Thursday, September 25th, 2014

Time	Event
12:00p	N. Virginia Set to Overtake New York as Biggest Data Center Market by 2015 Northern Virginia will overtake the New York metro as the biggest multi-tenant data center market in the country by the beginning of next year, according to 451 Research. The region, whose data center market is mostly concentrated in Loudoun County, is now nearly tied with the New York-New Jersey area in terms of size. The two markets were roughly tied in terms of space at the end of last year too, but more active builds in Northern Virginia will push it ahead for the first time by the end of the year. At the end of 2013, Northern Virginia had 3.22 million square feet of multi-tenant data center space while New York had 3.25 million square feet of space. Loudoun County estimates that the total market (both multi-tenant and enterprise) is 5.2 million square feet, and more than 3 million square feet more is in development. Michael Levy, senior analyst at 451 Research, said supply will grow 14 percent year over year in Northern Virginia, while the New York metro market will grow by 11 percent. The market research firm isn’t tracking nearly as many builds in the New York metro as it does in Loudoun. “With a torrent of cloud service providers and media/content providers deploying significant workloads is Ashburn, the market is solidifying its position as the epicenter of the Internet,” Levy said. “Northern Virginia has grown to be one of the top colocation markets in the United States, and we believe that by early next year it will overtake NY/NJ as the largest US multi-tenant data center market in the U.S.” Made for data centers Northern Virginia, and especially Loudoun, were made for data centers, with abundant fiber, cheap and reliable power from Dominion Virginia and attractive tax incentive programs. Loudoun officials have seen how valuable data centers are to the local economy and have been supporting growth of the industry using tax breaks. Connectivity is rich, as the very foundations of the Internet were formed in the region, with major companies like AOL and Equinix setting up shop in Northern Virginia in the 1990s. As of the end of 2013, 451 Research said, there were 30 data center providers operating more than 75 data centers in Northern Virginia. New York had 52 active data center providers operating 92 data centers. The gap is quickly closing, however, Some of the main multi-tenant players in Loudoun are Equinix, DuPont Fabros Technology, Digital Realty Trust and RagingWire. Equinix’s campus is a key location, with more than 10,000 cross connects, 900 networks and direct access to 90 percent of Internet routes. How big is the Northern Virginia data center market? In any other region, the pipeline of capacity set to come online might be considered a glut. RagingWire just completed an expansion at its VA1 Ashburn facility, and DuPont Fabros is holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its ACC7 facility (also in Ashburn) today. Still in the pipeline for the remainder of the year is new capacity by Latisys and CenturyLink. Several large campuses are planned beyond 2014. CyrusOne broke ground in April, but doesn’t appear to be pre-selling just yet. Equinix is also planning another 1 million square foot campus. RagingWire has secured capital for additional expansion. Pricing remains stable despite high supply Pricing remains very stable in the market, and Levy doesn’t see the new capacity have any major effect on it. “There will be very minor difference of marginal downward pressure temporarily,” he said. “We see a very sensitive balance between supply and demand. With the new capacity, supply and demand will be equal.” Pricing in the region never really dips below a certain level, Levy said. “What I’m seeing is that in Ashburn there’s definitely a price floor and it never goes below that,” he said. (Comment on this)
1:00p	Rackspace Re-architects its OpenStack Private Clouds Rackspace has redesigned the fundamental architecture of OpenStack private clouds it deploys for its customers using Icehouse, the latest release of the open source cloud system. The changes, the company claims, make it more stable and scalable. The provider is backing those claims with a new 99.99 percent OpenStack API uptime guarantee – a Rackspace first. OpenStack is the most widely used non-proprietary cloud architecture, and Rackspace has extensive technical expertise in the open source system. The company was involved in its creation, and its public cloud is one of the world’s largest production deployments of OpenStack. Rackspace has been offering private cloud services for two years. The company can deploy an OpenStack private cloud in the customer’s own data center, host it in one of its own nine data centers or both. It emphasizes its ability to mix and match dedicated servers, private and public cloud resources in hybrid deployments. OpenStack services packaged in containers With the latest version of its private cloud, Rackspace has introduced Linux containers to OpenStack cloud management. Different elements of the OpenStack suite – Nova for compute, Neutron for networking or Keystone for identity management – are packaged in LXC containers (the acronym stands for LinuX Containers) and can scale individually. This means a customer that needs more network capacity in their cloud can scale the Neutron component without scaling