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Wednesday, March 23rd, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Microsoft Tackles Big Problem with Fuel Cell-Powered Data Centers Fuel cells are an attractive alternative energy source for data centers, whose number and energy consumption continue growing at a fast pace, as people consume more and more digital services. So far, companies including Apple and eBay have deployed large centralized high-capacity fuel cell plants to power some of their data centers. But Microsoft has been experimenting with placing smaller fuel cells directly into IT racks, an approach that promises to do away with the power distribution infrastructure necessary to bring power from the utility feed to each server and convert it to the appropriate type of electricity – a process that results in a lot of energy being lost. While promising, the approach has one big problem that’s yet unsolved. Spikes in workloads servers need to process often result in significant spikes in power load, and fuel cells, which use a chemical process to convert gas to electricity, cannot ramp up their power output quickly enough. Traditional utility infrastructure handles such spikes very well. The problem is that fuel cells that are available today, while capable of serving high electrical loads, cannot consume fuel quickly enough to ramp up their power output to keep up with data center demands. A recently published paper, written by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research, zeroes in on this problem and proposes a way to solve it. The two primary ways to address this issue that have been proposed before are power capping, or server throttling, which basically means not letting servers ramp up load beyond a certain set point, or using energy storage to absorb the spikes. Neither solution on its own is ideal, the researchers write, since power capping translates to performance capping, and since having high-capacity energy storage just for the biggest of power spikes – which are infrequent – means lots of expensive capacity sits idle most of the time. According to the paper, it costs about $20,000 to increase capacity of the supercapacitors used to store energy by 1 kWh. “With an ESD-only solution that uses worst-case sizing, the TCO increases significantly to cover these infrequent occurrences,” the paper’s authors wrote. ESD stands for Energy Storage Device. They propose a solution that combines power capping and energy storage in a way that can reportedly be a lot more cost-efficient without taxing performance. Called SizeCap, it is a framework for coordinating the sizing of ESDs and power capping. Using the framework, the researchers claim they can reduce the necessary ESD capacity by 85 percent for a “workload with infrequent but large power surges, and by 50 percent for a workload with frequent power surges, under a reasonable SLA constraint.” They tested SizeCap and a variety of capping policies on simulated workloads and on actual production workloads in Microsoft’s data centers. Most server power consumption spikes are mild. While big spikes do happen, they happen rarely, but regardless of their frequency, the data center’s electrical infrastructure has to be ready to absorb them. The proposal is to use medium-capacity ESDs to absorb the small spikes, together with some small ESDs to help absorb the big spikes. During those big spikes, the small ESDs get some help from power capping, with the framework helping to determine the degree of power capping that allows the data center to continue meeting its Service Level Agreements. SizeCap is a framework for determining what the most optimal sizes of those ESDs are and what the most optimal power capping policy should be. Microsoft has been testing two types of in-rack fuel cells in recent years: ones that use natural gas and ones that use methane. In 2014, the company received a $5 million grant from the US government to study the latter in a joint project with the University of Maryland, fuel-cell vendor Redox Power Systems, and advanced-material specialist Trans-Tech. Microsoft has been studying viability of using methane-fueled fuel cells to power data centers since at least 2012 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where it launched a data center module powered by fuel cells that used methane generated by a municipal waste treatment plant. The company installed the module directly on the plant site. The biggest actual production deployments of fuel cells in data centers have been different from what Microsoft is attempting with its in-rack research. They are large centralized high-capacity fuel cell plants, deployed primarily by Bloom Energy, which has made more progress than others in selling fuel cells to data center operators. eBay, Apple, CenturyLink, and Equinix are companies that have publicly said that they have deployed Bloom’s solutions in their data centers. You can find the Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon paper in its entirety here. |
| 3:00p | GoDaddy Launches Cloud Servers and Bitnami-Powered Cloud Apps Worldwide  By The WHIR Web host and domain name provider GoDaddy expanded its hosting services to offer its Cloud Servers product and Bitnami-powered cloud applications which are available on a pay-as-you-go pricing model and hosting from four world-wide data centers. GoDaddy Cloud Servers is based on the open source cloud operating system OpenStack and supports various operating system distributions including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Cloud Servers were based around the needs of a freelance developer or small web agency creating websites and applications for a small to medium-sized businesses, According Jeff King, GoDaddy’s SVP and GM of hosting and security. It features control over virtual instances using a simple API (and access to multiple, public-facing APIs) as well as a user interface. Virtual instances can be provisioned in 54-seconds or less, and VM snapshots let