Wednesday, June 4th, 2014

Time	Event
7:00a	Canonical and Mirantis Partner On Enterprise OpenStack Canonical and Mirantis, both OpenStack distribution providers, announced they were partnering to accelerate enterprise adoption of OpenStack, the open source cloud architecture. The two are collaborating on private cloud solutions based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu GuestOS. The partnership means investment in continuously testing compatibility between Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu to ensure that Mirantis OpenStack distribution works seamlessly with Ubuntu.  The companies said they will collaborate to offer an OpenStack solution that is fully supported, secure and ready for production workloads. This adds flexibility and security from Mirantis with the Ubuntu operating system, which currently has a sizable share of the totality of OpenStack instances deployed. This partnership allows customers to benefit from having another proven and supported OpenStack cloud solution but also demonstrates how vendors can team up to boost interoperability in the open source ecosystem. “As the leading provider of scale-out and open cloud solutions we are committed to interoperability and freedom from vendor lock-in”, said John Zannos, vice president of Cloud Alliances at Canonical.  “We support Ubuntu in the Ubuntu OpenStack distribution and, as part of this strategic relationship with Mirantis, will support Ubuntu in Mirantis OpenStack. This collaboration will further encourage adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise, and working together is a testament to our belief in interoperability and customer choice.“ Mirantis will offer enterprise customers a commercial bundle that will include subscription to Mirantis OpenStack with support for Ubuntu host and guest instances. Mirantis and Canonical will integrate support operations to provide a consistent service level agreement and seamless support escalation path for customers. “As OpenStack adoption moves from proof-of-concept trials and pilots into production, offering support for operating systems becomes critical,” said Boris Renski, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Mirantis. “Ubuntu is the most popular Linux platform used in OpenStack, and we expect this partnership to give Mirantis OpenStack customers additional confidence in production use cases.” The ARM ecosystem on OpenStack is widening, with many making bets on the low power requirements of ARM architecture and its role in the future data center. This is behind Canonical and Ubuntu also announcing expanded support for the ThunderX SoC Family from Cavium. Ubuntu says it is the first commercial-grade platform for ARM64 computing with optimized integration for the ThunderX SoC Family. Canonical and Applied Micro recently demoed production software on a 64-bit ARM server as well. (Comment on this)
11:00a	Digital Realty Launches Marketplace for Cloud Services Digital Realty Trust has launched a web portal where its data center tenants will be able to buy cloud infrastructure services from its other tenants who offer them. The Global Cloud Marketplace, built by Digital’s partner ComputeNext, is a central interface through which companies can spin up virtual machines and cloud storage resources from the likes of IBM SoftLayer and Internap as needed, get billed and pay for the use. The announcement by Digital Realty, essentially a specialized real estate developer, is yet another indication that the lines between traditional data center provider business models are blurring. Retail colocation providers, such as Equinix and Telx, have established similar cloud marketplaces for their customers. Equinix, which has traditionally specialized in retail colo, has been experimenting with selling larger chunks of space, and wholesale data center providers like Digital Realty, or its rival on the U.S. market DuPont Fabros Technology, have added retail colocation products in some of the facilities in their portfolios. Companies that have traditionally been providers of data center space, power and cooling are now also hosts and enablers of service provider ecosystems. Adam Levine, vice president of strategic alliances at Digital Realty, said the move was a recognition by the San Francisco-based developer that the market was moving toward hybrid environments, where traditional private data center infrastructure was mixed with cloud resources. “It’s more about offering as wide a spectrum of services as possible,” he said. Partnering to stay focused on core As they expand into different layers of the stack, most data center companies prefer to do it through partnerships with other providers, as Digital Realty did with ComputeNext. The approach gives it a way to offer its customers cloud options without having to build the necessary technical capabilities. “We’re still Digital Realty and we know what our core business is,” Levine said. Competing with own customers Because providers like Equinix and Telx are also its tenants, Digital Realty has to tread carefully in introducing products that are potentially competitive with some of its own customers’ products. Equinix is responsible for three percent of Digital Realty’s income from rent, while Telx is responsible for four percent, according to a June fact sheet the company created for investors. Both tenants also have cloud service marketplaces for their clients. Commenting on the need to keep this