Thursday, April 16th, 2015

Time	Event
12:00p	H5 Pumps $8M in Denver Data Center Efficiency Upgrades Wholesale data center provider H5 Data Centers is making more than $8 million worth of infrastructure upgrades to increase data center efficiency at its Denver campus. The 300,000-square-foot campus, which H5 acquired 18 months ago, features two data center buildings with more than 17 megawatts of power. The most sizable change is a full UPS electrical upgrade, not only to the switchgear but the UPS units themselves to solidify uptime and reliability. As part of its data center efficiency efforts due to be completed by the end of this year, H5 has installed a new high-efficiency insulated roof, all the way down to variable speed fans; LEDs, and a new building management software system. “We’re working on reducing our PUE and making as modern a data center as possible,” said COO David Dunn, a seasoned veteran in the space who has held executive positions with CoreSite and Zayo. The strategy for H5 is to acquire assets with “good bones,” according to Dunn. The Denver upgrades are more complicated than other properties, said Dunn, as the other campuses contain mostly powered-shell space. Dunn said that the company is looking to run more of the day-to-day operations in the Denver facility and in other locations such as Seattle. The Denver campus is a former United Airlines data center, or Travelport, as it is known by others. The team’s tenure there averages 15 years, meaning the company kept most of the Travelport staff, which was responsible for keeping 100 percent uptime over the last 15 years. Improvements to the building itself include a new high-efficiency insulated roof and redone lighting. H5 has also added a cooling tower water treatment system to prevent costly problems and a new building management software (BMS) to better keep track of it all. “Our decision to invest more than $8 million in capital improvements to the Denver data center campus shows H5 Data Centers’ commitment to being on the leading edge of operational and energy efficiency,” said Josh Simms, chief executive officer of H5 Data Centers, in a press release. “This commitment also supports the green initiatives of our growing ecosystem of enterprise customers, content distributors, and networks and cloud providers.” Data center efficiency upgrades in Denver include: New UPS units that will increase power efficiencies to more than 94 percent Flat-plate heat exchanger to utilize water-side free cooling Variable speed cylindrical fans on computer room air-handling units (CRAHs) Sub-floor baffling cold air containment for high density zones New, high-efficiency insulated roof Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and proximity lighting Cooling tower water treatment system New building management software (BMS) system H5 Data Centers is privately owned and funded. It owns and operates properties in Seattle, San Luis Obispo, CA; Atlanta, Charlotte and Denver; and is on the lookout for other assets with “good bones” and an attractive cost basis. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Report: AWS, VMware Lead Enterprise Cloud, But Shakeup is Possible A pair of recently published 451 Research cloud reports – the Vendor Window and Microsoft-commissioned Beyond Infrastructure: Cloud 2.0 Signifies New Opportunities for Cloud Service Providers – revealed interesting trends in the cloud landscape. The first report showed that Amazon Web Services leads the public cloud space while VMware owns the private, on-premises space. However, both vendors have competition breathing down their necks. The report, compiled for Microsoft (no sign up required), found that a bigger portion of the budget in general is being dedicated to off-premises deployment models. It also concluded that cost is not the major driver for these decisions, adding weight to those vendors scoring high marks for satisfaction in the Vendor Window report. The noted leaders are no surprise given the head start AWS and VMware had in public, and on-premise private clouds, respectively. The most fragmented market is hosted private cloud, which saw adoption by just one-third of those surveyed. Rackspace led all hosted private cloud providers with 20 percent, but those with less than 3 percent of total market share own more than half of the total. One-third of enterprises expect IT to spend more over the next 90 days, with the majority staying with their current cloud providers, according to the both reports. Competitors Gaining on AWS Lead In other results, AWS remains the leader in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) adoption among enterprise IT buyers, but Azure is not only breathing down its neck, it was cited as the vendor enterprises will likely evaluate for their next IaaS supplier. VMware ESX and vCloud have a 70 percent adoption rate in the enterprise, but the majority of those customers have also deployed an alternative such as OpenStack, CloudStack or Microsoft Cloud OS. AWS is used by 57 percent of respondents, while Azure has been adopted by 42 percent. AWS achieved the highest marks for its ability to fulfill customer needs. Not to be outdone, Rackspace performed on par with AWS for its ability to fulfill customer IaaS needs and is the highest-rated IaaS provider for guaranteed SLAs, consistent with its new managed cloud positioning. However, current users of Microsoft Azure rate Rackspace lower than other vendors on the metrics of