Tuesday, May 13th, 2014

Time	Event
11:00a	Akamai Becomes First DE-CIX New York Customer Akamai, one of the leading content delivery network providers, has become the first customer of the new Deutsche Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX) Internet exchange at 111 8th. Ave. in New York — a Google-owned building that is one of the most important carrier hotels in the U.S. and home to many data centers. DE-CIX NY is part of the European interconnection wave hitting U.S. shores. In addition to DE-CIX, Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) has launched an exchange in New York and London Internet Exchange (LINX) is launching the LINX NoVa exchange across several sites in northern Virginia. A big reason behind the European interconnection movement coming to American shores is Open-IX. This is an organization seeking to adopt the European model for Internet exchanges to the North American market. Its aim is to create a new network of Internet exchange points (IXPs), creating neutral, member-governed exchanges that allow participants to trade traffic. The group is embracing a non-profit model that is widely used in Europe and spreads exchange operations across multiple data centers in a market. In the past, the European open model for Internet exchanges has struggled to establish itself in North America. In the current U.S. model, data center operators operate commercial exchanges, serving primarily their own on-campus tenants or connecting customers with passive Private Interconnects (PIs). This has resulted in a concentration of exchange activity at locations controlled by a handful of providers, most notably Equinix. Akamai is a longstanding DE-CIX customer in Europe and the Middle East and is a big name to land for the newly established exchange. The CDN operator has the potential to make peering there more attractive for others. Akamai started delivering data packets over DE-CIX New York on May 9. Steven Schecter, senior manager of network architecture at Akamai, said, “Having this new Internet exchange in New York will enable us to connect with other peering partners across a resilient Ethernet platform.” DE-CIX NY recently introduced the Apollon platform, which is an Ethernet interconnection platform which consists of a 100 Gigabit Ethernet-capable switching system that supports a large number of 100 GE ports across the switching fabric. One port from a DE-CIX site now delivers access to any other customer at the same site or 110 other locations in the New York metro and more than 600 customers at the operator’s primary Frankfurt exchange. DE-CIX NY was first announced in September 2013 and first opened for customer orders in November 2013. Its New York area Internet exchange has scaled across more than 100 access points across Manhattan, New Jersey and Long Island. (Comment on this)
11:30a	Internap Launches OpenStack-Powered Public Cloud Internap has become the latest data center services provider to launch a public cloud service built using the open source cloud infrastructure software OpenStack. The company has offered public cloud services before, but the new AgileCLOUD platform ensures better operability with other OpenStack-based clouds through the OpenStack API. “We’ve had a cloud offering for some time, but with this step we’re taking a different approach by going the open source route,” Adam Weissmuller, director of product management for cloud and hosting at Internap, said. ”We’ve had the AgileCLOUD platform, but it was built on a proprietary API. If you think back several years ago, there were very few standards. Going from provider to provider often required learning a new language, making it difficult to move. With OpenStack it’s an interoperable cloud.” Weissmuller noted the company had customers on the platform’s beta version for several months prior to the general-availability launch. “We were getting live feedback throughout the process,” he said. “We have production workloads on day one with this offering.” The service is currently hosted at Internap’s Dallas data center, but the company plans to roll it out worldwide – including eastern and western U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific – over the remainder of 2014. Bare-metal configurations will be available during the summer. AgileCLOUD is one of the first cloud services available through the OpenStack Marketplace, announced this week at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, Ga. Exposing the API is a key criteria for inclusion in the OpenStack Foundation’s new public cloud marketplace, which serves as a repository of OpenStack products and services. The public cloud is just a piece of a wider portfolio of Internap services, which also include colocation, managed services and bare-metal servers. Christian Primeau, senior vice president and general manager of cloud and hosting at Internap, said building the offering on OpenStack enabled the company to integrage core features, such as hybridization. ” The result is an advanced open cloud computing solution that allows customers to meet a full range of workload needs, from large-scale, distributed environments to real-time, data-intensive applications,” he said. There are several performance tiers and custom configurations on AgileCLOUD. Customers choose from three configuration series depending on performance requirements: two based on virtual instances and a bare-metal option. Networked (persistent) storage is based on an SSD-imbued SAN. Each volume has a guaranteed number of IOPS to prevent the “noisy neighbor” problem, which occurs when one application or virtual machine hogs bandwidth and affects performance for others on the physical host server. Internap also provides a performance optimization service, called Managed Internet Route Optimizer,  which analyzes network characteristics and continuously adjusts for highest traffic performance. Internap has been a contributor to the OpenStack project since 2010.  The company says it has contributed more than 160 OpenStack commits to date and is among the top 30 contributors to the Essex, Folsom, Grizzly and Havana releases.   (Comment on this)
