Monday, December 7th, 2015

Time	Event
1:00p	Compass Changes Data Center Design to Get More Clients Having a single standard data center design whose delivery can be honed to perfection by replicating it over and over has its advantages for a developer, but it doesn’t necessarily work for every customer, and if the developer wants to branch out, change is inevitable. Compass Datacenters, the Dallas-based wholesale data center provider co-founded by Digital Realty veteran Chris Crosby in 2012, started with the idea of delivering a standard 1.2 MW all-included single-tenant data center anywhere the customer wants. Now, three years later and several completed projects under its belt, the company is changing the design, so it can provide more capacity under one roof. The point is to be able to serve customers Compass hasn’t been able to serve before, Crosby explained. One example would be large cloud service providers that usually need a lot of capacity in a short period of time. Compass has already had some success in the cloud market with its first-generation design. It has built data centers for Windstream Communications – which recently sold its data center business to TierPoint – and for CenturyLink. Little Impact Expected from Client Changes Coincidentally, CenturyLink is also thinking about selling the data centers it owns, but it hasn’t voiced any plans to get out of the data center and cloud services business at this point. Crosby said whatever CenturyLink decides to do, it’s unlikely to have a major impact on Compass. “It’s early to tell, but I don’t think that the fundamentals change,” he said. Both Windstream and CenturyLink are tenants. TierPoint bought Windstream’s assets as it continues to expand through acquisitions, so chances are it will keep the Compass footprint, and CenturyLink execs said they plan to continue providing data center services, even if they sell some of the company’s data center assets. Now Competing in Top Markets Compass’s new data center design builds on the first one but makes it more flexible in terms of both space and power, allowing the company to go after different kinds of customers in more competitive markets. This year it bought land in Dallas and Atlanta, for example. With the ability to provide more capacity in a single build, the company can now compete on price with the top wholesale providers in the biggest markets, such as Dallas or Northern Virginia, Crosby said. With its previous design, Compass prices were higher than big customers could get from a Digital Realty or a DuPont Fabros Technology in Ashburn, Virginia, for example. If a customer takes the higher-capacity option, they can now get it at a lower rate than they can get from one of the big competitors. “Now we can compete pricing-wise with the major markets,” Crosby said. In addition to price, Compass is offering dedicated facilities, where customers don’t have to share infrastructure or amenities like loading docks and storage areas. The typical large wholesale campuses, like the ones in Northern Virginia, usually have multiple tenants per building, some of whom might actually prefer the single-tenant option. More Density Options The basic unit of capacity is still 1.2 MW, but where the old design included a 10,000-square-foot data hall and all the electrical and mechanical infrastructure to deliver that 1.2 MW of critical power, customers can now have 1.2 MW, 2.4 MW, 3.6 MW, and so on, supported by a single electrical system and mechanical plant. The size of the data hall scales in 10,000-square-foot to 16,000-square-foot increments, independent of power capacity. In other words, you can have that 1.2 MW or 2.4 MW delivered to 10,000 square feet of raised floor, in a high-density deployment, or to 20,000 square feet or 30,000 square feet, depending on your needs. To be able to scale capacity of the supporting infrastructure, the new design moves the cooling units from the roof of the building. Having it on the roof physically limited the amount of capacity that could be provided with the old design, even though it saved space. Like the first design, the new one includes 2N infrastructure redundancy. The plan is also to get the second-generation design documents and buildings Tier III-certified by the Uptime Institute, Crosby said. Existing Compass data centers have the certification. Kyoto Wheel for Free Cooling The new Compass data center design is also more efficient, according to Crosby, who said the PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, is now 1.1 to 1.2. Compass can now deliver PUE under 1.3 in every market in the US, including places where the weather is warm, such as Dallas or Miami, he said. To get better efficiency, the company has switched from direct airside economization – where outside air is pulled into the facility to supplement its mechanical cooling capacity – to indirect economization, where outside air still assists the cooling system but isn’t pushed directly into the data hall. The new system does economization using heat wheels. As it slowly rotates, a heat wheel – also known as Kyoto wheel or rotary heat exchanger – serves as a heat exchanger between warm server-exhaust air and cool outside air, each flowing through its own separate duct. The technology addresses common problems with direct airside economization, such as air contamination and unwanted humidity, thus expanding the number of locations where economization is possible. The cooling system requires no water. ‘Wherever the Client Wants the Data Center’ The company has been showing its new data center design to potential customers for several months now, Crosby said, and has gotten positive feedback. Being able to double the density opens doors with customers that were closed before, he said. The move doesn’t mean Compass is moving away from its original focus on underserved secondary markets; it’s simply an “adjustment” made to be able to address more markets. “We’re definitely still primarily focused on [building] wherever the client wants the data center,” he said. (Comment on this)
