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Friday, January 8th, 2016
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| 1:00p | Friday Funny: Lightsabers on the Raised Floor There’s got to be a massive data center inside the Death Star… 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 Anthony, whose caption won the Thanksgiving edition of the contest. His caption was: “You said Angry Birds was running slow so I got you a new one.” Some good submissions came in for the Christmas edition – all we need now is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below! Take Our PollFor previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! |
| 4:00p | Power Grid Vulnerability Imperils National Security
This is an article by our sister site The Energy Times. Because grid security and reliability are matters of life and death for the data center industry, we’re posting it here for our readers. EDITOR’S NOTE: This the second part of our two-part interview with Ted Koppel, one of the most prominent journalists in America and the author of the new book “Lights Out.” The previous excerpt of our conversation: “Presidential Candidates Must Address Grid Security.” The entire interview will be aired in the opening segment of an upcoming Energy Times webcast, “The Grid Cyberthreat – Are We Prepared?” ENERGY TIMES: Of all the topics and you could tackle as a senior journalist, why did you pick the cyberthreat to the electric power grid? KOPPEL: First of all, because the number of senior administration people who were issuing warnings about it was significant – including the president, his former defense secretary and his former secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano. They were all warning about the danger of the cyber-attack on the power grid. What really caught my attention is that no one was really focusing on this – including my colleagues in the media. There just wasn’t a whole lot of coverage. If indeed the danger of this is great as the senior leaders were saying, the question that really caught my interest is I wonder what the government is doing about it. Is it possible to defend against this kind of an attack? If the answer is no, and the attack is likely to happen, what preparations are being made to protect the American public against the consequences of something that, after all, could involve tens of millions of people over a very extended period of time?  Ted Koppel (Photo: Steven Biver) ENERGY TIMES: You quote some officials as saying they believe an attack of this nature is probable. Do you agree? KOPPEL: It’s really not up to me to agree or disagree. You’re a reporter also. What we do is we go to the best sources we can find, and we ask our questions, and then on the basis of the answers that we get, and on the basis of the sort of overlapping confirmation that there is between and among experts, we draw our own conclusions. I conducted about 60 interviews on the subject, and talking to the best experts I could find within the industry, within the intelligence community, the military and current and former leaders. The conclusion that I came to was that while there is not unanimity, the preponderance of expertise points in the direction of something like this not only being possible, but likely. ENERGY TIMES: Did you have any in depth talks with senior utility executives? KOPPEL: I did speak to a very senior electric company executive but I promised him that I would maintain his anonymity. People in the industry can probably figure out that it’s only possibly one of a handful of people. He is one of the people who participates in the White House conference that takes place three times a year on precisely this subject. ENERGY TIMES: Does the utility industry or government have the primary responsibility of safeguarding the grid? KOPPEL: Look, it’s obviously a shared responsibility. But the industry has been very resistant to any kind of return to a federal regulation of the industry. I don’t know to what degree you’re familiar with the relationship between the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. The federal agency cannot simply impose on the industry regulations that it believes are essential to protect the grid. It can only propose them to the industry, or to the industry’s representative, through NERC. The NERC membership has to vote on whether or not they’re going to accept this regulation. And unless there is a two-thirds majority, they don’t accept it. It’s a sort of bizarre situation when you think about the security of the nation being at risk. I can’t think of any more critical utility in the nation than the electric power grid. Everything else – communications, transportation or the banking system – are all helpless without electricity. The fact that the power grid is vulnerable should be an enormous national concern. But the federal government does not have the authority to impose regulations on the electric power industry. It is a vulnerability. It’s a problem. ENERGY TIMES: One of the paths to secure the grid is the dissemination of distributed generation, microgrids and energy storage. What’s your feeling about that? KOPPEL: It absolutely is an answer. Microgrids tend to be more in rural areas. I don’t know to what degree microgrids could take care of a market like New York City, Chicago or Los Angeles. But that’s only a tiny part of the problem. The bigger part of the problem is if the decision were made tomorrow to do this, and if the power industry were to agree to it unanimously, it would still take years to implement something like this. This is not something that’s going to provide a quick fix. ENERGY TIMES: You talk about how survivalists are coping with the potential collapse of the grid. Do you think individuals should be stockpiling food? It seems like that wouldn’t really address this at all. KOPPEL: Well I don’t know what you think would address it if that wouldn’t. To answer your question – yes, I think those who can afford it and who have the space should. Obviously apartment dwellers in the big cities are going to have a hard time finding room for three or four months’ supply of food. But in the absence of any plan by the federal government, what alternative is there to individuals preparing for their own protection? If the power goes out and there is no huge federal supply of food… New York state has only about 25 million MRE’s – meals ready to eat. The City of New York has a population of 8 million. That’s a three-day supply for the City of New York. Then what do you do? And if neither the state nor the federal government has taken action to prepare for this kind of an incident, what alternative do you see to individuals taking measures to protect themselves? ENERGY TIMES: So have you done anything personally along these lines? KOPPEL: Along the lines of buying freeze dried food? Yes. I have. This first ran at http://tdworld.com/news/power-grid-vulne |
