Monday, June 29th, 2015

Time	Event
12:00p	Navajo-Owned Data Center Offers Way to Diversify Tribe’s Revenue Base Beyond Casinos Shattering the stereotypical association of Native Americans with the casino business, an IT services company owned by the Navajo Nation has launched a data center in New Mexico. The facility is an opportunity to further differentiate the country’s largest federally recognized tribe’s source of revenue beyond casinos and to entice Navajo youth to stay on the reservation. “This venture is an attempt to diversify the portfolio and not focus largely on casinos,” Don Cox, CIO of Nova Corp., said. “The data center market today is huge and growing.” The data center is operated by Innava Data Solutions, a subsidiary of Nova, a Navajo Nation-owned IT company. Nova has been in the IT business for about 10 years, serving commercial and government customers, including the US Department of Defense and Department of Energy, Cox said. Besides providing data center services, the facility in Albuquerque will have an IT training and certification facility for Navajo students. The drive between the data center and the Navajo Nation reservation, which lies in the area where borders of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet (known as the Four Corners region), is about two hours. The hope is that Navajo youth will be less inclined to leave the reservation, if they can get IT skills and high-paying IT jobs locally, Cox said. Several customers have already taken space in the new data center, including local startups and IT-services companies. The State of New Mexico and nearby US Department of Energy national labs have expressed interest as well, Cox said. Defunct Solar-Panel Plant Gets a New Life The building is massive. At about 130,000 square feet, it is the largest data center in New Mexico, Innava claims. The first phase, which came online recently, has 6,000 square feet of data center space. The building has the potential to accommodate 80,000 square feet of data center space at full build-out. This is a different site from the one Nova described when it first announced the project in 2011. After the company bought the first property, which was 5 acres, a facility that used to house a solar-panel manufacturing plant became available about 1 mile away, Cox explained. It came with 8 MW of power, 18-inch-thick floors, and 30 acres to build on. The company decided to use that facility instead and signed a 10-year lease with an option to purchase it in the future. Overall, Innava expects to invest $100 million to $150 million in building out the campus in Mesa del Sol, a master-planned mixed-use development in Albuquerque. The Innava facility in Albuquerque uses Schneider Electric’s EcoBreeze economizers as part of its cooling system (Photo: Innava Data Solutions) Addressing Sovereignty Concerns Because it isn’t on the actual reservation, Innava hopes it will help pacify concerns by potential customers over doing business with the sovereign Navajo Nation, which has its own government. It can be a concern because as a sovereign nation it enjoys immunity from litigation in US courts, Cox explained. The data center is outside of the borders of the Navajo-governed territory, however, and Innava has made sure to include in its SLAs and contracts language that limits the Navajos from exercising their sovereign immunity in case of a dispute with a customer, he said. A People Development Corporation Nova is part of the Diné Development Corp., the Navajo Nation’s holding company that creates subsidiaries to generate profit for the tribe and to create job opportunities for its members. In the Navajo language, “diné” means “people.” It is the word members of the tribe use to refer to themselves. They don’t actually call themselves “Navajo,” Cox explained. (Comment on this)
4:32p	OneNeck IT Opens $20M Colorado Data Center OneNeck IT Solutions opened the first phase of its $20 million Denver-area colocation and managed services facility, the company’s first Colorado data center and ninth in the US. The initial footprint is 35,000 square feet, with the overall project designed for up to five phases totaling 160,000 square feet. The data center is located near the Denver Tech Center, a business and economic trading center in the southeastern portion of the wider Denver metro. OneNeck announced the data center in 2014, detailing the construction step by step on its blog as well as providing a time-lapse video of the build. The new data center sits on over 11 acres of land and is supported by over 11.5 million pounds of high-density concrete surrounding and supporting the structure. The walls and ceilings are made of 15-inch-thick pre-stressed, steel-reinforced concrete. OneNeck offers managed services and cloud in addition to colocation. It targets compliance requirements facing businesses today, such as SSAE 16, PCI-DSS and HIPAA. The facility is in response of demand for managed services in the Rocky Mountain region and will serve as a disaster tolerance and avoidance location for those outside the region. OneNeck parent company TDS acquired Colorado data center services provider MSN Communications in October 2013, unifying it under the OneNeck IT brand and giving OneNeck its initial presence in the state. TDS acquired OneNeck in 2011 for under $100 million to form the foundation of its cloud play. The company’s cloud is dubbed ReliaCloud. Denver is a logical choice for the provider. The market, which