Friday, May 30th, 2014

Time	Event
11:30a	As Mining Demand Grows, Data Center Firms Begin Accepting Bitcoin Cyryptocurrency businesses can now use Bitcoin to purchase large chunks of data center space for their mining operations. Wholesale data center developer Server Farm Realty and colocation specialist C7 Data Centers each announced this week that they will accept customer payments in Bitcoin, the digital currency seeking to move from novelty status to payment platform. The two companies’ decision to accept Bitcoin is the latest signal that the data center industry sees an emerging opportunity in catering to the hosting needs of crypto miners, who typically seek high-density space with cheap power. C7 Data Centers, which is based in Salt Lake City, currently has about 4.5 megawatts of capacity dedicated to Bitcoin customers, according to CEO Wes Swenson. The company just brought an additional data hall online to accommodate the demand from Bitcoin-related firms, which includes miners, transaction processing firms and cryptocurrency startups. Strong demand at C7 “We have not announced that new data center yet, but it sold out within weeks of notifying interested customers,” said Swenson. “I anticipate more demand on top of the backorders we have. I would estimate that approximately 35 to 40 percent of worldwide Bitcoin mining will be originating out of C7 by the fall.” That type of demand makes it an easy decision to accept Bitcoin, as many Bitcoin-related businesses seek out vendors who accept the digital currency. “We saw no demand to pay in the currency a year ago, and now it comes up once a week,” said Swenson. “It’s easy to setup, and process, with the added bonus of low fees to do so. Compared to setting up a merchant account, Bitcoin is a snap. I can’t help but think ‘simpler is better’ when it comes to payment processing, so I have to believe (Bitcoin) adoption is going to grow rapidly.” C7 first became involved in Bitcoin with its sponsorship of the soon-to-be-released documentary “Life on Bitcoin.” Beccy Bingham, director of marketing at C7, lived and traveled the world on the digital currency with her husband for 101 days in 2013, while a film crew followed them on their journey. The project has been profiled by the BBC, NPR and the Wall Street Journal. Bitcoin goes wholesale C7 offers colocation space, where customers typically lease cabinets or cages. Server Farm Realty specializes in wholesale data center space, where companies lease entire suites of space. Only a small number of cloud mining operations – most notably PeerNova (formerly CloudHashing) – lease wholesale data center space. The acceptance of Bitcoin for colo and wholesale space marks an expansion from its early acceptance by web hosting firms, which handle smaller requirements. More than 50 web hosts currently accept Bitcoin. Server Farm Realty operates a facility in Moses Lake, Washington, a site that will be of particular interest to Bitcoin mining operations because of the extremely cheap power available in central Washington. The area has become a hotbed of Bitcoin mining activity, serving as home to multi-megawatt facilities for MegaBigPower and HashPlex. Server Farm Realty’s Titan facility is located in a hotbed of Bitcoin mining activity in central Washington state. (Image: Server Farm Realty) “Server Farm continues to find ways to make it easy for companies to work with us,” said Avner Papouchado, CEO of Server Farm Realty. “As one of the first data center owners and operators to accept Bitcoin as payment, our innovative approach to business, coupled with the leading-edge design, security and capabilities of our facilities, continue to differentiate Server Farm in the market.” Holding on to those digital coins Both C7 and Server Farm Realty said they will convert some of the Bitcoin they receive from customers into U.S. dollars, but will also hold some of their Bitcoin in anticipation that it will increase in price. Many Bitcoin enthusiasts view the cryptocurrency as an investment, hoping it will approach the peak price of more than $1,200 from last November. The value of Bitcoin has declined from that lofty goal, but recently rallied about 10 percent to reach about $565. “I plan to exchange half of my Bitcoin payments into US currency, and harbor the other half,” said Swenson of C7. “I’m pretty confident in its eventual rise in currency valuation. I’m simply gauging the interest in customers that want to pay in Bitcoin, and it seems that acceptance is growing.” Server Farm Realty will also hold some Bitcoin, according to spokesperson Jeanne Matijasevic. “SFR believes in the Bitcoin market and is a long-term player,” she said. (Comment on this)
12:00p	Equinix in Ashburn: Refining the Old, Testing the New ASHBURN, Va. – Equinix has gotten its template for a data center down to a science, and its latest DC10 and DC11 facilities here show a few modifications that hint where the company’s designs are headed in the future. DC10 represents a move away from traditional retail colocation with the introduction of Business Suites, while DC11 shows refinements of previous designs on the campus. Business Suites selling well Instead of cages, DC10 is divided into suites, or pods, that act as dedicated rooms and data centers. A recent tour revealed that all inventory in this facility is sold out except for two smaller pods. Most rooms are four times the size of one of the empty pods. One of the most recent takers of a Business Suite was Data Foundry. The Business Suites marked a departure from the traditional Equinix retail model. The