experience and support for open-source software. “While the 2015 Vendor Window for IaaS shows Amazon Web Services as the clear leader based on multiple metrics, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and VMware’s vCloud Air are becoming competitive challengers,” said Michelle Bailey, senior vice president of Digital Infrastructure and Data Strategy for 451 Research, in a press release. “As more mainstream customers move business-critical workloads to cloud environments, the decision criteria for evaluating potential vendors change relative to early cloud adopters, and in turn, so do the vendors under consideration.” VMware Owns On-Prem Cloud As mentioned previously, VMware dominates on-premises clouds with ESX and vCloud. The highest-rated VMware partner solution was Cisco UCS in terms of promise, fulfillment, company brand, and platform reliability. “As open-source-based solutions continue to receive investment from major hardware and software vendors such as HP, IBM, Red Hat and Citrix, VMware’s dominance is under pressure, especially for mobile and cloud-native applications,” said Dr. Scott Ottaway, vice president of cloud services and data research for 451. Hosted Private Cloud Space Fragmented Meanwhile, hosted private cloud is more likely to land mission critical applications than IaaS. Other than Rackspace, frequently mentioned vendors include, Verizon, CenturyLink, AT&T and VMware vCloud Air. Move to Off-Premise Accelerating The “Beyond Infrastructure” report also looked into overall enterprise expectations and budgeting. The fact that cloud and off-premises IT infrastructure budgets are incrementally growing while on-premises budgets are slightly shrinking, suggests a slow but not insignificant move off-site occurring in the enterprise space. It also showed that one-third of enterprises will have 60 percent of their applications on some sort of cloud platform, with 60 percent of marketing departments already making the shift. Enterprises as a whole reported using the cloud most often for backup and recovery followed by disaster and site recovery. Database, email and business applications are moving to hosted models most often. Global IT budgets for cloud, SaaS and things outside of corporate walls in general have gone up a few percentage points to 56. That budget is coming out of on-premises infrastructure and staff and is expected to drop from 43 to 40 percent in the next two years. Cost is Not the Main Driver According to “Beyond Infrastructure,” the biggest expectations when moving to outside services is gaining improved technology quality on platforms and applications (22 percent) followed by helping grow the business (18 percent). Surprisingly, speeding up time to market came in on the low end; so did cost, which makes more sense because the move to cloud is inexpensive. The inclination to adopt off-premise services is indicative of a larger trend: IT is moving outside of corporate walls. However, the often conservative nature of enterprises means they’re not looking to make wholesales shifts but hybrid ones. In conclusion, the fact that companies are increasing spending and seeking out diversity means that the cloud market is not set in stone as AWS and VMware’s long-term dominance might suggest. (Comment on this)
3:30p	Key Considerations for a Prefabricated Data Center Solution Eric Wilcox is vice president of engineering and operations, Hyperscale Solutions, Emerson Network Power. In today’s rapidly changing IT environment, data centers must meet changing capacity demands efficiently – from both timing and financial standpoints. Prefabricated data centers are emerging as a solution to this challenge. Although it has received considerable attention in recent months, prefabrication is more than just a buzzword or a trend – the process of prefabricating a data center is fundamentally changing traditional data center construction practices. Building a prefabricated data center requires a collaborative approach to design where the critical infrastructure systems are assembled and tested as a complete sub-system in a manufacturing and controlled environment and deployed to the installation site. The result is a state-of-the-art, tightly integrated facility that can be deployed faster and at a lower cost than a similar facility using traditional construction practices. The economics of a prefabricated data center are attractive. While recent public examples of companies employing a prefabricated approach to a new build fall in the hyperscale category, i.e. Facebook and T-Systems, prefabrication is by no means a niche practice limited to that environment. It’s viable for new builds of all shapes and sizes and, under the right circumstances, the economics may even change the cost-benefit analysis of expanding an existing facility or choosing a new build; and prefabrication seems like a clear path. Who wouldn’t want an integrated facility available faster and at a lower cost? If you’re still wondering if a prefabricated solution is right for you, here are some questions to consider: What is the value of rapid deployment? Any organization seeking to accelerate data center deployment will benefit from a prefabricated solution. In fact, the primary advantage of prefabricated data centers is faster deployment. The approach cuts months off the deployment timeline, allowing organizations to bring new capacity online 30 to 60 percent faster than traditional stick-builds. This has quantifiable