Wednesday, August 28th, 2013

Time	Event
11:30a	Data Center Jobs: BendBroadband Vault At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from BendBroadband Vault, which is seeking a Senior Account Executive – Vault Solutions in Bend, Oregon. The Senior Account Executive – Vault Solutions is responsible for growing revenue for one of the Northwest’s premiere technology companies,  providing outreach to businesses in Central Oregon, utilizing a solutions sales approach to deliver maximum customer value, representing highly technical products and services and selling local, and collaborating with an exceptional team, from engineers to trusted sales partners. 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)
12:21p	Open Internet Exchange Movement Organizing Open IX is a new organization seeking to adopt the European model for Internet exchanges in the United States. A new group is seeking to change the way networks connect with one another in the United States, saying it believes it can improve the cost and reliability of the physical connections that tie the Internet together. Open IX wants to create a new network of Internet exchange points (IXPs), creating neutral, member-governed exchanges that allow participants to trade traffic. The group is embracing a non-profit model that is widely used in Europe and spreads exchange operations across multiple data centers in a market. In the U.S. these exchanges are typically hosted by commercial providers, with interconnections focused in a single facility or campus operated by that provider. The organizers of Open IX have spent the past year developing the framework for the initiative, which will endorse network operators and data centers to participate, based on their acceptance of the basic principles of Open IX. This week they are creating a non-profit entity to manage the effort, which is coming out of stealth as companies announce ambitions to house Open IX exchanges in northern Virginia and the New York/New Jersey markets. “In the US, interconnection is limited based on the commercial terms that incumbent data center providers enforce on ISPs,” said David Temkin, one of the organizers of Open IX. “Certain service providers have terms that forbid from competing against them. You can’t build competing Internet exchanges.” In addition to the business issues, there are also concerns about the resiliency of the current model, which have been heightened by recent disasters. “The idea really is to be able to not have all your servers in one building and all the world’s network connectivity in another,” said Martin Hannigan, a networking industry veteran who has worked with Temkin to launch Open IX. “There are concerns about resiliency, and these were highlighted by Hurricane Sandy in New York.” Volunteer Effort Temkin and Hannigan are volunteers, and emphasize that Open IX is a grass-roots effort and they’re not representing their employers. Temkin heads network architecture at Netflix, while Hannigan holds a similar post at Akamai Technologies. Other members of the volunteer board have day jobs at Google, Comcast and Iron Mountain, illustrating the new project’s technical experience and familiarity with issues facing large networks. Advocates of the European peering model say its strengths are that exchanges are managed by members and distributed across multiple data centers (See Bill Norton’s Dr. Peering site for a broader comparison of U.S. and European models). The London Internet Exchange (LINX), which this week announced plans to launch U.S. operations with EvoSwitch in northern Virginia, has 477 members in London and is spread across 10 data centers operated by four different providers. The AMS-IX in Amsterdam has 611 participants and is spread across 12 different colocation facilities. “A crucial part of the Open IX approach is to span the buildings of more than one operator,” said John Souter, the CEO at the London Internet Exchange. “The operator community is saying loudly and clearly that they want to have exchanges that span multiple buildings. The American operator community is saying it wants a level playing field, and we’re modeling what we’ve seen work in the rest of the world.” (Comment on this)
12:29p	Creating End-User Mobility Policies Bill Kleyman is a virtualization and cloud solutions architect at MTM Technologies where he works extensively with data center, cloud, networking, and storage design projects. You can find him on LinkedIn. BILL KLEYMAN MTM Technologies IT consumerization has taken many organizations by storm. Users are asking IT administrators to help them support more devices which want access to corporate data. Smartphones, tablets and ever personal laptops are all being used by end-users to be more productive and have a more positive computing experience. The Age of Bring-Your-Own-Device has arrived, yet the implementation is where the underlying challenge begins to arise. With all of these devices, how does an IT department manage the data being delivered to these devices and how can they continue to provide a powerful end-user experience? In developing a BYOD platform, it’s important to understand that the goal isn’t to manage the end-point, rather, the idea is to control the data and the flow of information. By setting good policies and have the right tools in place, administrators