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Friday, October 24th, 2014
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | IO Offers Free Colo to Compete in Tough New Jersey Market It is no secret that New Jersey is one of the most competitive data center markets in the U.S. with lots of available space across a multitude of providers. In hopes of accelerating the take-up of capacity in its massive building in Edison – a former New York Times printing plant – IO is offering the first three months of services there free of charge. The offer ranges from single-cabinet deals to dedicated IO.Anywhere modules, Jason Ferrara, IO’s vice president of marketing, said. Crowded market, lots of supplyPricing in the New Jersey market has been very competitive, he explained, and customers have plenty of options to choose from. A lot of new space came on the market in 2013, as well as this year, and more is under development. The biggest launch of the year was the opening of CoreSite’s 280,000-square-foot facility in Secaucus. Another major development was QTS’ acquisition of the McGraw Hill Financial data center in East Windsor in July – a deal that has the potential to bring up to 20 megawatts of capacity to market. Also this year, a pair of companies partnered to remodel a 15-story carrier hotel in Jersey City and market its 100,000 square feet of data center space. Another example is Sentinel’s ongoing 20-megawatt expansion in Somerset. Differentiating with technology and priceIO’s 830,000-square-foot building in Edison is an east coast beachhead for the company. Ferrara told Data Center Knowledge in August that it had deployed 88 modules there. It assembles the modules at a factory in Arizona and ships them to its locations in the U.S. and Singapore. IO offers space in New Jersey at market rates, but differentiates with the extra layer of physical security and rapid deployment its modular data centers enable, as well as its data center infrastructure management software. Others in the market offer traditional raised-floor space and, in case of Equinix, concrete floor with overhead cooling. To differentiate further, IO is now offering 90 days of free colocation from move-in day. The promotional program ends at the end of the year. In a small-scale deal, a typical cost per rack at an IO data center is about $1,000 per month. The pricing “gets more aggressive, the more power they consume and the more cabinet space within the module they take.” Ferrara said. To bring the cost to the customer down further, IO offers free cross-connects and some basic remote-hands services. Deal extends to OhioThe 90-day offer is also available at IO’s Miamisburg, Ohio, location but for a different reason. That site is comparatively small (about 26,000 square feet of data center space), and the company wants to fill it and focus on the bigger markets like New Jersey and Singapore. Also in the pipeline is a modular data center in London, expected to launch next year. IO pitches the Ohio site as a good disaster recovery location for customers in New Jersey. “It’s far enough away, yet not too far, like Phoenix,” Ferrara said. |
| 12:42p | Data Center World Expo Hall Highlights The Data Center World conference in Orlando drew participants from around the globe to discuss the industry and learn about ways to improve their data centers. From power and cooling to security and facilities management, the expo hall was packed with sponsors showing off their wares and attendees. Here are a few highlights from the show floor:  Purkay Labs, which specializes in portable temperature and humidity monitoring systems, had its gear on display. (Photo: Bri Pennington)  Methode was on hand to showcase its data center infrastructure management (DCIM), physical layer infrastructure and rack level battery back-up solutions. (Photo: Bri Pennington)  Attendees could learn from Emerson Network Power about its infrastructure management solutions. Emerson also had on display a rack designed specifically for Open Compute servers (Photo: Bri Pennington)  Panduit staff answered questions at their booth in the Data Center World exhibit hall. (Photo: Bri Pennington)  Raritan exhibitors were busy showcasing their data center solutions to attendees. (Photo: Bri Pennington)  There were several impressive displays in the Data Center World exhibit hall, including this containment system from Subzero Engineering. (Photo: Bri Pennington)  Siemens staff talked with attendees in the Data Center World exhibit hall on Tuesday. (Photo: Bri Pennington)  ORR Protection Systems was on hand to talk with attendees about their fire protection systems and related services. (Photo: Bri Pennington) That wraps up our coverage from this week’s Data Center World. For additional conference news, read our Data Center World Orlando recap. If you’re interested in more information about the sessions or would like to download conference presentations, log onto the Data Center World website. |
