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Friday, February 13th, 2015
| Time | Event |
| 1:00p | Hortonworks Teams With Others on Hadoop Data Governance Framework Hortonworks believes the only way to properly make Hadoop enterprise-hardened is through open source. The company recently partnered with a handful of others to form the Data Governance Initiative (DGI), which will tackle data governance, a much needed piece of the puzzle in enterprise Hadoop adoption. The consortium will ensure Hadoop data systems meet enterprise requirements for data governance. In addition to Hortonworks, the founding members of DGI are Aetna, Merck, Target, and Hortonworks’ technology partner SAS. However, success will be driven by the larger open source community. The goal is to open source the new framework through the Apache Software Foundation and continue to build it out with the full support of the open source community. DGI will work with the open source community to deliver a comprehensive solution, including metadata services, deep audit store, and an advanced policy rules engine. It will have deep integration with with Apache Falcon for data lifecycle management and Apache Ranger for global security policies. “The Data Governance Initiative has the potential to supercharge Hadoop innovation, because industry leaders actually participate in open source development,” said Mike Gualtieri, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “If successful, that should result in a razor-sharp prioritization of data governance features that enterprises need the most for their Hadoop implementations.” Hortonworks President Herb Cunitz stressed the importance of open source as not only a business model, but a development model. “It de-risks Hadoop for the entire industry,” he said. “Customers look at it and say, ‘You’re driving innovation, but if you ever take too much power, I can go back to the open source.’ It’s a more equitable balance of power. More companies join in and make that flywheel spin even faster.” In his view, the big question now is not if Hadoop will succeed, but how it will succeed. “No-one debates whether [Hadoop] is the storage layer for big data; it’s become that,” he said. “That being the case, two things need to happen: we need to make sure Hadoop is enterprise-grade and to do it all in open source for rapid ecosystem and customer development support.” The enterprise Hadoop market consists of a few “pure-play” vendors, offering a variety of flavors, and numerous others providing services and products built on top of Hadoop. The big three pure-play ones are Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR, but there are many others. One big prediction for 2015 is that there will be fewer pure-play Hadoop vendors. Hadoop will continue to be massively successful, but consolidation and exits among the multiple players is inevitable. Vendors will abandon the “flavor” approach (Intel being a recent example) and open source will continue to fuel innovation. This is something Cunitz suggested to look out for in 2015. Will other companies align? Break apart? Or will there be one common way of doing it? “What we’ve seen in the market is the market has embraced open source,” he said. “A lot of the companies originally thinking of doing Hadoop their own way are aligning with Hortonworks.” Cunitz cites Microsoft as an example. Hortonworks is the default Hadoop configuration for Azure. Another example of this open source approach in practice can be seen in Hortonworks’ approach to security. Hortonworks acquired XA Secure and released its formerly proprietary tech to the community under an open source license, which is now the Apache Ranger project. “Before Ranger, there were several different ways and products to lock down the platform, and if you blow any of them, it was a big hole in the entire platform,” said Cunitz. “Ranger makes it easier to authenticate. You’ll see more and more from us on the security side.” Enterprises adopting modern data architecture are facing difficulty, as legacy and new data from disparate platforms are brought under management. The answer is to make sure things plug in cleanly and easily (YARN, Apache Spark), and to make sure that process is clean and easy. Open source means more interoperability, faster innovation, and less fragmentation. |
| 4:00p | Cogeco to Open 100,000SF Montreal Data Center Canada’s Cogeco Data Services said it will open a new 100,000-square-foot Montreal data center this spring. This will be the fifth data center of the major Canadian telco and media company’s subsidiary. The new data center will be in Kirkland, an on-island suburb, and is described as being the size equivalent of 12 NHL-sized ice surfaces. CDS footprint is all in Canada, its total data center capacity totaling over 200,000 square feet. It has three facilities in the Toronto metro and one in Barrie, Ontario. Cogeco is one of many big cable companies with growing data center businesses. CDS was formed in 2008 following an acquisition of Toronto Hydro Telecom, which provided a lot of its Toronto infrastructure, and renamed that same year. It later acquired and integrated Quiettouch and MTO Telecom, a Montreal private telco and fiber network, under the CDS name. Parent Cogeco made a big acquisition in 2012, acquiring Peer 1 for $635 million , which formed a separate Peer 1 Hosting division. Tony Ciciretto is president and CEO of both CDS and Peer 1. “We are very excited to add another advanced facility to our growing data center footprint,” Ciciretto said in a statement. “The new center is specifically designed to meet an increasing demand in the Montreal region for reliable and secure ICT solutions.” Other Canadian telecommunications companies boosting data center businesses include Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications. Rogers acquired Pivot data centers and Blackiron data in 2013 to build out its data center fleet. Shaw acquired ViaWest last year to expand data center operations across North America. Montreal is a sizable Canadian city and data center market, along with Toronto, Ontario, and Vancouver. It features relatively low-cost clean hydro power and great connectivity to New York, Toronto, and Europe. Despite all of the prerequisites, the Montreal data center colocation market hasn’t grown as fast as in its Canadian counterparts, and pricing has been occasionally soft. However, the factors listed above, growing comfort with outsourcing facilities, and data privacy needs are all contributing to data center growth. In Montreal, other colocation and hosting providers include CenturyLink, Cologix, OVH which recently added a 10,000 server container, and iWeb, which was acquired by Internap in 2013 but maintains the iWeb branding. ROOT is a recent startup that has focused on the Bitcoin sector. |
| 5:00p | Friday Funny Caption Contest: Different Sizes The flowers have come and gone for Kip and Gary and their next adventure awaits. Help us figure out what they’re getting into now 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, “Kip and Gary decided to test out different size cabinets to see which one works best for their data center!” Congratulations to the last cartoon winner, Darrell, who won with, “I was wondering why flowers.com rented data center space without any power requirements.” For more cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. For more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website. |
| 7:30p | What Interxion and TelecityGroup Merger Means for Europe’s Colocation Market The merger between Interxion and TelecityGroup, two of Europe’s top data center providers, changes the European colocation landscape and puts the company in better position to expand globally. The companies announced the deal earlier this week. The merged company would leapfrog Equinix and take over a clear leadership position in the EMEA market, according to Synergy Research Group. TelecityGroup and Interxion have been in a close fight for second place behind Equinix in several of the region’s markets. Besides being a formidable player in the major markets, the new company will be top-ranked in terms of total footprint outside of the big four. U.K. is recognized the largest colocation market in Europe, followed by Germany, France, and the Netherlands. These four countries account for majority of the region’s colo revenue. The merged company will be the biggest in the U.K. and Netherlands and third in Germany and France, according to Synergy Research. It also leaps to second in the fifth- and sixth-largest emerging markets of Spain and Switzerland, respectively. Combined, the company has 15 percent share of the overall EMEA retail colocation market, compared to Equinix’s 9 percent. Equinix has 1.4 million square feet of space in the larger EMEA (Europe and the Middle East) region across 32 data centers. Telecity and Interxion combined have just under 80 data centers, though total square footage is not known.  Synergy Research Group shows where the merged company stands in top markets (Source: Synergy Research) While the merger creates a company with massive footing in Europe, Equinix believes its global footprint gives it an edge. “There’s no question that positive secular trends, including cloud, big data and mobile, are driving significant data center demand around the world, so this announcement is in line with what we’re seeing in the market,” said Eric Schwartz, president of EMEA at Equinix. “And, as enterprises operate increasingly interconnected, on-demand business models, it’s imperative they have a global data center strategy. Today, more than half of Equinix’s business is derived from customers located in all three of the regions in which we operate — EMEA, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas — because they can access a critical mass of networks and easily connect to leading cloud services.” The merger has repercussions outside of Europe as well, Jabez Tan, senior analyst at Structure Research, said. He believes that the deal positions the company better on a global basis. “The merger essentially settles strong internal competition in Europe between both sides,” he said. “Telecity will soon be able set its sights on global expansion outside Europe with core international markets, such as the United States, Singapore, and Hong Kong, being likely candidates for future expansion plans.” The European colocation market is growing overall. “While the company is in good position, the overall market itself is also showing healthy signs,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research, said. Retail colocation market continues to grow about 10 percent per year, boosted by trends in big data, cloud services, outsourcing, video and social networking. |
| 8:00p | Google’s Perfkit Benchmarking Tool Aims to Evaluate Performance Across Clouds