| 4:30p | IT Innovators: Taking a Cloud-Based Approach to a Holiday Campaign
By Windows IT Pro The holiday season is busy for online retail–but a bit of advance planning can avoid headaches during a busy and lucrative time of year. That was certainly the case for Marks and Spencer when the British retailer successfully took a cloud-based approach to one of its holiday campaigns. A decidedly modern approach was taken by the longstanding UK retailer for its Magic & Sparkle campaign in 2013, with a television campaign that encouraged viewers to visit a dedicated website. The holiday campaign required the company to get a website up and running in just weeks, and to ensure that site could handle heavy traffic during December, the retailer’s busiest month of the year. It was all done successfully with the help of Microsoft Azure, a cloud-based business platform. The holiday promotion was the company’s first foray into a cloud-based campaign says John Pillar, head of software engineering with Marks and Spencer, and that meant that it was a learning experience for everyone involved. “It’s kind of a strange thing, when for the first time, you’re doing this kind of thing, just watching those dials go,” says Pillar. But being able to watch customers react in real time really highlighted the value of the approach, he says. There were a few points in favor of taking the leap into a cloud-based approach, Pillar says. “One of the big reasons is that we didn’t want to purchase a whole load of infrastructure.” By its nature, the holiday campaign was limited in time. It didn’t make sense to purchase, say, a new server to provide additional bandwidth for the increased traffic from a campaign that was only going to last for a few weeks. At the time Pillar and his team were planning the campaign, going through the traditional IT routes meant that getting the hardware was a months-long process. “We got the requirement extremely late in the day,” Pillar says, “so we just didn’t have time to even think about going and buying some fancy hardware.” And, it also wasn’t ideal to rely on existing internal IT resources–nobody wanted to risk high traffic to the campaign website and compromise the customer experience on the main Marks and Spencer page. In addition to the savings in IT resources, going with a cloud-based platform allowed Pillar and his team to test for potential issues before the campaign launched–and avoid them once it was live. One of the key steps in putting the campaign together was figuring out how it might break, Pillar says. This was particularly important because the Marks and Spencer campaign had to happen at a particular time of the year, for a limited period, and during a lucrative shopping season, therefore, any issues had higher stakes in terms of lost traffic and sales for the company. As well, Marks and Spencer didn’t actually know how much traffic there would be because the campaign was new. That’s another reason the elastic scale of a cloud approach was helpful, Pillar says, because it allowed the company to be ready regardless of how the campaign performed. “The platform just scales and you just kind of sit there and watch it happen as it does, which is great,” Pillar says. “It’s very different from traditional campaigns where you’ve got your hardware vendors and your data-center operators on the phone.” The cloud-based platform for the campaign even allowed Marks and Spencer to simulate what would happen in the case of serious issues. For example, it could pretend to take out a data center to see what would happen. With a more traditional IT hardware set-up, it’s difficult to turn off traffic in those ways just to test for potential issues, Pillar says. That testing can also mean turning off purchasing traffic to your site, he says, which is not ideal. “That’s nice to be able to simulate those things,” Pillar says, “whereas in a traditional data center that’s hard to simulate.” Marks and Spencer’s cloud-based approach allowed it to avoid major issues during the campaign, he says, by testing for issues like coding mistakes or traffic spikes before it ever launched. And, because the campaign was tied into a variety of channels–including television and online–it was important to be able to handle the traffic spikes that could arise when customers saw an advertisement and went to the campaign site, Pillar says. “If our data center went off in that five minutes, forget it, we’re in serious trouble.” The scalable approach didn’t just provide a benefit in terms of traffic, it also was helpful in containing the costs of the campaign, Pillar says. Along with not needing to invest in expensive hardware, the campaign’s cost was tied to the traffic it received–which lessened the negative financial impact of a less-than-successful campaign, if that were an issue. “If you have a really great campaign then great, you kind of justify that you had good reach, etcetera,” Pillar says of the scalable approach. “But if the campaign went badly, then there’s no massive outlay on cost.” The IT Innovators series of articles is underwritten by Microsoft, and is editorially independent. Terri Coles is a freelance writer based in St. John’s, NL. Her work covers topics as diverse as food, health and business. If you have a story you would like profiled, contact her at coles.terri@gmail.com. This first ran at http://windowsitpro.com/it-innovators/it-i |
