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Friday, April 17th, 2015
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Event |
| 4:01a |
Huge Sacramento Facility Part of Global NTT Data Center Push NTT Communications, subsidiary of the Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Group, is bent on becoming one of the dominant forces in the global data center market. There is now substantial NTT data center presence in nearly all major markets around the world and continues to expand this footprint aggressively.
NTT is huge but remains relatively unknown in the North American market, where it nevertheless has serious ambitions. Its subsidiary NTT America has had a data center business in the U.S. for years, but NTT Com made a big push to expand in the market in 2013 by acquiring an 80-percent stake in major U.S. data center provider RagingWire for $350 million.
RagingWire recently launched a massive third data center at its campus in Sacramento, California, the company’s home base. The 180,000-square-foot facility provides 14 megawatts of power and 70,000 square feet of data center space.
The two other data centers on campus are “virtually sold out,” Doug Adams, RagingWire’s chief revenue officer, said. Some of the more well-known tenants at the site include StumbleUpon and, reportedly, Twitter.
RagingWire has been able to expand in Sacramento and at its East Coast site, in Ashburn, Virginia, thanks to investment from its new parent company. NTT is also investing in expansion at the East Coast campus and simultaneously in eight more locations around the world, Motoo Tanaka, senior vice president of cloud services at NTT Com, said.
Those other locations are in the U.K., Germany, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, and Japan. Until only a few years ago, most NTT data centers were in Asia, the bulk of them in Japan, Tanaka said. But the emphasis now is on becoming a global player, which it has been pursuing mostly through acquisition.
NTT gained instant number-three status in the European colocation market earlier this year when it acquired German data center provider e-shelter. Prior to that, in 2012, it acquired a U.K. data center provider Gyron, gaining a sizeable London data center footprint.
The company moved into the Indian market with a bang in 2012, acquiring a 74-percent stake in Netmagic Solutions, which had data centers in Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, and Bangalore. It followed that deal with the acquisition of a massive data center in Thailand.
While NTT has a slew of managed hosting and cloud services, the strategy is to lead with colocation and sell the other services to colo customers if they need them, Tanaka said, acknowledging that it would be difficult for a less-known company like NTT to compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, or VMware on cloud services alone.
“We are not so well-known, like Amazon, but we are now providing fairly good cloud services, and maybe we can ask the customer to combine our cloud with their own data center and also, in some cases, other cloud services,” he said. “I’m not number-one – I understand that clearly – but I can be part of the [cloud] world.”
The strategy of leading with colocation and upselling on cloud services reflects in the business unit’s revenue. Roughly 10 percent of NTT Com’s revenue comes from its colocation and cloud services, and 80 percent of that portion comes from colocation, Tanaka said.
That’s also a reflection of the company’s legacy. It has been in the data center services business for about 15 years now, while its cloud business is only three-to-four years old. | | 2:00p |
As AFCOM Turns 35, Data Center World Makes Full Circle AFCOM is turning 35 this year, and the upcoming Data Center World Spring conference in Las Vegas will be an anniversary celebration and start of the next chapter in the life of one of the data center industry’s oldest professional organizations.
In a way, AFCOM, one of the sister companies of Data Center Knowledge, is coming full circle. Launched in 1980 as the Association for Computer Operations Management, it was an organization for mainframe operators, who were really the world’s first data center managers. For two decades the organization was focused on education for a range of data center professions, be it network management, storage, compute, or facilities. Then came changes.
One of the fallouts of the energy crises of the early 2000s was sudden public scrutiny of the internet’s power consumption. The coal lobby was pushing a narrative (quite successfully) that for the internet to continue to grow at the same rate, coal was essential to ensuring there was enough energy to power data centers.
Public pressure aside, the fact that data center facilities were inefficient and needed to get better at utilizing power they used was clearer to data center operators than it was to anyone else. As a result, a lot of focus at AFCOM meetings shifted to facilities management. It was necessary.
“In the 2000s, we got pretty heavy into the facility side,” AFCOM President Tom Roberts recalled. “This year, we did something different.”
This year’s Data Center World program will have better balance between IT and facilities, he said. There are three specific educational tracks: IT infrastructure management, facilities management, and power and cooling.
On the IT management side of things, Microsoft’s lead enterprise architect Paul Slater is going to talk about running services at global scale. George Clement, a software engineer on Intel’s Data Center Manager software team, will talk about using new telemetry data in server platforms to drive efficiency in server utilization.
Arup Chakravarty, director of network engineering at the insurance company MetLife, will talk about using information about applications running in the data center to make proactive capacity planning decisions, from virtualization and security to physical infrastructure.
