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Tuesday, June 30th, 2015
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Net Data Centers Selling New Jersey, Virginia Data Centers to Exit Bankruptcy Data center services provider Net Data Centers is selling its New Jersey and Northern Virginia data centers as part of a global plan to exit bankruptcy. The company retained investment banking firm Three Twenty-One Capital Partners to help with the sale of its East Coast operations and is now actively seeking potential buyers. The East Coast business includes one data center in Piscataway, New Jersey, and three Northern Virginia data centers: two in Ashburn and one in Reston. The facilities generated close to $15 million in revenue in 2014. The company also has data centers in Los Angeles, which are not being marketed for sale, but the ownership is “open” to selling all of its assets at once. Founded in 2002, Net Data Centers provides retail colocation, managed hosting, and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions out of leased wholesale data center space. The company changed its name from Net2EZ last March after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February. According to a Three Twenty-One promotional email, the company’s problems were caused by above-market rental rates at its data centers. The company leased its wholesale data center space at a higher price than the current going rates. The bankruptcy allows a potential buyer the means to buy the operations with renegotiated market-based rents. The company disclosed some of its financials in the marketing materials. Revenue for the entire operation exceeded $40 million in 2014, with revenue growth of 15 percent from 2012 through 2014. East Coast operations revenue grew 26 percent between 2012 and 2014. The revenue numbers show decent growth, but it’s possible that Net grew overly ambitious and leased too much wholesale space too quickly. Wholesale providers often have colocation and data center services providers as customers. It often makes sense to take wholesale space rather than build your own data center, because it means a premium facility without the premium capital expenditures of building. However, the lessee needs to provide additional value and still make a healthy enough margin above what it has to pay itself, making it particularly sensitive to pricing fluctuations. It’s a careful balance. “Retail colocation providers have been squeezed over the past few years as wholesale providers started to lease smaller amounts of capacity and compete on price with some retail firms,” said Kelly Morgan, research director, North American Data Centers, 451 Research. “To survive, retail providers such as Net2EZ (Net Data Centers) have had to be able to differentiate, typically with added services (everything from remote hands to IaaS). However, providing services can put pressure on margins, which are thinner in many cases for firms that do not own their underlying facilities.” Morgan said that Net Data Centers was potentially hit by a combination of lackluster cost control and not being able to differentiate in the highly competitive New York and Northern Virginia markets. The bankruptcy was felt beyond Net Data Centers, as it’s a sizable wholesale data center customer. Two of its landlords are DuPont Fabros and Digital Realty. “For wholesale providers, of course, the nightmare is to have a tenant that cannot pay the bills,” said Morgan. “This is one reason why investors have worried about DuPont Fabros’ concentration of tenants: if one does not pay, such as Net Data Centers, that has a much larger effect on DuPont than it would on a larger, more diverse provider such as Digital Realty.” However, wholesale providers were prepared to navigate through the issue. Both DuPont Fabros and Digital Realty discussed the Net Data Centers bankruptcy situation on earnings calls and set aside reserves to account for non-payment. Net Data Centers’ Los Angeles market footprint is significant. In 2007 it signed a lease with Digital Realty and continued to expand before making its way east. “While we are not actively marketing the business as an entirety (East and West Coast operations) ownership remains open to the possibility of an entirety sale and will evaluate all offers,” Three Twenty-One Capital Partners said in a statement. The provider’s East Coast data center operations might make for an attractive asset, given the quality of the data centers and the ability to renegotiate the rents. Both Ashburn and New Jersey are hot markets. In Ashburn, Yahoo recently subleased 13 MW still under contract in a DuPont Fabros facility to another DuPont Fabros customer. The wholesaler also recently signed Facebook for 7.5 MW. Facebook leases over 40 MW from DuPont Fabros in Ashburn. |
