Thursday, September 12th, 2013

Time	Event
11:30a	Seaport Capital Acquires DSA Mission Critical Services The private equity sector sees opportunity in data center maintenance. Seaport Capital, which has a long history of investing in the data center industry, said this week that it has acquired DSA Mission Critical Services (MCS), which may become a vehicle for “strategic acquisitions.” MCS provides maintenance support for data centers, was previously a subsidiary of DSA Encore, but will become an independently operated business under Seaport’s ownership. MCS provides both preventative maintenance and emergency service programs for the critical infrastructure, including uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). Seaport Capital was previously an investor in Switch & Data, Peak 10 and Voxel. Its current investments include American Internet Services of San Diego and New Jersey provider Net Access. “Seaport Capital has a long track record of successfully investing in businesses like MCS and its investment will allow us to access substantial capital to fund the Company’s anticipated rapid growth and strategic acquisitions,” said Ron Croce, President and CEO of MCS. “In particular, the additional capital will enable us to expand our national footprint while also expanding our core product and service offerings.” “MCS is well regarded across the industry for providing high quality, reliable and responsive service to its customers,” says Justin Choi, Vice President of Seaport Capital. “We look forward to partnering with the Company and its management team as it continues to build on that foundation of exceptional customer service.” Steve Friedman, CEO and Co-Founder of DSA Encore, says he expects to see MCS continue to grow under Seaport’s stewardship. “We built MCS into a market leader by developing its vendor agnostic service offerings to include every model and brand of critical power equipment,” said Friedman. “We also created a full-spectrum technician training program that leverages live data center infrastructure installed in MCS’ state-of-the-art training center, which increases the readiness and quality of our technicians compared to the rest of the industry.” (Comment on this)
12:30p	Is It Time To Optimize Your Data Center? Chris Heyn is the General Manager of KEMP Technologies Italy. He lives in a small village called Arcene about 40kms from Milan. For the past 14 years Chris has been involved in business development for ICT companies looking to expand their activities into Italy and the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Middle East. CHRIS HEYN KEMP Technologies There is no time like the present to give the data center a good cleaning, or in other words, “optimize your data center.” Let’s take a look at how you can dust off the old appliances and make sure your data center is running as efficiently as possible. Cost Model is Changing Traditionally, each application that users need to run has been given its own server to host it. From a network application management point of view, this makes perfect sense as by physically separating the servers they are easier to manage and control, this makes sense or does it? Actually, there is a fundamental problem. According to IDC, Gartner and even local sources in the United States, Japan, Italy and South Africa, the cost of running each server hosting an application is getting more and more expensive. Understand here we are talking about not buying the server or even the application that runs on it, but the cost for running it — electricity, cooling (air conditioning or other means), fire prevention. When collected together, the cost of running these servers is frightening. What is the cost, or “the damage” as they say in the East End of London, of this approach? Here are the numbers for running each server on an annual basis: IDC – $6,551 Gartner – $5,248 Skeptics – $3,275 While the exact figures estimated to keep each server running differ, the analysts do agree that it is a problem. Here are the 3 principal causes of the problem using IDC’s report as an example: 1) Physical server sprawl. As a consequence of the huge numbers of installed servers, staffing costs on systems maintenance have risen 600% to over $120 billion annually, and the cost to power and cool installed servers has more than tripled from $2 billion to $10 billion per year during that same period. 2) Overprovisioning and underutilized assets. a. While the rise in the number of installed systems has been dramatic, equally concerning is the low utilization of these servers. Most applications consume a fraction of a server’s total capacity, averaging 5–10% utilization on a typical x86 server. 