Thursday, July 11th, 2013

Time	Event
11:00a	SolidFire Gains Traction for SSD-Powered Cloud Storage A “five stack” of SolidFire’s all-SSD storage systems. SolidFire is definitely on to something. The all-SSD storage architecture provider has been promising service providers that it can provide premium storage with quality of service guarantees in a much more cost effective manner than traditional solutions. The proof of these claims is in the continued customer traction it is seeing, most recently signing up European Telecom Colt. Colt is a forward-thinking kind of telecom, different in an industry typically identified as cumbersome and slow to evolve. Colt has the largest enterprise-class cloud footprint in Europe, with 20 European data centers in 10 countries. “Colt’s new high performance, shared storage service allows us to meet growing customer demand for performance guarantees that are not available anywhere else in the industry,” said Jon Bennett, VP Portfolio & Strategy, Colt Technology Services. “Guaranteed performance coupled with 24×7 service level availability make Colt’s new shared storage services the enterprise grade that our customers expect.  We now make it possible for our customers to deploy a far greater number of business critical applications utilizing the most predictable and efficient enterprise class cloud across Europe.” SolidFire will supply storage for Tiers 0-3, with Guaranteed performance added to Tiers 1 and 2. Tier 4 is SATA. The rollout of SolidFire gear across seven Colt data centers will begin with Zurich, Milan, and London. The SolidFire rollout will occur in two phases. Phase 1 will be the 5 tiers, with all new volumes place on SolidFire infrastructure, and current application volumes migrated over as hardware depreciates. Phase II will see delivery of additional services beyond shared storage tiers, such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, PaaS, and/or SaaS – in other words, it will be a foundation for a lot of Colt’s cloud initiatives. SolidFire has been in General Availability for three quarters and the customer list is growing. The first companies to dip their toes into Solidfire were Viawest and Calligo. It has since added several big names such as IWeb based in Montreal, Canada. The majority of its customers out of the gate have been cloud providers, with a few enterprises as well. Most of these deployments are production data, according to Jay Prassl, VP Sales & Marketing, SolidFire. It’s enjoying a 91% win rate of deal with a point of contact, but word is spreading; 42% of deals have been completed without POC. Cloud Service Providers are aggressively building clouds to compete with AMZN, GOOG, MSFT, and SolidFire believes it provides quantifiable differentiation and business value. SolidFire’s Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities with multi-tenant clouds continues to be a strong selling point for providers looking to differentiate cloud storage offerings. With the application of SolidFire QoS controls, providers are able to create fine-grained tiers of performance, isolate application performance, and enforce performance SLAs. It kills off the noisy neighbor effect – the result of one noisy neighbor affecting the performance of others in a multi-tenant setup. (Comment on this)
11:30a	Digital Realty Plans Huge Expansion in Ashburn One of the new Digital Realty Trust data centers in Ashburn, Virginia. The company continues to expand its Loudoun Exchange campus. (Photo: Rich Miller) Digital Realty plans to build a 400,000 square foot data center at its Digital Loudoun campus in Ashburn, Virginia, the company said Wednesday. Digital Realty will invest at least $150 million in the new facility by 2015 and create 50 new jobs, allowing it to qualify for tax exemptions under Virginia’s newly beefed-up incentives for data center development. The new project will be the eighth data center at the company’s campus in Loudoun County, which is home to more than 5 million square feet of data center space, according to local officials. “We’re very pleased that Digital Realty, with more than one million square feet of space, is the largest data center operator in Loudoun County,” said Buddy Rizer, Assistant Director of the Loudoun County Department of Economic Development. “And we look forward to the completion of their newest building, a 400,000-square-foot facility that will ultimately house 22 data centers.” Incentives Boost Industry in Virginia Digital Realty is the most recent company to take advantage of the sakes and use tax exemptions for data centers, following in the footsteps of RagingWire, DuPont Fabros and Capital One “The abundant data center infrastructure in Virginia, as well as our Sales & Use Tax Exemption Incentive for data center owners and their tenants, are major benefits that put us at the forefront of this booming industry.” said Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. “This significant relief on computer equipment effectively lowers the total cost of ownership and operation, and enables Digital Realty and its customers to continue to grow and thrive in the Commonwealth.” “The sales tax exemption is really a boon for our customers with data centers located in Loudoun Country – already one of the most attractive data center markets in the country,” said Michael Foust, Chief Executive Officer of Digital Realty. “The significant relief we and our customers expect to receive effectively lowers the total cost of ownership of our data centers in the area. We are very excited about this development and believe