4:00p	ByteGrid Expands Compliant Cloud Options for Healthcare and Life Sciences With digitization of the healthcare industry came rise in demand for hosting and cloud compliant with the industry’s stringent data privacy and security regulations, and many data center and cloud service providers have jumped on the opportunity to make compliance easier for prospective customers in healthcare and life sciences industries. One of these providers, ByteGrid, has expanded its compliant cloud, colocation, and hosting offerings substantially, following acquisition of Sidus BioData, a hosting provider specializing in compliant services for those heavily regulated industries. Today, ByteGrid unveiled a wide-ranging new portfolio of compliance delivered as a service together with colocation, managed hosting, and cloud hosting services across the company’s nine data centers. The move is another step on a path ByteGrid, formerly a wholesale data center provider, has been on recently. The company has been diversifying the types of services it provides, adding managed services with the acquisition of NetRiver last year and compliant cloud and hosting with Sidus. The provider is now promising on-demand compliance with regulations by the US Food and Drug Administration and its Chinese and European equivalents, as well as American healthcare data privacy and security regulations. The services include ongoing security and compliance monitoring and incident response and forensics. ByteGrid’s nine data centers are located in six US markets, totaling about 750,000 square feet of data center space. (Comment on this)
4:30p	Data Centers as a Competitive Tool in Today’s Business Landscape Russell Senesac works in Data Center Business Development for Schneider Electric. Twenty years ago, data centers were looked at through a Wizard of Oz tinted lens. They were a big, powerful and expensive means for data storage, but few business stakeholders outside the IT department really understood their impact – or knew what was going on behind the curtain. The digital revolution flipped this reality on its head. Today, data centers are no longer bulky cost centers, but drivers of business, enabling the data processing and availability modern enterprises need to maintain continuity and gain competitive advantage. The Importance of Data Data is everywhere: it is created by nearly everything – tollbooths, online transactions, instant messaging, telephone calls – and it has become earth’s most abundant digital resource. In fact, every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. As a result, data has transformed into businesses’ greatest asset and competitive differentiator. Organizations able to quickly and effectively harness, manage and analyze data that has the opportunity to enhance customer interactions, offer more strategic solutions, evolve their services, meet increasing consumer demands, and reap huge financial and reputational rewards. As data grows more precious, data center processing power has been placed under a growing amount of scrutiny. As real-time data transmission becomes the norm rather than the exception, delays in processing can be significantly detrimental to a business’ ability to innovate. A Communication Dependent Generation Our lives – both personal and professional – are increasingly dependent on 24/7 anytime, anywhere access to information. We shop from our phones, stream movies instantly to our TVs, and telecommute hundreds of miles from brick-and-mortar offices. We rely so heavily on our connection to the Internet and its evolving ecosystem of “Things” that data center outages – a concern once relegated to IT staff – are increasingly making national headline news. In just one instance of downtime, productivity can be almost completely lost, consumer trust weakened and finances greatly impacted. Data center uptime is no longer an IT responsibility, but a business imperative. Data Center as a Service In an era where data management is becoming more complex than ever before, data centers are not only becoming an asset that pushes business forward, they are becoming the business itself. Colocation centers – businesses that provide data center equipment, space, and bandwidth for rent to customers – have become increasingly popular. In fact, according to DataCenterMap.com, there are currently more than 1,500 colocation facilities across 49 states. Data centers can also enhance a business’ existing revenue stream. In the telecommunications industry, as an example, providers can diversify customer offerings by considering the implementation of an edge computing infrastructure, whereby empty floor space is converted into a smaller, onsite data center. This approach enables telcos to diversify sources of income, and to provide better services by bringing data processing closer to the point of collection, thus reducing latency and lowering transmission costs. It is for these very reasons that data centers are becoming the most imperative factor in business processes, putting the IT department into the spotlight as key enablers of enterprise success. There is a tremendous opportunity for enterprises to drive business forward through a data center strategy that is intelligent and agile, leading business to a competitive advantage in the market. Now that the data center has emerged from behind the curtain, it is imperative that its value be fully utilized. 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)
5:00p	Creating an Infrastructure Strategy for Enterprise Mobility When we think of mobility, our first inclination might be to look at the hand-held device in our pocket. But that view is too limited. The concept of enterprise mobility must now extend into a strategic conversation involving the end-user, how content is consumed, how efficiently it’s being delivered, security capabilities, as well as the end-point device. Most of all, real mobility solutions must directly incorporate a good infrastructure strategy. The strategy should revolve around the company’s ability to enable and empower the workforce, giving them greater freedom of access to information and resources. As users evolve and workloads get more complex, we’ll see an increase in data usage as well as the kinds of devices accessing the modern enterprise data center. Consider this from the latest Cisco Mobile Forecast and Cloud Index reports: Global mobile data traffic will increase nearly tenfold between 2014 and 2019. Because of increased usage of smartphones, smartphones will reach