Wednesday, November 26th, 2014

Time	Event
1:00p	Eaton Tying Data Center Power Management With IT Using Software Software is redefining the data center. It has also become an opportunity for big vendors that sell lots of different physical infrastructure components into the data center space to unify their product portfolios. Eaton is the latest such vendor to make the attempt to use data center power management software to turn a variety of power management products into a unified solution. Schneider did something similar with its StruxureWare data center infrastructure management software, and so did Emerson Network Power with the Trellis DCIM. Eaton has a rich and diverse heritage. The conglomerate, historically a Cleveland-area company that moved its global headquarters to Dublin, Ireland, in 2012, has solutions across a variety of industries, but sees data centers as an extremely important segment. Within this segment, it has a wide range of electrical equipment, as well as racks, cable trays, meters, and airflow management solutions. It also provides professional services for data centers. “A lot of people have an impression of us, but not of all we do,” said Philip Fischer, Eaton’s global data center segment manager. “The sum of the parts is equal to more than one plus one. We have the ability to provide solutions from the substation to the outlet level. We’re bringing together all of it through software.” Integrating Power and IT Management Convergence of facilities and IT has the company changing its market approach. “We want to bring better understanding between facility and IT support layer,” said Jeff Kennedy, business value marketing manager at Eaton. “Many times [facilities and IT] are the same person. IT is seen as an enabler to solve business problems; ‘How can I deliver in the most cost efficient way possible?’” “The data center needs to be delivered in a fashion that meets the IT timeline,” said Fischer. “It’s a ‘just-in-time’ mentality.” In order to facilitate the approach, customers need to understand complex interdependencies. This is where software comes in. Eaton is focused on what it calls the fifth element: data center power management. The other four elements are compute, storage, network, and software. Eaton believes that power management hasn’t been integrated into the whole picture as much as it should be. “If we can make that intelligent and integrate into the stack, it adds value,” said Kennedy. There are a lot of popular buzzwords around what Eaton is trying to accomplish. It can fall in the realm of converged infrastructure, data center infrastructure management, or software-defined data center. Eschewing the buzzwords, Fischer said, “It’s all about getting the right information to the right person. We really see software as key to solving the challenge of complex interdependencies.” Bigger Focus on Multi-Tenant Data Centers The way people deploy technology is changing, with cloud and multi-tenant data centers on the rise. “We’re keeping our eyes on what the new technology means for the physical layer,” said Fischer. “We are seeing different maturities of technologies, spots much denser than facilities were designed for. We’ll deliver the targeted solution that people are trying to achieve.” The company says it still does a lot of work with enterprise facilities but multi-tenant facility work is the fastest rising segment. A lot of data center vendors have noted the trend, including Schneider, which opened a division specifically focused on colocation providers. Eaton said that the biggest difference between an enterprise data center and a multi-tenant facility is predictability. “A multi-tenant data center is unsure about what kind of equipment will ultimately be deployed,” said Fischer. “Our entire business development team is dedicated to that sector,” said Kennedy. Fischer is the strategic leader for the electric sector’s activity in the global data center industry. Kennedy’s role is the newly created business value marketing manager. Kennedy was brought aboard to help figure out how to tie the product portfolio together through software. Strategic Partnerships The company is also partnering to make sure everything plays nice in the bigger IT picture. It has partnerships with the likes of Cisco and VMware. With Cisco, now Eaton has the ability to power cap the chassis and notify UCS if there’s a power outage. Other partnerships include Caterpillar for generators, software manufacturers like CA. “You’re going to see validations,” said Jeff. “We’re Vblock ready, for example. You’ll see a continued push in those validations. It gives peace of mind to customers, tells them you’re product’s already been tested.” (Comment on this)
4:00p	HP Revenue Shrinks Further as Whitman’s Separation ‘Machine’ Ramps Up HP reported another quarter of shrunk revenue Tuesday, but the company’s CEO Meg Whitman was upbeat on its Q4 fiscal 2014 earnings call about future prospects, relying on continued execution of her turnaround plan and separation of the giant into two separate companies – a move she announced three months ago. It has been about three years since HP reported quarterly revenue growth, but the company’s margins have continued to improve as a result of implementation of Whitman’s ongoing multi-year turnaround plan, which includes letting go 55,000 employees. Analysts have welcomed the changes – both the split and optimization of the overall business – but have pointed out that the big problem still remains: HP is shrinking. Its PC business has shown growth, while the enterprise business, which includes hardware, software, and professional services, has not. “Turnarounds aren’t linear,” Whitman said. “While we are seeing clear pockets of growth, other areas still need more work.” HP’s