it further establishes Virginia as a key hub for companies seeking to locate or strengthen their east coast data center footprint.” Building Again in Ashburn Digital Realty’s announcement accelerates the building boom in Ashburn, a section of northern Virginia which is perhaps the most connected piece of Internet real estate in the United States, housing servers for Facebook, Amazon, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft and hundreds of other companies. DuPont Fabros Technology recently began development of ACC7, a 41 megawatt data center on its huge campus in Ashburn. The 11.89 megawatts first phase is expected to be delivered in the second quarter of 2014. Meanwhile, Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT) is building two large data centers in Ashburn’s “Data Center Alley” that are bpth fully leased to “a subsidiary of an investment-grade Fortune 500 company,” which is reported to be Amazon. The 200,000 square foot first facility will come online late this year, with an additional 115,000 square foot building following by mid-2014. In addition to the new construction, DBT Data is marketing several powered-shell properties, and RagingWire and Sabey Data Centers have both announced plans for future projects. Digital Realty’s 122 properties, excluding three properties held as investments in unconsolidated joint ventures, comprise approximately 22.7 million square feet as of April 26, 2013, including 2.6 million square feet of space held for development. Digital Realty’s portfolio is located in 32 markets throughout Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. Data Center Knowledge’s Rich Miller contributed to this story. (Comment on this)
1:00p	Data Center Jobs: CBRE At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have two new job listings from CBRE,  which is seeking a Project Manager – Data Center and an Associate Project Manager – Data Center in Mountain View, California. The Project Manager – Data Center  must be able to create and establish the Master Project Schedule, based on the Critical Path and Key Project Milestones, then update and enforce team compliance during project life, create and establish the Master Project Budget, including soft costs and hard costs, bonds, insurance, contingencies, allowances, etc., contract negotiation, typically in concert with the Clients PM and legal counsel, including establishment of design consultants and all GC business terms including mark-ups, fees, insurance, labor rates, escalation, etc., coordinate Design Team to Clients pre-determined Design Guidelines and standards, and assist with City and/or other Authority approvals process, permitting, etc. To view full details and apply, see job listing details. The Associate Project Manager – Data Center is responsible for managing general contractor cost / change control, including change order review, negotiation, & recommendations, delay analysis, value engineering, budget management and tracking, schedule monitoring, tracking and analysis, document control (track and coordinate addenda, bulletins, new drawing sets, clarifications, etc.), QA/QC assistance- supervising consultants as needed, invoice / Payment, application processing, tracking and reporting, and tracking of all key project documents, including submittals, RFIs, change orders, invoices and payments, lien releases, etc. 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)
1:25p	Tower of Babel Invades the Data Center & NOC Jeff Klaus is general manager, Data Center Manager (DCM) Solutions, at Intel Corporation. Jeff leads a global team that is pioneering data center infrastructure management (DCIM) technologies. JEFF KLAUS Intel Monitoring data center and mission-critical assets remains as important today as it did 20 years ago. The environmental requirements, enabling technologies, delivery mechanisms, and best practices have, of course, evolved immensely along the way. Regardless of these innovations and improvements in operational excellence, continuing opportunities to innovate can yield immediate value as well as future strategic capability. It is not surprising that progress in this area has been made at the expense of simplicity. Today’s monitoring and management solutions have to “speak” the latest protocols and keep up with rapidly changing industry standards for connectivity. Each data center and NOC now resembles a “Tower of Babel,” with a myriad of device connectivity languages. KVM Hardware Overcomes Connectivity Challenges, but Introduces Others When early versions of keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) switches were introduced almost 30 years ago (initially supporting only keyboard and display functions), these hardware solutions simplified connections to managed infrastructure assets. Data center sprawl was sending IT running, literally, from room to room and site to site. KV, and later KVM, helped IT centralize management by delivering the ability to connect to any remote server or networking device through an overlay network of dedicated hardware switches. However, the introduction of KVM switches also increased energy costs in the data center and represented yet another layer of hardware to be maintained, serviced, upgraded, and refreshed. Virtualization has helped to avoid some of these costs in the data center. Hardware KVM solutions have been replaced with software solutions and in many instances merged into holistic management consoles and platforms. This has been great for some, but not all, data center sites, because many organizations are now faced with