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Monday, July 8th, 2013
| Time | Event |
| 11:01a | U.S. Labor Department Consolidating Data Centers Into ByteGrid Facility  One of the battery rooms at BYTEGRID’s data center in suburban Maryland. (Image: BYTEGRID) The U.S. Department of Labor will be consolidating its data centers at the BYTEGRID data center in Silver Spring, Maryland. This huge win for BYTEGRID comes via systems integrator Lockheed Martin, which has been awarded a contract to transition and relocate the Department of Labor’s data centers in metropolitan Washington, D.C. into BYTEGRID’s facility. The agreement, known as an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract, is for seven years. “The deal validates what we’re doing in Maryland,” said BYTEGRID CEO Ken Parent. “It validates what we’re doing in the federal space with a high quality product.” The Labor Department’s migration is part of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), which plans to eliminate and/or consolidate 1,186 federal data centers by 2015, with a goal of saving $2.4 billion, according to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). A rough history as well as progress was written up last November. FDCCI Keeps Moving Forward“The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative requires premium data centers able to meet the most stringent requirements for security, reliability, uptime, and compliance,” said Lynn Singleton, director of Environmental Services at Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions. “BYTEGRID’s secure, FISMA-compliant facility met all contractual requirements, enabling our team to support DOL’s mission needs.” It’s hard to quantify how big a deal this is, but it’s big. There is a dollar amount out there for the size of the overall contract of over $59 million. BYTEGRID is a big piece of that number. The DOL selected the Lockheed Martin/BYTEGRID team for their abilities to provide a secure data center that meets the compliance standards for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). These services will allow DOL agencies the flexibility to grow and meet future functional needs with scalable dynamic computing capabilities such as managed hosting and cloud service technologies. BYTEGRID’s Montgomery County, MD facility sits on an 11-acre campus, strategically located within the metro Washington, D.C. data center market. BYTEGRID’s acquired the facility in 2011. It is the largest multi-tenant data center in Maryland featuring 214,000 sq. ft. of data center space and over 90,000 sq. ft. of raised floor. It features new redundant power supply systems, providing a total of nine megawatts of critical load power, 22 megawatts of on-site power generation and cooling that exceed requirements for concurrent maintainability and fault tolerance, with future planned expansions to double critical load power capacity. The carrier neutral facility is served by multiple telecommunications providers across diverse, redundant paths and is efficiently designed to provide BYTEGRID’s tenants an extremely competitive total cost of ownership. The 11-acre campus is entirely gated and integrates a full range of 24/7 physical and logical security features ranging from ballistic rated entrances and checkpoints to biometric registration and authorization systems. Savings Via Consolidation, CloudThe Department of Labor is consolidating to save money and operate in a more efficient environment. It will move some infrastructure to the cloud as well. “The migration is happening over time,” said Parent. “A migration of any size is a huge undertaking. There’s a lot of anxiety between migrating … it’s much more difficult than (deploying) a new platform. At a high level there are six to seven agencies within the department that will migrate over a period of time. It was a shared approach. The department identified shared resources from these six to seven agencies.” “They’re creating savings and innovating by taking these agencies and moving together,” said BYTEGRID President Manny Mencia. Lockheed went out in early 2012 looking for a partner, and they selected BYTEGRID through a competitive process. BYTEGRID teamed on the RFP and we were awarded it in late third or early fourth quarter of 2012. “The FDCCI is an initiative of significant national importance and unique opportunity for Maryland companies,” said Don Goodwin, BYTEGRID’s Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing. “We are pleased to provide the critical data center infrastructure and innovative in-center cloud bursting, meeting all key government standards for security compliance. In addition to the big success in Maryland, BYTEGRID executives indicated there will be more news to follow “Over the next two years, we anticipate moving from planning to execution in a few new markets,” said Parent. “We’re positioned well inside – we’re busy in all existing markets.” The company recently announced Cleveland, and says it is seeing very healthy demand. “Enterprises locally never had a wholesale alternative,” said Mencia. ByteGrid’s leadership team includes executives with expertise spanning real estate, finance and facilities. It’s the latest example of a trend in which executive teams with industry experience team with capital partners to form new data center companies. |