revenue for the quarter was $28.4 billion, down 2 percent year over year. Profits were $1.3 billion, down 6 percent. Earnings per share were $0.70, down 4 percent. Whitman attributed lack of growth this year to currency fluctuations. “We would grow this year in my view if we didn’t have the currency headwinds,” she said, adding that she expects next year’s revenue to be flat if currency value remains consistent. Cloud is Hard to Win for Legacy Vendors Both Whitman and HP CFO Cathie Lesjak said they expected the enterprise half to grow thanks to multiple new products introduced this year. These include ARM-based Moonshot servers, software defined networking products, and Helion, a portfolio of cloud services. “It gives us some real upside,” Lesjak said about the enterprise group’s product lineup for the year. Overall market dynamics may be working against HP in its current state, however, even as the company focuses on growing its cloud business. “Structurally, the cloud and virtualization model is not good for brand-name boxes, and that’s the bottom line,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anand Srinivasan said in a Bloomberg-produced video. Growth in the cloud market is happening primarily for businesses like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google, which don’t buy brand-name hardware from the likes of HP. They buy generic low-cost boxes directly from Taiwanese manufacturers, he said. ‘Execution Machine’ for Separation Whitman is expecting the split into HP Enterprise (which she will lead) and HP Inc. to help a lot. Each company will benefit from better cost structure, focus on its respective market segment, and better alignment with customer needs and market changes, she said. HP has created a big team focused on implementing separation full time. Whitman said the group would be between 400 and 500 people strong at its peak, referring to it as an “execution machine.” “It is the biggest separation that’s ever been done,” she said. “These are two Fortune 50 companies. It’s big, and it’s complex, but we’ve got the best people on it.” The management is looking at separation as an opportunity to further optimize operations of each company. The process will include rethinking everything from operations and IT infrastructure to go-to-market strategy and supply chain for each entity. (Comment on this)
4:30p	Forging Data Center Demand in Untested Markets Corey Welp is the Managing Director at 1547 Critical Systems Realty. Data center developers and operators must compete in crowded, thriving markets while expanding to meet and create demand in new locations. Striking the correct balance is a combination of strategic planning, market research, resource allocation, and a bit of intuition. However, the opportunity for data center development can present itself in unexpected places. Whether in the Pacific islands, an underground bunker, a Norwegian fjord, or the middle of nowhere USA, overlooked locations can sometimes present thriving data center opportunities. Identifying the Market At 1547 we take a demand-driven approach. As these markets are not proven, that demand can come from many sources, not just an obvious number of software startups or enterprises that need hosting. Existing customers or tenants in another market might create demand for expansion, like a customer on the West Coast who needs a low latency connection to their new Asia office. Further, demand could be part of the zeitgeist—recent headlines about data privacy, for example, might drive the creation of more data centers deep in bunkers. With a market pegged as a development opportunity, financial institutions and investors have to be convinced as well. Beyond performing research on projected market growth, data centers can leverage anchor tenants (partners, nearby service providers, or enterprises) and existing assets as built-in value. An attractive building or existing infrastructure is another form of implied demand. Addressing Existing Infrastructure If the data center site has an existing building (or other structure—some data centers are in mineshafts or old water storage tanks) it must be retrofitted to allow a drop ceiling, raised floor, air plenums, and other necessary features. There might need to be new walls put up to segment office space and white space. Security measures will likely need to be added, from video cameras to fencing to biometrics. If the location was chosen due to existing technology assets, like an onsite NOC or some existing white space, costs can be reduced. We like to say, “The data will follow the fiber.” Rolling out high-speed fiber lines can be a significant expense at up to $10,000 per mile, but it is almost always well worth the investment. More data is coming online every day, to and from customers all over the world, facilitated by fiber connections. Once 1 gigabyte connections are in place, interested businesses will likely come running. Executing in Untested Markets Once the market has been identified and the building construction finished, with new cabinets installed and servers hooked up to the network, you have to deliver on your promises to investors and execute. Securing business is much easier with partnerships. As with any business, relationships are critical. A local partner, whether they are bankrolling as a capital investor or a tenant in the data center, can go a long way to help fill white space. Acquisitions work if you have the money to spend and a solid company to purchase, but a partnership with a data center service provider can be easier to pull off. These boots on the ground have greater insight into local demand and requirements. They can also fill in around your core competencies, which as a developer may not include system architecture or administration. Not every location is practical for data center development—there may not be fiber lines within a few hundred miles, construction costs may be astronomical, and so on. But in many cases, once you build it they will come, whether that means disaster recovery, primary infrastructure, or a “meet-me” point between two larger markets. 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. (Comment on this)