multiple solutions and diverging approaches. Plus, legacy sites where virtualization is not an option cannot take advantage of the benefits of control offered by KVM. And what about technology teams that need more flexible connectivity options? For example, most NOCs still face extreme challenges related to large-scale real-time infrastructure management. If anything, the challenges here have increased with the growing numbers of interfacing standards and options, and higher-speed, higher-capacity endpoints. The Tower of Babel just keeps getting taller. A New Era for KVM – More Features and Product Innovations KVM is still a vital tool for the teams that must deal with complex, large-scale, heterogeneous networks. To meet the latest challenges, many new KVM solutions offer expanded feature sets and greatly enhanced visibility of assets. Best-in-class solutions also support monitoring of a growing diversity of intelligent endpoints that include network servers, kiosks, video servers, surveillance systems, and more. Perhaps the most exciting KVM trend involves product integrations. Today, it is possible to introduce leading-edge KVM connectivity and monitoring capabilities without introducing any hardware KVM switches. Firmware-based KVM capability can be embedded directly into servers. The virtual KVM serves the same purpose: it gives data center and NOC teams an easy way to connect to any remote endpoint and creates a single-pane-of-glass view of the infrastructure. The Virtual Gateway to the Future Virtualizing the KVM switch comes at an opportune time. In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to keep KVM hardware in sync with server and network connectivity standards. Incompatibilities and constant upgrades have put a strain on lean support staffs, and driven up cost of ownership for the hardware KVM deployments. Virtual KVM solutions, besides providing complete visibility and control, actually go well beyond the one-to-one capabilities offered by hardware switches. Software solutions are more tightly integrated with the target systems. Virtual KVM solution vendors are introducing combined views, with user-defined groups of blades, racks, or servers. Vendors are also adding automation to streamline common tasks. Upgrades are similarly enhanced, and much more cost-effective, since a new interface standard can be supported with a software patch or new release instead of requiring the purchase of the latest hardware switches. As a result of the easy deployment and upgrades, organizations can transition at their own speed to new virtual KVM technology. This simplicity is also unifying organizations that have been struggling with multiple monitoring solutions. Instead of having to rip and replace KVM hardware, the data center teams and NOC teams can standardize on a single virtual software-based KVM solution. This is just the beginning. By migrating away from hardware KVM switching infrastructures, data centers and NOCs position themselves to consolidate many monitoring functions and systems into more streamlined platforms and practices. Choosing a virtual KVM solution should therefore put priority on broad vendor support for servers, and communications options that offer full device coverage. Yes, the Tower of Babel still exists in the data center. The underlying complexity is still there. Thankfully, virtual solutions can shield IT teams from the low-level connectivity challenges and introduce some much-needed simplicity for monitoring and management. 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)
2:00p	What’s the Best Caption for “Star Spangled Cabinets” Cartoon? It’s Thursday and time for a breather! We are asking our readers to vote on our “Fourth of July” cartoon captions that was published on June 28. Diane Alber, our favorite cartoonist,  writes, “I’m seeing a lot of themed colored data centers so why not one celebrating the 4th of July!” Vote for your favorite caption suggestion below. Also, congratulations to our reader Ryan B, who submitted “You can not escape us, the NSA is everywhere! Muhahaha!” for our June 14 cartoon, which we titled Hanging Around the Data Center. New to the caption contest? Here’s how it works: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion. The winner receives a hard copy print, with his or her caption included in the cartoon! Take Our Poll For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Learn to Unlock the Full Business Value of DCIM Many organizations already deploy some type of monitoring solution for their data centers. Many will swear that this solution works well and gives them the metrics they need. However, within today’s modern data center infrastructure – are you really getting the full benefits of DCIM? Data centers have become the central hub of the Internet age, providing the infrastructure for the delivery of digital business services. The performance of the data center has become intrinsically linked to an organization’s overall success. To remain profitable and competitive, organizations need to ensure that every resource is consumed economically and every asset utilized optimally. According to the whitepaper – the real challenge revolves around fragmented operations, tools and information, which causes a failure among organizations to collate and analyze the metrics needed to bridge the data center performance divide. Management in a fragmented sense can be challenging to control. Furthermore the possibility of misinformation creates a reactive, rather than a proactive environment. In this whitepaper, CA explains how