Friday, August 7th, 2015

Time	Event
12:00p	Top 10 Data Center Stories, July 2015 Here’s a recap of the 10 most popular stories that ran on Data Center Knowledge in July: Uptime Institute Kills Tier Certification for Commercial Data Center Designs The Uptime Tier system, which rates data center efficiency on the scale of I (least reliable) to IV (most reliable) has long been criticized for numerous reasons, but the biggest complaint has been the proliferation of misuse of its terminology. At Facebook Data Centers, New Protocol Helps Add Servers Faster One of the Facebook data center team’s latest projects had to do with shrinking the time it takes between the point a server is physically installed in a data center and the point it comes online and starts crunching numbers. A technician at work in a data hall at Facebook’s Altoona, Iowa, data center. (Photo: Facebook/2014 Jacob Sharp Photography) Cloud Needs Drive Consolidation in Colocation Data Center Market The market is increasingly driven by service-provider clients rather than enterprises. As a result, data center providers need both scale and breadth of geographic footprint to meet service-provider needs, prompting consolidation. Equinix in Aggressive Pursuit of SaaS Provider Partnerships Access to cloud service providers has been “changing the dialogue” with customers about colocation services. It has become an essential attribute of a multi-tenant data center, on par with the fundamentals of space, power, and cost. Inside Equinix’s SV5 data center in San Jose, California (Photo: Equinix) CenturyLink Expands Data Centers in Six Markets Latest round of expansion was to address growing demand in Boston, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and London. Survey: Enterprises Plan to Spend More on Data Centers Despite the popular belief that cloud services are well on their way to replacing enterprise data centers, most mid-size and large businesses are planning to increase spending on their mission-critical facilities in the near future. What Chicago’s New ‘Cloud Tax’ May Mean for Service Providers While it’s creation seems tailored specifically to subscription entertainment services like Netflix, it may also apply to cloud-service providers, from infrastructure to cloud apps. Brocade CEO: Specialized Data Center Network Gear on Its Way Out Software-defined networking and network function virtualization, in combination with constant advances in capabilities of the x86 server architecture, are changing everything about data center networking technology and economics. Amazon’s MySQL Alternative Aurora Now Generally Available The company positions Aurora as a formidable alternative to traditional MySQL, claiming Aurora couples enterprise-grade performance with open source database economics, Report: Utah Cops Get $1M a Year to Park at NSA Data Center State highway patrol troopers provide the facility that became a center of attention following Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the agency’s mass surveillance practices with a “perimeter presence” under contract with the feds. The NSA data center with the Salt Lake Valley in the background in Bluffdale, Utah, in 2013. The data center has reportedly been plagued by power surges that destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and delayed the opening of the center for a year. (Photo by George Frey/Getty Images) Stay current on data center news by subscribing to our daily email updates and RSS feed, or by following us onTwitter,Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. (Comment on this)
3:00p	IBM Rolls Out Enterprise Mac Services for Corporate IT IBM is helping invite Macs to the enterprise party. Its new cloud-based IT services help quickly and securely integrate Apple’s Mac computers at scale with enterprise systems and applications. IBM has provided these services on a custom basis but is now commercializing the service through IBM MobileFire Managed Mobility Services. More companies are adopting or allowing the use of Macs by employees, and Macs have outgrown the PC industry every year for the last decade, according to IBM. The service also supports a mix of PC and Macs and also helps the enterprise extend to other iOS devices like iPads and iPhones. While Macs have seen a ton of commercial usage, its enterprise game is nowhere near as strong. However, the cordoned-off, vanilla enterprise is on its way out with more devices and platforms coming into the mix. Sometimes this occurs outside of policy, and it can be an integration nightmare for the IT organization. Mobility services has been a major focal point for IBM in order to help evolve enterprise security approaches beyond the traditional enterprise walls and for the hyperconnected but heterogeneous world. The service could boost enterprise Mac usage by simple virtue of making it easy to use Macs in a business setting. The service allows clients to order Macs and have them delivered directly to employees without additional setup, imaging or configuration. Employees have quick and easy secure access to connect to email and download business applications. IBM gained experience through its internal Mac@IBM program, which saw the company distributing Macs to employees around the globe while keeping it a secure enterprise environment. An Apple partnership presented an opportunity for a commercialized offering, according to the company. The service features the Casper Suite from JAMF and IBM’s enterprise integration and support services. “Today’s announcement is a powerful testament to the growing demand for Apple technology in the enterprise and to the strong relationship between IBM and JAMF to help organizations inventory, deploy and secure their Apple devices,” said Dean Hager, CEO, JAMF Software, in a press release. IBM can now help support customers with diverse systems across Windows, Linux, AIX, zOS, iOS, Android, and now also OS X. (Comment on this)
3:30p	Friday Funny: Liquid Cooling in Data Center Have you heard about liquid cooling? Here’s how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon, and we challenge our readers to submit the funniest, most clever caption they think will be a fit. Then we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Congratulations to Dan, whose caption for the “White Board” edition of Kip and Gary won the last contest with: “Oh crap! Who put the sharpie here?!?” Several submissions came in for last week’s “Wind Power” edition – now all we need is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below! Take Our Poll For previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! (Comment on this)
