Monday, August 31st, 2015

Time	Event
12:00p	Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: August 2015 Lightning in Belgium Disrupts Google Cloud Services A series of successive lightning strikes in Belgium managed to knock some cloud storage systems offline briefly, causing errors for some users of Google’s cloud infrastructure services. Chillers and cooling towers of the Google data center campus in St. Ghislain, Belgium (Photo: Google) How Edge Data Center Providers are Changing the Internet’s Geography As people watch more and more of their video online versus cable TV or satellite services, and as businesses consume more and more cloud services versus buying hardware boxes and software licenses, the physical nature of internet infrastructure is changing. Explosion in Downtown Los Angeles Disrupts Data Center Operations The explosion interrupted connectivity on network infrastructure operated by Level 3, which serves a lot of data center users in the area. Resulting power outage also caused the cooling system at a CoreSite facility to go down, leading for a brief period to above-SLA temperatures on the data center floor. The moon is seen behind downtown high-rise buildings during the shortest total lunar eclipse of the century before dawn on April 3, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images) Equinix Cloud Chief Chris Sharp Leaves to Join Digital Realty as CTO For the past two years, Sharp ran the cloud strategy of Digital’s biggest rival Equinix. Jim Smith, who has been the data center provider’s CTO since its founding more than a decade ago, is leaving the company. Top US Data Center Markets Absorbed 100 MW in First Half of 2015 Hunger for capacity in primary US data center markets continues, with financial services, healthcare, social media, and other types of tech companies driving demand. Rackspace to Provide Managed AWS Services Before Year’s End Rackspace is building a managed services product for Amazon Web Services, its rival in the public cloud market where Rackspace has struggled to grow. Salesforce Latest Convert to the Web-Scale Data Center Way The company is going through a “massive transformation” of the way it runs infrastructure, going from lots of specialized custom server specs and manual configuration work to the approach web-scale data center operators like Google and Facebook use, standardizing on bare-bones servers and implementing sophisticated data center automation tools, many of them built in-house. Pollution in China Makes Free Cooling Difficult for Baidu China’s notoriously high air pollution levels are a well-documented public-health issue. But pollution also has other less talked about effects. One of them is on the efficiency of data centers in the country. A Chinese man wears a mask as he waits to cross the road near the CCTV building during heavy smog on November 29, 2014 in Beijing. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images) Exclusive: RagingWire Takes Its Massive-Scale, Luxury-Amenities Data Center Model to Texas The company, whose customer list includes Twitter, is preparing to buy a 42-acre tract of land in Garland, a fairly large city immediately to the northeast of Dallas. Garland officials have approved an economic incentive package for the company. Facebook Takes Over Server Management Software Control from Vendors Originally developed for Facebook’s data center switches, OpenBMC now also supports the company’s modular System-on-Chip-based server system called Yosemite. A technician at work in a data hall at Facebook’s Altoona, Iowa, data center. (Photo: Facebook/2014 Jacob Sharp Photography) 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	Welcome to the Hybrid Age Marc Olesen is the Senior VP and General Manager for Splunk. Every company has a cloud strategy. If transitioning to the cloud is a journey, your strategy is your proverbial roadmap. It’s your GPS device giving you turn-by-turn directions as you head toward your destination. As companies embark on their cloud journeys, they increasingly find themselves between destinations with some processes still running on-premises and others running flawlessly in the cloud. This is by design and a natural progression along a journey that may take months or years— a progression that has sparked the hybrid age. The Hybrid Age It’s easy to see why many organizations are starting to move to the cloud, given that the benefits include saving on infrastructure costs, cutting license fees and increasing scalability and agility. However, the transition to cloud isn’t a zero-sum game, nor does it happen with the flip of a switch. It’s a gradual implementation, with individual applications being moved to the cloud while others remain on-premises or in a private cloud. These hybrid environments can include private and public clouds and on-premises IT infrastructures, all working together to deliver technology services to employees and customers. Hybrid environments deliver the “best of both worlds” to organizations that are looking to have the flexibility and cost savings offered by the cloud, but also want to keep some workloads on premises. As a result, businesses are becoming more and more comfortable with this model. For most of these companies, the hybrid age is part of the broader cloud journey that’s becoming more common. For example, a 2014 report by Infonetics Research states that hybrid cloud is the next evolution in cloud architecture, with adoption among enterprises expected to more than double by 