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Friday, February 6th, 2015
| Time | Event |
| 1:00p | DEC-IX Joins Open-IX, Wants to Certify New York Exchange DE-CIX North America, subsidiary of the organization that operates the Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange in Germany, has joined forces with Open-IX and started the process of certifying its distributed internet exchange in New York as compliant with Open-IX standards. DE-CIX is one of the three European internet exchange operators that recently moved into the U.S. market. Until now, it was the only one of the three that wasn’t involved with Open-IX. Open-IX is an industry group formed by network and data center operators, as well as by several Internet giants, such as Google, Netflix, and Akamai, to bring more diversity to the list of Internet exchanges in the U.S., currently dominated by Equinix and, to a much lesser extent, a handful of other companies, including Telx and Verizon. The point is to increase diversity and bring down the cost of peering. The non-profit has devised sets of certification criteria for exchanges and data centers that house them with the goal of creating distributed exchanges hosted across multiple data centers, making exchanges accessible to more users from more locations. While many companies have staff on the Open-IX membership roster, there is a lot of uncertainty about the initiative in the industry. Many like the idea but remain unsure about the ability of Open-IX-certified exchanges to reach the critical mass of members necessary to become serious alternatives to the likes of exchanges operated by Equinix. DE-CIX President Harald Summa made an optimistic statement about the future of Open-IX in the company’s release announcing this week’s agreement with the non-profit and plans to get its New York IX certified: “Open-IX has gained traction and proves to be valuable to the continued evolution of the U.S. Internet marketplace.” European Exchange InvasionDE-CIX launched its New York IX in the second half of 2013. LINX NoVA, Northern Virginia subsidiary of the London Internet Exchange, came online around the same time. AMS-IX (operator of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange) followed suit with the launch of a New York exchange in April of last year. Both AMS-IX NY and LINX NoVA have been Open-IX certified. AMS-IX has also launched a San Francisco Bay Area Internet exchange, hosted by Digital Realty in San Francisco and CoreSite in Silicon Valley. Open-IX certification for AMS-IX is pending. The nine switches that currently make up DE-CIX New York are hosted in seven data centers, located in Manhattan, Long Island, and New Jersey. Its data center providers are zColo, CoreSite, 325 Hudson, Telx, Telehouse, and Sabey. The current DE-CIX New York topology, courtesy of DE-CIX:
AMS-IX New York is hosted in five data centers in New York and New Jersey, provided by Digital Realty, DuPont Fabros, Sabey, Telx, and 325 Hudson. AMS-IX announced a plan to add a point of presence at a Telx data center within Google-owned 111 8th Avenue in Manhattan earlier this week. LINX NoVA is hosted by CoreSite, DuPont Fabros, and EvoSwitch in Reston, Ashburn, and Manassas, respectively. |
| 3:37p | OpenStack Summit Vancouver The OpenStack Summit Vancouver will be held May 18-22, 2015 at the Vancouver Convention Centre in British Columbia, Canada. Held twice annually, the OpenStack Summit is a unique opportunity to learn more about the OpenStack community, to witness the expansion of this revolutionary open source cloud platform and to meet executives at supporting organizations in the ecosystem. At the upcoming Summit in Vancouver, the community will celebrate its progress and fuel the acceleration of OpenStack’s rapidly expanding footprint, innovation, interoperability and IR evolution. For more information about the Vancouver Summit, visit the OpenStack Summit website. To view additional events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar. |
| 4:00p | Brocade Beefs Up Data Center NFV Play With Riverbed ADC Acquisition Brocade is buying the application delivery controller business of Riverbed Technology, a San Francisco-based network technology company. Terms of the transaction were no disclosed Riverbed’s virtual ADC technology plays a key role in the acquisition. It is one of the fastest-growing segments of the emerging network function virtualization market – a major strategic focus for Brocade. NFV, as well as software defined networking, are expected to drive the next phase of growth in data center networking. Brocade’s SAN business still generates the bulk of the company’s revenue, but that business isn’t growing, while its data center Ethernet and IP network business was up 5 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2014. The company has been taking big steps to get involved as much as possible in the NFV market. In 2012 it acquired Vyatta, developer of virtual routers, virtual firewalls, and VPNs. Last year, Brocade bought Vistapointe, maker of virtual network analytics tools. Brocade has been involved with OpenDaylight, an open source project to develop a common framework, or set of standards, for NFV and SDN. The company announced a Vyatta SDN controller that supports OpenDaylight standards last September. Investors have responded positively to the company’s recent activities. Its stock has risen steadily over the past two years. Riverbed’s ADC product line, called SteelApp, will become part of Brocade’s Software Business Unit when the acquisition completes. ADCs are used to make sure applications are delivered to users smoothly and securely. “We are thrilled to add SteelApp’s widely-adopted solution to our portfolio and will invest our existing ADC resources to aggressively advance the roadmap and extend it into our open Vyatta Platform offering for NFV and SDN,” Brocade CEO Lloyd Carney said in a statement. Riverbed has been undergoing big changes. The company sold its storage backup appliance business, called SteelStore, to NetApp in October of last year. Also last year, it was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $3.6 billion. Thoma Bravo beat Elliot Management’s $3-billion takeover bid in January. |
