Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Time	Event
12:00p	BYOD is Not the Enemy: Using Consumer Tech to Manage the Data Center LAS VEGAS - BYOD is not the enemy. Instead, the Bring Your Own Device movement of adopting consumer technology can be of great benefit for an It organization, according to Joseph Furmanski, Associate Director Data Center Facilities and Technology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). In a presentation Tuesday at the AFCOM Data Center Word Spring 2013 conference, Furmanski outlined how consumer tech such as iPhones and tablets were embraced at UPMC and have become valuable tools for the huge health care provider. Workers bringing their own devices to the workplace are inevitable, he noted, so why not embrace it? For UPMC, consumer tech offered a way to do more with less manpower. ”There’s 3 people, we stretch them a lot and want to minimize that,” said Furmanski. Furmanski believes adopting consumer tech is important in addressing long-term staffing challenges facing the data center industry. Many in the data center field are no longer spring chickens, and the industry will need younger workers who are accustomed to using iPhones and tablets rather than Blackberries and PCs. Attracting A New Generation of Staffers “We have to train a new generation and get them excited, and the key is using the tools they use,” said Furmanski, who said his thinking was influenced by discussions at AFCOM and other industry groups on attracting and retaining Millenials. “The people we’re hiring now grew up with this stuff.” UPMC operates more than 20 hospitals, with 3,200 physicians and more than 55,000 employees at400 clinical locations, which include hospitals as well as long-term care and senior living facilities. UPMC also operate s a health plan with nearly 1.8-million members. With the objective of improving data center management and IOC support, the company began looking at consumer tech, with the stipulations that it would be low or no cost, and must be used in a way that required little to no custom programming. The effort initially focused on the most popular applications: Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Evernote, and QR code to perform various functions and communications. Quick Deliverables, Quick Wins “We had to convince management that we weren’t doing it just to have fun,” said Furmanski. The initial stages were about quick deliverables and quick wins. The UPMC’s main data center is in Forbes Tower, a 10,750 square foot facility with limited staff. The hardware is leased on 3-4 year cycles, and they’re heavily virtualized with over 5,000 virtual machines in use. It’s not a large data center, and they are constantly looking at how they can improve efficiencies. This is where consumer tech came into play. The first phase of the plan cost under $2,000 in equipment. The staff would use QR codes and code scanners for things like the FM 200 manual, making it easier to access documentation. The staff took video for information purposes, and used Skype to call subject matter experts to solve problems. UPMC was able to more effectively use limited staff, save on paper and organize documentation through use of consumer tech.  As time passed, using tablets improved quality and processes and saved the company a lot of paper. It wasn’t all smooth. “Integration was the beast that stopped the project,” said Furmanski. Security integration was a particular pain point with devices like iPads and iPhones. “There were a lot of good vertical applications, but we hated logging in over and over,” he said. “There was little to no integration. We talked to a lot of vendors about this.” The Surface to the Rescue? The company then looks to Microsoft’s Surface tablet, and believes the new Surface Pro will make many of those headaches go away. “Security and content worked really well with it,” said Furmanski. “We found we can run any web or windows based app.” Working with these devices are now a DCIM requirement. The company uses these devices to access data on the overall health of the data center. The wealth of applications emerging from app stores for consumer devices is proving useful to UPMC. Staff can view real-time PUE and the environmental control system, all from a tablet. Furmanski says Sharepoint is a key knowledge repository, and Windows 8 and Active directory passes context through, so the silos between apps are breaking down. The bottom line for UPMC is that a small staff, with limited investment in consumer tech devices, was able to do more and virtually eliminate the heavy paper usage that plagued the company, Furmanski said. Information is at their fingertips, a limited staff can do more and can access documentation quickly and easily. UPMC will continue to look into how consumer tech can improve its everyday operations. By implementing proper usage of BYOD and consumer tech, the data center can greatly improve processes and drive valuable insight, even with limited manpower. There are a wealth of applications from data center management providers coming out every day that increase the value of these devices, so it’s worth looking into the consumerization of data center management. (Comment on this)
12:30p	Cloud Crosswinds Ahead as Behemoths Battle on Price Ted Chamberlin is vice president, market development, cloud for Coresite. TED CHAMBERLIN Coresite With the recent announcement from the Microsoft Azure camp stating “ its commitment to price match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services like compute, storage and bandwidth, aligned with the general availability of Windows Azure infrastructure services,” the official race to zero begins in the Infrastructure as a Service market. This shot across the bow of AWS will most definitely bother AWS, but it should scare the stuffing out of the rest of the IaaS market. Particularly the providers who the traditional businesses trust a bit more for more enterprise-ish workloads should be concerned. Providers like GoGrid, Tata, Savvis, Terremark, Rackspace Cloud and others just entering the market will face the heavier crosswinds as these behemoths engage battles. The stark reality is that hyper scale providers like Amazon use their operational acumen and scale to drive pricing down on IaaS services on a regular basis. This will create an exceedingly tougher environment for the rest of the cloud providers to compete. How is an IaaS provider to thrive, yet alone, survive? The Power of Community Many of these market entrants have the solution already teed up in the data centers. Many companies will choose their colocation, hosting or cloud providers based upon the current occupants in those facilities so that they can trade traffic, conduct commerce or just inhabit a robust ecosystem. The next step in this evolution is to develop these neighbors into a fully-fledged community where users can vote/nominate who enters the community and freely conduct business in these exchanges. The community clouds truly contain elements that represent the best of both worlds in cloud adoption, scalability and exclusivity. According to my alma mater Gartner, “Private Cloud Computing is among the highest interest areas across all cloud computing according to Gartner, with 75% of respondents in Gartner polls saying they plan to pursue a strategy in this area by 2014.” Many enterprises understand cerebrally that public cloud scale is a key enabler tor growth, but many still are uncomfortable moving critical, compliant