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Friday, January 30th, 2015
| Time | Event |
| 12:06a | Amazon Web Services Launches Business Email Service to Take on Cloud Competitors
This article originally appeared at the WHIR Public cloud giant Amazon Web Services launched its response to Office 365 and Google Apps for Work on Wednesday. Amazon WorkMail is a business email and calendaring service hosted in the AWS cloud that starts at $4 per email inbox. According to AWS, WorkMail doesn’t require users to buy specific hardware or license email server software, and allows users to pay monthly, only for the mailboxes they create. “Customers have repeatedly asked us for a business email and calendaring service that is more cost-effective and simpler to manage than their on-premises solution, more secure than the cloud-based offerings available today, and that is backed by the same best-in-class infrastructure platform on which they’re reliably running so many of their current (and future) workloads,” AWS Compute Services VP Peter De Santis said. “We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests and to help businesses achieve agility and cost savings by letting AWS manage the non-differentiated heavy lifting involved in corporate email and calendaring.” Amazon WorkMail can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook and native iOS and Android email applications, and integrates with existing corporate directories. WorkMail can also be used with WorkSpaces, Amazon’s virtual desktop service, and Zocalo, a cloud storage service, much like Dropbox. With a stronghold on the enterprise market, AWS offering a secure email and calendaring service isn’t a stretch, and it could be successful if it is able to convert existing clients to its email service and continue to promote its enterprise-grade security. Users can even choose which AWS Region their data is hosted in, a big incentive for corporate users concerned about the privacy of their email data,particularly in the wake of Microsoft’s email warrant case in Dublin and Google quietly handing over WikiLeaks staff emails to the FBI. AWS WorkMail also integrates the AWS Key Management Service so customers can control their own encryption keys. Service providers who have conventionally offered customers value-added services like hosted email to differentiate their service from companies like Google and AWS may have to take a look at their offerings. Between Google launching a domain registration service and AWS now offering a corporate email solution, the companies are positioning themselves as more of a one-stop-shop than ever before. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/a |
| 1:00p | Survey: One-Third of Cloud Users’ Clouds are Private, Heavily OpenStack While public cloud services continue to grow – as this week’s Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure earnings reports illustrated – private cloud still enjoys a higher adoption rate. A recent survey, conducted by GigaOm and funded by Canonical, found that more than one-third of cloud users use private clouds, and more than half of those are OpenStack clouds. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud adoption is on the rise, since it’s a strategy that offers the best of both worlds. The survey had about 3,000 respondents, including CIOs, managers, software developers, and engineers from a range of organizations in different industry verticals. The recent wave of price cuts by the cloud services giants has not had much effect on public cloud adoption, the researchers noted. The trends may also indicate that public cloud providers still haven’t addressed the security and compliance concerns enterprises have about the model. Big Year for Enterprise Linux = Big Year for OpenStackNearly 65 percent of respondents agreed that OpenStack was now ready for mission critical workloads. The open source cloud architecture has matured substantially. There has been a huge push recently by large enterprise IT vendors either to support OpenStack or to make it an integral part of their products and services. Another reason for growing OpenStack confidence may be the fact that three key Linux distribution vendors (Canonical is one of them) launched new enterprise Linux releases that fully support OpenStack deployments, Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu cloud solutions product manager at Canonical, said. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS came out in April; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 came out in June; and CentOS-7 came out in July. It was unusual for all three major distros to release enterprise Linux versions in one year, making 2014 a big year for enterprise Linux, and consequently, OpenStack. Kirkland said lots of people will be deploying OpenStack clouds this year as a result. Here’s a ranking of OpenStack cloud deployments in 2014 by operating system, courtesy of OpenStack Superuser:
