Monday, November 30th, 2015

Time	Event
4:00p	The Paleo Diet: Unstructured Data for the Enterprise CEO Shomit Ghose works with ONSET Ventures. The original Big Data dates from mankind’s Paleolithic age: speech, pictures and writing. The data gained from sight (text, images) and sound (language, music) remain the essential media of communication for humans today. Unfortunately, the data that’s conveyed in speech, text and pictures falls into the category of “unstructured” data as it has no defined structure unlike, for example, numeric data that can be easily mapped into a database and interpreted. For enterprises, the Paleo Diet – i.e., accessing and unlocking the insights contained in unstructured data – presents the key strategic opportunity in the field of Big Data. As we swim in ever greater oceans of Big Data, IDC has found that 90 percent of this digital information is unstructured content. For the enterprise, this unstructured data takes the form of social media posts, call center notes, email, images, video, Web content, sensor and mobile data, warranties, contracts, sounds, shapes, ads, click-streams, Office documents, X-rays, MRIs, doctors’ notes, real estate listings and annual reports. Needless to say, the rows and columns of a traditional structured database are completely unsuited to organizing and making sense of unstructured data. If properly harnessed and combined with structured data, unstructured data promises to deliver to enterprises deep, 360-degree views of customers. Unstructured data is a powerful resource for applications like audience clustering, predictive marketing and sentiment analysis. Essentially, while the stream of structured (transactional) data readily explains what is happening at the moment, the stream of unstructured data can yield insights into what’s going to happen, or why something happened. To date, structured data has been the basis of enterprise analytics because it’s relatively easy to interpret: structured data is primarily numeric, repeatable in type, and predictable in timing and treatment. Unstructured data is far more challenging. Not only is the data volume vastly greater, but unstructured data has (by definition!) no inherent format or repeatability, and brings with it an extremely unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio. Further, securing unstructured data is an added challenge (think regulatory risk) given that its content cannot be known a priori. As well, different industries have different levels of reliance on unstructured data, and different departments within the same company may rely on entirely different sources of unstructured data: Marketing on social media; engineering on design documents; customer support on call notes; finance on emails; sales on contracts; and HR on employee reviews. For an enterprise, making sense of unstructured data can seem a daunting undertaking. So, how does a C-level executive manage an unstructured data initiative within their company? Despite the apparent complexities of bringing unstructured data into the enterprise, the recipe for embarking on a corporate Paleo Diet is rather straightforward: Clearly understand the business. Without a well-defined business use case, it’s impossible to know what unstructured data is required, how it should be interpreted, or whether in the end the unstructured data initiative has been successful in improving the bottom line. First and foremost, begin by understanding the types of insights the business needs. Identify the sources of unstructured data. Sources may be internal or external, but they must exist. If multiple sources are available, a good starting point might be to work with the source that’s growing most rapidly. Clean the data. Unstructured data is voluminous, “noisy”, and brings lots of redundancy. For unstructured data to be usable it must first be cleaned, de-duplicated and consolidated. Confidential data that requires special handling should be secured or completely masked. Structure the data. Without a business-driven categorization overlaid upon it, unstructured data is useless. Structure must be imposed according to classifications that are critical to the business. As more data is ingested (with homogeneity never a given), the categorization must be automatic through techniques such as text analytics, auto-tagging, and auto-taxonomy generation. Integrate the structured data with the unstructured data. Big Data will only reach its full potential when structured data is seamlessly combined with unstructured data. Build a feedback loop. Is the classification of the unstructured data optimal? How should it best be integrated with the structured data? Is the unstructured data helping drive meaningful business decisions? Support unstructured data as true production data. If unstructured data is used to drive an enterprise’s business, then it needs to be appropriately treated as a production asset. It must be secured; it must be testable; it must be resilient to failure; it must support archiving and recovery; it must be accessible. We continue to flood the Internet with many trillions of gigabytes of data annually, overwhelmingly through the unstructured data of text, images and video. The opportunity for enterprises to gain insights from this, the largest and oldest class of business data, is immense. With a thoughtful strategy, and thanks to enabling technologies such as Hadoop, enterprises are now able to drive predictive analytics from the patterns and connections hidden within the 90 percent of Big Data that is unstructured. A comprehensive strategy that marries unstructured and structured data promises to fully and finally deliver the benefits of Big Data to the enterprise. 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)
4:30p	Colo Provider Digital Fortress Adds Managed Cloud Services This article originally appeared at The WHIR Digital Fortress, a large privately owned colocation provider in the Seattle area, is expanding beyond its colo roots by offering a Hybrid Infrastructure Management service that covers Azure, Amazon Web Services, and customer-owned infrastructure. The new services are aimed at helping mid-market companies move toward a more agile infrastructure. Digital Fortress said that it uses best practices, standardization, and automation to monitor new and existing workloads across IT infrastructure – wherever it is. The service is comprised of monitoring, resolution, and optimization. Digital Fortress staff provides round-the-clock support to identify abnormalities or activity that could impact system health and performance. The company said its staff quickly attend to incidents, and documents them so they can be resolved quicker. And Digital Fortress will also optimize infrastructure and services based on advanced reporting tools, and help determine which cloud services are optimal based on performance and cost. Mid-Market Clients Dabbling in Public Cloud “One of the things we’ve realized is almost every single one of our customers in the mid-market is looking at implementing something that leverages the public cloud or they’ve already moved workloads out of our colocation facility,” Digital Fortress CEO Matt Gerber told The WHIR. “So, what we did about six months ago was we made a decision that it would be in our customers’ best interest and in