12:00p	Microsoft Adds Private Azure Links at 37 European Data Centers London-based data center provider TelecityGroup announced availability of Microsoft ExpressRoute, the service that offers private network links to Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, in 37 data center locations across Europe. ExpressRoute bypasses the public Internet, giving customers better security and network performance when using the public cloud services. Microsoft’s biggest public cloud rival Amazon Web Services has a similar offering called AWS Direct Connect. The direct links to Azure will be available on TelecityGroup’s cloud-neutral Cloud-IX platform. The provider’s CEO Michael Tobin said, “Offering our customers direct connections to Microsoft Azure, via our Cloud-IX platform, strengthens and improves the already rich ecosystem found in our data centers, and offers businesses a choice of cloud solutions that best suits their specific business needs.” Steven Martin, general manager of Microsoft Azure, said ExpressRoute made it easier for customers to deploy hybrid clouds that use Azure. “We look forward to expanding access to Azure, via Cloud-IX and Azure ExpressRoute, through TelecityGroup’s extensive data center footprint,” he said. Zadara Connects to Azure and AWS at Equinix facilities U.S. based colocation giant Equinix also recently announced availability of Azure ExpressRoute in its data centers. This week, the company highlighted one of the most recent customers to use the service at Equinix data centers. The customer is Zadara Storage, a provider of software defined storage solutions that connect on-premise storage infrastructure with cloud storage. Zadara’s Virtual Private Storage Arrays are colocated at Equinix facilities where they are connected through high-speed fiber lines directly to Azure. The company’s platform connects to AWS as well. (Comment on this)
12:20p	View from the Cloud: Bringing Technologies Together Preeti Nirwal  is Product manager at Hostway Corporation. Cloud computing remains one of the hottest trends in modern technology. Analysts at IDC predict that global spending on public cloud services, just one sector of the cloud, will top $100 billion in 2017, growing five times as quickly as the IT industry as a whole. But as the sector experiences this swift growth, cloud technology itself is evolving. The very definition of “cloud” has expanded beyond the basics of processing, memory and storage. As cloud computing and services become more entrenched in SMB and enterprise operations, the cloud is bringing multiple technologies together in a manner that is changing the way companies conduct business. From Simple Cloud to “As a Service” Packages Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the fundamental core of cloud offerings, drove strong growth from its inception due to its flexibility and scalability in delivering expanded capabilities without an upfront hardware investment. Soon, elements such as runtime, API and web server assets were added to create Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which allowed developers and software vendors to create applications and scale resources via virtualization. With Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the circle was complete, as end users could run applications on virtual machines. So what does this evolution mean to cloud services users? Many leading analysts see it as a shift from efficiency-driven cloud adoption to the use of cloud services as a competitive differentiator. Frank Gens, SVP and Chief Analyst at IDC, notes that the “emergence of cloud as the core for new ‘business as a service’ offerings” will drive greater cloud adoption and significantly increase the model’s strategic value, delivering an edge to C-level executives of all types, not just CIOs. The Ever-Changing Cloud Market An analysis of the cloud market confirms that the availability of more cloud deployment options and the growing variety of services drive interest, recognizing benefits beyond the initial boosts to efficiency and scalability. While concerns about security have prevented some customers from moving to public cloud services, the growing popularity of virtual private cloud and multi-tenant public cloud options signify greater confidence in the increased security and privacy protections those models offer, accelerating interest and clearing the way for the next stage of cloud growth, which is expected to be more user friendly. The rise of open-source public cloud infrastructure supports this trend by providing a foundation that allows third parties to build scalable servers, networks and storage systems while empowering users to deploy native programming languages. The use of open-source technology enables contributions by multiple programmers and allows users within the community to support one another. This sets the stage for innovation by supporting the creation and continuous improvement of new cloud-based products. As the cloud market evolves, considerable uncertainty remains about the direction it will ultimately move – will public or private cloud become pre-eminent? Will open-source or proprietary development win out? Open-source public cloud proponents tout the innovation and independence users enjoy when not tied to changeable vendor protocols. On the other hand, open-source public cloud opponents cite fears of a lack of expeditious security updates within collaborative user communities. But one aspect of the move to the cloud that is not under debate is its ability to unite diverse technologies. Although it can be difficult to precisely predict the shape cloud services will take, the cloud’s ability to expand possibilities for businesses of all sizes may ultimately prove as transformational as any development since the launch of the Internet. 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)