DCIM provides the integrated framework and automated formulas needed to convert metrics into meaningful analytics. From centralizing data collection, managing physical capacity and assets, and integrating with critical IT management applications, DCIM unifies the processes, tools and raw data needed to provide an accurate view of data center performance across both IT and facilities. Download this whitepaper today to learn how to make DCIM metrics meaningful. By unifying the process, data center operators will be able to see into many more vital aspects of the infrastructure. This includes: Unlocking greater business value Building a personalized metric map for actionable analytics Understanding how to achieve valuable business insight from DCIM analytics Learning to take an automated approach to some management processes Gaining a competitive advantage with proactive DCIM analytics Reliance around the modern data center will only continue to grow. Furthermore, there is more pressure around high levels of performance and uptime. DCIM enables organizations to close the gap by providing an integrated and automated management approach for both IT and facilities. As CA goes on to note – there is no one-size-fits-all approach to DCIM analytics, but the outcome is always the same: a positive impact on the triple bottom line—operational, financial and environmental. (Comment on this)
5:30p	Customer Wins for Equinix, Telx, and Internap Equinix, Telx and Internap all recently announced customer wins: Equinix selected by Rocket Fuel.  Equinix (EQIX) and video advertising platform company Brightroll announced that Rocket Fuel is leveraging the BrightRoll VideoRTB+ solution on Platform Equinix to improve the ability of buyers to successfully bid on video ad inventory. Earlier this year, BrightRoll created an ultra-low-latency video advertising solution by building on Equinix’s Ad-IX platform instead of public networks for its ad exchange traffic. The Rocket Fuel platform empowers media teams to focus on strategy instead of spreadsheets, and the Equinix Ad-IX ecosystem enables efficiencies in the digital advertising market, which is evolving from traditional ad purchasing to include ad exchanges that help buyers match inventory to viewers in real-time. ”What BrightRoll has accomplished with Rocket Fuel is further proof of the value of the connected ecosystem on Platform Equinix,” said Chris Sharp, general manager, Cloud and Content at Equinix. ”Through this offering, they’re delivering reduced latency, increased efficiency and greater predictability to their customers, three things every business is looking for today.” Telx selected by Blucora. Telx announced that Blucora has established its presence as an anchor client in Telx’s SEA1 Seattle data center, located on Sabey’s Integate.Seattle-East campus just south of Seattle, Washington. This marks the first major client deployment for Telx in the Seattle market. The SEA1 facility has 114,000 gross rentable square feet, and was launched late last year. From SEA1 Blucora can now offer customers in the Pacific Northwest high-performance connectivity to Blucora’s business platforms through InfoSpace, an online search and monetization solutions business with a network of more than 100 partners worldwide; and TaxACT, an online tax preparation service. “Today’s announcement with Blucora is an exciting moment for Telx as we further solidify our presence and national portfolio in the fast-growing Seattle market,” said Chris Downie, president and chief financial officer for Telx. “The growing demand for secure infrastructure by businesses in the Pacific Northwest makes Telx’s commitment to Seattle an important long-term investment for our continued growth. We are pleased to bring on Blucora as the first anchor client in our SEA1 facility. Working with a respected company such as Blucora will help Telx make further inroads in the Seattle market while increasing our service offerings for our existing and future customers.” Internap selected by Screendragon. Internap Network Services (INAP) announced that software as a service marketing company Screendragon is using Internap’s bare-metal servers and managed hosting services to support the growth of clients’ multi-channel digital marketing campaigns. Looking for  flexible, on-demand hosting services on a global scale, Screendragon looked to Internap to support the growing pressure on its SaaS platform. Screendragon’s primary environment is hosted in Internap’s New York data center, and it recently added a hosting footprint at Internap’s Singapore data center. The additional capacity will serve Screendragon’s growing customer base in Asia and provide redundancy to the primary facility in New York. “Our business relies on granting clients 24×7, fast and reliable access to our SaaS offering – anytime, from anywhere in the world,” said Jan Quant, managing director at Screendragon. ”Internap’s route-optimized IP connectivity with its 100 percent uptime SLA adds significant value to its enterprise hosting services, delivering the performance and low latency we need to ensure a positive experience for our international clients.” (Comment on this)
