Thursday, March 3rd, 2016

Time	Event
1:00p	ASHRAE Strikes PUE from Data Center Efficiency Standard Draft The data center industry spoke, and ASHRAE listened. The society is no longer proposing the use of PUE to set data center efficiency standards in a new standard document that’s currently in the works. ASHRAE drew criticism from some prominent industry voices last year after it released the first draft of standard 90.4, whose goal is to set energy efficiency standards specifically for data centers, recognizing that large stand-alone data centers need a special approach and cannot be lumped in with other building types as they currently are in standard 90.1. Standard 90.4 is being created to work together with 90.1 and references a lot of definitions in the older standard, meant for all building types, except low-rise residential buildings. ASHRAE doesn’t enforce compliance with its building standards, but they are a big deal because local building officials in the US use them extensively in building inspection and permitting. PUE Gone from the Standard The most controversial part of the first draft of 90.4, released for review and comment in February 2015, was its reliance on PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, as the data center energy efficiency metric. Developed and promoted by The Green Grid, it is the industry’s most widely used (and most widely misused) metric, but the draft’s critics argued that using PUE in the ASHRAE standard would disadvantage colocation providers, whose facilities often run at partial load for the majority of their lifespan. Put simply, the metric compares power consumed by IT to total power supplied to the facility. The bigger the portion of total power that doesn’t make it to IT equipment on the data center floor, the more inefficient the facility’s infrastructure is. Therefore, the more power IT equipment consumes, the better the overall PUE. If the success of your business relies to a great extent on having available capacity for more servers, that unused capacity will theoretically have negative impact on your PUE. Second draft of 90.4, released last August, got rid of PUE, introducing instead two new efficiency metrics – Mechanical Load Component and Electrical Loss Component – but made PUE one of the alternative options for compliance. The latest draft, released for review this January, gets rid of PUE altogether, replacing it in the alternative compliance section with a metric that combines MLC and PLC. As an example, here’s how Design MLC (there’s Design MLC and Annualized MLC) is calculated: More details on MLC and PLC in the draft itself, which is worth reviewing and commenting on as soon as possible if your job has anything to do with data center design and operation. The point of the alternative compliance method is to give data center operators more flexibility. If the mechanical system doesn’t meet the required MLC level, but the electrical system is so efficient that it compensates for inefficiency of the mechanical system, they can use the combined metric to comply with the standard. Cooling Upgrade Requirements Clarified Another complaint was that the initial draft could be interpreted in a way that would force operators to upgrade existing cooling systems. The new standard should apply only to new data centers or data center expansions. But, if a data center expansion is getting some or all cold air from a previously existing cooling system, should that cooling system be upgraded to? That wasn’t clear in the first draft, but the current draft specifies that older mechanical systems supplying air to a new portion of a data center don’t have to be upgraded. View the current draft of ASHRAE Standard 90.4 here. The comment period for this draft ends in less than two weeks, on March 14, so, if you have any comments, it’s time to let ASHRAE know. Later this month, join me and a panel of experts in a keynote session that will focus on ASHRAE 90.4 at the Data Center World Global conference in Las Vegas. The panelists are: Don Beaty: founder of the engineering firm DLB Associates. Beaty has spent many years on ASHRAE committees dedicated to developing data center standards. Chris Crosby: co-founder and CEO of data center developer and provider Compass Datacenters. Crosby is a data center industry veteran who was part of the team that founded Digital Realty Trust, the world’s largest wholesale data center developer and provider. Rich Miller: founder and former editor in chief of Data Center Knowledge. Miller is currently editor in chief at Data Center Frontier, which he also founded. Join Don Beaty, Chris Crosby, Rich Miller, myself, and 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. (Comment on this)
