Thursday, March 5th, 2015

Time	Event
1:00p	New CenturyLink CTO Reorgs Management, Teams It has been about four months since CenturyLink CTO Aamir Hussain has been in his role, and now he has a plan. CenturyLink is an $18 billion telco that gets most of its revenue from its bread-and-butter network services but like many of its competitors has been spending a lot of time and money on growing its data center and cloud business. To do that, it has made several acquisitions over the past several years. Companies it has acquired, combined with all the different “legacy” service teams, have made for a sprawling organization that has not delivered solutions to customers as quickly as it can. This “velocity” problem is what Hussain has been thinking about over the past four months, which has culminated in the deep organizational changes he recently made across the entire organization. Solutions Instead of ‘Widgets’ The changes are meant to support the company’s current business strategy. “We want to transform into an IP-based IT services company,” he said. Instead of having countless disparate teams for every product and technology, there are now 10 groups organized by function. There are groups that deliver solutions to customers, and there are groups that work on the backend, making sure the infrastructure is in place to deliver those solutions, as well as groups that ensure the platform and the products continue to evolve. Instead of building “widgets,” as CenturyLink has done until now, Hussain said, “we are building solutions, and we are also transforming how we onboard the customers to our network.” The onboarding will happen through something called Platform CenturyLink, which will essentially be a centralized portal to buy and manage all the available services from. The company first announced it was working on a centralized platform for its services last October. Changes at the Top Leaders for most of the new groups have been selected internally, but there are also several leadership positions that will be filled by industry heavyweights from outside the company. “We are bringing some very high-power individuals to run some of these functions,” Hussain said. The company is still negotiating with the people who will lead its new Business Transformation, Enterprise Architecture and Roadmaps, New Product Development Strategy and Innovation, and Test and Integration groups, so Hussain declined to name them. The changes have not been limited to adding talent. The company has lost some as well. The most prominent example is the recent departure of senior vice president of cloud and technology Andrew Higginbotham, who had been with the company since 2001 and who led the acquisitions that were central to its data center and cloud services strategy. He oversaw the acquisition of Savvis in 2011, and the Tier 3 and AppFog acquisitions in 2013. Bigger Purpose for Everyone Change is never easy, and Hussain and his team spent a lot of time explaining to the staff why the reorganization was necessary. The roles of people on the “front lines” have not changed, he said. Somebody doing software development or quality assurance is still doing that. They are just part of a bigger organization with a bigger function now. “The impact is in how we actually take our product development process and change it to be more customer-centric than what we had before,” Hussain said. “We are doing this for the benefit of our customers and to create velocity.” (Comment on this)
4:00p	Cologix Opens Third Minneapolis Data Center Cologix recently opened its third Minneapolis data center. This one resides in the region’s carrier hotel downtown called the Minnesota Technology Center, also referred to as the 511 Building. The building offers access to more than 75 network carriers in the Meet-Me-Room for existing customers and other tenants. The first phase of the planned 28,000-square-foot “MIN3” supports 250 cabinet equivalents and is ready for customers. The second phase is prepped for a quick build-out, so it can leverage the base infrastructure in Phase I. The facility is close to receiving Tier III Certification from the Uptime Institute and Minnesota already approved it for the state’s tax incentive program. “Minneapolis is a really good example of two of the key growth trends—content and applications—moving closer to the edge, and enterprises outsourcing what was once in-sourced data centers,” said Cologix COO Graham Williams. “Legacy data centers are coming to end-of-life, and now they’re looking at different options. Historically, the options were Chicago, New York or build it yourself.” While there is a great deal of supply in the greater Minneapolis market, Williams said the company views the product as fundamentally different. “We’re downtown players,” he said. “We built in the carrier hotel and it’s a different proposition to an enterprise than out in the suburbs.” The enterprise appeal is predominantly location; customers want to be close to servers, whereas the suburbs require long drives in an area prone to big snowstorms. The connectivity appeals to content and cloud providers as well, though the ability for enterprises to future-proof infrastructure also comes to play. “Once you put your servers somewhere, it’s challenging to move,” said Williams. “So they’re looking for locations with low switching costs. They don’t know which of their apps will live in the cloud, so the answer or antidote is choice.” 