are able to control the IT consumerization phenomenon. Data/computer usage policies. Part of any great technology policy is the ability to not confuse the end-user. In working with BYOD usage policies, it’s important to take the time and differentiate between what is the user’s responsibility, what their personal information is, and what corporate data they may be accessing. A BYOD policy should outline that although devices may belong to the user, the information they are accessing – even by simply viewing it on a phone for example – will place them under the computer or technology policy. Furthermore, although IT administrators aren’t really supposed to be working on end-user devices, the user’s data usage may be monitored. This means that any device accessing corporate information may be monitored (only that specific session) for suspicious activity. Stipend programs. One widely adopted policy has been to look at various ways to offset existing end-point costs. Let’s look at the typical PC within a large organization. Over the life of the machine – approximately 3-5 years – the maintenance costs may average $5K a year. This includes software, hardware, and general administrative costs. Now, imagine offsetting almost all of that into a stipend-backed BYOD program. A user can select an approved device from a general corporate-provided list for about $2-$3K. The device, the hardware, and all of the maintenance will fall on the user. The corporation will subsidize the purchase of the device, provide a client for access, and allow the user to use the machine for business and personal consumption. The benefit here is that the organization can streamline management costs, provide a better end-user experience, and provide an end-user buyout option. At the end of the life of the device, the organization can offer the end-user a $1 (or some similar amount) buyout option. This way, a company is able to write off the machine and not be responsible for disposal of the hardware. Creating an approved device list. In creating a BYOD policy, it’s very important to create a structured list of approved devices or pieces of hardware. This can range from phones, to tablets and of course – PC machines. Given today’s similarities in hardware and even OS platforms from an end-user perspective, the list can be fairly all-encompassing. Still, it will provide a certain element of rigidity when it comes to device selection. In some cases, certain types of devices just won’t work with a corporate workload delivery infrastructure. Whether some type of client provides challenges or an application isn’t compatible – there needs to be a good understanding of which devices will operate with the least amount of administration requirements for the IT staff and the end-user. Controlling remote access. One of the challenges with BYOD is that information can be access from almost any device in any location – given an Internet connection. This means that there have to be good security policies in place to monitor where an end-user is coming from. One of the policy requirements may be that a secure connection is required. Administrators are actually able to interrogate a device and see where it’s coming from. If the location is deemed as unsafe, administrators may actually block or provide only partial access to the corporate data. In creating a remote access policy – ensure that users are aware that although the device belongs to them, the corporate data does not. In light of that, they need to exercise caution in how they access the information. From the data center side, administrators can do some of the following to further secure remote access: – Access Control Lists (ACLS) – Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms – Device Interrogation Policies – Intrusion Detection/Prevention Services (IPS/IDS) – Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) Engines The most important rule with any BYOD initiative is to prevent an unmanaged free-for-all. The end-user computing experience and the data that the end-point receives must be monitored and controlled. Using advanced security technologies capable of managing all sorts of endpoints will simplify the device control process. New tools are able to monitor everything from mobile phones to what a user is trying to send out when accessing corporate data. This type of granular control will help administrators manage the BYOD initiative and prevent potential security issues. With good policies and a solid deployment plan, BYOD can help organizations support a wider and more diverse user base. 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)
