Friday, January 16th, 2015

Time	Event
2:52a	Switch Plans Massive $1 Billion SUPERNAP Data Center in Reno Few data center providers build bigger than Switch. Today the Las Vegas company unveiled plans for its largest project yet, a $1 billion, 3 million square foot SUPERNAP data center campus on 1,000 acres of land near Reno, Nevada. E-commerce giant eBay Inc. will be the anchor tenant for the SUPERNAP Reno, which will connect to the main SUPERNAP campus in Las Vegas via a new fiber loop, which will also extend to Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area. The massive project was announced tonight by Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval. “This will make Nevada the most digitally connected state in the United States,” Sandoval said in his annual State of the State address. The SUPERNAP project brings another major hyperscale data center to Reno, which is already home to a large cloud computing facility for Apple. The first phase will feature an 800,000 square foot data center, and is scheduled to open in early 2016. The Reno data centers will be designed to meet the Uptime Institute’s Tier IV Gold rating for both facility and operations, a standard currently met only by the Switch SUPERNAP 8 in Las Vegas. Switch has built a major cloud computing hub in Las Vegas, including two huge SUPERNAP data centers, with a third nearing completion. When the new SUPERNAP 9 opens, the colocation provider will have nearly 1.5 million square feet of capacity in Las Vegas. Switch said today that it will also expand the scope of its Las Vegas campus, where it will develop data centers on an additional 200 acres of land, which land could support more than 1 million square feet of new capacity, Switch said. Looking Beyond Las Vegas As it scales up in its core market, Switch has extended its gaze beyond Vegas, announcing plans for an international expansion as well as the project in Reno, which lies about 500 miles north of Las Vegas. “Offering our clients the ability to locate their infrastructure safely in two cities, over 500 miles apart and yet only 7 milliseconds away is critical for both redundancy and scalability,” said Switch CEO and Founder Rob Roy. “The construction of SUPERNAP Reno will create the need for Switch to expand its Las Vegas footprint and Nevada will remain Switch’s global anchor location.” A key component of the Reno expansion is the SUPERLOOP, a fiber network that will kick off with a 500-mile route between Las Vegas and Reno. The network will also extend from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Switch said the fiber ring that will place 50 million people within 14 milliseconds of data hosted at the SUPERNAPs. A graphic overview of SUPERLOOP, the West Coast fiber network planned by Switch. The Reno project is welcome news for the state of Nevada, which has been touting data centers as a growth sector as it seeks to diversify its economy beyond tourism and casino gambling. It comes on the heels of an announcement that automaker Tesla will open a “gigafactory” battery plant near Reno. Switch has become a major economic force in Las Vegas, where its construction projects have created hundreds of jobs. “Switch’s expansion is an incredible win for the entire State of Nevada,” said Steve Hill, Executive Director for the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. “Not only does it provide a massive economic boost for northern and southern Nevada but also through construction of the SUPERLOOP it will provide high-speed connectivity access to rural Nevada, a key for education and economic development.” Switch now has more than 1,000 customers, including more than 40 cloud computing companies and a dense concentration of network carriers. The company’s roster of clients includes tech industry heavyweights like eBay, Google, Cisco, VMware and Microsoft’s Xbox One. The 350,000 square foot SuperNAP 8 is the latest design from Rob Roy, the CEO and founder of Switch, as well as the company’s principal inventor and chief engineer. It sits adjacent to SuperNAP 7, the 400,000 square foot center that put Switch on the map. Roy has patented many of the design innovations at the facilities, including an advanced cooling system which can switch between six different cooling modes, and the T-SCIF heat containment system. The company is currently nearing completion on SUPERNAP 9, a 600,000 square foot data center adjacent to the existing buildings. Switch constructs its facilities using pre-fabricated modular components known as SwitchMODs, which each feature two data halls. The current design includes flywheels to provide additional runtime on for HVAC units in the event of a power outage, a steel aisle containment system that also functions as a thermal storage system, and a boudle-roof system that protects the data centers from wind speeds of up to 200 miles per hour. The design can operate effectively in any climate, providing a template for global growth. (Comment on this)