acts as a complement and midpoint for OneNeck data centers in the Midwest and Phoenix, has seen increased activity. Other recent Colorado data center activity includes ViaWest’s acquisition of Applied Trust, a Colorado-based security, consulting, and infrastructure services company. Commercial real estate brokers from Cushman & Wakefield are pitching a huge Colorado energy park for data center use. Zayo acquired Latisys, a provider with good footing the state, and opened a third zColo data center in Denver earlier this 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. OneNeck recently built in another emerging data center market: Minnesota. The company added a $12 million expansion in Eden Prairie. That facility achieved Uptime Institute’s Tier III Certification. The Colorado data center’s cooling system is designed to take full advantage of free cooling as much as it can. None of the data rooms are located against exterior walls and HVAC equipment and water sources are completely outside of data rooms. “All six sides of our data rooms are built like a concrete fortress to provide an added measure of safety, load bearing strength, and protection for our customers’ most critical IT equipment and business systems,” Phil LaForge, president and CEO of OneNeck, said in a statement. “Built to be fault tolerant and continuously maintainable without interruption, this facility is designed to deliver maximum reliability for our customers.” Douglas County offered attractive tax and construction incentives to OneNeck, expecting the data center to promote economic activity and bring jobs to the market. Among those on hand for the opening were Senator Chris Holbert and Jill Repella, chair of the Board of Douglas County Commissioners. (Comment on this)
5:00p	Answering the Mobile Data Deluge With Flash Michael Kuhn is Vice President and Business Line Executive for IBM’s FlashSystem & Enterprise Storage. In the era of mobile, companies that can best connect mobile and internet communications with things like digital media, mobile advertising, and big data are the ones poised for success. To do this, the data that organizations serve up to their mobile customers has to be stored in a way that can speak easily to the application, and must also be able to move quickly despite slower networks. To enhance the performance of mobile applications, it is important to consider the type of storage that organizations are using on the back end to connect to their mobile customers. Companies must be able to efficiently store, access and analyze information to serve up the right content to the right customers. Though organizations are pushing for faster response times and constant data availability, they do not want to compromise on aspects such as cost, scalability and flexibility. The future of media will be in the hands of the company that can ensure access and analysis when and where it’s needed with storage that will not degrade and will provide better price performance. For years, as big data and analytics have proliferated every aspect of the enterprise, processing power has increased and networking bandwidth has grown, but storage has been the single largest factor to weigh down system performance. Spinning disks, the more popular form of storage, has restricted applications due to its own limits around disk speed and I/O. All that is changing with flash storage, which supercharges an organization’s IT infrastructure, enabling it to keep pace with access-demands of its mobile applications. Analysts predict that organizations are going to move the vast majority of active data to flash storage over the next five years. A lot of this movement is being driven by consumer demand for mobile devices and the demand from consumers for fast access to data. Add this to the organization’s need to merge more traditional mobile services with big data and analytics to deliver innovative services to satisfy the modern customer’s need for personalization, and turbo-charged, flash storage becomes critical to the organization. Flash storage is disrupting three industries in particular: Mobile Payments One of the fastest-growing mobile industries is mobile payments with the likes of Square, PayPal, Google Wallet, ApplePay growing at a fast pace. With more and more transactions being done directly through mobile devices, the data storage technology that facilitates purchasing must keep up with the pace of mobile payment adoption. The entire mobile payment business model is based on the flexibility and scalability of cloud resources and distributed computing infrastructure. Payment databases are traditionally very large and require fast response times and low latency. Latency can slow down transactions and if the latency is too high, the transaction can be lost. With its powerful combination of high performance and low TCO, flash storage can help the industry meet new demands and tame IT outlays simultaneously. Mobile Healthcare Healthcare is an industry being turned upside down. The digital health revolution means that modern healthcare professionals, as well as patients themselves, interact with their own medical information on mobile applications. Healthcare data spans the spectrum from pharmaceutical research to medical images to personal health records. The requirements to electronically create, transfer and view medical data in real time on handheld devices is the future of the healthcare industry. Nurses use mobile carts with built-in laptops