1:00p	CiRBA Adds Reservation Console For Virtual Machine Workloads CiRBA’s new Reservation Console enables organizations to automate new workload routing to the best cloud environment based on a comprehensive scoring mechanism and capacity reservations. (Image: CiRBA) Capacity management software provider CiRBA is adding a brand new Reservation Console to fill a critical gap in enterprise operations, addressing the need for automation of VM routing and capacity bookings. The company has tackled the rise of the virtual machine and how enterprises manage operations in an increasingly complex world. The reservation console will be available in November 2013. The reservation console allows users to reserve capacity – so it’s not just a clever name – in advance of its actual use. Co-founder and CTO Andrew Hillier uses a hotel reservation system as an analogy. The new console complements the environment-level CiRBA Booking Management System by providing users with visibility into all inbound capacity reservation requests and all available environments, enabling routing and reservations into the best environment for each request. It’s good for confidence, forecasting, and avoiding unnecessary expenditures on hardware and software. “Many internal cloud platforms focus on automating the process of provisioning capacity in a specific target environment, but this is actually a small part of the overall picture,” said Hillier.  “It still forces organizations to figure out which environment, geography and hosting technology is best for an application or request. This is a time consuming, inaccurate and highly manual process, and the Reservation Console solves this by automating the process of evaluating hosting options, routing capacity requests and reserving capacity in the target environment.” It’s another step towards improving data center efficiency, eliminating what is typically a manually intensive process for those with several environments trying to gauge what should go where. At the beginning of the year, CiRBA added a license control system to help reel in “Licensing Sprawl.” Now with the reservation console, it’s enabling organizations to automate new workload routing and capacity processes. The reservation console features a scoring system that uses several variables to identify the optimal destination environment for new workloads. There’s a ‘Hosting Score’, which is based on criteria such as occupancy levels, technical considerations, software licensing constraints (this ties in to the aforementioned license control system), operational policies and compliance. Organizations can fine tune the weighting to suit their needs. The reservation console leverages CiRBA’s workload routing API which was released in June, that enables placement recommendations to be fed directly from CiRBA through to cloud management platforms such as OpenStack. (Comment on this)
1:06p	Reseller Figures in Domain Hijacking via Melbourne IT (Again) “Lapse at Melbourne IT Enables Domain Hijacking.” Does this headline sound familiar to anybody? The Australian domain registrar is acknowledging that a third party was able to alter the domain records for nytimes.com and redirect its web site, forcing one of the world’s leading media organizations to resort to numerical IP addresses to share its work. Melbourne IT told CNET that “the credentials of a Melbourne IT reseller (username and password) were used to access a reseller account on Melbourne IT’s systems.” Folks with long memories will remember that Melbourne IT figured in a very similar scenario in the 2005 hijacking of the domain for a New York ISP, disabling email and Internet access for thousands of customers. In January 2005, hackers were able to take control of the domain name for Panix.com. The problem was traced to Melbourne IT, which said the transfer was initiated through the account of a Melbourne IT reseller that was not properly vetted. At the time, ICANN promised a review of the incident, saying it was “very concerned” that Melbourne IT relied upon a reseller to confirm the transfer request, and will “review the appropriateness of these arrangements.”   (Comment on this)
1:56p	NoSQL Leader Couchbase Raises $25 Million NoSQL database leader Couchbase announced that it has closed on a $25 million series D funding round led by Adams Sweet Partners and joined by existing investors Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, North Bridge Venture Partners and Ignition Partners. “Since the 2.0 release of Couchbase last December, Couchbase’s growth has been remarkable,” said Robin Murray, general partner of Adams Street Partners. “The delivery of document database extensions and cross data center replication features together with existing leadership in scalability and performance has allowed them to win big orders at many high profile enterprise accounts and immediately attracted our attention.” Sales have grown more than 400 percent and the company has won several high-visibility competitive enterprise accounts. Couchbase has been known to be used by companies such as AOL, Cisco, LinkedIn, Orbitz and Salesforce.com.  Couchbase will use the funds to expand international sales and marketing operations as well as support key strategic product initiatives. These initiatives will be announced in the coming weeks. It will also use the funding to expand its local presence in North America,Europe, Israel, Japan, and Korea and open offices in China, India, Brazil, and Argentina. “We have seen a significant increase in the adoption of NoSQL by enterprises,” said Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase. “They are doing deep strategic evaluations of NoSQL technologies and our leadership in providing easy scalability, consistently high performance, and cross data center replication has allowed us to consistently win these evaluations. This funding will allow us to rapidly expand the number of enterprises we serve around the world.” (Comment on this)
