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Thursday, August 14th, 2014
| Time | Event |
| 12:30p | Data Security: Encryption in the Cloud As Vice President of Product Management and Strategy, Richard contributes his well-respected data protection expertise and thought leadership to the information technology security activities of Thales. The third annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2012–2017) states that 2014 is the first year the majority of workloads will be in the cloud, with 51 percent processed in the cloud versus 49 percent in traditional IT space. Cisco anticipates that “global data center traffic will grow threefold and reach a total of 7.7 zettabytes annually by 2017.” Cloud services have taken the business world by storm, and all the data handled by the cloud must be secured. Encryption plays an important role in creating trust in the cloud. Data security = top priorityEncryption use has risen sharply in the last several years and is deployed in a multitude of ways, from encrypting data in databases and file systems to data being transferred over public and internal networks. This increase in enterprise data security is necessary and good, but it brings with it a risk of creating fragmentation and inconsistency – encryption sprawl – as organizations deploy the diverse technologies in different places to secure different types of data. And if that weren’t enough, we have the cloud to consider with its own unique threats and challenges. With an undeniable value proposition, it is clear that the cloud is inevitable and protecting data within it will be a top priority. More than 50 percent of businesses surveyed in the 2014 Encryption in the Cloud report confessed that they have sent sensitive or confidential data to the cloud. Only 11 percent of respondents said that their organization has no plans to use the cloud for sensitive operations. While it is encouraging that the use of encryption to protect sensitive data in the cloud is on the rise, it remains a cause for concern that over half of those respondents who store sensitive data in the cloud report that their data is “cleartext,” meaning that anyone can read it if they can get their hands on it. That is a dangerous gamble, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Effective key managementOpinions vary on how and where to use encryption in the cloud. The aforementioned report shows an almost equal split between those who encrypt data before it is sent to the cloud and those who choose to apply encryption directly within the cloud. Regardless of approach, key management remains a challenge as businesses walk a fine line between trust and control between their own organization and the cloud provider. A well-planned encryption strategy, in fact, has as its foundation effective key management. Although many regard encryption itself as being black and white – data is either encrypted or not – the reality is that there is such a thing as good or bad encryption. Much of the variance comes down to implementation and key management. In light of this reality, it is good to see that 34 percent of respondents said that their own organization is in control of encryption keys when data is encrypted in the cloud. Only 18 percent of respondents report that the cloud provider has full control over keys. Giving the provider full control may seem like a small matter, but it could have important implications. If the cloud provider owns the encryption keys, how can you determine if they’re safe? If someone files a lawsuit or presents a subpoena, will the cloud provider release these keys without your knowledge? In addition, a criminal would much rather steal keys than steal data. Stealing data is the modern equivalent of stealing money, yet stealing keys is like stealing the press that prints the money – an attack that keeps on taking. Finding confidence in the cloudCloud services offer ease and convenience – and opportunities for malicious actors to steal data or worse, keys. Encryption is a vital component of any organization’s security strategy. Trust in the cloud is based on a full accounting of where your organization’s data needs to be secured and at what level. Proper encryption that enables you to retain control of the keys will protect your data and give you confidence in the cloud. 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. |
| 1:00p | Vocus Acquires Perth Data Center in Western Australia For $11.7 Million Telecommunications provider Vocus Communications has bought the Bentley data center in western Australia from IT solutions provider ASG, which will remain in the facility as a tenant. The purchase price was AU$11.7 million. ASG will continue providing consulting, cloud and managed hosting services at the facility. Vocus gains a preferred-supplier relationship with ASG, a sizable provider with about 600 employees across the country and over 120 customers. Selling the data center will enable ASG to focus on providing IT business solutions rather than managing the facility, while Vocus expands its data center footprint. The acquisition also comes with many other existing customers. Opened in 2011, the Bentley data center serves some of Australia’s largest mining and utility companies under long-term contracts. Vocus owns and operates eight data centers across Australia and New Zealand. It expanded into New Zealand through acquisition of data center provider Maxnet in 2012. It recently acquired fiber company FX Networks in a push into the New Zealand market. Vocus provides three main products: internet access, data centers and fiber networks. It owns a portion of a submarine cable that connects Perth with Asia, as well as a portion of the Southern Cross cable that connects to the U.S. The Australian data center market is growing, and the country has a high rate of cloud adoption. Many U.S. companies and service providers set up shop there as a way to better serve the Asia-Pacific region. The data center is located on the fringes of the Perth central business district in the Bentley Technology Park. It is about four kilometers from another Vocus data center. “The acquisition continues our investment in Perth and provides Vocus with additional resources to serve the fast-growing western Australia market,” said Vocus CEO James Spencely. “We look forward to a long, mutually beneficial relationship with these clients and with ASG for many years to come.” |