balance, Levine said the decision was driven by demand from the company’s enterprise customers. “It’s logical that Equinix has a product like this,” he said. “They were always a little bit further up the stack than we have.” Not all cloud tenants on marketplace There are also some big cloud providers that use Digital Realty data centers but are not part of its new initiative. CenturyLink is responsible for eight percent of Digital Realty’s rent income; IBM pays six percent; Verizon and Sungard each represent two percent. Of the four, IBM is the only one represented on the new marketplace. Besides IBM SoftLayer and Internap the marketplace offers services by GoGrid, Interoute and SingleHop. Levine said he expected the list to grow from five to 10 providers by the end of 2014, however. While there are some Software-as-a-Service offerings on the marketplace, it is currently weighted heavily toward Infrastructure-as-a-Service – raw on-demand virtual compute and storage resources. Also separately from the marketplace, Digital Realty’s customers can establish private connections to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure clouds through Level 3 Communications, a network carrier that has agreements with the two IaaS giants. There are currently no plans to integrate those services into the marketplace. (Comment on this)
12:00p	Server Technology Wins PDU Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Schneider’s APC Server Technology, a Reno, Nevada-based vendor of power distribution gear for data centers, has been granted a $10.8 million award in what has been a seven-and-a-half-year patent infringement lawsuit with American Power Conversion Corp., a subsidiary of the French industrial giant Schneider Electric. The two patents in question cover innovations in products that are core to Server Technology’s business. Its CEO Brandon Ewing said the CWG series of plug strips was responsible for about 40 percent of the company’s revenue. The series consists of more than 60 products. The technology covered by the patents is a combination of four things: a vertical one-piece power distribution plug strip, relays behind the receptacles for switching, remote current monitoring system and a digital numeric current display on the strip itself. “It’s the combo of those four elements that makes up the basis for the patent,” Ewing said. Schneider did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. The Rueil-Malmaison, France-based electricity distribution and automation management company announced plans to buy APC in October 2006 — about two months before Server Technology filed its complaint. APC products named in the lawsuit were its AP7900 series and AP8900 series vertical switched power distribution units. The damages award for Server Technology was part of a jury verdict in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Nevada. Ewing said he did not know whether Schneider was planning to appeal the decision or whether the rival would discontinue the two product families. “These are decisions that somebody from APC needs to make,” he said. “The verdict really represents what would be a reasonable royalty for the products that have been infringed.” The inventor behind the patents was Ewing’s late father and Server Technology founder Carrel Ewing. Server Technology filed for one of the patents in 2001 and for the other in 2006. (Comment on this)
12:30p	Want to Grow Your Business? Think DCIM Integration Lara Greden is a senior principal, strategy, at CA Technologies. You can follow her on Twitter at @laragreden. In April, we examined the requirements for integrating data from a multitude of sources for power, cooling and other facilities related assets in the data center, so now let’s hone in on the importance of your DCIM software integrating with other critical systems in your environment. If you are exploring which DCIM solution is right for your organization, chances are you are looking to undertake this project to more effectively manage risk and help drive growth for your business. So to support these efforts, it is imperative that you understand what the solution’s integration capabilities are with other strategic systems and applications in your environment. Integration with IT Service Management Gaining rapid problem resolution with automated and integrated system communications to address problems and manage risk is core to any data center operating plan. So integration with IT Service Management solutions is a crucial functionality to have if you are looking to track changes in the environment across system and groups via service desk tickets and change management solutions. By integrating your DCIM implementation with your service management systems, you can simplify and unify common operational processes. Also, by integrating with IT Service Management systems, your DCIM solution can empower you to use information across different parts of the infrastructure to quickly find answers to problems. For example, to troubleshoot a slow internet issue, instead of passing the blame from one group to the next, some DCIM software solutions can show if the root-cause is related to a power, network, router, or equipment issue. In addition, the alerting engine in your DCIM solution can uncover signs of problem assets that require maintenance and open a ticket for investigation or assign a service technician to fix the issue. Integration with Business Growth Many organizations that invest in DCIM do so not only to better address risk, but also to support their strategic data center plan which ultimately is to enable business growth. Thus the need to manage data center capacity to support this growth makes capacity management one of the core functions – with supporting software tools – with which your DCIM solution must integrate.  