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Friday, September 19th, 2014
| Time |
Event |
| 12:00p |
McHugh Resumes Plan to Build Downtown Chicago Data Center A few years ago, McHugh Construction saw a golden opportunity in downtown Chicago. There was a lack of data center supply and McHugh owned a key property in close proximity to the major carrier hotel 350 East Cermak. The company pitched a brand new, 350,000-square-foot data center to city officials who approved the plan.
It was heartbreaking when city government decided it had different plans for the property. Two years ago, McHugh came to an agreement with the city to build a one-block-long hotel to fit into the plan, meeting the city’s requirements for room count and hotel.
But the company found a way to build a data center in the area anyway. The planned data center development has been moved to South Indiana Avenue, just 100 feet south of the originally planned location, Larry Graiber, who oversees data center business development at McHugh, told Data Center Knowledge.
The new site changed little in the original data center plans. “This is the perfect opportunity for a purpose-built rather than retrofitted data center,” Graiber said. “Things lined up well. [The 350 E. Cermak facility] is full for the most part and downtown supply is tight. Ninety-eight percent of the data center plan has stayed the same. The size is the same, consisting of 350,000 square feet on 6.5 floors. The other half-floor of the seventh floor consists of the mechanical infrastructure.”
The data center will have 40 megawatts coming in from three different feeders. The only change to plans is the company now has to incorporate the historic Rambler building for parking. Everything seems to be settled with the city, and McHugh hopes to break ground in November.
Project led by Chicago data center vet
Graiber is a vet of the industry, originally brought to McHugh from Latisys. He helped construct Latisys’ Oakbrook facility in suburban Chicago.
He was vice president of the Stargate data center, running it before acquisition by Latisys (known as Managed Data Holdings at the time). Stargate had been known as a web hosting brand and was not well known in colocation. “We had to engineer the facility so customers would be impressed with the quality of the data center,” Graiber said.
The company did just that, and the data center started doing well. It began to offer private suites before private suites were a popular option.
McHugh reached out to Graiber for his expertise as its interest in the mission critical facility space continued to grow. “McHugh has been involved in construction for 100 years,” said Graiber. “We built the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) trading floor 20 years ago, We’ve done the Trump hotel and other various projects. The McHugh family had an interest in mission critical facilities for a long time.”
McHugh has owned the property originally slated for the data center development for about half a century. It was originally the site of the company’s headquarters, which was moved to make room for a data center. “We moved headquarters and since the property was close to 350 Cermak, it made sense to make it a data center,” Graiber said. “It’s hard to find the right places to build data centers downtown.”
Chicago continues to be a strong market
Downtown Chicago and the suburbs are two distinct markets. The used to be primarily used for disaster recovery purposes, but a tight supply started forcing production environments outside the city proper. The suburbs have become more production-friendly over the years.
Both downtown and the suburbs have seen healthy and stable pricing, with locations downtown going for a premium.
In the suburbs, there is DuPont Fabros Technology, Forsythe Technology, Latisys, ByteGrid, Server Farm Realty and Continuum.
Digital Realty’s development in Franklin Park sits right in the middle of downtown and the suburbs. It has done really well, selling out the first phase completely, signing multiple tenants.
There is also a few big downtown projects in the area that are in the pipeline. In addition to McHugh, Centerpoint is constructing a large data center close to 350 E. Cermak. QTS has acquired the Chicago Sun-Times plant to turn it into a data center. There is also Ascent Corp. and existing providers Digital Capital and Server Farm Realty. | | 3:59p |
DIRECTV Moves Core Servers into ViaWest Data Center DIRECTV has chosen ViaWest as its data center provider in support of critical TV servers network infrastructure. The satellite TV company has more than 37 million customers in the U.S. and Latin America.
DIRECTV is moving its apparently power-intensive production environment to the The ViaWest data center from an undisclosed previous location. The companies did not disclose which of ViaWest’s nearly 30 facilities around the country the customer chose.
“We chose to work with ViaWest because they deeply understand complex data center builds,” said Paul James, senior vice president of finance for DIRECTV. “We have extensive power needs and were impressed with ViaWest’s ability to help us forward-plan our space, power and cooling needs, and the company’s willingness to make a long-term commitment to us.”
