Monday, December 9th, 2013

Time	Event
1:00p	Opscode Rebrands as Chef, Raises $32 Million Chef, the software, is now Chef the company. Opscode has rebranded itself as Chef, unveiling its new identity along with $32 million in funding from a Series D venture capital round. “The reason is pretty simple,” said Jay Wampold, the company’s VP of Marketing. “Chef has brand equity and awareness around the world, and Opscode really doesn’t. Chef has enormous energy and awareness.” The company plans to build on that energy, and with the new funding has the resources to do it. Scale Venture Partners led the round, which included Citibank and Amplify Partners, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures, DFJ, and Ignition Partners. Chef has now raised $63 million in four rounds of financing. “This new financing will fuel our next stage of growth and enable us to deliver even more innovation to our rapidly growing base of enterprise customers,” said Chef CEO Barry Crist. “We’re now at a tremendous inflection point for our business because Chef adoption is soaring around the globe.” Sales Have Doubled Chef is an open source framework using repeatable code – organized as “recipes” and “cookbooks” – to automate the configuration and management process for virtual servers. It enables users to deploy infrastructure as code across any operating system from Windows to Unix and Linux, across physical, virtual or cloud infrastructures. Opscode was founded in 2009 to commercialize Chef, and how now taken on the name of its core technology. Chef has more than doubled total sales in the 12 months ending September 30, with Fortune 1000 companies now accounted for 60 percent of Chef’s sales. “Chef’s strong revenue and customer growth, vibrant open source community, and disruptive technology point to strong momentum and a huge opportunity ahead,” said Rory O’Driscoll, a partner with ScaleVP, who will join Chef’s board. “I’m excited to be working with Barry and his team; they have the vision and the capability to deliver.” Staff Will Double, Too And now they need the staff. Wampold said Chef expects to double its engineering and sales staff over the next year, growing to 200 employees. To get the hiring boom underway, Chef announced two new executive appointments. Curt Anderson joins Chef as CFO, having most recently served as CFO for Microsoft’s Manufacturing and Supply Chain Division. Tucker Callaway, who previously served as CA Technologies’ VP of Americas for the Growth Market, joins Chef as VP of Enterprise, reflecting the shift in the company’s business.. “We’re definitely moving up the adoption curve into the enterprise,” said Wampold. “We need to invest in making the product easier to use and polishing some of the features.” Chef has long been a favored tool in the DevOps movement, which combines many of the roles of systems administrators and developers, and was popularized at large cloud builders with dynamic server environments. Deliver Fast, or Die Trying Enterprise adoption of Chef is being driven by “continuous delivery” – the need for large companies to become more agile and accelerate the deployment of its software updates and releases. “Our business results prove our deliver-fast-or-die mantra is very real, indeed,” says Adam Jacob, Chief Dev Officer at Chef. “Only Chef empowers businesses with code to achieve the speed necessary for satisfying digitally-enabled customers worldwide. Chef will help build the next 1,000 Amazons – companies capable of using code to re-build and change their businesses hundreds or thousands of times daily in the name of customer demand and service. We’re not fooling around.” (Comment on this)
1:30p	Five Tips for Finding the Right SSD Esther Spanjer is director, marketing management, SanDisk Corporation. ESTHER SPANJER SanDisk Corp. Enterprise organizations face an interesting dilemma when it comes to meeting their data storage and application needs. In many cases, they are forced to balance the need for fast, reliable, consistent storage, with having access to limited resources. Often times this leads to IT managers selecting the lowest cost option, knowing that it fits within the budget and assuming that advertised speeds are representative of how the drive will perform in their environment – a win-win, right? Not so fast! When selecting an SSD for your environment, there are a variety of factors that you need to take into account if you are going to eventually choose a solution that can properly meet your needs. Below are five tips that will help you choose an SSD that meets the needs of your applications, makes the most of your available budget and reduces the frequency of future headaches you may have. Understand Your Application Requirements An SSD is an SSD, right? Wrong. In fact, SSDs are designed in many different ways to handle very different types of workloads. There are SSDs designed to handle mostly read operations, for example client-class drives, and those that are designed for write-intensive environments. It is extremely important that you understand what applications you are supporting in your data center and the mix of read/write operations required by those applications before you start your search. If you do not have this information on hand when you start your search, the chances that you begin evaluating SSDs that will not be able to deliver what you need will go up significantly, and likely lead to headaches in the future. Look at Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) not Acquisition Price Calculating TCO for a solid state drive can be overwhelming, but that’s no reason to shy away from doing so. It is actually extremely important to look at TCO over acquisition costs as the initial price is just that, the initial price. It may be appealing now, however if the drive can’t meet your long-term needs and ends up burning out earlier than anticipated in your environment, you are stuck spending the acquisition cost once again to replace the drive. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has developed tools to help enterprise organizations make TCO calculations, which can be found here. In general though, many organizations are comfortable calculating direct costs like acquisition price, labor and capital expenditures because they are relatively easy to measure. However, you must also take into account indirect costs like lifetime power and cooling, average drive lifespan, replacement costs, maintenance, etc., otherwise you can quickly find yourself in the middle of a TCO nightmare as SSDs burn out after being subjected to application workloads they were not designed to handle. Look at $/TBW, Not $/GB, When Comparing Drives It’s easy to look immediately at the price of an enterprise SSD and figure out what the best deal is per gigabyte. This is how evaluation of traditional hard drives has always been done. And, when you go to present the options to your boss they will surely love seeing a low $/GB ratio. However, this measurement is not appropriate for SSDs because they have finite lives. They come out of the box with a set number of write operations they can perform before the flash wears out. Because of this, you should look at the cost per Terabyte Write ($/TBW) instead. This will tell you how much you will be paying for the amount of data that you can actually write to the drive over its lifespan. Using this stat for comparison can quickly lead to some amazing realizations, including the fact that the SSD with the lowest acquisition cost can often be the most expensive per TBW. Not exactly a good sign if your applications require a lot of writes. Cool Down The power and cooling of your storage setup has a bigger impact than you might think! A metric you should pay attention to is IOPS/Watt. The power density plays a huge part into saving money on energy requirements.  The goal is achieve the highest throughput for the lowest amount of power needed to operate the SSD – especially in tier 0 and 1 systems. Not all SSDs are created equal on this front and since power and cooling efficiency can help save up to 80 percent in total energy expense, this becomes an important metric in organizations with limited resources. Think Low and Consistent (Latency) Many IT managers look to SSDs because they offer the performance benefits needed from today’s applications. Often times the latency improvement alone can make all the difference. When looking at latency, it is important to look beyond just the average response time metric. Sure this number should be as low as possible, however you also need to understand how consistent the SSDs latency is. Does the drive experience latency spikes or does latency stay within a relatively tight range? You should always be looking for as consistent of latency as possible, otherwise your data center will perform slower than anticipated while the SSD works through spikes in latency, leaving data sitting, waiting. Taking all of these items into consideration and doing your homework in advance of your search will not only lead to you selecting an SSD better suited for your environment, but also make it a smoother, more enjoyable search. You will also experience far fewer surprises in the future. 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)
2:00p	Network News: Ciena, Juniper, F5 Ciena helps Shentel scale and expand its networks and helps Globalcom upgrade its submarine cable system with 100G, Juniper advances its Junos Pulse solutions, and F5 Networks helps power the Verizon Cloud. Ciena selected by Shentel for 4G backhaul.  Ciena (CIEN) announced that Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (Shentel) has deployed Ciena’s packet networking, unified management and Service Level Agreements (SLA) portal solutions to support its expanding Fiber-to-the-Tower (FTTT) and mobile backhaul services. Shentel is using Ciena’s 3930, 3931, and 3960 Service Delivery Switches – interconnected with G.8032 Ethernet rings to provide greater network scalability, resiliency and protection. Additionally, Shentel is deploying Ciena’s cloud-based SLA Portal that provides direct access to SLA reports and gives Shentel and its customers visibility of the health and status of the service delivery. “As more businesses and end-users continue to increase their usage of mobile data and the industry continues to advance to 4G technology, new opportunities are opening for service providers like Shentel to expand their FTTT and other related offerings,” said Matt Salter, Vice President of U.S. Regional Service Providers at Ciena. ”With the power of our packet networking portfolio to quickly turn up services, service providers can augment that with resilient and cost effective backhaul services as their end-user demand dictates.” Along with Reliance Globalcom Ciena also announced the upgrade of Reliance Globalcom’s FA-1 North submarine cable system with 100G wavelengths.  With Ciena’s converged packet optical and GeoMesh solutions, Reliance Globalcom can now deliver high-speed, low latency OTN and 100GbE client services between London and New York with greater capacity to meet soaring bandwidth demand. With an initial total lit capacity of 400Gbs, this upgrade compliments Reliance Globalcom’s deployment of Ciena’s GeoMesh technology on its FA-1 South submarine network that links New York to Paris, allowing the provider to offer additional capacity on two diverse routes across the Atlantic. Juniper advances Junos Pulse.  