Tuesday, January 21st, 2014

Time	Event
12:30p	Visual Effects Company Framestore Partners with Dell Expanding upon a partnership in the UK, British visual effects company Framestore has selected Dell to grow its business presence in North America. Framestore needed to provide infrastructure equipment for its new Montreal office, which needed to be completed from scratch in less than 12 months due to significant upcoming projects. The new studio facility, financed by Dell Financial Services, means that Framestore can now accommodate new film opportunities while also gaining access to a new and talented North American creative community of artists and engineers. Framestore has deployed high performance, end-to-end Dell solutions in support of current, big-budget projects such as RoboCop and Edge of Tomorrow. The company has also been responsible for recent box office hits Gravity and Iron Man 3. To support the establishment of its Montreal office, including 150 new artists, producers, software developers and engineers, Framestore deployed Dell workstations and Dell Networking M6620 switches. PowerEdge M610 and M620 Blade servers will aid photoreal rendering and advanced physics simulations and Poweredge T610/T620 and R320 servers will allow highly-available remote access for Framestore’s London team. “Dell has a made firm commitment to the professional engineering desktop and we can see that in the build quality of the machines we are purchasing,” said Steve MacPherson, Framestore’s chief technical officer. ”The Dell Precision T5610 is a world-class workstation that addresses the key requirements of demanding Tier One visual effects (VFX) artists. As we move forward into increasingly advanced levels of simulation and photorealism having this power on the desktop presents a wealth of creative opportunities for our artists. These machines are both powerful and cost-effective.” MacPherson continued, “Just over 12 months ago, we began planning our expansion into Montreal and quickly realised the challenge of building the site infrastructure after it had opened for business. Part of the success of this project is due to the help we received from Dell in terms of supply chain logistics, financing and technical support. Our entire machine room was commissioned with Dell’s participation – racks, cooling, storage and rendering – all this combined to make the planning process straightforward while the execution and delivery were both efficient and cost-effective.” (Comment on this)
2:00p	SuVolta Raises $10.6 Million to Advance Low-Power Chip Technology SuVolta raises $10.6 million to accelerate growth in its low-power chip technology, SanDisk makes an investment in software-defined storage company Nexenta, and HP’s 3PAR storage server help Blood Systems blood bank increase capacity and gain efficiency. SuVolta raises $10.6 million.  Scalable semiconductor technologies company SuVolta announced that it has secured $10.6 million in funding. New investor Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited participated in the round along with existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, August Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Northgate Capital and DAG Ventures. SuVolta will use the funding to accelerate the integration of its low-power chip technology into the design and fabrication of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) for ultra-low power applications, such as DRAM, Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile computing. “Fujitsu Semiconductor is committed to advancing the development of energy efficient products for the consumer and mobile markets,” said Haruyoshi Yagi, Corporate Senior Executive Vice President at Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited. “Our investment in SuVolta is a reflection of the excellent working relationship between the companies and our confidence in the value of DDC technology at a variety of process nodes.” SanDisk invests in Nexenta.  SanDisk (SNDK) announced it has invested in software defined storage (SDS) provider Nexenta. Nexenta’s software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, scalable and cost-effective storage solutions for both private and public cloud environments. The company has over 5,000 customer deployments with more than 800 petabytes of storage under management. Nexenta partners with key technology vendors, including Dell, Cisco and others, to support cloud deployments built on CloudStack and OpenStack solutions. “SDS and flash-based storage solutions are both complementary and disruptive technologies in the enterprise,” said Sumit Sadana, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at SanDisk. “Together, these technologies offer the capability to deploy high-performance, scalable solutions with significantly improved total cost of ownership that customers are looking for. We are looking forward to collaborating with Nexenta to optimize SDS solutions for flash technology in enterprise applications.” HP 3PAR helps Blood Systems Boost efficiency.  