6:56p	Netflix Accuses Yahoo CIO, its Former VP of IT Ops, of Fraud Netflix has filed a civil lawsuit against Yahoo CIO Michael Kail and his company Unix Mercenary, accusing him of taking kickbacks from two IT contractors during the three years he worked as vice president of IT operations for the online video streaming and DVD rental company. Relying on copies of emails between Kail and the contractors Netflix has obtained, the company is alleging Kail had collected between 12 percent and 15 percent kickbacks on the invoices Netflix paid to the contractors. The “commissions” were paid to Unix Mercenary. Kail was appointed as Yahoo CIO in August of this year, the same month he left Netflix, where he worked since June 2011. When he joined Yahoo, he told the Wall Street Journal that his first priority would be to streamline the company’s data center infrastructure to better support its online video initiatives and multi-device services. Alleged Kickbacks on $3.7M in Payments The two IT services companies named in the lawsuit (first reported by Re/Code) are Vistara and NetEnrich. The companies are related, both founded by Raju Chekuri. Chekuri is chairman for both firms, and a spokesperson for both told Re/Code that NetEnrich was spun out of Vistara. Kail’s emails with the contractors revealed that NetEnrich often invoiced Netflix on behalf of Vistara, according to Netflix. The suit estimates that the company has paid about $1.44 million to Vistara since 2012, and about $2.3 million to NetEnrich during the same period. Netflix’s evidence includes texts of the emails as well as copies of invoices exchanged, including Unix Mercenary invoices to the service providers. Part of Kail’s job was negotiating and executing IT products and services contracts for Netflix. He was also responsible for approving service provider invoices to Netflix. Missing Corporate DocuSign Account Netflix uses DocuSign as a third-party service to handle contract paperwork. When the company tried to locate documents related to Kail’s dealings with NetEnrich and Vistara, it could not find Kail’s corporate DocuSign account. According to the documents filed in court, Netflix later learned that Kail had asked a senior DocuSign employee to transfer his corporate Netflix account to a personal one and to remove his corporate account records. (Comment on this)
7:57p	Report: More Firms Use SaaS for Mission Critical Apps Software-as-a-Service applications are increasingly being used for mission critical purposes, according to a recent report by Gartner. Cost considerations continue to be a driving factor, but many senior business leaders view agility as a primary reason for moving to SaaS. Enterprise SaaS pilot projects are turning into production deployments, with private cloud deployments outpacing public due to security concerns. Gartner expects traditional on-premise software deployments to shrink from 34 percent today to 18 percent by 2017, moving to public and private cloud app deployments. The remaining on-prem will be legacy software. H0wever, Gartner noted that few organizations will completely migrate to enterprise SaaS. A recent IDC report predicted the public cloud market would reach $127 billion by 2018, and a Cisco study predicted that cloud growth would drive data center traffic to triple by that year. Private cloud application growth will be nearly twice that of public growth (46 percent versus 24 percent) over the next two years. Private adoption will be pushed by concerns with public clouds. Security, privacy and fear of government snooping remain leading concerns, particularly outside of the U.S., and drive private cloud application growth. “Data loss, data breaches, unsecure application programming interfaces and shared technology in a multitenant environment are just a few of the concerns expressed by respondents tackling the option of using public cloud,” Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner, said in a statement. “In addition, recent concerns of government snooping in the name of anti-terrorism and general privacy issues contribute to the lack of public cloud adoption.” The biggest benefits of enterprise SaaS are the ability to be “hands-off,” giving application management over to the provider. It means you don’t need to dedicate in-house resources to managing and maintaining the application. The pay-as-you-go model is also attractive. In a statement, Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner, said, “We’ve seen a real transition from use cases in previous surveys, where early SaaS adoption focused on smaller pilot projects. Today, the projects are mission-critical and production grade. This is an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation and email.” The original driver for SaaS was cost reduction, but those in more senior roles are citing “cloud as modern approach,” “innovation,” and “operational agility” as top drivers. Forty-four percent of survey respondents, however, said that overall cost reduction continues to dominate as the main reason for investment in SaaS. (Comment on this)