Internet of Things Key Next Cloud Growth DriverThe next phase of growth in cloud adoption will be driven by the Internet of Things, growing amounts of data, and software defined data center technologies, in survey respondents’ opinion. Of the three, IoT will be the biggest driver. “The amount of data and requests and just network traffic generated by IoT will drive cloud adoption even bigger,” Kirkland said. “Cloud as an architecture, as a methodology, is particularly well suited for the Internet of Things.” It is well suited primarily because of the flexibility it provides. The amount of connected devices is growing very quickly, so capacity to ingest and process data they generate on the backend needs to grow quickly as well. The devices also change quickly, which means the backend infrastructure needs to be able to adapt quickly. A company may release a new model of a personal activity tracker, for example, which may use a different protocol and have different capabilities than a legacy model. The vendor has to have infrastructure that can support both, Kirkland explained. Few Testing Docker WatersDocker was of course last year’s hot new thing in IT. But the survey found that while interest in the open source Linux application container technology is high, few have actually implemented it in their data centers. More than 80 percent of respondents have not used Docker to deploy workloads. Kirkland said publishing the figures was not meant to deflate the importance of Docker as a technology. Docker is an important technology to the company, he said. “We’re just trying to put Docker into perspective. It seems a little bit like Docker sometimes is the only way people are deploying in the cloud, just because of the noise around Docker.” |
| 3:00p | Top 10 Data Center Stories, January 2015 From a massive $1 billion SUPERNAP campus in Reno to a rare look inside Google’s data center operations, here are the 10 most read articles on Data Center Knowledge during the month of January. Enjoy! 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. Top 10 Data Center Predictions for 2015 – With the arrival of a new year, organizations are making plans to address the explosion of enterprise data in 2015. A big question is how those plans will differ from your data center operations this past year. Fire at Amazon Data Center Construction Site in Ashburn Contained – A fire broke out at an Amazon Web Services data center construction site in Ashburn, Virginia, Friday morning. It started around 10 a.m. EST on the roof of the large structure, Mary Maguire, a Loudoun County Fire, Rescue and Emergency Management spokeswoman, said.  Roof fire at an Amazon data center construction site in Ashburn, Virginia, was contained, with no reported injuries. (Photo: Rob Johnston) Upcoming Verizon Cloud Downtime May Be Wakeup Call for Some – For some Verizon Cloud customers this coming weekend’s prolonged downtime will be a resiliency test for their architecture; some will simply experience a period of downtime they knew could come at some point; yet for some, the outage may serve as a wakeup call. Video Tour: Google Data Center in South Carolina – Providing a rare look inside its data center operations, Google recently posted a video describing its data center in Berkeley County, South Carolina, including descriptions of the facility’s cooling system and security measures.  Google’s infrastructure team is experimenting with using this rainwater retention pond as a source of water for the South Carolina data center’s cooling system. (Photo: Google) Amazon Data Center Project in Virginia Stumbles Over Power Line Opposition – Amazon wants to build a 500,000 square foot data center in Haymarket, a town in Prince Williams County in Northern Virginia. To provide enough power for the future facility, code-named “Midwood Center,” utility Dominion Power needs to build a new substation and a transmission line. What Pundits Think: Cloud Predictions 2015 – While some trends in the cloud market in 2015 will signal maturity – trends like consolidation and cloud service portfolio pruning, for example – some are shifts of non-organic nature. Examples of the latter include a growing focus on Asia and the effects of new data privacy legislation around the world on cloud decisions. Why Zayo is Paying $675M for Latisys – Acquisitions are part of Zayo Group’s day-to-day business. Having bought 30 or so companies since its founding in 2007, acquisition has been the Louisville, Colorado, company’s chief instrument of growth.  The Latisys data center in Englewood, Colorado, one of four facilities the company operates. Five Reasons Hybrid Cloud Technologies Will Continue to Grow – It’s 2015, and it’s safe to say that many of us have our heads in the cloud. We’re using more mobile devices, requesting even more data from a variety of data center points, and are demanding even more from the infrastructure that is designed to support the next-generation cloud platform. Amazon Data Center Construction Fire Linked to Welding Mishap – The cause of this morning’s roof fire at an Amazon Web Services data center construction site in Ashburn, Virginia, has been traced to a welding mishap, local fire officials said. 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+. |
| 5:30p | Friday Funny Caption Contest: Roses Roses are red, violets are blue, we have a brand new Friday Funny for you! 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, “In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I thought I would let Kip experience some Valentine love!” Congratulations to the last cartoon winner, Mike, who won with, “Well, the boss said he wanted to put everything in the cloud.” For more cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. For more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website. |