HP (HPQ) announced that Blood Systems blood bank has selected 3PAR StoreServ storage to maximize data capacity and improve performance of mission-critical applications. Blood Systems’ legacy storage architecture was unable to accommodate the organization’s increasing data capacity and performance demands. Improved scalability in the HP solution aided with application uptime and lower latency improved critical workflow processes. With the increased capacity, Blood Systems can more easily add donation centers to its current manufacturing and logistics program, while accommodating plans to consolidate data from affiliate organizations.“We needed a storage solution that would enable Blood Systems to expand while improving efficiency within a not-for-profit organization’s budget parameters,” said Alain Black, manager, IT Systems, Blood Systems. “The scalability and performance power of HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage allows us to meet future growth requirements and significantly lower IT and companywide operational expenses.” (Comment on this)
2:13p	Savvis Brand is Retired, Becomes CenturyLink Technology Solutions The name “Savvis” is no more, as CenturyLink has undergone a rebranding to reflect the full spectrum of the company’s offerings. The new name for the data center services will be CenturyLink Technology Solutions. “We are pleased to become CenturyLink Technology Solutions, as aligning our brand with CenturyLink demonstrates the deeper ties to the broad portfolio of IT solutions that we collectively deliver for businesses,” said Jeff Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink Technology Solutions. “While we are extremely proud of our nearly 20-year legacy operating as Savvis within the industry, we value CenturyLink’s extensive market leadership and look forward to operating under one brand to continue helping businesses become more agile, secure and sustainable with integrated solutions that deliver bottom-line results.” The big news is that the company is retiring the Savvis brand. CenturyLink has been putting together a cloud strategy over the years, adding Platform as a Service provider AppFog and Infrastructure as a Service platform provider Tier 3. CenturyLink acquired Savvis in 2011, which was its first big cloud move.  The company continues to invest in opening of new data centers around the world and ongoing, aggressive expansion into new markets. “CenturyLink Technology Solutions will remain the distinct data hosting operating segment within CenturyLink. Said Von Deylen. “Though our name is changing, our customers will continue to be served by the same account teams providing the same excellent levels of service and experience that enterprises have come to expect from us.”     (Comment on this)
3:00p	As Bitcoin Infrastructure Booms, Mining Heads to the Data Center This custom piping system supports a liquid immersion cooling system powering a Bitcoin mining data center in Hong Kong. It’s one example of custom infrastructure emerging to support the global bitcoin network. (Photo: Allied Control) This is the first of a two-part series on the boom in Bitcoin computing infrastructure, and what it means for the data center industry.  Emmanuel Abiodun once mined for Bitcoins on a desktop computer in his home. He’s now running 160 powerful computers in server space in Iceland, where the machines are cheap to power and cool. Later this year, Abiodun expects to have an empire of 4,000 bitcoin mining rigs spread across two continents, eventually filling nearly 5 megawatts of data center space. “To be able to scale, you’re going to have to look at a data center,” said Abiodun, the founder and CEO of London-based CloudHashing, which leases server capacity to customers hoping to generate bitcoins. “We’re definitely seeing that trend.” The journey of Abiodun and CloudHashing reflects the larger story of the Bitcoin network. After getting started in garages and server closets, bitcoin mining is moving into data centers and the cloud. Some traditional data center providers will benefit, but this transition also has the potential to enrich a new generation of entrepreneurs emerging from within the bitcoin community. Over the past year, the computing power supporting the bitcoin network has soared, creating a powerful global network backed by 150,000 petaflops per second of computing power, roughly 600 times the combined power of the all the supercomputers in the Top500 list. Practitioners of Bitcoin mining – the term for using data-crunching computers to earn newly-issued virtually currency – are adopting more powerful hardware, pooling their efforts and seeking to slash their power bills. An Opportunity for the Data Center Industry? As this trend continues, “production capacity and operating efficiency will drive profit margins,” writes Jeff Schvey, a bitcoin analyst at The Genesis Block. “The natural evolution of this will be large data centers that can take advantage of economies of scale.” The increasing industrialization of bitcoin infrastructure presents an opportunity for the data center industry. Large mining operations are beginning to follow the example of their forerunners in hyperscale computing, shifting compute capacity to remote areas with cheap power, including Iceland and central Washington. But the bitcoin network may