Wednesday, November 6th, 2013

Time	Event
12:30p	Coho Data Raises $25M for Cloud-Scale SDN Storage Coho Data, which provides software-defined networking integrated storage appliances, announced the closing of a $25 million round of funding. This financing round was led by a new investor, Ignition Partners, and included existing investor, Andreessen Horowitz. With the funding, Coho Data plans to ramp up its research and development as well as its go-to-market efforts. The company is working toward the general availability of Coho DataStream. Founded in 2011 and led by a team of XenSource and Citrix virtualization and storage industry veterans, the start-up was funded by Andreessen Horowitz, and has offices in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Sunnyvale, California. Emerging from stealth last month, Coho unveiled a hybrid flash appliance dubbed “the Coho DataStream 1000.” The device is engineered to to deliver 18 times the performance of traditional storage and 2 times the price/performance of all-flash array, at public cloud pricing. Leveraging Flash Techonology “Flash technology has been limited to point use cases to date, but with Coho Data’s approach to using commodity hardware for cloud economics and its innovative use of software-defined networking integration for reliable scale, we believe flash’s full potential for mainstream data center usage is finally being unlocked,” said Frank Artale, Managing Director from Ignition Partners. Artale recently joined Coho Data’s Board of Directors. Coho Data CEO and Co-founder Ramana Jonnala said, “Storage is the final battleground in the data center, with expensive, outdated monolithic storage vendors fending off the advances of dozens of storage start-ups. Nearly all of these new product offerings are simply packaging flash technology into similar architectures with limited scalability and narrow applicability. “With our unique use of software-defined networking to eliminate bottlenecks that flash creates in traditional arrays, flash will finally be able to be used in an efficient way to add value for any application at any scale.” From the investors’ perspective, the growth trajectory of this company is very positive. “It’s amazing to see what Coho Data has accomplished in the year since we funded their Series A,” reflected Peter Levine, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz. “The team has rebuilt the entire storage array to support the most demanding hyper-scale environments with new software and integrated networking to offer the fastest, most scalable storage system in the market.” (Comment on this)
1:00p	What Are Top States for Data Center Tax Breaks? Jake Iskhakov is the Director of Sales & Marketing at ServerLIFT Corporation. JAKE ISKHAKOV ServerLift Technology is one of a few recession-proof industries, and regardless of the state of any economy, the industry continues to evolve and grow year over year. Some companies choose to take advantage during downturns, while others wait until trends start to make their way into the green. Regardless of the growth strategy, there is a constant need to find the best areas to expand the data center footprint. In choosing a destination to break ground, there are many things to consider such as real-estate costs, weather patterns, natural disasters and staffing, and now there is a new trend that is becoming a part of the decision making process. To capitalize on the boom of data centers, select states are introducing tax breaks as additional benefits for potential expansion. Several states now offer data center-specific tax breaks, and some offer more appealing benefits than others. While taxes are historically not the top criteria in the scope of a data center build, it may be something to start consider. 1) Virginia Virginia, over the past few years, has utilized tax breaks and other financial incentive programs to establish itself as one of the premier locations for hosting data center operations on the Eastern seaboard. In particular, Ashburn, Va., and other surrounding municipalities in Loudoun County have become go-to locations for housing data centers, in part due to the county’s proximity to the D.C. Metro area. In addition, Virginia has a number of unique tax incentives that help to establish the state as one of the best hosting spots in the region. State law exempts qualified data centers and colocation tenants from paying sales or use tax on hardware, software and other pieces of equipment central to data center operations. Plus, Senate Bill 1133 allows municipalities to establish lower property tax rates for data centers. 2) Texas The Lone Star State has one of the most business-friendly tax codes in the nation, and this is especially true regarding data center operations. Qualifying data centers – the specific standards that need to be met are established in House Bill 1223 – are exempt from paying personal property taxes on anything that is “necessary and essential” to running such a facility. For example, while office supplies would not fall under this clause, critical IT equipment and electricity are covered by the exemption. Texas’s law is unique in that it only exempts one occupant per facility. However, the measure sets a minimum size requirement at 100,000 square feet, meaning that one large facility could house multiple data centers that qualify for these tax breaks. 