A La Carte offering isn’t targeted to retail nor wholesale, it sits in the middle. The revenue per square foot for wholesale isn’t attractive to Equinix because it does not fit the company’s business model. While Business Suites have been a success, they will primarily serve to compliment retail colocation in certain markets or be a way for some customers into emerging markets. The pods are well suited to those undergoing a lot of consolidation or a tech refresh. They are also aimed to compliance- and security-minded customers that still want the “Equinix experience,” but with more privacy, control and flexibility. The only shared infrastructure is power and backup, and even then it’s only possible to have up to four customers on one backup generator. In addition to Ashburn, Equinix is building out Business Suites in Secaucus, New Jersey, set to open in 2015. The next logical step is the West Coast. “The Business Suites [offering] in DC10 opens up the conversation to a new range of customers,” said Bryson Hopkins, senior manager, Global Solutions Architects, at Equinix. “Most customers can’t grow too big to completely exit Equinix. Even social media giants that have outgrown retail colocation space still keep something in the campus due to its connectivity. Our sweet spot is still interconnection.” Inside a Business Suite in DC10 Footprints for these suites begin at 281 kVa, 2,200 square feet — enough for roughly 85 cabinets — the lower-end of the range where retail colocation and wholesale data center providers frequently compete for customers. A quarter-suite option provides space for 28 cabinets and below. An empty pod has no overhead gear. Equinix builds this out once a customer decides how they want to configure the space. Suites are customizable – the space can be utilized for racks or office space. Some customers even post their own security guards. Minor tweaks to traditional template While DC10 is a complete departure from business-as-usual for Equinix, DC11, the final building on the company’s Ashburn campus, represents the most current iteration of the traditional retail colocation facility design after years of evolution and refinement. The building is two stories. The mezzanine level houses uninterruptible power supply systems, freeing up space on the main level, where the colocation floor is. Mesh patch panels, filled with connectivity options outside of the cages is a standard sight for an Equinix facility. The panels make it easy to set up cross-connects without the provider’s staff having to physically enter the server banks. “We pre-wire the gear,” Hopkins said. “It’s particularly attractive to banks and high-frequency traders – businesses where packet transmission is sensitive.” The facility also has accommodations for larger racks and an executive briefing center. It is slab floor with higher ceilings. You can see the company experimenting with plenums in some empty space to try and further optimize airflow. DC 11 looks like it’s filling up fast. On the mezzanine level, a company called Datatility has set up an office specifically to work with Equinix customers, which illustrates Equinix’s focus on building an ecosystem within its data centers. Equinix customers seem to relish the opportunity to announce their presence. Some more visible signage includes government and enterprise hosting specialist Carpathia, who put up a sign in the line of sight of the executive office across from its floor space. Game event streaming company Twitch has splashed its branding on its server racks. Changes that will stick With completion of the Ashburn campus Equinix has further refined its data center template. Saving floor space by housing power infrastructure on a mezzanine level is a refinement it plans to keep, and the Business Suites experiment has been a success, offering a big addition to the company’s business model. This is important now, because Equinix already has a lot of retail colo footprint in the major U.S. markets, where further expansion opportunities may lie outside its traditional comfort zone. (Comment on this)
12:30p	Dept. of Energy Challenges Agencies to Improve Data Center Efficiency Continuing the pursuit of more energy efficient data centers, the U.S. government is preparing to issue a “challenge” to its agencies, as well as interested companies in the private sector, to improve energy efficiency of their data centers by 20 percent by the year 2020. The Data Center Energy Challenge is a spin on similar programs the government has conducted before for other types of buildings, William Tschudi, program director at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, said. “There was a Better Buildings Challenge, directed at commercial buildings, and it was successful,” he said. “This is a challenge specifically for data centers.” The U.S. federal government as a whole is arguably the world’s largest data center user. While nobody knows the exact amount of all data centers agencies use, a 2011 government-wide inventory pegged it at more than 3,100. In parallel to a four-year-old data center consolidation initiative, there has been a push in the government to optimize energy efficiency of the facilities that are spared from closure or facilities whose fate remains undetermined. LBNL to act as the program’s brain center The Data Center Energy Challenge is being organized by the Government Information Technology Executive Council and LBNL. The national lab will house a Center of Expertise for the program, offering guidance to agencies, setting up a protocol to track progress, analyze