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Friday, May 9th, 2014

    Time Event
    11:30a
    EMC and NetApp Veterans’ Startup Igneous Raises $23.6M

    Igneous Systems, a Seattle, Wash.-based company founded by storage technology veterans who come from Isilon Systems, EMC and NetApp, closed a $23.6 million Series A funding round.

    The startup says little about what exactly it is planning to do other than promising a new approach to building, maintaining and scaling enterprise data center infrastructure. The sizeable round will fund product development and expansion of the company’s engineering and leadership teams.

    Igneous CEO Kiran Bhageshpur spent the last six years in senior engineering roles at Isilon, a scale-out NAS storage company acquired by EMC in 2010. He continued working for EMC after the acquisition, most recently as vice president of engineering, running product development for the Isilon division.

    Byron Rakitzis, chief architect at Igneous, was NetApp’s first employee (other than the storage giant’s founders) and holds about 30 storage and file-system technology patents. His most recent assignment at NetApp was on the company’s all-Flash storage team.

    Third member of the founding team, Jeff Hughes, spent years doing product engineering at Isilon. Two years after the acquisition, he became director of engineering at EMC’s Isilon division. At Igneous, Hughes is vice president of engineering.

    Not revealing much about the company’s plans, Bhageshpur said it was going to bring to market a cloud solution that “solves some of today’s most complex engineering challenges.”

    The funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures and Isilon co-founder, Sujal Patel. The company had previously raised a $3 million seed round led by Madrona, with participation from Redpoint.

    Matt Mcllwain, managing director at Madrona, said the startup brought together three of Seattle’s leading technology visionaries and that its team already comprised of top talent from cloud pioneers, including Amazon Web Services. “We are excited to have seeded and incubated Igneous and look forward to playing a role in the success of Seattle’s next great enterprise technology company,” he said.

     

    12:00p
    OpenStack Cloud Startup Metacloud Raises $15M

    Metacloud, a Pasadena, Calif.-based enterprise cloud startup whose technology is based on OpenStack, has closed a $15 million Series B funding round. The company, whose backers include Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, said it will use the funding to expanding its team and speed up development of its product.

    OpenStack is a popular open source cloud infrastructure technology used by companies large and small to compete with incumbent providers of proprietary private and public cloud solutions and services.

    Steve Curry, Metacloud president and co-founder said the company’s install base had doubled over the last quarter and grew 10 percent per month on average.

    “We see this round as further validation of both our business model and our technological capabilities,” he said. “We have filled a significant market gap by offering solutions that combine the convenience of public cloud with the security, predictability and economic advantages of private cloud.”

    Metacloud added a hosted version of its Private OpenStack Cloud last February to an on-premise version. Each version has its own appeal. The on-prem one puts the agility of cloud behind the corporate firewall, on company-owned hardware, within its own data centers. The hosted version is a turn-key solution for those not interested in building or managing their own cloud infrastructure.

    The latest round featured new investors, including Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and UMC Capital, as well as prior investors AME, Canaan Partners and Storm Ventures.

    “With this round, Metacloud establishes itself as a company that has arrived,” AME’s Yang said. “They are in a large and competitive market, but they have all the ingredients to be big winners, and we are excited at the opportunity to reinvest in their future.”

     

     

    12:00p
    Opengear Gets Head Start On Data Center Management Over 4G LTE

    As being physically close to your data center becomes increasingly less important, remote data center management becomes increasingly more important. Opengear, a vendor of remote-management products, has chosen to differentiate by investing early on into remote-management capabilities over 4G LTE networks used primarily by wireless carriers.

    Opengear, based in Sandy, Utah, specializes in “out-of-band” hardware management, which enables users to manage their gear at the bare-metal level, independent of the operating system. With out-of-band management, you can do things like changing BIOS settings, monitoring fans and voltage or turning devices on and off.

    In the 90s, out-of-band management consisted of external modems attaches to switches. When the dot-com boom occurred, it was done over broadband, and the 2000s saw a race to cellular. Opengear started offering out-of-band management over 3G in 2010 and today says it is one of the first vendors to market with a 4G LTE solution.

    Being first is important because 4G LTE certifications for out-of-band management are new for carriers, and certifications are difficult and expensive to get. Todd Rychecky, Opengear’s vice president of sales for the Americas, said the company’s competitors have not really bothered with 4G yet. Opengear has already gone through the process with AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.