ViaWest has 27 data centers located across the U.S. The company was recently acquired by Canadian telco Shaw Communications for $1.2 billion dollars. The branding remains and the business continues growing.
“ViaWest has a long and successful history of working closely with customers to deliver tailored solutions that solve business problems,” Nancy Phillips, ViaWest president and CEO, said. “We are proud to bring DIRECTV’s mission-critical enterprise production environment into one of our enterprise-class facilities. We look forward to a strategic long-term partnership with DIRECTV to support their data center strategy as their business grows.” | | 4:37p |
SAP Buys Corporate Travel Services Giant Concur for $8.3B SAP continued to build out its services network with the acquisition of business travel management software provider Concur, announced this week. The Concur board of directors has unanimously approved the transaction, which is now subject to stockholder approval.
SAP expects to close the in the fourth quarter of 2014 or first quarter of 2015. It is paying $129 per share for Concur, a 20-percent premium over the September 17 closing price, making for a total value of about $8.3 billion.
Concur has developed an open platform to connect corporate travel service providers, such as airlines, hotels and car rental companies.
SAP’s war cry has been to “run simple” and make the “real-time networked economy” a reality. The acquisition represents further commitment to the “as-a-Service” model and the continued building of a services network on the part of SAP.
Concur joins the Ariba and Fieldglass, acquired earlier, which combined cover a lot of ground in the enterprise services space.
“With Ariba, Fieldglass and Concur, SAP is the undisputed business network company,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. “We are redefining how businesses conduct commerce across goods and services, contingent workforces, travel and entertainment.”
The acquisition boosts SAP’s cloud play in general, particularly when it comes to Software-as-a-Service. There’s a lot of potential cross-sell opportunity in both companies’ install bases, as the majority of SAP customers don’t run on Concur, and only 30 percent of Concur customers currently run on SAP.
SAP will migrate all of its own business travel management to Concur’s integrated solutions.
Also of interest to SAP is a major deal Concur landed in June 2012, when it was awarded a 15-year contract to supply travel and expense software to multiple federal agencies. SAP, with government customers numbering in the tens of thousands, intends to expand this business across the globe with other governments and agencies.
SAP has also been trying to grow its presence in the small and mid-size business markets, and the acquisition is poised to boost these efforts. Concur solutions will complement the new SAP Business One Cloud solution, powered by SAP HANA, to offer a suite of solutions for businesses of all sizes.
Together the two companies will have more than 50 million users in the cloud. SAP HANA will become the backbone of Concur, powering real-time network collaboration as it looks to reshape the travel value chain.
“With the SAP HANA platform, the possibilities to innovate new business models around Concur and the network are limitless,” said McDermott.
With the addition of Concur, SAP’s business network will transact more than $600 billion annually. Concur touts 23,000 customers, 4,200 employees and 25 million active users in more than 150 countries. Concur will expand SAP’s business network to reach into the $1.2 trillion corporate travel spectrum.
SAP is building one of the richest travel-and-expense datasets in the industry with the acquisition. It will also help Concur develop enhanced network-based and context-aware mobile applications.
“Concur shares SAP’s vision to help our customers ‘Run simple.’” said McDermott. “Concur cloud solutions are network-based and enable context-aware applications for travelers to use on any mobile device. With Concur, people are given the professional courtesy and ultimate flexibility to make the choices that are right for them. No longer does cost control for companies have to come at the expense of people.” | | 4:54p |
Red Hat Buys FeedHenry for Mobile Dev Capabilities for OpenStack and OpenShift Red Hat has acquired enterprise mobile application platform provider FeedHenry for €63.5 million cash (about $82 million) to further advance its mobile strategy and support of open hybrid cloud environments. The sale is expected to close in the third quarter of 2015.
The cloud-based mobile platform that FeedHenry provides gives companies the ability to scale mobile applications, with support for centralized security, notification and integration services.
Red Hat said FeedHenry complements its vision for the future of application development by attracting mobile application development to its OpenStack and OpenShift cloud offerings. Red Hat made several strides into OpenStack this year, acquiring French cloud firm eNovance, and introducing an integrated infrastructure OpenStack solution with Cisco.
Supporting the market growth and validation of its mobile strategy Red Hat points to predictions from IDC that show mobile application platform market growing at an 38.7-percent compound annual growth rate, from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $4.8 billion by 2017. Red Hat’s strengths are in enterprise middleware, and the strong mobile capabilities from FeedHenry augment that nicely.