financial benefits – both cost-saving and revenue-producing. Those benefits should be factored into the analysis when comparing the cost of a stick-build facility to a prefabricated solution. How does site selection affect design? Prefabrication by no means equals “cookie cutter” or “standardized.” Instead, data centers are custom designed to a site and have no limitations in terms of functionality or aesthetics. That said, site location does affect what should be included in the design and development. Because the prefabricated process is more collaborative than the traditional stick-build process, technology vendors are more involved in the development. As such, they can better match infrastructure systems to specific site characteristics, including climate conditions and energy availability. This is particularly important in regard to the thermal management system, as the site may present opportunities to use free cooling and other approaches that dramatically reduce data center energy costs. What compromises must be made to achieve rapid deployment? It’s counterintuitive, but don’t assume there have to be penalties associated with faster deployment. The quality and performance of prefabricated modules and facilities are exceeding what can be achieved through traditional construction practices, and the costs are often similar. In fact, when the value of faster deployment is factored in, the total cost of ownership of a prefabricated data center is likely to be lower than a similar stick-build facility. Off-site prefabrication occurs in specialized facilities using skilled craftsmen and established workflows to drive high quality and enable true technology integration. Simply put, these aren’t LEGO-like stacks of containerized IT. With prefabrication, architectural requirements and preferences and customized industrial design can make the finished facility as individualized as any business might prefer. Efficiency won’t be compromised either. The collaborative process supports system level configuration and testing prior to on-site installation, streamlining commissioning and minimizing the potential for startup problems. When additional capacity is needed, new modules can be added with minimal engineering and without disrupting existing operations. Unified infrastructure is an emerging category in the industry, and prefabricated data centers are a natural evolution in this space. We’ve seen this process work well in limited sizes and configurations over the past several years, and facility-scale, fully customizable data centers can benefit from the same approach. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
5:06p	Google: Big Data Shouldn’t Be an Infrastructure Project Google unleashed a slew of improvements to its cloud big data offerings, including the beta launch of Dataflow, the service based on technology that replaced MapReduce in its own analytics engine. Google and its competitors are offering users sophisticated analytics without having to build and manage infrastructure. Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have cloud big data offerings, and so do IBM and HP, among others. All of these companies “wrote the book” on building and managing data center infrastructure at massive scale, and Google’s message is, “Don’t try to do it yourself. Let us handle it.” “For example, you might be collecting a deluge of information and then correlating, enriching and attempting to extract real-time insights,” William Vambenepe, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post. “Should you expect such feats, by their very nature, to involve a large amount of resource management and system administration? You shouldn’t. Not in the cloud.” Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure at Google, made a big splash last June when he said the company had stopped using MapReduce and replaced it with Dataflow, which could do both batch and stream processing for big data applications. MapReduce has for years been the go-to framework for batch processing and underpinned Hadoop, the most popular framework for storing data on server clusters and running parallel processing jobs for analytics on that data. MapReduce hasn’t been an inseparable part of Hadoop ever since Hadoop 2 was released. The framework can now use a variety of processing models. In the beta version of Google Dataflow, the user can choose between batch and stream processing modes. The service starts the resources needed to run the user’s program, scales them automatically (user defines the limit to which resources can scale), and terminates them when the work is done. The company also added new features to BigQuery, its API-driven SQL analytics service and extended its availability to European data centers. The new features include better security and performance. (Comment on this)