| 2:00p | Data Center Jobs: ViaWest At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have three new job listings from ViaWest, which is seeking a Data Center Engineer in North Las Vegas, Nevada; a Data Center Engineer in Dallas, Texas; and a Data Center Manager in North Las Vegas, Nevada. Each Data Center Engineer is responsible for monitoring the buildings HVAC, mechanical and electrical systems; performing preventive maintenance; site surveys; replacement of electrical and mechanical equipment; reading and interpreting blueprints, engineering specifications, project plans and other technical documents; performing operation; installation and servicing of peripheral devices; assisting with equipment start-ups; repairs and overhauls; and preparing reports on facility performance. To view full details and apply, see job listing details: Nevada or job listing details: Texas. The Data Center Manager is responsible for developing and maintaining positive relationships with clients; overseeing the scheduling, maintenance, and monitoring of all heating, ventilating, air conditioning, water, electric and other systems to ensure efficient operation; inspecting the facility and generating inspection reports; cultivating productive and proactive working relationships with property management and other tenants in order to jointly resolve issues; and building a strong team of technical experts to maintain infrastructure. To view full details and apply, see job listing details. Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed. |
| 4:58p | Intel Buys LSI’s Networking Business for $650M Intel has agreed to pay $650 million in cash to acquire LSI‘s Axxia Networking Business and related assets from Avago Technologies, which acquired LSI late last year for $6.6 billion. Avago divested LSI’s Flash business by selling it to Seagate six months later and has now also gotten rid of Axxia. The Avago/LSI Axxia chips are used in a variety of products, including PCIe cards which could be then placed inside of systems powered by Intel processors. Besides gaining the product line and about 650 employees, Intel advances its strategy for mobile and Internet of Things divisions through the acquisition. In a blog post, Rose Schooler, vice president of Intel’s Data Center Group and general manager of its Communications and Storage Infrastructure Group, said the acquisition will help the company’s wireless access networking strategy, which is focused on the critical network workloads of application, control, data and signal processing. Axxia product lines include custom silicon solutions for mobile and enterprise communication processors, including System-on-Chips (SoCs). Exactly how Schooler’s group takes in the Axxia product line may be interesting. The Axxia Communication processors feature an ARM-based communication processor family. Axxia 5500, launched last year, can have up to 16 ARM cores and uses the ARM CoreLink CCN-504 Cache Coherent Network interconnect. The Axxia enterprise communications processor line features a rich set of SDN capabilities, however its range of products contain ARM-based multicore or PowerPC processors. ARM is a huge competitor to Intel, especially in the low-power chip markets, such as smartphones and tablets, networking and storage devices, as well as embedded devices. The UK-based company licenses its processor architecture to manufacturers. Schooler writes that “Intel’s goal is to offer a common architecture approach that scales up and down at many different price, power and performance points.” Intel has incorporated products and intellectual property into its networking business before. When it acquired Fulcrum Technologies in 2011 it folded in its ASICs into a top-of-rack switch and its communication platform. |
| 7:02p | Cloud Management Startups StrataCloud, Luminal Raise Funding Two cloud management players announced new funding rounds this morning. Luminal, a company that assists in building and managing cloud infrastructure, landed a $10 million round led by New Enterprise Associates, and StrataCloud, a startup that helps manage VMware-based data center environments, raised $2 million in seed funding, also announcing appointment of a new CEO. Both companies offer tools and software that aim to make cloud management easier. Stealthy Luminal does configuration management and moreLuminal is still very much in stealth and is keeping its purpose secretive. It will compete with configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef, but is not limited to configuration management. It will first be available on Amazon Web Services. The company is taking beta customer signups now. Luminal will grow its engineering team with the funding. “This investment, led by NEA, will allow us to grow our team and expand our beta customer base in advance of general availability of our product,” said Josh Stella, founder and CEO of Luminal. “We’re building solutions from first principles to tackle hard problems in computing, and the strong support we’ve received from NEA, Core Capital, Maryland Venture Fund and our other investors helps make that possible.” Luminal has raised $13.8 million to date. Previous investors participating in the funding round include Core Capital and the Maryland Venture Fund. “The complexity of cloud deployments is only increasing with adoption, and there is an escalating need for a cheaper, more scalable way to manage it all,” said Harry Weller, general partner at NEA. “Luminal is developing a radically new approach to cloud architecture that leverages ephemeral components to allow for a higher degree of automation, efficiency and security.” StrataCloud builds its future around converged infrastructure managementFounded in 2008, StrataCloud tracks and collects data using algorithms to help store it more efficiently. The solution takes a snapshot every 20 seconds to judge efficiency and uses historical data to predict resource needs