Friday, July 18th, 2014

Time	Event
12:00p	Report: Rackspace Leads Europe’s Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting Market Less than one week before Rackspace announced new services for managing customers’ application stacks running in its infrastructure cloud, Gartner published a report identifying the Windcrest, Texas-based company as leader in the European cloud-enabled managed hosting market. Rackspace has been leader in Gartner’s North American “Magic Quadrant” for the category for the past two years. This is the first time the market research firm has published a European Magic Quadrant for cloud-enabled managed hosting, determining that Rackspace beats all competitors in Europe as well, including European companies Interoute, Colt, BT Global Services and Claranet, as well as its U.S.-based competitors playing in the European markets, such as Verizon and CenturyLink, among others. Gartner defines cloud-enabled managed hosting as a standardized hosting offering that combines cloud-enabled infrastructure (compute, network and storage) with cloud management software and managed services. It’s basically managed services but managed services specifically for applications running on cloud infrastructure. More competition than in North America All the companies mentioned above are in the top-right section of the quadrant, designated for leaders in the managed cloud hosting category, Rackspace ahead of others in terms of both vision and ability to execute. London-based service providers Colt Technology Services and Interoute are both close to Rackspace on both axes. The Texas company’s competitive landscape is very different in North America, where, according to Gartner, the only other leader in the cloud-enabled managed hosting category is San Jose, California-based Datapipe. To the left of the “Leaders” section of the European quadrant is the “Challengers” section, which includes Attenda, IBM and AT&T. Leading niche players in the market, according to Gartner, are NTT, Fujitsu, Telefonica, Vodafone, Sungard, Easynet and SFR (formerly Société Française du Radiotéléphone). The analyst firm has not identified any companies that would fit into the “Visionaries” section of the quadrant. Lack of non-UK data centers a weakness While identifying Rackspace as a leader in Europe, Gartner cautioned that the company does not have any data center presence outside of the UK, which is something to consider for non-UK customers with “data residency requirements or latency concerns in European regions farther away from the UK.” Another caution was Rackspace’s lack of an integrated self-service firewall capability. This means customers have to deploy host-based firewalls or dedicated managed firewall appliances. The third potential drawback is Rackspace’s global portal strategy, which the company is still rationalizing. Customers using Rackspace to deploy applications globally may at some point end up with different interfaces and logins. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the European cloud-enabled managed hosting market. Managed hosting pioneer Rackspace claims to have been the first company to do managed hosting. “Fifteen years ago, when scores of companies rented out access to single-tenant servers with little or no support, we at Rackspace created the managed hosting business,” John Engates, the company’s CTO, wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. Early on, the provider strengthened its expertise in Linux and Windows system administration, as well as network security, with the goal of relieving customers of the burden of managing complex systems. It is now applying the same ethos to cloud services, of which there is a myriad of kinds, and where complex interrelations and infrastructure sprawl are a constant. The non-entry-level tier of its new managed cloud services offers customers the option to essentially outsource end-to-end operations of their entire stack deployed in the Rackspace cloud. (Comment on this)
12:30p	Microsoft and HP Launch Program to Get Customers Off Windows 2003 To empower channel partners and customers to migrate legacy Windows 2003 Server installations to newer platforms that integrate better with Azure cloud services, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard are launching a program to help ease the transition. As Microsoft ends support for Windows 2003 next year, the companies look to the $10 billion opportunity to have partners enroll in the HP Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Migration Program, which they say will help customers migrate rapidly and safely. The last service pack for Server 2003 came out more than six years ago, and the five-year grace period for extended support on the product ends on July 14, 2015. “The success of customer migrations from Windows Server 2003 depends on thorough planning, disciplined migration execution and post-migration support,” said Sue Barsamian, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Group, HP. “Our migration approach offers partners optimal flexibility and support, whether they are transitioning their customers’ workloads to a private, public or hybrid cloud or modernizing their applications and IT infrastructure to achieve better business results.” As Windows 2003 end of life nears, the migration program will provide bundles engineered for specific Microsoft workloads. To ensure alignment with Azure cloud services the bundles migrate Server 2003 to Server 2012 R2 and offer Azure as a cloud backup solution. In addition to training, sales and marketing assistance for partners the migration program will offer special licensing replacement promotions and financial incentives for technology refreshes. “For three decades, Microsoft and HP have been jointly innovating and delivering products and solutions that provide tangible business results for our shared customers,” said Nick Parker, corporate vice president, Device Partnerships, Microsoft. “Today’s joint Windows Server 2003 EOS program announcement is another example of the differentiated end-to-end offerings that our customers and partners can rapidly and safely deploy, whether on premises with HP’s latest innovative server platforms or in the cloud with Microsoft’s Azure platform.” (Comment on this)