7:20p	EMC Refreshes Data Protection Portfolio At a Backup to the Future event this week EMC announced a broad array of new hardware and software products that enable customers to deploy new Protection Storage Architectures. The new products cut across the company’s market leading Data Domain, Avamar, NetWorker and Mozy product lines. You can catch the webcast on demand. “Organizations must have an effective data protection strategy and infrastructure in place as they transform their IT and business objectives,” said Robert Amatruda, Research Director for Data Protection and Recovery at IDC. ”EMC’s array of data protection solutions announced represents coalescence of proven, existing products with new features and functionality allowing customers to free themselves from the antiquated backup products and processes to a more flexible, holistic approach.” The three key tenets of the EMC Protection Storage Architecture are protection storage, data source integration and data management services. Key technology announcements across these tenets include: Four new Data Domain mid-range systems are up to 4 times faster and 10 times more scalable than the existing Data Domain systems they replace. In addition, the new systems support up to 540 data streams, a 3 times increase that further enables complete consolidation of backup and/or archive data. Data Domain systems now support direct backup from SAP HANA Studio via NFS, and DD Boost for Oracle RMAN now supports Oracle Exadata and SAP running on Oracle.  EMC Avamar  7 now supports all major data center workloads being directed to Data Domain systems, with the addition of file system and NAS/NDMP backups.  EMC NetWorker  8.1 introduces new integrated snapshot management, featuring a new wizard-based user interface, auto-discovery, and intelligent assignment of snapshot storage. Mozy by EMC adds active directory integration and simplified storage management introduces new storage pools which means less time spent monitoring storage quotas at the individual machine level. “Deployment of a Protection Storage Architecture, which arrests the proliferation of the ‘accidental architectures’ we talk so much about, is the best strategy for ensuring effective data protection,” said Guy Churchward, President, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division. ”Accidental architectures are an outgrowth of users addressing individual data protection challenges reactively as they arise, and applying costly silo’d or ‘one size fits all’ products and solutions that become difficult to manage, optimize and pay for. The products we’ve announced today pave the way for our customers to consolidate their data protection strategy and infrastructure, and enable them to proactively prepare for the data protection challenges that accompany transformational IT initiatives.” (Comment on this)
7:50p	365 Main Acquires Data Center in Bay Area Some of the cabinets inside the Evocative data center in Emeryville, Calif., which has been acquired by 365 Main. (Photo: 365 Main) Data center operator 365 Main has expanded its presence in the San Francisco Bay Area with the acquisition of an Evocative, Inc. facility in Emeryville, Calif.  It will be the company’s 17th date center, following 365 Main’s purchase of 16 data centers from Equinix. The acquisition builds on 365 Main’s legacy in San Francisco, where the company is headquartered and opened its first data center, which was later acquired by Digital Realty. 365 Main has a data center in San Jose, but the Emeryville site provides it with a footprint just across the Bay Bridge from the San Francisco business community. 365 Main CEO Chris Dolan says the Emeryville data center houses more than 100 customers, compared to the 200 customers spread across the company’s other 16 data centers. Evocative has built a solid business selling colocation and managed hosting services, with many customers using less than a full rack. “Emeryville boasts an impressive roster of companies, many of which require flexible, reliable data support,” said Dolan. “Our customers wanted to see our highly available and attentive services in this location, and we responded. We’re proud to deliver 365 Main’s quality and customized service, and broaden our presence in the San Francisco Bay Area market.” “Our customers have the added benefit of being part of a large, nationwide platform of data centers that is continuing to expand domestically,” added Dolan. “This affords them the opportunity to easily expand to multiple markets, be in close proximity to their data and improve latency.” Retaining the Evocative Team 365 Main will retain the staff of Evocative, which will add its expertise in network services. The company has been on Inc. Magazine’s “Inc. 5000′ list of fastest growing companies from 2009-2012. Carriers available include AT&T, CenturyLink, Paxio, Verizon and Zayo. “Operational excellence and personalized service have been hallmarks of Evocative’s business, making us a perfect fit to join 365 Main’s portfolio, and our customers will continue to benefit from their like-minded approach,” said Patrick Rigney, Evocative’s founder. “The entire Bay Area market has just gained, by this acquisition, a top-ranked market operator in the retail colocation space, with the operational and customer service standards and experience sought by established enterprises and aggressive start-ups alike.” Dolan said the addition of the Evocative team provides 365 Main with the capability to add network services at other data centers in the future. “Now that we have a national footprint, a lot of our deals have a bandwidth component,” said Dolan. “We’re carrier-neutral and have a robust choice of carriers. But being able to offer a network product as an option could help us with customers interested in one-stop shopping.” The exterior of 365 Main’s newest data center facility in Emeryville, Calif. (Comment on this)

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