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Friday, February 26th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 1:00p | Digital Realty to Enter Frankfurt Data Center Market Digital Realty Trust is expanding presence in Europe with entry into the Frankfurt market. The San Francisco-based data center provider has acquired a large parcel of land in the German city, where it plans to build a three-building data center campus. Frankfurt is one of Europe’s biggest and most active data center markets and, according to Digital Realty executives, has been on the company’s radar for some time now. Digital Realty management announced the land acquisition on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday. It made $500 million in revenue for the quarter – up about 20 percent year over year. The data center REIT currently has 22 data centers in Europe, including facilities in Dublin, Manchester, London, Amsterdam, Geneva, and Paris. Much of the company’s current business strategy revolves around leasing its data center capacity to the biggest cloud service providers, for whom Frankfurt is an important market. It is one of Europe’s major network interconnection hubs and a popular digital gateway to Eastern European markets. Read more: Telx Acquisition Closed, Here’s Digital Realty’s Plan Examples of cloud providers that expanded infrastructure into Frankfurt recently include Amazon Web Services, IBM, DigitalOcean, Oracle, and VMware. Microsoft announced last year it was planning to add data centers in Frankfurt and Magdeburg to support its Azure cloud. Virtually all major cloud providers are also customers of Equinix, the retail colocation and interconnection provider with substantial footprint in the Frankfurt market. In addition to competing with Digital Realty, Equinix is one of its biggest customers and one of the companies Digital relies on to bring enterprises that want to access cloud services via Equinix into its facilities. Other Digital Realty customer that serve this purpose are IBM and AT&T. Equinix had five data centers in Frankfurt prior to last year’s acquisition of the European data center services giant TelecityGroup, which added two Frankfurt sites to its portfolio. However, Equinix has to sell one of the two Telecity data centers – the Lyoner Strasse one – as part of the deal it made with European antitrust regulators to secure their approval for the merger. Digital Realty has not disclosed a timeline for development in Frankfurt, saying only that it will base timing decisions on market dynamics. The six-acre parcel will accommodate a three-building campus with 27MW of power capacity total. This is a second major land acquisition for expansion Digital Realty announced recently, following a long period of construction freeze, as the company tweaked its strategy, made substantial changes to the executive team, and made efforts to sell off non-core assets. It is now back in expansion mode, which kicked off with last year’s acquisition of a 2 million-square foot piece of land in Ashburn, Virginia, which has access to 150MW of power. |
| 5:05p | Spotify Ditches Own Data Centers in Favor of Google Cloud  By The WHIR Streaming music service Spotify is migrating its infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform, the company announced this week, calling the move a “no-brainer,” due to the balance of high quality, performance, and low-cost storage, computing, and networking services shifting in favor of cloud. Like any complex migration, however, it is expected to take time. Headquartered in London, Spotify has offices around the world and is available in 58 markets. The service has more than 75 million active users with over 30 million songs available for streaming. All of this equals a ton of content that has to be delivered seamlessly to global audiences. By spending less time and money on its data centers, as the story goes, it should be able to free up resources for other areas of its business that touch end users. It’s already made some investments in that area, acquiring Cord Project and Soundwaveto “boost Spotify’s existing strengths in developing engaging and innovative music experiences.” Netflix was the latest streaming giant to say goodbye to its own infrastructure, opting to go all-in on AWS cloud. Between AWS, Google, and Microsoft, it’s likely that we’ll see a lot more of these types of announcements of customers putting all their chips in the cloud. Read more: Netflix Shuts Down Final Bits of Own Data Center Infrastructure “Historically, we’ve taken a traditional approach to doing this: buying or leasing data center space, server hardware and networking gear as close to our customers as possible,” Nicholas Harteau, Spotify VP of engineering and infrastructure said in a blog post this week. “This approach has allowed us to give you music instantly, wherever you are in the world. But in a business growing quickly in users, markets and features, keeping pace with scaling demands requires ever increasing amounts of focus and effort. Like good, lazy engineers, we occasionally asked ourselves: do we really need to do all this stuff?” The answer has changed to the negative for Spotify, which was ultimately won over by Google’s data platform and tools, according to the announcement. Google’s data infrastructure, including Dataproc traditional batch processing, Pub/Sub event delivery, and BigQueary’s “nearly magical abilities” provide a significant advantage to Spotify. “What really tipped the scales towards Google for us, however, has been our experience with Google’s data platform and tools. Good infrastructure isn’t just about keeping things up and running, it’s about making all of our teams more efficient and more effective, and Google’s data stack does that for us in spades,” Harteau said. Spotify is fairly active on its engineering blog, recently breaking down its “event delivery system,” one of the foundational pieces of its data infrastructure. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/s |
| 5:12p | Weekly DCIM Software News Update: February 26th News from Nlyte, Modius, and FNT Software: Nlyte earns VerAfied DCSM security mark. Nlyte Software announced that the company has earned VerAfied status for its data center service management (DCSM) solution, which has been certified with the Veracode VerAfied DCSM security mark. The VerAfied status demonstrates that Nlyte is actively identifying and remediating application vulnerabilities to provide its customers with one of the highest levels of software assurance and security verification. Modius and FNT Software named to CRN’s Data Center 100 List. Modius announced that it was named to the 2016 CRN Data Center 100 list for its OpenData DCIM solution. FNT Software also announced that it was recognized on the CRN list, for its FNT Command flagship and FNT ServicePlanet DCIM solutions. |
