Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016

Time	Event
1:00p	Telco Central Offices Get Second Life as Cloud Data Centers Two years ago, AT&T said 75 percent of its entire global network would be virtualized by 2020. What it didn’t say back then was what implications this wholesale network virtualization project would have for the facilities where that network lives – the countless central offices, or exchanges, in cities and rural areas built over the years to deliver the telco’s services. As AT&T and other major telcos, such as Verizon, upend their sprawling network infrastructure to make it more agile through software, most of those facilities will eventually look less like typical central offices and more like cloud data centers. Sophisticated software running on simple commodity servers and switches will replace expensive specialized hardware appliances; customers will consume telco products as cloud services; and the facilities that support this infrastructure will be converted accordingly. “We’re going to use already existing footprint of central offices across the country as kind of a distributed cloud,” Igal Elbaz, VP of innovation and ecosystem at AT&T, said. A “significant number” of central offices will get electrical and mechanical infrastructure upgrades to convert them to data centers, he said. It’s unclear how many of these facilities AT&T has exactly – the company doesn’t share that number publicly – but the gray, windowless concrete buildings are a familiar sight to most US city dwellers. The central offices vary in size: the ones in densely populated areas tend to be smaller, while remote aggregation facilities are larger. AT&T calls the ones that have been converted “integrated cloud nodes.” The company has so far created about 70 of them, Elbaz said. Learning from the Best For ideas on the types of hardware that will go into those facilities, the big telcos have turned to none other than companies that have perfected the art and science of building cloud data center infrastructure on a global scale. Last month, AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, British mobile operator EE, South Korea’s SK Telecom, and several other companies announced they were joining the Open Compute Project, the Facebook-led open source hardware and data center design community. Together with data center services giant Equinix and the network technology vendors Nokia and Nexius, they formed a whole new group under OCP focused specifically on data center technology for network operators. The OCP Telco Project will serve as a way for these companies to tap into the innovation ecosystem and supply chain that have saved Facebook billions of dollars in data center costs. Apple and Microsoft are OCP members, and so are major financial services companies, such as Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, Bank of America, and Capital One. Nearly all major IT vendors, such as HP, Cisco, Juniper, and IBM, participate, along with design manufacturers they compete with for the hyperscale data center business – companies like Taiwan’s Quanta Computer or Hyve Solutions, the division of Silicon Valley’s Synnex created specifically to supply hardware to the likes of Facebook. Read more: Wall Street Rethinking Data Center Hardware The wide pool of vendors is important to what the telcos are doing. If Facebook found standard off-the-shelf HP or Dell servers too expensive for its scale, those who can build, or afford, specialized telco hardware comprise one of the most exclusive clubs. There have traditionally been very few vendors a company like AT&T has been able to work with because of the sophistication of the appliances, Elbaz said. If open source network software and hardware for telcos gain traction, that pool of vendors will widen substantially, as the barrier of entry to the market will lower. For telcos that means one thing: lower cost. Turning to Open Source for Answers There’s also the benefit of having a group of engineers from different companies collaborating to solve technology problems specific to the telco industry. Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization are key to delivering modern high-bandwidth network services to customers and making them easier to consume. Regardless of the shift from hardware to software, these are still extremely sophisticated technologies, and a single company has to spend a lot more time and resources to develop them on its own. Now, in addition to participating in the multitude of open source networking software projects, telcos are turning to open source hardware. Leveraging the open source ecosystem is a “fresh way” of designing and operating networks, Gagan Puranik, director for SDN architecture planning at Verizon, said. “The biggest thing for us is to create faster innovation. We have a great opportunity to redefine how we design our data centers,” he said, and the vendor pool that will help them do it will be a mix of traditional and non-traditional vendors. Read more: Why Should Data Center Operators Care about Open Source? Equinix Future-Proofing its Model For Equinix, joining the OCP Telco Project is a way to future-proof its business model, which relies heavily on interconnecting service providers, enterprises, and partners inside its data centers. “All these networks [the telcos that recently joined OCP] are our customers today, and they all connect to each other and to the cloud using IP protocol in our data centers,” Equinix CTO Ihab Tarazi said. The data center provider, which has already built a sophisticated interconnection platform, wants to be part of the process as key decisions about the next generation of telco networks are made. “What we see is an evolving architecture under OCP that supports the high scale and performance needs of applications and cloud, especially in the age of SDN and the explosion of mobility and (Internet of Things),” Tarazi said. Equinix has to make sure its platform supports this evolving architecture, because it needs the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and Deutsche Telekom to continue using its data centers to connect to each other, their customers, and cloud service providers. “We continue to innovate with all of them today,” Tarazi said. “I suspect we’ll continue to evolve our interconnection model with them as well.” (Comment on this)