| 12:43p | Recap: Data Center World Orlando Conference Data Center World kicked off in Orlando Monday with a packed audience for a keynote session with Jennifer Torlone, senior director of technology and information services at Amerijet International.  Jennifer Torlone, senior director of technology and information services at Amerijet International, speaking about the way she reorganized the cargo carrier’s IT team to enable company growth. Attendees gathered at the Hyatt Regency to network and attend sessions with a variety of facilities and data center management topics. Data Center Knowledge had the opportunity to cover several of these sessions throughout the week, including a presentation from Kevin Brown, vice president of data center strategy for Schneider Electric. Brown’s session was focused on the misguided prediction several years ago that overall power density would increase rapidly in the near future. In a second Monday session, specialists in storage, networking and data center environments discussed the software-defined data center, including software-defined storage and software-defined networks. Panelists provided insight into the deployment of these new services, the opportunities they offer and the risks to be managed.  Art Meierdirk of INOC during “Software-Defined Data Centers: Next Steps for Storage & Networking” Monday morning. Other panelists (not pictured) included Bina Hallman, IBM Corporation; Aaron Rallo, TSO Logic and Marco Alves, SDN Essentials. (Photo: Rich Miller) To close out the morning, Adrian Porter, senior manager for data management at 1-800-CONTACTS, spoke about real-world disasters and the lessons they hold for disaster recovery. He identified “disaster-causing” attitudes and behaviors and ways they can be modified to enhance our work environments.  Adrian Porter of 1-800-CONTACTS discussed lessons learned from disasters in a session Monday at Data Center World in Orlando. (Photo: Rich Miller) During day two of the conference, Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters, stressed the importance of commissioning, the thorough testing of mission-critical systems in new data centers. Crosby called on service providers to commit to Level 5 commissioning of new data centers, which involves integrated testing of all mission-critical systems. In another Tuesday session, industry leaders discussed the role a data center plays in the overall business. Panelists took a hard look at strategies for improving performance and compliance and for reducing risks and costs in the data center today.  The session on “Aligning Business and Technology Strategies to Deliver Value and ROI” included panelists (left to right) Dennis Wenk, Symantec; Jake Sherrill, Tier 4 Advisors; Nicola Hayes, Andrasta; Chris Crosby, Compass Datacenters and Derek Odegard, CentricsIT. David Snead, founder of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, discussed how revelations about the NSA’s electronic surveillance activity have led to more data center customers avoiding U.S. and placing their infrastructure elsewhere around the world. Snead also outlined the steps that can be taken by data centers in order to have a greater voice in Internet governance issues that will impact their business.  David Snead, founder of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, speaking at Data Center World 2014 in Orlando. (Photo: Rich Miller) If you’re interested in more information about the sessions or would like to download conference presentations, log onto the Data Center World website. For scenes from around the conference, check out our Data Center World Expo Hall Highlights. |
| 4:00p | Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption for Mystery Cabinet It has been a busy week here at Data Center Knowledge and we’re in a Friday Funny mood! Let’s finish the week out strong with our DCK Caption Contest! Several great submissions came in for last week’s cartoon – 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 PollFor previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! |
| 5:16p | RagingWire Breaks Ground on Second N. Virginia Data Center NTT-backed RagingWire has commenced construction of a new Northern Virginia data center that will double its footprint in the region. The company announced the groundbreaking during a two-year anniversary bash for its Ashburn campus this week. The new two-story data center, dubbed VA2, will open with 14 megawatts and 140,000 square feet, pushing total campus footprint close to 300,000 square feet. The company expects the facility to be ready for first customer installations at the end of 2015. The construction begins shortly after the final phase of VA1 came online, one third of which was pre-sold before it was lit up. RagingWire and the other major area providers report strong colocation sales activity in Northern Virginia. The area is on the brink of becoming the biggest data center market in the country, overtaking New York. It has a favorable business environment and offers healthy tax breaks, of which RagingWire is one beneficiary. A third data center on the company’s home-base Sacramento, California, campus will precede VA2’s opening, with first customer installations expected this year. The California and Virginia data center campuses are interconnected, and with the two combined, RagingWire is on the verge of joining the one-million-square-foot club of data center providers. But the company also has its eyes beyond these two markets. “These are