Friday, February 20th, 2015

Time	Event
1:00p	Survey: Enterprise Cloud Adoption Driving Changes in IT Ops Hybrid cloud continues to gain momentum as the strategy of choice, and there’s lots of headroom for more growth, as most enterprises run less than 20 percent of workloads in cloud, according to a recent survey. DevOps is growing in tow, as enterprises and other types of organizations value speed and agility above all else. RightScale’s annual State of the Cloud survey (free registration required) has served as a solid measuring stick over the years. A noticeable trend is continued rise of multiple cloud usage, whether public or private, and the rise of DevOps. The latter suggests operations need to evolve in addition to infrastructure itself. Only a quarter of respondents are RightScale users, suggesting a more comprehensive picture rather than results skewed to favor RightScale’s business, which is multi and hybrid cloud management. For 2015, more than 90 percent of respondents are using cloud, yet there remains significant headroom, with 68 percent of enterprises running less than one-fifth of their application portfolio on cloud infrastructure. This year’s survey finds 82 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014. In 2012, around half of respondents said they were pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy. Multi-cloud (whether hybrid or multiple public clouds) and the rise of DevOps were also highlighted in 2013. Eighty-eight percent of organizations use public cloud compared to 63 percent that use private. Thirteen percent of enterprises and 22 percent of organizations run more than 1,000 VMs. Amazon Web Services remains king of public cloud, though the competition appears to be grabbing mind share: AWS makes forward strides in spite of increased competition (RightScale State Of Cloud) DevOps is to People as Cloud is to Infrastructure Cloud is a sea change for infrastructure, and operations needs to follow, leading to growing DevOps adoption. That operational influence can be seen with popularity of DevOps and Docker: both are prompting and supporting cloud growth. DevOps combines many of the roles of systems administrators and developers, driving greater collaboration and breaking down operational silos. DevOps adoption was 6 percent in the 2014 RightScale survey, and 66 percent for the 2015 survey. A recent Rackspace survey saw nearly everyone (93 percent) using DevOps by the end of this year. DevOps adoption rises once again (Rightscale State Of Cloud 2015) Cloud and DevOps are inextricably linked and complementary; both are about speed and agility. Faster access to infrastructure and scalability were most frequently reported as cloud benefits. DevOps is similarly about agility in operations. Docker is proving to be a handy tool in DevOps. Those using or planning on using Docker leaped significantly (RightScale State Of Cloud 2015) The least frequently touted benefits were moving CapEx to OpEx and cost savings (though both saw higher percentages of positive responses than last year). Both were cited as top benefits earlier on in the cloud adoption cycle. Cost is a consideration, but it is taking a back seat to speed and agility. Room to Grow Over half of enterprises report a significant portion of existing application portfolio is not in cloud, but is built with cloud friendly architectures. Legacy applications remain but it appears they are either slowly being phased out or made ready for a cloud future. Similarly, a Gartner report found that many enterprises are increasingly trusting SaaS for mission critical applications. Gartner noted that private cloud application growth will be nearly twice that of public growth (46 percent versus 24 percent) over the next two years, while RightScale’s findings show enterprise workloads largely remain in private cloud, while private cloud growth is anticipated to be slower than public. Cisco’s Global Cloud Index from November is further confirmation that a significant majority of today’s workloads are processed in private cloud environment, predicting almost 70 percent of cloud workloads will be private cloud-related by 2018. All recent reports and surveys have been universal in anticipating high growth in hybrid and multi-cloud usage. Private and public cloud growth does not have an inverse relationship like stocks and bonds have (at least in theory). They’re both growing. Private cloud will grow as private cloud better mimics the economies and flexibility of public, while public will grow as comfort in security grows. I’m the Decider: Central IT vs. Business Units RighScale’s survey reveals Central IT is taking on most cloud purchasing decisions. Central IT has declining concerns about security (41 percent today versus 47 percent last year) and is warming to public cloud. Central IT is acting as cloud broker or should act as cloud broker. Central IT is making cloud decisions (source: RightScale State Of Cloud) “The tide of enterprise cloud adoption has shifted from shadow IT to strategic adoption led by central IT teams,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “As enterprise IT has become more open to public cloud and more comfortable with cloud security, it is now in a strong position to broker cloud services to internal customers and drive cloud adoption forward. In the next year organizations expect to shift more workloads to cloud, with public cloud workloads growing faster than private cloud.” Challenge Depends on Maturity Cloud continues to shift from an alternative to core part of the strategy. Adoption is occurring, and growth in cloud usage suggests more successes than failures. The survey finds challenges decrease with maturity. How challenges change depending on cloud maturity (RightScale State Of Cloud 2015) (Comment on this)