3) Lack of integrated management tools and service management frameworks. Customers have multiple, disparate systems management tools in place that have both unique and overlapping functionality. Many customers have under-invested in systems management and automation tools relative to the investments they have made in systems infrastructure. This has meant that many data centers employ manually intensive processes, including the integration of service management frameworks, resulting in greater burdens on staffing. Users probably recognize all these problems. Fortunately, there are three smart tips to correct the problem: Destroy the slave to the server myth. The application rules! The server is dead long live the application. Yes we have moved on up. Traditionally server optimization was all you could achieve at the IP layer (OSI layer 4) now users can manage and manipulate performance at layer 7, the application itself. For a data center manager, this means that rather than amputating a patient’s leg to remove a verruca, you can treat and remove it with a pair of pincers saving the leg and even the foot. Virtualize – In and Out of the Cloud Virtualization is the new creed, the new approach to application deployment. Did you notice that this is application not server deployment? It is an application deployment because we are now in a position where application performance is the key not the server. Compared to only a few years ago, the choices for IT managers, and CTO’su, who are just responsible for making all our web and IT stuff work, has been revolutionized. Users may not accept this but times could not be better if you get to be a little bit smart. You must not compromise and insist on application load balancing. Load Balance Once data center and IT managers have done their due diligence, received quotes from the cloud providers and considered the cost savings to the company it is time to consider the need for load balancers. the cost savings to the company are looking more than interesting. Each one is well detailed explaining necessary server capacity, firewall and application security appliance functionality, but you have one last question, do we need to use load balancers? The answer is yes! The latest application delivery controllers (ADCs) or load balancers will ensure that your network servers run at peak efficiency thanks to their ability to direct traffic to each server based upon its “network performance health check” at both layer 4 and layer 7. Regardless of whether users are running applications in their own network or in the cloud,network load balancers are a crucial component of the network infrastructure. Once the load balancers are in place, users can relax knowing they have thoroughly “cleaned” their data center. A clean data center is secure and efficient data center, ready to handle the workloads. 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)
12:59p	Ajubeo Launches Modular Cloud Hub in NJ With FORTRUST, IO Data center modules inside the IO New Jersey data center in Edison, N.J. FORTRUST will use modules like these to deploy a new cloud hub in Edison for Ajubeo. (Photo: Rich Miller) Cloud infrastructure provider Ajubeo will expand into the New York metro market with a new deployment of modular data center capacity in Edison, New Jersey, the company said today. For the expansion, Ajubeo continues to work with FORTRUST, its data center partner in in its home market of Colorado. FORTRUST will house Ajubeo’s IT equipment in an IO.Anywhere modular data center in space it leases inside IO’s massive facility in Edison. The installation will be Ajubeo’s primary cloud hub in the Northeast. Ajubeo is a Boulder-based provider that offers enterprise hardware, software and networking technology packaged for either direct sales to end users or as a private-label Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud platform for channel partners. Ajubeo is backed by Grey Mountain Partners, a Boulder-based private equity firm that recently boosted its investment in the cloud provider. “The combination of strong demand for Ajubeo high-performance cloud infrastructure as a service and new funding from Grey Mountain Partners made this an ideal time to expand our Northeast cloud hub footprint,” said Tom Whitcomb, a co-founder of Ajubeo. “We selected FORTRUST and IO.Anywhere for its unparalleled energy efficiency when supporting high-density colocation environments such as Ajubeo cloud computing. Additionally, the new modular data center will increase operational efficiency and reinforce our layered cloud security model with multiple new access denial features.” FORTRUST has been Ajubeo’s data center provider in the Denver market since the company’s inception. All of FORTRUST’s locations are Tier III design certified by the Uptime Institute. “The best validation of business and operational success is customer loyalty and continued expansion,” said David Shepard, SVP of Sales & Marketing for FORTRUST. “IO.Anywhere was built for companies like Ajubeo who demand maximum uptime, scalability and security. IO.Anywhere can handle increased per rack densities, and provide intelligent data center design that enables expedited cloud hub commissioning and data center expansion. We were able to provide this optimum solution in a standardized deployment across states to expedite Ajubeo’s growth.” As the first participant in the Powered by IO program, FORTRUST uses IO modular data center technology exclusively as it expands its colocation and disaster recovery services. IO Anywhere is a family of modular data center components that can create and deploy a fully-configured enterprise data center. FORTRUST now has IO data modules in all three of its locations, which include its own data center in Denver and IO-operated facilities in Phoenix and Edison, (Comment on this)
