Wednesday, March 19th, 2014

Time	Event
12:22p	Wholesale Provider Ascent Opens Colocation Operation In Chicago The line between retail colocation and wholesale continues to blur. Developer Provider Ascent, which provides wholesale space in the Chicago suburbs, is opening a colocation operation. The company is launching a multi-tenant colocation suite in its CH2 data center facility in Northlake, Illinois consisting of 36,000 square feet of space and 2.5 megawatts of critical power. “Our products and services have been very well received at the enterprise level, and in discussions with users in the market we know there are many small to mid-size companies looking for this same level of quality infrastructure and service but on a smaller scale,” said Phil Horstmann, CEO of Ascent. “The launch of our multi-tenant colocation suite will allow us to provide highly efficient, cost-effective data center solutions to a huge part of the marketplace we haven’t traditionally worked with, and offer an option that is not currently available to these companies.” Looking Beyond Large Enterprises Ascent typically deals with large enterprises. It leased its first project in Northlake, a 700,000 square foot data center, to Microsoft. The nearby CH2 building is home to data centers for Comcast Corp. and a major retailer. But this is a retail colocation play. Ascent isn’t the first wholesale provider to expand into retail colocation. Both Dupont Fabros and Digital Realty have slowly crept closer to offering colocation by selling smaller footprints and deals. This move reflects growing competition for outsourced data center space, which has led both wholesale players and “retail” colocation providers to expand their service offerings. In colocation, a customer leases a smaller chunk of space within a data center, usually in a caged-off area or within a cabinet or rack. In the wholesale data center model, a tenant leases a dedicated, fully-built data center space. Variety of Density Options The new multi-tenant space space has a separate secure entrance and a dedicated shipping and receiving area. The shared suite is built to accommodate a variety of infrastructure and power density requirements. Ascent provides 24/7 onsite operational support, remote management and Smart Hands services. Acent’s CH2 data center facility is 48-inch raised floor construction and 12 foot clear height from the floor to the ceiling plenum to ensure maximum flexibility and space utilization. The new space is designed for tenants that want to reap the traditional benefits of CH2, including dedicated onsite electrical substation, but don’t want to or need to take down an entire suite. (Comment on this)
12:30p	Disaster Recovery & Backup Are Part of Cloud Storage, Not Stand-alone Apps Andres Rodriguez is the CEO and Founder of Nasuni, a unified storage company that serves the needs of distributed enterprises. Previously he was a CTO at Hitachi Data Systems and CTO of the New York Times. Backup and disaster recovery are currently two of the most popular uses of cloud software in the enterprise. Providers of such software have experienced boom times, with a few even going public. While they’ve enjoyed tremendous success over the past few years, they would be advised to branch into a wider array of services soon. A rising group of cloud-integrated storage vendors have integrated backup and disaster recovery into the very fabric of their complete storage offering, at no additional cost to the customer. It’s not surprising that backup and disaster recovery would be among the first applications for cloud storage – tape backup is difficult to manage and costly to maintain, and cloud backup/DR represented a low-risk way to experiment with cloud services. Every dollar saved on moving backup to the cloud represented a dollar IT could spend on innovative technologies and business transformation, a very appealing tradeoff for any CIO. Additionally, the time spent managing physical backup systems could be redeployed into more useful tasks. But while cloud backup and DR has been an improvement over the tape-based status quo, it’s not an unqualified success. Costs may be lower, but the cost of storing backups in the cloud is still too great an expense. Managing backups in the cloud is simpler than managing tape, but these systems are still too complex and unreliable, and if IT needs to recover a great deal of data from the cloud, downloading all that data will likely be a very slow process. Despite all the copies upon copies of data, despite all the spending both in time and money, most IT personnel, when surveyed, still have little confidence in their cloud backup or disaster recovery systems. A New Model for Data Protection It’s time to give up on incrementally improving a broken backup system, and instead move forward toward a new model for data protection. The cloud holds much more potential than a cheap dumping ground for backup and archive data. In truth, it can provide the foundation for an integrated storage system that will revolutionize the data center. This storage system is made possible by the commodification of cloud storage – led by Amazon and Microsoft. The cloud is the next generation hard drive, forming the back-end of cloud-integrated storage controllers, which look and feel like the traditional storage controllers that IT already knows, but with incredible capabilities like unlimited capacity and access from anywhere made possible by the cloud. With cloud-integrated storage, IT can scale the system as large as they like, all without ever having to back it up. That last part sounds like a trick, but it’s not. Through the use of snapshots and cloud mirroring, IT never has to run another backup. In an integrated storage system, cloud storage forms the back end of an on-premises storage controller, which can be deployed in the form of a hardware appliance or a virtual machine. That storage controller has a local