1:00p	Nearly 100 Data Centers Qualify for UK’s Climate Change Tax Break About 100 data centers have been approved to be exempt almost entirely from paying an extra tax on energy use under one of the government’s climate change initiatives in exchange for commitments from the operators to increase energy efficiency of the facilities. Among the operators are major players, such as Digital Realty Trust, CenturyLink Technology Solutions, Equinix, TelecityGroup, and IBM, among others. Called Climate Change Agreement, the exemption is for energy intensive industries, created by the government to help them remain competitive with foreign players after the levy was introduced. It slashes the levy on companies in these industries by 90 percent if they commit to making measurable energy efficiency improvements. The levy was introduced in 2010, and the CCAs have been around since 2001, but data centers were not among the 50 or so industries that were considered energy intensive and that would qualify for CCAs. In July of last year, thanks to years of lobbying efforts by data center providers and trade groups (most notably techUK), the data center industry finally made the list, and the new Climate Change Agreement for Data Centers went into effect. “The industry has lobbied the government since 2010 to prove that U.K. data centers are good for the U.K. economy,” Mark Yearwood, director of financial planning and analysis for CenturyLink EMEA, said in an emailed statement. “We are an energy intensive industry, hence energy efficiency in this sector is paramount to overall scheme objectives.” To get the tax break, an operator has to agree to improve energy efficiency of each of their CCA-covered sites by 30 percent over a 2011 baseline by 2020. Efficiency, under the scheme, will be expressed using Power Usage Effectiveness – the widely used data center energy efficiency metric. (See full list of data centers covered by CCA as of January 5, 2015 here) CCA Won’t Mean Big Changes for Digital Realty in UK Digital Realty Limited, U.K. subsidiary of the San Francisco-based wholesale data center giant Digital Realty Trust, has seven data centers covered by the CCA, but most efficiency improvements that will get it to the target will not be something the company would not have done had it not chosen to participate in the scheme. “I don’t think it’ll be a huge departure from business-as-usual,” Paul Cranfield, director of power for Digital Realty in EMEA, said. “Combination of [new] investments and housekeeping will get us across the line.” The company has grown a lot via acquisition, and many of the facilities in its portfolio have infrastructure that is simply outdated and needs to be upgraded regardless of the CCA. Cranfield also expects PUE improvements to come from customers upgrading IT gear to newer, higher-density boxes. Expressed simply, PUE is a ratio between power consumed by IT and total power consumed by the data center, including all the mechanical and electrical infrastructure and energy losses that occur in transmission and conversion. PUE improves if IT consumes more power, while total power remains constant. Improvements to bring “legacy” facilities up to today’s standards will be quite ordinary. Things like replacing old inefficient chillers with modern systems that use free air cooling; coupling live cooling capacity more tightly with IT load; increasing ambient air temperature; widening humidity bands; implementing hot- or cold-aisle containment, Patrick Coogan, investment and acquisitions associate at Digital Realty, said. CenturyLink to Make Upgrades Throughout The efforts at CenturyLink, which has three data centers covered by the CCA, are along similar lines. “A key part of our innovation plan will involve replacement, upgrade or alteration to our existing mechanical and electrical infrastructure,” Mark Taylor, director of data center operations at CenturyLink EMEA, said in an email. The company is planning to replace chiller-plant equipment, upgrade electrical infrastructure, CRAHs (computer room air handlers), improve airflow management and controls. CenturyLink will also switch to LED lighting, among other improvements. “The key is also investing in staff training which provides enhanced knowledge supporting strict procedure and policy enhanced management,” Taylor said. Savings Passed On to Customers The point of all this work is, of course, substantial savings. On top of savings that result from more efficient equipment, companies participating in the scheme expect to save a lot by not paying most of the climate change levy. “The significant savings to CenturyLink will allow us firstly to re-invest in the infrastructure that will deliver the targets of the scheme whilst remaining internationally competitive with our utility costs, as well as removing CRC pass through tax charges to our clients, which has often not been well received,” CenturyLink’s Yearwood said. Cranfield also said Digital Realty’s savings from the levy exemption will be significant. “That saving, in reality, is passed straight to our customers,” he said. (Comment on this)
4:00p	Intel Data Center, Internet of Things Groups Grew Fastest in 2014 Intel reported a 6 percent increase in annual revenue, with its data center and Internet of Things groups growing at much faster rates than others. The company’s Mobile and Communications Group saw a sharp drop in annual revenue, which was down 85 percent from the previous year. Intel made $55.9 billion in revenue total in 2014. The company reported $11.7 billion in net income for the year – up 22 percent from 2013. Its earnings per share were $2.31. This was the first full year Intel’s current CEO Brian Krzanich has been at the helm. He succeeded previous chief exec Paul Otellini in May 2013, after serving as chief operating officer for about 1.5 years. The Intel Data Center Group, led by its general manger and senior vice president Diane Bryant, continued to outperform all other units in the fourth quarter, like it did in previous quarters. The group’s Q4 revenue was $4.1 billion – up 25 percent year over year. Its full-year revenue was $14.4 billion, or 18 percent higher than in 2013. The group makes processors and other components for servers, workstations, networking, and storage hardware. In addition to off-the-shelf products, the group has been growing its business of making custom chips for major cloud service providers and hardware vendors. Some of the deals in this category the company has talked about publicly include custom chips for the latest high-performance C4 instances on Amazon Web Services