4:00p	Bloom’s Mission Critical Man Gross Joins Active Power Board Peter Gross, who runs the mission critical business of fuel-cell maker Bloom Energy, has taken a seat on the board of Active Power, an electrical infrastructure vendor that does a lot of business in the data center space. Gross is a well-known figure in the data center industry. He was a co-founder and CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a data center design and operations company acquired by HP in 2008. Following the acquisition, Gross worked as a managing partner at HP’s Carbon, Power, and Critical Facilities unit. He joined Bloom Energy, one of the leading fuel-cell vendors, in 2012 to kick off and head the company’s mission critical systems practice. Since then, the company has closed numerous deals with high-profile companies who deployed its fuel cells to power their data centers. Those projects include Apple’s massive North Carolina data center, where Bloom Energy Servers work in concert with photovoltaic panels to power the facility, and eBay’s data center in Utah, powered entirely by Bloom fuel cells, using the electrical grid as backup. Among smaller data center deployments is a CenturyLink data center in California. Austin-based Active Power is known in the data center industry for its flywheel UPS systems and for its containerized electrical infrastructure solutions. In a statement, Gross said he was “thrilled” to join Active Power, which had “elegant” flywheel-based products, a compelling value proposition, and a growing customer base. Active Power President and CEO Mark Ascolese said Gross was a respected mission critical industry leader who led design and construction of facilities around the world for some of its largest companies. “He is intimately familiar with what our customers’ value in terms of power system design and electrical infrastructure,” Ascolese said in a statement. (Comment on this)
5:00p	Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption for Different Sizes Another work week has come and gone and our two-day vacation is just hours away. Let’s start the weekend right with some Friday Funny humor. 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)
6:30p	IBM Launches New All-Flash Data Center Storage Systems IBM introduced two next- generation all-flash data center storage solutions called FlashSystem Storage earlier this week. Acknowledging a competitive market for flash, IBM lays claim that its new all-flash products perform up to 50 times better and have up to four times better capacity in less rack space than EMC’s ExtremeIO flash arrays.t A few years after injecting $1 billion into research and development for its flash portfolio IBM continues to build it and is ranked as a leader in all-flash data center storage arrays in Gartner’s magic quadrant. The company also recently hired Eric Herzog away from Violin Memory (previously from EMC) to help market IBM Storage Systems. Recent IDC research revealed that data center customers drove the flash-based array market past $11 billion last year. IBM said the new FlashSystem 900 and V9000 products offer the advantages of software-defined storage at the speed of flash. The company continues its collaboration with Micron, as the new FlashSystem products move from using eMLC flash to MLC NAND, which it touts as having better chip density and cost benefits. IBM also adds its FlashCore foundation technology in addition to a set of virtualization features. According to specifications, the FlashSystem 900 can scale up to 57 terabytes in a single system, and the V9000 can scale up to 456 terabytes and up to 2.2 petabytes of usable capacity with full scale-out of control enclosures. Around the time IBM was making its big push for flash solutions, IBM customer Coca-Cola Bottling was turning to FlashSystem storage. Coca-Cola’s IT infrastructure manager Tom DeJuneas said that FlashSystem storage helped the company “achieve a 75 percent reduction in data processing, reducing jobs that took 45 minutes down to just six. Today, we’re using IBM’s newest FlashSystem solution to process data and draw key insights even faster, so we can dramatically improve our demand forecasting and get our products on the right shelves at the right time.” (Comment on this)
7:09p	FalconStor Launches Software Defined Storage Platform Traditional storage company FalconStor has launched FreeStor, a unified data services software defined storage platform. Taking the company’s years of experience and applying it to modern infrastructures, FalconStor said, the FreeStor storage platform introduced a horizontal data services approach for migration, continuity, protection, recovery, and optimization in any storage environment. The new software platform is a big deal for this 15-year-old New York company, as it has developed, from scratch, a software-defined process for accommodating modern IT environments with cloud and flash-enabled systems. The unified platform attempts to bring together disparate enterprise storage assets and then orchestrate with an Abstraction core, which is a scalable storage hypervisor, coupled with a data services engine and automation. The company explained the benefit of this approach as giving the business the flexibility and choice of having the right storage technologies for their needs and allowing the FreeStor platform to be the intelligence that virtualizes, manages, and protects the data. The software defined storage platform offers a single interface for managing storage with a single price based on managed capacity across arrays, servers, hypervisors, data centers, and the cloud. “IT organizations must deal with data services such as migration, continuity, recovery, efficiency, and optimization with a vertical integration view – each aspect being something to stack on one another – which tends to add layers of complexity as well,” Phil Goodwin, research director at IDC, said in a statement. “The FreeStor platform is designed to allow companies to simplify data migration, recovery, protection and deduplication without tying their business to specific hardware, networks or protocols.” (Comment on this)