| 9:26p | Iron Mountain Joins Obama’s Data Center Energy Challenge Iron Mountain, the nearly 70-year-old “information management” company that grew out of a big early 20th century underground mushroom growing operation, has joined a White House program created to push companies and government agencies to improve their data center energy efficiency. President Barack Obama’s administration rolled out the Better Buildings Initiative in parallel with its clean energy investment program in 2011. The Better Buildings Challenge, one part of the initiative, called on companies and agencies to make specific energy efficiency improvement commitments for their facilities in return for access to some technical assistance from the government, shared best practices, and, of course, good publicity. So far, Boston-based Iron Mountain is one of 11 private-sector data center operators to have accepted the challenge, pledging to reduce energy intensity of eight of its data centers by 20 percent in 10 years. The others are eBay, Facebook, Intel, Intuit, Home Depot, Staples, and Schneider Electric, as well as data center providers Digital Realty Trust, CoreSite Realty, and Sabey Data Centers. Energy intensity is a metric that’s different from PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, the most popular data center efficiency metric. PUE is designed to measure how efficiently supporting data center infrastructure as a whole delivers energy to IT equipment. Energy intensity allows the operator to measure efficiency of each component subsystem, such as power equipment, cooling equipment, IT equipment, or, if necessary, the entire data center. It focuses on how much useful work a system achieves using energy it receives. At the Data Center World Global conference in Las Vegas next month, Iron Mountain VP of data centers Chris Bair, Intel data center architect John Musilli, and Department of Energy staff scientist and engineer Dale Sartor will talk about the role of the government in data center energy efficiency and explain the ins and outs of the Better Buildings Challenge. The 20 percent reduction in energy intensity across the eight Iron Mountain data centers amounts to 8.75MW total. In other words, the company has pledged to use 8.75MW less power to do the same amount of work it does now. Iron Mountain hasn’t provided much detail about how exactly it is planning to achieve the improvements. In an email, a spokesperson said the company would use “geothermal cooling and infrastructure innovations, including air and water-side economization,” as well as better airflow containment. The data centers in question are in Boston; Kansas City, Missouri; and just outside of Pittsburgh. The latter is Iron Mountain’s famous data center inside a limestone cave in Boyers, Pennsylvania. Caves play a big role in the company’s history. Iron Mountain founder Herman Knaust was a mushroom grower and seller in early 20th century and bought a cave in New York State in the 1930s to expand his growing facilities, giving it the name Iron Mountain. The mushroom business eventually dried up, and during the Cold War Knaust pivoted to use company facilities as secure underground storage for corporate documents to protect them from destruction by the Bomb. Today, Iron Mountain’s core business is still providing secure storage facilities for both companies and government agencies, except a lot of the information it stores now comes in digital form. Want to learn more? Join data center experts from Iron Mountain, Intel, and the Department of Energy, as well as 1,300 of your peers at Data Center World Global 2016, March 14-18, in Las Vegas, NV, for a real-world, “get it done” approach to converging efficiency, resiliency and agility for data center leadership in the digital enterprise. More details on the Data Center World website. |
| 9:59p | IT/Dev Connections Teams with Microsoft to Deliver TechNet Virtual Conference 2016 Many of you are aware already – but for those that are not, Microsoft is putting on a 3-day online event to talk about what’s coming and what to expect, working as an IT Pro in an extremely versatile and constantly changing profession. There have been tectonic-type shifts in the technology industry over the last few years, with much of it being led by Microsoft as the company has begun to revamp its entire corporate culture around today’s modern and disruptive technologies. To help IT Pros comprehend these changes, Microsoft is leading a 3-day discussion that will stream live HERE on the IT/Dev Connections 2016 web site March 1-3, 2016(stream will go live on March 1).
Partnering on this effort makes a lot of sense for both us and Microsoft. Here at IT/Dev Connections we agree with much of what Microsoft will propose, which is why we deliver the conference content that we do – and in the manner we offer it. For Microsoft, IT/Dev Connections is the perfect next step for TechNet Virtual Conference attendees so they can get deep-dive, technical solutions to current issues but also to expand their expertise on the topics Microsoft presents in its online event. Hit the Save the Date link above to add a reminder to your calendar, and then check back here for new information. But time is short! Bookmark the live stream site: TechNet Virtual Conference 2016 IT/Dev Connections 2016 is a no-nonsense, deep-dive technical community conference that is community and content driven – not a keynote-scripted event. Listed as one of the top DevOps conferences for 2016, ITDC covers the hottest industry topics in 5 categories including Cloud & Data Center, Data Platform & Business Intelligence, Enterprise Collaboration, Enterprise Management, Mobility, & Security, and Development & DevOps ensuring attendees leave with the knowledge to fix open problems and deliver technology planning information for long-term business strategy and continuity. IT/Dev Connections 2016 runs from October 10-13, 2016 at the ARIA Resort in Las Vegas. This first ran at http://devconnections.com/itdev-connecti |
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