Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014

Time	Event
12:30p	Dell Helps Skyscanner with Global Converged Data Centers Dell helps travel-search site Skyscanner build converged data centers in Europe and Asia, and SanDisk releaes its ULLtraDIMM solid state drive. Dell helps Skyscanner architect converged data centers. Dell announced that travel-search site Skyscanner has selected Dell to architect and build new converged data centers in the UK and Singapore and has plans n the works to deploy in Hong Kong in January 2014. Moving away from hosted IT resources and building its own data centers in Europe and Asia Skyscanner sought an IT partner to support its ambitious global growth. After a review of the market and a proof of concept with Dell blade and networking equipment Skyscanner selected Dell. Dell’s end-to-end, scalable solutions were put into place at Skyscanner’s new data center sites. Each site was equipped with multiple Dell Converged Blade Data Center solutions, which combine Dell EqualLogic blade arrays, servers, switching and management to provide an entire data centre within a single blade enclosure and helping to streamline IT management and operations. “Web-based services across the world are experiencing great market opportunities as consumers and businesses increasingly spend online,” said Aisling Keegan, General Manager and Executive Director for Preferred Accounts, Dell UK. “As these organisations grow and become more successful, the challenge of providing a consistently high quality of service becomes crucial to long-term success. Dell’s converged end-to-end solutions and services provide the scalability, flexibility and performance required to help organisations deploy powerful data centre environments to support heavy demand and accommodate rapid business growth.” SanDisk releases ULLtraDIMM solid state drive.  SanDisk (SNDK) announced that its ULLtraDIMM Solid State Drive (SSD), an enterprise-class, ultra-low latency, memory channel storage solution, is now shipping for qualification with select enterprise servers. The addition of flash technology on the DRAM memory channel expands the growing penetration of flash storage technology in enterprise data centers, and complements SanDisk’s existing flash-based server hardware and software storage solutions. IBM recently announced that the eXFlash DIMM is an option for its System x3850 and x3950 X6 servers providing up to 12.8TB of flash capacity. “The SanDisk ULLtraDIMM SSD was designed to expand the reach of ultra-low latency flash storage throughout the data center and scale to meet the requirements of any enterprise application, no matter how bandwidth or capacity intensive,” said John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. “The ULLtraDIMM SSD’s linear performance scalability and innovative DIMM form factor allow organizations to deploy flash as their application requirements change, without requiring significant infrastructure investment.” (Comment on this)
1:00p	Five Great Ways to Optimize Your Data Center How can data center managers get more from their data center model? Bill Kleyman looks at five areas where you can optimize. It’s a new year and once again data center professionals are looking at new ways to make their infrastructure even more efficient. At this point, the modern data center has become the central hub for almost all technologies. Whether it’s content delivery, data distribution, or just overall business support, the data center is absolutely critical for today’s business to thrive. The proliferation of cloud computing and IT consumerization has all driven a pretty big boom in data center demand. Because of this, data center administrators are constantly trying to find ways to improve performance, enhance infrastructure density, and increase multi-tenancy capabilities. As more converged systems make their way into the data center, infrastructure optimization will be critical to maintain a high level of service. So what are some great ways that you can optimize your data center? How can data center managers get more from their data center model? Let’s look at a few ways. Software-defined technologies (SDx) and virtualization. The capabilities of the modern hypervisor are light-years ahead of what was possible just a few years ago. We are now able to directly integrate with key APIs to reduce resource hops and drastically improve workload performance. Even more so are the new technologies around software-defined networking, storage, security – and the data center! Our ability to abstract so many critical layers is a huge reason why we can build in many more data center efficiencies. New levels of network virtualization allow administrators to create vast network environments capable of spanning numerous data center across many countries. We are no longer bound by hardware requirements. Software-defined technologies are capable of delivering many kinds of data center efficiencies at numerous different levels. Utilize cloud computing. There is a very real reason that hybrid cloud platforms are gaining so much popularity. One great way to increase data center efficiency is to integrate a cloud model. Many organizations are expanding their data center to the cloud for many different reasons. Competition in the data center space has created new offerings, better pricing, and a lot more available resources. This means that creating intelligent links