develop along several tracks, and not all of them involve traditional data centers. Some entrepreneurs in the bitcoin community are developing custom facilities to house high-density hardware, ranging from makeshift server farms in warehouses in the Pacific Northwest to futuristic racks of sleek, liquid-cooled immersion rigs in Hong Kong. One thing is certain: Bitcoin infrastructure will need to become more energy efficiency. Recent estimates from Blockchain.info suggest that the global bitcoin network has been using between $12 million and $15 million of electricity each day, while generating $5 million to $6 million in new Bitcoins. “Bitcoin mining is very energy intensive,” said Abiodun. “Power is key, because it affects your profitability.” Bitcoin is sometime referred to as the “Internet of money” – a platform using cryptography and software to offer an alternative currency and payment-tracking system. At its heart is a huge distributed computing network that verifies each transaction. Participants in this online ledger – which includes individuals, corporations and mining collectives – are rewarded with new bitcoins, which are issued about every eight minutes. This ability to discover new coins has prompted the “mining” analogies, which some say are misleading. “I hate the term,” said Josh Zerlan, Chief Operating Officer for Butterfly Labs, a Bitcoin hardware specialist. “We’re not mining. This is transaction processing.” Cloud Hashing: Building Big CloudHashing has been the first major bitcoin specialist to go public with its use of data centers. The UK-based company has set up shop near Reykjavik, Iceland in a data center operated by Verne Global. The company’s presence in Iceland was profiled in The New York Times, and is about to get a lot bigger. “Our mission is to bring Bitcoin mining to everyone in an easy and affordable way,” said Abiodun, who said the service has grown from 800 customers in September to 5,000 in early January. To meet that surge in demand, he has ordered 1,500 custom mining rigs using ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to crunch data for creating and tracking bitcoins, which he says will boost CloudHashing’s Iceland operation to 2.5 megawatts of power capacity. (Comment on this)
3:47p	Pre-fabrication: A New Way of Architecting Data Centers Steven Carlini is senior director, Data Center Global Solutions for Schneider Electric. STEVEN CARLINI Schneider Electric In today’s connected world, digital devices that generate data are omnipresent. As a result, the world’s data is growing, and it’s growing fast. So fast, in fact, that industry research firm IDC predicts that our “digital universe” will have reached four zettabytes of information by late this year. 1 For perspective, that’s nearly 50 percent more than 2012 volumes and almost quadruple 2010 volumes. As businesses realize the advantages of collecting this big data, they have begun to look for more efficient, powerful and flexible IT infrastructure able to store, analyze, protect and manage it. As the demand for more computing power has risen, so have the pressures placed on data centers. Today, these facilities must be able to keep up with the pace of business where computing demands continue to increase at warp speed, and many managers are finding that legacy infrastructure can be expensive and difficult to scale as needed. Consider some of the challenges associated with many traditional data center builds: Too many parties involved: typical data center deployment and upgrade projects involve many different professionals such as electrical and mechanical contractors, designers, consultants, architects, facility departments, IT departments, and executives. Large groups with differing perspectives and opinions can cause significant delays. Complexity and duration: a traditional project involves numerous steps along the plan, design, build and operate pathway, increasing the potential for problems to arise at given points throughout the process. Inconsistencies in quality and incompatibility of equipment: in general, data center architecture is comprised of numerous pieces of equipment from a variety of different manufacturers. Issues with compatibility are likely to arise and the time, effort and talent needed to integrate, test and commission is significant. With business success relying heavily on an organization’s ability to connect with customers and provide services, data center downtime can not only be detrimental to an organization’s reputation, but can strain customer relationships and incur costs upwards of tens of thousands or millions of dollars. To avoid these problems, data center and facility managers should consider a recent innovation helping to mitigate these difficulties: pre-fabricated architecture. In contrast to traditional construction where components are installed separately onsite, pre-fabricated infrastructure is a pre-engineered, factory-integrated and pre-tested system of power, cooling and IT modules mounted on a skid or in an enclosure. Benefits of Pre-fabricated Data Centers According to a recent Uptime Institute survey, 70 percent of companies globally have built a new site or significantly renovated