Thursday, October 29th, 2015

Time	Event
12:00p	Equinix CEO: Digital Realty-Telx Deal Will Not Change Competitive Landscape Equinix executives are not worried about rival and landlord Digital Realty Trust buying Telx, a direct competitor. Asked for their thoughts on the transaction by an analyst on Wednesday’s third-quarter earnings call, Equinix CEO Stephen Smith and the company’s COO Charles Meyers said their company was many years and millions of dollars of investment ahead of Digital in building a retail colocation business with interconnection as the centerpiece. “Our general belief across the company is that the combination will not change the competitive landscape meaningfully,” Smith said. “Can they replicate what’s been going on here for 17 years?” It would be “a pretty high bar to attack and a huge investment in some fairly unfamiliar areas (for Digital).” Like Equinix, Telx has made its retail colocation data centers attractive by developing rich interconnection ecosystems around meet-me rooms it operates in several strategic locations around the US. Equinix has deployed the model on much larger, global scale, and has made a lot more headway in attracting major cloud service providers to this interconnection ecosystem and building an IT platform to make interconnection easier. Earlier this month, Digital revealed new product offerings that combine its strength in providing wholesale data center space in large chunks with access to interconnection in Telx facilities. Equinix does not sell wholesale data center space, so, while there is some overlap between the two companies models, it is far from being a one-to-one match. Earlier this year, Digital hired Chris Sharp, who ran Equinix’s cloud interconnection strategy for two years, as CTO. Equinix reported about $687 million in revenue for the third quarter – 3 percent up year over year – and $41 million in net income, or $0.72 in earnings per share. Smith: Telecity Acquisition “on Track” Equinix has made two major acquisitions of its own this year: the blockbuster $3.6 billion TelecityGroup deal which, if closed successfully, will make it the largest data center provider in Europe, and the smaller $280 million acquisition of Japanese data center provider Bit-isle. Equinix is still waiting for a green light for the Telecity deal from European regulators. “We are seeking approval from the European Commission,” Smith said on Wednesday’s call. The company has made a formal offer with proposed commitments to the commission, which are now in the process of being “market-tested,” he said. Smith declined to provide any details on the contents of that offer, saying only that he expected to hear back from the regulators by mid-November, and that the deal was on track to being closed in the first half of 2016. Interconnection Reels in Enterprises Today, a lot of focus at Equinix is on providing private network cross-connects between enterprise customers’ servers in its data centers and infrastructure by major cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The company announced it has added Oracle to the list of cloud providers accessible from its data centers Wednesday. The enterprise space has become Equinix’s largest source of new customers, Smith said. Access to cloud providers and interconnection in general drive a lot of that enterprise momentum. Equinix now provides services to more than 100 companies on the Fortune 500 list, he said. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Data Center Decision Makers Need to Meet the CFO Agenda Zahl Limbuwala is CEO of Romonet. According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is set to grow to $3.8 trillion in 2015 as organizations look to spur growth in the wake of economic malaise. This tremendous investment gives a clear, simple image of technology’s value: As IT forms the backbone of more and more crucial business functions, its proportion of the overall business budget needs to increase. This often results in the CFO or CEO feeling like IT costs are spiraling out of control. They cannot risk foregoing investment and falling behind the competition, while at the same time they may have little idea whether this investment will add value to the business. For CIOs who need to justify their expanding budgets, understanding these pressures and being able to demonstrate the value of IT to the business is a key skill. A Costly Business To add to these increasing pressures, many CIOs are already finding that they are being made more accountable for more of the costs of IT. For example, operational costs, such as energy bills, are increasingly being charged to the IT department rather than coming out of an all-encompassing utility budget for the business as a whole. Given that IT will often be one of the most energy-intensive parts of a business, this can mean the department suddenly becoming responsible for a huge extra cost. For CFOs this makes perfect sense, as they can more clearly see exactly where resources and funds are being used. However, the CIO will see a sudden growth in IT costs with no corresponding growth in IT capacity. To prove the IT department’s accountability, a new approach is needed where IT costs are equivocally treated as business costs, and CIOs can accurately and consistently demonstrate return on investment for their decisions, rather than having to build budgets on trust and guesswork. Find Some Common Understanding In order to provide this information, CIOs need to know the exact unit cost of delivery of IT down to the individual service or application if they are to provide the CFO with a strong case for investment. For instance, take the growing use of data centers to provide IT infrastructure, whether in-house or via a colocation service. In such cases, the actual hardware running in the data center represents a small part of the total cost. Energy costs, cooling, networking and management costs all need to be taken into account, whether they are incurred in-house or form