Juniper Networks (JNPR) announced enhancements to its Junos Pulse remote access (SSL VPN) and network access control (NAC) solutions and new technology partnerships with leading Mobile Device Management (MDM) companies. Anew open initiative to enable MDM providers such as AirWatch and MobileIron will provide a simple and open way to integrate Junos Pulse Secure Access Service (SSL VPN) and Junos Access Control Service (NAC) with MDM solutions that simplify and secure BYOD efforts for both IT and end-users. ”More needs to be done to help IT embrace BYOD by both enabling users to work everywhere, anytime on any device, while keeping the network secure,” said Tamir Hardof, senior director, security product marketing, Juniper Networks. ”Integrating and linking VPN, NAC and MDM solutions reduces complexity, functional silos and provides a better BYOD experience for both IT and end-users. By working together with our partners, Juniper Networks can simplify the user experience and provide IT peace of mind that they are not compromising security, privacy or control.” Juniper also unveiled the Junos Pulse AppConnect software development kit (SDK) that enables per-application virtual private network (VPN) connectivity from both Apple iOS and Google Android devices to Juniper’s Junos Pulse Secure Access Service. Junos Pulse AppConnect technology and SDK is the first solution to offer per-application SSL VPN connections on both Android and Apple iOS mobile devices. With AppConnect, enterprises will have more granular control over access to corporate networks and applications, preserving the security and integrity of their data, network and resources end-to-end. F5 helps power Verizon Cloud.  F5 Networks (FFIV) and Verizon Enterprise Solutions announced that F5 technologies provide network traffic and security management services for the new Verizon Cloud.  Verizon embedded F5’s comprehensive suite of application services into its Cloud Compute, and F5′s BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager connects isolated environments and intelligently directs users to the best-performing data center to maintain high application performance. In addition, Verizon Cloud utilizes the advanced capabilities of BIG-IP Access Policy Manager that allow for consistent deployment and enforcement of the policies governing security. “Helping customers effectively, securely, and efficiently combine application services and cloud environments—regardless of the specific makeup of their infrastructures—is a top priority for us,” said Karl Triebes, EVP of Product Development and CTO at F5. “Verizon Cloud demonstrates how organizations can use flexible, enterprise-class technologies to seamlessly and safely extend their applications to the cloud. With F5’s Software Defined Application Services, customers like Verizon can easily configure how optimization, security, and availability services are employed, tailoring environments to meet the needs of their business and cloud initiatives.” At the Node Summit last week in San Francisco F5 also launched LineRate – an application proxy software, running on commodity hardware or virtual machines, which eliminates the need for DevOps to manually set up complex proxies or incorporate networking logic into applications. LineRate incorporates Node.js into its high-performance, highly scalable platform, enabling DevOps to support a variety of next-generation architectures that require highly programmable proxies, as well as to develop and deploy common services such as API metering and centralized authentication. (Comment on this)
2:39p	Verizon To Acquire CDN EdgeCast Networks A look inside the cold aisle of a Verizon data center. The comoany has acquired content delivery specialist EdgeCast. (Photo: Verizon) Verizon is acquiring content delivery specialist EdgeCast in a deal that greatly improves Verizon Digital Media Services’ end-to-end services. Both company’s boards have approved the acquisition, which Verizon hopes to finalize in early 2014. “The combination of EdgeCast and Verizon Digital Media Services will allow us to fully exploit and accelerate growth in Internet media consumption and online business performance,” said Bob Toohey, president of Verizon Digital Media Services. “EdgeCast’s industry-leading technology and strategically placed assets, combined with Verizon Digital Media Services’ video solutions, improves our ability to deliver the rich, reliable and quality digital media services that our customers have come to expect.” Verizon Digital Media Services will integrate EdgeCast complementary capabilities to further improve and increase its ability to meet the exponential growth in online digital media content, as well as broaden its portfolio of site acceleration services for digital enterprises. This acquisition will further strengthen Verizon Digital Media Services’ ability to deliver content and site acceleration services to customers that include studios, broadcasters, retailers and enterprises seeking quality high-performance digital experiences across all devices. EdgeCast has more than 6,000 accounts and serves some of the largest Web brands for global media delivery and acceleration services. Strong growth for EdgeCast Last July,  EdgeCast raised $54 million in new financing to continue its aggressive expansion. EdgeCast added more than 2,000 customers in the past year prior to this financing, and the company has been profitable for four consecutive years.  Under Verizon, it will have all the financial resources it needs to continue its impressive growth. “Having journeyed from start up to technology leader in a short seven years, the time is right for EdgeCast to elevate itself again by joining Verizon to continue our innovation and growth,” said Alex Kazerani, EdgeCast chairman and chief executive officer. Both companies deliver advanced video solutions and share a common architectural approach to video-optimized networks. Earlier this year, Verizon Digital Media Services announced the acquisition of upLynk assets, with technology that streamlines the process of uploading and encoding of video. The combination of Verizon, upLynk and EdgeCast further boosts performance of Verizon Digital Media Services’ end-to-end services. Verizon’s financial advisor for this acquisition was LionTree Advisors LLC. (Comment on this)

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