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Friday, February 8th, 2013
| Time | Event |
| 12:30p | Dell Launches New Switching Platform & SDN Capabilities
Dell announced new additions to its networking portfolio, with new top-of-rack and blade switches, as well as commercial availability of OpenFlow in its Force10 Operating System (FTOS). The new Dell S4820T top-of-rack (ToR) switch is purpose-built for deployment in high-performance data center and cloud computing environments, offering the right mix of scalability, performance, operational simplicity and cost-effectiveness. Powered by FTOS it will support both Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality. It features 10G connectivity, copper-based support for Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and four 40G uplinks for high-speed fabric connectivity. “Private cloud, storage, and big data analytics usage models are driving the need for increased bandwidth,” said Dawn Moore, general manager, Intel Networking Division. “The Intel Ethernet CNA X540 with the Dell S4820T 10GBASE-T switch provides customers an easy migration from an existing 1G infrastructure to a high-performing, cost-effective 10G network. We’ve also jointly validated FCoE interoperability on this combination to help facilitate a smooth migration to a next-generation converged network.” To help customers migrate to 10/40G architectures for server and storage connectivity Dell announced two new network offerings. A new Dell MXL blade switch is built for PowerEdge M1000e blade server chassis, and features 1/10/40FbE Layer 2 and layer 3. A new PowerEdge M I/O Aggregator offers similar connectivity options, and is optimized for plug-and-play simplicity and rapid configuration-free deployments. OpenFlow in FTOS Dell also announced the commercial availability of OpenFlow for its FTOS code base. Available now for the Dell Z9000 and S4810 data center switches, OpenFlow is a key technology enabler for next-generation software-defined network (SDN) deployments. The new software is fully compliant with available standards-based OpenFlow controllers, including the Big Switch Controller from Dell partner Big Switch Networks. |
| 1:00p | Cobalt Opens Cheyenne Data Center in Las Vegas  A look at the unique network operations center at the Cobalt Cheyenne data center in Las Vegas, which opened its doors yesterday. (Photo: Cobalt Data Centers) Cobalt Data Centers has opened the doors on the first of two planned Tier 3-compliant data centers in Las Vegas. Cobalt Cheyenne is a 34,000 square foot facility backed by 5.5 megawatts of critical power. The facility is located on West Cheyenne Avenue, 20 minutes from the Las Vegas Strip and 10 minutes from the Red Rock recreation area. It has room for more than 450 cabinets, and it supports 300 watts per square foot densities throughout, with higher density up to 600 watts per square foot available. The company fell in love with the site from the begining. “This was an enterprise data center for a dot-com that put a lot of money into the infrastructure,” said Mike Ballard, CEO at Cobalt Data Centers. “When we saw the building, we decided to make this our priority.” The facility is loaded with amenities, including private offices, a lounge, a business center and even showers are available for client use. Yesterday Cobalt held a ribbon cutting cermony with Las Vegas Mayor Pro Tem Stavros Anthony, who toured the center with other business leaders and Cobalt’s principals: Ballard, Joseph Gallagher, Russ Ketchum, Mark Hanson and Tom Harris. “Showcase for the Industry”“Our data centers and Las Vegas Peering and Internet Exchange (LV-PIX), which provides superior fiber connectivity, will serve as fundamental infrastructure supporting the development of the growing technology industry in Las Vegas,” said Mike Ballard, who serves as chief executive officer of Cobalt Data Centers. “We are very excited to be a part of the city’s success and technology diversification. Our Cobalt Cheyenne site is a showcase for the industry on how data centers can be designed and operated in alignment with community interest and environmental stewardship.” Cobalt has already signed clients in gaming, health care, cloud computing and managed services, and the company says it is seeing significant demand from prospects based in Chicago, Texas, and California companies, as well as providers seeking to serve those markets. The firm is expecting to employ 20 people directly within its first year. The Cheyenne facility incorporates a high density, distributed power infrastructure. The electrical design is a modular, expandable system providing 2(N+1). Generator capacity is 9.0 MVA with six generators, while UPS capacity is 4.5 MVA in six 750KVA UPS in a tri-redundant system design. Cobalt’s electrical system was designed by Harris Consulting Engineers and allows for multiple redundancies in all critical components. The building’s architect was Dan Ballard of Ethos Three Architecture, and the general contractor