to chart information regarding their patients. Every time a nurse checks a patient, dispenses medication, or takes vital signs, information is logged into a laptop wirelessly connected to the hospital’s network. This data is recorded into a backend database where information regarding the patient is stored. Every time a nurse inputs information or pulls information about a patient or client, they use the database. Every time doctors access this information whether in the hospital, at their practice, or from their home, they use the database. Every time administrators access this information, they use the database. For hospitals with hundreds of patients and hundreds of employees, this puts tremendous pressure on the database applications. Generating high numbers of both read and write cycles lead to longer latencies when accessing traditional hard drives. This I/O bottleneck can be reduced significantly, if not eliminated, by replacing these hard drive arrays with solid state storage. In addition to performance and reliability, security is a priority in healthcare. Redundant array of independent disks (RAID) technology coupled with the no-single-point-of-failure design is critical in healthcare environments where data loss is unacceptable. Mobile Retail Finally, the online retail business has continued to thrive in the digital age thanks to mobile searching, targeted advertising, and traditional desktop shopping. With targeted advertising finding its way into much of what we view on the internet today, and a wide range of new formats and platforms from which to launch new media, goods, and services, customers now anticipate that retailers have shifted their business models to a more personalized shopping experience. The popularity of large online marketplaces places incredible demands for high performance and quick response times on the website infrastructure. With membership and transaction volumes continuing to rise, those demands are set to continue. In addition to having more mobile customers, these customers have higher expectations for the content that mobile shopping applications offer. They are demanding rapid responses, quicker transactions, dynamic content and faster loading of application pages. By removing the latency of moving parts, flash storage systems present access times of less than 100 microseconds, over 50 times faster than hard disk drives. As the world continues to navigate the current technological revolution with mobile computing at its core, harnessing big data for public and personal benefit will continue to present itself as one of the most important business demands of the foreseeable future. Mobile technology has given the customer unprecedented power and influence in the commercial decision-making process, but it will be the companies that are able to connect mobile applications with the right data storage and analytics solutions which will provide the best customer experience. 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)
6:58p	​​Oracle Launches Cloud-based Online Storefront Solution This article originally appeared at The WHIR Aimed at providing a simple and customizable solution for ecommerce, Oracle has launched its new cloud-based online storefront solution, Oracle Commerce Cloud. Commerce Cloud is hosted on the Oracle Public Cloud, and is the latest addition to the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) SaaS application portfolio. Commerce Cloud promises an easy-to-use storefront builder that provides design templates and modular widgets to build mobile-friendly online store pages. It also includes pre-integrated search and navigation, a recommendation engine, promotions, reporting, payments, and Search Engine Optimization. Oracle positions its solution as different than the “cookie-cutter” solutions that are limited in terms of design and functionality. For further customization, front-end code can be easily altered, and companies can build custom extensions or download third-party extensions from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. In the US and Europe, Oracle is also planning on holding bootcamps to get customers up and running quickly, as well as hackathons to help build in new features for the platform’s future growth. Commerce Cloud can also be used as part of the broader Oracle CX Cloud suite to provide easy integration to tools such as Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle Configure, Price and Quote Cloud, and Oracle Social Cloud. Ecommerce is expected to rise substantially as mobile Internet usage grows, leading mobile payments to grow an anticipated 60 percent this year. With this major shift towards online stores already in effect, many brick-and-mortar businesses are having to adopt ecommerce. Smaller retailers looking for an easy way to sell their wares online are likely to join marketplaces like eBay and Alibaba, or create an online store using a DIY store builder service which take a lot of the complications out of running a stand-alone ecommerce site. Oracle Commerce Cloud seems similar to DIY services like Bigcommerce and Shopify (and services from web hosts like 1&1 and Go Daddy) which are aimed at a segment of retailers who lack the expertise to build their own ecommerce site. Oracle Commerce Cloud, however, offers some more advanced features and SLAs aimed to appeal to larger organizations. Lifestyle brand Elaine Turner and outdoor gear retailer Rock/Creek are among the early adopters of Commerce Cloud. According to Oracle, Commerce Cloud has already been chosen by several midsize and enterprise level B2C and B2B customers as part of their ecommerce strategy. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/oracle-launches-cloud-based-online-storefront-solution (Comment on this)