| 5:43p | Report: Oregon’s ‘Brand Tax’ May Be Diverting Data Center Construction Oregon is racing to fix a sort of “brand tax” that might be preventing tech giants from doing more data center construction and other infrastructure expansion there, according to the Oregonian. A provision in Oregon tax law means the state taxes Oregon utilities’ property based on the value of their brand. The amount you pay is based on your brand, and Google and Apple brands are worth quite a bit. The term for the practice of assessing based on the intangible brand value is dubbed “central assessment.” This tax might be one reason why Oregon hasn’t seen an Apple solar farm in Prineville or Google Fiber in Portland. These are only two theoretical examples. While Google Fiber “passed over” Portland, Apple hasn’t publicly spoken of a potential solar farm. The Oregonian is illustrating how important tax code factors into these decisions. It a similar question to what the Seattle Times posed when Microsoft chose Iowa for a big data center investment. Microsoft has a massive data center campus in Quincy, a data center hub of sorts. Oregon is already a magnet for big data center construction projects. Apple did invest in a data center in Prineville, and Google has spent well over one billion expanding in Oregon. Other big data center investments include Facebook, which went through a tax battle of its own in 2011, and Amazon, which used a modular design to build its data center there. Another multi-million-dollar tax battle occurred between Comcast and Oregon counties. The five-year battle had the Oregon Supreme Court rule in favor of Oregon counties. According to the Oregonian, the ruling created more uncertainty about what kind of technologies could be taxed, opening the door to interpret similar situations for other technology giants operating data centers there. However, Apple’s big solar investments have been going to North Carolina. Facebook has invested in wind in Iowa. Amazon’s recent wind power purchase was in Indiana. Google fiber makes many people across the country salivate at the prospect of breaking the monopoly hold many are under in their markets, but Oregon hasn’t really been on the map as a potential market. The tax is just one potential reason these projects aren’t going to Oregon. Site selection involves a lot of factors – the tax might be more of a nuisance than a barrier. Regardless, lawmakers are trying to fix the law. |
| 6:07p | eBay Enterprise Expands Magento Infrastructure with IBM Cloud eBay Enterprise has signed with IBM as a cloud infrastructure provider for Magento. Magento, which eBay acquired in 2011, is big in the e-commerce space, helping optimize e-commerce sites for customer interaction, backend sales, and analysis needs. It’s used by close to a quarter of a million retailers. IBM is one of several hosting partners but stands out as the largest. Others include Rackspace, Peer 1, and Hostway. The addition of IBM is a substantial expansion in scale of the infrastructure available to the company and its customers. IBM has more than 40 cloud data centers around the world. Its cloud infrastructure expanded substantially since the company acquired SoftLayer in 2013. In December, SoftLayer joined Equinix’s Cloud Exchange, giving Equinix customers around the world direct access to IBM cloud services from their colocation facilities. eBay has substantial data center infrastructure of its own. The company has designed and built some of the most cutting-edge, energy efficient data centers. But eBay Enterprise would not get the kind of scale and flexibility cloud services provide using the company’s own facilities. The e-commerce space is one of the biggest beneficiaries of cloud infrastructure services. Online vendors can have unpredictable traffic patterns, driven by introduction of new products or fluctuating seasonal demand. “E-commerce is a key vertical business for IBM Cloud,” Jim Comfort, general manager of IBM Cloud Services, said in a statement. “Partnering with eBay Enterprise will better position our joint customers to realize their growth goals by leveraging their Magento platform running on IBM’s cloud infrastructure, which together will deliver unparalleled performance, automation and global reach.” In January, IBM appointed one of its veterans Robert LeBlanc to run the new dedicated cloud business unit, which oversees SoftLayer. SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby recently left, 18 months after the $2 billion acquisition. |
| 6:30p | SolarWinds Acquires Cloud Monitoring Company Librato for $40 Million
This article originally appeared at the WHIR As cloud adoption continues to increase to a predicted $127-$200 billion market in 2018, service providers are looking for a strategic edge. SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) believes the acquisition of the cloud monitoring company Librato will give them an advantage. On Thursday, SolarWinds acquired San Francisco-based Librato for $40 million. Librato leverages data analytics to offer insights into cloud usage. Data analytics of all kinds are a big trend in the cloud, as identified in a recent WHIR podcast. “We believe that as the world moves towards web-scale applications, continuous deployment and intelligent, internet-connected devices, the ability to capture, analyze, query and act on time-series data in real time becomes mission-critical for every organization,” Librato CEO Fred van den Bosch said in a blog post. “We also believe that when a need becomes this universal and data volumes this big, the best answer is a scalable, application agnostic platform with open APIs and an active user community. It allows organizations to extract the most value from their data and to have access to a broad range of application-specific solutions.” Just a few