Monday, September 23rd, 2013

Time	Event
12:30p	AIS Appoints Greg Rollet As CEO AIS appoints Greg Rollet as CEO, and Interxion, RagingWire, and CyrusOne welcome new customers. AIS appoints new CEO American Internet Services announced the appointment of Greg Rollet as the company’s new chief executive officer. Mr. Rollet takes over from Tim Caulfield who has served as the company’s top executive since September 2010 and is transitioning into an advisory role for private equity firm Seaport Capital, an AIS investor. Prior to joining AIS Mr. Rollet was senior director of operations and service delivery at EMC where he managed over 150,000 square feet of hosting and cloud infrastructure supporting EMC business units worldwide. Before that he was a regional data center operator at Peak 10.  ”Greg Rollet embodies the leadership qualities we value in a chief executive and the board is confident that under his management we will achieve our full potential for future growth and success,” said Scott McCormack, partner at Seaport Capital and chairman of the AIS board of directors. “We’ve worked with and admired Greg for many years while he was on the executive leadership team at Peak 10. He’s just what AIS needs at this point in our growth and expansion.” Interxion welcomes Deutsch Börse Interxion (INXN) announced that Deutsche Börse is opening a new access point in Interxion’s Vienna data centre campus. Deutsche Börse offers its customers in the CEE region direct access to its global network via the new Access Point. Deutsche Börse’s network interconnects market participants with the major players of the financial services industry throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia. “Part of our mission is to create the leading global network in capital markets,” commented Sean Chinnock, Director COO Data + Services, Deutsche Börse. “We were impressed by Interxion’s track record in financial services combined with the unrivalled range of connectivity to the entire CEE region from the Vienna data centre.” RagingWire selected by Silverchair Information Systems RagingWire announced that Silverchair Information Systems, a Virginia-based provider of scholarly and professional publishing solutions, has selected RagingWire’s Virginia data center to host the company’s SCM6 publishing platform. “Data center performance is a critical link in delivering top-notch service to our customers, and so it was a strategic business decision to choose RagingWire, a colocation provider focused on innovation and customer experience,” said Benjamin Floyd, manager, technical operations at Silverchair.  “Our decision to physically host our SCM6 production environment at RagingWire’s Ashburn data center gives our staff the ability to focus on building and delivering meaningful products to our customers instead of worrying about our data center infrastructure.” CyrusOne selected by CINgroup Cyrus One (CONE) announced that it has been selected by The CINgroup to deliver data center services including disaster recovery colocation. The CINgroup is a leader in legal data and software services providing due diligence and workflow products used by more than 10,000 consumer law firms. CyrusOne’s North Cincinnati facility serves the production colocation, backup and recovery, and business continuity needs of customers in an enterprise-class environment with 8.1 megawatts of total available power through two independent circuits and diverse fiber feeds from multiple carriers. “Our customers rely on The CINgroup for bankruptcy forms preparation and fact-checking data services that promote increased accuracy, create process efficiencies, and streamline workflow management,” said Bob Tester, senior infrastructure architect at The CINgroup. “In order to deliver the best possible experience for all customers whether accessing our services from our desktop forms preparation software or our cloud-based CINcompass practice management technology, we must have a production and disaster recovery solution that will deliver optimal uptime. The high levels of resiliency and redundancies in CyrusOne’s North Cincinnati data center are exactly what we were looking for.” (Comment on this)
1:00p	Data Centers Can Use SSAE 16, PCI, Cybertrust Certifications to Validate Physical Security Michelle Ziperstein is the Marketing Communications Specialist at Cervalis LLC, which provides data backup and disaster recovery solutions for mission-critical data. MICHELLE ZIPERSTEIN Cervalis Data centers protect their companies’ or clients’ operations by securing operating perimeters, controlling access to data and equipment, providing protection against environmental threats, and more. Data centers hold a lot of secure information. So, it is important to know whether they are providing effective and adequate safeguard against data theft and other potential problems. This can be known by an assessment of their physical security. There are three main certifications for assessing physical security. These are SSAE 16, PCI, and Verizon Cybertrust. Some data centers like Cervalis have attained all three certifications, including additional ones like the US Department of Commerce’s SafeHarbor, HIPAA, and SOC. Data centers can help companies comply with regulations. Let’s take a closer look into the three physical security certifications. SSAE 16 SSAE 16 is the standard for attesting physical security issued by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ Auditing Standards Board. There are two types of SSAE reports – Type I and Type II. The Type I report is