three-quarters of mobile data traffic by 2019. By 2019, mobile-connected tablets will generate nearly double the traffic generated by the entire global mobile network in 2014. Globally, data created by Internet-of-Everything devices will be 277 times higher than the amount of data being transmitted to data centers from end-user devices and 47 times higher than total data center traffic by 2018. With all of this in mind, how do we create an enterprise infrastructure strategy that’s capable of keeping up? Where do we deploy data center components which directly enable enterprise mobility? To create real-world enterprise mobility, we have to enable our users, the data center, and the overall business. Here are some things to think about when building an infrastructure that supports greater levels of mobility: Deploy Smarter Networks Mobility spans much further than a device or an access point. Your network now plays an absolutely critical part in controlling mobility and data created by mobile devices. In fact, intelligent networks can identify the kinds of devices coming in and are able to segment the traffic appropriately. Furthermore, you can directly control how certain types of apps and data sets work within your corporate environment. Let me give you an example. Platforms like Cisco’s next-gen firewall integrates with wired and wireless systems and can identify thousands of applications. Furthermore, it also identifies more than 75,000 micro-applications, like Farmville on Facebook. The other big aspect is that these kinds of services can also identify the application behavior. Are there anomalies? Is data leaking? Are users posting or sharing things that they’re not supposed to? The other big aspect is the capability to integrate these kinds of security solutions directly into the network backplane. Rogue devices, malicious traffic, and attempted attacks can be stopped quickly when network and security platforms are combined tightly and intelligently. Intelligent Wireless Access Points and Controllers Did you know that wireless solutions are outpacing wired platforms? Today, organizations need to understand this very quickly and deploy controls around their mobility platforms. New kinds of access points allow users to roam throughout an entire building, while never dropping the connection. However, on the backend, wireless controllers help track user movements and allow them to connect to resources closest to them: printers, servers, and even IP-based medical equipment. Furthermore, you begin to create a lot more internal wireless intelligence as well. You can now deploy a wireless network with one single SSID. From there, your wireless platform can identify the device, the user, the content being requested, and even the authentication method. Privileged users will see a broader array of applications and data sets. Guests, for example, will only get access to the internet. The cool part is that you no longer have to use separte wireless SSIDs for guest, admin, doctor, and associate networks. The intelligence is happening in the background. Finally, you give the user the ability to roam. This means they can go off-site while still being compliant with their mobile device. A doctor, for example, can walk from the hospital to the coffee shop while never dropping a connection. However, once the doctor hops off the enterprise network, they will no longer be able to see protected healthcare information. They may still be able to do a video session, check some records, and be productive, but information that must stay within your organization will always do so. Enterprise Mobility Management Working with enterprise mobility management platforms can have a lot of benefits for organizations which are allowing personal devices to connect to internal network components. Scanning for things like rooted or hacked devices and stopping access from malicious software are all MDM/EDM features. Furthermore, administrators can leverage granular control mechanisms to have better visibility and manageability of end-point devices. If a device is lost or stolen, administrators have the option to wipe only corporate data or the entire device remotely. Remember, these systems can directly integrate into your data center backbone. That means optimization, policies, and even user access can still be centrally managed. Finally, a good enterprise mobility ecosystem will have a lot of intelligence built into it as well. This means that you can proactively scan user experiences, create adaptive orchestration policies, and ensure optimal user experience while accessing a mobile workspace. Mobility-Centric Security There’s no silver bullet for all security options out there. New types of threats take aim at mobility ecosystems. This means that traditional storage solutions might not be enough to secure an enterprise mobility initiative. In using mobile-centric next-gen security technologies, organizations have a lot more control over their data, users, and applications. Administrators can now deploy specific security processes on dedicated virtual or physical devices. For an enterprise mobility initiative, mobility-centric security technologies can help with the following: Capabilities around end-point interrogation Contextual access based on user, device, location, etc. Incorporating firewall rules, policies, and application filters Using virtual security appliances for dedicated mobility monitoring and security Deploying adaptive two-factor authentication methods driven by secure certificates Monitoring, reporting, and log aggregation around mobility utilization and data access Using policies to lock down applications and mobile workloads Mobility for the modern enterprise will be critical. You’re now supporting a much more agile workforce that’s constantly adapting to market shifts. Most of all, you’re supporting a business model that is also a lot more mobile. The proliferation of devices has moved us into the digital age where IoT and mobility are tools for productivity. To create real mobility best practices, you have to start with an infrastructure strategy. This strategy must be agile, support new use cases, and help you evolve with the fast pace of the industry. (Comment on this)

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