| 12:41p | SanDisk Buys SMART Storage, Invests in Panzura Storage specialist SanDisk (SNDK) continues to diversify its offerings with an acquisition of SMART Storage Systems, and a strategic investment in cloud storage provider Panzura. SMART Storage SystemsSanDisk announced a definitive agreement to acquire SMART Storage Systems, a developer of enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) based on the SATA and SAS storage protocols. The $307 million acquisition is expected to close in August, and approximately 250 employees of SMART Storage Systems will join SanDisk at the close of the transaction. “SanDisk is excited to build upon its leadership position with its fourth acquisition in the enterprise storage market,” said Sumit Sadana, executive vice president & chief strategy officer of SanDisk. “This acquisition enables SanDisk to address a $1.6 billion market opportunity in enterprise SATA products, and complements our strong enterprise SAS product portfolio. With this combination, SanDisk will have products qualified with six of the top seven storage OEMs worldwide.” Advancing its enterprise business momentum SanDisk will combine the benefits of SMART Storage Systems’ products, technology, and talent with the existing enterprise SSD and software product portfolios, vertical integration, scale, market reach and financial strength of SanDisk, to address fast-growing opportunities in enterprise storage. SMART’s Guardian Technology extends the native endurance of NAND flash memory, while improving reliability. Panzura InvestmentSanDisk announced that its venture arm SanDisk Ventures, has invested in Panzura, a provider of flash-based network attached storage (NAS) solutions for enterprise companies. SanDisk participated in Panzura’s recent Series D funding round and joins Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Khosla Ventures, Opus Capital and Chevron Technology Ventures as Panzura backers. Panzura optimizes enterprise data storage management and distribution in the cloud, with a global cloud storage solution combines the flexibility, performance and productivity benefits of distributed storage with the manageability, security and cost benefits of centralized storage. “Panzura’s innovative global NAS cloud infrastructure solution offers numerous benefits compared to traditional on-premise NAS offerings,” said Sumit Sadana, executive vice president and chief strategy officer of SanDisk. “Panzura is another excellent example of the important role flash memory is playing in the transformation of the enterprise.” |
| 2:05p | Virtualization Acceleration in the Real World Josh Miner is Director of Product Marketing at Fusion-io, where he works closely with customers.  JOSH MINERFusion-io Virtualization – creating virtual versions of resources and running them on physical devices – promises to enable IT organizations to become more efficient. When virtualization works, it helps organizations lower IT costs and simplify management by making use of idle resources such as CPU and RAM. But virtualization sometimes struggles to deliver on its promise, especially in data-rich and transaction-intensive environments. Data I/O bottlenecks cause latency that slows down applications. As a result, VM density is limited and I/O intensive mission- and business-critical applications are often not even considered as candidates for virtualization. For those who want a refresher on virtualization, I am including this short video which explains the basics. PCI Express flash memory combined with software caching removes the I/O bottleneck, moving read workloads into powerful, underutilized virtualization servers. It also frees storage resources of the I/O read burden, while preserving valuable migration, DRS, and availability features. A wide range of businesses, from professional sports to off-road vehicles to convenience food businesses are now using virtualization to make efficient use of their data resources. Increasing VM Density While Preserving vMotion VMware virtualization is at the heart of Sharks Sports and Entertainment (SSE)’s IT environment. Owner of the San Jose Sharks hockey team, and based in Silicon Valley, SSE is always on the lookout for new technologies to optimize its growing business. Happy with the cost savings it had achieved via the consolidation virtualization enabled, SSE decided to evaluate whether caching software would provide any additional benefits. With caching software to accelerate its virtualization, SSE realized a 10x boost in VM performance. Since performance was not a problem for SSE, IT Director Uy Ut immediately thought about the significantly higher virtual machine (VM) density he could potentially achieve with a tenfold boost in IOPS horsepower. “I can add just about any application to my environment without adding physical systems, which is a tremendous cost savings and takes my virtualized environment to the next level,” he said. Increasing server VM density is not viable for most organizations unless they can preserve vMotion and other features used to support high availability, disaster recovery, and maintenance windows. Accordingly, SSE chose caching software that supported dynamic vMotion migrations of virtual machines