Additionally, FeedHenry brings with it a strong global customer base and mobile development expertise. FeedHenry is headquartered in Waterford, Ireland, with offices in UK and U.S. The company has had only one financing round of $9 million in 2013, which included participation by VMware and Intel Capital.
Red Hat plans to fold FeedHenry technologies into its JBoss xPaaS for OpenShift strategy, providing a platform and services for mobile developers and applications. The extensible architecture of FeedHenry simplifies backend integration to business systems, speeding app delivery with reusable connectors and plug-ins to common enterprise systems such as Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle and more.
Red Hat noted that FeedHenry is a strong, secure and scalable platform that also integrates with mobile application and device management solutions, such as AirWatch and MobileIron.
Craig Muzilla, senior vice president of application platform business at Red Hat, said, “As mobile devices have penetrated into every aspect of enterprise computing, enterprise software customers are looking for easier and more efficient ways for their developers to build mobile applications that extend and enhance traditional enterprise applications. FeedHenry will help us enable customers to take advantage of the capabilities of mobile with the security, scalability and reliability of Red Hat enterprise software.” | | 5:00p |
Friday Funny Caption Contest: Ghosts We’re seeing ghosts here at Data Center Knowledge and that can only mean one thing! Let’s finish this week out strong with a brand new Friday Funny!
Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, has a new cartoon for Data Center Knowledge’s cartoon caption contest. We challenge you to submit a humorous and clever caption that fits the comedic situation. Please add your entry in the comments below. Then, next week, our readers will vote for the best submission.
Here’s what Diane had to say about this week’s cartoon, “There is nothing like a haunted data center . . .”
Congratulations to the last cartoon winner, Tom, who won with, “They told me it was time to scrub the drives.”
For more cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. For more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website. | | 5:20p |
IBM’s Aspera Accelerates Movement of Massive Data Volumes Between On-Prem Data Centers and Cloud Software provider Aspera, an IBM company, announced expanded capabilities for its on-demand data transfer platform for Big Data workloads. The company, which IBM acquired late last year, made the announcement at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam earlier this month.
Data mobility is a difficult problem to solve when dealing with massive amounts of data. Companies in the Big Data analytics ecosystem have taken different approaches to the problem, some working on accelerating movement of data and some finding ways to analyze data in place.
Aspera describes its patented FASP technology as giving businesses the ability to overcome inherent bottlenecks in broadband wide area networks that slow the transfer of extremely large files, such as high-definition video or scientific research files, over distance.
The company said the latest FASP 3.5 technology will allow any content to seamlessly move across distributed cloud and on-premises systems while meeting fluctuating demands in real time with speed, control and ease. It is integration with all major cloud vendors.
The platform transfers and synchronizes large ultra HD files or millions of small files direct to cloud storage.
To bring cloud scale to its direct-to-cloud storage transfer capabilities Aspera has also launched an Auto-scaling Transfer Platform that automatically scales and expands transfer capacity of Aspera server software in the cloud, providing media companies the ability to expand capacity as needed and leverage the most cost-effective infrastructure.
Michelle Munson, president and CEO of Aspera, said, “Consumers are watching media and streaming videos at unprecedented rates while pushing the limits of content providers’ abilities to meet these rising expectations.”
Aspera also announced a set of FASPStream APIs, which allow live video transport and data feeds over global WANs in real time for near-live production on remote cloud systems. All transfer performance statics are captured by a new scale-out data store for distributed, high-throughput collection, aggregation and reporting. | | 5:37p |
Front Porch Digital Acquisition Boosts Oracle’s Digital Media Storage Capabilities Boosting its storage portfolio Oracle has acquired Front Porch Digital, a provider of cloud-based and on-premise content storage management solutions, for an undisclosed sum. Recognizing the explosion of media across many diverse industries, Oracle cited a Cloughlin Associates research estimate that the world’s digital storage capacity needs would grow from 35 exabytes in 2013 to 100 exabytes by 2018.
Colorado-based Front Porch Digital lists over 550 major media, sports and government organizations as customers and will combine with Oracle’s application-engineered storage solutions to help clients efficiently manage the growing complexities associated with migration, integration, storage and delivery of rich-media content. The company says it manages over 750 petabytes of content for clients such as NBC, A&E, BBC, MLB the National Archives and the Library of Congress.