4:00p	Are Security Data Breaches Hastening a Shift to the Cloud? Mario Duarte is Director of Security at Snowflake Computing. There is an old saying that there are two things certain in life: death and taxes. I would like to add a third one–data security breaches. The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) defines a data security breach as “an incident in which an individual name plus a Social Security, driver’s license number, medical record or financial records (credit/debit cards included) is potentially put at risk because of exposure.” The ITRC reports that 717 data breaches have occurred this year exposing over 176 million records. On the surface, finding a pattern across all such breaches may appear daunting considering how varied the targeted companies are. However, the ITRC argues that the impacted organizations are similar in that all of the data security breaches contained “personally identifiable information (PII) in a format easily read by thieves, in other words, not encrypted.” Based on my experience, I’d expect that a significant portion of the data breaches compromised data in on-premises systems. Being forced to realize the vulnerability of on-premises systems, organizations are beginning to rethink their cloud strategy. For example, Tara Seals declares in her recent Infosecurity Magazine article that “despite cloud security fears, the ongoing epidemic data breaches is likely to simply push more enterprises towards the cloud.” Is the move to the cloud simply a temporary, knee-jerk reaction to the growing trend in security breaches or are we witnessing a permanent shift towards the cloud? Some industry experts conclude that a permanent shift is happening. Tim Jennings from Ovum for example, believes that a driving force behind enterprises’ move to the cloud is that they lack the in-house security expertise to deal with today’s threats and highly motivated bad actors. Perhaps the headline from the Onion, which declares “China Unable To Recruit Hackers Fast Enough To Keep Up With Vulnerabilities In U.S. Security Systems” is not so funny after all. But are the cloud and cloud offerings more secure than their on-premises counterparts? Tara Seals appears to suggest that they can be when she writes that, “Modern cloud providers have invested large sums of money into end-to-end security” by providing sophisticated security intelligence.” Let’s consider data encryption as an illustration of her point. The principle behind safeguarding information by leveraging encryption is as old as the Roman Empire, with most organizations agreeing that it is an effective way to minimize the impact of a security breach. But if that is true, what is behind ITRC’s observation that PII was not encrypted by the impacted organizations? The truth of the matter is that encryption is hard. Take the example of storing encryption keys using Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). In general, using an HSM is a good security practice for safeguarding encryption keys and for meeting government standards and compliance requirements. However, its utility is as useful as an unlocked safe without the proper security and operational controls to protect it. To that end, organizations moving to the cloud need to understand their cloud provider’s encryption framework to measure their effectiveness in thwarting an intruder’s attack. Things to consider when assessing a cloud provider’s encryption solution include: Encryption key wrapping strategies Rotation encryption key frequency Methods for rekeying encryption keys Ability to monitor, log, and alert when suspicious activities are performed against the HSM Tim Jennings and Tara Seals present compelling arguments for the possible security advantage of cloud providers over their on-premises counterparts. However, I feel that there are other equally or possibly more compelling reasons than just that cloud providers have more talented security experts. The systems that organizations use to store and analyze data are often critical to the business. As a result, any planned or unplanned outage can significantly impact productivity and may even result in lost revenue. Now imagine the position that a CISO may find herself when requesting that an emergency security patch be deployed under the aforementioned situation. Even under the best conditions, coordinating and deploying a security update may take weeks if not months, which ultimately leaves the system vulnerable to a bad actor. That’s where a cloud solution can outperform its on-premises counterpart. An effective cloud solution allows one to almost instantly deploy security updates without impacting consumers of its services and thus reducing the time that the system is vulnerable. Alas, PII data is so financially attractive of a target, whether the data is located on-premises or on the cloud, that one should more and more attempts—some of which will succeed—to breach systems in the cloud as organizations continue to leverage more cloud services. It is therefore imperative that organizations perform their due diligence when selecting the right security-focused cloud services partners. 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)