and for Oracle’s latest Exadata database machine. Company leadership expects the Intel Data Center Group’s revenue to grow at an average 15 percent annual rate through 2018. At the company’s Investor Day event in November, Intel execs said the group would potentially generate $24.66 billion in revenue and $9 billion in profit by that year. The PC Client Group, which contributes the biggest portion of the company’s total revenue, reported $34.7 billion for the year – up 4 percent from the previous year. The third-biggest portion of annual revenue came from software and services operating segments, which generated $2.2 billion in sales for the year, albeit it was only a 1 percent year-over-year improvement. These segments include the company’s Software and Services Group, which builds software for Intel-based products, and the Security Group (formerly McAffee, which Intel acquired in 2011). Revenue of the Internet of Things Group grew 19 percent in 2014, reaching $2.1 billion. This group designs embedded chips for network-connected devices. “There is more to do in 2015,” Krzanich said in a statement. “We’ll improve our profitability in mobile, and keep Intel focused on the next wave of computing.” (Comment on this)
4:30p	Newly Formed Dark Fiber Provider Enters New York Market A new dark fiber operator, called Axiom Fiber Networks, has been formed to serve the New York metro. The company says its fiber routes will run between key traffic exchange points in New York City. It is targeting both enterprises and carriers with dark fiber and managed private network services. The 20-mile 864-strand network construction started late last year. The company expects to complete the first phase, which will connect multiple carrier hotels, in the first quarter. The network will connect five of New York City’s biggest carrier hotels, according to the company’s website. These are Google-owned 111 8th Avenue, 325 Hudson, 60 Hudson, 32 Avenue of the Americas, and Sabey-owned 375 Pearl. Axiom Fiber CEO Felipe Alvarez has been in the telco business for more than 25 years. He has held positions at Sidera Networks, Con Edison Communications, Hibernia Networks, and Verizon. “I am thrilled to be back at building a service provider business that not only addresses continued market demand for fiber connectivity but also gaps in the marketplace in areas such as customer service, deal flexibility, and speed of delivery,” Alvarez said in a statement. (Comment on this)
5:03p	Citrix Acquires Storage Virtualization Company Sanbolic Citrix announced it has acquired storage virtualization company Sanbolic to complete its virtualization portfolio for app delivery and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments. Sanbolic’s software-defined storage platform unifies management of heterogeneous storage, and enables scale-out file serving and block storage management. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Citrix says it will blend the workload-oriented solutions from Sanbolic into its XenDesktop, XenApp, and XenMobile products to cater to specific workload needs. It also notes that over 200 of its clients already use Sanbolic’s storage virtualization products in on-premise or cloud-based storage, networking, and compute infrastructure. Co-founders Eva Helen and Momchil Michaylov started Sanbolic over 13 years ago in Waltham, Massachusetts, to help bring the benefits of hyperscale economics to enterprise storage and workloads. The company’s software-defined platform abstracts underlying hardware and lets management and access be defined by individual workloads. The platform also allows customer deployments to be distributed across multiple locations and clouds. Citrix Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer Geir Ramleth said, “Infrastructure complexity continues to hinder VDI and application delivery deployments. By leveraging Sanbolic technology with XenDesktop and XenApp, Citrix is able to address this problem head on, delivering solutions to our customers that simplify the infrastructure and reduce the overall cost of deployment and management.” In the realm of enterprise software defined storage, Sanbolic competitor ScaleIO was acquired by EMC in 2013. Last year, EMC also acquired cloud storage management company TwinStrata. (Comment on this)
5:30p	Friday Funny Caption Contest: Tall Data Center Another weekend is (practically) here and we’re in a Friday Funny mood. Help us complete our Kip and Gary cartoon by submitting your caption below! 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. Then, next week, our readers will vote for the best submission. Here’s what Diane had to say about this week’s cartoon, “This comic was inspired by Grand Ming’s 15-story data center in Hong Kong. Just how tall can they make a data center?!” Congratulations to the last cartoon winner, Ben, who won with, “I’ll trade you this job list for that hat. THEN I’ll call it a “happy” new year!” For more cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. For more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website. (Comment on this)