between private and public cloud environments has become much easier. Data center control can now span many different cloud models where administrators don’t actually have to worry about physical infrastructure. Rather, they concern themselves with the workloads running directly on top. This type of infrastructure optimization can see a part of an environment remain in-house – while other piece is directly extended into the cloud. The beauty here is that by using cloud automation, software-defined technologies, and improved distributed infrastructure management – the cloud can be a powerful tool to optimize your data center. Optimize power usage. There’s a good reason that data centers are being built in some interesting climates. Now that bandwidth is much better and data centers can reach further – organizations are warming to the idea of deploying data centers in some pretty remote locations. For example, Iceland’s power grid draws entirely upon hydro-electric and geothermal power, ensuring a totally “green” power supply. Plus, power in Iceland is available at 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour, with lower pricing available for bulk purchases. That’s an attractive pitch when you consider the potential for fluctuations in power pricing in countries like the U.S., Britain and Germany. Outside of building a new data center, there are other direct ways to optimize power utilizing. Examine your existing environment and inspect lost power areas. For example, what wattage are your servers taking when sitting idle? Do you have good power management systems which can dynamically provision/de-provision resources as needed? Directly in line with power usage are optimizations around the overall infrastructure as well. A well monitored and maintained data center with good power regulation will see direct PUE optimizations. Improve cooling and other data center environmental variables. Data center environmentals are never easy to control. Cold or hot spots can create energy drains and poor airflow circulation. In creating data center environmental optimizations, there are several key factors to examine. This includes rack placement, server density, flooring (slab vs raised), aisle control, and much more. Furthermore, using predicative trend analysis systems helps with both current and potential future demands. Optimizing a data center also means reducing operational costs. The less money you need to spend running the environment the more you can have to spend on critical infrastructure improvements. Create management transparency. The vast amount of data center distribution and the increased utilization of cloud computing has created a new challenge for the modern data center. As one of the most important pieces around data center optimization, clear management is absolutely critical. We now have concepts around data center virtualization and even the new data center operating system (DCOS). These management platforms take DCIM, automation, cloud control, and many other data center services to a whole new level. Basically, these new management systems place all critical components under one management environment. Now, we have much more data distribution and vast data centers sharing resources over the wire. One of the best ways to optimize your data center is by knowing exactly what is being run on physical systems. From there, you’re able to make proactive decisions around resource allocation and where there needs to be improvements. The future data center will only continue to support more users. All of this will continue to drive the need for optimization-ready data center management platforms. As cloud computing and other such technologies become more prevalent, core data center technologies will need to evolve to support all of these new demands. Just like anything in technology, the data center infrastructure will evolve. Along with that will come new ways to keep your environment up and running optimally. Remember, there are a lot more than five ways to create a better data center. Always take the end-user into consideration and create redundancy whenever possible. One major aspect of data center optimization is making sure your environment stays up in the first place. With that in mind, always take a proactive approach to data center planning and deployments. Building in infrastructure redundancy and DR planning are also critical pieces around maintain an optimally run data center environment. In optimizing your data center, you develop  a more resilient platform that will save you money and improve the overall performance of your business. (Comment on this)