    “The barrier to entry for 4G LTE is huge – very expensive,” Rychecky said. “It takes about 9 months, and I have to give them [carriers] a developer. That’s why we’re the only ones. The reason it’s significant is we can deploy products anywhere on the globe.”

    Competing solutions require customers to use external dongles to enable cellular capabilities, which are both frustrating and not future proof, he said. Having the capability built in has won Opengear a lot of deals with enterprises and data centers. Its customers include HP, Liberty Mutual, F5 Networks and J Crew, as well as numerous hosting and data center providers, such as Internap, ViaWest and Peak 10.

    While extremely mission-critical verticals — such as financial services — tend to be the biggest adopters of the technology, cellular networks have put out-of-band management within everybody’s reach. A phone line costs around $50 per month, while the minuscule cellular data plan needed for Opengear’s solution costs about $5.

    Today’s data centers have fewer staff and enterprises have more and more remote locations. Using modems can be problematic: unplug one and you are of luck. Opengear gets a lot of customers who come after experiencing issues with remote access because of unplugged phone lines.

    “All it takes is one time,” Rychecky said. “One customer had to fly from Austin [Texas] to San Francisco. The CEO saw the expense report and asked ‘why did you have to go?’  It was to fix a router he couldn’t access. So they deployed an out-of-band solution.”

    12:30p
    Friday Funny: What’s the Best Caption?

    It’s Friday! Let’s end the week with some fun and laughs. There was a lot of interest in last week’s cartoon, The Server Desk! Scroll down and vote.

    Here’s how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon and we challenge our readers to submit a humorous and clever caption that fits the comedic situation. Then, next week, our readers will vote for the best submission. The winner gets a signed cartoon print.

    Take Our Poll

    For more cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. For more of Diane’s work visit Kip and Gary‘s website.

    12:30p
    Google Acquires Popular Cloud Monitoring Firm Stackdriver

    Google has snapped up Stackdriver, a popular service that has been monitoring workloads for Amazon Web Services and Rackspace cloud platforms. The Boston-based startup will join Google’s Cloud Platform team, giving the giant some cloud talent as well as taking out a valued supporter of rival AWS.

    Stackdriver will continue to work with other clouds, but the focus will be on developing for Google.

    There has been a lot of activity by public cloud giants in the area of cloud monitoring, with providers investing more in these capabilities through buying existing services or developing their own.

    Microsoft, another major contender for cloud market share, recently made a similar acquisition, buying Greenbutton, which provides a dashboard for monitoring cloud applications, prioritizing jobs and helping to manage costs.

    AWS recently launched an in-house tool that works along similar lines called Cost Explorer. It helps drive deeper insight into cloud usage and spending on the provider’s platform.

    “I’ve been working with folks from the Stackdriver team for months, and I’ve been enormously impressed with their domain expertise, their engineering talent and their clear passion to make the lives of cloud developers better,” Toby Smith, senior manager of cloud infrastructure engineering, wrote in an entry on Google+. “I’m absolutely thrilled that they’re joining our cloud efforts.”

    Stackdriver tools monitor infrastructure, systems and applications. Customers use them to analyze things like CPU usage for predictive capabilities and minimizing downtime. It provides monitoring across a wealth of AWS services, including elastic load balancing and Dynamo databases.

     

    1:00p
    IBM SoftLayer Touts A Slew Of Global Cloud Wins

    About one year into ownership of cloud services provider SoftLayer and a few months after announcing its $1.2 billion investment in expanding the data center infrastructure that underpins those cloud services, IBM is touting customer wins that demonstrate global appeal of its cloud offering. Here is who is using IBM’s cloud services  in Saudi Arabia, India, Mexico, Malaysia, Korea and Brazil:

    The Saudi Arabia Ministry of Education is working with Mobily and IBM for managed and cloud security services, hoping to better anticipate and mitigate threats and breaches. The services are offered through IBM’s Security Operations Center hosted in Mobily’s data center.

    Extramarks, an education solutions enterprise, tapped IBM SoftLayer for a three-year engagement to expand and grow its educational-content business, improving delivery of content to thousands of K-12 students across 250 locations in India.

    ClickBalance, an online business management company based in Mexico, uses SoftLayer to run a proprietary business management system delivering online business processes and management features, such as accounting, finance, management, suppliers management, human resources and billing to more than 3,000 small and medium sized businesses in Mexico.

    LookHunters, an e-commerce site designed to sell clothing from independent designers that also has editorial content, chose SoftLayer’s cloud to support rapid increases in traffic it has been experiencing monthly.