1:00p	Hitachi Says its New 1.8TB Ultrastar is Highest-Capacity 10K Drive Targeting the enterprise market and data center applications with increased hard drive performance Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a Western Digital company, announced the Ultrastar C10k1800 1.8 TB 10K RPM hard drive. Previous Ultrastar models had a 6 Gbps SAS connector, and with the launch of the C10k1800 all models in the C10K drive family move to a 12 Gbps SAS connector. Shipping immediately, the 2.5 inch small form factor enterprise-class drive is the highest capacity 10K drive. The vendor said the project featured significant improvements in both random write and sequential performance. While even HGST recognizes the enterprise lure towards solid state drives, the company notes that tiered storage infrastructures call for a variety of performance requirements, and that the 10K hard drives still meet the needs of cost per gigabyte of storage price efficiencies. “Our customers continue to contend with explosive data growth, balancing disparate application loads, while needing to improve data center space and power efficiencies,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. “By fusing unmatched capacity with ultimate performance in the same drive, the Ultrastar C10K1800 offers the optimal balance of capacity, performance and cost. We expect our customers to use the Ultrastar C10K1800 with a complement of SSDs and 15K performance HDDs in tiered pools of storage.” According to HGST the performance increase in the new drives is enabled by a media cache feature, which is a disk-based caching technology that provides a large non-volatile cache on the media, resulting in improved reliability and data integrity during unexpected power loss, as well as a significant improvement in write performance even with high-demand workloads when compared to solutions with limited NAND or flash-based NVC. The company said that the new drives also feature a number of security and encryption options, including Instant Secure Erase (ISE), Trusted Computing Group, enterprise SSC-compliant Self-Encrypting Drives, and TCG enterprise SED with FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 certification, Level 2. To accommodate legacy compatibility the drive family comes with both 4K native / 512 emulation and a 512 native sectors version. Complementing the new Ultrastar C10K1800 HDD family, HGST also announced that the 512 emulation format for its 15K enterprise-class Ultrastar C15K600 product family will be shipping in July. (Comment on this)
4:15p	Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption We’ve got that Friday Funny feelin’ here at Data Center Knowledge and that usually means one thing – it’s time for an afternoon chuckle with our DCK Caption Contest. Several great submissions came in for last week’s cartoon so now all we need is a winner. Help us out by scrolling down to 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 we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon! Take Our Poll   (Comment on this)
4:48p	Amherst, NY, Lures $80M BlackRock Data Center Project With Tax Breaks BlackRock, the largest asset management firm in the world, has selected an Amherst, New York, site for construction of a $79.8 million facility that will include a data center and office space. The location was chosen because of various data center incentives offered by Amherst. The development isn’t only one of the largest data center projects the town has seen, but also one of the largest private sector-driven developments in its recent history. Hearings on the incentive package start today. Amherst is yet another area looking to attract data centers through economic incentives. Data centers are generally considered great for local economies. This project was attractive to Amherst officials because of BlackRock’s name in the financial industry. The multinational corporation reports assets of more than $4.32 trillion through its global investment and risk management services and has more than 11,000 employees around the world. The 31,000 square foot building will be located on a vacant parcel of land in Uniland Development Co.’s CrossPoint Business Park. CrossPoint is a growing cluster of financial institutions, has good fiber infrastructure and a reliable power grid. Companies such as Bank of America, CitiGroup and Geico, among others, have corporate offices there. BlackRock was evaluating several upstate New York locations as well as outside, in Pennsylvania and Canada, according to Buffalo Business First. Amherst sweetened the pot with an incentive package through Amherst Industrial Development Agency, an allocation of low-cost hydropower from New York Power Authority and grants from Empire State Development Corporation. The incentive package could potentially save BlackRock $6.8 million in sales tax, $2.15 million in property tax and about $165,000 in mortgage recording taxes. BlackRock is seeking a 10-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) package. PILOT provides Federal payments to local governments that help offset losses in property taxes. It’s often used as an incentive for investment in taxable infrastructure or facilities that create a public benefit. Two school districts will collectively see a net revenue gain of $956,666 in new tax dollars during the PILOT period. BlackRock has agreed to pay a graduated property tax during that 10-year period and pay full taxes by the 11th year. The company also has agreed to hire at least 25 new workers with an average annual salary of $68,000. (Comment on this)
