Friday, September 25th, 2015

Time	Event
12:00p	ARM Server Cloud in Full Swing, Online Builds Bare Metal Cloud on Power Servers One accusation nobody can level against the team behind French service provider Online’s hosting and cloud services business is being hesitant to think outside the box. Following April’s launch of a bare-metal cloud service underpinned by ARM-powered servers and cloud software, both designed in-house, Online this month announced another bare-metal cloud offering, this time for high-performance workloads, built on IBM servers run by Power, the processor architecture that is Big Blue’s challenge to Intel’s x86 chips that dominate the data center market. Online, subsidiary of the French telco Iliad, launched the ARM-based service into preview last year. It came out of preview this April as Scaleway. While Scaleway’s sweet-spot workloads are scale-out web applications, the Power-based offering is there for heavy lifting, such as processing database transactions or Big Data analytics. Customers can provision both ARM and Power platforms as they would provision VMs in public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Citing internal tests, IBM claims its Power S822L server, the model deployed at Online data centers, supports close to two times as many MariaDB transactions per minute per core as a similarly configured x86 machine and costs 40 percent less. Here’s a photo tour of one of Iliad’s Paris data centers IBM’s Big OpenPower Bet Now that IBM has gotten out of the x86 server business – after having sold its System x product line to Lenovo – Power is its main focus as far as non-mainframe servers go. It’s taken an unusual approach to growing this business, launching the OpenPower Foundation together with a handful of other tech giants: Google, Nvidia, Mellanox, and Tyan. It has also “opened” the architecture, meaning companies can license processor IP if they want to build chips of their own, while foundation members, through an interface, get direct access to system memory to integrate Power chips with FPGAs or GPUs for acceleration. Sumit Gupta, VP of OpenPower alliances at IBM, said such integrations were a way to address the recent slowdown in CPU performance advances. “Fundamentally, if you look at what’s happening in the data center, we’re just not seeing the rate of innovation that used to be there in the past,” he said. As CPU progress slows, accelerators become increasingly important, because users have grown accustomed to annual 20- or 30-percent performance improvements. Gupta joined IBM this May after seven years at Nvidia, where he led the graphics processor maker’s GPU Accelerated Data Center Computing unit. The Accelerator Race against Intel The use of GPUs and FPGAs in tandem with CPUs is on the rise, with GPUs becoming a mainstay in high-performance computing and FPGAs making their way into big global cloud providers’ data centers. Nearly 90 systems on the latest Top500, the biannually updated list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, were powered by the combination of CPUs and GPUs. Almost 90 percent of all systems on the list, however, use Intel chips. Intel also appears to be dominating the nascent FPGA market for cloud servers, and if its recent $16.7-billion acquisition of Altera, the leading FPGA supplier, is any indication, it has every intention to hold on to that position. FPGAs, or Field Programmable Gate Arrays, are semiconductors that can be reconfigured based on specific application needs. Intel uses them to create custom platforms for some of its biggest customers. The latest spec for its cloud servers Microsoft has contributed to the Open Compute project, for example, includes support for FPGAs, in combination with Intel Xeon chips. OpenPower’s big differentiator that sets it apart from Intel in this accelerator race is openness, according to Gupta. Users like Google or vendors like Tyan or Mellanox can build custom solutions based on Power with their own feature sets while keeping their source code to themselves, he said. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Dell Unveils High-End Multi-Rate Data Center Switch Dell unveiled an in-rack data center switch IT organizations can use to deliver varying levels of network throughput via multiple ports. The Dell S6100-ON provides multi-rate connectivity spanning 10G to 100G Ethernet in a chassis designed to fit in a 2U rack space. Configurable with QSFP28 and CXP ports, the switch is best suited for IT organizations looking to future-proof their network infrastructure for years to come, Amit Thakker, senior director for product line management at Dell Networking, said. It provides up to 32 ports for 100G; 64 ports for 40G; 128 ports for 10G; 128 ports for 25G or 64 ports for 50G. “This switch is really about flexibility and investment protection,” said Thakker. “We’re providing up to 3.2 terabits of throughput in a 2U rack.” While most IT organizations are still making the shift to 10G Ethernet, Thakker added that at the higher end of the data center switch market IT organizations are evaluating 25G, 40G, 50G and even 100G Ethernet options. Scheduled to be available in the first quarter of 2016, the Dell S6100-ON now represents the top of the Dell switch line up. Since acquiring Force 10 Networks in 2011, Dell has been aggressively bundling servers, storage and networking together in a drive to gain share at the expense of rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and Cisco, both of which now bundle switches with servers inside both rack and blade servers. In addition to offering its own network operating system, Dell has also been leading an open networking push via alliances with Cumulus Networks and Big Switch Networks. In general, Dell is hoping that enterprise IT organizations will emulate Web-scale companies that have opted to deploy their own white box switches. In the case of Dell, the commercial switch still