    Malaysia’s KPJ Healthcare uses IBM’s services for a national infrastructure that provide healthcare services for more than 3 million patients.

    SK Planet, a Korean information and communications technology company, is using SoftLayer to expand its presence in the Turkish market.

    Project Funding Entity of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation of Brazil has teamed with IBM to develop a solution to manage cloud resources more efficiently and in real time.

     

     

    2:00p
    Top 5 Traits That Top Cloud Recruiters Are Seeking

    The cloud, data center and the end-user are all evolving. The way we compute and process information has completely changed over the past few years. Now, with more consumerization and a lot more cloud computing, data centers, administrators and everyone in between must adapt to new types of demands.  The movement towards the Internet-of-Things has created additional challenge for both the cloud and the modern data center.

    Mobility and data-on-demand has become the new normal. Large enterprises are already adapting their business model to be more conducive to the capabilities both the cloud and their own infrastructure.

    But what happens to the staff? How does the cloud administrator adapt to these types of changes? More specifically, what can you do today to get on the bandwagon of tomorrow?

    Large organizations and recruiters are actively changing the way they acquire talent. Technical skills, education and certifications are certainly still important. However, there are other aspects that are becoming just as important in the hiring process. Shops like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other large IT organizations are now looking at a new type of technologist to help drive innovation and IT.

    Here’s a list of what some of the largest organizations and top cloud recruiters are expecting from the next-gen technology specialist.

    Your Willingness (and Capability) to Learn

    Leading organizations which know how to lead with technology want a person who is excited about what’s next. This is the engineer, architect, manager, or executive who truly wants to envision the future of their respective technology. The blistering pace of technological evolution leaves little room for technologists who are unwilling to adapt. Taking on new challenges and learning new technologies is becoming the norm for the next-gen cloud professional.

    Your Interpersonal Communication Skills

    Because business, IT, and various IT teams are so intertwined that you will find yourself speaking to engineers, business people and entire IT teams. Although you may think this is easy, it’s really not. Hiring folks look for people who are capable of listening and interpreting the challenges and ideas of individuals as well as team members within an organization. Your ability to communicate at multiple levels is critical to your career and success. Remember, in some cases being interpersonal comes naturally; other times you might have to work at it.

    Your Personality

    Are you approachable? Do you speak up during meetings? Do you “think outside the data center?” Personality and your enthusiasm around an organization or technology gets both you and the recruiters excited. Furthermore, hiring managers love to see someone who is enthusiastic about their product or platform. Take the time to understand what an organization does. Learn their technologies and solutions. Now, are you genuinely excited about the opportunity to work with this organization? If not, maybe you should keep searching. Talent acquisition professionals actively evaluate the personality of a candidate to make sure they’re the right fit for the organization both now, and in the long run. Remember, they’re investing quite a bit in hiring you.

    Your General and Theoretical Technology Knowledge

    There’s nothing wrong with being an absolute expert in a given field. However, the interconnected nature of cloud computing and the modern data center has pretty much forced all IT people to learn some type of parallel technology. Network engineers must now better understand application that traverse their environment. Storage professionals must understand how underlying compute resources and connections impact their platform. Cloud professionals must understand everything that makes up the various cloud models, and what makes it all tick. Take the time to learn what impacts your work, even if it’s outside of your comfort zone. You don’t have to become an expert in every technology. However, having a solid theoretical understanding of how ecosystem technologies impact your technology or organization is important. The more intelligently you’re able to discuss a variety of cohesive platforms, the more of a visionary you’ll become. Remember, critical technologies now span the logical and physical. Take the time to know what’s making an impact in the cloud industry.

    Your Ability to Speak the Language of Business

    Whether you’re currently in a cloud position or are seeking something in the industry, there’s an important concept to understand. The modern business depends on technology, which basically means that IT folks now have a direct say in the flow of organizational operations. Business flow processes can be built around cloud, SaaS and other next-gen data center models. Hiring managers are looking for people who are directly capable of aligning business goals with the capabilities of technology. The big firms, which are tech-savvy, actively try to recruit IT and cloud professionals who can speak the language of business. That means seeing the big picture, explain concepts in a manner everyone can understand, and laying out a technological plan which integrates with the business.