3) Arizona As mentioned on the ServerLIFT TechLIFTblog, Arizona has some of the most data center-friendly tax breaks in the country. For example, House Bill 2488 exempts the transaction privilege tax for data center construction, IT equipment purchases and related energy expenditure. Furthermore, House Bill 2009 provides additional financial incentives for data center owners and operators as well as colocation tenants. “This makes the state very competitive,” said Sylvia Kang, CyrusOne data center’s vice president of site selection and acquisition, as quoted in the Phoenix Business Journal. “Arizona has great features prior to the bill and is an ideal place for data centers to be located, but this really puts Arizona on a financial level playing field. It helps us to get clients previously looking at neighboring states to come here instead.” Taxes are just one of the many costs that affect data center operations. However, they are enough of a burden that even a slight difference can affect the decision on where to build your next location. 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)
2:09p	Red Hat Releases CloudForms 3.0, Partners on OpenStack Solutions Enterprise Linux distribution provider Red Hat announced its cloud management platform, CloudForms, has added new functionality in version 3.0. The company has also been partnering and delivering certified OpenStack solutions at a feverish clip. A slew of news of Red Hat news was generated during the OpenStack Hong Kong Summit this week. Continue to follow the OpenStack event at the hashtag – #OpenStack. Cloud Management Platform Gets New Features, Enhanced Capabilities Red Hat announced the next release of its cloud management platform, Red Hat CloudForms 3.0, based on a robust feature set stemming from Red Hat’s acquisition of ManageIQ in 2012. The new release adds enterprise-grade management capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform as well as enhanced management capabilities for Amazon Web Services. CloudForms already provides management and automation for VMware vSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and AWS. CloudForms 3.0 expands support of these features to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, providing cloud administrators and operators with both new capabilities for managing OpenStack as well as the ability to integrate OpenStack into existing environments through unified management. CloudForms 3.0 also expands its support for AWS, enabling users to seamlessly manage workloads running in public clouds together with workloads in their private clouds. With CloudForms 3.0, organizations now have greater choice and flexibility in building both their private and hybrid clouds. Its features automate OpenStack and other cloud infrastructure platforms, and provide seamless self-service portals, advanced chargeback, quotas and metering with detailed usage tracking. Continuous discovery and insight from automatic, agent-free discovery of OpenStack instances and relationships and capacity and utilization. And Unified Operations management, offering multi-site federation that provides a ‘single pane of glass’ view across cloud and virtual infrastructures. Growing Partner Ecosystem Since June 2013, the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network has experienced 30 percent growth in partner participation, and more than 900 certified solutions are now included in the Red Hat Marketplace, which enables customers to easily find technologies and solutions that have achieved Certification with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, or with other products in Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio. Partners who recently achieved new storage, networking and compute product certifications include Brocade, Huawei, Mellanox, Midokura, NEC, NetApp, SolidFire, Stratus Technologies, and Unisys. The Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network connects both business and technical resources to third-party technology companies who are aligning with Red Hat’s OpenStack product offerings. Since the launch of the program in April 2013, hundreds of software, plug-ins, and hardware systems have been added to the list of certified and supported OpenStack commercial solutions. The partners building these solutions work closely with Red Hat to offer customers an enterprise-ready and commercial-grade OpenStack infrastructure, with complementary technologies integrated across compute, networking and storage. The Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network has also expanded beyond the initial original equipment manufacturer (OEM), independent hardware vendor (IHV) and independent software vendor (ISV) partners to include several additional types of partners including system integrators (SIs), managed service providers (MSPs) and communication service providers (CSPs). (Comment on this)
3:00p	Juniper Veteran Named New CEO of Big Switch Networks Big Switch Networks  announced the appointment of Douglas Murray as Chief Executive Officer. Murray comes to Big Switch from Juniper Networks, where he held various roles including senior vice president and GM of the data center security business and senior vice president of Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China. Current CEO and co-founder Guido Appenzeller will continue with the company as Chief Technology Officer and board member, working closely with Murray on the next chapter of Big Switch, which focuses on software defined networking (SDN). “With Doug, we have found the right CEO to take Big Switch to the next level,” said Appenzeller. “His breadth of data center expertise led him to resonate with our goals for SDN, and his go-to-market experience is just what the company needs in this next phase of growth. His recent Asia experience