| 3:00p | Justifying the Cost of DCIM This is Part 5 of our five-part series on the countless number of decisions an organization needs to make as it embarks on the DCIM purchase, implementation, and operation journey. The series is produced for the Data Center Knowledge DCIM InfoCenter. In Part 1 we gave an overview of the promises, the challenges, and the politics of DCIM. Read Part 1 here. In Part 2 we described the key considerations an organization should keep in mind before starting the process of selecting a DCIM solution. Read Part 2 here. In Part 3 we weighed DCIM benefits versus its costs, direct, indirect, and hidden. Read Part 3 here. In Part 4 we pondered the challenges of implementing a DCIM solution. Read Part 4 here. The preceding four parts of this series examined vendor promises, purchasing guidelines, potential benefits, as well as the implementation challenges of DCIM. The long-term promise is gathering data across all areas and creating a centralized database used to deliver unified visibility for all management and technical domains. If this broad-scale vision is finally delivered, DCIM should be the solution that finally allows IT and facilities managers to work together to make more informed and presumably better decisions about overall energy usage, operational optimization, and workflow optimization. And now for the most elusive task, which is identifying which of the myriad of DCIM functions can produce the most quantifiable financial payback and provide clearly definable cost justifications. Simple Payback – Facility Energy SavingsLet’s start with the simplest cost-justification example: the payback based on energy savings. This depends directly on several primary factors: the present facility energy efficiency, the potential projected efficiency improvement, and last, but certainly not least, the cost of energy. For example, in a large older facility with relatively poor energy efficiency (i.e. a PUE of 2.5), the largest energy waste will typically be the cooling system. While a DCIM system by itself will not deliver as much of an improvement as replacing an old inefficient chiller, it can identify, analyze, and help tune the operating parameters of facility equipment as well as optimize the airflow issues in the whitespace. As a hypothetical case, if we assume an IT-equipment draw of 1,000 kW, at a PUE of 2.5, the facility overhead requires an additional 1,500 kW, for a total site draw of 2,500 kW. This results in an annual energy consumption of 21,900,000 kWh (based on 8,760 hours per year). Assuming an energy cost of $0.10 per kWh, the annualized energy cost would be $2.19 million. Assuming a DCIM system helped improve cooling system efficiency though optimization, thus reducing facility overhead by 20% to 1,200 kW, the PUE would then be 2.2 (a conservative projection). Therefore, the annualized energy cost would be reduced to $1.927 million – a direct saving of $263,000 per year. This offers a well-defined basis for an ROI payback calculation. However, if your cost of energy is lower or higher, it will obviously change the ROI. In the US, the cost of energy can range from $0.025 to $0.25 per kWh. So, as can be seen from the above case, the cost of energy will directly impact the annualized cost saving ($131,500 at $0.05 per kWh to $526,000 at $0.20), either diminishing or enhancing the ROI. Conversely, if the site is a newer, more efficient facility and already has a relatively good PUE (i.e. an initial PUE of 1.5), it is less likely that DCIM will be able to provide anywhere as much in energy saving. So, while any energy efficiency improvements are always welcome, in this case it would make it very difficult to make energy saving the primary basis for cost justification. |
| 3:30p | Modernizing and Standardizing Data Centers with Converged Infrastructure and Modular Systems Patrick Donovan is Senior Research Analyst for Schneider Electric’s Data Center Science Center. Today, data volumes have reached astronomical levels as a result of trends like the Internet of Things and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and managing this growing amount of information with traditional systems is becoming increasingly difficult. Over time, businesses have scaled their existing infrastructure to handle this data growth by adding disparate systems onto older technology, making their IT environments more complex than ever before and putting strain on data center managers. But as today’s digitally driven world demands faster and more agile access to information, these complicated systems are becoming a detriment to businesses rather than a competitive advantage. Enterprises looking to modernize their IT and the physical infrastructure supporting it should consider a more nimble and faster-to-deploy architecture using Converged Infrastructure (CI) and prefabricated, modular power and cooling systems. Converged Infrastructure from the Perspective of Power and Cooling InfrastructureCI rolls compute, storage and networking into a self-provisioning pool of shared resources that are often pre-engineered, pre-tested, and pre-configured before dropping into your data center. Through this “plug-and-play” deployment, critical IT infrastructure can be up and running in hours or days, not weeks or months, as with traditional builds. However, like traditional IT, converged infrastructure still needs adequate power, cooling, space, and connectivity resources in a secure, reliable and efficient manner. CI is typically characterized by a high degree of virtualization and automated software management. Virtualization allows for the pooling of compute, I/O, and storage resources, and the pre-engineered and tested logic of CI gives rise to automation schemes that make the rapid configuration and allocation of these resources possible for wide varieties of workloads. This automated flexibility lends itself well to self-service and “pay-as-you-go” type models typical of private cloud infrastructures. Furthermore, CI provides IT managers with the ability to provision, test and deploy IT dramatically faster with a major reduction of time and resources needed to manage and maintain the infrastructure, making it an attractive choice for businesses. These valuable benefits stem directly from the fact that all the components and sub-systems are pre-designed and supported together as a single system by the vendors or system integrators. Modernization Through CI and Prefab Physical InfrastructureAs more