Thursday, July 18th, 2013

Time	Event
11:30a	Data Center Jobs: Communication Supply Corporation At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have  a new job listings from Communication Supply Corporation,  which is seeking a Sales Specialist – Power in Carol Stream, Illinois. The Sales Specialist – Power  will proactively call on CSC branches, in an effort to identify and assist in closing APC opportunities, complete certified Sales Professional status with focus on Small / Medium Datacenter market within the first month, possess working knowledge of APC channel programs and CSC status, have complete understanding of ORP registration process and discounts, plus ISX designer pricing increments and requirements, and co-develop measureable goals with APC NAM, CSC: MRKT, Regional VPs, and local branch management to be executed at the branch level. This includes ORP, Revenue, Engineer.  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)
11:47a	GI Partners Buys LA Telecom Hub One Wilshire GI Partners has acquired One Wilshire, the leading telecom building in Los Angeles and one of the world’s most wired buildings. (Photo: CoreSite Realty) Private equity firm GI Partners has acquired One Wilshire, the leading carrier hotel in Los Angeles and one of the most wired buildings in the world, the company confirmed this week. The new owner, a long-time player in data center real estate, acquired the building from Hines Property Trust. The transaction was conducted through through  TechCore, a $1 billion fund managed by GI Partners on behalf of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). One Wilshire is a key meeting place for the world’s communication networks, serving as one of the busiest intersections in global Internet and telecom traffic. The 30-story building in downtown Los Angeles has more than 300 tenants, including dozens of data center firms and telecom carriers. One of the largest tenants is wholesale data center operator CoreSite, which operates more than 150,000 square feet of space in the building. Other tenants include Verizon Communications, Savvis, Level 3 and Global Crossing. “One Wilshire is one of the preeminent West Coast network facilities,” said Michael Wong, Vice President of GI Partners. “The property fits well with TechCore’s strategy of acquiring high-quality, core, technology-advantaged properties leased to market leading tenants.” The Data Center Premium The deal for One Wilshire underscores the premium value of data center real estate. The reported sale price of $437 million works out to $660 a square foot, according to the LA Times, a huge premium to recent valuations for commercial real estate in Los Angeles. By comparison, the U.S. Bank Tower recently sold for about $260 a square foot. That sale price represents a nice return for Hines, which bought One Wilshire in 2007 for $287 million from the Carlyle Group. One Wilshire is a 30-story, 663,000 square feet building housing data center, office, storage and retail space with a five-level subterranean parking garage. GI Partners and CalPERS formed TechCore in early 2012 to acquire technology-advantaged properties, including data centers, internet gateways, corporate campuses for technology tenants and life science properties. In its first year the fund has acquired more than 1.7 million square feet of mission critical data center and office properties throughout the United States. Longtime Partners in Sector GI and CalPERS have a lengthy shared history of investment in the data center market. In 2001, CalPERS backed GI Partners to acquire dozens of data center and Internet gateway properties, including many distressed properties bought at discount prices during a glut of data center real estate in the wake of the dot-com bust. The portfolio formed the nucleus of Digital Realty, the real estate investment trust that has become the leading player in the global market for mission-critical facilities. In the past decade, data centers have matured into a new asset class, to the point where the new TechCore fund can focus on stable income properties rather than turnarounds. One Wilshire is a prime example of this strategy, as the building is filled with tenants, with about 60 percent of its space occupied by telecom ro data center firms. GI Partners recently a controlling interest in IT infrastructure provider SoftLayer to IBM for a reported sale price of $2 billion, and previously acquired and sold the interconnection provider Telx. GI Partners also is a minority  owner of managed hosting specialist ViaWest (Comment on this)
12:00p	Data Tape: Dying a Slow Death or Already Dead? Jeff Yaptengco is a Systems Architect at En Pointe Technologies, a national solution provider of IT products and services. Follow @EnPointTech on Twitter for news and updates across the technology industry. JEFF YAPTENGCO En Pointe Technologies Over the past 10 years, numerous articles have reported that “tape is dead.” Yet in 2013, many data centers are still using tape. I’ve been in the data storage industry for years, and our customers STILL have some sort of tape storage lingering around. Data tape is not dead; however, its purpose has changed. In the past, linear storage media was used as the first line of defense to restore lost data. Yet today, there are few backup administrators using this technique. Today, many customers are using tape as a duplicate backup. They run quicker to disk within their backup windows and can be