the Open Compute Project is that companies as diverse as Rackspace Hosting, Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs are all running servers based on these “open hardware” designs in their data centers. In less than two years, the Open Compute Project (OCP) has grown far beyond its origins as a showcase for Facebook’s design innovations, evolving into an active community building cutting-edge hardware, disrupting the traditional IT supply chain, and laying the groundwork for future innovation. Fusion-io Sets the Stage for the All-Flash Data Center – Fusion-io (FIO) announced its newest product line, Fusion ioScale. Aimed at the hyperscale and cloud companies, ioScale provides up to 3.2 terabytes of ioMemory capacity, and is available to order in a minimum of one hundred units. Pricing starts as low as $3.89 per gigabyte, with increasing discounts based on volume. Emerson Adapts Open Compute, Eyes HyperScale Market - In the first two years of the Open Compute Project’s initiative to bring open design standards to hyperscale data centers, vendors of power and cooling products have been notable for their absence. Not so with the 2013 Open Compute Summit, as Emerson Network Power was on hand to show off a rack solution that integrates power distribution and back-up concepts in the Open Rack specification, created with off-the-shelf components. AMD Rolls Out Open Compute Servers for Wall Street – If Facebook and the world’s largest financial services companies got together to build a server, what might it look like? The answer can be seen in new servers being unveiled today based on the AMD Open 3.0 platform, which was developed through the Open Compute Project. The hardware, which AMD calls “a radical rethinking of the server motherboard,” will be on display today at the 2013 Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. It is also being evaluated in data centers at Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs. Hyve Unveils Open Compute Servers and Storage – Hyve Solutions, a division of SYNNEX Corporation (SNX), rolled out Open Compute Project compliant hardware at Tuesday’s Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit, which drew 1,900 participants. Many attendees at the event held in Santa Clara, CA were at the company’s booth reviewing the production-grade rack which was on hand. Riot Games, an online PC game developer and publisher whose flagship title is “League of Legends,” is using Hyve’s OCP hardware within its data center environment. Calxeda Rolls Out ARM-Based Open Vault Storage – The Open Compute Project is getting some ARM-powered hardware, but perhaps not where you’d expect. Calxeda today introduced Project Knockout, which teams its low-power processors with the Open Vault storage system. We spent some time on the expo floor having video conversations looking at some of the latest innovations. Watch for those on DCK this week. (Comment on this)
3:30p	TheInfoPro: “Sea Change” Towards Converged Infrastructure Converged infrastructure is rising in terms of interest and spending, according to a new report from TheInfoPro, part of The 451 Group. The growing complexity and interdependency of storage, network, server and software in virtualized environments is driving interest in ‘integrated infrastructure’ solutions, which include unified computing, converged and appliance-oriented infrastructure, according to the report on servers and virtualization. General-purpose offerings – especially those that are composed of multi-vendor components – are gaining favor, with offerings from Cisco and its array of partners being the most widely mentioned by respondents. The report focuses on where the money will go and which vendors are best positioned/most trusted by those interviewed. “In a few years, we’ll move away from people buying the piece parts,” says  Peter ffoulkes, lead analyst on the report. “It’s going to change the way people spend going forward. No longer can people buy individual pieces like storage. Whatever they buy has to be designed and tested to work together.” “We’re sort of in a transition,” said ffoulkes, lead analyst on the report. “The way did computing for the last 20 years is not the way we’re going to do it for the next 20. We’re in a sea change. It’s a multi-year journey, and we’re in the middle of it. We are definitely seeing people are refreshing their technology. “ The overall findings show budgets are flattening into the future. Right now, companies are in need of a technology refresh and this is driving immediate spending. “There’s a sort of bump that is going through the system,” said ffoulkes. “Once that happens, people will get on a more normal type of cycle.” A Spending blip is going to keep moving through the system for the next 3-4 years, but will get smaller as we move through the system, the report finds. Different companies are at different stages of this refresh process to cloud. ffoulkes identifies three stages of data center cloud readiness, three “As”: Agile, Automate, Adaptable. The first is the “Agile” infrastructure stage, where infrastructure becomes consolidated, standardized and virtualized. The next stage beyond Agile is to “Automate,” such as building software scripts and processes and procedures so that infrastructure scales better.  The final stage of the modern data center is when you make it “Adapatable.” Things like having a Governance engine. Solving problems like ‘Can I run this stuff at night instead of during the day to save money?’ “Making infrastructure adaptable is the last step necessary for the cloud-ready data center,” said ffoulkes. Other key findings in the report include: Server virtualization projects are still driving activity and spending across much of the IT marketplace, with less than a third of respondents considering their environments to be sufficiently virtualized. The majority of respondents are undertaking a major refresh of their x86 server infrastructure together with the network and storage technologies that are required to optimize performance in virtualized, cloud-ready datacenters. In the x86 environment, which represents over 80% of respondents’ computing capacity, average virtualization levels have increased 13% from last year to 51%, with a notable increase at the higher levels, roughly doubling the number of organizations virtualizing production applications. From the software perspective, attention is switching from base virtualization capabilities to the automation tools required to manage production workloads in virtualized environments: service catalogs, usage-based reporting and accounting (show-back), service-level monitoring tools and runbook or script-based automation and provisioning. With most organizations embroiled in virtualizing business-critical production workloads, it is hardly surprising that vendors closely associated with the technologies required to build cloud-ready, virtualized datacenters top the list of exciting vendors. This strongly favors VMware as the dominant virtualization provider for x86-based infrastructure, and Cisco for hardware vendors. Both vendors also top TheInfoPro customer ratings for promise and fulfillment. The report is based on extensive interviews with server professionals and primary decision-makers at large and midsize enterprises in North America and Europe. The interviews were conducted over the course of the second half of 2012 (Comment on this)

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