organizations turn to converged infrastructure to simplify IT management and accelerate deployment, many may, for very similar reasons, look to the deployment of prefabricated, modular data center physical infrastructure (power, cooling, racks) systems to support them. Indeed, the beneficial capabilities of CI – getting applications up and running as fast as possible – rely greatly on a data center’s power, cooling and rack space: This wonderful ability to deploy IT quickly can be greatly mitigated if power and cooling resources are difficult and time-consuming to design, deploy, test and commission. For instance, if the facility is running out of power, cooling, and rack space, or a greenfield facility is being built, new physical infrastructure systems must also be fast and easy-to-deploy in order to realize the potential speed benefits of CI. Particularly when compared with traditional stick-built facilities, prefabricated data center modules are faster to deploy thanks to their standardization and prefab nature. And it does so at a cost that is very similar to or even less than traditional “stick” builds. A popular application for CI is a branch office or any small, remote site with less than 150 kW or so of IT capacity. This is due, in part, to CI’s automated, remote management capabilities making it ideal for sites where local IT staff is limited or non-existent. In addition, there is now a newer form of prefabricated, modular data center physical infrastructure that targets this same application, called a “micro data center.” These small facilities are self-contained, secure computing environments ship in one enclosure and combine the converged IT systems with all of the necessary infrastructure to power, cool, manage and secure them. Micro data centers also include all the storage, processing, and networking necessary to run applications. And, since they are assembled and tested in a factory environment, it takes just a matter of days or weeks to get the data center up and running. But beyond micro data centers, there are many other types of prefabricated data center modules for larger applications that can built, customized and assembled to accommodate the needs of the location and the business. From self-contained, containerized, prefabricated modular rooms and purpose-built prefabricated modules, data center managers have many different options to choose from today. Each can be easily scaled up or down, giving businesses greater flexibility to grow or consolidate more quickly and at a similar or lower cost than a traditional brick-and-mortar data center. Leveraging CI and Prefab Power and Cooling to Meet the Future Needs of the Data CenterAs made evident by a recent survey, the importance of infrastructure upgrades/modernization is at all-time high – 93 percent of respondents agreed somewhat or completely on the importance of infrastructure upgrades/modernization. To modernize and upgrade their data center operations to meet the high demand of today’s data-laden world, businesses can look to leverage converged IT infrastructure and the prefabricated physical infrastructure modules to support it. As converged IT infrastructure and prefabricated power and cooling break down site engineering and deployment complexities, while also driving standardization and simplicity in the data center, data center managers will be better equipped to deploy and maintain their facilities – allowing them to turn their data centers into efficient, agile business drivers. 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. |
| 4:25p | Amazon to Build Cloud Data Centers in India Amazon Web Services announced plans to build cloud data centers in India in 2016. Amazon already has a sizable customer base inside the country being served out of other AWS regions, but the company will build new data centers to better serve local customers with better performance, as well as to appease any data-sovereignty needs some organizations may have. India is a key growth market with a healthy appetite for cloud services, according to a recent report. The country has the third-largest population of internet users in the world and home to a massive amount of small to medium enterprises. The market’s emergence has been dependent not on demand, but having the proper internet infrastructure in place. While India has made several investments in its infrastructure over recent years, it still suffers from limited speed and high connection costs, according to Asia Cloud Computing Association. These are temporary problems given the speed at which India has become a connected country. Recent activity indicates increasing momentum. To capture that appetite, several service providers are building cloud data centers in India. Amazon’s cloud competitors IBM and Microsoft have both made commitments or built data centers there to better server the market. IBM recently established its first data center in Mumbai, while Microsoft is building three new facilities in support of Azure. Google doesn’t have any data centers in India as of now. Amazon counts “tens of thousands” of customers in India, according to Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS. “Several of these customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India, so they can enjoy even lower latency to their end users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have,” said Jassy in a press release. Jassy also said that Amazon believes India will be one of AWS’s largest regions over the long term. AWS isn’t building a cloud business from scratch in India. It has a rich ecosystem of partners. Consulting partners include Accenture, Blazeclan, Frontier, Wipro, and many others. AWS Technology Partners in India are Adobe, Druva, Freshdesk, Indusface, Microsoft, Newgen, RAMCO, SAP, Seclore. Indian telecom Bharti Airtel recently began offering AWS Direct Connect to customers, as well as Microsoft’s SaaS office suite, Office 365. Current AWS customers in India include Tata Motors, which uses AWS for customer portals and its Telematics systems in cars. Media company NDTV has used AWS since 2009 to run their video platform and all their web properties. During an election, NDTV had to scale to support 13 billion hits on its page compared to 500 million on a regular day. Other cloud providers in the region include NTT, which acquired India’s NetMagic in 2012 to further boost its presence. Indian cloud hosting provider ESDS recently raised $4 million for data centers. |
