Friday, December 26th, 2014

Time	Event
1:00p	Top 10 Data Center Stories, December 2014 From Amazon Web Services slashing prices to the rise of direct liquid cooling, here are the 10 most read articles on Data Center Knowledge during the month of December. Enjoy! Rise of Direct Liquid Cooling in Data Centers Likely Inevitable – It’s been a decade since cooling vendors began predicting that power densities would force servers to be cooled by liquid rather than cool air. Instead, the industry has seen major advances in the efficiency of air cooling, while liquid cooling has been largely confined to specialized computing niches. IO to Split into Two Separate Companies – IO, the Phoenix-based data center provider best known for its modular data center containers, is going to be split into two companies. One, called IO, will continue operating as a data center provider, while the other, called BaseLayer, will be a technology vendor, selling data center containers and data center infrastructure management software IO.OS. One of the two future companies will retain the name IO and will continue providing colocation space in modules and on traditional raised floor. (Photo: IO) Report: Colo Business Thrives as Enterprises Move to Cloud – The colocation data center market is very well insulated against the huge shift in enterprises pushing IT workloads to the cloud, according to Synergy Research Group. The colocation industry is in fact thriving, the analysts said. AWS Slashes Cloud Data Transfer Prices – You can almost set your watch to cloud price cuts. The most recent cuts by Amazon Web Services, however, are not for compute and storage but for outbound data transfer. AWS has cut data transfer pricing on transfers out of its cloud, and both ways for CloudFront CDN. Phoenix Utility to Pilot Data Center Without Generator – There is only so many ways to build a data center without a generator or some other kind of backup power source and still have the level of reliability companies that rely on their applications to stay up around the clock need. SRP and BaseLayer have set out to prove that plugging a data center directly to bulk transmission lines removes the need for backup generators (Rendering: SRP) With Open Commodity Switch, Juniper Goes After Web-Scale Data Center Market – Juniper Networks and Taiwanese hardware manufacturer Alpha Networks have designed a “white box” network switch for web-scale data centers using principles of Facebook’s Open Compute Project and submitted the design to OCP for review and adoption. Juniper’s upcoming white box switch will be the company’s first users can use with any network OS of their choice (Photo: Juniper) Arista CEO on Cisco’s Lawsuit: “It’s Not the Cisco I Knew” – Saying they have not had the chance to go over the details of accusations in Cisco’s litigation against the data center network technology vendor, Arista Networks management said the move was unbecoming of a market-leading company. Why HP is Investing a Lot in the OpenStack Project – Bill Hilf knows a lot about vertical integration after spending 10 years at Microsoft. In his current role running cloud product strategy at HP, he knows enough to realize that vertical integration is not a good strategy for the company’s cloud business. IBM adds 12 Cloud Data Centers, Endorses OpenStack Throughout – IBM has added 12 cloud data centers to the list of locations its SoftLayer services are now delivered out of. Nine of them are inside Equinix data centers. Dell to Ship Open Switches with Midokura’s OpenStack SDN – Dell and Cumulus Networks have initiated a Software Defined Network startup called Midokura into their open and disaggregated data center network alliance. Midokura has an overlay network virtualization solution for OpenStack that will now be available together with Dell’s commodity hardware and the Linux-based network operating system by Cumulus. Stay current on data center news by subscribing to our daily email updates and RSS feed, or by following us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. (Comment on this)
4:30p	Planning for the Future: Enterprise Cloud Trends in 2015 eKris Bliesner is the co-founder and CTO of 2nd Watch Without a doubt, demand for public cloud services is growing. In its third quarter earnings report, Amazon reported that the “North American Sales, Other” category, which includes AWS, had sales of $1.34 billion, up from $960 million in the third quarter of last year. CFO Tom Szkutak said AWS saw close to 90 percent growth in usage. Microsoft reported that its commercial cloud revenues, which includes Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM, grew 128 percent in its latest quarter. The cloud growth trend will continue into next year and our latest survey showed that most companies will spend at least 15 percent more on public cloud infrastructure in 2015. We believe that with the maturity of public cloud IaaS services, CIOs should consider the following trends