6:08p	Storage Failure Brings Salesforce Down for Some in Europe Storage hardware failure has brought Salesforce down for some users in Europe in a lengthy outage Wednesday. The outage made the popular cloud CRM software provider’s service inaccessible for customers in Europe whose applications were running on the EU2 instance. Users didn’t have full access to the instance for about 11 hours, starting around 3 pm GMT, although they could access their data in read-only mode from about 8 pm. It’s unclear what constitutes a Salesforce instance, whether it is a group of physical servers, a single server, or a data center. The latter is unlikely, since there are close to 40 instances in North America alone. There is a total of seven EU instances, covering the EMEA region. It’s unclear how many customers were on the EU2 instance and saw Salesforce go down. We’ve reached out to Salesforce for clarification, but a company spokesperson, Gina Sheibley, chose not to answer specific questions, referring us instead to the Salesforce status page. “The problem was caused by a hardware failure within the storage tier,” company representatives explained on its status webpage (click on the long crimson strip across from EU2). “Normal service was restored once the hardware failure was isolated and resolved.” Salesforce is going through a major shift in the way it designs and operates its data center infrastructure. It is switching from many specialized server specs and manual configuration to emphasizing standardization and automation, the web-scale data center approach companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have taken. Read more: Salesforce Latest Convert to Web-Scale Data Center Way (Comment on this)
7:57p	Data Center REITs Scored Big in 2015 Despite Weak Markets February was the last of three consecutive losing months for the NASDAQ, an event investors have not experienced since 2011. Seemingly immune to broader stock-market troubles, all data center REITs reported record leasing and earnings growth for the fourth quarter of 2015. There’s a number of tailwinds driving strong data center REIT results, including strong market fundamentals, enterprise adoption of cloud computing, and the exponential growth of wireless data. These macro trends continue to propel data center REIT growth, despite a backdrop of weak global economic reports, low commodity and energy prices, and anemic holiday sales reported by US-based retailers. “Data center demand is not directly linked to job growth, household formation, or even the price of oil, although the drop over the last 18 months is striking,” Digital Realty Trust CEO William Stein said on the company’s earnings call last week. “We have the good fortune to be levered to secular demand drivers that are both somewhat independent from and growing faster than GDP.” Enterprise customers are increasingly outsourcing new workloads to hyperscale public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Office 365, and Google Cloud Platform. Data center REITs are also benefiting from the fact that many of the enterprises moving to cloud adapt a hybrid cloud approach — a combination of public cloud services and dedicated data center infrastructure they control and manage themselves. DuPont Fabros Technology DuPont Fabros kicked off the Q4 earnings parade in early February, announcing outstanding results after recommitting to its wholesale data center roots. DFT reported a record 47MW in signed leases for 2015, including 12 leases for a combined 32MW in the fourth quarter. The results exceeded its previous annual leasing record by more than 5MW. The company confirmed that Toronto expansion plans would impact earnings by early 2017, while management continues to evaluate potential expansion into Phoenix and Portland markets. Currently, the company only has 1.5MW of available capacity, with another 30MW expected to be placed in service during 2016. Notably, DFT was able to achieve a return on investment of 13 percent on its latest leasing activity, a full 100 basis points above its target return. Read more: DuPont Fabros Firing on All Cylinders: Time to Step on Gas? CoreSite Realty Corp. Colocation and connectivity focused CoreSite signed more revenue in 2015 than it has in any previous year. During 2015, CoreSite added 95 new customer logos, a 16 percent year-over-year increase, including 41 net new logos during Q4 2015 alone. While the entire data center REIT sector performed well last year, CoreSite delivered sector-leading 50 percent in total returns to investors. However, CoreSite will be maxing out its existing powered shell and building capacity in some key markets, an important issue management will need to address in 2016. Read more: CoreSite Reports Strong Q4 but Shell Capacity in Key Markets Short Equinix Global interconnection and colocation giant Equinix, a Fortune 500 company with $18.5 billion market cap, is