exists, but the network operating system running can be based on open source software that serves to lower the total cost of networking in the data center. The challenge that all three vendors face is that upgrades to networks, servers and storage don’t always occur in lockstep with one another. As such, even in an converged infrastructure environment network administers still exercise a fair amount of influence over switches that typically have life spans that range anywhere from two to five years. As a result, not only are vendor such as Cisco and HP a force to contend with, there is still a lot of networking gear from vendors such as Juniper Networks and Extreme Networks installed in the data center. Of course, as networking, servers and storage become simpler to manage via a unified console, issues concerning who is in charge of what inside the data center will one day be broadly forced. In the meantime, there are still many IT organizations where the only thing servers, storage and networking have in common is that they happen to share the same rack. (Comment on this)
3:30p	Friday Funny: What Do We Do with All These Servers? What to do when you show up and you have a pile of servers at the front desk? 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 Ben, whose caption won the “Blob” edition of the contest. Ben’s caption was: “Oh man, I knew we shouldn’t have signed that contract with Nickelodeon!” Lots of submissions came in for the “Data Center Ceiling” 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)
6:36p	Weekly DCIM Software News Update: September 25 RiT Technologies announces that a global bank has deployed its CenterMind IT Infrastructure Management software and Schneider hints at a SaaS version of its StruxureWare DCIM software. RiT’s DCIM software selected by global bank. RiT Technologies announced that a global investment bank has deployed CenterMind, RiT’s IT Infrastructure Management Software, to manage its global IT infrastructure, with over 20 million network elements and ports worldwide. Schneider building SaaS version of DCIM software. At the Data Center World event this week in National Harbor, Maryland, Schneider Electric was interviewed and said that it plans to offer a Software-as-a-Service version of its data center infrastructure management software suite called StruxureWare for Data Centers. (Comment on this)
7:29p	Video: Alibaba Site Showcase of Cloud Data Center Design Innovation Earlier this month Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced the launch of its latest cloud data center on the shore of Qiandao Lake in the Zhejiang Province. From cooling to modules, racks, servers, and management, the facility is a showcase for modern data center design. One of the most distinctive data center design features is the facility’s use of water from the lake for cooling, which provides free cooling capacity for 90 percent of the time, according to Alibaba. A 2.5-kilometer canal carries warm water to the nearby Qingxi New Town after it has gone through the facility’s cooling system. The plan is to use that return water for comfort heating in nearby buildings in the future. Inside the cloud data center, Alibaba Data Center Modules are used to deploy new capacity quickly. ADM is a prefabricated aluminum frame that reduces server deployment time by eliminating a lot of onsite engineering work that takes place in traditional data centers. Modularity is an important aspect of data center design that emerged in recent years. Employed in power and cooling systems, as well as at the building level, it enables faster deployment speeds and greater cost controls. One “bare” utility feed and one UPS-backed DC feed bring power to the ADM. Bringing DC power directly to the racks brings the power distribution system’s efficiency to 90 percent, according to Alibaba. Another innovation is AliRack, which is based on Facebook’s disaggregated rack design, where server components share common power supplies and cooling. The disaggregated rack is part of Open Compute Project, Facebook’s open source hardware and data center design initiative. At the server level, PCIe Flash drives developed by Alibaba engineers to overcome SATA interface bottlenecks achieve five to 10 times more IOPS and reduce latency by 70 percent. This is Alibaba’s eighth cloud data center. It has cloud sites across China, as well as in Southeast Asia, Middle East, and US. The company established its first cloud data center in the US this year. Here’s a video tour of Alibaba’s latest cloud data center in China: (Comment on this)
7:54p	Regulator Decision on Equinix-Telecity Merger due Next Month European antitrust regulators plan to decide whether to approve Equinix’s takeover of TelecityGroup, this year’s biggest acquisition deal in the data center services market so far, by early next week. The European Commission’s deadline for the decision is 29 September, according to a schedule posted on its website. Equinix announced agreement for the $3.7-billion acquisition in May. If approved, the deal will expand the Redwood City, California-based data center and interconnection services provider’s European data center footprint by 40 facilities in 11 countries and make it the biggest data center provider in Europe. The deal broke up a previously announced merger agreement between Telecity and Interxion, another heavyweight in the European market. Equinix CFO Keith Taylor told Data Center Knowledge in an earlier interview that had the Silicon Valley giant allowed the Interxion merger go through, it would in all likelihood be forever relegated to a number-two position in the European market. Telecity’s market capitalization is more than $2.6 billion. If it does not approve the merger, the commission may kick off an investigation into the deal, according to Reuters, which was first to report the news of the deadline. (Comment on this)

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