Friday, April 12th, 2013

Time	Event
12:24p	Salesforce.com Launches Mobile Services Platform Targeting the mobile application developer, Salesforce.com, HP and Rackspace all have announcements catering to their needs. Salesforce.com launches mobile services platform. Salesforce.com (CRM) announced new Salesforce Platform Mobile Services, the latest in a series of innovations to empower customer companies to transform for the mobile era. The platform includes a Mobile SDK 2.0 to assist in securely connecting enterprise data to any mobile app, and enabling native, hybrid, or HTML5 on any iOS or Android device. It also includes Developer Mobile Packs to enable any web developer to build highly responsive HTML5 or hybrid mobile apps on any platform and access real-time Salesforce data. Salesforce.com has also added a partner accelerator program and mobile developer week – launching across 39 cities worldwide the week of April 21. “With these new mobile services, CIOs can immediately accelerate every mobile app dev project in their backlog,” said Mike Rosenbaum, EVP of Salesforce Platform, salesforce.com, “By combining the world’s leading customer platform with the mobile tools and frameworks developers love, we have made it possible for CIOs and web developers to deliver the mobile apps their customers, partners and employees are screaming for.” HP Enterprise cloud services – Mobility. HP (HPQ) announced a cloud-based management solution that delivers secure anytime, anywhere access to applications and data from any mobile device. As a part of the HP Converged Cloud portfolio, Enterprise Cloud Services – Mobility will give enterprises the essential foundation of technologies and services to confidently build, operate and consume IT services. The solution also allows users to download approved enterprise applications from a secure storefront, upload files to support collaboration and synchronize files between the HP cloud infrastructure and any mobile device. Mobile data is encrypted in transit and at rest, covering the device as well as the cloud infrastructure. The solution also provides the ability to configure cloud file storage that can scale up and down, and offers local storage options that address data sovereignty and compliance requirements. “Mobility in the workplace continues to be a key focus and concern for IT executives,” said Pete Karolczak, senior vice president, HP Enterprise Services. “HP Enterprise Cloud Services – Mobility leverages HP’s strong cloud portfolio by providing clients with a mobility service that provides the highest level of user experience and productivity while minimizing risk for IT.” Rackspace launches mobile cloud stacks. Rackspace (RAX) announced the release of its new mobile cloud stacks for developers. These stacks are purpose built to help developers design, build, test, deploy and scale mobile apps in the hybrid cloud. Hoping to provide a frictionless environment for developing mobile apps the stacks minimize upfront configuration time  for developers and allow them to focus more on designing applications while Rackspace manages the backend operations. Rackspace is also launching a new ecosystem of industry leading partners that will give developers access to robust software developer kits (SDK), push services, mobile backend-as-a-service, testing and monitoring capabilities from industry leaders such as FeedHenry, New Relic, Sencha, SOASTA, StackMob, and Trigger.io. “Mobile technology is disrupting all industries.  Businesses, from startups to enterprises, are aggressively building out their mobile presence. By launching a powerful new ecosystem, we are enabling mobile developers to innovate faster,” said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace.  “Our pre-configured mobile stacks were developed based on our experience with hosting thousands of complex applications. These stacks are reducing complexity for mobile developers who no longer have to reinvent the wheel every time they build and deploy mobile apps. By wrapping Fanatical Support around these new mobile tools and capabilities, we’ve created a unique developer experience that’s unmatched in the market.” (Comment on this)
12:33p	Research Cloud Powered By SeaMicro, OpenStack The AMD SeaMicro SM15000 many-core server has been deployed by the University of Texas at San Antonio in a research cloud. AMD announced that The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has deployed SeaMicro SM15000-OP servers with a combined 1,024 AMD Opteron processor cores in 20 rack units. The servers are the foundation infrastructure for a new computing cloud, powered by OpenStack, and will be used for cutting edge research and computational biology. For a university research staff, procuring and managing computing and storage infrastructure creates overhead that takes up valuable time and energy. The new SeaMicro deployment allows the broader UTSA community to realize the benefits of cloud computing by making it more widely available and easier to use. The SeaMicro SM15000 server has been certified to be Private Cloud ready, and Rackspace Private Cloud Software will be deployed at UTSA to provide a flexible and efficient computing cloud.  This will serve as the basis for a managed, private computing and storage cloud, accessible by the entire UTSA research community. “As the computing backbone of UTSA’s cloud infrastructure, AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server will provide researchers tremendous computing power and storage to help them make breakthrough discoveries in a variety of disciplines,” said Dhiraj Mallick, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Server Solutions, AMD. “This infrastructure will help the university attract top talent, increase competitiveness for research funding, and advance towards designation as a premier research institution. Whether the project is to do a large scale study of proteins, simulate high throughput biochemical systems, or analyze computational fluid dynamics, the SM15000 server provides a powerful and flexible cloud computing platform.” (Comment on this)