9:25p	CyrusOne Kicks Off Third Massive Phoenix Data Center CyrusOne announced it has started construction of a third building on its massive campus in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb, in a sign of strong demand in the Phoenix data center market. Carrollton, Texas-based CyrusOne, entered the Phoenix market around the same time its previous owner Cincinnati Bell spun it off through a public offering more than two years ago. It entered the market with a bang, announcing plans for a campus that, at full build-out, can provide up to 1 million square feet of data center space and more than 100 MW of power. The company completed the first building on campus in February 2013 and last October announced the launch of its second facility there. The Phoenix data center market competes primarily with major West Coast data center hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest. A 2014 report by the commercial real estate services firm CBRE attributed growth in the Phoenix market primarily to low cost of power (in comparison to the other hubs), as well as recently passed data center tax breaks. eBay has a data center in Phoenix, Apple is building one in nearby Mesa, and Microsoft is eyeing a data center build there, according to local news reports earlier this year. A number of major data center service providers (CyrusOne competitors) have facilities in the market as well, including local company IO, Digital Realty, CenturyLink, and Telx. At 120,000 square feet, CyrusOne’s third Phoenix data center building will be smaller than the first one (about 150,000 square feet) but almost twice as large as the second one (about 60,000 square feet). Company leadership has not determined how much data center space or power will be available at the third building, according to a company spokesperson. Phoenix I has close to 80,000 square feet of data center space built out and total power capacity of 28 MW, while Phoenix II has about 35,000 square feet of data center space and 6 MW. Whether the latest building will be called Phoenix III has not been determined. (Comment on this)
9:41p	Microsoft Keeps Open Cloud Mind This article originally appeared at Talkin’ Cloud Now that Microsoft has firmly established itself as a top tier provider of cloud services finding ways to leverage its relationships with solution providers to gain share has not only become a major priority, the channel stalwart is committed to be more flexible than ever to win that business. According to Ervin Flores, Microsoft general manager for managed partners, Microsoft plans to work closely with solution providers to enable them to provide customers with individual pricing schemes that take into account, for example, both volume and seasonality as opposed to simply trying to force every customer to consume one of three basic sizes of virtual machines. In addition, Flores said that in some cases Microsoft will even be willing to put skin in the game by becoming a full-fledged partner in a cloud venture through which a company may be looking to enter a new market. This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/06262015/microsoft-keeps-open-cloud-mind (Comment on this)
11:44p	Myths and Realities of Data Center Certification While there can be a lot riding on the level of certification a data center achieves from the Uptime Institute, there’s also a lot confusion as to what types of data centers need to be certified to what level. At the Data Center World conference in National Harbor, Maryland, this September, Steven Shapiro, mission critical practice lead for Morrison Hershfield, a provider of data center consulting services, will dispel many of the myths associated with gaining Tier III and IV certifications for high-availability data centers. He’ll also explain under what circumstances it’s actually worth making the effort to gain those certifications. Shapiro said that given the fact that its not clear what is actually required to gain a Tier III or IV certification, the guidelines published by the Uptime Institute are naturally subject to a lot of interpretation. For the most part, he said, the only organizations that need to gain these level of certification are finanical services firms or government organizations that need to able to prove they did everything possible to guarantee availability of their data centers. In fact, Shapiro said, the first thing any data center operator needs to ask when it comes to attaining a certification is how much actual financial risk do the application workloads running in that enviroment actually represent. Once that’s determined, data center operators should proceed to make the effort to get their data center environments certified as a Tier III or IV, but only when the time and effort required to attain those certifications adds meaningful value to the business. For more information, sign up for the spring Data Center World, which will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, on September 20-23, 2015, and attend Steven Shapiro’s session titled “Myths and Realities about Designing High Availability Data Centers.” (Comment on this)

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