the progress and make recommendations for improvements. “The DoE has reached out to a few federal and private data center operators and there’s half a dozen to a dozen already signed up,” Tschudi said. While this is a federal energy program, the DoE encourages private-sector data center operators to participate as well. The department is trying to get some tech giants, such as Facebook, to sign up. LBNL’s Center of Expertise will also work with private-sector companies to help them provide tools participants in the challenge can use to meet their efficiency goals. It is also working with industry organizations, such as The Green Grid, to establish a better information pool. Attempts to legislate efficiency unsuccessful In addition to coming during a government-wide data center consolidation project, the challenge, currently in its early stages, is being developed as Congress considers legislation that would mandate federal data center energy efficiency. The House passed one of the bills, called Energy Efficiency Improvement Act of 2014, in March. It calls on regulatory agencies to create and enforce energy efficiency standards for agency data centers. Data center infrastructure equipment vendor Schneider Electric, The Greed Grid and the IT Industry Council all supported it. A sister bill, the much debated Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2014, also known as the Shaheen-Portman Bill, was killed, blocked before the Senate had a chance to vote on it. Jay Owen, vice president of IT Federal Solutions at Schneider, said none of the legislation would pass, however. “If these bills were passed, it would have accelerated initiatives.” Systemic roadblocks to better IT There are several factors preventing the government from hitting its lofty efficiency goals. “The culture of the way they’ve been built hasn’t been conducive,” Owen said. “There are departments, sub-departments, and you’re telling them they have to go and move into other facilities. There’s not a clear reporting hierarchy.” There are also budgeting issues. Budgets are passed and approved for short periods of time, making long-term projects, such as the consolidation and energy efficiency improvements, difficult to take from start to finish. One solution to the budgeting issue is an Energy Savings Performance Contract. This is where a vendor implements an efficiency solution and gets paid out of cost savings that result from the smaller electricity bill of the customer agency. (Comment on this)
4:03p	Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption for ‘Caught Up In Cables’ It’s Friday! Time to roll into the weekend with some data center levity. We received a lot of fun caption submissions for last week’s cartoon, Caught Up In Cables! 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. (Comment on this)
5:13p	Applied Micro and Canonical Demo Production Software on 64-bit ARM Server Applied Micro Circuits and Canonical demonstrated for the first time a production software deployment on 64-bit ARM architecture at an event in Taipei Friday. The demonstration used the latest OpenStack (Icehouse) release using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in a KVM virtualized environment on a server based on Applied Micro’s X-Gene System-on-Chip. The applications included Elasticsearch, SugarCRM, Kibana, Logstash, Hadoop and MediaWiki. “We are pleased to offer the first ARM 64-bit Server-on-a-Chip production silicon with full certification for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, including all the relevant server workloads and tools to allow commercial hyperscale deployments on X-Gene,” said Gaurav Singh, vice president at AppliedMicro. “The X-Gene plus Ubuntu offering means enterprises can now capture substantial TCO savings for their scale-out data centers.” Whether for hyper-scale enterprise or Internet companies, the ARM server market has potential because of the architecture’s low power requirements and the ARM partner ecosystem. With more and more enterprise applications migrating to the cloud, enterprise system vendors are shifting toward an open architecture to deliver data and services. Both Applied Micro and Canonical were early participants in the ARM Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) specification launched earlier this year. Applied Micro acquired the first architectural license for the ARM v8 64-bit architecture in 2010 and is now first to demonstrate production software on a 64-bit ARM server. The Applied Micro X-Gene is a fully integrated Server-on-a-chip (SoC). Servers using it do not need other chips, such as I/O controller hub, NIC or baseboard management controller. Applied Micro showcased the X-Gene enterprise-class ARMv8 64-bit Server SoC at the Open Compute Summit V earlier this year. Applied Micro was recently included in Canonical’s Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL). Ubuntu has been a reference operating system for the open-source cloud architecture OpenStack from early on, and Canonical hopes to build a tightly integrated enterprise stack for companies running OpenStack clouds. The Ubuntu Metal as a Service (MaaS) was used in the joint demonstration to orchestrate applications, databases and services. “Ubuntu is the primary platform for the cloud – public, private or hybrid,” aid Christian Reis, vice president of Hyperscale at Canonical. ”Working with Applied Micro, we have delivered to the ARM ecosystem the ability to orchestrate server workloads at scale. X-Gene and Ubuntu provide a perfect platform for companies considering hyperscale deployments: outstanding performance, disruptive economics and fully automated management.” (Comment on this)