| 6:01p | IBM Cloud Unit CTO Retires, Watson Fails to Impress at CES
By theWHIR Three top executives from IBM have retired over the past few weeks, including Danny Sabbah, whose 30-year career at IBM ended with his role as chief technology officer and general manager for IBM’s cloud unit. According to Fortune, Sabbah retired late December. He joined IBM in 1988 and held various roles including leading its next-gen computing initiative and its Tivoli systems management software. Elsewhere at IBM, Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM’s security group, retired in December after a four-year stint at the company that started when IBM acquired Q1 Labs, which he led as CEO and president. Steve Mills, executive vice president software and systems, retired on New Year’s Eve. He was in charge of IBM’s software group, which included DB2 database, Rational, Tivoli, Lotus andWebSphere, according to a report by The Register. IBM Shares Fall, IBM Watson the Future?According to a report by 24/7 Wall Street, some areas of IBM are going to do more for revenue growth than others; “Cloud revenue was up more than 65% in 2015 at that time to $9.4 billion over trailing 12 months, and business analytics revenue was up 19%, if you adjust for currencies (or 9% as reported). Watson continues to grow as well, but the real growth for that will be in the years ahead.” “Watson may be the software product of the future. However, so far, it is barely more than a demonstration tool for an IBM initiative that has not improved the company’s fortunes enough for investors to believe IBM has much of a future,” according to the report. IBM’s shares are off nearly 6 percent over the past month and 17 percent over the past year, according to 24/7 Wall Street. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/i |
| 6:08p | Analysts: Cloud Spending Tops $110B, Led by IaaS and PaaS
By Talkin’ Cloud 2015 is officially being referred to as “The Year of the Cloud,” according to Synergy Research Group, which said last year marked the first time cloud services and infrastructure officially became mainstream in the eyes of enterprise customers. On Thursday, Synergy published the results of a study that measured the growth rates of six different cloud segments ranging from Unified Communications as a Service and Software as a Service to public and private cloud deployments. Synergy concluded that cloud operator and vendor revenues reached a total of $110 billion during the four quarters between Q4 2014 and Q3 2015, which marked a 28 percent annual growth rate for all cloud service and infrastructure market segments measured. Public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) exhibited the highest growth rate at 51 percent, followed by private and hybrid cloud infrastructure services at 45 percent, according to Synergy. All segments grew by at least 16 percent. While infrastructure hardware and software spending continues to beat out the amount of spending on cloud services, Synergy said the gap is closing rapidly, which could signal a reversal within the next several years. About $60 billion was spent on infrastructure hardware and software during the measured period, with more than $30 billion going toward the growth of private clouds, according to Synergy. Public cloud spending accounted for less of the overall growth, but spending has increased much more rapidly in this arena, the study showed. Overall, investments in infrastructure by cloud service providers generated an impressive $20 billion in revenues from the myriad of cloud infrastructure services, with an additional $27 billion coming from Software as a Service and other internet services. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future, making this an exciting time for IT vendors and service providers that focus on cloud,” said Synergy Research Group Chief Analyst John Dinsdale, in a statement. Of course, it’s been fairly apparent for a long time now that cloud service spending is on the rise, but Synergy’s study is useful in placing giving cloud enthusiasts the numbers to back up their claims of market dominance. Naturally, companies like Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Amazon and Microsoft continue to lead the pack in this arena, echoing earlier studies naming them as the dominant cloud service providers. Aside from the success of the cloud infrastructure industry, adjacent services are also seeing an uptick in popularity, including cloud security services and mobile cloud solutions. This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-r |
| 9:02p | Equinix CEO Unveils Aggressive Plan to Court Enterprises Equinix CEO Steve Smith is gearing up to hunt the widely coveted enterprise market, while investing in mission critical growth in 2016. The Redwood City, California-based company, already the world’s largest data center provider, wants to at least triple its customer base over the next five to 10 years and expects enterprises to comprise most of that growth. Smith presented on Equinix’s strategy for 2016 at the Citi Internet, Media and Telecom conference earlier this week. He was interviewed by Citi telecom analyst Mike Rollins. Smith’s priorities for this year will be integration of TelecityGroup and Bit-isle, continuing to press the Equinix “advantage in the market,” and growing the list of enterprise logos on its customer roster at an unprecedented rate. Untapped Enterprise Market HugeThe Equinix enterprise customer initiative will be the big emphasis for 2016, and for the foreseeable future. The addressable market is huge. The data center provider is targeting an estimated 350,000 global enterprises. These companies have at least $10 million in annual sales and 500 or more employees. Another major difference, which Equinix began to realize five years ago, was that it takes a “substantial investment” to help create enterprise demand. This requires investing in a multipronged approach of marketing, sales, lining up channel partners, and creating service offerings. Smith believes that Equinix is capable of going to 20,000 and even as high as 60,000 enterprise customers over