for planning in 2015 and beyond. Advancement of Hybrid Cloud Services and Tools Many companies have data center components that can’t move to the cloud, such as with ERP upgrades that are pending. Next year, companies will have better options for integrating systems between their existing data center and public cloud. There’s less concern about security and compliance in the cloud and more talk around where data is stored. For example, it is more common for a U.S. company to want to keep its data inside the U.S. With considerable innovation in privacy and security, even financial services and insurance providers are moving their data to the cloud. The decision is more about where to best manage the workload, internally or in the cloud. It’s now becoming possible for organizations to invest in monitoring and management solutions that can work on-premise and in the cloud. As an example, the AWS OpsWorks product is now available for managing on-premise servers as well as cloud servers. The integration isn’t tight yet, but it’s a step in this direction. Companies like Microsoft are also investing heavily in hybrid cloud solutions to enable more seamless hybrid environments. We believe that the hybrid cloud infrastructure is a transition phase. It might take 10 years, but hybrid is not the end state. We’ll continue to see companies move entire data centers to the public cloud. Disenchantment with Private Cloud The 2nd Watch survey indicated that private cloud was one of the least popular enterprise IT trends for 2015. Although private clouds make it easier and faster to deploy software and services, they’re still expensive to manage. Additionally, if your competitors are moving more assets to the public cloud and running on less expensive hardware, your business is at a disadvantage. Earlier this year, at AWS re:Invent, the CIO of Johnson and Johnson told audience members that private cloud couldn’t give the company what it was looking for. Because of that, Johnson and Johnson is on a public cloud trajectory – for a large enterprise, that’s quite telling. Security Gets Better Due to virtualization and the cloud, it is easier than ever to provision servers which means a company can triple its footprint overnight. A larger footprint, however, means managing more moving parts. Because of that, we will see more security software companies focusing on endpoint security next year. In fact, I’m confident that several security companies will be among the top 10 successful software startups next year. We will see innovation focused at the logical layers. As well, many of our customers are looking at third-party providers that can deliver Security-as-a-Service to take advantage of expertise around the ever-changing security space. Designing Natively for Public Cloud Emerging trends like the Internet of Things (IoT) and the sharing economy have created more complex infrastructure problems to solve. IT infrastructure management will require better automation but also new developer skills and knowledge that’s specific to the cloud. Companies are most interested in IT workers that possess experience managing public cloud workloads, according to our survey. Innovation will come from companies big and small. McCormick, for example, recently released a recipe app which helps users find new recipes based on the flavors they find enticing. The company mashed together different data sets to deliver this unique customer experience. Similarly, one of our customers is doing great work with cloud-based mobile pricing apps which is impressive for a multi-billion dollar company. Companies also need specific expertise on each platform, such as Azure or AWS, as there are currently no standards among the cloud IaaS providers regarding how they provision their architecture or the endpoints to access services. CIOs will need to hire experts, retrain staff and consider outsourcing. The world of people with these cloud native development skills and platform-specific cloud skills is very narrow. But if you can do this well, your company will have a competitive advantage. 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)
5:00p	Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption for Christmas Tree Although Christmas is technically behind us, we’re still in the holiday spirit! Join us for an extended celebration with this week’s Data Center Knowledge Caption Contest! 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. Several great submissions came in for last week’s cartoon – now all we need is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below! Take Our Poll For previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! (Comment on this)