A complete approach to capacity management is crucial to managing risk and availability in supporting delivery of new applications. For example, Facebook defined and implemented DCIM technology to accommodate 42 use cases. In the article, author Rich Miller notes that Facebook’s overall data center management strategy integrates DCIM with several in-house tools, including Cluster Planner, which is used in planning and deploying entire clusters. So what does this all mean? It means that not only do you need DCIM to integrate with capacity and business growth enablers, but you need it to be central to those goals. Your DCIM implementation should support your efforts to align IT and data center resources with current and future demands on the business. After all, when you are faced with a request to support an expanding range of business services or applications, you don’t want to be dealing with the pain of managing in siloes – IT on one side and Facilities on the other side. When investing in a DCIM implementation, be sure to take the time to go beyond power, space and cooling, and understand how it fits into your organization’s overall management of resources and be sure to include network, storage, and server capacity on this list. With this mindset you will be sure to undergo a DCIM implementation that not only integrates, but rather, is integral to your strategy and the growth of your business. 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)
5:17p	Cloudera Deepens Hadoop Security Play With Gazzang Acquisition Cloudera, one of the more prominent Apache Hadoop distribution vendors, has acquired a startup called Gazzang in an enterprise security play for an undisclosed sum. Gazzang provides enterprise-grade data encryption and key management, addressing the challenges of processing sensitive and legally protected data within the Hadoop ecosystem. The startup’s team will stay aboard to tackle additional security challenges in Hadoop, forming the heart of the Cloudera Center for Security Excellence. Hadoop is growing in popularity among enterprises, and distribution providers for the open source distributed data storage and processing system are working to simplify it and boost its security to open market potential further. The need for better security was heightened following addition of the YARN resource-management tier in Hadoop 2 last year. YARN allows multiple workloads to run on Hadoop, and customers have requested simple centralized security following its release. This is the impetus behind Cloudera’s acquisition of Gazzang as well as its competitor Hortonworks’ acquisition of XA Secure in May. Gazzang’s encryption and key management help fulfill requirements of several compliance regulations, such as HIPAA-HITECH, PCI-DSS, FERPA and the EU Data Protection Directive. Cloudera now offers encryption for all data at rest stored inside a Hadoop cluster. Its approach is transparent to applications using the data, minimizing encryption costs. Cloudera customers also have the choice of a broad range of cross-platform data protection methods from the vendor’s partners. Cloudera is continuing to invest in the open source community to support and accelerate security features into project Rhino—an open source effort founded by big Cloudera backer Intel in early 2013. Project Rhino is a broad based open source security architecture that looks to address many of the major enterprise security pillars, including perimeter security, entitlements, access control and data protection. “Data security is no longer a check-box for IT organizations or operations departments, it has become a top business priority,” said Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera. “At the same time compliance requirements for protecting data continue to expand in scope where data access comes under scrutiny. We’re entering a whole new era with the rise of the Industrial Internet and the Internet of Things where there is vastly more data being streamed from billions of devices. Centralizing and accessing that net-new data to unlock its value is therefore a challenge when you consider the security requirements. That’s what we’re solving now.” The Cloudera Center for Security Excellence will work on comprehensive data and cluster security technologies, security testing and enabling a partner ecosystem for certification and security. It is a three-pronged approach to raising security policies, ensuring education and securing integrations through APIs and certifying partner products. Cloudera laid out a security roadmap last year when it delivered Sentry, an independent security module that provides fine-grained authorization to data stored in Hadoop. Hadoop for enterprises is a busy and competitive market, but Cloudera, with $900 million in funding and backing from Intel, is considered one of the strongest players in the field. Intel CIO stengthens Cloudera’s board of directors Intel CIO Kim Stevenson was recently appointed to Cloudera’s board of directors, following the closing of the most recent round of funding. Stevenson is responsible for the corporate-wide use of IT for all of Intel, a company that consists of more than 6,000 technology professionals worldwide. The $900 million round includes $530 million of primary capital and $370 million of shares purchased from existing Cloudera investors. In total, Cloudera has raised $670 million of primary capital since its inception. “We are honored and thrilled to welcome Kim Stevenson to the Cloudera board,” Reilly said. “Kim’s experience and strategic role as CIO of Intel are particularly valuable as she represents the voice of the customer and has a deep understanding of how data and insight can transform businesses.  