a data center in the past five years.2 However, only 8 percent of responding data center operators have deployed pre-fabricated modular data centers, with an additional 8 percent planning to deploy the prefabricated modular products.3 These numbers are surprising, considering many survey participants likely experienced the unexpected delays caused by the aforementioned issues. Despite slow adoption, pre-fabrication has the potential to be a disruptive technology in the data center design and build industry. Not only does it allow managers to ensure availability by shortening overall deployment time, allowing new, expanded or retrofit facilities to be up and running quickly, but increases agility and reliability through a tried and tested design and construction, decreases uncertainty and lowers total cost of ownership (TCO): Design: Because the building blocks of this phase are designed mostly in R&D or provided via reference designs, the need to pre-design customized data center modules is near non-existent. Additionally, site plan design becomes very simple and costs are lessened because the layout uses pre-engineered modules- Construction: Infrastructure that is pre-engineered, prefabricated, factory-integrated and repeatable allows for decreased complexity of the project and nearly eliminates issues with human error. It cuts costs on shipping, un-packaging components, taking inventory, and laying out and assembling components since these procedures are completed at the factory. Additionally, because pre-fab data centers can be mounted in an enclosure, money can also be saved by deploying the data center outside, rather than in a facility- Installation and Maintenance: A “one-stop” contract leads to less expenditure on purchasing a custom management control system installation or custom programming. Capacity Management and Expansion: Pre-fabricated data centers are highly scalable. With traditional infrastructure, managers must estimate future growth at the time of construction. This leads to high capital expenses, wasted cash flow, and large amounts of unused and unnecessary equipment. Pre-fabrication allows for easily deployment of additional modules in a relatively short time and at a low upfront cost, which optimizes cash flow and reduces unused data center capacity. While uncertainty cannot be fully eliminated from any project, prefabrication can reduce many of the time and cost risks associated with traditional data center deployment, while also future-proofing the data center investment to meet new demands. By taking advantage of this architecture methodology, managers can trust their data center to run smoothly and efficiently, and to meet the ever-growing demands of our highly digitized business environment. 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. Endnotes 1 “Top 10 Predictions,” IDC, http://www.idc.com/research/Predictions13/downloadable/238044.pdf 2 “2013 Data Center Industry Survey,” Uptime Institute, http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.data-central.org/resource/collection/BC649AE0-4223-4EDE-92C7-29A659EF0900/uptime-institute-2013-data-center-survey.pdf, page 7 3 “2013 Data Center Industry Survey,” Uptime Institute, http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.data-central.org/resource/collection/BC649AE0-4223-4EDE-92C7-29A659EF0900/uptime-institute-2013-data-center-survey.pdf, page 10 (Comment on this)
4:53p	Vantage Signs 1.5 Megawatt Expansion Deal The exterior of a data center on the Vantage Data Centers campus in Santa Clara, Calif. (Photo: Vantage) Vantage Data Centers has announced an expansion agreement with a leading e-commerce company, which will lease an additional 1.5 megawatts of wholesale data center space, the company said today. Under the terms of the agreement, the existing customer is expanding its IT capacity at Vantage’s Santa Clara campus to support its growth, while also extending the term of its initial 1 megawatt lease. Vantage said it built out 7,200 square feet of expansion space in four months to meet the customer’s “unique design requirements” and delivery timetable. “We are proud to support the continued growth of a leading e-commerce company,” said Sureel Choksi, President and CEO of Vantage Data Centers. “Vantage’s strong operational track record, willingness to custom-configure new capacity and deliver highly energy efficient facilities positioned Vantage uniquely to support this customer’s expansion requirements. This win further validates Vantage’s focus on delivering the industry’s best service experience for our customers.” Progress for Santa Clara Market The Vantage Santa Clara campus now supports 26 megawatts of critical IT load, and has seven megawatts of inventory available for sale. Vantage is one of several data center providers with space available in Santa Clara, which is the busiest data center market in Silicon Valley due to affordable power from the local utility, Silicon Valley Power. Vantage now operates four data centers between its campuses in Santa Clara, California, and Quincy, Washington, with more than 100 megawatts of potential capacity. (Comment on this)

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