6:45p	Symantec Joins OpenStack Foundation as Gold Member Symantec is the newest gold member of the OpenStack Foundation, whose membership is limited to eight platinum members and up to a couple dozen gold members. The security and information protection company has been active in the OpenStack security group for a while, contributing code to the Keystone Identity Service and the image service Glance. The company has also contributed to documentation in the areas of APIs, training, and security, including the Operations Guide used by many operators today. The foundation was announced in 2011, and the board was formally announced in 2012. A training marketplace was launched last year. Started by Rackspace and NASA in 2010, OpenStack has matured substantially and will celebrate its fifth birthday with several mainstream production deployments. “OpenStack is the cornerstone of our internal cloud infrastructure and is the blueprint for how Symantec is enabling a cultural shift around open source engineering best practices,” Stephen McHenry, Symantec’s senior vice president of cloud platform engineering, said in a statement. Jonathan Bryce, the foundation’s executive director, said the new member’s depth of knowledge will be valuable to OpenStack security and make the cloud technology more palatable for large enterprises. “Symantec offers our project a depth of security expertise that is especially valuable to the growing list of global enterprises who are using OpenStack in production to drive innovation through software development.” Other gold members are Aptira, CCAT, Cisco, Dell, DreamHost, EMC, Ericsson, Hitachi, Huawei, Juniper, Mirantis, Nebula, NEC, NetApp, Piston, and Yahoo! (Comment on this)
7:32p	Report: Fire Brings Down Maryland Police Data Center A small fire in the generator room of a Maryland State Police building caused a data center outage Friday, interrupting state troopers’ access to central crime databases, the Baltimore Sun reported. The data center was running on generator power during routine IT maintenance work when a small fire in the generator room activated fire sprinklers, which in turn caused the generator to shut down. The state police website was down on Friday afternoon. A police spokeswoman told the Sun that the data center outage interrupted access to shared documents for police staff around the state. Crews were bringing the system back online using a portable backup generator, she said. Backing up important data at remote sites or using cloud backup to maintain access during a primary data center outage is part of IT best practices. It is unclear whether Baltimore state police has such backup in place. Data center outages caused by fire are rare, but they do occur once in a while. One of the major recent examples was a big fire at a Samsung data center in South Korea in April, which affected network access for Samsung device users around the world. In April of 2013, Macomb County, Michigan, lost IT services after a fire in the building that housed its data center. This November, a fire at a warehouse in Thailand destroyed what was estimated to have been millions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin mining servers. (Comment on this)
7:48p	Kim “Santa” Dotcom Creates Christmas Miracle: Xbox Back Online While Playstation Struggles Following Lizard Squad DDoS Attack This article originally appeared at The WHIR It appears the hacker group Lizard Squad made good on its threat to cause Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation big headaches for Christmas. The group left gamers unable to use new consoles received as gifts by orchestrating DDoS attacks on the sites. This comes after the group claimed credit for two major outages at the same sites earlier in December and posted the tweet that those disruptions were “just a small dose of what’s to come on Christmas.” The group says it’s DDoS attack was, “possible thanks to rooted undersea routers used on transatlantic cables.” With Xbox boasting 48 million subscribers and PlayStation over double that with 110 million, the hackers affected a substantial number of gamers Christmas day. Users have been experiencing problems since Wednesday. At 6:51 a.m. EST on December 25th, thePlayStation Twitter feed posted, “We’re aware that some users are having issues logging into PSN – engineers are investigating.” At 11:41 a.m. the Xbox support Twitter feed posted, “We’re aware users are having issues logging into XBL & are actively working to resolve. Please visit xbx.lv/XBLstus for updates ^JX” The Xbox status page reports all services are back to normal except minor problems with IGN, Maxim and MLG.tv apps. As of 11:07 a.m. EST on Friday, PlayStation is still offline according to it’s status page. The last update was posted Christmas day. “We are aware that some users are experiencing difficulty logging into the PSN,” according to the site. “We will update this article with any changes that occur in regards to this issue. Thank you for your patience.” Neither Playstation or Xbox support feeds have updated their Twitter status today. This is at least the second outage for PlayStation this month and comes after Sony’s major hack that the FBI says was caused by North Korea. At 8:08 p.m. EST December 25th, the