We look forward to Kim’s addition to the team building a world class organization.” In addition to Intel, Stevenson has held positions at EDS, HP and IBM. “Together, Cloudera and Intel have committed to bring innovation to enterprise data management,” she said. “We are enabling the next generation of enterprise data through enterprise data hubs – a single central system to store and analyze all data – with leading technology to both drive IT efficiency and enable the monetization of big data. I look forward to working with the Cloudera board and management team to pursue this substantial growth opportunity.”   (Comment on this)
5:47p	Cavium Launches Line of Workload-Optimized 64-bit ARM Server SoCs At the Computex conference in Taipei this week semiconductor company Cavium launched ThunderX, a 2.5 GHz 48-core, 64-bit ARMv8 System-on-Chip (SoC) family of workload- and power-optimized processors tailored for high-performance volume compute, storage, secure compute and networking-specific workloads. ARM ecosystem starting to see production hardware Cavium has been one of the companies building solutions for the ARM Server Base System Architecture, and goes beyond the typical low-power server focus with an alternative offering to rival Intel Xeon systems. AMD has been active in the ARM market with an eight-core ARM server SoC as well. It has contributed its ARM microserver design to the Open Compute Project — the open source hardware and data center design community spearheaded by Facebook. Applied Micro, with its X-Gene family of 64-bit SoC solutions, is another major player in the game. “The ARM ecosystem is radically expanding the realms of possibility for cloud and data center infrastructure,” said Simon Segars, CEO of ARM. “ThunderX is an innovative implementation of the ARMv8-A architecture. Together with ARM’s Server Based System Architecture standard, it will accelerate the deployment of workload-optimized ARM-based systems and transform the pace of innovation in the data center.” As a fifth generation of multi-core processor design from Cavium, the ThunderX CN88XX family of processors is designed using a 28-nanometer process and under architectural license from ARM. The chips are cache-coherent across dual sockets using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect and feature a standards-based low-latency Ethernet fabric, interconnecting thousands of ThunderX nodes in 2D and 3D configurations. ThunderX also has Cavium virtSOC technology, which has full system virtualization for low latency from virtual machine to I/O. “Cavium has leveraged its multiple generations of world-class IP to engineer a highly integrated family of SOCs that we believe will set a new bar for performance, features, power and cost, targeting next-generation data center deployments,” said Gopal Hegde, vice president and general manager of Cavium’s Data Center Processor Group. The ThunderX family of highly integrated SOCs is a finely tuned and balanced architecture designed from the ground up to deliver optimum application level performance.” Workload optimization from silicon to application is what ThunderX aims its four processors at, all of them able to scale up to 48 cores. An entry-level ThunderX_CP targets public cloud  servers, content delivery, web caching, search and social media workloads. The ThunderX_ST adds PCIe Gen3 ports and a scalable fabric along with hardware accelerators for big data and block and object storage. The Thunder_SC goes even further to include fourth-generation NITROX and TurboDPI technology with acceleration for IPSec, SSL, anti-virus, anti-malware, firewall and DPI. The Thunder_NT adds 10/40/100 GbE connectivity, and features hardware accelerators for high packet-throughput processing, network virtualization and data monitoring. The ThunderX family of processors along with a range of hardware reference platforms will be available for general sampling in the fourth quarter of 2014. Oracle, Red Hat, open source support for ThunderX Cavium announced a collaboration with Oracle in support of the ThunderX family to certify and optimize the upcoming port of Java Platform, Standard Edition 8 (Java SE 8) for its ARMv8 architecture. It also has a partnership to work with the openSUSE community to provide engineering resources along with ThunderX-based reference systems for openSUSE development, optimization and support. Cavium has also expanded its collaboration with the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration. The Fedora 21 release will enable support for the 64-bit ThunderX processor family. “With support for key industry standards and an active engineering engagement in the open source community, Cavium is demonstrating the commitment it takes to build and drive a thriving server software ecosystem. Cavium’s collaboration with the Fedora community plays a key role in driving momentum for the ARMV8 architecture,” said Jon Masters, chief ARM architect at Red Hat. (Comment on this)