anything else, Bryan Thompson, who leads product management for private cloud at Rackspace, said. With the release of Ubuntu 14.04 in April, the LXC technology matured into a stable 1.0 release, which made it possible for Rackspace to use it to build a commercial offering, he explained. More resilient control plane Another major change is a switch from a two-node control plane to a four-node one, making the system a lot more stable at scale. The two-node plane did not scale well, forcing Rackspace to build and interconnect multiple clouds with multiple control planes for some of the larger deployments, Thompson explained. In the new four-node setup, data is replicated between three of the nodes in an active-active-active topology, with the fourth one acting as a dedicated logging server. The change enables massive scalability within a single cloud, he said. Here’s a visualization of a new Rackspace private cloud deployment using block storage. Back to hardware load balancers and firewalls With the new release Rackspace also decided to get away from Open vSwitch, the open source software defined network platform used as a plug-in for Neutron (the network element of OpenStack), conceding it was not quite ready for production and high-volume workloads. The team switched to traditional hardware load balancers and firewalls, still leveraging Neutron SDN capabilities within customer clouds. These and other changes have enabled Rackspace to offer “four nines” API Service Level Agreements for each of the core OpenStack services. “The nature of OpenStack, the types of workloads that it attracts … is really about that API interface,” Thompson said. Single-cloud scalability across hundreds of nodes The new release of Rackspace Private Cloud is now available in the company’s U.S. data centers and will roll out in its overseas facilities in October. Last he checked, about 60 percent of the company’s private cloud customers had the provider host their clouds, the rest using the on-premises deployment option, but that ratio fluctuates, Thompson said. The company has customers with five-to-10-node private cloud deployments, as well as customers running as many as 700 nodes. Those several-hundred-node deployments, however, consisted of multiple clouds because of the technological limitations of the previous versions of the architecture. The latest release takes care of that problem. Leaving ample transition time Customers are naturally incentivized to transition to the new version of OpenStack private cloud, but, realizing the transition may be quite invasive, Rackspace is not forcing all of its existing private cloud customers to do it immediately, planning to continue support for Havana, the previous OpenStack release, for more than one year, Thompson said. (Comment on this)
2:00p	DuPont Fabros Brings Massive Ashburn Data Center Online DuPont Fabros Technology has officially launched ACC7, its seventh data center in Virginia and sixth on the company’s 1.6 million-square-foot campus in Ashburn. Northern Virginia is one of the most active data center markets in the country. According to 451 Research, construction projects by DuPont Fabros and its competitors’, such as RagingWire, have placed the region well on its way to overtake the New York metro as the biggest data center market in the U.S. by the beginning of 2015. RagingWire announced the launch of the final phase of its Ashburn data center Wednesday. In true DuPont Fabros manner, ACC7 is huge. The facility is nearly 450,000 square feet and can provide as much as 41.6 megawatts of power. It is the largest data center in the company’s portfolio. It is also the first data center built using the company’s new data center design, which features a medium-voltage (4,160V) electrical distribution system and an isolated-parallel uninterruptible power supply topology, which enables the company to provide a wide range of space, cabinet layouts and power densities in the facility’s 28 computer rooms. Each of the rooms is about 8,500 square feet and provides from 1 megawatt to 2 megawatts of critical power. One room can hold about 380 server cabinets. Another change in design is an evaporative cooling plant that uses recycled water. There ae 12 centrifugal chillers and heat exchanger lineups, each with 1,400 tons of cooling capacity. The facility also has an above-ground 80,000-gallon chilled water storage tank. Scott Davis, executive vice president of operations at DFT, said ACC7 was a product of three years of design work. The company plans to use it as a standard design going forward. “This design is a culmination of collaborating with our customers, incorporating trends in the data center industry, and leveraging our vast experience in designing and operating data centers,” Davis said. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Data Center Jobs: Peter Kazella & Associates At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Peter Kazella & Associates, which is seeking a Data Center Facility Manager in Houston, Texas. The Data Center Facility Manager is responsible for operating and managing both routine and emergency service on a variety of state of the art critical systems such as: medium voltage switchgear, diesel generators, UPS systems, power distribution equipment, chillers, cooling towers, computer room air handlers and fire detection/suppression. The Data Center Facility Manager will also supervise the on-site management of sub-contractors and vendors to ensure that all work is performed according to established practices and procedures, and manage local client relationships, acting as the point of contact for the company at this site. 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. (Comment on this)