has given him a front row seat to the most highly evolved market for SDN, and we could not be more thrilled with our choice. We are confident he is the right person to lead us forward.” Murray has a track record of growing revenue and market share while competing against large incumbents. While leading Asia Pacific at Juniper, enterprise switching grew by over 25 percent in 2012. Big things ahead for Big Switch At the Open Networking Users Group Conference last week Big Switch Networks held five demos to preview upcoming releases due out next year, and show a unified P+V SDN software stack spanning a fabric of bare metal (physical) and hypervisor (virtual) switches, driven by OpenStack for application awareness. Unified P+V SDN designs deliver end-to-end automation for massive operational simplification and end-to-end traffic visibility for troubleshooting, and are compatible with today’s L4-L7 services. Combining a Unified P+V SDN controller, bare metal switch hardware and OpenStack automation puts network CapEx and OpEx levels comparable to Amazon EC2 within reach for a broad range of enterprises and cloud providers. “We are seeing tremendous demand for OpenStack-based networks that are competitive to Amazon EC2 in cost, features and automation,” said Kyle Forster, Big Switch Network co-founder. ”There is simply no way to get there without the economics of bare metal switch hardware, the feature set of OpenStack, and the automation that comes with P+V SDN.” (Comment on this)
3:31p	HP Helps Enterprises With OpenStack, General Cloud Interoperability Through its commitment to OpenStack, HP has added functionality to its public cloud and cloud architecture to help enterprises launch OpenStack-based hybrid clouds. HP is now delivering open-standards-based hybrid cloud solutions that IT teams can use to manage and secure multiple cloud environments, while maintaining flexibility without vendor lock-in. The company is focusing on providing interoperable cloud solutions along with enterprise-grade security, manageability and control. “With proprietary offerings, cloud users are trapped in single-vendor solutions, hindering industry collaboration and, therefore, innovation,” said Saar Gillai, senior vice president and general manager, HP Cloud. “HP’s partnership with the OpenStack Foundation enables us to be at the forefront of cloud innovation, but allows us to enhance our offerings to provide our customers with open, enterprise-grade cloud solutions and services to thrive in today’s hybrid world.” OpenStack Horizon Powers the HP Public Cloud Console The OpenStack Horizon project is in production as the core technology behind a public cloud management console—the new HP Public Cloud Console. Horizon is the standard  implementation of Openstack’s Dashboard, which provides a web-based user interface to OpenStack services including Nova, Swift, Keystone, and more. Horizon provides a web-based user interface to OpenStack cloud services, allowing fast and easy provisioning of compute, storage, database, load balancing and other public cloud services. The Horizon-based HP Public Cloud Console offers improved simplicity and security via identity management capabilities, networking topology maps, and support for the new HP Cloud Relational Database service. HP also is using Horizon with HP Cloud OS, the technology foundation for the HP hybrid cloud architecture. HP Cloud OS adds enterprise-grade features, such as role-based access and a common user interface. These new features increase security and governance, while providing simplicity of use and a common experience across all environments. To simplify the cloud experience for IT administrators, HP is adding features to HP Cloud OS, including a new distribution network (CODN), simplified infrastructure provisioning and improved multi-region support. The HP Cloud OS enhancements are available via the Cloud OS technology preview. HP Is Very Active in OpenStack Community As with any open source project, OpenStack is developed by its community, which includes developers and and engineers across the globe. HP outlined the steps it has taken to establish a leadership position in the OpenStack community and across the OpenStack Foundation’s many projects. The company has contributed: 100 HP employees participated in the Havana development cycle. More than 20 core team members, including project technical leads for the latest Ironic, TripleO and Infrastructure projects, are from HP. Five of the top 20 reviewers, across the OpenStack Projects, are from HP. Two members to the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee, a board elected by community contributors, are from HP. HP Offerings Implemented by Clients HP’s clients, such as PeriShip, a leader in the shipping and receiving of perishable products, are realizing the benefits of HP’s open-standards-based cloud offerings. “In choosing a cloud services provider, openness and flexibility were key to us because we need the ability to scale our business quickly without interrupting customer service,” said Jack Wang, chief information officer, PeriShip. “We considered a few cloud providers but chose HP because it offers an open and extensible cloud solution based on OpenStack technology, while also serving as a trusted partner on our cloud journey.” (Comment on this)