2:30p	Puppet Labs Being Used in VMware’s new vCloud Hybrid Service VMware is using Puppet technology in VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, one of several collaborations between Puppet Labs and VMware, which made a $30 million investment in Puppet Labs in January. The investment made sense, as Puppet is a compatible management tool used by much of VMware’s user base. The vCloud Hybrid Service integration is yet another example of continued partnership and integration between the two companies, enabling the growth of DevOps. VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service, which announced general availability during VMWorld, is the first enterprise-class, infrastructure-as-a-service public cloud that is completely compatible with VMware-virtualized data centers. “The automation framework of VMware vCloud Hybrid Service was designed around ‘DevOps’ principles, and we were looking for a solution that would bring that approach to configuration management as part of cloud service provisioning,” said Mathew Lodge, vice president, Cloud Services, VMware. “We are pleased to use Puppet Labs’ technologies within VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.” Joint customers currently benefit from the integration of Puppet Enterprise with VMware vCloud Automation Center, the Puppet Enterprise content pack for VMware vCenter Log Insight, and over 12 modules on the Puppet Forge to deploy VMware products, including VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter Operations Manager. “Together, VMware and Puppet Labs give customers the agility and scalability they need to manage today’s complex heterogeneous environments,” said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. “Puppet Labs powers some of the largest and most successful cloud service providers, and this partnership with VMware extends our offerings in cloud automation.” In addition to VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, Puppet Labs’ technologies also power many of the largest and most successful cloud service providers and ISV cloud software, including Salesforce.com, Dropbox, Cisco WebEx, OpenStack, and Red Hat. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Mellanox Partners To Launch VMware-Powered Solutions From the VMworld 2013 event this week in San Francisco, Mellanox announced a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution with LSI Corporation, and a 40 Gigabit Ethernet Flash storage solution with Micron. 40 Gigabit Ethernet Flash Solution Mellanox (MLNX) announced a collaborative solution to enable higher storage performance and efficiency for virtualized environments using VMware’s ESXi 5.1. The solution consists of Mellanox’s ConnectX-3 40GbE NICs with iSCSI over RDMA (iSER) and Micron’s 1.4TB P420m PCIe SSD cards. By taking advantage of the iSER protocol, Micron’s flash storage solution delivers superior performance, providing virtual machines on a single ESXi 5.1 host with an aggregate bandwidth of 11GB/s or 527,000 IOPS using only two interconnect cards in a 3U box. “The combined solution of Mellanox’s 40GbE NICs with iSER and Micron’s P420m PCIe SSD enables higher performance and accelerates storage applications running in virtualized environments,” said Yaron Haviv, vice president data center solutions at Mellanox Technologies. “In addition, consolidating compute and storage traffic over a single-wire infrastructure reduces data center complexity and cost.” Accelerate VDI workload performance Mellanox announced the results from  collaborative solution for enabling greater virtual desktop density per server using VMware Horizon View. The combined low-latency solution consists of a Mellanox 40GbE NICs and the LSI Nytro MegaRAID application acceleration card that integrates onboard flash capacity with intelligent caching software and hard drive RAID management. The solution can power up to 1,500 desktops across 10 vSphere servers for under $25,000. “Mellanox 40GbE interconnects teamed with LSI PCIe flash cards optimizes VDI environments and provides unmatched cost-performance benefits.” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “The hardware offload capabilities embedded in our 40GbE NICs overcome the limitations of ordinary TCP/IP interconnects, thereby allowing servers to efficiently connect to the storage subsystem and take full advantage of the performance of flash storage in a VDI environment, and eliminates redundant and costly SAN infrastructure.” (Comment on this)
4:00p	Internet of Things: ARM Acquires Software Firm Sensinode ARM boosts its Internet of Things strategy by buying Sensinode and accelerating open standards, and Broadcom hopes to be a catalyst for the wearables market with a wireless platform for embedded devices. ARM Acquires Sensinode ARM announced that it has acquired Sensinode Oy, a provider of software technology for the Internet of Things (IoT). The privately held Finland company has led the creation of the 6LoWPAN and CoAP standards for low cost low power devices, and has been a key contributor to the IETF, ZigBee IP, ETSI and OMA standardization efforts. The proliferation of  open standards that Sensinode has helped develop will be accelerated through the ARM mbed project. mbed is an industry collaboration to deliver fundamental open source hardware and software building blocks for rapid development of intelligent connected devices. “ARM