our best interest to figure out a way for them to do that.” While mid-market CIOs look to public cloud services to reduce their hosting costs and increase their agility, it also requires new skillsets and staff able to run these new infrastructures. As a colocation provider, Digital Fortress had to bulk up its skills and staff to handle infrastructure outside of its data centers. “We had to hire a lot of really smart people who were AWS certified,” Gerber said. “We’re also changing the way we’ve structured our NOCs and we will have all of our Level 1 NOC technicians will complete an AWS assessment, and Level 2 NOC technicians will be system-operations certified to support both Azure and AWS environments.” The company is already an Azure-certified partner, and is working to get employees certified in Azure. “It’s a lot of training,” he said. He said that Digital Fortress’s Hybrid Infrastructure Management services also require a deeper relationship with customers than with traditional colocation. “The traditional colocation business provides a ‘warm hands’ service,” he said. “But warm hands doesn’t involve monitoring the customer’s infrastructure 24/7 so there will be a much more intimate relationship with our customers because they’re essentially giving us the keys to their IT kingdom where we’re becoming a trusted partner and it will be our eyes on their infrastructure 24/7.” The company has been building and testing its capabilities and procedures for the past three months with a pilot program involving select customers. Colo Providers Need to Evolve In many ways, the agility provided by public cloud services has been forcing colocation providers to evolve to remain relevant. “You’re going to have to go one of two ways to remain relevant as a colocation provider – either you compete on scale and have to get very big very fast and service very large wholesale and enterprise colocation customers; or if you’re like us, you have to stay relevant by catering to the customers’ needs and moving up the stack,” Gerber said. “We’ve seen in the last year a lot of regional, traditional colocation providers move up the stack but we feel a thing that they’re missing is the competency and the skillset to provide the public-cloud tie. When you look at what their customers are doing, the customers really want the ability to leverage the big public clouds in addition to private cloud providers too.” Digital Fortress’ new managed services seems to allow it to do just that. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/digital-fortress-goes-from-colo-to-hybrid-infrastructure-with-new-service (Comment on this)
8:19p	LinkedIn Switches to Custom Data Center Design Once the latest LinkedIn data center comes online in Hillsboro, Oregon, late next year, the company will have completed its multi-year transition from renting retail colocation capacity to an all-wholesale model. Wholesale data centers give customers more infrastructure design flexibility, which is something LinkedIn’s infrastructure team has needed to increase efficiency and power density. Its next-generation data center design includes 400-volt power distribution, cabinet-level heat rejection, and twice the energy density it had elsewhere, Michael Yamaguchi, the company’s senior manager of data center services, wrote in a post on the LinkedIn Engineering blog. The Oregon data center will be the first site to feature this new design. Once it comes online, the company plans to decommission its final two multi-megawatt retail colocation deployments. The two other core LinkedIn data center sites in the US are in wholesale facilities in Virginia and Texas. “It was logical to plan our third location on the West Coast,” Yamaguchi wrote. As we reported earlier, LinkedIn leases both Virginia and Texas sites from Digital Realty Trust. Its retail colocation provider has been Equinix. At least two new LinkedIn data centers are expected to come online next year, one in Hillsboro and the other in Singapore. While its user base is much smaller than Facebook’s – LinkedIn says it currently has 400,000 registered members, while Facebook’s most recent estimate is about 1 billion daily users – the career and professional networking oriented social network also has to constantly add data center capacity to make sure the site stays up for its members around the world. LinkedIn data center infrastructure currently occupies about 30 MW worth of capacity total, 3 MW of which is deployed in facilities outside the US. Its storage and compute needs grew more than 30 percent over the last 12 months, Yamaguchi wrote. The new capacity in Hillsboro, about 20 miles west of Portland, will be in a space leased from Infomart Data Centers, the wholesale data center provider formed last year as a result of a merger between Dallas Infomart and Fortune Data Centers. Yamaguchi didn’t specify how much capacity LinkedIn had contracted with Infomart for, but a local news report said it was 8 MW. A LinkedIn spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. The LinkedIn data center in Singapore, which Yamaguchi expects to launch in early 2016, will support about 6,500 servers. Technicians are currently busy deploying applications on the Singapore servers. (Comment on this)
11:40p	Russian Nuclear Plant Operator Building 80 MW Data Center The state-owned company that operates all of Russia’s nuclear plants has kicked off construction of what may ultimately become the largest data center in the country. The project is taking place near one of the company’s plants, on a site it has previously pitched as a location for service providers with infrastructure overseas to house their servers so they can comply with the new law that requires companies to store Russian citizens’ personal data within Russia’s borders. The company, Rosenergoatom, plans to launch the first phase of the data center in March 2017, the government-owned news agency RIA Novosti reported, citing an official announcement. At full build-out, the facility’s capacity will reach about 80 MW, which according to the announcement will make it the largest data center in Russia. The company explained the decision to build the data center near the nuclear plant in Tver – a city of 400,000 located about 100 miles northwest of Moscow – by the need to ensure reliable and efficient power supply for the facility. According to an earlier report by the Russian news daily Izvestia, Rosenergoatom will use up to 10 percent of the future data center’s capacity, hoping to lease the rest. The Russian law that requires service providers to store personal data of the country’s citizens in Russia went into effect in September, but companies aren’t required to comply until 12 months later. A September news report said only one of every 10 customers of Russian data center providers, including Apple, had managed to move data to ensure compliance, citing a market study by two IT services companies. Apple, the report said, had taken 50 cabinets in a data center operated by Russian provider IXcellerate. Google has taken some space in data centers operated by the state-controlled telecommunications company Rostelecom in March, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, which cited statements by a Rostelecom official. (Comment on this)

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