2015. Like any journey, there’s always something you never want to leave home without — and in this case, it’s visibility. Visibility Into the Hybrid Cloud Visibility across on-premises and cloud deployments is key to a safe and successful journey. It’s what helps companies understand cloud workloads and ensures service assurance, security and compliance. It helps you understand when things go wrong and why things are happening, which can be very difficult in a hybrid environment. Workloads across on-premises and the cloud need to be monitored, measured and secured. If cloud isn’t performing as expected, you need to find out if and where you took a wrong turn on your journey. Visibility ensures that workloads in the cloud are as reliable and secure as they were on-premises, and will go a long way toward building confidence for a full transition. It gives you confidence with your current cloud applications to comfortably move more workloads to the cloud—and ultimately reach the final destination of your journey. It’s the Journey and the Destination On every major road trip, you learn a little a bit about yourself, and a lot about the world you haven’t explored yet. The move from on-premises, to hybrid, to full cloud deployments will require a change in mindset and corporate culture. The hybrid age is just one stop on a much longer cloud journey that will change how businesses around the world use technology. As you head down the path, make sure to reference your map and keep your eyes on the road. Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series. The second article, “Learning to Trust in the Cloud,” will be published on Thursday, Sept. 3. 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)
3:30p	Aligned Data Centers Applies Cloud Pricing Model to Colocation Prior to completing construction of a data center in Plano, Texas, Aligned Data Centers, a unit of Aligned Energy, announced it is implementing an elastic pricing model based on the actual amount of energy and space IT customers consume. Long-term contracts based on assumptions about static power requirements and fixed densities don’t provide customers with enough cost transparency into the hosting services they use, Jason Ferrara, chief marketing officer for Aligned, said. “We’re bringing the cloud model to the data center,” said Ferrara. “It’s now buy only what you need and pay for only what you use.” Ferrara noted that IT organizations often don’t know how many users of an application there might actually be one day. As a result, they need access to hosting services that they can use on an as-needed basis. In contrast, many IT organizations wind up making commitments to a predetermined amount of megawatts that they almost never wind up fully utilizing. In the case of Aligned, because of its efficient supply chain management processes, it can significantly increase the amount of power available to a customer in as little as eight weeks, which he said compares to several months for other providers. Aligned is tapping into its existing data center infrastructure management (DCIM) and data center design expertise to move into the data center services sector. The 30 megawatt data center it is building in Plano will enable customers to deploy servers in rows that generate as little as one to 25 kilowatts per rack. Aligned has also started construction of a larger 550,000 square foot, 65 megawatt data center in Phoenix and says it will soon be expanding its footprint to California, Illinois, Virginia, and New Jersey. (Comment on this)
6:52p	FireHost Rebrands to Armor, Sharpening Cybersecurity Focus This article originally appeared at The WHIR FireHost has rebranded to Armor, reflecting a shifting focus to security and compliance solutions, rather than cloud hosting, according to an announcement on Monday. As part of the announcement, Armor is extending its FireHost Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to a variety of environments. FireHost VPC is now known as Armor Complete and is a fully integrated secure managed cloud that meets compliance requirements like PCI, HIPAA and HITRUST. “For too long the industry stood idle watching the manifestation of a wide-scale cybersecurity problem that forced organizations to procure, integrate and manage point solutions in-house in an attempt to defend themselves from cyberattacks,” Chris Drake, founder and CEO, Armor said. “This approach is expensive and grossly ineffective. The announcement of Armor is in direct response to today’s threat landscape and the logical evolution for our company to stand between our customers and the threats that seek to disrupt their businesses.” Armor Anywhere is “central to Armor’s expansion,” the company says, and delivers cybersecurity to both public and private clouds and on-premise infrastructure. Armor Anywhere is available on a number of third-party cloud environments including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, SoftLayer, VMware, HP Helion and more. It currently includes two products – CORE and CORE+. Earlier this month, FireHost announced that its managed security as a service offering, then called FireHost Armor, was available in the Microsoft Azure marketplace to help secure multi-cloud environments. According to its website, CORE offers features such as VM hardening, patch management, log and event management, anti-malware management, file integrity monitoring and vulnerability scans. CORE+ includes all these features, plus additional capabilities such as managed OS