1:30p	Big or Little Business, Know the Value of Your Data Joel Dolisy is a Senior Vice President and CTO and CIO at SolarWinds, an IT management software provider based in Austin, Texas. JOEL DOLISY SolarWinds By now, we’ve all witnessed the power of big data. From the enterprise to retail, government, healthcare and beyond, the way data is harnessed has changed the way we do business and the way we live. Big data, however, doesn’t seem manageable for every company. For small to mid-sized organizations not equipped for massive data storage and analysis, the big data trend should not be discouraging. Taking a right-sized, data-centric approach to understanding the value of information stored by organizations of any size begins with the IT pro. At larger companies, there is usually a database administrator (DBA) who has been trained to compile data and provide actionable intelligence. For smaller companies without a dedicated DBA pro, but rather one or two IT pros wearing many hats, it’s important to understand best practices from both a technology and employee perspective to ensure easy access and optimal utilization of data. Technology The key to data optimization in smaller organizations is integrating systems in such a way that the non-DBA IT pro is able drive meaningful insights. To do this, technology is required to pull data residing in multiple silos so it can then be correlated and aggregated to provide the additional context necessary to deliver high-level analysis. For example, if a small to mid-sized company needs to understand customer engagement – including the first visit to its web site, interaction with support and order placement – the information required to gather this timeline is stored in various silos managed by separate applications. In order to provide a normalized view of this disparate information stored in the ERP system, marketing data warehouse and CRM system, it’s crucial that these systems are able to communicate and integrate with each other seamlessly. By creating a central repository for this information, the IT pro enables different teams to leverage the technology, provide key perspectives and utilize the data for multiple business functions. However, as more and more groups within a company rely on a consolidated set of data, IT pros need to implement role-based functionality to ensure data access control. For instance, sales or revenue data cannot be readily visible to anyone outside of the sales or finance team. Even within those teams, different people will have a different scope of visibility depending on their position within the hierarchy. Therefore when designing a solution that solves a particular set of use-cases, IT pros need to work with company employees to understand how access to the data will be restricted. Employees With integration-enabling technology and role-based data access functionality in place, the IT pro can then empower the rest of the business to solve concrete problems specific to different roles within the company. By providing the infrastructure necessary to support those business functions, the IT pro not only solves a short term problem, but also provides direct business impact in terms of unlocking additional sales or providing a better customer service experience. As different business functions take advantage of this consolidated data perspective, other groups within the company will look at those early adopters and realize the value they can gain from the data as well. The IT pro then can act as a catalyst of data reuse and data consolidation. In addition to working with employees to implement personalized access, IT should also work closely with leaders in each department to ensure that data currently being harvested is useful, and to understand how to best optimize data collection for each business function. A quick feedback loop is necessary between those stakeholders and the IT team in order to guarantee the solution is providing true business value. The role of the IT pro at smaller organizations often involves a “jack-of-all-trades” approach, making data collection and analysis (related to what we’re seeing on a larger scale with big data) a formidable task. By integrating technology to create a central system for pulling and viewing data, and working with company employees to ensure optimal data access and usage, IT pros can ensure the solution provided fits within the company’s data strategy and can evolve over time to meet changing business needs. 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)
2:16p	Northern Virginia Tech Council Meeting The Northern Virginia Technology Council announced the NVTC Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure Committee meeting is set for January 24 at Dominion Power in Herndon at 8 a.m to 9:30 a.m. (Networking begins at 7:30 p.m.) The featured speaker will be Dwight Gibbs, CEO of Contraqer, who has a rich history in both start-up and Fortune 500 companies. Gibbs will address the battle for cloud supremacy between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, and the future of infrastructure hosting. He is unique in his ability to present the cloud from the perspective of both the CIO and the developer community. The DCCIC Committee’s mission is to provide a clear, collective and compelling voice for the region’s data center and cloud and critical infrastructure community in an effort to contribute to the long term growth and prosperity of the industry. Membership draws from the entire ecosystem of data centers and cloud hosting service providers, data center operators and equipment manufacturers, large power, network, and software providers, and a wide variety of enterprise consumers of cloud and IT infrastructure services. For more information, visit the NVTC website. Venue Dominion Virginia Power 3072 Centreville Road, Lincoln Park offices Herndon, VA For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar. (Comment on this)