    It’s important to note that many of these new traits are being applied to job fields all across the board. Whether you’re an engineer or working on the data center floor, you are now directly tied into the business process of your organization. There are a few very critical points to understand when it comes to the modern enterprise:

    1. IT is no longer an island within a business.
    2. Organizations are actively building their business plans around the capabilities of IT.
    3. Business leaders look to IT to enable them to do great things – and get ahead of the competition.

    Unlike the past, your business and IT model are tied at the hip. To advance in your career it’s critical for you to understand the business structure and how IT enables the entire process. As you move forward in your cloud and technology career, always think outside the box and be creative with your solutions. Ultimately, you’re helping your company optimally align business goals with the capabilities of your technology platform.

    2:30p
    Data Center Jobs: GoDaddy

    At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from GoDaddy, which is seeking a Data Center Ops Manager, Team Lead, and Technician in Ashburn, Virginia.

    The Data Center Ops Manager, Team Lead, and Technician is responsible for working in a fast-paced environment with rapidly shifting priorities while maintaining availability and uptime, must be well-versed in data center best practices, cabling standards, capacity projections, and up-to-date with the latest technologies. Attention to detail and documentation skills are critical components to success in these positions.To view full details and apply, see job listing details.

    Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed.

    3:44p
    Finding Clarity in the Information Jungle

    The data center industry is full of buzzwords these days: DCIM. Hybrid cloud. Interconnectivity. How does one sort through all the information on new technologies, and basically, “find the wheat, not the chaff”?

    A credible, well-sourced white paper can fit the bill.  We present below some of our recent white papers that can assist you in your research and help you reach informed decisions. Enjoy!

    Another good place to guide your research might be the Data Center Knowledge White Paper Library, there are a ton of resources from highly reputable, established vendors who have a vested interest in helping you bridge your information gap.

    5:02p
    Rumored Peak 10 Acquisition Could Reach $900 Million: Reuters

    logo-WHIR

    This article originally appeared at The WHIR.

    Private equity firm GI Partners is in talks to acquire Peak 10 in a deal valued between $800 million and $900 million, according to a report by Reuters on Wednesday.

    Citing sources familiar with the matter, the report says that GI Partners “has so far prevailed” in an auction for Peak 10. The cloud services and infrastructure provider has had interest from other private equity firms as well, including Cox Enterprises.

    Both sides are keeping mum on the deal, as expected. Companies typically don’t comment on acquisition rumors until the deal is finalized.

    Peak 10 is based in North Carolina, and operates 10 data centers around the world. Along with IT infrastructure, Peak 10 offers colocation services, disaster recovery, managed security, cloud services, and compliance services.

    The company was founded in 2000, and has had some notable clients including former Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow and the Professional Golfers Association of America.

    Private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe acquired a majority stake in Peak 10 in 2010.

    This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/rumored-peak-10-acquisition

    5:58p
    Music of Data Centers

    The only sounds the Internet makes on the end user side are those coming out of PC speakers or headphones – preprogrammed, prerecorded, contrived. While the boomy, echoey machine sounds of a factory making physical products is not hard to summon for anyone in their memory, your average iPhone user has no idea what the factory that produces their Facebook news feed sounds like (or that it has a sound).

    Server fan noise may be a nuisance for people working inside data centers, but for a sound artist, the seemingly monotone humming and hissing can be a complex multitimbral source of inspiration. Composer Matt Parker visits data centers around Europe, records their sounds and turns them into minimalist electronic music (scroll down to hear his work).

    He submitted the first composition in what he plans to be a series to Cities and Memory, a project that collects recordings that are representative of physical places and remixes of those sounds, in April. It is a recording of sounds from the server aisles inside a Birmingham City University data center and a piece of music using those sounds as the source.

    Here is how Parker himself described it to Cities and Memory: “I have been working on capturing recordings of data centers and turning them into compositions. I am hoping to travel to some ‘DCs’ across Europe over the course of the next year and taking their unique and intense sounds and creating some interesting sounds from them.

    “The idea is to highlight the physical nature of ‘cloud computing’ and to remind people that whilst their phones might be sat silently in their pockets, somewhere out there, a huge hive of hard drives and fans is spinning around frantically, managing our digital identities. My most recent visit was to a recently built and highly praised medium-sized data center at Birmingham City University in Edgbaston Birmingham.”

    Here is Parker’s recording of the data center:

    listen to ‘Birmingham City University, Edgbaston Campus Data Centre’ on Audioboo


    And here is the music he made out of it:

    listen to ‘Birmingham City University – Edgbaston Campus Data Centre (REMIX)’ on Audioboo

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