duplicated or archived to tape for off-site storage. Additionally, they are using tapes for their second, third, or fourth line of defense. There have been many fault tolerant systems like replication, mirroring, snapshots, clustering, and backup to disk that have superseded tapes as the first line of defense against data loss. Evolution of Storage and Backup Technology From reel-to-reel to data tape, the technology has evolved over time. When I started, quarter-inch tapes (QICs) were used, which had about 200 to 400MBs of capacity. The savings incurred by backing up to tape over disk were astronomical. Best of all, tapes could be moved off-site in case of site disasters. The technology grew to larger capacity media formats like DAT, AIT, DLT, and LTO and faster tape drives were created. Companies like Archive, Sytos, Maynard, Connor, Colorado, and Seagate popped up everywhere and were competing to manage tape and drive backups through schedulers and databases. By this point the demand for tape storage had grown so much, tape automation robots from manufactures including Exabyte, Sony, Quantum, HP, Compaq, IBM, and ADIC were used to move hundreds of tapes in and out of tape drives. This allowed the automation of moving tapes to span beyond their capacities. They had a fixed price, and a fixed amount of slots, which could hold a fixed sized tape. When slots were empty it equaled wasted cost. Today, tape automation robots are being used less because of their limited expandability and cost over disk; only a handful of all those manufacturers remain. Data Tape Killers The first and most obvious data tape killer is that disk prices have decreased exponentially. Almost all data centers today use fault tolerant “Nearline” systems (also called High Availability or HA) like disk RAID and mirroring, server clustering, and snapshots. If these systems are working properly, restoration from backups may never be needed. For example, mirroring usually involves writing the data to two forms of storage at the same time. One is active while the second one is passive. If the active storage or disk fails, the second one can take over with no down time. With these systems, if disks are lost, the first line of defense to recover is not from tape anymore, but the “Nearline” resolutions. Another “killer” was the creation of Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs), an emulated tape library system that writes directly to disk. VTLs looked and acted just like a tape library, but were composed of disks. However, modern day backup software can now also backup directly to disk storage via local disk, OST, NFS, and CIFS protocols. Backup software today can backup to disk storage with de-duplication, a compression technique used to get single instances of data on the storage, saving possibly 50-90% of capacity on repeated data segments. Additionally, with cloud services, it doesn’t need to be stored locally in the data center. Backups can go off-site to cloud storage providers, and with de-duplication, only unique data needs to be sent to the cloud. The Future of Data Tape So what is the future of data tape? Well, “How important is your data to you?” Even as a second, third, or fourth line of defense, tapes are still the most cost effective way to move data off-site and store it away for long periods of time. Additionally, a few of the data centers still using tapes require data to be essentially cataloged and locked up in a vault never be touched. There is also a matter of compliance requiring data be kept for a certain amount of time. There will always be data that must be kept or converted from old backups on tapes. For companies where data can, at no cost, be lost, tapes will always hold a purpose. They will always be portable and store large amounts at lower costs. So while it appears the purpose of data tapes has changed, tape still has a long life ahead. 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)
2:13p	Open-Xchange Raises $20M, Turning the Browser into the Office Hub Web-based communication, collaboration and office productivity software suite provider Open-Xchange has secured $20 million in Series C funding to grow its cloud office suite. United Internet, Josef Lamberti, and existing shareholders have made the investment to support further growth of the company. The company’s roots are in providing an open email platform to service providers, but it has long expanded its offerings to become a platform for all things office in the cloud. It has been adding and developing open office productivity applications to its arsenal. The additional funds will support the company’s growth through investments into software development. The company acquired much of the talent behind OpenOffice, an open source competitor to Microsoft’s Office Suite. It has been building out web-based versions of these apps launching OX Documents, a cloud based office productivity suite in March. The funding will help further these developments. Part of the proceeds will be used for a secondary transaction. Major Presence in Hosting “What makes this story a little unique is that you rarely see European companies get this kind of money,” said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. The company touts many of the biggest hosting companies as its customers. It provides e-mail, collaboration and office productivity software suites to many of the top providers who in turn use it as a platform for their customers. “Hosting