5:44p	Hardware Problem in Amsterdam Causes Phoenix NAP Storage Outage Brought to you by The WHIR. Phoenix NAP customers in its Amsterdam public cloud location experienced an extended storage outage on Tuesday, related to a hardware issue. In a status update on Tuesday night, Phoenix NAP apologized for the “extended interruption in service.” “Our engineering team has involved in the hardware vendor in order to help diagnose and troubleshoot the root cause of this outage in order to find a quick resolution that should restore services to your VM’s,” Phoenix NAP support staff said in an update. Phoenix NAP’s Amsterdam cloud hosting node was opened in March 2012 in an Interxion data center, marking its first expansion overseas. Amsterdam is a popular location for US-based web hosts to expand in Europe. In June, SingleHop opened its new data center in Amsterdam, expanding its server capacity by 20 percent. Phoenix NAP opened its second North American node for its cloud services at a Latisys data center in Ashburn, Virginia. The company has third location in Phoenix, Arizona, where it is headquartered. Recent research has predicted worldwide spending on public IT cloud services to reach $47.4 billion in 2013, with enterprise cloud projects exploding over the next two years. This article was originally published at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/hardware-problem-in-amsterdam-causes-phoenix-nap-storage-outage (Comment on this)
6:52p	LSI Sees Traction for 12Gb/s MegaRAID Storage Solutions LSI launches its 12Gb/s SAS and MegaRAID solutions, and partners Xyratex and Super Micro launch storage solutions powered by the new technology. LSI SAS Technology Drives I/O Performance Gains LSI announced that several manufacturers have selected LSI 12Gb/s SAS and MegaRAID solutions to provide accelerated performance and enterprise data protection for their next-generation server platforms. LSI’s 12Gb/s SAS technology delivers 50 percent greater storage I/O performance. “This is an exciting time for the industry as 12Gb/s SAS technology has emerged to satisfy the ever-increasing demands for more storage performance and I/O bandwidth in the enterprise,” said Kelly Bryant, vice president of marketing, RAID Storage Division, LSI. “As the first-to-market leader in 12Gb/s SAS solutions, LSI has worked closely with Intel on the server platform supporting the new Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 v2 Product Family, and is committed to helping ensure the solutions deliver their promise of world-class server performance and efficiency.” Xyratex storage solution Xyratex announced the introduction of 12Gb/s SAS technology into its OneStor line of enterprise-class modular storage enclosures. This technology doubles the data transfer speed between the storage enclosure and the host server, significantly increasing the performance of I/O and bandwidth intensive applications. This technology enables 12Gb/s SAS EBODs and 12Gb/s host connectivity, which permits a theoretical maximum I/O bandwidth of 28.8GB/s from SAS hosts to the installed disk drives in 2U12, 2U24, 4U24 and 5U84 storage enclosures. “Xyratex has a long history of innovation in OEM data storage, and our OneStor solutions are top-rated in the OEM marketplace because of their ability to deliver the best in performance, reliability and value,” said Ed Prager, senior vice president and general manager of OEM Storage Solutions at Xyratex. “Our 12Gb/s support extends these benefits through the ability to integrate high-performance flash storage in a seamless manner over the fastest interconnects and accelerate existing 6Gb/s rotational devices, all within our standard density and unique high-density enclosures. As technology and the storage industry both continue to evolve, we’ll stay aggressive about integrating the best in storage value so that our customers are able to satisfy their most pressing and challenging data center demands.” Super Micro launches 12Gb/s Storage solutions Super Micro (SMCI) announced new end-to-end 12Gb/s SAS 3.0 server and storage solutions featuring LSI SAS 3108/3008 12Gb/s SAS3 controllers with MegaRAID technology and the LSI 12Gb/s SAS Expander with the unique DataBolt bandwidth optimizer feature. As a building block, it enables a new class of high performance storage platforms with double I/O performance of the current 6Gb/s SAS interface and maximum utilization of PCI-E 3.0 bandwidth. “Supermicro leads the industry with a full range of 12Gb/s SAS 3.0 solutions, doubling acceleration in storage performance for I/O intensive applications,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. “We are actively expanding our server platforms with the latest LSI technologies to bring the highest levels of performance to enterprise, big data analytics and mission-critical transactional database applications. Together we will drive faster adoption of the 12Gb/s SAS3 protocol and make it an accessible, cost effective standard for mass markets.” (Comment on this)