part of the charges from an outsourcing partner. Unless these are considered, the CIO cannot demonstrate whether IT investment will provide better value and the CFO cannot accurately understand the Total Cost of Ownership of IT as part of the business. With Gartner predicting an increase in worldwide investment in data centers, there is massive potential for error if any wrong decisions are made. This level of understanding doesn’t just cover existing IT services and infrastructure: The approach needs to extend across future projects, such as building additional data centers. After all, expanding data center capacity is pointless if the CIO has no way of guaranteeing that it will benefit the business for the best possible cost. To give an example, some organizations have investigated building data centers in locations in sub-Arctic locations to reduce the need for cooling. Yet in order to invest with confidence, the business needs to be sure that the money saved on cooling isn’t offset by the cost of building and maintaining a data center in such a hostile environment. To make sure they’re guiding the business toward the best decision and making the best argument for investment, the CIO needs to understand the cost of each option to the overall business down to the unit level, and accurately predict the results of these decisions to the CFO. Planning Ahead Armed with this information, the CIO can then advise the CFO on the validity of longer-term strategic decisions, such as moving services to the cloud. The anticipated cost savings and improved efficiency promised by the cloud in recent years has put many CFOs under pressure to outsource more of the organization’s IT functions. The problem is they have had no true indication which option is the best to go for, or even whether it would make more sense to keep services in-house. If the CIO can predict the potential savings, if any, of moving to the cloud then the CFO can make the decision on whether to invest, with confidence. Without this insight, the CFO can risk funding a move that ultimately proves costly to the business. One company that attempted to do things on its own was General Motors, which invested heavily in outsourcing IT services to later discover it was far more efficient for the business to have their IT services in-house. Understanding the exact savings outsourcing could provide, as well as what would happen to any existing in-house infrastructure now running at reduced capacity, could well have saved General Motors considerable time and expense. Confidence In Investment A large part of the problem for CFOs making investment decisions is that many IT services aren’t measured in terms of how they benefit the business. Instead of the efficiency and costs of individual data centers, the CIO should aim to provide the costs and benefits of individual IT services along with how investment in those services will benefit the business. Knowing this, the CFO can then make investment decisions with much greater confidence. Without this insight, unwitting CFOs and CIOs may find their businesses swept away by nimbler, faster competition that uses their IT services more efficiently. 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)
5:12p	Oracle Expands its Cloud Services with Elastic Compute and Storage Cloud This article originally appeared at The WHIR Oracle has launched a new set of Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud offerings including elastic compute and storage, and it is expanding its Cloud Marketplace to include more partner-certified machine images of pre-configured applications and software that can be run on its IaaS cloud. Oracle’s president of product development, Thomas Kurian, made the announcement this week at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. “Oracle’s infrastructure services already power the Oracle Cloud Platform and Oracle SaaS businesses and some of the world’s most recognizable organizations,” he said during a Tuesday keynote. “With this major update, Oracle is now making this same set of foundational Oracle Cloud infrastructure services—Compute, Storage and Network—available to its customers and partners.” On Wednesday, Oracle announced its IaaS and PaaS services will be accessible through the Equinix Cloud Exchange in several Equinix data centers around the world. The new Oracle IaaS services include Oracle Compute Cloud, Oracle Storage Cloud, Storage Cloud Archive Service, Oracle Network Cloud (which includes Site-to-Site VPN and its high-bandwidth data center/Oracle Cloud connection “FastConnect”), and Oracle Container Cloud (which supports Docker container deployments). IaaS is a long-awaited service for Oracle’s cloud services portfolio, which until now had included only Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service. The Oracle Cloud will provide a broad portfolio of integrated services across applications, platform, and infrastructure. The Oracle Cloud Marketplace provides various third-party applications for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS layers, making it an attractive platform for systems integrators. Some pundits have noted that Oracle’s IaaS elastic compute cloud happened nine years after Amazon launched its elastic compute cloud, EC2. But it’s also worth noting that Amazon began offering public IaaS cloud services years ahead of Google and Microsoft, which are now its biggest competitors. An advantage for Oracle, however, is that it already has relationships with many large enterprises that it can leverage to gain IaaS customers. On the topic of entering the IaaS market, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in a keynote address that end-customers typically have to deal with different aspects of the cloud ecosystem – so that service providers who only offer IaaS are missing out on the big picture. “We went into the SaaS business, and came to understand that required us to be in the platform business. And we went into the platform business and came to understand we had to be in the infrastructure-as-a-service business. That’s how we got to where we are today,” Ellison said. He also noted that it’s unrealistic to assume that providing solutions for on-premise infrasturce is important because it’s unrealistic for all organizations to move all their applications to the cloud. “On-premises computing is not going to vanish. Even if on-premises computing eventually becomes a smaller piece of the pie than cloud computing, there’s going to be a long period of transition.” This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/oracle-expands-its-cloud-services-with-elastic-compute-and-storage-cloud (Comment on this)