12:30p	EMC Intros VMware-Integrated Hybrid Cloud Solution EMC launched a new hybrid cloud solution and a Software-a-a-Service offering built on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Enterprise PaaS during last week’s EMC World conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. EMC owns about 60 percent of Pivotal, the rest of the software startup belonging VMware (of which EMC also owns a controlling stake) and GE. Hybrid Cloud The solution is an end-to-end reference architecture built on EMC’s private cloud products. The vendor said it allowed customers to integrate with multiple public clouds to create a unified hybrid cloud. It simplifies combining private clouds with compatible on-demand services from EMC-powered Cloud Service Providers. It includes EMC’s storage and data protection products, Pivotal CF PaaS and big data suite VMware‘s cloud management and virtualization solutions, as well as its vCloud Hybrid Service. The federated solution currently supports VMware environments but will eventually also support OpenStack and Microsoft environments, according to EMC. “With today’s announcement of the EMC Hybrid Cloud solution, we are delivering the industry’s best method for IT to deliver added value to the business while evolving itself to a broker of services ­- whether in-house or from a public cloud,” Josh Kahn, senior vice president of global solutions marketing for EMC, said. EMC Supplier Exchange The company also announced its first industry-specific public SaaS solution, EMC Supplier Exchange, which extends Documentum-based private cloud solutions to enable collaboration with the extended enterprise. The exchange is powered by Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry PaaS and is designed specifically for the energy and engineering industry. It integrates with EMC Documentum Capital Projects to extend support for existing business processes and interaction with critical business documents, deliverables and transmittals. (Comment on this)
1:00p	Software Defined Storage Startup Maxta Raises $25M Maxta, provider of a VM-centric storage platform that turns standard servers into a converged compute and storage solution for virtualized environments, has closed a $25 million Series B funding round. Two new investors, Tenaya Capital and Intel Capital, led the round in addition to Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed the company in the past. The company is working with Intel to develop a converged platform optimized for x86 architectures. The storage world is undergoing great changes, one of which the trend of software defined storage. The idea is to adopt the principles of server virtualization to abstract and pool together physical storage resources, which can have a positive impact on cost and agility when deploying storage systems. “Server virtualization enabled the creation of a very efficient compute platform that is easy to manage and scale,” Yoram Novick, Maxta founder, president and CEO, wrote in a post on a company blog following the announcement. “As most of you know very well, due to the benefits of server virtualization, the main bottleneck of the virtual data center these days is predominantly storage. Storage didn’t keep up with the improvements that took place at the compute end.” Maxta’s storage platform MxSP is software-based and hypervisor-agnostic, according to the vendor. It integrates with server virtualization at all levels, from user interface to data management, while supporting a variety of possible deployments of virtual data centers, including private, public and hybrid clouds. Maxta is working with Intel because x86 architecture is the backbone of all major server virtualization platforms. The partnership is working on business development, marketing and optimizing MxSP technology to deliver converged software-defined storage for Intel-based platforms. “Having Intel, a world-class technology leader, work with Maxta to provide customers with the most efficient storage solution for the virtual data center supports the approach we are delivering to the enterprise storage marketplace, and realization of the tremendous benefits of software-defined storage,” Novick wrote. “Maxta will use this opportunity to tap into Intel’s significant engineering and marketing resources to provide superior VM-centric storage solutions.” (Comment on this)