cache of the most frequently accessed data, with the gold copy of the fileshare stored in the cloud. At frequent intervals a snapshot – defined as a complete picture of an office’s data at that moment – is taken. Any changes to files are then uploaded to the cloud after being encrypted and compressed, all behind the scenes without the involvement of IT, with updated data propagated throughout the system. The snapshots themselves can be stored forever, offering an unlimited history that can be restored from any point. This redundancy can be further augmented by the capabilities of cloud storage. Data stored in the cloud is replicated into as many as six copies around the world, and if that protection isn’t enough, the entire data set can be mirrored to a secondary cloud, without any disruption of end user performance. Supporting Disaster Recovery: Quickly and Easily Both snapshots and the redundant nature of cloud storage create simple and attractive options for disaster recovery. Files, folders or entire directories from any point in the snapshot history can be restored in just a few mouse clicks through a process that is as simple to use as Apple’s “Time Machine.” In the end, cloud backup and disaster recovery does not offer IT a great deal of value. No one likes buying life insurance, and no one likes paying for or managing backup. It’s a budget item that CIOs would love to eliminate, and a huge annoyance for IT. Thankfully, for the same price as a distributed enterprise backup solution, an integrated cloud storage service provides not only backup and DR, but also block and file storage, file synchronization and access to the global fileshare from any location. Organizations demanding more of their backup and disaster recovery systems need to look beyond the minor improvements and minimal cost savings offered by the latest generation of vendors. CIOs should start to reconsider what a storage system is and instead of fearing this future, they should embrace it and the opportunity to put a big red line through “backup” in their budget. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
1:00p	Hadoop Pioneer Cloudera Raises Whopping $160 Million From pioneer to leader, big data powerhouse Cloudera brings its total amount raised to $300 million, after announcing that it has closed a new $160 million financing round to accelerate its growth in 2014. This round was led by T. Rowe Price, along with three other top-tier public market investors, and included an investment by Google Ventures and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment firm for Michael S. Dell and his family. The company will use the funds to further drive the enterprise adoption of and innovation in Hadoop and promote the enterprise data hub (EDH) market; support geographic expansion into Europe and Asia; expand its services and support capabilities; and scale its field and engineering organizations. “Cloudera is successfully helping enterprises exploit ‘big data’ and manage the transition to becoming more data centric,” said Henry Ellenbogen, Portfolio Manager, T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund. “With strong leadership, an ability to innovate, a satisfied customer base, and a large partner community, we believe Cloudera is well positioned to build a durable and leading company in this space.” Vote of Confidence in Hadoop Cloudera believes that Hadoop has emerged as the de facto choice for the underlying data management technology making it possible to store, process and analyze vastly larger and more complex datasets than ever before. The latest round of funding validates the mainstream adoption of Hadoop among enterprises today and Cloudera’s leadership in what many believe is the most important technology sea change in the data center for the next decade. The success of Hadoop has also drawn the attention of big, established players in the market, including most leading enterprise software companies. Recently Cloudera was added to the Gartner 2014 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems. “We see broad demand from enterprises who want a flexible approach to handling large amounts of data, and we expect this market to continue to grow rapidly,” said Google Ventures General Partner Karim Faris. “Cloudera is dramatically lowering the cost of reliable storage for the enterprise and is enabling the analysis and mining of large data sets in a way that wasn’t possible before.” “When Cloudera emerged from stealth in 2009, the vision was to bring Hadoop to the enterprise,” said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer at Cloudera. “At the time, the idea of ‘big data’ was on the cusp of adoption. Five years later, Cloudera is setting the standard for how enterprises across all verticals are managing their big data. The market demand for these technologies is fierce as companies realize the competitive advantage and strategic value of their data. We are thrilled to have the backing of major institutional and strategic investors in this latest round and are well positioned to drive our vision and company growth at an even faster pace.” (Comment on this)