| 5:00p | Defining Best Practices around Data Center Growth Strategies It’s good to be in the data center business these days. Data center demand is booming, organizations are realizing new cloud use-cases, and the modern data center is even more critical for today’s businesses. We’re seeing a lot of dynamic growth in resource utilization, deployments, and user access. Through it all, the data center has been challenged with keeping up with this increased demand while still running efficiently. As a result, the industry has been faced with big questions around agility and growth: Do I go to the cloud? Do I work with a colocation provider? Or, maybe I decide to work with a hybrid solution? The point is that there are new options around data center growth control, which can directly help your overall business. However, it’s not always clear what these options ultimately mean for the data center ecosystem. This whitepaper dives into detail around some critical growth considerations that today’s data center managers must face. It offers key points of clarity around rack density, power density, and energy cost savings to help you create an even more efficient data center environment while growing your overall infrastructure! Download this whitepaper today to learn about best practices for flexible space allocation, capacity design, and TCO optimization. Plus, this paper covers important considerations around DCIM, hosted services, and the impact of cloud computing on the modern business and data center growth considerations. |
| 5:51p | Emerson to Spin Off Data Center Infrastructure Business Emerson announced Tuesday a plan to spin off Network Power, its data center infrastructure business, as part of a restructuring effort. Emerson Network Power is one of the biggest vendors in the data center market. Its logo has a nearly ubiquitous presence on power and cooling equipment in data centers around the world. The company is also one of the leading data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software vendors. Its DCIM product is called Trellis. As a separate entity, Network Power, which also sells telecommunications infrastructure equipment, will have more flexibility and ability to bring products to market faster to better respond to changing market dynamics and customer needs, the company explained. “Emerson and Network Power will each have sharper strategic focus, enabling both companies to better allocate resources, incentivize employees, and allocate capital to capture the significant long-term opportunities in their respective markets,” Emerson Chairman and CEO David Farr said in a statement. St. Louis, Missouri-based Emerson’s stock slumped about 0.30 percent in the afternoon following the announcement, trading at $55.28 per share at one point, but started climbing back up around 1 pm EDT. The data center infrastructure business is one of five Emerson units. The other four are Process Management, Industrial Automation, Climate Technologies, and Commercial and Residential Solutions. In its 2014 earnings report, Emerson reduced the 2015 outlook for Network Power, attributing the “more cautions expectations” to deteriorating economic conditions in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Network Power revenue was down 9 percent in the second quarter of fiscal 2015 (its most recently completed quarter). The segment’s margin shrunk to 3.2 percent. Data center infrastructure business decreased moderately, the company said, attributing the decrease to “continued weakness in customer infrastructure investment.” Telco infrastructure sales were much worse, decreasing “sharply” as a result of spending cuts by telcos around the world. Emerson said demand for the rest of the year will be mixed, expecting improvements in the data center market but not in the telco market. |
| 6:21p | Cisco Acquires Enterprise Security Firm OpenDNS As part of an effort to bolster its security services Cisco announced today a plan to acquire OpenDNS, a provider of a cloud service that enables IT organizations to rely more on external DNS servers to better secure their data center environments. The general working theory behind OpenDNS and other enterprise security intelligence services is to help IT organizations to be forearmed by being better forewarned. Big Data analytics applications are then applied against that data in the hopes of identifying new types of malware before they arrive at the proverbial data center doorstep. Armed with that information, IT organizations can then remediate the vulnerabilities that malware is trying to exploit. In addition, these intelligence services are also getting better at identifying specific IT organizations that malware may be targeting. With 25 global point of presence, OpenDNS will extend the visibility Cisco can