2N UPS and generator infrastructure as well as N+1 cooling infrastructure support the site. The flexibility in the design—integrated in part by Parallel Technologies—means it can also accommodate high-density applications. The 511 Building is a 270,000 square foot building adjacent to the Metrodome. Anything north of Chicago flows through it, said Williams, adding that the location has attracted a lot of cloud and media companies in the last five or so years. The Minnesota Vikings football team once put the building in jeopardy by wanting to tear it down for a new stadium. However, its importance to the area’s business culture prevented that from happening. This newest Minneapolis site brings the number of Cologix data centers to 21, with a total footprint spanning more than 500,000 square feet. Minnesota has been home to an increasing amount of data center build activity and acts as a network aggregation point for the upper Midwest. The state has some friendly incentives to keep data center growth momentum going. In order to qualify for an exemption from sales tax on IT gear, cooling and power equipment, energy use and software for 20 years, a facility must contain 25,000 square feet or more and owners or tenants need to be committed to investing $30 million in the first four years. “We’re seeing our customers light up when we tell them we’re approved,” said Williams. “Any equipment we put into the data center, you get the same tax rebate. It starts to add up. There’s more interest than I initially though it would have.” Minnesota’s data center market has been burgeoning over the past few years. Players besides Cologix include Compass (also qualified for tax exemption and leases to CenturyLink), Stream Data Centers, ViaWest, DataBank, and its planned 20-megawatt data center; Digital Realty, OneNeck IT, and Zayo’s zColo. Cologix said that Minneapolis is a textbook example of content and cloud providers serving traffic closer to the Internet’s new edge. The local exchange point, referred to as The Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange (MICE) has grown 14-fold in the past year. (Comment on this)
4:30p	Communications and Collaboration Infrastructure and Enterprise IT Success Michael Segal is director of solutions marketing at NetScout and a seasoned product management professional with expertise in technical areas such as cloud, virtualization, security, IP networking, mobility, Wi-Fi / wireless, and VoIP / UC. Large Information Technology (IT) organizations are afflicted with ‘specialty’ silos that hinder productivity and fail to approach Communications and Collaboration Infrastructure (CCI) with a unified vision. However, uniting enterprise IT teams with a common goal for collaboration and process promotes innovation, streamlines workflow, and significantly impacts the bottom line. Battle Modern Workforce Obstacles Due to the proliferation of the IT service catalog and feature set, a CCI road map and integrated strategy has never been more needed. Communications services like Internet Protocol (IP) telephony, email, and faxing; collaboration tools and services like voice and video conferencing, instant messaging and application sharing require data networking professionals not only to re-engineer the enterprise infrastructure and the Wide Area Network (WAN), but also to constantly monitor the performance of connections with carrier networks. There is also a growing cost associated with the overlap and over supply of these services due to poor coordination across the IT silos. In order to successfully battle modern workforce obstacles and drive strong Return on Investment (ROI), infrastructure and operations executives must invest time into developing a CCI road map that fosters employee adoption of available technologies and standardizes best practices. Key Elements for a Strong Road Map What are the key elements for building strong road maps that not only drive IT department success, but also limit risk? At a high level, the internal enterprise IT strategy should coordinate procedures, policies and collaboration standards that touch all elements of the infrastructure and operations group. The plan should integrate detailed guidelines for: Product development Ongoing maintenance/performance monitoring User support requests Governance Management tools Usability case studies and examples User experience standards Although this level of planning initially seems extensive, providing standardized training for your IT department will save time during execution and minimize the ravages of unintended operational consequences. In essence, a CCI road map or plan must combine enterprise strategy, business requirements and end users’ needs into one, well-orchestrated effort. IT teams armed with a solid plan will not only deliver streamlined performance, but also produce significant cost savings. Successfully structuring communication and collaboration channels will allow transparent workgroup communication in an efficient and elegant manner. In order to facilitate the adoption of CCI integration within enterprise organizations, the utilization of sound policies, procedures and principles should be a pro forma process in establishing a solid framework of best practices. Below are four key best practices IT organizations should exercise before embarking on the CCI transition: 1: Choose a Leader The process should include: Designate an enterprise architect to spearhead plan formulation and adoption. Develop and oversee a cohesive application integration strategy that comprises all CCI functionality. Standardization should be the watchman on the tower. All elements of the entire IT infrastructure must be considered. The IT infrastructure elements include telecom, PBX, data network, video conferencing, collaboration portals, application development, any CCI integration requirements, and end-user inputs. The right performance management platform should be selected. This platform should offer a holistic view across the entire infrastructure and enable IT to customize the monitored metrics for each department to foster collaboration. Since a typical CCI is comprised of multi-vendor products, the performance management platform should be vendor agnostic and scale to accommodate future CCI growth needs. 