5:13p	NetApp and Equinix Plug Enterprise Storage into Azure Cloud via Private Links Equinix and NetApp announced an expansion of their cloud partnership with more private storage offerings integrated with public cloud, including NetApp Private Storage for Microsoft Azure. As a means to access the cloud more efficiently, NetApp’s private storage for Azure is now available through the Equinix Cloud Exchange, the colo company’s interconnection platform that provides direct access to multiple clouds. NetApp and Equinix started the partnership in 2012 by enabling the same direct connections between NetApp private storage to Amazon Web Services. Equinix offers Microsoft ExpressRoute, a private connection service to Azure, in many of its data centers worldwide, the last six added recently. Like ExpressRoute — and an AWS equivalent called Direct Connect — integration of NetApp storage systems and Azure through Equinix facilities is a way to make public cloud more digestible by traditional enterprises. NetApp and Equinix developed tests to examine performance gains that can be achieved when accessing multiple cloud and IT services. The companies said test results showed data throughput between NetApp Private Storage customers and Microsoft Azure rose by an average of 36 percent when the two services were connected via the Equinix Cloud Exchange, versus sending data over a VPN on the public Internet. It was also noted that latency was two milliseconds or less in the Azure U.S. East and Azure U.S. West regions, where NetApp Private Storage Labs are deployed with Equinix. Phil Brotherton, vice president of the Cloud Solutions Group at NetApp, said, “The exchange platform’s automated connections give NetApp customers direct, easy access to multiple clouds and managed services, so they can quickly create a virtual portfolio IT services that works for them. As for NetApp, we see great value in this new solution, because it enables us to connect our infrastructure stack to multiple cloud vendors, expanding opportunities for our customers and our business.” (Comment on this)
7:00p	DCK Webinar: Mining Data Center Gold There’s gold in your data center and it comes in the form of useful device and operational data. Mining, consolidating, and interpreting this data can help you identify new opportunities, implement a more effective management strategy and give you a market advantage. Join us Tuesday, July 29 for Mining Data Center Gold: How DCIM and Business Intelligence Tools Can Give Your Data Center a Unique Competitive Advantage. During this one hour webinar, Jeff Hughes, Director of OS Product Marketing at IO, will discuss the following: Why you must take a closer look at DCIM and Business Intelligence within your data center How DCIM, combined with Business Intelligence, can identify key usage patterns within your data center that lead to cost savings What the future holds for advanced business intelligence within the data center Webinar details Title: Mining Data Center Gold: How DCIM and Business Intelligence Tools can Give Your Data Center a Unique Competitive Advantage Date: Tuesday, July 29, 2014 Time: 2 p.m. Eastern/11 a.m. Pacific (duration, 60 minutes including time for Q&A) Register: Sign up for the webinar Following the presentation, there will be a Q&A session with your peers and industry experts. About the speaker Jeff Hughes is Director of OS Product Marketing at IO, and has 20 years of experience in high tech product marketing. He’s the author of 13 books on technology and marketing, and has written numerous articles and white papers on the topics of security, technology, and marketing. His most recent book is: iPhone and iPad Apps Marketing: Secrets to Selling Your iPhone and iPad Apps. Sign up today and you will receive further instructions via e-mail about the webinar. We invite you to join the conversation. (Comment on this)
11:03p	Condé Nast Parts With Delaware Data Center in Favor of Amazon’s Cloud (VIDEO) Next time you’re browsing Reddit, reading an Ars Technica article or trashing an email asking you to extend your subscription for Vanity Fair or Wired, you can be 100 percent sure it is being hosted and served out of Amazon’s cloud. Condé Nast Publications, the publishing giant that owns these and more than two dozen other well-known brands, has recently decommissioned and sold its data center in Newark, Delaware, in favor of an all-cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Condé Nast CTO Joe Simon told CIO.com that the company’s management had come to a realization that owning and operating its own data center would not give it the infrastructure agility and flexibility it needs as it expands its already massive presence in digital publishing. “… we are not in the business of maintenance,” he was quoted as saying. “We’re in the business of rapid change.” The publisher has used AWS for many of its digital properties before. By shuttering its own data center earlier this month the company switched from a hybrid to an all-cloud infrastructure strategy. The data center building in Newark was about 70,000 square feet in size and housed about 500 servers, one petabyte of storage capacity, about 100 database servers and 100 switches, routers and firewalls. The migration took about three months. Simon said the decision to migrate was a hard one but the process of actual migration to cloud was painless and successful. His operating costs are now about 40 percent down, and performance of the infrastructure has increased by 30 percent to 40 percent. Here’s a video of smiley data center guys ripping out and packing up old Sun servers in the former Condé Nast data center in Newark: While migration to the cloud makes sense for a lot of companies, it is not always the best way to go for all of them. Migration happens in the other direction too, especially in cases where a large company that specializes in data centers gobbles up a born-on-the-cloud startup. A good example is the recent migration of Instagram’s entire platform and photo repository from AWS into Facebook’s data centers after Facebook acquired it. (Comment on this)

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