for applications. It will compete with VMware’s vCenter operation management software itself as well as with another new entrant, Platform9, a company started by former VMware veterans. StrataCloud will use the money to market its software to enterprises. The company sees converged infrastructure management as its future. In its words, enterprises are moving towards a model for IT in which all elements of an organization’s infrastructure, including networking, storage, compute and security, are delivered as a service. Its customers include Rackspace, various e-trade companies and U.S. intelligence agencies New CEO Brian Cohen was previously president and CEO at SPI Dynamics, which he sold to HP in 2007. “Virtual infrastructure is used by most of the world’s largest companies, and management of these resources can be complicated and expensive,” Cohen said. “We have the most mature product for VMware and compute on the market and a clear vision for how to help companies as they adopt converged solutions that incorporate all infrastructure components. We are anticipating the infrastructure management requirements for a software-defined data center and will be well-positioned as it evolves.” |
| 8:00p | Mike Siteman Leaves Digital Realty for L.A.’s Boutique Private Cloud Firm M-Theory Michael Siteman, former solutions director at Digital Realty Trust, has left the San Francisco-based wholesale data center provider to join M-Theory Group, an IT solutions provider whose primary focus is standing up private cloud infrastructure for clients and managed services. Siteman’s appointment is part of an aggressive expansion push by M-Theory. Along with him, the company brought on board three more senior executives and acquired the managed services business from a boutique New York City company, all of which took place in July. “We’re doing some heavy expansion,” M-Theory CEO Chant Vartanian said in an interview. “We’ve been kind of stealthy [with] our private cloud model here for a while.” Private clouds for the small guysThe private cloud business is relatively new for the company, but its leadership has chosen to pursue it as a primary focus. M-Theory has been around since 2008 but started offering private cloud infrastructure solutions only about two years ago. It also has a value-added-reseller (VAR) business, which Vartanian said was continuing to do well. But the private cloud opportunity is big enough to become a strategic priority. The company targets small and medium-size businesses, offering them all-inclusive cloud infrastructure hosted in M-Theory’s data centers, in clients’ colo space or in their on-premise facilities. Vartanian declined to disclose the name of the company M-Theory bought the managed services business from, but said the acquisition brought about 20 customers. The company is also expanding operations to New York City as a result of the acquisition. Its current offices are in Los Angeles, and it is also eyeing an office in San Francisco. Opportunity to make a bigger impactSiteman will do business development, strategic marketing and relationship development for his new employer. He will act as an “evangelist” for its technology and “build the company from a sales perspective,” he said. He was at Digital Realty for little over 18 months. Prior to that, he spent three years working as executive vice president of data center solutions at the commercial real estate company Jones Lang LaSalle. He said he decided to leave Digital Realty because he wanted to be at a smaller company where he could make a much bigger impact than was possible working for a behemoth like the real estate investment trust. “I feel like I can really contribute something here,” he said. “Digital is a massive company, and I want to help grow something.” Siteman said he believes M-Theory’s strategy is right on the money. There is a lot of small and medium-size companies looking for services that will help make their IT operations more efficient, he said. |
| 8:36p | Rackspace Shares Fall as Cloud Provider Reports Q2 Results
This article originally appeared at The WHIR After announcing record results for Q2 2014 including $441 million in revenue, Rackspace share price has tumbled, as speculation about the cloud giant’s future continues. Rackspace opened at $29.50 on Wednesday, a fall of almost 6 percent since closing at $31.31 immediately before the earnings announcement on Monday. The early Wednesday price is also a drop of nearly 12 percent since the WHIR reported on speculation that the company may go private rather than join with another company. M&A talk was ignited by a SEC filing in May, which disclosed the company’s consultation with Morgan Stanley. The market was optimistic about Rackspace as speculation ran rampant, but as time passes without a deal, market sentiment has changed. Rackspace has shifted its focus to include services other than infrastructure, andGartner named it a leader in managed hosting in both North America and Europe.Regular price reductions from the largest public cloud providers may have intensified pressure on Rackspace to make the change. However, the cloud market is also evolving in terms of geography, hardware, andservice types. With Q2 2014 revenue rising4.8 percent from Q1 and 17 percent from Q2 2013, Rackspace hardly sounds like a company out of options. “This was a record quarter for Rackspace,” Graham Weston, Chairman and CEO of Rackspace said. “We added thousands of new customers, including one of our largest ever, and we saw solid growth from existing customers like Under Armour, SunPower and Alex and Ani. We generated a company record $20 million in incremental revenue in the quarter and revenue per server was an all time high. Total revenue grew 4.3 percent on a constant currency basis, which was the highest rate of growth that we’ve generated since the fourth quarter of 2012.” Rackspace will chase the growing market of managed big data solutions, as well as of regions with rapid growth in cloud adoption, like Asia-Pacific. Rackspace also launched a DevOps Advisory Service and new features for its DevOps Automation Service on Tueday. On May 5, just days before the SEC filing started the M&A furor, Rackspace hit its lowest stock price since Oct. 25, 2010, at $26.28. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/r |