that automatically rebalanced, cache capacity across host VMs. This freed Ut’s team to focus on strategic objectives while consistently maximizing the use of the cache capacity. Extending the Life of Existing Hardware Polaris, the leading off-road vehicle manufacturer, trimmed its IT costs by virtualizing its web servers. In making the move, Polaris needed to ensure it had performance that could scale to support a web-based rich media customer experience, including video, high-resolution photos, order details, and customer info—without requiring a major overhaul of its existing network and NetApp storage infrastructure. “My options were limited, as I needed to keep the existing storage and network infrastructure of the dealership portal extranet,” said Infrastructure Manager Adam Knutson. Upgrading storage in virtualized environments typically requires complicated hardware setup to get the necessary performance results. But the addition of caching software was faster, simpler, and less expensive than adding more servers or storage arrays to the infrastructure. Besides preserving its existing hardware investment, with its virtualization upgrade, Polaris increased VM density to make web pages load five times faster. Blazing Performance to Boost the Bacon Adding caching software to its virtualization environment helped Quaker Maid Meats produce SQL Server-based Microsoft Dynamics reports 40 times faster. For Quaker Maid, reducing wait times meant recovering 10-15 employee hours per day. “I estimate we are saving the company around $52,000 yearly through increased employee productivity,” said Jesse Pryor, Systems Engineer. “The better user experience also means happier employees.” Today, IDC estimates that more than 50% of server workloads are virtualized. Companies working to extract more value from virtualization can benefit from reviewing breakthroughs in software caching that support the evolution from caching on physical servers to fully virtual architectures. With software to support virtual performance, organizations can maximize the savings and performance possibilities offered by leading virtualization solutions as their business needs evolve. 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. |
| 6:41p | SoftLayer Becomes Part of IBM’s SmartCloud
Lance Crosby knows about the power of new beginnings. In 2005, he and his fellow co-founders left The Planet to found SoftLayer Technologies, and focused on building a different kind of hosting provider. “When we started SoftLayer, the vision was to become the de facto platform of the Internet,” said Crosby. Today Crosby marks another new beginning, becoming part of IBM, which today closed its acquisition of SoftLayer. Crosby said teaming up with IBM is the latest step in a journey that has taken SoftLayer from a startup to a vital cog in the cloud ambitions of a global technology leader. “We went out and looked for partners that can accelerate what we could become,” said Crosby today. “We chose IBM for this, as well as several other reasons such as data center locations, access to technology, and what has become really apparent the last few months, the people.” SoftLayer and IBM have traditionally had very different types of customers. SoftLayer has a very internet-centric customer base, while IBM has an enterprise customer base. On a conference call today, the company sought to allay concerns that the acquisition would change SoftLayer’s strategy when it comes to smaller and/or Internet-centric companies. “This is a tremendous company for us, a tremendous add to our portfolio,” said IBM Cloud Services General Manager Jim Comfort. “It compliments and extends our SmartCloud portfolio.” Winning The ‘Born on the Cloud’ CompaniesTo emphasize that point, IBM cited a customer engagement, announcing that Flow Corporation has moved some of its services off another undisclosed public cloud provider (most likely Amazon Web Services) to the IBM SmartCloud. Flow is a new customer that reflects what IBM saw in the SoftLayer acquisition. Flow was “born-on-the-cloud,” meaning it’s one of the new breed of companies that have been enabled by the lower barriers to entry cloud computing presents. IBM will try to retain SoftLayer’s strengths among these types of customers as well as the Fortune 500, is casting a wide net with its cloud offerings. “It’s a compelling platform for both enterprises and small businesses,” said IBM’s Comfort, who said SoftLayer enables IBM to deliver the security, privacy and reliability of private clouds with the economy and speed of a public cloud. Flow streams all types of data specifically to mobile devices. IBM will provide clients with integrated solutions based on Flow, the high performance SoftLayer technology and IBM SmartCloud. This streamed, integrated real-time data will enable clients to send and receive data from any mobile device that is integrated with enterprise data, thereby enabling the collaboration essential to a Social Business. Flow is a real time platform for a real-time enterprise. It breaks down silos between applications. “You might have 20 applications on IBM cloud, and Flow helps bring a common data flow, a single workflow that sits in the cloud,” said Flow CEO Eric Alterman. ‘The Problem was the Platform’“We were having issues