support, performance-tuning, application consulting and more. “Enterprises are facing a growing challenge of sifting through myriad choices on where to host their workloads and how to effectively secure them,” Michael Suby, VP of Research, Stratecast, Frost & Sullivan said in a statement. “This is forcing them to elevate their security expertise. However, for many this is unattainable due to the shortage in information security talent, constantly evolving cyberthreats and an unsustainable number of security technologies that they have in place now but cannot manage reliably. Armor solves this dilemma by providing robust, holistic security solutions that span private and public clouds and private data centers. For enterprises, they can choose their workload-hosting locations without uncertainty on how they will secure them.” In April, FireHost raised $25 million in Series E funding, led by The Stephens Group, its longtime investment partner. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/firehost-rebrands-to-armor-sharpening-cybersecurity-focus (Comment on this)
8:15p	VMware and Rackspace Release OpenStack Cloud Architecture This article originally appeared at The WHIR VMware and Rackspace announced a new interoperable OpenStack cloud architecture this week at VMworld 2015 to help customers spin up OpenStack clouds without the complexity, particularly those associated with hybrid or multi-cloud environments. According to a blog post by VMware on Monday, the interoperable OpenStack cloud architecture enables customers to start with either VMware Integrated OpenStack or Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack, and build all of their infrastructure automation using standard OpenStack APIs. “Our two companies will work to ensure this automation works with the respective OpenStack clouds. This is in line with the direction the OpenStack Foundation is taking to enable multi-cloud environments via identity federation,” VMware said. VMware touts a “multi-vendor approach” as the best approach for “customers that want to run a heterogeneous infrastructure underneath the OpenStack API layer.” “We are collaborating with Rackspace on exactly this type of multi-vendor architecture for OpenStack – one that removes lock-in at the infrastructure layer,” VMware said. Rackspace said that enterprises using this solution will gain flexibility by being able to deploy applications across KVM or EsXi hypervisors and have a choice in how and where they provision a workload using common credentials. “This interoperable OpenStack cloud architecture provides enterprises with a Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack environment running alongside their vSphere cluster with VMware Integrated OpenStack,” Rackspace said. Also on Monday, VMware launched version 2 of its VMware Integrated OpenStack, which adds support for seamless OpenStack installation upgrading, among other capabilities, according to a report by InfoWorld. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/vmware-and-rackspace-release-openstack-cloud-architecture (Comment on this)
9:23p	Some Terminated HP Employees Offered Jobs at Ciber Employees hate to hear the dreaded “restructure” word coming from a CEO because it’s almost always synonymous with layoffs. By now, those at Hewlett-Packard must really despise it. HP’s current effort to breathe life into its Enterprise Systems (ES) business has already resulted in 3,900 pink slips, with more to come, reported our sister site, The VAR Guy. In HP’s FQ3 2015, sales in the ES unit fell 11 percent to $4.9 billion, triggering this latest round of layoffs. The company recently completed a step in restructuring that involved the division of its internal systems which will allow its PCs and printers business to operate separately from its enterprise business. The recent string of layoffs is part of the company’s long-running plan that began in 2012 with a possible 25,000 jobs on the chopping block that turned into 55,000, and now may exceed that number as well. HP’s CFO Cathie Lesjak says the company will cut up to an additional 5 percent more people from its workforce than it had originally planned. Although HP “terminated” those affected by the separation, it’s not completely bad news for some employees. Taking a page from its 2012 playbook when GM hired the 3,000 HP ES personnel that were running its information tech systems on an outsourcing contract, HP and IT consultant Ciber brokered a deal. A number of the newly laid off HP Enterprise Services employees will be offered jobs at Ciber and have 48 hours to accept or decline. HP confirmed the agreement with this statement provided to Business Insider: “HP reached an agreement with a strategic labor partner, Ciber to allow more flexibility in managing labor demands. There are a small number of employees who will move from HP to Ciber, and become contractors to HP’s Applications Delivery Services organization. HP will continue to own and manage the end-client relationship and overall service responsibility.” Ciber is a Denver, CO-based IT solutions provider leveraging HP products and services along with offerings from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. To find out about some nuances regarding the job offers and how the deal will also save HP money, read the original post at: http://thevarguy.com/business-technology-solution-sales/083115/hp-confirms-deal-ciber-laid-enterprise-services-staff. (Comment on this)

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