was Burke Construction Group, a 28-year-old, award-winning construction company in Las Vegas. Cobalt controls an additional site for large-scale deployment and wholesale operation at the Las Vegas “carrier row” on Sahara Avenue. The Las Vegas MarketThe opening of Cobalt Cheyenne is the latest in a series of indicators of the growth of Las Vegas and Nevada as a data center destination. “Nevada is known for having an attractive tax environment, and Las Vegas is well protected from natural disasters,” said Everett Thompson, chief executive officer of Wired Real Estate Group Inc., a leading data center advisory firm and Cobalt strategic partner. “With multiple clients already installed within their first 30 days of operations, it’s apparent that the Las Vegas market was in need of a high-touch, alternative provider. With a large footprint of both retail and wholesale space, Cobalt is well positioned to become a national brand.” “The (Las Vegas) market is attractive for a couple of reasons,” said Ballard. “It’s been dominated by one company for the last several years, so there’s an opening for a high service provider.” Ballard says the company underwent several focus groups to determine what people wanted in a colocation provider, “one of the biggest demands was flexibility. They wanted a colocation provider to be able to work with them, to not provide a cookie cutter experience.” Cobalt’s executive team has a long legacy of data center design and development in Las Vegas and Silicon Valley, with members having held senior management positions with brands such as Switch Communications, Marquisnet (now zColo), Exchange@200 Paul, and others. |
| 1:30p | Data Center Jobs: Opengate Data Systems At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Opengate Data Systems, which is seeking a Regional Sales Manager in Sacramento, California. The Regional Sales Manager is responsible for developing relationships with key technical and decision makers within a customer’s organization; including data center and facility managers, engineers, project managers, management, executives, construction, financial, and purchasing personnel, gaining organization trust by demonstrating and constantly improving technical consultation and service, high level sales activity through initiative, persistence, ingenuity, creativity, personal and business relationships and influencing the design of integrated data center cooling and airflow systems along with data center management and automation systems. To view full details and apply, see job listing details. Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed. |
| 1:33p | Is Your DR Plan Ready? Tips to Help You Weather the Storm  Is your data center ready for a blizzard? Better check your disaster recovery plan. Heavy snow can be beautiful, but can also be a challenge. (Photo of New York’s Gramercy Park in Feb. 2011 blizzard by Marc Cappelletti via Flickr) With a potentially historic blizzard threatening parts of the Northeast, it’s a good day to review your disaster recovery and business continuity plans. As part of Data Center Knowledge’s Industry Perspectives feature, disaster recovery expert Richard Dolewski has written a series of comprehensive articles on disaster recovery planning and strategy that provides guidance and tips for all who face business continuity issues. Disaster Recovery Scenario: Stick to the Plan - No one likes disasters and downtime. Prudent operations managers have business continuity plans that can assist in a crisis and support organizational priorities and goals as well. Health Check For Your Disaster Recovery Plan – Just as a health checkup can point out areas where your body is not operating at its peak, your Disaster Recovery Plan needs a regular review to make sure your IT systems and staff are fully prepared for any disaster that may occur. Disaster Recovery Plans: Practice Makes Perfect – Once you’ve developed and implemented a Disaster Recovery Plan, your job is just beginning; you must test it — not just once, but regularly — to reflect the changing dynamics of your computing environment. We’ll also pose a question to our readers with expertise on disaster recovery: What are the special considerations for dealing with a major snow event? How does the checklist for a blizzard differ from other types of disasters? Share your thoughts and expertise in the comment section. |