| 5:00p | Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption for Roses Kip and Gary are at it again, embracing another holiday to the fullest. Join in on the Valentine’s Day fun with our 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 PollFor previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! |
| 5:35p | MongoDB Update Addresses User Criticism MongoDB announced the latest iteration of the popular open source NoSQL database earlier this week. The company expects a general release of MongoDB 3.0 in March. The update improves scalability, speed, and manageability. A lot of the improvements come as a result of the recent acquisition of WiredTiger, such as a new pluggable storage engine architecture. There is also new Ops Manager software that helps users manage MongoDB clusters. The latest MongoDB update follows an $80 million funding round, announced in January. WiredTiger is good for write-intensive use cases. It is also better at compressing data. The second storage option is called in-memory Experimental. It’s not just a clever name, as it’s still in experimental stages. The goal is to make it production-ready for low-latency use cases – think fraud detection and recommendation engines. MongoDB has a reputation for being easy to use, but one criticism has been about performance limitations of the existing storage engine. The recent additions are a major fix. Ops Management addresses a big enterprise need. It is on-premise software based on the cloud-based MongoDB management service. Ops Management is included with MongDB’s commercial enterprise distribution. It helps with automation and best practices for MongoDB cluster management, from initial install to ongoing maintenance. Automation, in this context, means carrying out multiple tasks across clusters rather than making a change manually in each machine. “We’re making major improvements that have a big impact,” Elit Horowitz, MongoDB CTO and co-founder, wrote in a blog post announcing the upcoming MongoDB update. “Write performance has improved by 7x – 10x with WiredTiger and document-level concurrency control, compression reduces storage needs by up to 80 percent, and new management software called Ops Manager can reduce operational overhead by up to 95 percent for most tasks.” Open Source NoSQL is Winning in the EnterpriseAccording to DB-Engines rankings, MongoDB is the fastest-growing and most popular NoSQL database. All fastest-growing Database Management Systems (DBMS) are open source. Popularity of MySQL (open source but owned by Oracle) and Microsoft SQL Server have taken the biggest hits as a result. Top database dog Oracle’s growth remains flat in some areas and shrinking in others. DB-Engines shows that graph database management systems have had the biggest spike in popularity. A company called DataStax recently made an acquisition in this area, gobbling up Aurelius, a graph database startup. DataStax and Cassandra (the open source database the company is built around) are competition to MongoDB. While WiredTiger and Aurelius are different kinds of companies, both acquisitions had similar rationale and spoke to a bigger NoSQL trend, which is performance in deployments at massive scale. Another major NoSQL player is Couchbase, which has been particularly strong in the scaling area. Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold said the company saw MongoDB as having paved the way for enterprise adoption, but added that Couchbase was ahead in terms of a few needs, specifically performance and administration. “[MongoDB] is a great solution for developers needing an easy way to persist and query data in non-mission critical apps,” Wiederhold said via email. “But once you start to get to scale your applications and need enterprise grade performance, ease of administration and support for a variety of use cases, we see companies swapping out Mongo with Couchbase Server.” Redis Labs, a provider of the NoSQL Redis notes a similar need out in the market. “It is clear that the strongest proponent for NoSQL’s adoption is the need for performance at scales and in a cost-effective way,” said Itamar Haber, chief developers advocate at Redis Labs. “To remain relevant and participate in this race, NoSQL vendors must ensure that their products deliver that performance.” Haber believes MongoDB acquired WiredTiger to skip an internal development project it would have to undertake to improve performance. |
| 5:53p | Beyond.pl Opening $27M Data Center in Poland Polish IT company Beyond.pl is planning to open a 65,000-square-foot data center in Poznań, a city in west central Poland. The data center is expected to cost about $27 million without the cost of equipment and will employ about 50 people, once it opens in March. The facility will be one of the largest colocation data centers in Poland and a major expansion for Beyond.pl. The company’s single current data center has only about 8,500 square feet of equipment space. The company is already accepting customers and hopes the facility to be one-quarter full by the time it comes online. It will be fed by two independent power sources, providing the building with 14 megawatts total. The European Regional Development Fund provided approximately $8.1 million worth of funding to the project. Beyond.pl offers business IT infrastructure services, employing