6:26p	Seagate Picks Up LSI Flash Business Months After Avago’s LSI Acquisition As the ever-transforming storage industry inches closer to retiring the spinning disk, Seagate announced an acquisition agreement with Avago Technologies under which Seagate will acquire assets of the LSI Accelerated Solutions Division (ASD) and Flash Components Division (FCD) from Avago for $450 million in cash. The news comes just six months after LSI was sold to Avago for $6.6 billion and less than one month after that acquisition was completed. As a part of Seagate’s portfolio, LSI solutions add established enterprise PCIe flash and SSD controller capabilities, such as the Nytro lineup and SSD-controller focused SandForce. LSI’s enterprise-grade PCIe flash solution has been very successful and focuses on the cloud and hyperscale markets. The FCD business, led by its SandForce SF2000 and SF3700 controller products, is driving a multi-product roadmap to address volume markets. LSI acquired SandForce in 2011 for $370 million. “Seagate is committed to providing our customers with a complete range of storage solutions, and this acquisition will significantly enhance our flash storage offerings to supplement our existing portfolio,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman and CEO. “LSI’s ASD business has the broadest PCIe flash product offering and intellectual property in the market today and the FCD business has best-in-class SSD controllers with proven support for a wide range of applications. This acquisition immediately boosts Seagate’s range and depth of flash storage capabilities today, and these teams bring to Seagate the expertise to accelerate our roadmap in this important and growing market.” LSI’s SandForce licensing model is widely used in the industry, allowing OEMs without controllers or NAND technology to enter the market. Whether Seagate will continue this licensing model once the LSI divisions are integrated into the company remains an open question. LSI has also contributed two storage infrastructure reference designs to Facebook’s Open Compute Project, an open source hardware and data center design effort. As a Silicon Valley stalwart, LSI was started in 1981 and has been a large OEM provider that licensed its intellectual property for server, storage and networking industries. Perhaps Avago was interested in LSI for other reasons and had no interest in its flash business. With the addition of LSI products, Seagate quickly becomes a big player in the SSD market. Its competitor Western Digital acquired another hard drive maker with Hitachi HGST, but then also acquired enterprise flash storage company Virident. (Comment on this)
7:09p	Newly Nonprofit Vancouver Internet Exchange Moves Into Cologix Data Center Vancouver Internet Exchange (VANIX), a network-neutral independent Internet exchange, has deployed a core node in a Cologix data center at 1050 West Pender Street. The data center provider’s business strategy is providing network neutral Internet access in growing second-tier cities and the addition of the newly nonprofit, peer-run VANIX aligns with that strategy. VANIX was recently restructured as an open, participant-run nonprofit exchange. A coalition of existing participants helped integrate the PEER 1 Internet Exchange with the BCNET-operated VANIX to create an independent exchange. “Cologix is committed to the Vancouver peering community and is pleased to play our role in support of VANIX’s growth,” explained Graham Williams, chief commercial officer at Cologix. “We share VANIX’s conviction that nonprofit, participant-run exchanges provide the best results for its users and create an economic development tool for the broader community. Cologix looks forward to evangelizing VANIX to its customers and partners across the content, education and network verticals.” Cologix partnered with VANIX through the exchange’s reorganization process and is contributing space and fiber optic network connections between its facility on West Pender and the VANIX infrastructure at 555 West Hastings Street. “We are excited to expand our reach with a core switch in Cologix’s new facility,” said Ron Grant, chairman of VANIX. “VANIX presently interconnects 43 IP networks, making it the second-largest IX in Canada. Moreover, Vancouver has a strong Internet community that is attracting increasingly more attention from major content providers interested in faster, more efficient Internet paths to British Columbia’s 4 million residents. “Cologix’s new data center has already proved a perfect fit to help us grow and attract new organizations outside British Columbia to establish a point-of-presence in Vancouver. Since recently connecting our facilities, we have brought compelling new organizations into the community.” Cologix recently expanded at the West Pender location, adding a second data center with 15,000 square feet of inventory. Vancouver is an important market for Cologix, which believes the market is underserved in terms of network-neutral colocation options downtown. Vancouver is Canada’s third-largest market, home to more than two million residents and a plethora of technology companies. Vancouver has been a hot spot for film production as well, subbing for more expensive city locations, so there is a booming creative industry as well. (Comment on this)

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