Front Porch Digital has a variety of solutions and services that are tailored for large-scale, rich media needs. Its SAMMA migration process has won an Emmy award. It also has DIVA content management and publishing solutions, which help simplify complex workflows inherent with migrating, managing and distributing media assets.
Front Porch Digital cloud solutions will integrate nicely into Oracle’s ecosystem of customized cloud platform of high availability applications, backed by Oracle engineered systems. The Front Porch Digital LYNX solution provides a media-grade private cloud solution on-premise or in the cloud for a single network of digital content that can be distributed worldwide.
Oracle said its will continue to utilize staff from Front Porch Digital to further innovations in digital content storage management, as well as maintain an open integration platform with third-party systems and applications. | | 7:30p |
LEDs, Air Flow, Claustrophobia: an Artist’s Take on Data Centers Matt Parker, the artist whose audio project using samples recorded inside a Birmingham City University in England we wrote about in May, is back with a much more ambitious data center art project.
Parker has produced a three-part site-specific audiovisual installation on display at the Birmingham Conservatoire. All three pieces are below, but they’re in stereo. The live installation at the conservatoire is designed for 6.1-channel playback.
Parker used material recorded at the same university data center he used for the first piece and at another one, he told Vice’s Motherboard. He did not disclose the name of the other facility citing security concerns.
Some of the source material for the video component was shot at the university data center as well, but Parker also used some footage he found online.
The installation is called The Cloud is More than Air and Water. The first part focuses on the tremendous amount of LED lights present in data centers. As Parker pointed out in description of the piece online, LEDs are used for notification as well as for making the environments more attractive.
“LED lamps are low-emission materials that are often used in excess for no major gain to the functionality of the otherwise noisy and empty world of the data center,” Parker wrote.
The second piece in the series explores air flow in the data center. The third part, called Turbulence in the Chamber, aims to depict claustrophobic atmosphere the artist sensed when spending time inside data centers.
Parker’s overall aim in creating the installation was to explore “the acoustic ecology and impact of cloud computing on the lives of those who use it, the places it is physically located in and the people who work to maintain it.”
To see and here more of Parker’s work, visit his blog Earth Kept Warm.
He isn’t the only artist inspired by the mystery of the Cloud, as it appears to people who don’t work in IT. A filmmaker named Timo Arnal recently produced a three-screen video installation using material shot at Telefonica’s data center just outside of Madrid. Arnal’s installation, called Internet Machine, was on display at the Big Bang Data art exhibition in Barcelona.
Here are all three parts of Matt Parker’s installation (hint: watch with sound on, preferably decent headphones):
DC1 – Lighting up the Information Superhighway from earthkeptwarm on Vimeo.
DC2 – Without the Flow of Air the Transmission Isn’t There from earthkeptwarm on Vimeo.
DC3 – Turbulence in the Chamber from earthkeptwarm on Vimeo. | | 9:43p |
UK Government Western Europe’s Biggest Public Sector IT Spender Along with being the five biggest Western European economies, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain are also responsible for the bulk of government IT spending in the region. Of them, UK’s public sector spends the most.
While UK spends the most, its spend doesn’t increase very quickly. IDC expects growth of German public sector’s IT spend to be the fastest, while IT spend by Spanish and Italian government agencies to decrease in the near future.
According to the latest IDC figures, combined, these countries account for 75 percent of the $53 billion Western Europe’s public sector spends on hardware, software and IT services annually. More than half of that spending is done by local governments.
Many European government organizations have been reviewing how much they spend on IT with noticeable effect. “Spending reviews have made an impact on UK, Dutch and Irish government IT spending,” Massimiliano Caps, an IDC research director, said in a statement.
“They are now affecting the Spanish government IT rationalization and consolidation strategy and are expected to push further cuts in Italy,” he said. “Those countries that have already implemented cost optimization are starting to rebound to make investments to take advantage of 3rd Platform technologies.”
IDC defines “3rd Platform” as modern IT stacks built on mobile devices, cloud services, social networking technologies and Big Data.
The market research house expects government agencies to spend more on systems that support pension administration, tax and revenue collection in the near future. IT spending in public safety and security areas (with the exception of immigration control and border protection) is not expected to grow as quickly. |
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