3:45p	AMS-IX Opens Internet Exchange in the New York Market An aerial view of the DuPont Fabros NJ1 data center in Piscataway, New Jersey, which will be one of the sites for a new Internet Exchange from AMS-IX. (Photo: DuPont Fabros Technology.) The European Internet exchanges keep coming. The latest provider to enter the US market in AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange) today announced plans to create an exchange spanning four data centers in New York and New Jersey. The move reflects growing momentum for Open-IX, the movement to spread the European model for exchanging traffic between major networks. AMS-IX USA Inc. has struck deals with Digital Realty, DuPont Fabros Technology, Sabey Data Centers and 325 Hudson in the New York/New Jersey area to build and operate a distributed Internet Exchange, named AMS-IX New York. AMS-IX says it will also deploy new Open-IX exchanges in the Chicago and Silicon Valley markets, which will go live in the first and second quarter of 2014, respectively. This new business initiative is a response to the certification process by the Open-IX Association for the setup of neutral and distributed Internet Exchanges in the United States. Surge of Entrants from Europe This makes AMS-IX the third major European exchange operator to enter the US market this year. The London Internet Exchange (LINX) is launching the LINX NoVa exchange across three sites in northern Virginia, while Frankfurt-based DE-CIX is setting up an exchange in the New York market. The recent rise of the Open-IX movement has reinvigorated efforts to bring the European approach to exchanges to the US market. In the European interconnection model, Internet traffic exchanges are managed by participants, rather than the colocation providers hosting the infrastructure. This model has struggled to establish itself in the U.S., where peering has been focused on commercial exchanges, especially thoses operated by Equinix. The Open-IX framework is emphasizing a neutral governance model and the technical compliance of any participating data center providers. The new AMS-IX exchange will be spread across three data centers in Manhattan and one in central New Jersey: Digital Realty Trust, 111 8th Avenue, New York DuPont Fabros Technology, Piscataway, NJ 325 Hudson Street, New York Sabey Data Centers, Intergate.Manhattan (375 Pearl Street) in New York AMS-IX said it could add more locations in the New York market if it sees market demand and interest from other data center providers. In Amsterdam, the AMS-IX exchange platform is distributed across 12 different data centers serving more than 600 IP networks from around the globe. Established in the early 1990s, AMS-IX has a traffic peak of around 2.5 terabits per second. “The opportunity to start neutral, distributed Internet Exchanges in the US with the endorsement of the Open-IX community fits our strategy of building Internet Exchanges in connectivity hub locations around the world,” said Job Witteman, Chief Executive Officer of AMS-IX. “We believe the model will bring the North American IP interconnection market tremendous value by decreasing complexity as well as the associated costs. AMS-IX is committed to bringing about this market transformation, and is pleased to have found initial partners in two major market participants Digital Realty and DuPont Fabros Technology.” “We are pleased to be collaborating with AMS-IX on this important initiative,” said Michael Foust, Chief Executive Officer at Digital Realty (DLR). “By helping establish a truly open Internet Exchange environment, we are supporting the Open-IX community’s desire for neutral exchanges that are more efficient and cost-effective than those available today. The end result for our customers will be access to enhanced interconnectivity and Internet peering capabilities.” Customer Benefit Seen “Building upon our carrier-neutrality principle, we are glad to support the Open-IX Association and encourage the deployment of the AMS-IX New York Internet Exchange in our Piscataway NJ1 data center,” said Hossein Fateh, President and Chief Executive officer of DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT). The AMS-IX Internet Exchange at NJ1 will complement the network providers and the New York Stock Exchange currently providing connectivity services to our customers. We expect our customers to benefit from this open Peering and Interconnectivity environment.” “We are very happy to partner with AMS-IX New York on this important market-changing initiative. Offering more choice in the New York City market to carriers and customers is good for everyone,” added John Sabey, President of Sabey Data Centers. AMS-IX New York is currently accepting orders in the 111 8th Digital Realty facility, where it says it is ready to provision customer ports. “With our experience of building and managing Internet Exchanges in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean and East Africa we have a blueprint for rolling out new exchange platforms,” Henk Steenman, Chief Technical Officer of AMS-IX. “All of the configurations, management and monitoring systems are pre-defined and ready for deployment. The main priority is to extend the organization, the team and to deploy the equipment and local Dark Fiber between the several data centers, as well as with other companies that are willing to partner with AMS-IX, and are Open-IX certified and commercially feasible.” (Comment on this)