4:51p	High-Speed Science Network Plugs Into ByteGrid’s Maryland Data Center Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), a multi-state optical transport network operated by the University of Maryland, has partnered with data center provider ByteGrid on a high-speed platform for life sciences research infrastructure. MAX is establishing a terabit-capable point of presence in ByteGrid’s Silver Spring, Maryland, data center. The data center provider will integrate massive storage archives typically involving petabytes of data with high performance compute and network requirements. The two will provide research infrastructure to serve a burgeoning science and education community, as well as federal government entities that are expanding their presence in Montgomery County. Both organizations will provide opportunities for high-end IT services, content and connectivity. ByteGrid’s “Maryland Connect” program will have access to all MAX services. MAX’s network has aggregate capacity of 8.8 terabits per second. It provides high-speed access to large national and global research and education network infrastructure, including multiple 100-Gbps connections to the Internet2 network and other wide area network infrastructures. In recent field trials, MAX successfully achieved, and hopes to eventually offer, a networking infrastructure based on 400-Gbps technology, with even higher speeds (up to 800 Gbps) planned for the future. ByteGrid’s 214,000-square-foot Maryland data center is located within the White Oak Science Gateway and Life Sciences Village in Silver Spring. It is on the company’s flagship campus, which consists of two data center facilities (MDC1 and MDC2), encompassing 91,000 square feet of computer room floor and 9 megawatts of critical power capacity. “MAX is pleased to be a key technology partner and establish the TeraPoP in ByteGrid’s FISMA-compliant facility in the heart of the Life Sciences Village in Silver Spring,” said Tripti Sinha, executive director of MAX. “We are committed to providing the advanced networking infrastructure required by the world’s most important research, education and scientific organizations.” Other services will include direct connection into Amazon Web Services and an “Innovation Sandbox,” focused on ultra-high-throughput IT infrastructure solutions. (Comment on this)
5:18p	NetApp Integrates Object Storage Software With Amazon S3 NetApp announced a new version of StorageGRID Webscale object storage software to help leverage hybrid cloud storage in managing massive data sets. NetApp presents StorageGRID for a number of use cases as a foundational platform for object storage. Support for Amazon S3 was added in the new release, giving seamless integration of cloud applications and enabling storage of billions of objects in a single elastic container that can be distributed in data centers worldwide.Using either NetApp E-Series storage or third-party arrays, StorageGRID Webscale runs on a virtualized server infrastructure to support cloud-enabled applications. NetApp said its patented capabilities include an intelligent policy engine, which determines the durability and physical placement of data to comply with business requirements. NetApp plans to launch this next generation of StorageGRID Webscale software next year and hints at other new solutions in 2015 and beyond to help organizations take full advantage of object storage. (Comment on this)
6:24p	U.S. Patent Office to Deploy CrestPoint DCIM in Multiple Data Centers The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has signed with CrestPoint Solutions to deploy a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution for data center management in several locations around the country, the company announced earlier this week. DCIM is a fairly new type of solution in the data center market, currently deployed primarily by early adopters. Federal government agencies are not generally viewed as data center operators that use cutting-edge data center management tools. The deal is an unusual one but may be a signal that more is to come as a result of the White House’s focus on optimizing the government’s sprawling data center infrastructure over the past four years or so. USPTO needed a DCIM solution that featured asset management, visualization, search capabilities, capacity planning, real-time measurement, reporting, analytics and efficiency and optimization capabilities. The vendor’s DCIM software is called CrestPoint-FME. According to 451 Research, there are more than 60 DCIM vendors in the market today. It is one of the fastest-growing software markets but still a small one within the context of the enterprise software market as a whole. The analysts estimated that vendors made about $530 million in DCIM sales in 2013. Another market research firm, Gartner, released its first Magic Quadrant report on top DCIM vendors earlier this week. The report named Schneider Electric, Emerson Network Power, CA Technologies and Nlyte Software market leaders. Gartner did not include CrestPoint in the report. (Comment on this)