2: Follow Security Protocol Establish and adopt industry-standard security protocols. The IT security ramifications alone justify proper governing standards as security breaches reverberate throughout every department of an enterprise operation and eventually impact profit. 3: Do Your Due Diligence Identify core service needs to avoid duplication and over-supply of hardware products and software licensing. Then, compile a preferred list of vendors who provide integrated CCI services and products. 4: Don’t Be a Gatekeeper Invite all relevant stakeholders during planning phase (e.g., IT security, networking and operations). If key stakeholders are not participating in the planning and implementation process, efficiency will degrade. The following management principle applies: if there is no involvement, there is no commitment. Share Your Early Wins Once your road map is implemented and IT team members have successfully engaged in collaboration communities, promote these wins internally. Internal communications achievements not only serve as a proof-of-concept, but also drum up support, share knowledge and reinforce the importance of your organizational efforts. Following these best practices and building a strong road map to direct daily activities and objectives will ensure successful delivery of communication and collaboration services and provide a quality user experience for enterprise employees. Rather than seek alternative short cuts or make costly, knee-jerk decisions, IT team members can work toward the same common end-goal and avoid endless pitfalls or headaches. The benefits of collaboration can only be reaped when employees adapt and intelligently employ the technology available to them. Developing a solid CCI strategy will rally the troops and have immediate, positive results on an enterprise’s bottom line. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission processfor information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
5:00p	Analyzing Data To Create More Efficient Operations Data center managers, including operations teams, are just now starting seeing the potential of Software Defined Networking, or SDN. Through the convergence of applications and networking, new technology is enabling faster development of applications, smoother administration of networks and better understanding of the whole application and infrastructure ecosystem. These of new developments and their possible implementation are exactly what data center pros want to continue to learn about and apply in their organization, in order to keep pace with the accelerated environment of the data center. This spring, Data Center World Global Conference and Expo will include many topical sessions, which will cover issues and new technologies that data center managers and operators face. Data Center Knowledge had the opportunity to speak with Arup Chakravarty, formerly of Cisco, and now director of network engineering at insurance company, MetLife, about his presentation on creating operational efficiency in the data center. Chakavarty says his presentation will address a very common issue among enterprise IT systems and infrastructure. Using Data To Optimize Efficiency “In the operations environment, there are many particular components, such as infrastructure, routers, switches, compute, storage,” he said. And all of these elements create data, but it is often separate and siloed. “We need to be putting things together.” He is suggesting more operational efficiency can be achieved by breaking down barriers by correlating information contained in different locations, such as server logs, network logs, firewall logs, and load-balancer logs. “Who is stitching these together?” he asked. “In today’s modern environment, workloads cannot be siloed.” For example, in a virtual machine there could be about 20 different components and they have a cascading effect on each other. There’s the NIC, IP address, VLan association, MAC address, and these have a cabling impact. “Today, we can correlate the data and get understanding of what’s going on,” Chakravarty said. By bringing data together, the planning for infrastructure needs becomes easier and you can understand the application landscape, he explained. Graphic: AFCOM/Data Center World   Chakravarty added that enterprises have thousands of applications, and if there is a better understanding, the organizations will be better able to budget on the infrastructure side. Conversely, a lack of understanding can lead to over-provisioning, based on educated estimates or guesses. When asked what tools are used to bring this data together for analysis, Chakravary said there are multiple tools, but there is also so much customization and legacy systems, that often a customized approach is needed. Across the Enterprise IT Sector In enterprises, it is very common that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. As a consultant at Cisco for about 15 years, Chakravarty saw this in his clients from the vendor side and now he’s seeing the same issues from enterprise side. “You have to find the operations touch points that the enterprise is depending on,” he noted. “It is important to understand the key revenue generating apps. Once they are understood, they can be mapped to the environment. If, for example, there are the resources, you can have Devops write their own analytics tool. There is not one single tool in the industry that can solve these problems.” His session will examine what challenges most enterprise environments are facing. “The bigger the enterprise, the more legacy equipment, the bigger the challenges,” he added. To find out more about how examining data can lead to better efficiency, you can register and attend the session by Chakravarty at spring Data Center World Global Conference in Las Vegas. Learn more and register at the Data Center World website. (Comment on this)