providers are using us as an integration tool,” said Laguna. The company is also picking customers among cable companies and telecoms, who in turn expose millions of users to Open-Xchange, according to Laguna. Open-Xchange is a good example of how the office is shifting over to the cloud to enable distributed, mobile workforces. “OX is the pioneer in making collaboration and productivity software accessible to anyone with a browser,” said Laguna. “As we aim to power ruthlessly open cloud solutions for the mobile web age, we’re encouraged by the validation in our client base, business model and global business expertise that this backing signifies. This addition of expertise to our board is critical as we expand our product offering during a time of great disruption in cloud-computing, and we’re thrilled to have investors who share our vision – to transform how people work.” The company hit 80 million users this year and expects to hit the 100 million mark by next year. “We’re still growing at 50% every year,” said Laguna. “We’re around 100 people now. We’ve started OX documents, in addition to the major update to our core product, called app suite launched earlier this year. We went out and said we need a few more dollars.” Backing from 1&1 Veteran Dr. Oliver Mauss will join the Open-Xchange supervisory board together with Hermann-Josef Lamberti. Mauss is well known in the hosting industry for his time at the helm of 1&1 Internet, before becoming CEO of United Internet Ventures AG. “This is an extremely exciting investment for us,” said Mauss. “Having been a customer of Open-Xchange for many years, we have seen the company evolve from a small vendor to a significant player in the cloud market. Open-Xchange´s vision of becoming the web desktop for cloud services makes this one of the most exciting software investment opportunities. “The investment will enable Open-Xchange to expand software development, professional services and international business development, which will hugely benefit all customers and partners,” Mauss continued. “We also understand that Open-Xchange’s customer-base includes other well-known cloud service providers from all across the globe, which stand to benefit from this investment. For us though there was never a doubt that this was the right investment to make – we’re thrilled to be working with such an innovative company.” eCAPITAL entrepreneurial Partners AG led the negotiations with the new investors.“As longstanding backers of Open-Xchange, we highly appreciate the investments by United Internet and Mr. Lamberti, said Dr. Paul-Josef Patt, CEO of eCAPITAL entrepreneurial Partners AG. ”The additional capital, board expertise and network will provide strong support to the Open-Xchange team as they strive to implement their vision of a superior cloud-based communication and productivity offering.” (Comment on this)
3:28p	MapR Platform Now Available on Amazon Elastic MapReduce MapR M7 is now available on Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Fruit of the Loom implements a Teradata Data Warehouse, and HP updates its ArcSight Security Analytics portfolio using big data to protect critical information and mitigate risk. MapR M7 big data platform available on Amazon EMR. MapR Technologies announced MapR M7, a Big Data platform for NoSQL and Apache Hadoop applications, now available through Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR). MapR M7 provides ease of use, dependability and greater performance for NoSQL and Hadoop. Amazon EMR makes it easy and cost-effective to deploy and operate elastic Hadoop clusters on AWS. M7 can run on SSD-backed high I/O instances and is able to scale to thousands of nodes per cluster. Benchmark tests of M7 running on AWS High Storage instances have shown it delivering consistent performance of over 100,000 operations per second per node. MapR M7 joins M3 and M5 editions as available through Amazon EMR. “MapR’s latest technology accomplishment with the availability of the MapR M7 Distribution is providing ground breaking capabilities for Apache HBase applications to enhance Big Data operations,” said John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder, MapR Technologies. “Customers that want added flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness in the cloud can gain further benefits from MapR’s technology via AWS.” Fruit of the Loom selects Teradata.  As a fundamental part of its analytics strategy Fruit of the Loom is implementing a Teradata Warehouse from Teradata (TDC). Claraview, Teradata’s business intelligence and analytics division, is playing a vital role in migrating data to the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance, laying the foundation for an integrated data warehouse. “The Teradata manufacturing LDM, data integration roadmap and operational mentoring we are providing will be instrumental in assisting Fruit of the Loom reach the next stages of its quest to become an organization capable of adapting to a changing, competitive environment,” said Keith Henry, vice president, global industry marketing and solutions for manufacturing, Teradata. “Strong and competitive companies like Fruit of the Loom have embraced the benefits of driving their business on data analytics.” HP uses big data for unified security analytics.  