4:00p	Data Center Connectivity Update: Week of August 6 Here’s the latest on data center connectivity, including news on internet exchanges, submarine cables, and data center network services: DE-CIX New York Membership Growing Content delivery network provider EdgeCast and data center providers CenturyLink and Windstream are the latest members to join DE-CIX New York, the US offshoot of the Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange. Launched in November 2013, DE-CIX New York now has more than 80 customers, including Google, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Akamai, Digital Ocean, and CoreSite. The distributed exchange stretches across 10 data centers in Manhattan and New Jersey. Cable to Expand Transatlantic Connectivity Options A partner of Aqua Comms, a Dublin, Ireland-based operator of intercontinental submarine cable networks, has loaded cable for Aqua Comm’s latest transatlantic system onto a ship as it prepares to start deploying it on the ocean floor. The America Europe Connect fiber-optic cable system will increase connectivity options between North America and the UK as well as Europe in general, the company said in a statement. It will span more than 3,300 miles and connect to Aqua Comm’s existing CeltixConnect cable in the Irish Sea. The cable system was designed and manufactured by Aqua Comms’ partner TE SubCom, which will also be deploying it using Reliance, one of its eight cable-laying ships. MASS IX to Extend to EdgeConneX Boston Data Center Boston’s Massachusetts Internet Exchange is planning to build a remote node into a Boston data center being built by edge data center specialist EdgeConneX. The node is expected to come online in the fourth quarter. The node will make it easier for web content providers and last-mile internet connectivity providers to interconnect in Boston and deliver media content to users at higher performance. It will also give customers in Boston access to a wide variety of connectivity services available on the internet, including direct links to public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services. Lumos to Serve DuPont Fabros Ashburn Clients Network service provider Lumos Networks is going to start offering its services to customers in the massive DuPont Fabros Technology data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia – one of the world’s biggest and most interconnected data center markets. Lumos is planning an expansion of its network to two other Virginia metros: Richmond and Norfolk/Hampton Roads. DFT is a wholesale data center provider. It has six data centers on its Ashburn campus. (Comment on this)
6:25p	DDN Powers Big Data, Big Research for Purdue University DataDirect Networks announced that Purdue University has deployed 6.4 Petabytes of its SFA storage to help accelerate access to multidisciplinary research being carried out. The Purdue campus hosts three supercomputers on the Top500 list, a large academic distributed computing grid, and one of the largest collections of science and medical online hubs. To accommodate storage needs of up to 1,000 researchers working on several hundred concurrent research projects, Purdue implemented a robust data repository called the Data Depot, powered by DDN storage. DDN said Data Depot was implemented with a pair of DDN SFA12KX storage systems with SFX and 6.4 PB of raw capacity. DDN’s SFX software extends storage cache with solid-state memory, which Purdue research infrastructure architect Mike Shuey said delivered “a 900 percent improvement in read capability at a low cost, while enabling us to access millions of small files on dedicated solid-state modules, while continuing to stream very large data files simultaneously.” DDN said that by pre-loading data into solid-state storage, Purdue has been able to realize the performance benefits of flash storage for handling big data sets at a price point that’s closer to lower-cost high-density hard disk drives. “The challenge of managing varied research needs is accommodating both very large parallel I/O jobs and millions of small, random read requests without imposing performance penalties on anyone,” Shuey noted. “With DDN’s scalable storage platform and SFX technology, we can sustain the highest levels of performance for all researchers by supporting all types of workloads at the same time.” (Comment on this)
8:23p	Weekly DCIM News Roundup: August 7 FNT Software advances its service management software ServicePlanet to version 3, Device 42 releases 7.2. of its DCIM software, and the DMTF announced Redfish 1.0, a new server management standard designed to replace IPMI. FNT Software releases ServicePlanet 3. FNT Software announced the release of ServicePlanet 3 service management software. The new release is designed to improve service management processes, and integrates with FNT Command, its infrastructure management solution. Device 42 releases 7.2.2. Device 42 announced release 7.2.2 of its software, with enhanced drag and drop between racks and the ability to mark network broadcast IP addresses as usable. DMTF releases new server management standard. The Distributed Management Task Force released Redfish 1.0, a standard for server management based on the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file format and a simple REST API. Redfish is designed to replace IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), which was introduced first in 1998. (Comment on this)
10:55p	DCIM Software Drives Granular Insight for Data Center Management Thanks to data center infrastructure management software, IT organizations have more insight into what’s happening inside their data centers than ever. At the Data Center World conference in National Harbor, Maryland this September, Methode Data Solutions Group president Tim Hazzard will go into detail about not only what constitutes the appropriate DCIM tool for different types of organizations, but also what data center operators should expect to get out of those DCIM software investments. “DCIM gives IT organizations access to a whole other layer of granularity into the data center,” Hazzard said. “With DCIM they can see what is happening inside a cabinet right down to the port level.” Hazzard said that IT organizations need to decide how much effort they need to make to achieve the level of granularity they seek. Many of them may opt to do a lot of custom integration work to integrate any number of sensors with DCIM software. Others may find that the analytics provided by DCIM software that often comes packaged with IT infrastructure to be more than sufficient for their needs. Ultimately, Hazzard said, having access to that level of detailed information will drive everything from where IT infrastructure needs to be placed inside the data center to the deployment of IT automation technologies that require access to analytics to optimize the overall environment. Regardless of the DCIM approach, the one thing that is for certain is that when it comes to DCIM software as an alternative to spreadsheets for keeping track in what are increasingly complex data center environments, most organizations will wonder how they ever did without it. For more information, sign up for Data Center World National Harbor, which will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, on September 20-23, 2015, and attend Tim’s session titled “Taking Data Centers to the Next Level with Integrated DCIM.”   (Comment on this)

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