5:59p	Survey: Enterprise Data Centers Fail More Often Than Colos Traditional enterprise data centers had significantly more outages that had an impact on business than did colocation data centers over a recent span of 12 months. That is another conclusion from the latest survey of data center industry professionals conducted by the Uptime Institute. We covered data center budget trends from the survey on Thursday, and today we are looking at outage-related data. Seven percent of enterprise data center operators (other than financial services companies) that were surveyed, said they had five or more “business-impacting” data center outages over 12 months. Only three percent of the colocation data center operators that were surveyed could say the same for their recent outage record. The split between enterprises and third-party data center service providers that participated in the survey was fairly even. In-house data center operators for financial service companies came in second, with six percent of such operators saying they had five or more painful outages over the past 12 months. Here’s a detailed breakdown of outage data from the slide deck of Matt Stansberry, Uptime’s director of content who presented results of the survey at the 2014 Uptime Symposium in Santa Clara, California, earlier this month: According to the survey, availability is the number-one selection criterion companies use when choosing a data center provider. Asked whether they had experienced an unscheduled outage with their data center provider, 21 percent said that they had. Majority of the enterprises surveyed said they were satisfied with their data center providers (half of them saying they were very satisfied, with the other half saying they were somewhat satisfied). Little scheduled downtime in colo contracts More than 40 percent of the participants said their contracts with colocation providers did not permit any scheduled downtime. About 30 percent said their contracts permitted between one and 12 hours of scheduled downtime per year; six percent allowed for 13 to 24 hours of downtime; two percent allowed for more than 96 hours, and two percent allowed from 24 to 48 hours. Of the financial services companies that were surveyed, 75 percent said their colocation contracts allows for zero hours of unscheduled outages. More than half of all companies surveyed said they measured the cost of data center downtime. (Comment on this)
7:10p	365 Data Centers Partners with ColoCrossing in Buffalo Managed hosting provider ColoCrossing  has formed a partnership with colocation services company 365 Data Centers. Buffalo, New York-based ColoCrossing will serve SMBs and enterprises out of the 365 Data Centers facility located in Buffalo’s Main Place Tower. In ColoCrossing, 365 Data Centers (formerly 365 Main), which has tailored its colocation offerings to the SMB market, gains a managed services partner that will help bring customers into the facility, which provides access to 22 network carriers. “365 Data Centers has a strong track record for delivering excellent reliability and customer service, and the speed at which they have delivered on their promises far surpasses other providers in the market,” Joe Robinson, vice president of corporate development at ColoCrossing, said. “We continue to see high demand in Buffalo because it is extremely strategic for our customers to be centrally located between large markets, such as Toronto, New York City and Chicago.” Buffalo economy roaring back? Both companies are citing rapid growth in the number of technology-oriented businesses in Buffalo. One of the largest IT companies pledged to add hundreds of jobs in Buffalo, they said. The company was not named, but IBM recently pledged this exact thing. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion economic development plan was also cited as a major turnaround factor. The governor committed a $1 billion investment in the area’s economy in 2012. “Thanks to local economic development initiatives, we have seen Buffalo begin to transform into the newest technology hub of the east,” said John Scanlon, CEO of 365 Data Centers. “Working closely with local companies, such as ColoCrossing, is the cornerstone of our business, because we truly believe the data center is a key to accelerating business growth on a local level.” 365′s SMB strategy working 365 Data Centers’ namesake comes from the iconic 365 Main facility in San Francisco, now owned by Digital Realty Trust. In 2012, 365 Main co-founders Chris Dolan and James McGrath resurrected the brand by acquiring 16 data centers from Equinix, seeing an opportunity to create a “national player with a local focus.” The deal worked out perfectly for Equinix, as it was looking to divest some facilities by Switch and Data, a company it bought in 2009. The data centers it sold to 365 Main did not fit into its overall strategy of serving top-tier markets. Last year, 365 Main added a data center in Emeryville, California, previously operated by a company called Evocative, bringing its portfolio to 17 facilities. It also undertook a a branding and strategy change, taking its current name and ditching multi-year colocation contracts in favor of month-to-month contracts, which are more attractive for SMBs in emerging markets.  Their goal is to optimize their offerings for small businesses, making colocation as user-friendly as possible. (Comment on this)

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