rather basic – it’s a relatively cursory report on the service provider’s internal controls and processes. For this report, the management submits a written description and the auditor issues an opinion on whether the service provider has adequate controls to provide services and handle emergencies. For a truly wide-ranging attestation, your company should schedule a Type II report, which not only assesses the company’s capacity but also tests it over a period of time. Most publicly traded companies, especially in highly regulated industries such as financial services and cloud computing, are all but required to pass SSAE 16 Type II, since many companies are leery of partnering with businesses that lack certification. SSAE 16 has replaced SAS 70, the earlier standard. There are mainly two differences. The management of a company now has to provide the service auditor with a description of its system and a written assertion. Before a data center can get the SSAE 16 certification, it has to undergo an audit of its infrastructure, environmental safeguards, customer service, communications, user controls, insurance coverage, and management. While SSAE 16 is a very wide-ranging report that examines companies in many different industries, it has a number of categories that apply specifically to data centers. SSAE 16 will determine if the data center has Adequate backup power and data redundancy Adequate monitoring of environmental conditions, such as temperature Is diligent at recording and reviewing alerts Has proper monitoring and protection against fire and water Has sufficient physical security solutions, such as biometric access controls, CCTV surveillance, guards, man traps. PCI Unlike SSAE 16 and its predecessor SAS 70, which were developed by an accounting organization, the PCI Security Standard Council was founded by credit card companies and comes from a place of stressing data security in particular when it comes to payment processing, credit card and other financial information. The PCI Security Standards Council website shows PCI standards as available to merchants, financial institutions, software and hardware companies, and finally professionals and services. The PCI Security Standards comprise the Data Security Standard, the PIN Transaction Security, and the Payment Application Data Security Standard. The standards basically serve as various ways to assess and improve the security of data on payment cards. As of now, there are six control objectives. These include: Building and maintaining a secure data network, and having good security practices in place to prevent vulnerabilities and leaks Protecting cardholder data by safeguarding data storage and using encryption while transmitting data Maintaining a vulnerability management program by using and updating antivirus and anti-hacking programs, and using secure applications and hardware Putting in place strong access control, such as allowing a minimum of need-to-know access to data, tracking system users with a unique identifier and putting barriers to physical access of data Regular testing and monitoring by tracking all access to data and hardware and testing systems against vulnerabilities Maintaining a policy for information security and make sure all personnel are aware of the policy and practicing it. Verizon Cybertrust Certification Cybertrust was a digital security company that was bought out by Verizon, and has become the cornerstone of the service provider’s security certification. Verizon offers a number of certifications and seals, for Verizon Cybertrust Security Certified Enterprise, Perimeter, Application, Business and Site. The perimeter security program from Verizon Cybertrust assesses parameters ranging from system and network vulnerability analysis to physical and policy evaluation. Six types of risks are covered under the program: downtime issues, electronic threats, human factors, malicious code, physical security, and privacy. In addition to assessing the security status of a business, location or application, Verizon also offers cyber security services, such as access & identity management, threat assessment and security compliance. 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	DataDirect Networks Adds Object Storage Appliance and Updates Web Object Scaler Data Direct Networks innovates for Web Objects Storage in web scale and big data applications, SanDisk incorporates Intel’s newest Atom processor into its iNAND Extreme flash drive, and LSI collaborates with VMware to scale application performance on Horizon View. DataDirect Networks tackles webscale for big data applications DataDirect Networks(DDN) announced new Web Object Scaler (WOS) 3.0 software and a WOS7000 Object Storage Appliance at the Gigaom Structure conference in London this week. Version 3.0 of WOS supports parallel search of user-defined metadata across a distributed WOS cloud of as many as 8,000 WOS cluster nodes. This allows indexing and contextualizing petabytes of data in milliseconds versus days, transforming data into information so they can make rapid, intelligent business decisions. This is partially enabled by its integration with DDN’s GRIDScaler parallel file storage system, powered by its Storage Fusion Architecture storage array technology to tier data from file-based workflows into a simple, scalable WOS archive. Preconfigured for rapid deployment, the WOS7000 appliance powered by WOS 3.0 software comes fully assembled and ready to run production workloads with minimal configuration, removing the guesswork and risk from deploying cloud storage, reducing management overhead, and providing rapid time to value from storage investments. “Organizations everywhere continue to grapple with ever increasing volumes of data, creating business and infrastructure complexity, and importantly, missed opportunity,” said Jean-Luc Chatelain, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Technology at DDN.  ”Traditional storage methods exacerbate issues of data growth by bottle-necking access to large volumes of data and limiting them within the context of single storage paradigms. For businesses seeking to extract value from their Big Data, our latest version of WOS object storage technology conquers issues of speed and scale to provide rapid time to insight, helping our customers grow their businesses and take advantage of the new era of cloud computing.” SanDisk iNAND optimized with Intel SanDIsk announced that the iNAND Extreme embedded flash drive (EFD) has been optimized to provide advanced digital storage in tablets powered by the new 22nm Intel Atom system-on-a-chip (SoC). Available in capacities up to 128GB, the iNAND Extreme will be used to power Android and Windows 8 tablets – featuring the high-performance and energy efficient Intel Atom Z3000 processors. iNAND Extreme offers sequential write/read speeds up to 45/150 MB/s, and random write /read speeds up to 800/4K IOPS. “We are pleased to offer the tremendous storage performance of SanDisk’s iNAND Extreme for use in tablets incorporating Intel’s impressive new Intel Atom platform,” said Drew Henry, senior vice president and general manager, Mobile and Connected Solutions, SanDisk. “We have clearly just scratched the surface of the potential for tablets to transform the user experience, and our iNAND Extreme enables developers to introduce the next wave of highly responsive tablets that offer richer entertainment, awe-inspiring graphics, and more productive business applications.” LSI Warp Drives power VMware Horizon View LSI announced that it is working closely with VMware to deliver breakthrough virtual desktop density for VMware Horizon View deployments. Collaborative testing with VMware Horizon View using a single LSI Nytro WarpDrive application acceleration card achieved concurrent support for 200 active virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads on a two-node cluster with no storage latency. LSI and VMware emulated demanding, real-world end user workloads using Login VSI version 4.02 and View Planner 3 to drive 200 active desktops. The LSI Nytro WarpDrive card comfortably supported the 200 active desktop workloads, achieving a VSImax rating of 280 before exhausting CPU resources. “Our testing of the LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards confirms Nytro technology can support demanding VDI workload environments with simplified management and increasing security and control,” said Mason Uyeda, senior director of technical marketing, End-User Computing, VMware. “LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards will help enable our customers to overcome the latency demands of VDI-intensive workloads to deliver high performance and return on investment.” (Comment on this)
2:00p	Rackspace Launches OpenStack e-Learning Course for On-Demand Training Brought to you by The WHIR. Rackspace expanded its Rackspace Training for OpenStack program last week with the launch of an on-demand, e-learning training course. Also, Rackspace added four new classroom-based courses to its OpenStack program, and established a training partner program. Rackspace was one of the founders of OpenStack, and was one of the initial providers to offer an educational program around OpenStack in 2011, launching the first OpenStack certification program in 2012. As OpenStack continues to evolve, education will play a fundamental part in its development and adoption. Even OpenStack has now established a more formal approach to training, launching a training marketplace for users to find courses from a variety of service providers. “As the founder of OpenStack, Rackspace recognizes the need for comprehensive educational courses and delivery models and is fundamentally revolutionizing OpenStack training to include a Certified Training Partner Program and on demand e-learning course,” Tony Campbell, director of training and certification for OpenStack at Rackspace said. “We are thrilled with the momentum that the Rackspace Training for OpenStack program has had over the past year, and we are proud to expand the scope of the program and provide individuals with the necessary skills to secure OpenStack related jobs.” The e-learning aspect of Rackspace’s OpenStack training will give customers the flexibility to learn in a self-paced environment. OpenStack Fundamentals is open now for pre-registration, with general availability launching next month. The new classroom-based courses will include OpenStack Networking – Neutron, Building Cloudy Apps, Security in the Cloud, and Hadoop on OpenStack. “As the founder of OpenStack, Rackspace recognizes the need for comprehensive educational courses and delivery models and is fundamentally revolutionizing OpenStack training to include a Certified Training Partner Program and on demand e-learning course,” Tony Campbell, director of training and certification for OpenStack at Rackspace said. “We are thrilled with the momentum that the Rackspace Training for OpenStack program has had over the past year, and we are proud to expand the scope of the program and provide individuals with the necessary skills to secure OpenStack related jobs.” The e-learning aspect of Rackspace’s OpenStack training will give customers the flexibility to learn in a self-paced environment. OpenStack Fundamentals is open now for pre-registration, with general availability launching next month. The new classroom-based courses will include OpenStack Networking – Neutron, Building Cloudy Apps, Security in the Cloud, and Hadoop on OpenStack. We also recently published this article of interest: OpenStack Foundation Launches Training Marketplace Article originally published at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/rackspace-launches-openstack-e-learning-course-for-on-demand-training (Comment on this)