is dedicated to enabling a standards-based Internet of Things where billions of devices of all types and capabilities are connected through interoperable Internet Protocols and Web Services,” said John Cornish, executive vice president and general manager, System Design Division, ARM. “Sensinode is a pioneer in software for low cost low power internet connected devices and has been a key contributor to open standards for IoT. By making Sensinode expertise and technology accessible to the ARM Partnership and through the ARM mbed project we will enable rapid deployment of thousands of new and innovative IoT applications.” Broadcom Expands Embedded Offerings to Wearable Market Broadcom (BRCM) expanded its Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices (WICED) portfolio with the introduction of WICED Direct. WICED is a platform that simplifies the implementation of Internet connectivity into an array of consumer devices. This platform will take advantage of the growing market of wearable products that communicate seamlessly to the cloud via smart mobile devices. “The value of a wearable device lies in its ability to connect to a smartphone or the Internet with minimal impact on battery life,” said Rahul Patel, Broadcom Vice President, Marketing, Wireless Connectivity Combos. “As the market gains momentum, Broadcom is actively widening business opportunities in this growing space by offering the breadth of IP and customized components that enable creative new smart wearable devices to be connected.” Broadcom’s WICED portfolio provides the foundation for embedding low power, high performance, interoperable wireless connectivity into these devices. Wi-Fi Direct is a specification that allows two devices to communicate with each other securely via Wi-Fi without an access point or computer. Wireless connectivity technologies that enable these devices to connect to smartphones are key – such as Near Field Communications (NFC), Bluetooth Smart and Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. “OEMs creating wearable products require interoperable technology that will allow these new devices to connect with smartphones and tablets available today,” said Joshua Flood, Senior Analyst, ABI Research. “Since Broadcom powers the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in the majority of smartphones on the market today, the company’s wireless SoCs are an ideal choice for OEMs developing consumer products that are designed to seamlessly communicate with other mobile devices on the market.” (Comment on this)
6:50p	VMware Enhances Enterprise Mobile Management VMware (VMW) unveiled new capabilities and partnerships such as a new desktop-as-a service, VMware Ready smartphones, a growing community of desktop and mobile partners, and integrated device and workspace management to reinforce VMware Horizon Suite. “VMware Horizon Suite offers a cost-effective and secure transition to the mobile-cloud era for organizations struggling to modernize their infrastructure,” said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “VMware is the only company that offers a comprehensive end-user computing platform with highly integrated management capabilities to make managing disparate users, devices and operating systems simple and effective.” Desktop-as-a-Service VMware Horizon Suite gains a desktop-as-a-service deployment option to give organizations an easy way to transition to virtual desktops. The Horizon Desktop-as-a-service option will be available via its vCloud Hybrid service by the end of the year, giving a common platform to extend desktops and the data center to the cloud. This gives organizations the choice of deploying desktop-as-a-service on vCloud Hybrid Service themselves or through a managed service provider. Deploying desktops from the cloud is being offered immediately through vCloud Partners. Enterprise Mobility An ABI research study shows that there will be 1.4 billion smart phones worldwide by the end of 2013, and VMware is responding with new capabilities and products to help simplify enterprise mobile management for IT administrators. In support of BYOD programs VMware announced expanded support of its VMware ready devices, with support from the LG G2, Motorola DROID family, and HTC One. Sony and HTC join the growing community of mobile partners who will introduce devices that are attractive to consumers and manageable by corporate IT using the dual persona capability found in Horizon Workspace. Support for mobile applications to enable administrators to entitle and manage applications, a new policy management engine to consolidate, model, and rationalize policies across all components, and support for the Oracle database are among some of the enhancements found in a new Horizon Workspace 1.5 release. “Northeast Wisconsin Technical College (NWTC) selected Horizon Workspace as a collaborative tool to help us attain our college goals of providing a fully accessible (anyplace, anytime, anywhere, any device) digital learning environment for our 40,000 students,” said Linda Hartford, chief information officer, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. “NWTC will use Horizon Workspace as a catalyst for technology to create easy access to the learning environment.” (Comment on this)

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