2:00p	3 Key Ways to Increase Energy Efficiency in Your Data Center It’s time to go green. Every data center is looking to cut power consumption, while maintaining the highest level of service. But achieving real energy efficiency is easier said than done. Sprawling and convoluted infrastructures make it hard to discern power usage effectiveness (PUE) and data center infrastructure efficiency (DCIE). Data centers end up “flying blind” when it comes to really understanding and optimizing power consumption. Let’s pause for a second and take a quick quiz: How many of these functions related to energy management can you currently perform? Align power delivered to SLA performance. Know which rack has the required amount of power to handle new equipment. Identify trapped capacity along the power chain. Identify unnecessarily powered idle equipment. Have nameplate, derated and actual power consumption documented. Receive real-time alerts when capacity thresholds are exceeded. Recognize consumption at each point in the power chain. Manage power based on current capacity model, actual consumption and projected growth/need. In this whitepaper from Emerson, we are able to learn about the key guidelines that can help you better understand and manage your power consumption. The conversation includes topics around: Creating a comprehensive inventory model of your data center Making the power chain visible Continuously, proactively, monitoring your data center Much more! Here’s the reality: Achieving optimal energy efficiency requires detailed understanding about the data center’s power chain. As your data center continues to evolve, there will be even more requirements to monitor and control critical resources. In this case, creating powerful energy efficiencies not only creates cost savings – it also allows your platform to continuously run more optimally. Download this whitepaper today to see how with the right tools – you’re able to deliver comprehensive, real-time data about resources, their relationships and dependencies, and how you can better calculate power consumption to ensure the lowest PUE at optimal availability. Furthermore, it’s always critical to understand true capacity to improve planning and resource allocation; as well as optimize the use of existing assets to reduce energy costs and comply with green initiatives while delivering the highest level of service. (Comment on this)
2:00p	Rackspace: We’re Not After Amazon’s, Google’s, Microsoft’s Cloud Customers While acknowledging that recent dramatic price cuts by public-cloud giants were a reality Rackspace could not ignore, the company’s executives said they were going after a set of end users that was distinctly different from those contenders in the race to ‘zero’ are targeting. Reporting results for an unsurprisingly slow first quarter, Rackspace CEO Graham Weston said the recent announcements of massive reductions in rates for Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings by Amazon, Microsoft and Google were just the latest example of long-standing strategies providers of raw compute capacity had. “Our business has always been about more than just renting out access to infrastructure,” he said on a conference call with investors Monday. While the big players add value in the form of low infrastructure cost through economy of scale, Rackspace’s strategy has always been to add value through infrastructure-management expertise. Rackspace President Taylor Rhodes said the company was not focused on serving developers that can deploy and manage IaaS resources they need themselves. Many businesses want an expert service provider that can help them pick the best infrastructure for their specific applications, as well as deploy and manage that infrastructure. “The ability to help customers really run a hybrid cloud system … is an important differentiator for us in the market,” Rhodes said. “None of our larger competitors offer the selection of hybrid solutions we include in our portfolio.” Depending on the service, the IaaS price cuts Google announced in March ranged between 30 and 85 percent. Amazon followed almost immediately by slashing prices by 10 to 61 percent, and Microsoft quickly responded with a plan to lower cloud rates by up to 65 percent for some services. As giants for whom IaaS is only one area where they do business leveraged the size of their infrastructure to undercut the rest the cloud market on price, the big question became, ‘Where does that leave companies like Rackspace, for whom infrastructure services are a core business?’ Rackspace executives spent most of their first-quarter earnings call on addressing this question. Their core message was that services and expertise offered enough differentiation to address a different market need than the demand for cheap raw compute power. “The price cuts really affect the unmanaged infrastructure portion of the market,” Taylor said. As cloud is becoming commonplace, few enterprises will want to hire people who can set up and manage their own hybrid cloud environments. These are the customers Rackspace is after. In Taylor’s view, nearly all cloud infrastructure services customers will eventually fall into one of those two buckets: the cloud-savvy customers that make up the bulk of Amazon’s customer base and the companies that choose to outsource cloud expertise to a provider like Rackspace. He said the company was competing for customers in the latter category with the likes of IBM SoftLayer, Verizon Terremark and CenturyLink Technology Services. Rackspace reported $421 million in revenue for the first quarter – up 16 percent year over year. Profit on that revenue was $25 million – down from $27 million the company reported for the first quarter of 2013. (Comment on this)