3:30p	Level 3, Data Direct Networks Deliver for TV Networks Data Direct Networks powers Starz and ENCORE TV networks, and Level 3 enables the U.S. Open video for the Tennis channel. Data Direct Networks supports Starz service DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced that Starz and ENCORE pay TV networks have implemented DDN GRID Scaler parallel file system and NAS solution to power its business-critical broadcast system, laying the foundation for future programming content growth. Starz was looking to upgrade further to a massively scalable, high-density and powerful storage platform to ensure expedited and reliable delivery of more than 600TBs of digital media for the more than 1,000 movies and original series episodes it provides to its millions of subscribers each month. DDN helped Starz nearly double its storage capacity, cut in half both its transcode and data center footprints including licensing and hardware costs, and add disaster recovery capabilities without adding additional administrative overhead. “DDN GRIDScaler is incredibly dense, as we now support primary and DR storage in four racks, compared to the nine racks we had for our legacy system in Englewood alone,” said Colin McGuire, Director of Infrastructure Services for Starz. “This lowers our storage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) considerably and elevates energy and disk-performance efficiency.” Level 3 enables Tennis Channel level 3 Communications (LVLT) announced it has successfully enabled the Tennis Channel to deliver the 2013 U.S. Open Tennis Championships as part of a new TV Everywhere application, which includes live playback of the Tennis Channel’s 24/7 broadcast network. Tennis Channel was able to use Level 3′s  content delivery network (CDN) and Vyvx broadcast capabilities to give its viewers around the world a consistent HD-quality experience during the U.S. Open. In total, Level 3 delivered more than 75 hours of live or first-run U.S. Open matches to connected viewers, and going forward, will continue to stream the network full-time 24 hours a day, seven days a week for tennis fans everywhere. “The U.S. Open marks the first time Tennis Channel has delivered authenticated live U.S. Open content to PCs and mobile devices, and Level 3′s extensive global network allowed us to seamlessly reach our audience through multiple platforms,” said Dean Hadaegh, senior vice president of Broadcast Operations and chief technology officer at Tennis Channel. “Our teams worked tirelessly to create a one-of-a-kind tennis viewing experience, and with Level 3′s content delivery expertise, we successfully introduced new ways for tennis fans to interface with our content.” (Comment on this)
4:00p	Riverbed Launches New Whitewater Appliances Riverbed (RVBD) announced new hardware models and upgrades to its operating system on the Whitewater cloud storage appliance family. New Whitewater model appliances have up to triple the cache of previous models and support of up to 14.4 petabytes of logical data. The Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) 3.0 also offers new features, including pairwise replication that enable enterprises to replicate to an additional Whitewater appliance at a secondary location. “We needed to replace our tape-based backup with a more efficient and scalable solution that could handle seismic data from our global operations and the new Whitewater cloud storage 3030 model appliance shocked us with really great results,” said Bradley Lauritsen, director of exploration applications, at Apache Corporation, a Houston-based oil and gas exploration and production company with operations globally. “The Whitewater appliance transforms our ability to backup and recover by improving our IT efficiency for protecting seismic data while delivering significant cost savings. We now feel confident that even in locations where connection speeds are slow, we can maintain continuous operations with the new WWOS 3.0.” Support for pairwise replication for Whitewater appliances is new in version 3 of the Whitewater Operating System, which gives enterprises greater flexibility to choose the appropriate recovery option to meet their RTO based on their business continuity plans. The new OS offers a pinning feature that allows enterprises to tier and choose which backup data sets are available on the Whitewater appliance cache for immediate access, while less critical backup data sets can be recovered from the cloud. As a a purpose built storage appliance, optimized for data protection and archiving the three new Whitewater model (730, 2030, 3030) appliances offer between 8 to 96 TB usable cache capacity. For faster performance, enterprises can also choose to use 10 gigabit networking interfaces to get up to 2.5 terabytes per hour ingest performance, a 40 percent increase over previous models. The 10 gigabit