Those are just a few examples. There will also be sessions on disaster recovery, switching and routing, storage management, and the role of network engineers in the software-defined data center.
That’s in addition to a slew of sessions on facilities management, power, and cooling.
Together, the three tracks are meant to cover all aspects of the data center under one roof. “I can’t think of anybody in the data center profession today that wouldn’t get something out of this,” Roberts said.
Getting people who work on different parts of the data center infrastructure together in one room has always been important, but today, when there is market pressure on enterprises to develop software and on vendors to make it easy for developers to ship the software they write, comprehensive data center management is crucial, because new software is coming down the pipe faster than it ever has.
Collaboration between facilities and IT “is definitely necessary, and we see it more today than we did five years ago,” Roberts said.
The five-day Data Center World Spring conference starts this Sunday at the Mirage in Las Vegas. | | 3:00p |
Apple Solar Project in China Hailed as Important First Step Apple is investing in a new Chinese solar power project as part of a larger push to use sustainable resources internationally.
The Apple solar investment is for a project with capacity of 40 megawatts, or enough to power 20 corporate offices and 20 retail stores in China and Hong Kong. The plant is being built in partnership with U.S.-based SunPower as well as four Chinese firms.
Apple now uses renewable energy for 87 percent of its facilities worldwide and the company’s data center energy supply is 100 percent renewable, making it a Greenpeace darling. These figures don’t include contract manufacturers, which Apple still relies on in China.
“It’s important to us to tackle climate change everywhere we are,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president for environmental initiatives, in a statement to The Associated Press. “When you talk about China, you’re talking about manufacturing partners. We’re looking to bring the same innovation there. This is the start.”
Stateside, Apple solar investments have been extensive. Apple is spending $850 million for half the output of 280 megawatt facility south of Apple’s Culpertino, California, campus. Other Apple solar projects include a third solar farm in North Carolina and plans for a 20 megawatt solar farm in Reno, Nevada. It has been less active internationally, but this is being hailed as an important first step.
“Apple’s announcement today is a significant first step toward addressing its energy footprint in China, and sets an important precedent for other companies that have operations in China: they can take action to power their operations with renewable energy,” said Greenpeace analyst Gary Cook.
China relies heavily on coal power but has aggressive goals for solar, wind and hydroelectric. Big corporations like Apple taking initiative is positive.
“The next step for Apple should be to work with its suppliers to power its manufacturing operations in China with 100% renewable energy,” Greenpeace East Asia Senior Renewable Campaigner Yuan Ying said. Chinese policies to reduce coal consumption and boost renewable energy are working, but there needs to be more rapid progress, Ying said. Some responsibility falls on companies with large manufacturing operations.
Apple also announced recently it was preserving 36,000 acres of timberland in Maine. | | 3:15p |
Friday Funny: Pick a Caption for ‘Natural Lighting’ No better way to get some natural light into the data center than a giant hole in the ceiling…
Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, has a new cartoon for Data Center Knowledge’s cartoon caption contest. What do you think would be the funniest text for the bubble? Post your caption in the comments. Then, next week, our readers will vote for the best submission.
Congratulations to Jasmine, whose caption for the Easter bunny edition of Friday Funnies won that week’s contest. Her caption: “He took ‘cache server’ quite literally.”
Here’s the poll for last week’s Empty Cage cartoon. Please vote on the best caption:
Take Our Poll
For more cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. For more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website. | | 3:30p |
ServiceNow, RightScale Marry ITSM and Cloud Management RightScale’s cloud management and IT service management (ITSM) tools by ServiceNow have combined in a move that caters to IT employees’ broadening scope and a growing role as service broker across clouds and web services.
As a result of this enterprise IT transformation, companies often have to leverage and tap multiple clouds and services to deal with distributed infrastructures and services on the whole.
One way to cross this hurdle is to establish processes that can control it all. Since it’s no longer a matter of all servers residing in a central place, managing that distributed and varied infrastructure needs to be centralized and ultimately automated; thus, the reason behind the partnership.
RightScale CEO Michael Crandall defined the Holy Grail of IT transformation as, “A centralized system to streamline delivery of IT services and assets to your company’s consumers, and to manage those services and assets simply, securely, and cost efficiently using automation.”
ServiceNow provides access to data on usage and trends that allow customers to make better decisions regarding where an application should be placed, while RightScale automates and orchestrates across a range of cloud platforms.
The requisition process is normally a slow and painful one, but the companies say the combo means going from 4-6 weeks to 10 to 15 minutes. ServiceNow triggers business process workflows to get appropriate approvals, and then calls on RightScale to provision the resources.