6:26p	IBM POWER Technology To Be Used in Suzhou PowerCore Technology Suzhou PowerCore licenses IBM POWER technology to develop and market chips for servers in China, Cirrascale makes power infrastructure improvements to its BladeRack 2 F-Series platform, and Tolly Group testing finds Fusion-io ioControl outperforms conventional hybrid flash arrays. Suzhou PowerCore Technology to design chip with IBM POWER technology. IBM, the Suzhou PowerCore Technology Company and the Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology today announced the two Chinese organizations will join the OpenPOWER Foundation, with Suzhou PowerCore intending to use IBM’s POWER architecture to provide customized chip design solutions to push server innovation in such areas as big data, cloud computing and next generation data centers. To develop and market processors for servers in China, Suzhou PowerCore will license the IBM POWER architecture and intellectual property related to POWER8 and chip design tools. “The proposed collaboration between Suzhou PowerCore, the Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology and IBM will benefit those innovative businesses in China that are aggressively taking advantage of big data and cloud computing to capture growth in such industries as banking, communications, retail and transportation,” said Bradley McCredie, Vice President and IBM Fellow, IBM Systems & Technology Group. Cirrascale improves BladeRack 2 F-Series.  Cirrascale announced the next generation of power infrastructure improvements to its BladeRack 2 F-Series blade-based platforms. The next generation power infrastructure employs an enhanced power shelf which integrates within the platform’s unique modular shelf architecture providing up to 18% better power efficiency over comparable competitive solutions. With improved efficiency, the power shelf converts the 48V power present in the rack to 12V power suitable for use by the company’s blade architecture. BladeRack 2 F-Series platforms are engineered to handle mission critical customer installations where high availability, ultra dense systems are a requirement, and feature its patented Vertical Cooling Technology. “By introducing a way to scale the power available to each BladeRack 2 F-Series shelf, increase the power conversion efficiency, and allow for N+1 redundancy, this next generation power infrastructure is yet another tool that can be used to tailor solutions closely to customer needs,” said David Driggers, Chief Executive Officer, Cirrascale Corporation. Tolly Group Testing shows Fusion-io Flash outperforming others.  Fusion-io (FIO) announced that the Fusion ioControl hybrid flash array has outperformed other hybrid storage arrays by up to seven times in testing conducted by The Tolly Group. Tolly Group found that Fusion ioControl delivers leading performance and scalability for virtual machines and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), as well as application input/output requests. Looking at performance for VDI, where boot storms caused by users logging on at the same time can overload storage resources, the results showed that Fusion ioControl provides greater read throughput than a SSD hybrid array. “Conventional SSD hybrid storage arrays offer acceptable performance for small datasets, but they are ultimately limited by SSD architectures,” said Kevin Tolly, founder of The Tolly Group. (Comment on this)
7:58p	VMware to Buy Mobile Management and Security Provider AirWatch for $1.54B This post originally appeared on The WHIR. Virtualization and cloud software provider VMware has signed a definitive agreement to buy AirWatch, a provider of enterprise mobile management and security solutions, which is expected to add secure, mobile workforce capabilities to VMware’s end-user computing portfolio. The transaction will roughly total $1.54 billion of which approximately $1.175 billion will be cash, plus about $365M in “installment payments and assumed unvested equity,” according to a press statement. The AirWatch team will continue to report to AirWatch co-founder and CEO John Marshall as part of VMware’s End-User Computing group, led by Sanjay Poonen, EVP and GM. And Alan Dabbiere, AirWatch, co-founder and chairman, will be overseeing a new AirWatch operating board which will report to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. Dabbiere said in a statement, “When we started AirWatch, we set out to help businesses succeed in the mobile explosion that was set to come. Now there are more than 2 billion smart phones and tablets in the world and more than half of those devices touch an enterprise. By joining a proven innovator like VMware, we now have an opportunity to bring our leading-edge solutions to an even broader set of customers and partners to help them optimize for the mobile-cloud world.” With so much data created outside of the traditional confines of the data center, cloud applications and mobile devices pose some significant risks for organizations hoping to use the latest applications and hardware. FBR Capital Markets analysts Daniel Ives and James Moore showed optimism about the deal in a research note Wednesday, noting that it will help the combined companies take advantage of “strong secular trends” in the field – meaning trends that aren’t up-and-down. They wrote: “[W]e believe the addition of AirWatch will extend VMware’s lead in the virtualization arena further…given AirWatch’s massively scalable mobile management solution.” This article was first published here: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/vmware-buy-mobile-management-security-provider-airwatch-1-54b (Comment on this)

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