7:00p	Xand Lines Up $200 Million For Data Center Expansion The colocation cages inside the server room of a Xand data hall. The company has more than $200 million in borrowing power as it continues its expansion. (Photo: Xand) Northeast data center services provider Xand has increased its debt financing to over $200 million, with a significant portion earmarked for acquisitions and facility expansions. The company is a data center triple play, offering colocation, cloud and managed services. “This financing is a resounding vote of confidence in Xand’s performance from our financial partners,” said Yatish Mishra, President and Chief Executive Officer of Xand. “The increase in available funds further bolsters our company’s strategic plan of investment, expansion, and acquisition to meet the dramatic surge in demand for services from our customers in the Northeast market.” Xand is a major rollup of several companies. It’s majority owned by Boston-based private equity firm ABRY Partners, which acquired the company in 2011 and has been on an active buying spree ever since. Growth Through Acquisition In April 2012, Xand and Access Northeast were brought together to form one of the largest privately held data center companies in the Northeast. That year was topped off with the acquisition of Pennsylvania-based DBSi, expanding it into yet another Northeastern market and more than doubling its available space to 400,000 square feet. That acquisition added three raised floor facilities in Pennsylvania, joining a trio of data centers in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, which all underwent expansions. “We are very pleased to have funded the bulk of our acquisitions, capital improvement projects, and corporate growth activities on favorable terms with key bankers in the data center field,” said Xand Chief Financial Officer Robert DeSantis. “Following acquisitions and internal growth in 2012, the resulting financial performance and position of the company rendered a very attractive financing opportunity this year for a syndicate of lenders active in the data center financial markets.” Last January, Xand added disaster recovery space citing increased demand in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. It added 35,000 square feet of new dedicated and shared workspace to its facilities in Marlborough, Mass. and Hawthorne, NY. Xand amended its existing financing arrangements with a consortium of industry-leading banking partners, arranged by TD Securities (USA) LLC and GE Capital Markets, Inc. “Xand’s ability to efficiently acquire and integrate multi-state data center and cloud operators in the demanding Northeast marketplace has been remarkable,” said TD Securities (USA) LLC Managing Director Dan DeAlmeida. “We are proud to partner with the Xand team as they continue to execute on their plan of record to become the major provider of cloud and data center services in the Northeast.” (Comment on this)
7:23p	Dell Shareholders Approve Buyout for $25 Billion Michael Dell, founder and CEO of the now struggling hardware company that bears his name, succeeded Thursday in convincing shareholders to allow him and the private equity firm Silver Lake to buy back the company for $24.9 billion dollars. The vote by the shareholders marks the end of a seven-month standoff with investors, including a proposal by wealthy investor Carl Icahn. We present a round-up of coverage from mainstream and tech media, who are interested in where Dell will go from here. Dell Shareholders Approve Founder’s Buyout Proposal – Bloomberg reports Dell Inc. (DELL) Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell won shareholder approval for a planned $24.9 billion buyout, capping a seven-month standoff with investors and gaining free rein to attempt a turnaround of the struggling personal-computer maker outside the glare of public markets. Michael Dell Wins: Now The Hard Part – InformationWeek reports that after months of challenges and setbacks, Michael Dell has finally succeeded in taking his company private. Now the CEO and founder’s real challenge begins: Rebuilding a company that last month reported a 72 percent drop in quarterly earnings. Michael Dell: We Are Going Back To Our Roots Taking Dell Private – Forbes’ article focuses on Michael Dell’s aims to “unleash the creativity and confidence of the company” as it reinvents itself and focuses on business software and services. “This is a great outcome for our customers and our company,” Dell said on a conference call. “In taking Dell private we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest growing and most successful companies in history.” Dealpolitik: Five Lessons from the Dell Deal - The Wall Street Journal’s MoneyBeat blog sought to point out the takeaways from the deal’s process, such as “Cash is King” and “Process Matters.” (Comment on this)
7:41p	NJ State Government Slowed by Data Center Outage A power outage in a New Jersey state data center knocked out services for a number of state agencies, including the Motor Vehicle Commission and many state web sites. New Jersey said that one of the state’s three main data center facilities experienced a power outage this morning at about 5 a.m., interrupting service for state web sites operated by the Office of Information Technology in the N.J. Treasury department. Power was restored by 9 a.m., but it took longer to restore service at state web sites. Many were back online before 1 p.m., but others were slower being restored, according to Treasury spokesman Bill Quinn “We’re not sure at this point if all the functionality is there, so we’re being a little cautious,” Quinn told NJ.com. “It’s going to be later in the day before full functionality is back on these websites.” The outage knocked out online services at 39 offices of the Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC), frustrating New Jersey residents seeking to get driver’s licenses or renew registrations. The incident was the third outage this summer for New Jersey IT systems, which had downtime on July 24 and July 19, when a fire alarm at a state data center caused an automatic shutdown of servers. There was no actual fire in the data center. (Comment on this)

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