provide across its security intelligence offerings, David Goeckler, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco’s security business unit, said. “For us, this acquisition is primarily about security,” he said. “This is part of our global effort to provide security everywhere.” Goeckler declined to elaborate on exactly how Cisco plans to extend the reach of the OpenDNS service across its existing portfolio of offerings. But beyond enhancing Cisco’s existing enterprise security intelligence services, OpenDNS provides a complementary set of security services on top of a DNS platform to both the Cisco InterCloud strategy for driving the evolution of hybrid clouds and the more nascent effort to create an Internet of Things (IoT) platform. Cisco estimates that nearly 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020. Goeckler credited OpenDNS, which is currently valued at $635 million, with building a range of security offerings all delivered as a service. Most recently, OpenDNS exposed those services via a set of APIs designed to make it easier to incorporate that information into, for example, IT automation platforms. As enterprise security technology gets more sophisticated, the line between security and IT management as a whole will not only continue to blur over time, the entire process will become much more automated. That’s critical, because, as the malware being strewn across the world at data centers gets more advanced, it’s increasingly becoming too difficult for the average IT organization to both detect and gauge how lethal that malware may be on their own. |
| 7:01p | Enterprises Say Cloud Providers Don’t Understand Their Needs: Report
This article originally appeared at The WHIR A lack of transparency is hurting enterprise cloud customers, and ultimately cloud providers as well, according to a new survey from Forrester Research. Sixty percent of companies using the cloud say a lack of operational, compliance information, and support is preventing them from increasing their cloud use. Forrester asked 275 IT leaders on behalf of enterprise cloud hosting provider ilandabout transparency and metadata provided by cloud hosts, and the impact on enterprise customers. All 275 respondents said that their organization had experienced negative impacts from a lack of information, including outages, wasted resources, unexpected costs and difficulty reporting to management. On the support side, 50 percent believe that their cloud provider does not care about their company’s success or understand their needs. More than half are dissatisfied with their onboarding and support processes. “A lack of clear cloud usage and operational data results in performance problems, challenges with reporting to management on costs of performance, payment for resources that customers ultimately don’t use, and unexpected bills,” the report says. There are a number of problems for enterprises related to the lack of usage information. Thirty-six percent have received unexpected line items or bills, and 41 percent have had challenges reporting costs and performance to management. Even more troubling, 39 percent have paid for unused resources, and 43 percent have had performance problems or outages. Both of these problems represent a major failure, as uptime and cost efficiency are often touted as two major benefits of cloud hosting. The value of cloud monitoring services, and optimism about their future can be seen in a number of recent deals and releases. SolarWinds paid $40 million to acquire cloud mentoring company Librato in January, and hybrid cloud monitoring startup ScienceLogic raised $43 million in a funding round in February. Cloudyn extended support for its cloud monitoring and optimization software to Microsoft Azure in April. Issues like security and legacy IT spend are considered significant barriers to cloud adoption, but as the market evolves to remove those barriers, the next ones to focus on a service provider appear to be support, onboarding, and information sharing, according to the report. The report urges enterprises to insist on providers that communicate clearly about compliance, processes and expertise, that provide all needed data, and that pick up the phone. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/h |
| 7:26p | Uber Buys Microsoft Data Center, Map Imaging Operation Uber, the popular ride-sharing software company, has bought a Microsoft data center and other assets that support mapping image collection operations for Bing. San Francisco-based Uber isn’t saying much about its plans for the assets, and Microsoft explained the move simply by saying it was one of “many actions” it has been taking to focus on its core strategy. “Over the past year, we have taken many actions to focus the company’s efforts around our core business strategy,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “In keeping with these efforts, we will no longer collect mapping imagery ourselves, and instead will continue to partner with premium content and imagery providers for underlying data while concentrating our resources on the core user experience. “With this decision, we will transfer many of our imagery acquisition operations to Uber.” Assets sold to Uber include a Microsoft data center outside of Boulder, Colorado, cameras, software, and a license to Microsoft’s intellectual property, the spokesperson said. According to news reports, Uber is also gaining a sizable image-collection team, consisting of about 100 employees. Spokespeople from both companies declined to provide any more details about the transaction. |
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