5:17p	Rackspace Adds Cloud-Based Docker Container Service with Carina This post originally appeared at The Var Guy Rackspace has jumped into the containers-as-a-service field in a big way with the announcement of a hosted Docker-based container service for the cloud called Carina. Currently available as a beta offering to customers based in the US, Carina provides a managed implementation of Docker containers. Rackspace describes it as “instant-on” container solution that saves customers from having to build, manage, and update a container environment manually. Rackspace is presenting Carina as a pure-play version of Docker. The service uses Docker’s native API for tooling, Docker Swarm for orchestration and the Docker engine itself for running containers. That approach “provides developers the freedom to easily move applications from development to test to production environments, while helping to reduce errors and saving time,” the company said. In announcing Carina, Rackspace also emphasized the “bare-metal performance” that it can deliver. That’s not because Carina works differently from other container environments, of course. The whole point of containers—or at least one of their big advantages—is that, unlike traditional virtual machines, they don’t require a hypervisor, which entails a performance penalty. Carina is not unique in that respect. Still, the fact that Rackspace is playing up the performance advantages of its containers-as-a-service offering suggests that it may see Carina as a way to attract customers who have been hesitant to adopt other cloud-based solutions because of performance concerns. For those users, a hosted container service may be worth investigating, and not just because “containers” have become a favorite buzzword. This first ran at http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/102915/rackspace-adds-cloud-based-docker-container-service-carin (Comment on this)
6:28p	Singapore’s Keppel Enters German Data Center Market Singaporean Keppel DC REIT has entered the German market by acquiring a data center that is currently under construction near Frankfurt from mainCubes One Immobilien for €84 million ($92 million), the company announced this week. In a sale-leaseback transaction, mainCubes One, a colocation company, will lease the data center from Keppel. Keppel DC REIT is a subsidiary of the Singaporean marine, property, and infrastructure giant Keppel Corp. It is the first data center real estate investment trust listed in Asia, trading on the Singapore Exchange. It was listed on the exchange in December 2014. Scheduled to come online in 2018, the four-story data center in Offenbach will provide about 130,000 square feet of space. The facility will be Keppel’s 10th data center. The real estate investment trust has data centers in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, UK, Ireland, and Netherlands. Frankfurt is one of Europe’s largest data center markets. Keppel’s future facility will be in proximity to DE-CIX (Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange – the largest internet exchange in the world by peak data rate. Keppel is the fourth-largest data center provider in the Singapore market, currently led by the local telco Singtel, Silicon Valley-based Equinix, and London-based Global Switch, according to a recent report by Structure Research. (Comment on this)
9:28p	Siemens and Baselayer Partner on Modular Data Centers German industrial conglomerate Siemens has partnered with Baselayer, the Chandler, Arizona-based IO spin-off that sells prefabricated modular data centers and data center management software to integrate a number of Siemens data center products into Baselayer modules. Power distribution, control and metering, and fire safety products by Siemens will be integrated into Baselayer’s modular data centers. Siemens’s intelligent busway, for example, will save space inside the module and enable localized power distribution, allowing optimization of airflow down to the component level, improving the module’s energy efficiency, Siemens said in a statement. As common elsewhere in the data center industry, Siemens and Baselayer are both partners and competitors. They compete in the data center infrastructure management software space, Siemens a fairly recent entrant with its Clarity LC DCIM tool and Baselayer adopting IO.OS created by IO as one of its products, rebranding it as Baselayer OS. Since its separation from IO, Baselayer has been promoting an unusual deployment model for its shipping-container-like modules: plugging them directly into bulk electrical transmission lines to avoid the expense of backup generators. Bulk transmission lines are reportedly more reliable than so-called “last-mile” transmission. The first such deployment, which the company has promoted as a showcase for the model, is for the Phoenix-based utility Salt River Project. The modular data center came online in Gilbert, Arizona, earlier this year. IO announced plans for the Baselayer spin-off late last year. The company’s executives explained the move by the need for IO to focus on its primary business, which is providing data center colocation services, while Baselayer continues developing as a data center technology company. (Comment on this)

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