Lizard Squad Twitter feed reported that it stopped the attacks and that continued problems are simply the aftermath. Kim Dotcom, who has been in the news recently regarding his extradition hearingwhen the US has lost a bid to have him remanded in custody in New Zealand said via Twitter, “Asking Mega management to approve 3000 @MegaPrivacy premium vouchers for @LizardMafia if they stop attacking XBOX Live and PSN immediately.” Dotcom is known for running Megaupload, a sharing site that prosecutors argue cost film and music companies more than $500 million and generated more than $175 million in criminal proceeds. He claims credit for stopping the attack on Xbox and PlayStation by giving the Lizard Squad 500GB of upload space at Mega, a cloud-based storage site with end to end encryption. The site says, “Unlike other cloud storage providers, your data is encrypted and decrypted during transfer by your client devices only and never by us.” Dotcom posted a picture of his chat conversation with Lizard Squad negotiating the end of the attacks. He gave them 3,000 vouchers worth $99 each. The Lizard Squad said, “Thanks @KimDotcom for the vouchers–you’re the reason we stopped the attacks. @MegaPrivacy is an awesome service.” It isn’t clear what the group may want to send through the encrypted service but Dotcom says the account is only as good as the gaming sites don’t get attacked again. He is an avid Xbox player which could account for that service being online while PlayStation is still struggling to restore services. Neither Microsoft or PlayStation have given any details about the nature of the outages, whether they were DDoS attacks or who may be responsible. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/kim-santa-dotcom-creates-christmas-miracle-xbox-back-online-ddos-attack (Comment on this)
8:46p	Taiwanese Firm Buys Defunct Calxeda’s ARM Server IP A Taiwanese gaming company has bought intellectual property of Calxeda, the Austin-based ARM server startup that went out of business late last year, to get into the server business. Silver Lining Systems, which bought the Calxeda IP, is a new brand of Taipei-based AtGames Digital Media. AtGames’ other two brands are Zooti, which sells Android tablets and tablet games, and a PC game reseller called D2D. Silver Lining has a partnership with the enterprise solutions division of Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturing giant, and with ARM. Both Foxconn and ARM actively participated in the process of Silver Lining’s purchase of Calxeda’s IP from a bank but did not participate in the actual transaction, Barry Evans, the defunct Austin company’s founder and former CEO, said. “Takes a village to fire up a semiconductor product line,” Evans said. He is involved with Silver Lining as an advisor. Calxeda shut its doors in December 2013, its execs saying they were unable to raise enough money to keep going. The company had developed several 32 bit ARM Server-on-Chip parts for different data center applications, including servers and storage systems. It was also well on its way to bring a 64 bit ARM SoC for servers to market. U.K.’s ARM Holdings licenses its chip architecture to semiconductor makers. The architecture is used in most of the world’s smartphones. Because they have relatively low power needs, ARM chips became an attractive alternative to the x86 processor architecture that dominates the server market. Other companies in the ARM server market include AMD, Applied Micro, Texas Instruments, and Cavium. When HP first announced its Moonshot microserver line in 2011, it said it would use Calxeda’s SoCs. But when the IT giant actually started shipping ARM-powered Moonshot servers earlier this year, the systems used the 64 bit X-Gene ARM SoC by Sunnyvale, California-based Applied Micro. Because he is only an advisor to Silver Lining, Evans didn’t have detailed insight into Silver Lining’s product plans, but said they included bringing Calxeda’s existing products back. He said the company was not going to take the general-purpose approach to ARM SoCs, working instead on products optimized for specific workloads. “A bunch of companies that were testing the system before are picking up and testing it again now,” Evans said. He said the number of players that have entered the ARM server market was striking, and that the high level of competition would drive a lot of innovation in the space. “When was the last time the PC industry had that many competitors?” he asked. “All these players have a lot more latitude in what to build and so you’re seeing some dramatically different implementations of a total System-on-Chip solution,” Evans said. Correction: An earlier version of this article did not make it clear that Foxconn and ARM did not actually participate in the transaction of Silver Lining’s purchase of Calxeda’s intellectual property. The article has been corrected to clarify that. (Comment on this)

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