months ago, SolarWinds made a similar strategic purchase of Pingdom to allow SolarWinds to extend its on-premise IT management to web application performance management. The company’s goal is to offer solutions for monitoring and management of cloud-based applications and infrastructure. The Librato acquisition addresses the infrastructure component by extending performance management capabilities to the cloud. “As we evaluate the growth of the business-critical application, we see three ‘horizons’ of application deployment that require robust performance management — on-premise IT, IT as a service, and IT in the cloud,” SolarWinds CEO and president Kevin Thompson said. “We expect that the requirement to manage existing on-premise infrastructure will continue, but will now be coupled with the need to manage the performance of infrastructure and applications either fully or partially deployed in private and public clouds.” Thompson also said that SolarWinds will continue to expand its offerings to take advantage of new opportunities this year. One of those opportunities could be boosting its internal threat monitoring capabilities, as the company continues to see insider data leakage and theft grow. SolarWinds released its financial results for 2014 as well, showing strong growth in licensing and subscription revenue. Total revenue for Q4 2014 reached a record high of $118.4 million, representing a 22 percent year-over-year growth, the company said. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/s |
| 10:13p | Digital Realty Rejigs Top Management Roles Digital Realty has made some tweaks to its top-level management team as the company continues the process of optimizing its operations for the future. CTO Jim Smith will take over the responsibilities of David Schirmacher, senior vice president of portfolio operations. He will remain CTO. Schimacher’s new role will be senior vice president of design and construction, but he’ll also continue to oversee development and implementation of EnVision, the data center infrastructure management software the company has designed in-house. Schirmacher has led the DCIM effort from the start. This is the latest change in the top ranks of the world’s largest provider of wholesale data center space. The other recent change was the appointment of CFO William Stein to the role of permanent CEO in November 2014. He had served as interim CEO ever since the abrupt resignation of the real estate investment trust’s founding CEO Michael Foust in March of last year. The point of the latest reorganization was to better leverage Smith’s and Schirmacher’s respective sets of expertise. “This organizational change is in keeping with our commitment to unlock the outstanding talent within Digital Realty as we focus on how to best utilize our resources to drive future growth,” Stein said in a statement. Organizational changes are part of a broader set of adjustments San Francisco-based Digital Realty has been going through since Foust’s departure. The company is in the process of identifying and selling off real estate assets that are not core to its strategy. It has also been entering into partnerships with a variety of service providers to be able to offer more support to its customers beyond its traditional bread-and-butter turnkey and powered-shell data center space. Investors have responded positively to the changes over the course of last year. The company’s stock is about 60 percent higher now than it was toward the end of 2013. Today’s news, however, had a negative impact on Digital’s stock, which was down about 1.6 percent in after-hours trading. |
| 10:53p | Colorado Vendor Starts Data Center Efficiency Business RLE Technologies, a Fort Collins, Colorado-based data center leak detection and monitoring system vendor, has launched a subsidiary that will help clients improve their data center efficiency. The company, called Future Resource Engineering, will assess the facility, make recommendations for improving energy efficiency, and help implement the improvements. It promises to provide a precise assessment of the amount of savings the improvements will provide to help the customer make the decision to improve or not to improve efficiency. Typical recommendations are adjusting airflow management, upgrading monitoring and controls, improving operational protocols, or increasing cooling efficiency. Future Resource Engineering will also determine whether the improvements will help the facility qualify for energy reduction incentives from the local utility. Data center efficiency is an ongoing struggle for most of the world’s operators. Average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) among data center operators surveyed last year by the Uptime Institute was 1.7, which means the average data center is using 70 percent of the energy required to run the IT equipment to power the underlying infrastructure (electrical gear, cooling, lights, etc.). And the average PUE has not gone down substantially since 2011, remaining close to flat throughout the four years. “For all their benefits, data centers consume an incredible amount of energy: an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in just 2013,” Jeremy Swanner, executive vice president of Future Resource Engineering, said in a statement. “Thanks to the numerous utility-approved incentive programs, there are many tangible motivations for data center owners [and] operators to make their facilities energy efficient.” |
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