This article originally appeared at The WHIR Having previously been unable to measure the relative performance of Google Cloud Platform with competitors, Google has released a cloud performance benchmarking framework called PerfKit Benchmarker that is designed to give organizations an easy way to easily benchmark across cloud platforms and give them a transparent view of application throughput, latency, variance, and overhead. According to a Wednesday blog post announcement from the Google Cloud Platform Performance Team, Google released the code under the Apache License, Version 2.0, allowing contributors to collaborate and maintain a balanced set of benchmarks through GitHub. Google noted, “[I]t’s surprisingly difficult to evaluate cloud offerings beyond just looking at price or feature charts.” The criteria and methods, according to Google, have meant consulting other cloud providers, analysts, and academics. “PerfKit is a living benchmark framework, designed to evolve as cloud technology changes, always measuring the latest workloads so you can make informed decisions about what’s best for your infrastructure needs,” Google said. “As new design patterns, tools, and providers emerge, we’ll adapt PerfKit to keep it current. It already includes several well-known benchmarks, and covers common cloud workloads that can be executed across multiple cloud providers.” Google said it has worked with over 30 leading researchers, companies, and customers over the past year including ARM, Broadcom, Canonical, CenturyLink, Cisco, CloudHarmony, CloudSpectator, EcoCloud/EPFL, Intel, Mellanox, Microsoft, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Rackspace, Red Hat, Tradeworx Inc., and Thesys Technologies LLC. Stanford and MIT will be leading a quarterly discussion on default benchmarks and settings proposed by the community. PerfKitBenchmarks can be run on major cloud providers including Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, as well as any machine with SSH access. Google also created a visualization tool Perfkit Explorer that includes a set of pre-built dashboards that help interpret the internal network performance tests results. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/g |
| 9:13p | HP Buys Encryption Specialist Voltage Security Amid widespread worry over cyberterrorism and corporate data breaches like the Anthem Healthcare attack, HP it has acquired Voltage Security, a data-centric security software solutions provider. Voltage solutions will complement HP’s Atalla data and payments security software to add data classification, payments security, encryption, tokenization, and enterprise key management. Smaller security companies are cashing in on increased spending for security software and services, and HP is making the acquisition in an attempt to get some of the market back. Cupertino, California-based Voltage has numerous patents based on research in mathematics and cryptographic systems and provides enterprise solutions for large companies in payments, banking, retail, insurance, and healthcare. Starting in 2002, the company focused on protecting corporate data across cloud storage and mobile access. It raised around $27 million in 2005 and 2007. Strengthening its end-to-end enterprise security offering, HP looks to extend a single framework from the data center to cloud and Hadoop environments. HP cited its 2014 Cost of Cybercrime study that found that the average annual cost of cyber crime for a U.S. organization was $12.7 million. It also showed that organizations were experiencing an average of 138 successful attacks per week. The acquisition was for an undisclosed amount and comes as HP continues to reorganize, including staff reductions and splitting the company in two. |
| 9:37p | Australia’s Vocus Buys Two Data Centers, Enters Fiber Construction Joint Venture Australian telco Vocus Communications has divested half of its fiber construction division to form a new joint venture and, in a separate move, has agreed to acquire two data centers from local disaster recovery company Enterprise Data Corporation. Vocus is divesting and selling its New Zealand construction division it gained through its FX Networks acquisition. Spark New Zealand acquired half of the new venture, called Connect 8, for an undisclosed upfront cash payment and agreed level of annual construction spend. Vocus acquired FX Networks last year as part of a push into the New Zealand market. Spark New Zealand owns several thousand kilometers of fiber in the country and an optical transmission network. The fiber construction division generates annual revenue of more than $8 million on average but is subject to significant volatility from period to period. The joint venture shields Vocus from that volatility. After initial startup period, Connect 8 is expecting an annual committed revenue pipeline of between $11 million and $12.5 million. It will continue to build fiber and telecommunications assets for Vocus, Spark, and other New Zealand clients. “The Connect 8 joint venture and its committed pipeline will help mitigate earnings volatility from the construction division, providing Vocus with a stable earnings profile from the joint venture while maintaining access to its industry expertise and substantial construction intellectual property,” Vocus CEO James Spenceley said in a statement. EDC Deal Expands Footprint, Business Continuity ServicesVocus is paying about $18 million for the two EDC data centers and its business continuity operations. The facilities are located in Sydney and Melborne’s Mitcham, in Victoria. The acquisition will be funded from existing cash resources. In addition to two new data centers, Vocus will bring the business continuity services to its other locations. Spencely called the services a logical extension to existing services on an earnings call. The data centers have existing long-term customers which provides a cross-selling opportunity in addition to monthly revenue. Vocus has made a big data center push in recent years, now owning and operating eleven data centers across Australia and New Zealand. It expanded into New Zealand through acquisition of data center provider Maxnet in 2012. Last August, Vocus acquired the Bentley data center in western Australia from IT solutions provider ASG. Last December, it acquired the remaining 90 percent stake in a competitor called Amcom. |
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