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Friday, March 1st, 2013
| Time | Event |
| 12:30p | Top 10 Data Center Stories for February 2013  Facebook adopted Opscode’s Private Chef to help manage its fast-growing infrastructure, like this data hall in the company’s North Carolina data center.The new version of Chef has been rewritten to enhance its scalability. (Photo:Rich Miller) February was a month for “big” news, such as Dell gaining a contract for 3 petabyte storage, a mysterious $1.5 billion project in Iowa, and Microsoft reaching the $15 billion benchmark in data center spending. But there was also levity with viral dance videos released by EMC and Rackspace. So here’s the line up of the most popular stories for February 2013, ranked by page views. Dell To Build 3 Petabyte Storage Infrastructure For JAIST - February 8 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. Facebook Scales Servers with Retooled Chef – February 4 Facebook was looking for improved tools to help it manage its growing armada of servers. The team at Opscode was looking for new ways to improve the scalability of its Chef tool for automating infrastructure. $1.5 Billion Iowa Project is Still Alive. Is it Apple? – February 1 The mysterious $1.5 billion project known as Project Catapult is apparently back in play. Local officials in Altoona, Iowa this week revived a site plan for the project, which has been shrouded in secrecy as a large company has scouted sites in both Iowa and Nebraska. Gangnam Style in the Data Center - February 8 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.” Superdome Infrastructure Eyed in Super Bowl Power Loss – February 4 It’s probably the most high-profile outage imaginable: A power loss at the stadium hosting the Super Bowl, in the middle of the game. How could this happen? The Evolution of Microsoft’s Data Center Design – February 4 The dramatic changes in web-scale data center design in recent years can be seen in the evolution of the Internet infrastructure at Microsoft, which has been among the leading proponents of deploying servers on pre-fabricated modules rather than traditional data halls. The company says this shift has allowed it to deploy servers at a faster pace with lower cost. Windows Azure Cloud Crashed by Expired SSL Certificate - February 25 Microsoft has spent more than $15 billion building one of the largest global cloud computing infrastructures. An SSL certificate can be had for as little as $70 a year from a commercial certificate authority, or can be effectively free if you issue your own, as Microsoft does. Eucalyptus: We’ll Be More Open Than Other Open Clouds – February 12 In a landscape with dueling open clouds, which is the most open? Cloud software specialist Eucalyptus sees pushing boundaries of open clouds as an opportunity. This philosophy is driving changes at the company, with a sharper focus on its “open” roots from its origins in academia. Eucalyptus has open sourced its courseware and training, making all those materials available for free. Rackspace Does The “Harlem Shake” – February 15 Rackspace, a cloud hosting provider, is known for its corporate culture. This week, it’s email and apps team demonstrated their energy and levity through their own version of the viral video hit, the “Harlem Shake.” Video: LeaseWeb Migrates 3,000 Servers – February 12 What’s it like to move 3,000 servers into a new data center? As part of its expansion in the U.S. market, LeaseWeb recently migrated 100 server-filled racks into a new data center hall at the COPT6 facility in Manassas, Virginia. Stay updated on the latest news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook. DCK is now on Google+. |
| 2:13p | Equinix to Sell $1.5 Billion in Notes to Fund Construction, Acquisitions  Equinix is selling up to $1.5 billion in senior notes, and plans to use some of the funds for data center construction and potential acquisitions. Last year the colocation provider acquired Ancotel and its Kleyer90 connectivity hub in Frankfurt, pictured above. (Photo: Equinix) Colocation provider Equinix plans to sell up to $1.5 billion in senior notes, and will use some of the money to build new data centers and fund acquisitions, the company said Thursday. The offering shows that the data center industry’s strongest players continue to use their financial strength to enter new markets and boost their competitive position. Equinix (EQIX) will also use some of the money in its plan to convert to a real estate investment trust (REIT), a move that has boosted interest from investors but would involve a substantial cash payment to shareholders of at least $700 million. The company plans two offerings: a sale of $1 billion in senior notes that mature in 2023 and pay 5.375 percent interest, and $500 million in notes due in 2020 pay 4.875 percent. Part of the proceeds will be used to reduce Equinix’s interest costs by paying off existing notes that pay 8.125 percent. Equinix said the remainder will be used for capital expenditures – which in the colocation business, means data center construction and maintenance – and to fund potential acquisitions. The company said it does not currently have any deals pending deals. But in 2012 Equinix was an aggressive acquirer, boosting its global expansion with three deals, including the acquisition of Frankfurt data hub AncoTel, Shanghai provider AsiaTone and a data center in Dubai. In the company’s recent earnings call, CEO Steve Smith said Equinix intends to “expand the global reach and scale of Platform Equinix both organically and through acquisitions.” J.P. Morgan, Barclays, Citigroup, BofA Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank Securities are acting as joint book-running managers for the offering, and Evercore Partners, Goldman, Sachs & Co., HSBC, RBC Capital Markets and UBS Investment Bank. |