1:31p	Equinix Strengthens London Ecosystem as CME Expands The cabling in these trays at an Equinix data center reflects the dense connectivity found in the company’s financial trading hubs. Today the CME Group said it was expanding with Equinix in the London market. (Image: Equinix) Equinix is reinforcing its financial ecosystem in the London market, as the derivatives marketplace CME Group is establishing a Globex hub inside the Equinix LD4/LD5 campus in Slough, scheduled to open in May 2013. Locating the CME hub at Equinix places CME Group’s business in close proximity to Europe’s leading trading platforms and electronic trading customers. CME Group exchanges offer trading across all major asset classes, including futures and options based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural commodities, metals, weather and real estate. The group brings buyers and sellers together through its CME Globex electronic trading platform and its trading facilities in New York and Chicago. Approximately 25 percent of CME Group’s electronic trading volume comes from outside the United States, primarily from the EMEA (Europe-Middle East-Africa) region. “We continue to see growing demand from our customers based throughout Europe for our product offerings, which means that we also need to focus on building our infrastructure and technology capabilities in the region,” said William Knottenbelt, managing director EMEA, CME Group. Community of Potential Customers By choosing Equinix, CME Group further aligns with its regional customers and gets access to an expansive community of potential customers located inside Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data center. Customers interested in connecting to the CME Globex hub simply need to acquire space in Equinix’s LD4/LD5 campus and cross-connect to the platform or lease a line. It’s another case of customers begetting customers on the part of colocation players, and Equinix’s strength in the financial vertical means customers are eager to get in the same ecosystem as like-minded businesses. “In today’s evolving market, exchanges want to reach the largest trading community with the lowest infrastructure costs, using data centers already well-populated with their target customers,” said Stewart Orrell, managing director of Global Financial Services at Equinix. “Equinix is the only network-neutral data center provider that’s able to meet these needs globally, and CME Group will be a uniquely powerful addition to the thriving financial ecosystem inside Equinix.” New market regulations across Europe are driving the movement of derivatives to trade on exchanges, resulting in trade processing through central clearing houses and data being reported and housed in trade repositories. Over the past few years, Equinix has built a cross-asset class business which is well-positioned to meet the demands of the evolving algorithmic trading market and its growth into additional asset classes such as FX and derivatives. (Comment on this)
1:53p	IBM Makes $1 Billion Investment In Flash IBM has announced a strategic initiative to drive Flash technology further into the enterprise to help organizations better tackle the mounting challenges of big data. Challenges like swelling data volumes, increasing demand for faster analytic insights, and rising data center energy costs is what has driven Flash to quickly become a key requirement to enable the “Smarter Enterprise.” IBM said. Big Blue will invest $1 billion in research and development to design, create and integrate new Flash solutions into its expanding portfolio of servers, storage systems and middleware.  IBM plans to open 12 Centers of Competency around the globe to enable clients to run proof-of-concept scenarios with real-world data to measure the projected performance gains that can be achieved with IBM Flash solutions. “The economics and performance of Flash are at a point where the technology can have a revolutionary impact on enterprises, especially for transaction-intensive applications,” said Ambuj Goyal, General Manager, Systems Storage, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “The confluence of Big Data, social, mobile and cloud technologies is creating an environment in the enterprise that demands faster, more efficient, access to business insights, and Flash can provide that access quickly.” IBM also announced the availability of the IBM FlashSystem line of all-Flash storage appliances, which are based on technology acquired from Texas Memory Systems. The IBM FlashSystem provides organizations instant access to the benefits of Flash. The IBM FlashSystem 820, for example, is 20 times faster than spinning hard drives, and can store up to 24 terabytes of data – more than twice the amount of printed information stored in the U.S. Library of Congress.  Sprint Nextel Corp., an early adopter of Flash, recently completed a deal with IBM to install nine flash storage systems in its data center, for a total of 150TB of additional Flash storage. (Comment on this)
2:30p	Friday Funny: Into Every Life, A Little Rain Must Fall It’s Friday and time for a little data center humor! Before you head out for the weekend, add your suggestions for the data center cartoon caption contest below. This time, our data center gurus, Kip and Gary, are facing a little indoor water feature in the data hall. For those of you who don’t know, here’s how it works: We provide the cartoon (drawn by Diane Alber, our awesome 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 cartoon humor. Click to enlarge. For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. (Comment on this)
5:30p	The Modular Data Center Market This is the forth article in the Data Center Knowledge Guide to Modular Data Centers series.  With the modular market developing in the industry, there has been some tremendous innovation and engineering design efforts put into solutions. The modular market is maturing with even more large enterprises actively deploying the modular data center platform. To further illustrate the traction in the modular industry, a recent Uptime Institute 3 survey showed that 41% of their respondents are already considering modular, pre-fab data centers or their components. Modular Products Many of the major server vendors have modular data center products and while they are optimized to work with their hardware, will typically support anything a standard rack supports. Vendors worldwide have engineered their own version of a container or module and incorporated a variety of unique capabilities into their solution. Having one vendor supply all components for and within the rack for a module enables them to engineer it as a complete solution that can then have modular power and cooling products complement the IT module. Modular data center products, including containers, are available from: IO, HP, IBM, SGI, Dell, Cisco, Cirrascale, Google, Elliptical Mobile Solutions, IPSIP, Toshiba, Bull, AST, Schneider Electric, PDI (acquired by Smiths Interconnect), Emerson Network Power, Silver Linings, Telenetix and Active Power. Modular Providers Within the everything-as-a-Service model, a modular provider is able to offer the entire data center as a service, by quickly adding a module of IT with all supporting power and cooling infrastructure. The idea is to deliver a data center-in-a-box solution. Quickly built-out and provisioned, the data center can be made operational far faster than a standard bricks-and-mortar solution. The entire module is available as a package, integrating all aspects of the IT within and subsystems through DCIM or other management tools, such as DCOS (data center operating systems). Modular data center Providers include: IO, NxGen Modular, mSun Modular Data centers, IBM, COLT, Toshiba, Cannon, Pacific Voice and Data, BladeRoom, Pelio & Associates, Dock IT, Lee Technologies (acquired by Schneider Electric), Datapod and Turbine Air Systems (TAS)/ Celestica (CLS).  The complete Data Center Knowledge Guide to Modular Data Centers is available for download in a PDF format and brought to you by IO. Click here to download the DCK Guide to Modular Data Centers. (Comment on this)

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