8:37p	NTT Opens Shanghai Data Center Japan’s NTT Communications has opened a data center in the Pudong Development Zone of Shanghai. The facility has 28,000 square feet of data center floor space, room for about 1,000 racks. China data center market is growing, up around 20 percent from last year. In order to capitalize on the market, data center providers providers need local footprint. In addition to normal latency considerations, cross-border network traffic is slowed down further by what is popularly referred to as the Great Firewall of China. CenturyLink recently launched a data center in Shanghai, citing the government’s firewall as one of the reasons, and Oracle is in discussions to establish China data center presence. Earlier this week CloudFlare announced intentions to open 12 data centers in mainland China over the next six months. The new facility will be NTT’s first China data center capable of total service design, construction, and operation for customers. The company is expanding its data center servies in the country to include cloud in addition to colocation. The data center is branded under the Nexcenter brand NTT uses worldwide. The company claims its efficient way of building and efficient operations means 20 percent lower costs than other facilities in the area. The company is also touting its connectivity. It is carrier neutral and has direct network connections to communications companies across China to help the problem of Internet instability common in China due to inadequate connections among local carriers, according to NTT. NTT has been expanding its data center services business elsewhere in the world as well. Its subsidiary NTT Facilities recently acquired EEC, a U.S. data center management firm. NTT also won a big deal with Salesforce.com in the U.K., where the company is providing the data center behind the SaaS giant’s UK expansion. Stateside, NTT-backed colocation provider RagingWire recently commenced construction on its second data center in Northern Virginia. NTT also recently expanded in Osaka. (Comment on this)
9:00p	Unlimited Cloud Storage Nearly Drove Bitcasa to Bankruptcy This article originally appeared at The WHIR Bitcasa has unveiled more details about why it had to discontinue its unlimited cloud storage plan in an interview with Gigaom on Tuesday. According to Bitcasa CEO Brian Taptich, the company could simply not afford to keep unlimited-storage users as customers. Taptich told Gigaom that one customer who stored 82 terabytes of data with the unlimited storage plan was costing the company between $3000 and $4000 per month. Bitcasa announced the change at the end of October, and said that a growing number of “suspected abusers” meant its Infinite cloud storage service was no longer a viable business model for the company, even though only 0.5 percent of Bitcasa accounts required more than 1TB of storage. Taptich said that Bitcasa’s encryption technology prevented the company from seeing who the data belonged to, which means it couldn’t get rid of data that belonged to inactive users on its servers. Its new infrastructure, on Amazon, will prevent this by letting the company know when data is tied to inactive accounts. One customer, upset by the discontinuation of the unlimited storage plan, launched a tentative class-action lawsuit against Bitcasa. He claimed Bitcasa didn’t give him enough time to migrate data. US District Judge William Alsup ordered the plaintiff to pay for $99 for an additional month under the company’s new pricing plan if he needs more time to migrate data. According to Gigaom, the legal documents stated that the court-ordered extension was likely to push Bitcasa into bankruptcy within weeks or days. Taptich told Gigaom he couldn’t comment on specifics because of the pending court case. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/unlimited-cloud-storage-nearly-drove-bitcasa-bankruptcy (Comment on this)
9:30p	Docker Solves Critical Vulnerabilities in Latest Release This article originally appeared at The WHIR The latest release of Docker patches two critical security vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to escalate their privileges and execute remote code on an affected system. Docker is a popular open-source applications packaging technology that allows applications to run in different environments. The Department of Homeland Security’s computer security division US-CERT and other security authorities have been strongly urging systems administrators to update their Docker installations. According to a security update from Eric Windisch, one of Docker’s top security personnel, Docker versions up to and including 1.3.1 have a flaw that could make it possible to extract files to arbitrary paths on the host during “docker pull” and “docker load” operations. He noted that this was due to “symlink and hardlink traversals present in Docker’s image extraction.” Previous versions of Docker (1.3.0 to 1.3.1) allowed security options to be applied to images, and this could change the default run profile of the containers executing the images to give the user more permissions. Docker 1.3.2, released Monday, patches this vulnerability with image extraction performed in a chroot, ensuring that users cannot access files outside a designated directory tree to which they have access. Last week, Microsoft issued a patch for a permissions vulnerability in Windows Server that could allow a user with basic privileges to act as though they were an administrator. Docker is becoming a major part of many online services. Amazon launched Docker support earlier this month, and Microsoft is aiming to include Docker’s containerized application technology in the next release of Windows Server. This means that the relatively young Docker project, whose first release was in March 2013, needs to quickly mature to meet the hefty demands of these businesses. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/unlimited-cloud-storage-nearly-drove-bitcasa-bankruptcy (Comment on this)

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