| 3:15p | Friday Funny: Vote for the Best Caption It’s Friday! Time for some data center humor with the Data Center Knowledge caption contest. Please take a minute a vote for the funniest captions in the poll below. Each Friday, Data Center Knowledge features a cartoon drawn by Diane Alber, our fav data center cartoonist, and our readers suggest funny captions. Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor. The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion. We are voting on submissions for the Harlem Shake cartoon, titled “Shaking in the Data Center.” Take Our PollFor the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. |
| 3:32p | SAP Boosts Hosting, Big Data and Mobile Solutions Global enterprise software giant SAP AG (SAP) had several hosting, big data and mobile announcements from conference events around the world this week. Savvis will be offer global, subscription-based hosting services for the SAP HANA platform. This hosting arrangement will provide enterprises a new way to tap into their big data. Using the hosted version will allow global enterprises gain instant, real-time entry into a leading transactional and analytical database platform–without the effort of owning and maintaining the infrastructure that supports it. SAP HANA is a real-time database platform that streamlines analytics, planning, and predictive and sentiment assessment to allow business to operate in real time. As an SAP-certified provider of cloud and hosting services, Savvis will provide global enterprises with a cost-effective, on-demand hosting and cloud-based delivery model for mission-critical SAP applications. “Our subscription-based services for SAP HANA give enterprises the ultimate flexibility and scalability they need as data sets grow and analytics capabilities evolve,” said Jeff Von Deylen, president of Savvis. “When organizations tap into SAP HANA through Savvis’ hosting services, they reduce the costs of owning and maintaining expensive server hardware without losing control over their operating systems and application layers.” SAP to support Intel Hadoop Solution SAP announced that it will work with Intel to bring to market a breakthrough big data solution for enterprise customers centered on the SAP HANA platform and Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software. The solution will store and analyze in real-time large volumes of structured and unstructured data from across the enterprise. SAP plans to leverage the in-memory technology innovations in SAP HANA as well as Intel’s innovations in security, connectivity and management tools for Apache Hadoop to bring a unique solution to market. The planned major technology components of the solution include integral parts of the SAP Real-time Data Platform, along with Intel Hadoop software. “SAP is reinventing the information processing landscape with SAP HANA – from business analytics and data warehousing, to enterprise applications and SAP Business Suite, and next to big data with Intel Hadoop,” said Franz Faerber, head of Data Management, SAP. “Together, SAP and Intel have a strong vision to bring significant innovations, enterprise IT maturity and go-to market efficiencies that will enable organizations to easily adopt an enterprise-class big data solution.” Upcoming phases of the big data solution from SAP and Intel are planned to enable integrated query processing, optimized data loading, and unified administration. SAP expands Portugal Telecom partnership At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, SAP announced the expansion of a global relationship with Portugal Telecom to make solutions built on the SAP HANA Cloud platform available on SmartCloudPT. The two companies are collaborating and plan to make available a developer edition of the SAP Business One application, version for the SAP HANA platform. “PT has changed its business model to focus on data and managing big data, which is a challenge for every enterprise,” said Miguel Moreira, Managing Director, Portugal Telecom, Sistemas de Infomacao. “We believe that with our SmartCloudPT offering for SAP HANA, small and large businesses will be able to experiment with the advantages provided by SAP solutions in a low-risk development environment. They can then later scale that environment to a virtually unlimited capacity as SAP HANA delivers more value to them.” SAP launches Rich Communication Services 365 SAP announced the launch of the cloud-based SAP Rich Communication Services 365 (SAP RCS 365) mobile service. For mobile subscribers, RCS makes services such as instant messaging, video and file sharing as simple and intuitive as sending a text message. The new service enables a “pay-as-you-go/grow” model so that mobile operators can avoid both the complexity of