Sounds simple enough, but anyone familiar with bureaucracy knows there are several factors to consider in the process. The goal is achieving extreme flexibility and agility, while at the same time, masking the complexity required to accomplish those goals.
Big customer Technicolor, a company with more than 14,000 employees that runs “hundreds of thousands” of CPU cores, integrated the two services to create its own platform called Constellation.
Constellation provides one-click self-service provisioning of resources across seven cloud environments from a single interface. Services range from infrastructure to applications, and from servers, storage, and networking all the way to web services. They are available through standard workflows and registered as assets in ServiceNow’s CMDB for global visibility and auditing. Notifications are sent when resources are deprovisioned. Low-level configuration of server software is handled using Salt, in which ServiceNow recently integrated its automation tools.
It’s about “delivering products and services to the market faster than the guy next to you,” Technicolor said in a discussion with Crandell.
Constellation can launch render farms with thousands of cores in continuous integration environments for its dozens of websites. It does so by using automated workflows that can allocate resources on any of its approved private or public cloud environments. And once running, critical maintenance tasks like patching a security vulnerability can be handled using one-to-many template-based updates in just a few hours. | | 6:40p |
Report: Apple Expanding Oregon Data Center Campus Apple has filed paperwork to expand its existing data center campus in Prineville, Oregon, local news outlet the Bend Bulletin reported. The expansion is in addition to the company’s recently filed early paperwork for a whole new data center adjacent to this campus.
The latest Apple data center expansion in Prineville will consist of final pods, each measuring over 35,000 square feet. The site’s final pods will be located in the southeaster portion of the property. Apple built first two of the proposed eight pods at the site when the project began in 2012.
Local officials expected the most recent Apple data center expansion to be completed by the end of 2015. Construction timetable for the new site is unknown.
A structural permit application estimates the value of the expansion at under $6 million. A second application filled concurrently is for around $600,000 of interior work, including sewage. The Crook County Building Department told the Bulletin that it is one of many permits expected.
“We’re excited to see the beginning of the last portion of the building,” Crook County Commisioner Ken Fahlgren told the newspaper.
Crook County requested an expansion to the city’s urban growth boundary to accommodate the potential new data center nearby. It requested changing the zoning from exclusive farm use to light industrial.
The Bulletin discussed the impact of data centers on the Central Oregon community. Prineville at one point had the highest unemployment rate in the state. Beginning 2010, it had a 3-year stretch where it attracted data centers by Facebook and Apple. The data centers helped turn the local economy around and triggered several other projects in recent years.
The speed at which Oregon worked to fix a controversial central assessment tax is further indicative of the importance of data centers to the local economy. While they are not massive job creators directly, the economic benefits go beyond a data center’s walls as they often kick-start the local tech scene or attract other projects.
A nearby example of the change data centers can bring to rural communities is Quincy, Washington. | | 7:24p |
Iowa Officials Approve Tax Breaks for Google Data Center Expansion Following local officials’ approval of a tax-break package for a Google data center expansion project in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the company is preparing to invest another $1 billion in its campus there. Google has already spent about $1.5 billion on its existing data center capacity there.
The Iowa Economic Development Authority Board approved a $19.8 million sales and use-tax refund for the Google data center expansion project Friday, local news outlet The Des Moines Register reported. The tax break follows $16.8 million in state incentives for the company approved in the past.
A Google employee in Council Bluffs confirmed the company’s data center expansion plans to The Register.
Tax incentives have been one of the main instruments state and local economic-development officials use to attract big data center construction projects. While they don’t create as many jobs as manufacturing facilities do, they boost local economies during construction and put towns on the map for future potential data center builds. There are other benefits, such as property taxes and taxes on the enormous electricity purchases data centers make.
Enormous investments in data center capacity expansion around the world is regular course of business for Google and its rivals in internet and cloud services. Just earlier this month, the company announced launch of a $600 million data center in Oregon, and officials in an Atlanta suburb recently approved a tax-incentive package for a $300 million Google data center expansion there.
The first facility on the Google data center campus in Council Bluffs was announced in 2007. Five years later the company announced it would build a second data center there.
Google has so far created about 130 jobs at the site. The company has also donated more than $800,000 to local schools and non-profits and paid to launch a free WiFi network in and around Council Bluffs.
Iowa has been successful in attracting massive data center projects.