exciting times at RagingWire, and our sales pipeline is growing extraordinarily fast,” said Doug Adams, senior vice president and chief revenue officer at RagingWire. “We are expanding our capacity in both Virginia and California by bringing on new data centers, as well as planning to enter new markets in the United States to ensure that we have the supply to meet customer demand.” RagingWire first entered Ashburn in 2012, with hosting and cloud provider Dreamhost as the anchor tenant. Dreamhost is a large mass-market hosting provider with a growing OpenStack cloud play. It has 370,000 customers and 1.3 million hosted domains under management, taking up significant space in RagingWire when it expanded operations to the East Coast. The company’s coffers are filled to support further expansion. It secured $230 million in 2013. NTT’s acquisition of a majority stake in the company gave it a parent with a growing data center strategy. RagingWire plays a central role in NTT’s U.S. data center business aspirations. |
| 6:27p | Equinix Pitches Private Links to New AWS Data Center in Frankfurt Piggybacking on the announcement of the new Amazon Web Services data center in the Frankfurt area Thursday, Equinix announced customers can connect to the new cloud availability region privately from 10 of its data centers in Germany. Called AWS Direct Connect, the connectivity service bypasses the public Internet, which according to the companies improves performance and security in connecting a customer’s servers to Amazon’s cloud. The service is available in Equinix and other providers’ data centers around the world. Microsoft offers similar private links to its Azure cloud from colocation data centers. Only one Equinix data center in Germany, FR5 in Frankfurt, is linked directly to Amazon’s facility, but other sites in Frankfurt, Munich and Dusseldorf can link to FR5 via Equinix’s Metro Connect network. Customers in other Equinix locations in Germany and elsewhere have to go through third-party carriers to use the service, according to an Equinix blog post. Amazon’s Frankfurt facility is its first in the country and second in Europe. Having a physical location within Germany is important for cloud service providers that want to do business with German customers, who are reportedly more sensitive to data sovereignty issues and who have to comply with stricter data location regulations than customers elsewhere. It was also important for Amazon to open a second availability region in Europe, so customers could set up geographically separated redundant cloud infrastructure without storing data outside of the continent. The other European AWS data center is in Dublin, Ireland. Availability of AWS Direct Connect in other data centers in Germany amplifies Amazon’s ability to serve the more security- and latency-sensitive enterprise customers in the country. This is the eighth metro globally where the cloud connectivity service is available to Equinix customers. “Our goal at Equinix is to help our enterprise customers realize the full benefits of the cloud, without worrying about application latency or cost issues,” Eric Schwartz, Equinix EMEA president, said in a statement. |
| 7:00p | Canadian Web Hosting Targets Enterprise Public Cloud Market with OpenStack Offering
This article originally appeared at The WHIR Canadian Web Hosting launched its pre-production Enterprise Public Cloud service running on OpenStack Icehouse called AURO. The company said on Tuesday that it aims to pit AURO against the big public cloud providers for Canadian enterprise customers, and claims it offers better rates. To design AURO, Canadian Web Hosting worked with Cloudscaling, Juniper, Nimble Storage, and other vendors to ensure “truly enterprise” availability, infrastructure redundancy, scalability, and comprehensive compliance, according to the company. AURO is AWS and GCE compatible, offers full API controls, and is SSAE 16 compliant. “We now have a public cloud in Canada that delivers the same enterprise infrastructure as other large public cloud providers, but adds the ability to completely control where and how their customer data is stored,” said Matt McKinney, Director at Canadian Web Hosting. “We’ve created an open platform that gives every customer the ability to spin up resources in real-time, and do so with the knowledge that their data is protected in a cloud that is the most secure in Canada and compliant with all Canadian privacy regulations.” Canadian Web Hosting is also adding availability zones in Calgary, Toronto and Montreal to give customers local access to users and meet strict privacy requirements. Upgrading to Icehouse also allows Canadian Web Hosting to offer a set of tiered cloud storage solutions. Icehouse was released in April, and services released by Oracle and Indian host ZNetLive in the past month are based on it. OpenStack clouds continue to appeal to customers seeking a high performance cloud environment without “vendor lock-in,” as shown by the huge funding round just announced by Mirantis. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/c |
| 8:00p | 2nd Watch, New Relic Partner for Performance Monitoring on AWS Enterprise Apps
