Wednesday, June 26th, 2013

Time	Event
12:30p	Data Center Jobs: Empire Southwest, LLC At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Empire Southwest, LLC, which is seeking a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) Technician II in Mesa, Arizona. The UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) Technician II is responsible for troubleshooting and repair equipment malfunctions and failures, maintaining excellent client relationships and support for corporate marketing objectives, repairing, reconditioning, and maintaining equipment and components, preparing service reports on a timely basis, planning and controlling cost of repair jobs, maintaining company equipment ” keep in good clean orderly condition, working safely at all times, adhering to all applicable safety policies, and complying with all company policies, procedures and standards. 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. (Comment on this)
1:26p	Hortonworks Secures $50 Million With a strong belief in the power of community driven open source software, Hortonworks is a Hadoop pioneer. Company CEO Rob Bearden announced in a blog post Tuesday that HortonWorks has received a new $50 million round of funding, led by new investors Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from our existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Yahoo!. The market reception for the Hortonworks business model and strategy has resonated strongly, and with over 100 customers and counting, the company has also built a strong ecosystem of partners that includes Microsoft, Teradata, Rackspace and many others. The new funding will be used to scale global field operations and further invest in engineering, as well as enable the company to increase the rate of innovation across all of the Hadoop projects. First in that list is YARN, the Apache Hadoop project that will further cement Hadoop as a core component of the data architectures of corporate IT organizations as it adapts Hadoop for an even broader range of new analytic, transactional, and operational use cases. Together with Yahoo! Hortonworks will host the Hadoop Summit North America June 26 and 27 in San Jose, California. The two-day event will feature many of the Apache Hadoop thought leaders who will showcase successful Hadoop use cases, share development and administration tips and tricks, and educate organizations about how best to leverage Apache Hadoop as a key component in their enterprise data architecture. The event conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #hadoopsummit. (Comment on this)
1:46p	Server Farm Realty Building Data Center for Windstream Windstream Hosted Solutions is in building mode. Server Farm Realty has broken ground on a new data center for Windstream in Charlotte, a facility first announced earlier this month. This will be Windstream’s fourth Charlotte facility and seventh overall in North Carolina. The 60,850 square foot, 10 megawatt data center is scheduled to open in late 2013. “Many of our customers have already realized the benefits of integrated, personalized solutions from Windstream Hosted Solutions, and demand for those services continues to increase significantly year over year,” said Chris Nicolini, Senior Vice President of Data Center Operations for Windstream Hosted Solutions. “This newest data center represents our commitment to providing customers with the highest level of services and reliability in order to meet the changing needs of their businesses.” Server Farm Realty has partnered with DSA Encore on the project, a company that builds equips and maintains data centers. The rack-ready data center facility for Windstream will eventually house cloud computing, dedicated hardware, managed services and disaster recovery as a service. The facility will be divided into multiple 10,000 square foot suites leased by Windstream. “Built to suit Windstream’s unique specifications, the Charlotte facility epitomizes SFR’s commitment to innovative, efficient, and flexible data center design,” says Avner Papouchado, CEO of Server Farm Realty. “Our success in developing the Charlotte data center demonstrates an ability to serve the critical connectivity, colocation, and overall data center needs of enterprise organizations such as those served by Windstream, in turn enabling them to reciprocate that same superior service and success onto their customers.” In terms of design, the facility will boast: 2N modular design for as-needed, seamless capacity expansion 3000kVA of day 1 utility capacity easily expanded to over 12MVA True A- and B-side power distribution via fully redundant 2N critical infrastructure Day 1 usable UPS capacity of 1215kW, expandable to over 3600kW High-efficiency chillers with 450 tons of 2N day 1 cooling capacity expandable to 1350 tons Access to multi-tenant infrastructure, such as Enterprise Cloud, EMC and NetApp SAN/NAS, F5 GTM/LTM platforms, as well as Cisco and Juniper network and security platforms Windstream is also building just outside of Nashville in Franklin, Tennessee, through Compass Datacenters. Through a long-term lease agreement, Compass is constructing a 22,000 square foot stand-alone data center, scheduled to open in 2013. Compass also has a big assist in North Carolina, Compass building Windstream’s third facility  in Durham. (Comment on this)
2:04p	Oracle Forges Cloud Partnerships with Microsoft, Salesforce.com Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld. Oracle has announced new partnerships with Microsoft and Salesforce.com. (Photo: Oracle Corp.) In a series of announcements this week Oracle (ORCL) announced strategic partnership agreements with Microsoft and Salesforce.com. The enterprise hardware and software giant also made a move recently to change its stock listing to the New York Stock Exchange – the largest exchange transfer, at $156.4 billion in market capitalization. Microsoft Oracle and Microsoft (MSFT) announced a partnership that will enable customers to run Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and in Windows Azure. Customers will be able to deploy Oracle software — including Java, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server — on Windows Server Hyper-V or in Windows Azure and receive full support from Oracle. “Microsoft is deeply committed to giving businesses what they need, and clearly that is the ability to run enterprise workloads in private clouds, public clouds and, increasingly, across both,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “Now our customers will be able to take advantage of the flexibility our unique hybrid cloud solutions offer for their Oracle applications, middleware and databases, just like they have been able to do on Windows Server for years.” “Our customers’ IT environments are changing rapidly to meet the dynamic nature of the world today,” said Oracle President Mark Hurd. “At Oracle, we are committed to providing greater choice and flexibility to customers by providing multiple deployment options for our software, including on-premise as well as public, private, and hybrid clouds. This collaboration with Microsoft extends our partnership and is important for the benefit of our customers.” Salesforce.com Oracle and Salesforce.com (CRM) announced a comprehensive nine-year partnership encompassing all three tiers of cloud computing: Applications, Platform and Infrastructure. Salesforce.com had long run on Oracle software, but the move to Oracle hardware was a major move for the company.  