with our platform and no code optimization would solve it,” said Alterman. “The problem was with the platform. We began investigating alternatives.” The company uses SoftLayer for bare metal machines, and this solved their problem. The company had been working with IBM’s cloud group in addition to looking for a new cloud provider, which ultimately ended up being SoftLayer. “We learned only very recently that SoftLayer was being acquired by IBM.” It was a coincidence that Flow had been in conversations and working with both companies prior to the SoftLayer acquisition. This customer win was highlighted to show the synergies between SoftLayer and IBM, with Flow an example of these synergies existing even prior to the acquisition. “Everything is combined into a single, integrated offering. For us it’s a big deal, and a game changer for the industry,” said Alterman,. “It’s IBM, it’s SoftLayer, and it’s connected to all of these services.” Flow Corporation moved to SoftLayer based on superior cloud latency. The win gives some indication on how IBM plans on differentiating in the cloud world, highlighting latency, which cannot be commoditized. Flow will integrate its real-time stream processing capability with IBM SmartCloud based on speed and performance of the SoftLayer technology platform. Prior to acquisition, SoftLayer was famous for saying it wants its network within 40ms of everyone on the planet. A strong network has always been one of its points of pride, and this will continue, and strengthen, under the IBM umbrella. IBM Going Big on CloudIBM announced a new suite of more than 100 SaaS solutions for the C-Suite last month. These cloud solutions help marketing, procurement, ecommerce, customer service, human resources, city management, and other professionals make better decisions and better serve their customers. IBM has made more than a dozen strategic acquisitions around cloud since 2007. IBM cloud revenue grew by 80 percent in 2012, and the company expects to reach $7 billion annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015. The company known for completely revamping its business model several times throughout the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s has done it again: IBM can safely be called a cloud company. |
| 7:00p | Best of the Data Center Blogs for July 8th Here’s a roundup of some interesting items we came across this week in our reading of data center industry blogs for July 8th: The Architecture Twitter Uses to Deal with 150M Active Users – High Scalability provides a deep dive into Twitter’s architecture: “Everybody has this idea that Twitter is easy. With a little architectural hand waving we have a scalable Twitter, just that simple. Well, it’s not that simple as Raffi Krikorian, VP of Engineering at Twitter, describes in his superb and very detailed presentation on Timelines at Scale. If you want to know how Twitter works – then start here.” Data Centers as Global Growth Enablers – At SwitchScribe, Mark Thiele looks at data centers’ role in the global economy: “Data Centers are rapidly taking over the role of manufacturing, communication, trading and shipping hubs. The work now being done in data centers would formerly have required a printing press, manufacturing line, travel agents, bank tellers, traders, railroads, highways, ships and seaports.” Netflix Provides a Brief History of Their Streaming Technology – Via Dan Rayburn: “At the Streaming Media East show in May, David Ronca, Manager of Encoding Tools at Netflix, walked through the technical history of the Netflix streaming service, looking at some of the key engineering decisions, codec and packaging, and a few key hacks.” 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Equinix – Consider yourself a data center guru? Think you know everything there is to know about data centers? Test your data center knowledge with these 10 things we bet you didn’t know about Equinix.” Hot or Cold Air Containment? – The Schneider Electric blog visits an oft-discussed choice: “It’s well known by now that air containment systems can eliminate hot spots and provide energy savings over traditional, uncontained data center designs. But which is best for an existing facility – hot air or cold air containment? This question has raised a lot of discussions among manufacturers, consultants and end users.” Schneider has a white paper offering a detailed overview. |
| 7:39p | AppleInsider: The Reno iDataCenter Has a Moat The AppleInsider blog has been following every detail of the company’s data center construction project in Reno, Nevada, including a post today with a series of photos of the site. The most interesting wrinkle: a series of large culverts that effectively form a moat around the section of the property where the company is building its data halls. Beyond on-site drainage management, the new photos don’t reveal much about the project or how it may reflect the evolution of the company’s design. Apple has filed plans with local officials to build two data halls totaling 50,000 square feet, which is a pretty modest first phase. But the new photos certainly reflect the excitement about these data center projects within the Apple community. For full coverage, see AppleInsider. |
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