deploying RCS within their networks and the capital expenditure traditionally associated with that approach. It also enables operators to quickly establish themselves in this evolving market, excite their subscribers with new IP-based messaging services and capitalize on the underlying value of their network. “User behavior and expectations have dramatically changed with the emergence of smartphone and tablet experiences,” said John Sims, president, SAP Mobile Services. “In today’s evolving mobile environment, operators are being threatened by new competitors offering innovative IP-based services. They must respond by rethinking their business models and innovating new service offerings. SAP RCS 365 arms mobile operators to quickly and cost-effectively launch such services while the SAP IPX 365 mobile service allows them to be interconnected to our ecosystem of mobile operators around the world.” For more big data news, follow our Big Data Channel. |
| 4:57p | BigData Top 100 Will Rank Data-Crunching Applications  Revelx The “big data” community will get a global ranking system for data applications. The BigData Top 100 will create a counterpart to the Top500, the supercomputing rankings that have generated enormous interest in high performance computing. Charter members of the group include Facebook and Google, illustrating the importance of massive data-crunching to the largest players in Internet infrastructure. The project’s objective is to develop an end-to-end application-layer benchmark for big data applications to enable ranking of big data systems, using metrics for performance and efficiency that are developed through a collaboration of academic and industry experts. The initiative was announced at the O’Reilly Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California this week. The San Diego Supercomputing Center will serve as the lead academic sponsor of the BigData100, while EMC Greenplum will lead the industry sponsors. Other launch participants include Facebook, Google, Mellanox, Seagate, Brocade, Oracle, NetApp and the University of Toronto. Need for Benchmarks“Big data is now part of every sector and function of the global economy, and the tremendous growth in data has created the need for benchmarks to quantify system performance and price/performance on big data tasks and applications,” said Chaitan Baru of the San Diego Supercomputing Center. “The existence of such benchmarks enables healthy competition among technology and solution providers, resulting eventually in product improvements and evolution of new technologies.” That “healthy competition” can raise the profile of specialized computing. Just look at the Top500, which now serves as the arbiter of supercomputing bragging rights for nations, vendors and universities. The list made national headlines when a supercomputer from China took the top spot in 2012. Major vendors and universities all promote their performance in the twice-yearly list. But there’s more than bragging rights at stake. “The goal of this activity is to provide clear objective information to help characterize and understand hardware and system performance and price/performance of big data platforms,” the group said. “The new big data benchmark should characterize the new feature sets, large data sizes, large-scale and evolving system configurations, shifting loads, and heterogeneous technologies of big data platforms.” The effort has been spearheaded by the San Diego Supercomputing Center, which has organized several workshops on big data benchmarking. For more info, see the BigData Top 100 web site. |
| 8:39p | Gartner, IDC See Server Sales Turning a Corner Server sales are up after a sluggish start to 2012, but growth isn’t coming from the incumbent server vendors, say several new reports. The “other” category, which includes Quanta and other companies building custom servers for large cloud companies had the most impressive growth, suggesting a significant impact for Open Compute designs at the expense of major server makers like Dell and HP. So while reports from IDC and Gartner show a slightly down year for servers, there was positive growth in the fourth quarter, driven by hyperscale data centers. Enterprise adoption of new server hardware was sluggish, with hyper-scale Internet companies and service providers driving growth. Gartner and IDC saw revenue increase 5.1% and 3.1% respectively in the fourth quarter of 2012 versus same period 2011, but both saw declines of 0.6% and 1.9% for the year compared to 2011. IDC said The Q4 increase was the first quarterly increase in five quarters. Growth offset by enterprise sluggishness, virtualization While hyperscale data centers were a bright spot in fourth quarter sales, overall annual sales are still being dragged down by enterprise delays. “2012 was a year that definitely saw budgetary constraint which resulted in delays in x86-based server replacements in enterprise and mid-sized data centers,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “Application-as-a-business data centers such as Baidu, Facebook and Google were the real drivers of significant volume growth for the year.” Gartner’s outlook for 2013 suggests that modest growth will continue. These increases continue to be buffered by the use of x86 server virtualization to consolidate