5:29p	Equinix Brings Online Its Sixth London Data Center Equinix has officially opened its sixth London data center. The facility is part of a global expansion program the company announced earlier this year, which also included new capacity in New York, Toronto, Singapore, and Melbourne. All in all, the expansion contributed nearly 500,000 square feet of data center space to the company’s already massive global portfolio. Equinix is the largest colocation provider in the world. The company spent $79 million to build the LD6 International Business Exchange (name of the new London data center). The data center was purpose-built from the ground up and has received LEED Gold accreditation for its energy-efficiency features, according to Equinix. Its main energy-efficiency feature is its cooling system, which uses 100 percent free cooling (outside air) and indirect heat exchange. The facility is located on Equinix’s Slough campus. Space there is in particularly high demand, because the campus is home to LINX (London Internet Exchange), and houses infrastructure for more than 170 financial-services companies that generates a substantial portion of all European equities trades. The campus also offers direct network access to major public cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. First phase of LD6 is about 240,000 square feet and can house about 1,400 cabinets. Phase II will add capacity for another approximately 1,400 cabinets. Commenting on the announcement, Julian David, CEO of techUK, a tech-industry lobbying organization, said opening of the new London data center was a sign of growth of the U.K.’s technology sector. “The decision by Equinix, and many other global companies, to invest in the U.K. is further evidence of the crucial role of this country as a hub for technology innovation, services and talent,” he said in a statement. (Comment on this)
6:09p	VMware Blends Data Center Management With VDI and Mobile VMware is starting to pull together its investments in the data center and the desktop in a way that simplifies IT administration. The company announced it has integrated VMware NSX network virtualization software with AirWatch and VMware Horizon administration software to make it simpler to not overprovision resources in the data center. Horizon is the company’s virtual desktop management platform, and AirWatch is for enterprise mobility management and security. Noah Wasmer, vice president of end-user computing strategy for VMware, says IT organizations using VMware NSX network virtualization software can establish isolated sets of micro-services for specific end users and their virtual desktops. Set up by the administration tools for AirWatch and VMware Horizon, those “micro-services” mean an end user is openly exposed to specific sets of backend services allocated to them. Wasmer says at a time when there is a lot of volatility both inside and out of the data center, dynamically provisioning resources has become a major challenge in data center management. On the data center side, tools such as vMotion make it possible to move virtual machines around the data center. At the same time, end users now have access to multiple devices, some of which may be owned by them or the company. “There are a lot of dimensions these days,” says Wasmer. “We’re trying to provide a lot stronger visibility into the data center.” At a time when regulatory compliance has become a pressing issue in data center management, Wasmer notes that isolating the services that end users can navigate inside the data center reduces the opportunity for those end users to access data or files that they won’t see in the first place. Wasmer says the ability to integrate AirWatch and VMware Horizon will VMware NSX represents one of the first tangible returns on VMware’s decision to both acquire AirWatch and push into desktop virtualization. While the number of virtual desktops being served up from the data center remains relatively small, Wasmer says there is an opportunity to converge data center and desktop management in a way that results in more control over the overall IT environment using micro-services. Naturally, it remains to be seen to what degree server and desktop management will converge inside a virtual data center. Many IT organizations may, for example, continue to have separate administrators. At the same time, there are just as many organizations where IT administrators already perform both roles. (Comment on this)
7:37p	Zayo’s zColo Opens Third Denver Data Center Zayo’s colocation business zColo has opened a new data center in Denver. The almost 20,000-square-foot, 2-megawatt facility is located downtown. It is Zayo’s third data center in Colorado. Zayo established its initial presence in Denver through acquisition of colo and managed services provider Latisys and its two area data centers in Englewood and Centennial. The company’s total footprint in Denver with the new facility is around 160,000 square feet. The new Denver data center is carrier-neutral but offers Zayo’s own fiber-optic network with connectivity to a carrier hotel 910 15th Street. “This is a strategic market expansion for zColo,” said Stephanie Copeland, president of zColo, in a press release. “With the addition of a third facility in the Denver area, we are able to offer customers broad availability of high-quality data center and interconnect-oriented colocation, connected by a deep fiber footprint.” Low rate of natural disasters, opportunity for free cooling, and a skilled tech workforce all work into Denver’s favor as a data center market. Other Denver data center providers include ViaWest, which launched its fifth, 140,000 square foot facility there last year/ CoreSite is expanding in Denver as well as other markets. H5 Data Centers recently announced an $8 million investment in facility upgrades to its Denver campus. FORTRUST, EdgeConneX, Equinix, and Level 3 all have data centers in or around Denver. Faction, formerly known as Peak, is a white label cloud provider headquartered in the area.   (Comment on this)

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