7:30p	Telstra to Expand Into Equinix Data Centers in Australia Australian telecom Telstra is expanding into Equinix’s Sydney SY3 data center and the Meblourne ME1 facility still under construction. The telco will establish a point of presence (PoP) at each site. The expansion will allow it to serve and manage more international customers coming to Australia. The PoPs also offer current Equinix customers additional network options. Telstra is seeing increasing demand for data center services. The company builds and operates telecommunications networks and markets voice, mobile, Internet access and pay television. It is seeing increasing demand from data center customers across Australia for low-latency, high-throughput content delivery and telecommunications capabilities. The company is also working with Equinix to deliver telecommunications and media services to colocation customers in Equinix. Equinix’s SY3 facility is one of the most densely connected data centers in Australia. The Melbourne facility will be the first data center in Australia’s second largest city. The Melbourne data center will have capacity for 1,500 cabinets, with a first phase of 375 cabinets scheduled for completion in the fourth quarter. Equinix is constructing a specially built 105,000-square-foot building shell to house the ME1 data center and allow for future development. The two new data centers expand Telstra’s Asia Pacific footprint. The telco also has deployments in Equinix facilities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney. “We have a strong and existing relationship with Equinix,” said David Piltz, director of fixed and data access engineering at Telstra. “We are in close proximity to hundreds of networks and through these networks are closer to our customers. The increased network bandwidth enables Telstra to manage more international customers coming to the Australian market.” Platform Equinix is home to more than 4,500 customers including more than 1,000 network providers, 120 of which are accessible in Australia. (Comment on this)
8:31p	Reports: Feds Raid Albuquerque Data Center Federal agents raided the data center of a small Albuquerque, New Mexico, service provider Thursday morning, according to local news reports. It is unclear why agents of the Internal Revenue Service executed a warrant on Big Byte, a family-owned business that provides colocation, disaster recovery and business continuity among other services. Big Byte offices could not be reached by phone Thursday afternoon and its representatives did not respond to an email seeking comment. An IRS spokesman told Albuquerque Business First that the warrant was served by agents from the agency’s Criminal Investigations unit. According to Business First, Big Byte’s customers include Bernalillo County and the State of New Mexico. While infrequent, law enforcement raids on data centers do take place from time to time. Depending on what the authorities are looking for, they may be very disruptive to data center customers. In one 2011 case, the F.B.I. raided a data center in Reston, Virginia, operated by Digital One. While the agents were looking for servers that belonged to one particular customer, they took out three enclosures that had many customers’ equipment, disrupting their operations. Another F.B.I. data center raid in Texas in 2009 disrupted services for hundreds of companies when agents seized more than 200 servers while serving a search warrant. (Comment on this)
8:43p	Amazon: Reboot Will Affect Less Than 10 Percent of Cloud Instances Amazon Web Services has released more details about this week’s massive instance update on its EC2 cloud. The update is being applied to patch a known issue that effects all Xen environments and is not AWS-specific, the company said. Amazon said that it will affect a small percentage (less than 10 percent) of the global EC2 fleet. It is a mandatory update and must be completed by October 1. Amazon said the update is not in any way associated with what is being called “The Bash Bug” in the news today. Not all instances will be rebooted. RightScale is reporting that it is impacting around 25 percent of the types of instances. RightScale has made a FAQ available. AWS said that the following instance types will not be affected: T1, T2, M2, R3 and HS1. To find out if you’re being impacted, visit Amazon’s “Events” page on the EC2 console. It will list pending instance reboots. The instances that do need the update require a system restart of the underlying hardware and will be unavailable for a few minutes while the patches are being applied and the host is being rebooted. Those instances requiring a reboot will be staggered so that no two regions or availability zones are impacted at the same time and they will restart with all saved data and all automated configuration intact. The company issued a statement: “We understand that for a small subset of customers the reboot will be more inconvenient; we wouldn’t inconvenience our customers if it wasn’t important and time-critical to apply this update.” The instances that need the update require a system restart of the underlying hardware and will be unavailable for a few minutes while the patches are being applied and the host is being rebooted. While most software updates are applied without a reboot, certain limited types of updates require a restart. (Comment on this)

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