physical machines as they are replaced. Some replacements are likely to begin in the enterprise segment as servers continue to age and economies improve. IDC says the x86 server market experienced sharp revenue growth in 4Q12 as systems based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge processor — which was launched in early 2012 — experienced strong demand which helped drive sharply higher average selling prices across the market. Trends of Note IDC is observing an increased interest from the market for converged systems, suggesting enterprises are latching onto the idea of turnkey solutions. Servers optimized for high density were helped by the growth of service providers in the market as well. “In addition to HPC, Cloud and IT service providers favor the highly efficient and scalable design of Density Optimized servers,” said Jed Scaramella, research manager with IDC. Revenue for Density Optimized Servers grew 66.4 percent year over year in 4Q12 to $705 million. “Blade servers are being leveraged in enterprises’ virtualized and private cloud environments,” said IDC, which said enterprise IT organizations are viewing converged systems as a method to simplify management and increase their time to value. IDC said blade server revenue grew 3.3 percent from last year to $2.4 billion, accounting for 16.3 percent of total server revenue. Gartner said blade servers posted a revenue increase of 3.2 percent but a shipment decline of 3.8 percent for the year. Another interesting trend is being driven by Open Compute. Gartner’s data shows strong growth for vendors lumped under “Others,” which includes Quanta and other companies (Hyve, ZT Systems, WiWynn) building custom servers for large cloud companies. High performance computing and cloud helped Linux, according to IDC, and now represents 20.4% of all server revenue. Microsoft Windows server demand continues to increase as well. What took the biggest hit is Unix, which saw its share decline for the sixth consecutive quarter. “Relatively weak mainframe and RISC/Itanium Unix platform market performance kept overall revenue growth in check,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. Growth from a geographic perspective IDC had forecast that server demand would begin to improve in the second half of 2012, following a number of product refreshes in the first half of the year. That was correct, albeit the turnaround was a quarter later than expected due to sluggish enterprise buying and soft market demand in particular regions. “While this did happen in the fourth quarter, market demand was uneven with the U.S., Asia/Pacific and Latin America all experiencing sharp growth, while demand in all other regions remained soft,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice president and general manager, Enterprise Platforms at IDC. ”Average selling prices for servers increased sharply in the quarter as large and small enterprises continued to invest heavily in new server capacity to drive additional consolidation and virtualization initiatives.” Gartner saw similar growth patterns from a geographic perspective.There was server revenue growth in spite of relative softness in some regions, most notably Western Europe. The three highest growth rates were shown by North America (5.5 percent), Asia/Pacific (3.4 percent) and Latin America (0.2 percent) in terms of unit shipments. These were the only regions to experience an increase in shipments. These three regions grew at a rate of 16.3, 15.5 and 6 percent respectively. The Revenue Market Share Rankings Both research houses once again had had IBM as the top server vendor. IDC said it had 36.5% market share, while Gartner accords Big Blue a 34.9% market share. IDC attributed IBM’s growth to improvements in demand for its System z mainframes, which recorded their highest quarterly revenue for System z in more than a decade. Revenue for IBM’s System z mainframe running z/OS increased 55.6 percent year-over-year to $1.8 billion, representing 12.3 percent of all server revenue in the fourth quarter. Jean S. Bozman, Research Vice President in IDC’s Enterprise Platforms Group attributed the System z growth to several factors, including “technology refresh, new products such as zEnterprise, new accounts in emerging economies, and consolidation of some enterprise Linux workloads onto IBM System z, using the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) specialty engines. Although revenue results for System z are traditionally heavier in the fourth quarter, this accelerated acquisition shows the breadth and depth of the IBM mainframe installed base.” HP is number two, with both IDC and Gartner pegging its share at 24.8 percent. Dell ranks third, with IDC placing it 15.1 percent factory revenue market share in the quarter, while Gartner has it at 14.3 percent. And then there’s Cisco Systems, the networking giant which entered the server market in 2009. This was the first quarter that Cisco maintained a position in the top 5 server rankings for IDC. Of Gartner’s top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, Cisco was the only vendor to experience an increase in shipments in the fourth quarter of 2012. Cisco’s worldwide server shipments increased 40.9 percent in the quarter. |
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