There is a huge Microsoft data center in West Des Moines, and the company announced plans to build another $1.1 billion facility in the state last year. The latest Facebook data center came online in Altoona, Iowa, in November of 2014. | | 8:03p |
Docker Makes Container Management Easier for IT Ops Staff Docker this week promised to make the lives of IT operations teams trying to cope with the rise of Docker containers a little easier. With the release of updates to the management tools it provides for Docker containers the company is now promising that updates to its platform will be synchronously delivered every two months. The announcement comes the same week the company closed a $95 million funding round.
“For the first time we’re unifying the cadences of our releases,” says Betty Junod, director of product marketing for Docker. “We’ll now be releasing updates every other month.”
With the release of Docker Engine 1.6 an embedded client that supports the Microsoft Windows operating system is available for the first time. Promised last year, the embedded client sets the stage for using Docker containers to easily port applications between Windows and Linux platforms.
Docker Engine 1.6 also adds a new driver for generating log files that can be consumed by IT monitoring and management tools to give IT operations additional insight into how Docker containers are impacting the data center environment.
Docker has also updated Docker Compose, which is used to define Docker components. The latest version makes it possible to share configurations and applications between different environments, thereby making it easier for IT operations teams to collaborate on deploying Docker containers.
In addition, Docker images are now content addressable, which means that system administrators can not only specify what content they want to update within a specific container, they can also apply policies to how those Docker containers actually get deployed.
Finally, the company has introduced a new application programming interface in version 2.0 Registry to connect to Docker Engine to make it simpler to distribute Docker images. Docker Engine 1.6 supports the new API while maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions of the API.
Junod says that while adoption of Docker is being primarily driven by developers, Docker is committed to making it easier for IT operations teams and developers to collaboratively manage Docker containers. At the moment, the vast majority of Docker containers are being used in application development environments. But a new survey of 658 CIOs published by Enterprise Technology Research finds that Docker containers are by far the technology that most of them plan to deploy in 2015.
Junod says that debate over where Docker containers should best run continues. Many contend that containers should run on bare-metal servers as a more efficient alternative to virtual machines. Others argue that because of the immaturity of Docker security and a paucity of management tools, Docker containers should either run on top of a virtual machine or in a Platform-as-a-Service environment.
The one thing that is for certain at this point is that IT operations teams are soon going to need ways to manage lots of Docker containers, whenever and wherever they happen to find them. | | 8:32p |
Report: Colocation Data Center Market to Reach $36B by 2017 The colocation data center market is expected to reach $36 billion worldwide by the end of 2017, according to a new report from 451 Research. The global footprint will grow over 40 million square feet in that time as well, from 109 million to close to 150 million square feet. Currently, the colocation market is pegged at $22.8 billion in annualized revenue.
Between now and 2017, the global footprint will grow close to 75 percent, while global revenue will grow 63 percent. The analysts said that the market remains fragmented, with the majority of current revenue (about 75 percent) derived by local providers with less than $500 million in annualized colocation revenue.
The data center market is driven by growth of cloud, with colocation serving “the bedrock for much of Cloud 2.0,” according to Katie Broderick, research director at 451 Research.
Off-premises means it has to live somewhere, and colocation’s central, connected facilities are where stuff is moving, albeit in a variety of hosted models, from floor space to fully managed cloud.
The market leader is Equinix, with close to 8.5 percent of global market revenue. Digital Realty is the the second-largest supplier in terms of revenue (5.6 percent) but the largest in terms of operational square feet, with or 9.6 percent of global capacity.
“This remains an extremely fragmented industry,” said Kelly Morgan, research director, North American Datacenters. “The majority of colocation facilities are provided by local operators with only one to three facilities each. However, it is becoming harder for them to compete with the more geographically diverse providers that are now entering many local markets. We will see continued consolidation in this sector.”
Consolidation in the data center market has been ongoing. The biggest recent deal was the merger between Interxion and TelecityGroup in Europe. A recent example in the U.S. was the Fortune Data Centers and Dallas Infomart merger last October.
Other consolidation is occurring in the form of telecoms and cable companies buying service providers. Zayo acquired Latisys, and Canada’s Shaw Communications acquired ViaWest. Large communications companies have been acquiring into the data center and cloud market for years. One big past example was Verizon acquiring Terremark.
The market seems split between those focusing on core markets and those focusing on emerging markets. Equinix and Coresite focus specifically on their core markets, while other players like 365 Data Centers and EdgeConneX focus on underserved metros.
451 Research estimates that today, less than half of the world’s total operational space for colocation (space supporting IT equipment) is in North America: about 43 percent. EMEA and Asia-Pacific compose a large portion of the other half, each accounting for one quarter of the market. However, this is the first quarter that APAC has edged out EMEA as the second-largest market. Latin America is around 4.5 percent of the market. |
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