the next five to 10 years. To put that into perspective, after 17 years in business, Equinix has about 6,800 customers; plus it will gain another 2,000 or so from its Telecity acquisition last year, which hasn’t yet closed, and 300 to 400 from the Bit-isle deal. Meanwhile, it continues to grow its interconnection business, driven mainly by the cloud and core verticals: networks, electronic trading, and digital content. The networks are also upgrading capacity in order to chase after enterprise customers. Essentially, all segments are growing traffic, including “…a push by digital media to move content around the world,” Smith said. The biggest example of the last trend is this week’s announcement by Netflix that it has launched its online streaming services in 130 additional countries simultaneously. Courting enterprises, however, is more difficult than serving Equinix’s traditional customer base, consisting of financial, network, media, and cloud companies. These customers basically knew what they wanted from Equinix, and all Equinix had to do was deliver. To attract enterprise customers, Equinix is putting in considerable time and effort to generate success stories across a multiplicity of industries which can be used as case studies. Smith said he agreed with the widely held belief that 80 percent of enterprise IT spend is still in-house, which implies that Equinix is fishing in an extremely large and deep ocean of prospects. Paying for GrowthEquinix is helping fund these efforts by increasing organic revenue growth from 12 percent to 16 percent during 2015. Smith said the outperformance was driven by: 1) an increase in gross bookings during the past three quarters; 2) cloud/enterprise wins; 3) the fact that 80 percent to 85 percent of growth is from the installed customer base; 4) churn that has been at the low end of the anticipated 2-to-2.5-percent range; 5) net bookings getting stronger; and 6) the sales force’s ability to “preserve price.” Notably, the lower churn numbers were helped by signing customers with the “right applications,” which are more interconnected, global, and mission critical. During the past 18 months, Equinix has invested in 21 markets, betting on the Big Three Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. This big bet “…played out as expected,” according to Smith. Equinix investments in development behind the cloud switch help customers connect with better security, lower latency, and higher performance. “There is not a single enterprise customer who doesn’t want to connect to at least one of the Big Three,” Smith said. The highest demand by enterprise customers is to access Microsoft Office 365, with Azure, Google Apps, and Amazon Web Services all being major magnets. IBM SoftLayer would be number four, followed by VMware, EMC, and Cisco. Smith sees Software-as-a-Service as being a large source of growth in 2016. Notably, Oracle will be making multiple deployments, and SAP was mentioned as another growing customer, with “…additional cloud players still coming in the door.” Equinix now has 500 cloud providers as part of its cloud exchange. This cloud density serves as a value-add for customers looking to deploy across the public internet, private cloud exchange, and hybrid cloud. It is also a significant competitive moat. TelecityGroup and EU UpdatesIn Europe, Equinix expects to end up with 64 IBX data centers after agreeing with regulators to “quarantine” eight data center assets, which will be sold in order to gain EU approval for acquiring Telecity. Smith shared that RBC bank was now onboard to assist with disposition of the eight assets. The EU will have a say in matters like revenue, capacity, and interconnection density resulting from the dispositions. However, Smith said that there was considerable demand for the facilities, and he felt that “…they could be disposed of in a manner which would avoid creating a competitor.” He also mentioned that last year’s annulment of Safe Harbor laws by the European Court of Justice would result in customers having to deploy more servers and storage in Europe. This would be a tailwind similar to the one Equinix enjoyed when regulations were implemented for financial firms involved with high-frequency trading, he said. REIT Approval and Allocating CapitalWhen it comes to allocating capital, having been granted REIT status has bumped dividends up to the top of the list, followed by organic and inorganic growth, debt repayment, and buying real estate assets when feasible. The dividend makes share repurchases less likely. New ecosystems, such as like electronic payments, cloud services, and Big Data – especially data generated by the Internet of Things –will all require investment in 2016. One of the biggest challenges facing Equinix is that a high growth rate and funding innovation require substantial investment, the CEO said. Meanwhile, the goal of achieving 50 percent EBITDA margin, which has been on the radar screen for many years, will have to be balanced with the investments required to fund the company growth opportunities. When it comes to growing the dividend in 2016, potential levers include moving more assets from the Equinix TRS, or taxable REIT subsidiaries – including TelecityGroup, Bit-isle, and Brazil assets – over to the Equinix QRS, or qualified REIT subsidiary. Market ApprovesRollins final question for Smith was: Has the ship sailed on wholesale and retail under one roof? Smith answered candidly, pointing out that the possibility of the biggest retail data center provider (Equinix) and the biggest wholesale provider (Digital Realty) getting together “…got pushed sideways, with the Digital-Telx deal having put it to bed.” He also acknowledged that while Equinix and Digital maintain a good relationship, it had become a bit more complex after Telx. Financial guidance for 2016, and more color regarding the dividend will wait until Equinix’s fourth-quarter 2015 earnings. However, the audience clearly liked what Smith had to say, as the company’s shares popped up to a new 52-week high of $309.13 per share after the Citi presentation. |
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