| 3:05p | Super Bowl Outage Blamed on Faulty Relay Device The power outage that interrupted last Sunday’s Super Bowl was caused by a malfunction in an electrical relay device, according to Entergy New Orleans, the utility supporting the SuperDome in New Orleans. “The device was specifically installed to protect the Mercedes-Benz Superdome equipment in the event of a cable failure between the switchgear and the stadium,” Entergy said in a statement Friday. “While the relay functioned without issue during a number of high-profile events – including the New Orleans Bowl, the New Orleans Saints–Carolina Panthers game, and the Sugar Bowl – during Sunday’s game, the relay device triggered, signaling a switch to open when it should not have, causing the partial outage. This device has since been removed from service and new replacement equipment is being evaluated.” The power outage during the game was initially blamed on an unspecified “abnormality” in electrical load at the point where the feeder lines from Entergy enter the Superdome. In its initial report on Monday, Entergy and SuperDome operator SMG said the system to detect electrical supply problems operated properly. “Shortly after the beginning of the second half, a piece of equipment that is designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system,” the Monday statement said. “The fault-sensing equipment activated where the Superdome equipment intersects with Entergy’s feed into the facility. Once the issue was detected, the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome in order to isolate the issue.” Entergy is now saying the relay device triggered when it should not have. “While some further analysis remains, we believe we have identified and remedied the cause of the power outage and regret the interruption that occurred during what was a showcase event for the city and state,” said Charles Rice, president and chief executive officer of Entergy New Orleans. In an analysis posted earlier this week, Amazon’s James Hamilton examined several potential weaknesses in the SuperDome power infrastructuree, including swithgear. “Given the Superdome just went through $336 million renovation, the switch gear may have been relatively new and, even if it wasn’t, it likely was almost certainly recently maintained and inspected,” Hamilton wrote. “Where issues often arise are in configuration. Modern switch gear have an amazingly large number of parameters many of which interact with each other and, in total, can be difficult to fully understand. And, given the switch gear manufactures know little about the intended end-use application of each switchgear sold, they ship conservative default settings. Generally, the risk and potential negative impact of a false positive (breaker opens when it shouldn’t) is far less than a breaker that fails to open. Consequently conservative settings are common.” |
| 4:00p | Dell To Build 3 Petabyte Storage Infrastructure For JAIST Dell announced that Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) has selected Dell Compellent arrays to provide high-performance and large capacity storage for its growing, private cloud environment that supports its students and researchers. The new storage infrastructure is one of Dell’s largest Compellent installations, with a capacity of three petabytes. JAIST selected Dell for Compellent’s automated data tiering technology, which allows them to benefit from both the performance and capacity from a single system, which previously had been managed separately. The storage infrastructure also features IPv6 compatibility, advanced snapshot features and advanced replication features. A key requirement for JAIST was to eliminate the issue of depleted IPv4 addresses and build an efficient storage infrastructure with IPv6 compatibility. “With advancements to the Dell Fluid Data architecture and the enterprise capabilities of Dell Compellent storage arrays, an increasing number of customers are turning to Dell for large-scale storage deployments,” said Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager of Dell Storage. “JAIST’s selection of Dell Compellent is the latest example of our ability to efficiently and cost effectively offer both performance and protection to power business-critical workloads.” The new storage arrays will bolster the storage capabilities of FRONTIER (FRONT Information EnviRonment), a campus IT platform constructed to support advanced teaching and research activities at JAIST, which specializes in graduate-level education and research. As the core of this system, a private cloud environment is being implemented with the aim to improve convenience for users and help achieve low cost, high energy efficiency and streamlined management by centralizing hardware resources. |
| 4:44p | Friday Funny: “I Thank goodness, it’s Friday! It’s been a long week, toiling in the cave at Data Center Knowledge. So it’s time for humorous pick-me-up. Time for the cartoon contest. Congratulations to Steven Shugarts, who submitted, “Kip, I don’t think that is what they meant by ‘uptime’.” For our cartoon inspired by “Up.” For this week, our favorite data center cartoonist, Diane Alber, writes, “And just when Kip felt forever alone, on Valentine’s Day, he got a secret admirer….” What’s your suggestion for a cartoon caption? Enter in the comment field below. The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon (drawn by Diane Alber, our fav data center cartoonist) and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion.The winner will receive their caption in a signed print by Diane. Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.