about 100 people. The company was founded in 2005 and opened its first carrier-neutral colocation data center in 2007. Beyond.pl also runs an Information and Technology Research Center. While Europe as a whole has enjoyed a growing data center and cloud industry, Eastern European countries generally lag behind their western counterparts. Poland is one of the more developed countries when it comes to data center infrastructure but is still considered an emerging market. Nevertheless, it is a key market in Eastern Europe. Including growth within the country, many nearby European businesses view Poland as a logical first entry point into serving central and eastern European markets. Global consulting company PMR Research believes Poland make up one-fifth of the total central and eastern European market. Other colocation providers in Poland include Varion, TeliaSonera, and Thinx, a subsidiary of ATM S.A. Thinx operates the Atman data center, which expanded last July. The facility has around 40,000 square feet of equipment space. TelecityGroup acquired PLIX internet exchange and its well-connected colo facility in Warsaw in 2013. Telecity cited Poland’s market potential as rationale behind the deal. The London-based service provider also acquired 3DC in Bulgaria in a bigger Eastern European play. In 2013, IBM launched a 14,000-square-foot data center in Blonie, west of Warsaw. Multi-cloud platform provider OnApp noted in 2013 that Poland was an emerging market for it as well. Although it resides in Montreal, Canada, OVH’s 10,000 server containers were designed in Poland. |
| 6:30p | New Proposal from FCC Chairman Heralded as Victory for Net Neutrality
This article originally appeared at The WHIR Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has detailed a new approach to enforcing net neutrality that will treat Internet Service Providers as common carriers like phone service providers, and that would make it illegal for them to blocking or slowing down web traffic, or strike deals with content providers like Amazon, Google or Netflix to have faster delivery. Wheeler made the announcement in a formal proposal as well as a blog post for Wiredthat ISPs should fall under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. This would give the FCC authority to implement and enforce open internet protections, and effectively stop providers like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Sprint and T-Mobile from favoring certain Internet traffic under most conditions. Wheeler, a former government lobbyist and telecom industry insider, had previously made a proposal in 2014 that would have allowed a two-tiered internet favoring an internet “fast lane” that would allow ISPs to prioritize certain online traffic. This proposal was largely panned by groups such as the Internet Association, as well as FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. US President Barack Obama was also against it, urging the FCC to implement “the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality” so that telcos and ISPs can’t act as gatekeepers. Explaining his backtracking on net neutrality, Wheeler writes, “Originally, I believed that the FCC could assure internet openness through a determination of ‘commercial reasonableness’ under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While a recent court decision seemed to draw a roadmap for using this approach, I became concerned that this relatively new concept might, down the road, be interpreted to mean what is reasonable for commercial interests, not consumers. “That is why I am proposing that the FCC use its Title II authority to implement and enforce open internet protections.” The new proposal is expected to be put to a vote at the FCC’s Feb. 26 meeting. As The Verge points out that a few incidents where ISPs have disregarded the principles of net neutrality such as AT&T, which blocked FaceTime in 2012, and more recently, T-Mobile has by giving some music companies special exemptions from data caps also known as “Zero-rating” or “positive price discrimination”. It would also likely put an end to AT&T’s practice of “sponsored data” which allows brands to subsidize data because it clearly constitutes “paid prioritization”, which will be forbidden under the proposed rules. Although it’s not certain yet, it’s suspected that the proposed rules could mean that Google, which has been rolling out its broadband internet service Google Fiber in select markets, would be forced to provide the same level of service to individuals across the country as a common carrier. There are also apparent loopholes. For instance, throttling would be disallowed “on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices,” however, ISPs can engage in a “reasonable” amount of “network management” or traffic shaping in order to ensure wireless networks operate efficiently. Stanford Law School Professor and telecom policy critic Barbara van Schewick said that it’s important to get this legislation right because of what hangs in the balance. “The key question is: who gets to decide what we do on the internet – is it us the users, or is it the Internet service providers?” she said. “Unless the FCC adopts meaningful net neutrality rules, our whole economy would change: startup innovation would suffer, small businesses for whom the internet has been a haven of opportunity will be shut out of the market, and even the large companies would be hurt.” To put forth the wrong rules, she said, would be “basically the most disruptive thing you can do to the American economy.” This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/n |
| 7:00p | Hackers Gain Access to 80 Million Accounts at US Health Insurer Anthem