now the largest member of the exclusive data center REIT club. Equinix had a lot of changes to report during 2015, including, REIT approval mid-year, the acquisition of TelecityGroup in Europe, which made it the biggest data center provider in the region, and of Bit-isle in Japan. Additionally, Equinix made substantial investments in its own IT platform to support hyperscale public cloud providers and to fund its sales and marketing initiatives targeting enterprise hybrid cloud customers moving forward. This Wednesday, Equinix announced a four-continent expansion, planning to launch new data centers in Dallas, São Paulo, Tokyo, and Sydney in the near future. Read more: Equinix: the Complicated Math of a Technology REIT Digital Realty Trust With Digital Realty having closed its Telx acquisition, Equinix is now the third largest Digital Realty tenant and accounts for 4 percent of the San Francisco-based REIT’s revenue. IBM Softlayer and CenturyLink remain Digital’s two largest tenants, at 7.5 percent and 6.1 percent, respectively. Previously, Digital had reported the six Telx leased locations at 100 percent occupancy. Now that Telx is a part of Digital, the space available for colocation and interconnection customer expansion is reported as inventory offered for lease. While there has been a lot of recent M&A activity in the data center REIT space, the $1.9 billion Telx acquisition was the only true game changer. Read more: Telx Beefs Up Digital Realty’s Interconnection Revenue and Cloud Strategy Digital Realty’s Top 20 customers accounted for 44 percent of revenues at the end of 2015, while tenants who occupied less than 2,500 square feet each accounted for just 5.6 percent of revenue. Telx has beefed up Digital’s colo and connectivity options to complement its global wholesale data center footprint, including a 152,650-square foot internet gateway in Atlanta. Digital recently added a whole new market to its portfolio, buying 27 acres of land in Frankfurt, which will eventually house three data centers in this European financial center. Read more: Digital Realty to Enter Frankfurt Data Center Market QTS Realty Trust QTS continued to leverage its flexible suite of customer solutions and large-scale infrastructure to deliver 15.8 percent returns on invested capital. Management expects that core organic revenue growth for 2016 will be in the mid-teens. QTS will be entering the Chicago data center market this year, launching the repurposed 133,000-square foot former Chicago Sun-Times press facility located on 30 acres near downtown. Management anticipates the mid-year 2016 opening of the initial 14,000-square foot phase will be a short-term drag on overall portfolio returns. The company has been working through a backlog of large multi-megawatt contracts, where the deployments are phased over several quarters. These booked-not-billed contracts give QTS earnings visibility and the confidence to move forward with its current development plans. Read more: QTS Managing for Long-Term Growth, Expanding in Seven US Markets CyrusOne CyrusOne pretty much hit the cover off the ball, reporting record leasing of 30MW, or more than 200,000 colocation square feet, in the fourth quarter. Cloud computing wins accounted for a large part of CyrusOne’s leasing success. Leasing activity was split fairly evenly between existing customer expansions and more than 170 new logos added last year. The signing of more than 1,400 leases contributed to a record $42 million backlog for future customer deployments. CyrusOne expects to book between $19 and $24 million of annualized revenue in the second half of 2016, with the balance recognized in 2017. Last year CyrusOne closed its $400 million acquisition of Cervalis, a colocation and disaster recovery data center provider with extensive operations in the New York market. On the earnings call, CEO Gary Wojtaszek revealed that CyrusOne is now looking to expand its operations into northern New Jersey. Read more: CyrusOne Reports Record 2015, Plans Big New Jersey Expansion Wojtaszek is agnostic regarding the New Jersey expansion and is willing to purchase land for ground-up development if a suitable facility can’t be bought at an attractive price. But, DuPont Fabros may just have a facility in New Jersey for sale that fits the bill. Want to know how other data center REITs did in the fourth quarter? Curious about investing in data center REITs in general? Visit the Data Center Knowledge Investing section for everything you need to know about this high-performing sector. (Comment on this)