6:15p	SoftLayer, EdgeCast to Continue CDN Partnership SoftLayer, an IBM company, has extended a multi-year partnership with Content Delivery Network (CDN) EdgeCast Networks. SoftLayer provides customers a CDN built on the EdgeCast network as a key piece of its overall cloud portfolio. “Content delivery and acceleration has become a business requirement for organizations of any size, from nearly any industry,” said Marc Jones, SoftLayer VP of product innovation. “By leveraging the EdgeCast network, we have been able to bring industry-leading site acceleration, scale, and delivery to thousands of cloud customers.” CDN customers are deeply tied to their ability to deliver services quickly and reliably. EdgeCast has been white-labelling and reselling its CDN to cloud providers, and in SoftLayer, it has a strong example of why cloud providers should consider going this route. “SoftLayer is a leader in cloud computing, and this partnership is a prime example of how service providers can expand their global footprint with a top CDN,” said James Segil, co-founder and president of EdgeCast Networks. “By integrating with the EdgeCast portals and network, SoftLayer has been able to round out their portfolio with an accelerated content delivery platform, making it easy to speed up, secure, and scale any website.” EdgeCast recently added major customers including Hulu, Twitter, and Pinterest. Last July, the company secured $54 million in new financing to fuel its growth. EdgeCast has been profitable for four consecutive years. (Comment on this)
8:01p	In Response to SDN, Cisco Launches Application Centric Infrastructure Vision The Cisco 9508 switch is a key component of the networking giant’s new Application Centric Infrastructure initiative. (Photo: Cisco Systems) Networking market leader Cisco today launched new switches, software and services to transform IT for the application economy. The company’s broad initiative includes the new Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) architecture, a new family of switches, professional services and a large ecosystem of partners. The ACI strategy, which the company outlined back in June at Cisco Live, is the networking giant’s response to emergence of SDN (software-defined networking). SDN allows networking hardware to be managed by software running on a commodity server, rather than the tightly-integrated gear sold by Cisco and other major networking vendors. As part of that effort, Cisco said today that it will acquire the remainder of Insieme Networks, the SDN-focused startup founded by former Cisco execs. Cisco made an initial investment of $100 million in Insieme in 2012. The maximum potential purchase price for Insieme is $863 million, based primarily on sales revenue. Application Centric Infrastructure With applications emerging as the lifeblood of business, Chairman and CEO John Chambers echoed Cisco’s Internet of Everything blueprint by saying that every industry is becoming an application-centric industry, and the business model shift is only accelerating. With projections of 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, “this shift to an application economy is perhaps the biggest IT market transition of all,” said Chambers. Cisco’s new ACI approach hopes to reduce the time it takes to provision, change or remove applications from months to minutes. A new Nexus 9000 switch is the key building block for the Cisco ACI solution, enabling a transition from NX-OS to the ACI-mode of NX-OS with a software upgrade and the addition of a controller. ACI is comprised of  the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), the Nexus 9000 switch portfolio, and enhanced versions of the NX-OS operating system. Using merchant silicon and custom ASICs, this portfolio delivers improved performance and port density. New Nexus 9000 models offer modular and fixed 1/10/40 Gigabit Ethernet switch configurations. The new Nexus 9508 switch is an 8 slot, compact 13 RU form factor chassis designed for high density End-of-Row (EoR) and high performance 10/40GbE aggregation layer deployments. For top-of-rack deployments the Nexus 9396PX is a 960G switch with 48 fixed 10GE  SFP+ ports and 12 40-Gbps QSFP+ ports. Finally, the Nexus 93128TX is a 1.28T switch with 96 fixed 1/10GBASE-T ports and 8 40-Gbps QSFP+ ports. Unifying automation and management for the ACI fabric is the Cisco APIC, which unifies the management of physical and virtual infrastructure. The APIC is a clustered software controller capable of managing up to 1 million endpoints. Unlike traditional SDN controllers, it operates independently of switch data and control planes, allowing the network to respond to endpoint changes even when the APIC is offline. Cisco says this approach enables tremendous flexibility in how application networks are defined and automated. Cisco Virtual ASA (ASAv) is fully integrated, and provides security services based on application needs designed specifically for ACI. It scales on demand and operates seamlessly in both physical and virtual environments with tight integration with APIC. Application network profiles are leveraged to dynamically provision networking, services, compute storage and security policies, no matter where the application is, or how it changes. Partner Ecosystem Support Cisco’s ACI vision for the data center includes an open ecosystem of partners that can help business applications perform with faster on-demand agility for customers. Leading companies supporting Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure include: BMC, CA Technologies, Citrix, EMC, Embrane, Emulex, F5, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, Panduit, Puppet Labs, NIKSUN, OpsCode, Red Hat, SAP, Splunk, Symantec, VCE and VMware. Cisco ACI combines software, hardware, systems and ASICs with an extensible application-aware network policy model built around open APIs. The open set of APIs enables a comprehensive ecosystem of management, orchestration, monitoring, virtualization, network service, and storage partners. The ACI rollout included some fanfare from customers working with Cisco to test-drive the solution. Among them is Cerner, a leading player in the healthcare IT market. “In the health care application and data hosting business, service availability, security and rapid scalability are the top considerations for IT systems infrastructures,” said Brett Jones, director of infrastructure technology for Cerner Corporation.  “With the help of Cisco we’ve been working on our own next generation data center initiative, and we believe the Cisco ACI solution will be a key component in that new architecture.  The ability to meet our projected scale points, increase the flexibility of computing infrastructure development and to manage a collection of network elements as a single entity will provide Cerner with significant operational advantage.  Furthermore the programmatic nature of the Cisco ACI solution should aid us in our pursuit to streamline operations through automation.” Cisco’s new technology also earned plaudits from hosting provider OVH, which says it will quickly begin using the latest Cisco hardware. “We are impressed with Cisco ACI features and functionality, and want to deploy the standard-mode Nexus 9000 Series now, with a gradual move to full Cisco ACI,” said Octave Klaba, CEO of OVH.com.  “Cisco ACI will offer huge advantages in deploying hybrid cloud solutions to customers, and we appreciate the two-step approach that Cisco is offering; we can move to a very cost-effective 40 Gigabit architecture now, with full software management functionality later, as we get the system in place, and get our staff trained.” (Comment on this)
8:15p	LinkedIn Expands With Texas Data Center One of the buildings at Datacenter Park, the Digital Realty Trust campus in Richardson, Texas. (Photo: Digital Realty) LinkedIn, the social network for business, continues to expand its data center infrastructure to support its rapid growth. Last month the company signed a $116 million, 11-year lease for a large chunk of data center space, the company says in an SEC filing. Industry sources say the winner of the deal was Digital Realty Trust, which reportedly will provide LinkedIn with space in its Dallas data center campus. Digital Realty doesn’t disclose its tenants, but described the lease in broad terms in its recent earnings call. “We’re pleased to announce that on Monday this week, we signed a 7-megawatt lease with a social networking company that had outgrown its existing colocation footprint,” Digital Realty CEO Michael Foust told analysts in the company’s Oct. 30 conference call. The need for additional data center space is one reason that LinkedIn recently announced plans to raise $1 billion in a secondary stock offering. LinkedIn has now leased 13 megawatts of data center space this year, placing it among the leading names in the “super wholesale” class of customers. These tenants are hotly pursued by data center developers for their ability to lease large footprints and serve as anchor tenants in new buildings. Earlier this year LinkedIn secured a new data center in northern Virginia, leasing 6 megawatts of  space from Digital Realty. The $109 million, 11-year deal marked LinkedIn’s first use of wholesale data center space, in which it leases a finished “turn-key” data hall from a third-party provider. LinkedIn also rents space in data center facilities operated by Equinix, which offers colocation space, in which servers are housed in dedicated cages within a data hall that may also house other tenants. While LinkedIn is known as the leading online hub for job seekers and professional networking, the company has also emerged as a leader in using “big data” analytics to unearth trends in salaries and job demand within the labor markets. LinkedIn’s data scientists have access to a rich trove of data shared by its 259 million users. The company has developed extensive software and tools to process and analyze its data (see the LinkedIn Data blog for details). While neither LinkedIn nor Digital Realty has provided details on the lease, it seems a likely candidate for the Digital Dallas data center park, a 70-acre, $500 million campus in the Telecom Corridor in Richardson spanning 800,000 square feet of space. Tenants at the campus include service providers such as DataBank, Rackspace and Verizon Terremark. (Comment on this)
9:24p	Google Says Mystery Barge is Interactive Learning Center The structure on a ship off of Treasure Island. (Photo: Jordan Novet) The mystery is officially over. The odd structure in San Francisco Bay is just a barge again, as Google has fessed up to its ownership of the project and confirmed that it’s not a data center. The company issued the following statement: “Google Barge … A floating data center? A wild party boat? A barge housing the last remaining dinosaur? Sadly, none of the above. Although it’s still early days and things may change, we’re exploring using the barge as an interactive space where people can learn about new technology.” This aligns with widespread reports that the barge under construction at Treasure Island might be some type of marketing exhibit for Google Glass. Google didn;t offer additional details about the project, which also appears to include a similar barge in Portland, Maine. That was fun while it lasted. But there’s still plenty of other Google data center news, such as this week’s expansion of its sea-cooled data center in Finland, which pushes its investment in the former paper mill past the $1 billion mark. (Comment on this)

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