HP (HPQ) announced updates to its HP ArcSight portfolio, offering enterprises unified security analytics for big data with expanded identity monitoring to accelerate the detection of persistent threats. Security solution updates include ArcSight Threat Detector 2.0 with out-of-the-box threat profiles and threat profile intelligence, ArcSight Threat Response Manager 5.5 with cloud-ready, closed-loop capabilities for accelerated threat detection and response, and ArcSight IdentityView 2.5. With the latest ArcSight Threat Detector, HP has added out-of-the-box pattern profiles that use heuristic analysis on common areas of threat such as browsing patterns, distributed attack detection, early-stage attack detection and activity profiling. “Adversaries only need to get it right once to invoke serious damage on an organization’s private data, ability to provide critical service or corporate reputation,” said Haiyan Song, vice president and general manager, ArcSight, Enterprise Security Products, HP. “With solutions designed to enhance threat detection through improved security analytics for big data, HP enables customers to quickly identify potential attackers and take action proactively to minimize business impact and prevent  disruption to critical client services.” (Comment on this)
5:21p	Best of the Data Center Blogs for July 18 Here’s a roundup of some interesting items we came across this week in our reading of data center industry blogs for July 18th: Apple+Reno+Solar  = “Controllable Power” – KC Mares of Megawatt Consulting, who helped develop the site in Reno where Apple is building a new data center, discusses the unique approach to energy his team pursued. “We created some unique tax incentives, but as a data center power guy for nearly two decades negotiating power deals and developing power plants, I saw the real potential was for clean, ‘controllable’ power. I brought Apple to the site last spring and they too saw the same potential.” Counting Servers is Hard – Data center guru James Hamilton looks at Steve Ballmer’s recent statement that Microsoft has more than 1 million servers, and what kind of infrastructure and power use that implies. “The Microsoft number is surprising when compared against past external estimates, data center build rates, or ramp rates from previous hints and estimates. Little data has been released by any of the large players and what’s out there is typically nothing more than speculation. Counting servers is hard and credibly comparing server counts is close to impossible.” A CPU, a GPU, and a Data Center walk into a Bar – At SwitchScribe, Mark Thiele looks at innovation and performance: “There’s been considerable uproar in the infrastructure and analyst community of late as we all gnash our teeth and wring our hands while considering the potential impacts of multiple new CPU types in our mix.” Define Efficiency – At Compass Points, Chris Crosby offers observations on how the industry talks about efficiency. “If you’re like me, you’ve probably lost count of the articles that you’ve read, or conferences you’ve attended, where the big climatic summary has been that data centers must become more efficient—a comment greeted with a nodding of heads that makes the room look like it’s filled with bobble head dolls. Despite our universal agreement that we all think efficiency is good, does this mean that we are all talking about the same thing?” How our Customers Built the New Equinix Customer Portal – The Interconnections blog has an interview with Equinix Customer Portal guru Robert Noakes to discuss how the development of the company’s new portal was shaped by customer feedback. (Comment on this)
5:52p	Department of Veterans Affairs Cancels $36 Million Cloud Contract The Department of Veterans Affairs has terminated a $36 million contract with HP Enterprise services, initially announced last November. The reason cited was a material change in the agency’s requirements. Remember that “Cloud First” mandate? It apparently doesn’t quite fit in this case. The initial contract was for five years, with the VA intending to move 600,000 personnel to Microsoft Office 365 for department-wide e-mail and calendaring. It never left the test account stage. Now even those test accounts are gone. The contract was terminated out of convenience, meaning the cancellation was not the contractor’s fault and was driven by changes in requirements. This will cost the VA approximately $150,000 for services performed, plus what could be a sizeable termination settlement, according to an FCW article. The VA is the second largest government agency—the Department of Defense is largest – so this was a big win for all involved, beyond the contract size. This win was important not only for HP, the systems integrator, but for Microsoft’s Office 365. The cloud version of Office has been in need of validation, and has received it in some regards with big wins elsewhere. It has strong footing in verticals like education, but government is highly sought after. There’s a mentality that if it’s secure enough for government use, its secure enough for businesses. What kind of enterprise email system the VA is going to use is up in the air for now. The terminated contract brings up a variety of questions. Is the government starting to question the cloud?  As FCW points out, the VA’s Deputy CIO for Architecture, Strategy and Design, Paul Tibbits, told an audience at 1105 Media’s Enterprise Architecture Conference that he questioned the cost-effectiveness of moving to the cloud. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2013/07/18 [Calendar]

Next Day >>