5:31p	Five Enterprise Technology Trends to Watch Chris Alberding, is VP of Product Management at FairPoint Communications. Technology is the lifeblood of business and government organizations as they strive to transform operations and increasingly become digital entities. The cloud and fiber networks are being woven into the central nervous systems of these organizations to operate more efficiently, deliver new service models and enhance the experience of customers. This market landscape is pushing organizations to examine and adopt new enterprise technology approaches at an accelerating rate. Working against this backdrop, here are five business tech trends to watch: The Push to the Hybrid Cloud Accelerates While the public cloud has proven to be massively successful, many companies maintain business applications that they are not ready to move to public cloud environments. Those applications include legacy solutions that can’t easily be adapted to the public cloud and ones with strict compliance requirements. Organizations are creating hybrid cloud environments to manage select systems in house while also developing and deploying new applications in a public cloud. This approach delivers on the flexibility and scalability of the cloud and the peace of mind of maintaining sensitive applications and data in a private environment. Data Center Colocation For applications that companies don’t want to move to the cloud, data center colocation is becoming the clear choice over on-premises environments. For most companies – except specialized web services – maintaining your own data center makes little sense. Data center colocation provides organizations with data center space without requiring them to invest capital for new construction and infrastructure, and can be an important part of a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. The combination of cooling, power, physical security and on-site amenities – all at a competitive monthly cost – will drive an increasing number of businesses to a third- party data center colocation model. High-Speed Bandwidth Demand Grows Unceasingly Demand for increased bandwidth for large and small organizations has grown exponentially in recent years, and this growth trend will continue. Cloud computing, mobile access, and video will place increased stress on enterprise bandwidth needs. Fiber and Ethernet-based services allow for increased bandwidth and are becoming an absolute requirement for financial services, healthcare, education, retail, hospitality, and more. In healthcare, for example, we’ll continue to see the need for high-speed bandwidth to address remote healthcare demands through telemedicine capabilities that can instantly share potentially life-saving information. K-12 school administrators will also focus on their ability to provide high-speed Internet up to 100 Mbps in the classroom as they increasingly embrace digital learning programs. Dark Fiber Seen as Strategic Asset, Not Commodity Companies, municipalities and higher education entities will do their homework on dark fiber network solutions compared to traditional lit services as they look for ways to manage their networks and future costs in the face of increasing demand for bandwidth over time. While dark fiber can prove difficult for owners to maintain, network service providers that offer a secure foundation, experienced local field technicians and other construction services will be in the best position to capture this business. Voice over IP Spreads to the Enterprise Over the past few years, IP-based unified voice and data communications solutions have been on an upward trajectory with small businesses as the primary driving force. Now, enterprise deployments will increase as these organizations look to replace aging phone systems with feature-rich technology. Additionally, they want to eliminate large up-front capital investments and ensure long-term scalability as their business and available technology evolves. In the last two years, many large organizations have started considering hosted Private Branch Exchange (hosted PBX) and Session Initiated Protocol trunking (SIP trunking) solutions. With improved capabilities, like full-featured automatic call distribution (ACD), video integration and robust reporting, it is becoming more practical for larger organizations to go with IP-based solutions over a traditional on-premise system. 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)
7:19p	Equinix Turns to Fan Walls for Data Center Cooling There’s been a lot of debate over the years about the various pluses and minuses of using raised floors for data center cooling versus simply dropping cold air onto the data center floor from ducts on the ceiling. But there’s a third option: the fan wall. Perhaps the most famous data center operator that uses fan walls in its facilities is Facebook. It has been combining airside economization and evaporative cooling, while using a massive wall of fans to push the cool air onto the data center floor starting with its first company designed and owned data center in Prineville, Oregon. Equinix, the data center colocation and interconnection giant, may be known in the industry for using concrete-slab floors with overhead cooling, but it actually also has raised floors in some of its facilities. Now, the company is trying something new. It is planning to start deploying fan walls in its future data centers. The fan wall at Facebook’s data center in Luleå, Sweden (Photo: Facebook) Raouf Abdel, Equinix’s regional operating chief for the Americas, shared the company’s new data center cooling plans in a blog post this week. He didn’t try to argue that the fan wall was better or worse than raised floor or overhead cooling, leaving that discussion until the company has actually seen the fan wall in action. He did list a couple of benefits of the fan wall: you don’t have to pay for overhead duct work or venting under the raised floor, and it leaves more room for equipment, since you don’t have air conditioning units on the data center floor. One drawback of a fan wall is that it can only be used in single-story or two-story facilities. The basic design will consist of an outside wall with cooling units and a fan wall inside the facility. There will be a five-to-six-foot plenum between the two walls that will be filled with cold air. Abdel’s blog post also has a good summary of the industry’s perennial data center cooling debate on raised floor versus overhead cooling. Read more on the Equinix Blog. (Comment on this)

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