9:08p	Mirantis Launches Latest OpenStack Cloud Distro By The VAR Guy Mirantis rolled out the newest version of its OpenStack distribution this week. The release, Mirantis OpenStack 8, advances the vendor’s strategy of providing an agnostic, “pure-play” open source cloud solution. Mirantis OpenStack 8 is based on OpenStack Liberty, the current stable release of the open source cloud computing platform. Liberty debuted last fall. In announcing its latest implementation of OpenStack, Mirantis emphasized features designed to enhance stability, particularly a new test suite. The company also says it is the “#1 bug fixer in Liberty, with over 1,100 bugs fixed and an additional 300 or so bugs fixed in Mirantis OpenStack 8.0.” Mirantis OpenStack 8.0 adds a variety of other cloud computing features, too. For the full list, you can refer to Mirantis’s blog. But features aren’t really the biggest item of note in the newest Mirantis OpenStack distribution. What continues to distinguish Mirantis from most other OpenStack vendors is what it calls its “pure-play” approach to the open source cloud. That means shipping an OpenStack implementation that is not tied to any particular cloud ecosystem or software stack. “Mirantis doesn’t ship SDN, storage or virtualization platforms with its distribution,” the company said. “Instead, at the heart of Mirantis OpenStack is a highly available infrastructure controller that makes it possible to orchestrate a wide range of virtualization, storage, and networking platforms of the customer’s choosing.” If you like choice, Mirantis’s pure-play offering is a good thing. And in a market where other open source cloud platforms tend to be offered by vendors that tie OpenStack to other platforms — usually to a particular GNU/Linux distribution and/or virtualization platform, which they use to host OpenStack — Mirantis continues to stand out. 26,000 organizations — which the company announced this week as the current size of its user base — apparently agree. This first ran at http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/mirantis-unveils-newest-openstack-offering-reaches-26000- (Comment on this)
9:21p	How Cybersecurity-Literate are You? Data centers are under constant attack. Hardly a day goes by without some kind of hack being uncovered. Intellectual property is stolen, cash ripped off from bank systems, websites brought down and millions of identities stolen. The 2015 U.S. State of Cybercrime Survey found that 77 percent of organizations had detected a serious security event in the past 12 months, with 34 percent noting an increase in such events over the previous year. “We’ve been at war here for almost 20 years, and many large companies are still in denial,” says William Kiss, CEO of Global 1 Research & Development, and speaker at the Data Center World Global conference later this month in Las Vegas. “And, small and medium-sized businesses still think they are not vulnerable to attack.” Kiss hopes to bring awareness to the IT community when he holds a five-hour Cyber Security Seminar/Data Breach Boot Camp as part of Data Center World’s Premium Pass program on Monday, March 14. Kiss will pull from his company’s nearly two decades of security and infrastructure protection to provide a comprehensive look at how to understand, protect against, and remediate a cyberattack on your business. For example, do you know what a spear-phishing attack is, and how it can negatively impact your business? It’s in your best interest to know the answers if you already don’t. Here’s the Cliff Note version: Not to be confused with phishing, spear-phishing often has a different motive to conventional phishing where scammers perform high-volume attacks generally looking for relatively low-value targets, such as credit card numbers that can be sold on the black market. Spear-phishing is a way of exploring an organization to find credentials that open up access to a company. Targeting a small number of people working at a company can often yield a foothold into that company, perhaps via a compromised computer, or a compromised password, given out by an unwitting employee. Once a foothold has been gained, it can be used to mount an advanced persistent threat (APT), which is modern-day lingo for an extended hacking campaign, designed to steal information from a potential target. A few ways Kiss suggests for staying educated and protecting your company from cyberattacks is by requiring SOC-2 compliance from your information-processing vendors, forming a Cyber Security Awareness program, recommending that your management team join organizations such as INFRAGARD or DSAC; and having your cyber liability coverage examined by a risk management professional. You do have insurance, right? If much of the above information is foreign to you, this Cyber Security Seminar/Data Breach Boot Camp could save you and your company time, money … and face. This is just one of eight workshops you can participate in if you register for Data Center World’s Premium Pass day. View descriptions for all of the workshops happening on March 14, then sign up for your Premium Pass. Join William Kiss and 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. This first ran at http://www.afcom.com/news/cyber-security-literate/ (Comment on this)

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