8:06p	Analysts Raise Expectations for Rackspace After Cloud Company Posts Q4 Earnings This article originally appeared at The WHIR After Rackspace posted strong quarterly earnings on Tuesday, two financial companies have significantly raised their expectations for the company’s stock price. Cowan and Company released a report on Wednesday giving Rackspace shares a “buy” rating and setting a $75.00 price objective, WKRB reports, almost 50 percent above the current price. In Q4 2014 Rackspace revenue was $472 million, up 15.8 percent over Q4 2013, earning it 26 cents per share, smashing analysts’ estimates of 19 cents per share. The company expects to revenue to grow between 14 and 18 percent in 2015, notwithstanding currency fluctuations. Since research firm Stifel Nicolaus began covering Rackspace by issuing a “buy” rating, analysts at several other firms including Bank of America, Credit Agricole and Pacific Crest all raised their ratings and price targets for the hosting company’s shares, WKRB reports. “The strong growth and improving margins that we’ve posted demonstrate the traction that we’re gaining as the leader of the managed cloud segment,” said Taylor Rhodes, president and CEO of Rackspace. “We will build on this momentum in 2015 by expanding the specialized expertise that we offer in areas such as ecommerce, big data and security. We’re helping more and more businesses leverage the power of the cloud without the pain of managing complex new technologies by themselves.” Rackspace also announced Tuesday that John Harper, formerly CFO at Dell Services and Perot Systems, has joined its board of directors. Rackspace began offering VMware vCloud in January, and also announced its OnMetal Cloud Big Data Platform in October. It also flexed its legal muscle recently, winning the rackspace.xyz domain based on a brand copyright claim last month, and defeating a patent troll to nullify a screen rotation patent in September. After back-to-back quarters of underestimating Rackspace, and perhaps the cloud hosting or managed hosting markets more generally, analyst expectations have risen, and the stock now has a consensus rating of “buy.” Rackspace was down slightly in Thursday trading after closing Wednesday at $51.12, just short of its 52-week high. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/analysts-raise-expectations-rackspace-cloud-company-posts-q4-earnings (Comment on this)
9:33p	‘CO2-Negative’ Green Data Center in the Works in Sweden An organization called EcoDataCenter is pitching a green data center project in Sweden that will be powered by a co-generation plant that burns things like wood chips and old furniture, heat homes with server exhaust heat during winters, and contribute cooling energy to a district cooling system during warm seasons. It is unclear who is behind the project in the City of Falun, known for a big copper mine that was operational until the early 90s. A promotional video that describes the project and claims it will be “CO2-negative” was posted on YouTube today, but access to the official EcoDataCenter website is blocked. Business Sweden, an economic development organization, is promoting a Falun site owned by the local electrical grid operator for data center use that has similar attributes as the project described in the video. The site can accommodate more than 430,500 square feet of building and has immediate access to 16 megawatts of power, with a substation already in place. It also has dark fiber. It has access to the local district cooling system, but the climate allows for free cooling from October through April, according to Business Sweden. Recycling server heat for comfort heating is generally considered an inefficient practice, but the economic development org says the Falun site would be an exception, because proximity of the district heating infrastructure will make the cost of building the system for pushing heat from the data center to the district system will be lower than usual. Finally, the site can also receive energy from a nearby solar farm. The green data center described in the EcoDataCenter video would be fully integrated into the city’s utility systems, including district heating and cooling. Falun’s co-generation plant burns branches and tree tops left over from logging, sawdust from local saw mills, and old wooden furniture people throw away to create steam to rotate a turbine that generates electricity. Water carries leftover heat from the plant to the city’s district heating system. Most houses that have district heating in central Falun get heat from the plant, which accounts for more than half of all households in the municipality, according to the EcoDataCenter video. Combined, the co-generation plant and local solar and wind farms provide more than half of the municipality’s energy needs. The rest comes from “other renewable energy sources,” including hydro, the video states, without elaborating what those other sources are. Here’s the video: (Comment on this)

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