This article originally appeared at The WHIR Managed services provider and AWS partner 2nd Watch is now using New Relic application performance data as part of its managed services offering for workloads running on Amazon’s public cloud. 2nd Watch’s managed services for AWS users provides Service Level Agreements, high availability and billing management, and its software and services have been found to save clients up to 70 percent on their AWS deployments. Among the 60,000 AWS instances it manages, 2nd Watch oversees brands such as Adobe Business Catalyst and Red Lion Hotels. Many managed service providers have begun helping customers manage the costs associated with their cloud-based infrastructure on public cloud platforms like AWS. For instance, Datapipe announced earlier this year its Datapipe Cloud Analytics for Amazon Web Services, which uses Datapipe’s Big Data Engine to collect and analyze AWS customer usage and provide analytics, recommendations and tools for better application performance. Meanwhile, New Relic has also been leveraged in on-premise cloud deployments through service providers such as Cloudscaling, which last year announced a partnership with New Relic to provide real-time application performance monitoring on its Open Cloud System cloud infrastructure. New Relic provides a SaaS-based application performance monitoring solution that provides web and native mobile application monitoring, and a simple environment for troubleshooting and tuning application performance. Earlier this year, the company raised $100 million in financing to put towards product development and expanding the company’s international presence. “Many of our largest AWS customers want to simplify management of their cloud infrastructure,” New Relic Business Development and Customer Success VP Bill Lapcevic said in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with 2nd Watch to help enterprises improve how they build and run modern software, using our SaaS solution as another great way to eliminate unnecessarily complex and expensive infrastructure.” There is no additional cost for customers, according to 2nd Watch EVP of managed services Joel Rosenberger. “We continuously look for opportunities to improve our already robust Managed Services offering for the enterprise by including industry leading tools like New Relic for our customers,” he said in a statement. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/2 |
| 8:53p | EMC Takes Full Control of VCE, Company Behind Vblock After about five years of its existence as a joint venture between EMC and Cisco, a new chapter is starting in the story of converged infrastructure vendor VCE, which will now be controlled by EMC alone. The enterprise IT hardware giant, known primarily for its storage arrays, announced this week it had bought out most of Cisco’s share in the company, whose line of solutions under the brand name Vblock combines integrated Cisco’s Unified Computing System servers and Nexus switches, EMC’s storage and VMware’s virtualization software. Cisco and VMware will remain strategic partners and investors, and Cisco will retain a 10-percent stake in the company. Intel was another early investor. EMC, which owns 80 percent of VMware, expects to close the VCE acquisition in the fourth quarter. Converged infrastructure integrates multiple technologies into one turnkey package. The converged approach has gained popularity in a very crowded vendor space for the cloud world, where several providers offer different pieces that may or may not play nice together and aren’t optimized out of the box. In addition to being an integration point between the three tech giants’ products, it will also focus on integrating EMC technologies from across the company. “VCE was created to be a disruptive force by radically transforming and simplifying IT data center architectures, accelerating a shift to cloud computing,” Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “It has been a huge success and has changed the conversation with CIOs. VCE’s size, scale and market reach now requires a more traditional business structure.” VCE CEO Praveen Akkiraju and his senior team stay aboard and existing multi-year engineering, resell and support agreements between itself, Cisco and its soon-to-be parent company remain. VCE said it had a $2 billion annualized demand run-rate for Vblock and Vblock-related products exiting third quarter. There are about 1,000 customers with about 2,000 Vblock systems out there, according to the company. Pivotal a bright spot in EMC’s Q3 earningsEMC reported its third-quarter earnings the same day it announced the acquisition, announcing $6 billion in revenue — up 9 percent year over year. Its spin-off Pivotal saw the highest growth, at 24 percent year over year, followed by VMware at 17 percent. The Information Infrastructure unit (its storage business) saw 6 percent growth, but the VMAX high-end storage system came out late third quarter and will contribute more next quarter. Enterprise software developer-focused Pivotal continues to be a bright spot for EMC. The company noted a significant uptick coming from Hadoop work. Pivotal has partnered with the likes of Hortonworks to make Hadoop easier. |
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