The company plans to standardize on the Oracle Linux operating system, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database, and Java Middleware Platform. In turn, Oracle will integrate salesforce.com with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, and provide the core technology to power salesforce.com’s applications and platform. Salesforce.com will also implement Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial cloud applications throughout the company. “Larry and I both agree that salesforce.com and Oracle need to integrate our clouds,” said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Salesforce.com’s CRM integrated with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud is the best of both worlds: the simplicity of salesforce.com combined with the power of Oracle.” “We are looking forward to working with salesforce.com to integrate our cloud with theirs,” said Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle. “When customers choose cloud applications they expect rapid low-cost implementations; they also expect application integrations to work right out of the box – even when the applications are from different vendors. That’s why Marc and I believe it’s important that our two companies work together to make it happen, and integrate the salesforce.com and Oracle Clouds.” (Comment on this)
2:51p	Cloud in a Box: ElasticBox Launches with Marquee Investors, Customers ElasticBox has publicly launched Version 2.0 of its cloud application lifecycle management platform. ElasticBox is a young company with $3.4 million in seed funding that hopes to end a lot of the headaches that come within the organization when it comes to using cloud. ElasticBox allows enterprises to define and rapidly deploy applications in any cloud, be it public, private or hybrid. It takes away the complexity of orchestrating cloud components, establishes consistency across the application lifecycle, and it applies policy-based access control and resource allocation. “Historically, a healthy tension has existed between developers, IT Operations, and the CIO,” said Ravi Srivatsav, co-founder and CEO of ElasticBox. ”Developers need cloud resources on-demand; IT Operations seek to build best practices and streamline the application lifecycle; and the CIO wants to drive business innovation without compromising governance. By delivering a unified platform that promotes innovation and team collaboration, ElasticBox is creating – for the first time – a powerful win-win-win partnership between key stakeholders in the application lifecycle.” Three Steps to Cloud Deployments With ElasticBox 2.0, users can develop, reuse, and re-purpose application “boxes,” or templates, across various development and test groups while maintaining IT governance and compliance. The company says this is done in three easy steps. After adding cloud infrastructure vendors and accounts (step 1), customers create “boxes” or component templates to include databases, language runtimes, web servers, middleware and more (step 2). These “boxes” are then reusable by everyone from developers to QA to IT Operations. The result is one click application deployment (step 3), the ability to scale up or down as demand requires, and easy moving of applications between providers based on business requirements. It is essentially a way to package and move around freely among heterogeneous clouds, avoiding lock-in and doing so without compromising governance. It’s still early in the game for ElasticBox, but it’s touting an impressive beginning. The company raised $3.4 million in seed funding led by Sieera Ventures with participation from big names like Andreessen Horowitz, Intel Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. The team includes executives and engineers formerly from Microsoft, VMWare, Cisco, and IBM. The company already counts the likes of Netflix as a customer: “Next generation IT is about enterprise transformation through innovation,” said Mike Kail, VP of IT Operations of Netflix. “ElasticBox provides us an integrated platform, allowing IT to develop self-service best practices and unleash collaboration throughout our organization.” ElasticBox helps to establish consistency between development, quality assurance, staging, and production environments, and to apply policy-based access control and resource allocation to provision heterogeneous cloud environments. ElasticBox currently supports Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and HP Cloud.  “ElasticBox addresses one of the biggest challenges facing enterprises – application deployment and management in heterogeneous clouds without vendor lock-in,” said Mark Fernandes, managing partner of Sierra Ventures. “This was strongly validated by many of the Fortune 1000 enterprises of the Sierra CIO Board.” (Comment on this)
3:29p	Western Digital Adds Enterprise SSD With $340 Million sTec Acquisition Western Digital (WDC) and sTec (STEC) announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which sTec, an early innovator in enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs), will be acquired by HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital for $340 million. HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) is a $4.3 billion acquisition that Western Digital made in 2011. Western Digital is one of the two leading players in the market for hard disk drives (HDD). The deal positions Western Digital for a shift in which more end users begin adopting solid-state drives, which offer faster performance but come with a higher price tag than HDDs. “Solid state storage in the enterprise will play an increasingly strategic role in the future of Western Digital,” said Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer, Western Digital Corporation. “This acquisition is one more building block in our strategy to capitalize on the dramatic changes within the storage industry by investing in SSDs and other high-growth storage products.” Extending HGST’s existing solid-state storage capabilities, this acquisition will continue to be committed to a joint development program with Intel and will continue to deliver current and future SAS-based SSD products with Intel. sTec has strong engineering talent and intellectual property that will complement HGST technical expertise and capabilities. “At this key point in the evolution of the storage industry, sTec is excited to consummate this transaction. It will be an important next step in proliferating many of the innovative products and technologies that sTec has been known for throughout its 23-year history and provides immediate value for our shareholders and a strong future for our employees and customers,” said Mark Moshayedi, president and chief executive officer, sTec. “This merger will enable our world-class engineering team and IP to continue to make a significant contribution to the high-performance enterprise SSD space that has long been sTec’s focus.” The sTec acquisition follows a recent strategic investment that Western Digital made in Skyera. (Comment on this)
6:47p	More Photo Highlights from GigOm Structure GigaOm Structure 2013, an event for start-ups to get some visibility and encouragement as well as a place to hear sharing from seasoned cloud pros, was held at the University of California-Mission Bay in San Francisco last week. Various speakers and panelists shared their cloud experiences, including how they personally improved their development processes or condensed their infrastructure, and six enterprising start-ups made their 4-minute pitches for a chance to win the LaunchPad competition. See More Highlights from GigaOm Structure 2013. (Comment on this)

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