1:30p	OnRamp Completes Second Austin Data Center Data center operations company OnRamp has completed construction of its second Austin data center and will hold a grand opening celebration on March 20. The 42,000 square foot facility is the company’s third data center in the US. “We are excited to open a second, enterprise-class Data Center in Austin,” said OnRamp CEO Lucas Braun. “We’re an Austin-based company, and a large percentage of our managed and cloud hosting and high security hosting services are delivered by our teams in Austin.” Design of the data center began in fall of 2012, and OnRanmp worked with Square One Consultants to oversee the design, development and construction of the facility. The Austin II data center uses OnRamp’s Redundant Isolated Path Power Architecture to deliver 2N power to customers from utility to rack. The facility has the capability of delivering upwards of 30 kW per rack. The data center is SSAE 16, SOC I Type II, HIPAA and PCI compliant, and will feature a separate area dedicated to HIPAA hosting for the healthcare vertical. OnRamp is a hybrid services provider, offering cloud, managed services and disaster recovery services in addition to data center space. The facility will house several on-site teams of OnRamp engineers to provide what it calls Full7Layer Support, i.e. support across all seven layers of infrastructure. The facility is staffed 24/7 year-round. In addition to two facilities in Austin, the company also has a facility in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company was founded in 1994 as an ISP, with a history rooted in secure connectivity that enables distributed computing.  It’s first colocation customer was added a year later, with managed hosting launching in 2000 and private cloud in 2007. The company today focuses on customers with sensitive data and hybrid solutions, offering a single point for cloud, managed services and compliant data center space. (Comment on this)
2:00p	Data Center Power: Looking at Emerging Options for Quality Energy As more users and devices connect into your data center platform, new types of service and delivery demands will be made. To support this growth in data center utilization, engineers were faced with a few types of challenges. Multi-tenancy and high-density data center systems are creating a myriad of new power technologies that are designed to support the goals of a modern data center. But how do you know what to look for? Most of all, how do you know where to find emerging quality energy? In this webcast from Caterpillar, attendees will have the opportunity to explore the options available today, and post questions live to a panel Caterpillar experts. Furthermore, Engineering Professionals who register and attend the webcast on April 3rd at 3 p.m. Eastern Time are offered the opportunity to earn a 1-hour Continuing Education Unit (CEU) towards the maintenance of their professional certification. There is a clear boom in data center deployments and migrations. A major part of any data center planning process is the power consideration. Remember, it’s not just about what you can support today – it’s about how well you can support your business and user needs moving forward. Register for this webcast today to gain new perspectives in the following critical data center and energy areas: Fuel options for onsite power systems: diesel, natural gas, renewable fuels, all of the above? Impact of regulations on facility design: environmental and utility Impact of datacenter mechanical & electric system design on power system selection Implementation of combined cooling, heat, and power (CCHP) systems: economics and reliability Long term power system planning: finance, maintenance, testing, and disaster preparedness From mission critical power supply, conditioning, and monitoring to new sustainable energy systems that are designed to fulfill renewable and energy efficiency goals, datacenter operators are increasingly exploring new ways to power their business. Join Caterpillar on this webcast to learn about creating a truly efficient data center platform built around intelligent energy optimizations. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Phunware Raises $30 Million To Grow ‘Software of Things’ Multiscreen as a Service (MaaS) pioneer Phunware announced that it has raised $26.25 million of Series E funding led by Firsthand Technology Value Fund. The Austin, Texas based company has grown dramatically since it started in 2009, with 2013 revenues of $22.1 million. The company currently supports more than 1 trillion annual transactions on its “multiscreen cloud platform” across nearly 190 countries and 10 languages. The initial closing of the round includes additional investment by current investors Fraser McCombs Ventures, Maxima Ventures, Wild Basin Investment and the Central Texas Angel Network, as well as new strategic investors Cisco and WWE. The investment brings the total raised by Phunware to $43M. With the investment, Kevin Landis, Chairman and President of Firsthand, and Chase Fraser, Managing Partner of Fraser McCombs Capital, join Phunware’s board of directors. “Phunware has proven its ability to support the largest brands in the world on the largest stages in the world at scale,” said Kevin Landis, Chairman and President of Firsthand. “We are extremely excited to be joining the Phunware team and equally enthusiastic about the company’s multiscreen platform vision for the future.” The company is responsible for multiscreen infrastructure, software and application development services for an impressive list of top-tier customers including E! Entertainment Television, NBC Sports, WWE, NASCAR, CBS, Qualcomm, Edmunds, Jawbone, HomeAway, Turner, UHealth, Transamerica, King, Warner Brothers, AT&T and Adobe among many others. Its solutions make it easy for any brand to add multiscreen application support for content management, location based services, advertising, alerts and notifications and business intelligence and analytics through the use of a single login on a single platform with a single partner. “We continue to have a very ambitious vision for Phunware – to enable our customers to engage, manage and monetize every connected device on Earth,” commented Alan S. Knitowski, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Phunware. “We have achieved tremendous growth since inception and this new funding will further accelerate our MaaS platform investments and geographic reach in supporting the multiscreen goals and objectives of our brands’ anytime anywhere audiences globally.  50 billion devices will mean 50 billion opportunities … and we intend to touch them all.” (Comment on this)

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