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| 5:00p | Storage News: NetApp, SAP Expand Partnership Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the storage industry: NetApp and SAP deepen partnership. NetApp and SAP announced an expanded partnership with the intent to support next-generation solutions, including the SAP HANA platform and SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Magement software. NetApp storage and data management solutions, including the Cisco and NetApp-developed FlexPod, complement SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management in the automation of routine administration tasks; reduction of costs, hardware resources and power; and simplification of landscape management of SAP solutions. “SAP is recognized worldwide for innovation and providing collaborative business solutions that help our customers compete and adapt to their fast-changing business needs,” said Rob Enslin, president of SAP Global Customer Operations and member of Global Managing Board, SAP. “Expanding our partnership with NetApp provides our customers with increased scalability and data protection, while at the same time allowing for greater management of data growth and adaptability to our customers’ changing on-demand needs.” SAP and NetApp plan to explore other areas in the future, including SAP database solutions, further integrations around SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management and cloud-based system management automation, and optimizing performance and availability of data management solutions for SAP HANA. Quantum announces new i6000 tape library. Quantum (QTM) announced the new Scalar i6000 HD enterprise tape library, offering 5 petabytes of data available in a single 19 inch rack. Targeting big data and archive needs with slot densities that are twice those offered by competitors, the i6000 can scale to over 75 petabytes of capacity. Quantum has also added new high-availability and management features to the Scalar i6000, as well as greater access capabilities for storing big data archives on tape. ”85 percent of the Fortune 100 have turned to Quantum to meet their storage needs, and we’re continuing to deliver innovative new solutions to address the challenges that large enterprise customers face,” said Robert Clark, senior vice president, Data Protection, Quantum. ”This includes adding new offerings such as the Scalar i6000 HD to our tape automation portfolio, which not only is unmatched in its breadth and depth but also reflects the unique benefits tape technology provides in today’s evolving data protection environment.” Nimble Storage exceeds $100 million run rate. Nimble Storage announced that the company surpassed a $100 million run rate in bookings in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year ending January 31, 2013, after just two-and-a-half years of commercially shipping its products. With more than 2,000 systems shipped to date the company has achieved annual sales growth of over 400 percent and quadrupled its number of customers. Global expansion has taken the company to Europe, Australia and Singapore. “This was a significant milestone for us in both sales and customer momentum,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage. “Our customers have validated the growing demand for hybrid flash storage arrays and the strength of Nimble Storage’s position against large incumbent vendors. Our founding premise, and the philosophy that every Nimble employee has held from the very beginning, is that we have the potential to build the next great storage company. Following that belief, Nimble has built not only groundbreaking products but also the infrastructure and sales funnel needed to deliver on its mission to make the world’s most efficient data storage solution for enterprises.” |
| 6:00p | Gangnam Style in the Data Center  Gangnam style comes to the data center, courtesy of EMC. It had to happen eventually: A “Gangnam Style” parody with IT professionals doing the Psy “horse dance” in the aisles of a data center. This “Oopa EMC Style” performance is brought to you via a YouTube video from “Chad Sakac and the EMC Giddyups.” Sakac is senior VP of Global Systems Engineering at EMC, aleading player in the storage market. “It took about 9 hours to record, and I was popping in and out to meet with customers and various folks at Cisco as we recorded it at the EMC campus in Santa Clara,” Chad writes in a blog post, in which he introduces his dance partners. We don;t think any of them should quit their day jobs just yet, but the lyrics and setting provide some good Friday fun to ease you into your weekend. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube. |
| 7:15p | Rackspace Hosting Partners with Alamo Colleges for $2.5 Million Job-Training Grant Rackspace (RAX) and Alamo Colleges have partnered to provide job training to 1,000 workers, through the use of a $2.5 million Skills Development Fund grant from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC). The grant will be used to custom train 1,000 new workers (no matter what their background) as well as current Rackspace employees, in San Antonio, Austin and Dallas, and will provide cutting-edge training on technologies that support the Rackspace open cloud platform. “As the open cloud company, Rackspace fully understands the importance of a highly engaged, cloud savvy workforce,” said Lanham Napier, Rackspace CEO. “We are thrilled to be partnering with Alamo Colleges and see this as an exciting step forward in our journey to bridging the IT skills gap.” Those trained will include technicians, Linux administrators and software developers. Upon completion of training, the new workers will earn an average hourly wage of $25.38. “We have enjoyed a highly successful partnership with Rackspace in helping the company train the skilled workers they need,” said Alamo Colleges Chancellor Dr. Bruce Leslie. “Partnerships such as this illustrate Alamo Colleges’ flexibility in addressing the needs of local employers while also providing students with tangible economic opportunities,” he added. From the program’s inception in 1996 through 2012, Skills Development Fund grants have created or upgraded more than 286,000 jobs throughout Texas. The grants have assisted 3,901 employers with their customized training needs. “Skills grants deliver customized training solutions that help Texas employers and workers succeed in the marketplace,” said TWC Chairman Andres Alcantar. “This investment builds not only employee skills, but the capabilities of our community colleges to the benefit of employers and the community. We are pleased to make this investment.” For more news on cloud computing, bookmark our Cloud Computing Channel.
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