and sensitive workloads to public. Community clouds, although still nascent in the landscape will start to provide the benefits or interconnect and limited participation that will help companies move of those workloads to a community cloud. These communities of like-minded organizations also represent a departure from commodity, low cost, low value services. They value of the community rises as the participants -albeit the correct ones-join the community. Operators and enablers of cloud communities also have value-based roles to play such as providing the interconnect services, advertising the services of the community as well as developing and managing of those hardware and software stacks. The U.S. government’s Fed RAMP initiatives has test driven the community cloud for government agencies and partners, and despite the less then atomic pace that the Federal government exhibits, growth is starting to show in Federal cloud initiatives. Next up? Potentially digital media clouds, expansion of financial services low latency communities and healthcare exchanges. All of this potential commerce and transaction in these communities represent a way for differentiated, value based IaaS services that will help to slow down the race to zero so that everyone carve out their own revenue opportunity in the new world order of cloud series. 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)
5:58p	USPS Leverages Big Data To Fight Fraud When you think “big data,” you probably don’t think of the United States Postal Service (USPS). As it processes more than 528 million pieces of mail each day, the USPS has become an active participant in the big data revolution, and operates one of the most powerful non-classified supercomputing databases in the world. Residing in the Eagan IT and Accounting Service Center in Eagan, Minnesota is the core of the USPS supercomputing operations. The supercomputing and revenue protection program helps to cut fraud on its reported $65 billion in annual revenue. To detect fraud on 528 million pieces of mail each day the USPS started building IT architecture in 2006, and has been expanding it ever since.  Simultaneously processing data from 6,100 mail pieces per second requires some hefty compute power. “All of this happens in an average of 50 to 100 milliseconds,” says Scot Atkins, USPS program manager. “If something is off – a package with insufficient, duplicated or fraudulent postate – it is detected and intercepted in near real-time. A distribution clerk can reassess a package, errors can be tracked down, and fraud attempts – large or small – are reported to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service for further investigation.” The system used to process and detect fraud is impressive. In a recent interview the USPS in-memory database was noted at 16 terabytes, up 6 terabytes from a 2010 Oracle case study report. Coupled with a transactional database it will perform billions of mail piece scans in a standard 15 hour processing day. Real-time scanning performs complex algorithms, powered by a SGI Altix 4700 system. Oracle Data Warehouse keeps fraud results stored in 1.6 terabytes of TimesTen cache, in order to compare and then push back into the Oracle warehouse for long term storage and analysis. Data ingest rates exceed 1.5 million records ingested per second per 16 core blade. Fighting fraud, waste and abuse is top of mind for USPS and government organizations, as budgets are cut, and billions of dollars are lost in duplicative payments, overpayments and fictitious vendors. (Comment on this)
6:30p	TechCrunch Disrupt New York: Dwolla, Skytree TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2013 was held this week in New York City, with plenty of focus on tech disruption, as well as a lot of apps, demonstrations, funding announcements and product announcements. Funding announcements came from SkyTree, which secured $18 million and Dwolla, raising $16.5 million. The event conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #TCDisrupt. Dwolla raises $16.5 million Payments network company Dwolla announced that it has raised $16.5 million in new Series C funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The company’s previous investors, Village Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Union Square Ventures also participated in the round. Highlighting Dwolla as an example, legendary venture capitalist Fred Wilson was at TechCrunch Disrupt New York and stated that ”money is information, like bits,” noting that giving currency a spin that puts it in a continuum with the many blogging and content companies that his firm has invested in over the years. “A16z makes bets on companies that change the underlying fabric of their markets and, like Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub, we think Dwolla is going to do it in the banking world,” said Scott Weiss, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and new Dwolla board member, in a statement about the investment. “The fact that Dwolla’s network can simultaneously meet the needs of a complex enterprise or government, while allowing a parent to pay the babysitter with her phone, reflects just how simple and strikingly different this solution is in the marketplace.” With the funding Des Moines, Iowa based Dwolla will double its workforce in Iowa and New York.  It will also open an office in San Francisco, adding to existing staff in Des Moines, New York, Omaha, and Kansas City. The Bay area office will be led by Dwolla’s Chief Operating Officer, Charise Flynn, and will be mainly focused on product and business development and marketing.  Dwolla CEO Ben Milne explains why he is so excited about the funding announcement, and why Andreessen Horowitz makes sense – including the fact that he and Marc Andreessen were both born in Cedar Falls, Iowa. “The reality is that our fundamental business is allowing anybody with an Internet connection get access to their money and exchange it with anybody else they want to receive it,” Milne says. “A lot of that adoption is going to come instead from third-party platforms and products,” he adds. “I don’t see people going to Dwolla.com more and more – I see them doing that less and less, while our software is just facilitating the payments.” Skytree receives $18 million Machine learning company Skytree announced that it has closed $18 million in Series A funding with U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) as the lead investor. Package delivery giant UPS and Sun Microsytems co-founder Scott McNealy joined the new investor syndicate. The new financing will help fuel an aggressive growth strategy to disrupt the Big Data Analytics market with enterprise-ready Machine Learning. As part of this transaction, USVP General Partner Rick Lewis has joined Skytree’s Board of Directors. “A new era has dawned, in which enterprises are demanding the advanced, real-time business insights that only Machine Learning can provide. Skytree makes the power of Machine Learning available to all enterprises, with a striking performance advantage over their competition. Since the company’s launch in February 2012, customers have validated our view that Skytree has a huge lead in this fast-growing market. Skytree’s team, technology, and customer traction have made Skytree the company to beat in applying Machine Learning for Advanced Analytics,” said Rick Lewis, General Partner, USVP. (Comment on this)

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