8:19p	Data Center Power Transmission Bill Introduced in Virginia Responding to outrage by many of his constituents in Prince William County about the proposed new power transmission lines for a future Amazon data center, Virginia State Delegate Robert Marshall, a Republican, introduced a bill that would require data center owners to foot the bill for burying transmission lines underground. When utility Dominion Power proposed construction of a 230 kV transmission line and a new substation to serve the future data center, many local residents voiced strong opposition, fearing the transmission lines would bring property values in the area down. One solution would be to burying the lines, but, according to Dominion, that would be a much more costly alternative. Virginia, and especially Northern Virginia, is a data center hotbed. It is one of the nation’s biggest data center markets, primarily because of the high amount of network connectivity options available in the region. According to planning documents, the proposed 500,000 square foot data center project in the Town of Haymarket will be built by Vadata, a wholly owned Amazon subsidiary that handles data center construction for the e-commerce giant. Marshall’s bill, filed Monday January 12, proposes to change state law to require any proposed data center that needs a 230 kV or higher electrical transmission line to be located in areas zoned for industrial use. If they’re outside of zoned industrial areas, the transmission lines that serve them must be buried underground at the data center owner’s expense. The planned Amazon data center would be in a non-industrial zone, and therefore, if it passed, the company would have to pay for laying the transmission lines underground. Opposition to the transmission line proposal among Marshall’s constituents has been strong. A group called the Coalition to Protect Prince William County formed in opposition to the proposed power lines. A town hall meeting about the project earlier this week filled every seat at a local high school auditorium, to a point where those who arrived late had to stand in the aisles, Washington Post reported. The auditorium’s capacity is 800. Before penning the bill, Marshall and Virginia State Senator Richard Black (also a Republican) sent a letter directly to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, asking to consider either changing the location of the project to an industrial-zoned property just outside of Haymarket, or to build the transmission lines underground. (Comment on this)
8:30p	Department of Defense Launches New Cloud Computing Security Requirements This article originally appeared at The WHIR The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) released the Department of Defense’s new Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide this week. The Service Requirements Guide (SRG) is meant to assist cloud service providers in looking to be included in the Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Service Catalog. The SRG (PDF) also provides a basis for the department to asses a providers “security posture,” and defines policies, requirements, and architectures for DoD cloud use. A draft was released for industry and public comment in December, just before acting DoD CIO Terry Halvorsen changed a rule to allow the department to procure commercial cloud services without going through DISA, FCW reports. That move was foreshadowed in September whenHalvorsen announced a DoD database consolidation project. “The SRG is designed to ensure that DOD can attain the full economic and technical advantages of using the commercial cloud without putting the departments data and missions at risk,” said DISA Risk Management Executive Mark Orndorff in a statement. Orndorff also issued a memo earlier this week (PDF) which indicates the version released by DISA may be followed by updates pending further research into some industry comments. The SRG applies to missions with “secret” or lower classification, and takes the place of the previous Cloud Security Model used by the DoD. “Consistent implementation and operation of these requirements assures mission execution, provides sensitive data protection, increases mission effectiveness, and ultimately results in the outcomes and operational efficiencies the DoD seeks,” the SRG says, in a clear message to cloud service providers in the government market. It remains to be seen if the follow through will be stronger than in the past. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/department-defense-launches-new-cloud-computing-security-requirements (Comment on this)
10:25p	Amerimar and Newby’s Carrier Hotel Venture Gets a Name After doing business together for nearly three years, real estate firm Amerimar Enterprises and Hunter Newby, an entrepreneur, have given their joint venture a name: Netrality Properties. The company buys carrier hotels with carrier-neutral meet-me rooms in top U.S. markets and offers data center space, interconnection, and remote hands services to tenants in those buildings. A key part of the model is not charging recurring fees for cross connections in the meet-me rooms. Netrality currently owns four buildings, in New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Chicago. Its most recent acquisition in the second half of 2014 was the major data center and interconnection hub at 717 South Wells in Chicago. Its acquisitions in Chicago and Philadelphia were funded by Boston-based Abrams Capital Management, a powerhouse with billions of dollars under management. Newby told us in November that Abrams wanted “to put a lot of money to work in a short period of time,” and that the company was shopping for more carrier hotels. Netrality is eyeing Houston as an upcoming expansion, according to the company’s website. Newby was one of the founders of Telx, a major U.S. colocation and interconnection player. He is also founder and CEO of New York-based Allied Fiber, a company that’s building a nationwide backhaul network. Amerimar is a Philadelphia-based real estate development, investment, and management company. “For years, I have been asked by the industry to bring back my original MMR (meet-me room) model of no monthly recurring charges for cross connects,” Newby said in a statement. “Today, we bring that model back. And we do so with unified building and MMR ownership to create a stable environment for all network operators.” (Comment on this)

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