networking interface also enables enterprises to transfer to Amazon Glacier cloud storage leveraging Amazon Direct Connect. “As public cloud storage costs continue to fall, customers are looking to move new and larger data sets into the cloud. Our new generation of Whitewater cloud storage appliances expands scalability and performance to meet customer requirements,” said John Martin, senior vice president and general manager, Storage Delivery Business Unit at Riverbed. “In addition to helping customers ingest, protect and store more data, the new WWOS 3.0 features, such as replication, improve customers’ disaster recovery initiatives by offering immediate recovery at a disaster recovery location should their primary system suffer a significant outage. These capabilities greatly expand the number of organizations that can implement cloud storage while tailoring RTO to their unique requirements.” (Comment on this)
5:33p	The Rise of the Purpose-Built Industry Cloud Paris Georgallis, VP of Platform Operations at RMS. (Photo by Colleen Miller.) Not all clouds are created equal. That’s especially true for specialized clouds built to serve a single industry, such as the RMS(one) platform rolled out last week. Risk management specialist RMS will use Datapipe’s Stratosphere high-performance cloud to support RMS(one), a new service that combines “big data” analysis and a cloud delivery model to provide insurers with real-time information on the risks posed by natural disasters. RMS maintains large databases of information about disasters and runs computer models to analyze the risk faced by its customers, which include about 400 insurers and reinsurers. The product was once delivered through DVDs for desktop analysis, but is now being ported to the cloud for an as-a-service model for RMS and its clients. RMS(one) is the latest of a growing number of clouds that are targeting a specific vertical. “You’ll see a lot of industry-specific clouds starting to surface, because it’s not one size fits all,” said Paris Georgallis, Vice President of Platform Operations for RMS. Industrial-Strength Infrastructure That’s certainly true when it comes to infrastructure. The service will run from data centers in London the United States, with disaster recovery operations hosted by Datapipe at its facility within the Verne Global data center in Keflavik, Iceland. RMS(one) will run on enterprise-class hardware, including Cisco UCS servers, EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage arrays, and Vertica databases from HP. “The RMS cloud is not a generic public cloud,” said Georgallis. “It’s a purpose-built cloud, built to do one thing only – deliver results extremely fast. That’s a key differentiator. We’ve built a dedicated set of rails and put a bullet train on those rails. It’s all about predictable performance and control. If I have that, I can write an SLA to that.” That speed will dramatically accelerate the amount of time it takes RMS clients to run the intensive data-crunching required to deliver real-time updates to disaster models – which can be crucial ahead of a developing event like a hurricane. When RMS(one) needs addditional compute capacity, it will use burst capabilities provided by the Datapipe Stratosphere cloud. “This is the type of challenge we like to sink our teeth into,” said Ed Laczynski, Senior Vice President of Cloud Services for Datapipe, who said the company’s Iceland data center provided to be ideal for RMS’ testing and disaster recovery needs. “We’re halfway between the US and Europe, and our customers like that,” said Laczynski. “Some of our largest customer footprints are in New York and London.” While most companies believe their clouds are special, RMS’ approach to its new service has impressed some partners, including those who have worked with a wide range of customers. “This is not a plain vanilla system,” said Neela Jacques, Director and Senior Cloud Strategist at VMware. “These guys know exactly what they want and need, and many customers don’t. On the upside, they are willing to do what’s required to accomplish their goals. They’ve really created something that’s a flagship for an industry cloud.” Bobby Soni, Chief Platform & Services Officer at RMS, said the RMS(one) offering would provide customers with “unprecedented freedom, business agility and competitive advantage by allowing them to execute on their entire exposure and risk management strategies.” (Photo by Colleen Miller.) (Comment on this)
7:11p	Internap Expands Boston Data Center The exterior of the Internap data center at 50 Innerbelt in Boston, which has recently been expanded. (Photo: Internap) Hosting and network services provider Internap has opened the third phase of its data center at 50 innerbelt in Boston, the company said today. The expansion adds 5,000 square feet of raised floor data center space to house customer equipment. Internap (INAP) says the expansion will support higher-density customer installations, which is a trend the company reports seeing across its footprint. The company operates 200,000 square feet of data center space across its network, which includes data centers in eight U.S. markets. The company had 3,500 customers as of June 30. The Internap site at 50 Inner Belt features a three-foot raised floor. Internap has incorporated numerous energy efficiency features, including air economizers, circuit level power monitoring and custom-built cooling systems that ramp up and down based on temperature changes. (Comment on this)

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