7:02p	Brocade and Huawei Propose OpenStack Solution for Multitenant, Multi-site Clouds Networking giant Brocade is proposing a new OpenStack service to simplify manageability and efficiency of inter-data center multitenancy for cloud service providers or companies with geographically distributed pools of shared resources. The proposal, which Brocade developed jointly with Huawei and announced this week at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, Ga., is for a flexible and automated solution that addresses the challenge of maintaining connectivity and policy context for virtual machines migrating between data centers. The proposal hopes to bridge orchestration of physical and virtual resources, which is a key challenge for companies using multiple data centers as a distributed pool of resources accessed on demand. The proposed OpenStack service would introduce capabilities to implement inter-data center multitenant services or to migrate tenant services from one data center to another. One potential use case for such workload mobility could be a follow-the-moon strategy for energy savings, where IT workloads are executed according to geographical variations in energy costs. The proposed service includes multiple API extensions for provider edge, attachment circuits, tunnels, and MPLS VPN service, all using the OpenStack Neutron Service Type Framework. Brocade has made numerous contributions to OpenStack and has been actively optimizing its data center networking portfolio for the open-source cloud platform. Since joining OpenStack in 2011 the company has also been taking part in the Open Networking Foundation and OpenDaylight — groups promoting open software defined networking technology. The company is also working towards enhancing the networking subsystem of OpenStack to support network function virtualzation and multivendor environments. Brocade CTO Ken Cheng said the company valued innovation that came out of the OpenStack developer community. ”Public and private clouds are still evolving, so Brocade continues to prioritize projects such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight to enhance the orchestration and control framework for cloud infrastructure and services,” he said. The company provides plugins to Neutron networking layers of OpenStack and has worked with ecosystem partners, such as Canonical, HP, Mirantis, Piston Cloud, Rackspace and Red Hat, to develop OpenStack enhancements. Cisco, Brocade’s largest competitor, has been involved with OpenStack as well and has grown its own set of ecosystem partners in working to enhance networking layers within OpenStack. OpenStack is an open cloud platform, however, and vendors are looking to further abstract networking layers in the form of a policy blueprint. Brocade is addressing inter-data center multitenancy, while Cisco is developing an application-centric interface to Neutron to compliment its own network-centric interface. Huawei, the Chinese networking multinational collaborating with Brocade on the latest proposal, became an OpenStack Gold member late last year, when the OpenStack foundation held its first summit in Asia. The company has made contributions to the open source cloud codebase for storage. Its joint effort with Huawei strengthens its integration possibilities for Neutron networking layers and gives it an opportunity for more contributions to the open source movement, which many of its competitors are involved in. (Comment on this)
9:37p	Alibaba’s Cloud Business Expands With Hong Kong Data Center AliCloud, the cloud services arm of Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group, has launched a data center in Hong Kong, which will be its first data center outside of mainland China. The provider, also known as Aliyun, has teamed up with Towngas, Hong Kong’s largest gas utility, to build the data center, according to a report by Alizila, an Alibaba-owned news website that covers the company and the e-commerce industry. The news comes about one week after the company announced the launch of a data center in Beijing – its third mainland-China location. The provider, whose parent company filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering on U.S. markets earlier this month, is planning to expand internationally, and the Hong Kong data center is the first step. The facility will serve the Greater China region and Southeast Asia. The company is also eyeing expansion in the U.S. Already a major competitor to U.S.-based e-commerce and cloud giants in China, Alibaba’s potential U.S. expansion would bring another big player into the North American market. Aliyun’s other two mainland-China data centers are in Hangzhou and Qingdao. While it is expanding its physical footprint outside of China, the move is targeted primarily at Customers located in China. According to the Alizila report, customers using compute services outside of the country were subject to regulations in the countries where the infrastructure was hosted. Using “offshore” AliCloud servers in Hong Kong would “simplify” operations for these customers, the company reportedly said, although it was not clear whether that meant AliCloud servers rented outside of China would be subject to Chinese regulations. An Alibaba spokesperson declined to comment, saying the company was in its pre-IPO “quiet period,” in which companies are precluded from making public statements. “We are not taking interviews on this at this time as we are in a quiet period,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. Alibaba’s is expected to be the biggest IPO on U.S. markets since Facebook’s $16 billion float in 2012. The offering is expected to yield between $15 billion and $20 billion for the company. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the offering will be Yahoo, which owns about 23 percent of the company. Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba is the second largest after Japanese telco SoftBank’s 34 percent stake. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2014/05/13 [Calendar]

Next Day >>