5:44p	CyrusOne Cooks Up Client Portal for Data Center Management CyrusOne has launched a new customer service portal that offers real-time access to information useful for basic data center management. Support, alerts, and billing info are provided through the web interface. The portal provides customers with additional transparency of their data center environment. The data center management tool is a small addition that’s indicative of the evolving role of data center service providers, who are getting more involved with customers, beyond the traditional space, power, cooling, network, and basic staffing support. Customers are provided a specific subdomain and granted user administration rights to sign into a web portal that acts as a complement to customer service. Permissions can be specified for different users and it works regardless of device, be it smart phone, laptop, or tablet. In addition to support and requests, the portal offers a virtual catalog of power whips, cross-connects, and other available products for order. Users can subscribe to incident and change notifications based on risk and severity settings delivered via email or SMS. The portal also shows billing information. The portal includes advanced support tickets, including original request submissions and progress monitoring, which covers service level agreement compliance. Customers can also manage physical access requests through portal email notifications to security-office staff and review a list of people granted access. Support and access changes are captured in a system log. “CyrusOne’s online customer service portal is a great example of transparent data center infrastructure management and further underscores our strong customer-service reputation in the industry,” said Amaya Souarez, CyrusOne’s vice president of data center operations, in a release. CyrusOne says it serves nine of the Fortune 20 and 144 of the Fortune 1000 companies. The company has more than 665 customers total. (Comment on this)
6:09p	AWS Could be Worth up to $50 Billion: Analysts This article originally appeared at The WHIR Analysts at financial firm Robert W. Baird on Wednesday pegged the value of Amazon Web Services (AWS) at between $40 and $50 billion, TheStreet reports. The RW Baird analysis was done in anticipation of Amazon reporting AWS earnings as its own segment at the close of the quarter, the company revealed following its Q4 2014 report. Analysts give AWS a value of about $95, and hiked their target for the overall share price from $380 to $425. They said that AWS could become a more important part of the company’s overall business, and generate $20 billion in revenue annually by 2020. For the sake of comparison, Rackspace is estimated to be worth around $7 billion. Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak announced in the earnings call that AWS would be moved out of the “other” category, which it shared with advertising and credit-card related revenues, into its own segment, calling it “an appropriate way to look at our business in 2015.” The new valuation puts AWS at over 20 percent of Amazon’s overall value, so it is possible that the change in reporting is driven by a concern for clarity around a major business segment. The company could have other motivations, too. TheStreet notes that Amazon has a relatively high debt-to-equity ratio of 1.50, as well as potential short term cash problems. These concerns as well as the gap between Amazon’s retail core and AWS lead Codero Hosting CEO Emil Sayegh to see an AWS spin off or be sale in 2015 when he gazed into his crystal ball for the WHIR at the end of 2014. It could also be a move to help the share price, which has lagged the S&P 500 over the past year, by increasing the visibility of a segment with strong growth. It is a foregone conclusion that however well fortune treats the American consumers who drive Amazon’s retail business, AWS will grow in 2015. Industry perception of the infrastructure giant is changing as partnerships and opportunities from complementary services are realized. Its public cloud was called the most popular for enterprises, along with Azure, in a recent Rightscale report, and the “international” segment should benefit from further penetration into the Australian ecommerce market following a partnership with Anchor announced earlier this week. Amazon stock was up slightly from a $385.61 open in early Thursday trading. This article originally appeared at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/aws-worth-50-billion-analysts (Comment on this)
6:55p	Chinese Internet Giants Eyeing Silicon Valley Data Centers Earlier this week, Alibaba subsidiary Aliyun announced it was opening a data center in Santa Clara, California, as the first step in expanding the giant’s reach into the U.S. cloud services market. Alibaba isn’t the only Chinese internet company looking to gain data center foothold in Silicon Valley. Other heavyweights, including Tencent and Baidu, have been shopping for data center space in the Valley in recent months, Jeff West, director of data center research at the commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, said. The San Francisco Bay Area isn’t the only option for an Asian company to expand its infrastructure on the West Coast, but it is the first obvious entry point. “Proximity to Asia in the Bay Area and the general concentration of technology companies makes the Bay Area a must-have location,” West’s colleague Bill Dougherty, an executive director at Cushman, said. Alternative options are Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle markets. It is unclear which Silicon Valley data center Aliyun has moved into. Supply of wholesale data center space in the region’s market is extremely tight at the moment, with only a few options for 1 megawatt or 2 megawatt deployments for customers who want newly built space, and who don’t want to sublease from Facebook or Yahoo, both