This article originally appeared at The WHIR The personal information of 80 million current and former customers of Anthem Healthcare, the second largest health insurer in the US, were exposed in what the CEO called a “sophisticated external cyber attack” on Wednesday. The number of victims may make this the largest data breach involving a US health insurer. The amount of information obtained dwarfs a previous attack Chinese hackers made on Community Health Systems. In August 2014, the FBI warned the healthcare industry it was being targeted after the Community Health attack. “This attack is another reminder of the persistent threats we face, and the need for Congress to take aggressive action to remove legal barriers for sharing cyber threat information,” US Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement late Wednesday. Anthem has been working with the FBI since discovering the breach. It also retained cybersecurity firm FireEye to evaluate Anthem’s cybersecurity processes and systems after the attack. FireEye was recently involved in discovering an insider trading scheme and was brought in to investigate after the hack at JP Morgan. There is no evidence that credit card or medical information was taken but the hackers gained access to names, medical IDs, social security numbers, employment data including income and email addresses. The information they do have access to is plenty to create some problems. According to a Google study released in November, hackers use email address and financial information to narrow down lucrative targetsthen use that information to gain access to bank and investment accounts. “Anthem detected the breach itself, which puts it in the minority among companies subject to such attacks, and ‘organizations don’t typically provide notification this early on,’” said David Damato, managing director at FireEye Inc., owner of cybersecurity unit Mandiant to the Wall Street Journal. Anthem is offering free credit and identity theft protection services to those whose information was stolen. It also set up a dedicated website, www.anthemfacts.com and telephone number customers can call with questions related to the security breach. Anthem CEO Joe Swedish apologized and said that his personal information was part of the breach as well. This attack ranks as one of the largest of recent attacks. JP Morgan exposed 76 million customers, Home Depot 56 million, and Target 40 million customers. Unfortunately, it has been a big year for cyberattacks. Kmart, Dairy Queen, Xbox, Sony and ICANN have all been the target of hacks designed to obtain sensitive data. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/h |
| 7:34p | Obama Appoints VMware CIO Tony Scott as Next US CIO Updated with VMware statements President Barack Obama has appointed VMware CIO Tony Scott to be the next U.S. CIO — the top federal government IT role. The position was created in 2009, and the first White House CIO was Vivek Kundra, who kicked off the current Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative and started a lot of other major efforts to overhaul the way government buys and consumes IT. Scott has been at VMware since 2013 and until now served as senior vice president and CIO. He came to VMware after serving for five years as Microsoft CIO. Prior to that, he was CIO at Walt Disney and CTO at General Motors. VMware issued a statement saying the company was actively looking for a new CIO and wishing Scott well in serving the country. “Tony Scott will bring to his new role strong leadership skills and a passion for success,” Jonathan Chadwick, VMware CFO, COO and executive vice president, said in a statement. “We are excited for him and the country and we thank Tony for his pioneering work at VMware.” Ever since the position of the U.S. CIO was created and Kundra was appointed to fill it, there has been a strong push from the White House to consolidate and modernize data center and IT infrastructure of federal agencies. Besides FDCCI, which has proven to be a very difficult, protracted process, there are now mandates for agencies to evaluate commercial cloud services for their applications before they decide to host them in-house and a number of other initiatives designed to bring government IT up to modern standards. “Over the past six years, this administration has embarked on a comprehensive approach to fundamentally improve the way government delivers results and technology services to the public,” Shaun Donovan, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Beth Cobert, deputy director for management at the White House, said in a joint statement.” Under Tony’s leadership, we will continue to build on the remarkable work done by the Nation’s first CIOs Vivek Kundra and Steve VanRoekel in changing the way the Federal government manages IT.” FDCCI has been a difficult initiative for agencies, and the progress with identifying and shutting down unnecessary data center capacity has been slow but steady. Since FDCCI was announced, the government changed the approach from simply consolidating data center assets to “rationalizing” applications, which means identifying core applications and finding the most economical way to host them, while getting rid of all others. Kundra left the White House in 2011 for a fellowship at Harvard and later joined Salesforce as executive vice president of emerging markets. His successor was Steve VanRoekel, who spent 15 years at Microsoft before joining the public sector as managing director of the Federal Communications Commission. He resigned from the federal CIO role abruptly in September 2014, joining the Ebola response team of the U.S. Agency for International Development as chief innovation officer. VanRoekel briefly served as executive director at USAID before being tapped for the White House position. |
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