| 9:00p | Is Direct Liquid Cooling Making a Comeback? First developed by IBM in the 1960s to cool mainframes, the use of direct liquid cooling in data centers was going strong until the 80s, when complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS) were invented. These chips could crunch through a lot more numbers per watt, and liquid cooling took a back seat to lower-cost cooling systems that used air for heat transfer. Today, however, the idea of bringing liquid coolant directly to the heat source in the data center is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance, according to a recent report by 451 Research, titled Liquid-Cooled IT: A Flood or Disruption for the Data Center? While far from mainstream, direct liquid cooling has become a business-case foundation for several new companies, and the amount of data centers with cooling requirements close to those of high performance computing is growing. A UK company called Iceotope, which floods an insulated server chassis with dielectric fluid, was founded in 2009, received several industry awards and raised $10 million in funding earlier this year. Another company, Denmark’s Asetek, which brings coolant directly to the processor via a small pipe, had a successful IPO on Oslo Stock Exchange in 2013. There is also a number of U.S.-based companies in the space, including LiquidCool Solutions and Green Revolution Cooling. Overall, 451 counted between 15 and 20 suppliers that have products that qualify as direct liquid cooling. Most of the smaller ones make from $5 million to $10 million in annual sales.  One of the biggest suppliers of dielectric fluid for liquid cooling of electronics is 3M. Its fluid is called Novec. The big IT vendors have not lost interest in the technology either. IBM continues doing R&D in the space, and so do Fujitsu, HP, Dell and Intel. While the majority of these efforts are focused on the HPC market, there are signs of increasing use of “HPC-like systems” by enterprises. Driven by Big Data and other demanding applications, this trend could potentially open a door for direct liquid cooling vendors to help companies stand up high-performance systems in their existing traditional enterprise data centers. Not the most popular kid in schoolWhile the companies’ approaches to direct liquid cooling vary, the concept of making cooling more efficient by using a more efficient heat-exchange medium and by coupling cooling more closely with the heat source is the same, and so are barriers to adoption. Customers worry about repairs and maintenance of the systems, lack of standards and the general risk of introducing any disruptive technology. The report cites a survey conducted by the Uptime Institute, a 451 Group subsidiary, saying that of all cooling technologies considered “advanced,” adoption of liquid-cooled IT was the lowest: 11 percent of the whole. The category includes things like cold-aisle and hot-aisle containment, higher inlet-air temperatures, variable frequency drives, air-side economization and water-side economization, among others. Here’s a detailed look at Uptime’s results:
Direct liquid cooling has a number of market trends working in its favor, however. One of them is the emergence of the web-scale data center operator category. Companies like Facebook and Google have “legitimized a less conservative approach to the design and operation of facilities and paved the way for use of technologies such as [direct liquid cooling] by other operators,” Andrew Donoghue, European research manager at 451 and the report’s author, wrote. Rack densities not going up as expectedWhat this technology does not have going for it is the industry’s overall power-density trend. Rack densities are not going up as quickly as they were expected to a few years ago. Median rack density in enterprise and colocation data centers is lower than 5 kW per rack, the densest racks reaching 8 kW, according to the Uptime Institute. Such densities are well within air-based cooling systems’ capabilities, making the business case for direct liquid cooling not as compelling.  Inside an Asekek-cooled server. (Image: Asetek) Other barriers to adoption include fear of bringing liquid into an environment with lots of electronics and high-voltage power. There are also more and more data centers that to a great extent rely on outside air for cooling and run at higher ambient temperatures than normal. This is both good and bad for liquid cooling. On one hand, it rules out use of liquid cooling for low-density environments, which are much cheaper to cool using outside air. On the other hand, if operator of a low-density data center that is using outside air wants to install some high-density racks, they can do so using direct liquid cooling without affecting the rest of the environment. There are other concerns, such as growing interest in low-power servers, powered by ARM or Intel’s Atom chips, and introduction of a single point of failure in the form of cooling-liquid supply to a rack, but one of the biggest barriers is all the investment companies have already made in air-cooled data centers. “Operators do not want to risk moving to an unknown technology despite its efficiencies, and suppliers are reluctant to jeopardize sales of existing air-based equipment,” the report’s author wrote.  Iceotope sells both AMD- and Intel-based modules filled with 3M’s Novec fluid. (Image: Iceotope) Physics will not be enoughAs Donoghue put it, “Even air-cooling apologists will admit that if the clock could be turned back liquid cooling is a more efficient way to cool data centers. Compelling physics alone, however, is not enough for most data center operators.” Success of the technology will depend on continued backing from the IT vendors the industry trusts – the Dells, HPs and IBMs of the world – and whether they, web-scale data center operators and HPC-facilities operators, will demonstrate business benefits of direct liquid cooling compelling enough for the rest of the industry. |
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