of which have been moving infrastructure out of leased space and into their own facilities, subleasing the space they vacate that’s still under contract. CoreSite, one of the area’s biggest data center providers, announced last July it had leased space in a Santa Clara data center to China Telecom, which would use the capacity to provide data center services to a “premier customer” that provided web and mobile services and that was looking to expand into the U.S. market. According to a report by North American Data Centers, a commercial real estate firm that specializes in data center space, China Telecom took 3 MW at the CoreSite facility. A CoreSite spokesperson declined to comment for this story, citing company policy. Other major Silicon Valley data center providers that specialize in wholesale deals are Vantage, DuPont Fabros, Digital Realty, and Infomart, which is the product of a recent merger between Fortune Data Centers and Dallas Infomart. Other big wholesale deals that closed in the Valley in 2014 were Microsoft’s 6 MW lease with DuPont Fabros, NaviSite’s 3.6 MW deal with Digital Realty, and a 2.5 MW lease by Dropbox at a DuPont Fabros facility, according to the North American Data Centers report. A lot of capacity was spoken for last year, creating a shortage of supply in the market. According to Cushman, demand is currently three to four times the supply. About 20 MW of data center requirements have “toured the market” since the beginning of the year already, Dougherty said during a presentation at an industry event in San Francisco in February. The demand is being driven primarily by local and Asian companies, especially Chinese internet players, he said. (Comment on this)
8:12p	VMware Unveils Virtual Network Functions Delivered as Cloud Services VMware has added a powerful new capability to its public cloud services. The company is now offering virtual network functions as services delivered via its vCloud infrastructure. Network Function Virtualization is a way to package functions traditionally performed by specialized physical appliances into virtual machines that can run on any physical server, or, as VMware has now illustrated, in a public cloud. Besides cost savings that come from not having to buy and install physical appliances, such as firewalls, network accelerators, or load balancers, the big promise of NFV is agility – a way to quickly configure the network for faster service delivery. The company made the announcement at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where NFV was in the spotlight. Juniper and Amdocs showcased a solution that delivers Juniper’s virtual router and firewall as virtual network functions running on customers’ premises. Spanish telco Telefonica together with Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated video streaming and videocall services delivered over LTE using a variety of virtual network functions. VMware’s new services are aimed at network service providers, which have recently been attempting to differentiate by providing a wide variety of services. Such agility helps them create and deploy new services much faster than they have been able to do traditionally. vCloud for NFV includes cloud compute, network, and storage resources. The company plans to add support for OpenStack in the near future. VMware has its own distribution of the popular open source cloud infrastructure software. VMware is offering about 40 different network functions by about 30 vendors. One of the first customers is Vodafone, the London-based telecommunications giant. The company is using vCloud to provide several of its Telco Cloud services. (Comment on this)
10:44p	Modular Data Center Deployed at Sagrada Família While it is reasonable that constructing a world wonder should take more than a century, timelines are a little more limited when it comes to deploying data center capacity. La Sagrada Família, the ongoing 140-plus-year cathedral construction project that started in Barcelona in 1882, needed a data center, and it needed it quickly. While still under construction, the cathedral, designed by the famous architect Antoni Gaudi, is visited by about three million tourists every year. Until recently, the site relied on a small server room for support of business functions, such as email, and for control of more than 250 security cameras. The UNESCO World Heritage Site’s IT capacity had to be expanded, but building a brick-and-mortar data center at the site of an already extremely complicated construction project would only make it more complicated. The solution was a prefabricated modular data center by Schneider Electric. Portability is one of the main appeals of modular data centers, which makes them convenient for an evolving construction site of a massive cathedral that’s already “in production.” Other appeals are being able to expand data center capacity quickly or expand in smaller increments. In addition to back-office and security functions, the La Sagrada Família data center, which Schneider recently completed, supports the tourist site’s new digital ticketing, validation, and baffle gate system. It is the most visited tourist site in the city. “Today, there is no longer a one-size-fits-all approach to data center design and build,” Kevin Brown, vice president of global data center strategy and technology at Schneider, said. “For Sagrada Família, it was clear that a flexible and portable, yet powerful facility was needed to meet the unique demands of their growing business.” Schneider, the French electricity distribution and automation management giant, has been growing its modular data center business in recent years. The biggest expansion move in this area was its acquisition of modular data center maker AST Modular (which happens to be based in Barcelona) in January 2014. (Comment on this)

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