developers reuse their configurations on new instances rather than start from scratch. Cloud Servers are also integrated with GoDaddy products such as Domains and DNS, which allows customers to manage and maintain new and existing domains and subdomains. Providing a Suite of Easy-to-Deploy Applications to DevelopersGoDaddy’s Cloud Applications are based on Bitnami, a library of open source application deployments, that provides one-click optimized installations of 130 applications ranging from content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, to customer relationship management tools like Odoo and OpenERP, to even more complicated applications. David Dennis, Bitnami’s VP of Marketing, said, “The Bitnami application catalog covers some stuff that’s pretty hardcore: Big Data applications, BI tools, and mobile back-end development tools.” Dennis said that many developers might start with CMS and CRM tools, then take things to “the next level” with some complex solutions. “Maybe their customer does want to do something with a mobile app or maybe they do want to have a better marketing automation engine than what you get with a basic CRM – so, they’re all in there and they’re all equally available and all easy enough to deploy and they really provide a giant toolkit for the developer to decide how they want to differentiate themselves versus the other offerings on the market.” Cloud Applications are also appealing to development shops that want to build their service offerings from simple websites to things like e-commerce and marketing automation. “They can focus their efforts on the clients’ needs and building the code, not on the guts of the infrastructure.” GoDaddy Cloud Server PricingCloud Servers available in configurations ranging from small instances (512 MB memory, 1 core, 20 GB SSD disk, 1 TB transfer) for 1 cent per hour, to large instances (8 GB memory, 4 cores, 80 GB SSD disk, 8 TB transfer) for 12 cents per hour. King said, “It is pay-as-you-go but we offer certain packaged capabilities starting at $5 per month.” He said a typical website would cost less than $20 per month, and it’s easy to scale up from there with more complex capabilities and services. The company is also providing a 30-day trial to let developers give it a try. Directing the Product at SMB DevelopersKing said that it would be wrong to interpret Cloud Servers as a direct rival to the cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Rackspace, who are competing for enterprise developers. “They’re trying to get people who are spinning up dozens or hundreds of servers. They’re focused on providing very high-end, complex services – global load balancing services adn things like that that small business customer and most web developers have no need for.” He noted that these platforms are “overkill” in terms of pricing and complexity for for most web developers and SMB customers. “What we’re providing is something much simpler, much easier to use,” also noting that they can also get DNS, domain names, security and IP addresses all with the same provider and using the same API and UI. “We think that’s going to be super compelling for this class of web developer,” King said. An International RolloutCloud Servers is being delivered from data centers in Phoenix, Virginia, The Netherlands and Singapore. GoDaddy originally introduced Cloud Servers in beta in April 2015, and was in limited availability since October 2015. It’s now available in 26 languages in 44 countries and territories. With its business largely focusing on small businesses in the west for a long time, GoDaddy has made a decided appeal to a more global audience with its entry into 11 new Asian markets earlier this year. It still doesn’t have a data center in the region’s largest market, China, despite its Chinese customers being able to buy .cn and .com domains, and other services. “Hosting in China is a complex thing – the environment there for companies outside China it’s complicated an difficult to get there,” King said. “For now, we’re hosting our Asian data centers in Signapore and that serves the Asian market very effectively… but it will be some time until we have a Chinese data center.” This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/g |
| 3:47p | Study: HPE Still Atop Cloud Infrastructure Equipment Market  By Talkin’ Cloud Cloud infrastructure equipment revenues for both Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems increased in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to a new study from IT market intelligence firm Synergy Research Group. In addition, Synergy Research Group noted Dell and Microsoft virtually tied for third place in this market, while IBM ranked behind these companies in Q4 2015. Other study results included: HPE leads in the cloud server segment and is a challenger in storage, while Cisco is dominant in the networking segment and continues to grow its server product line. Cisco leads in the public cloud infrastructure market, while HP has a clear lead in the private cloud sector. Total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues, including hardware and software, exceeded $60 billion in 2015. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 95 percent of the Q4 2015 cloud infrastructure market. “There continues to be particularly impressive growth in the public cloud infrastructure market,” Synergy Research Group founder Jeremy Duke said in a prepared statement. “But enterprises too are buying ever-larger volumes of infrastructure to support their private or hybrid cloud deployments. Across the board there is a massive swing away from enterprises running workloads over more traditional and inflexible IT infrastructure.” Recent data indicates there may be many new opportunities for cloud services providers beyond infrastructure as well. A study from Microsoft and 451 Research, titled “Beyond Infrastructure: Cloud 2.0 Signifies New Opportunities for Cloud Service Providers,” revealed nearly 70 percent of the opportunity for CSPs now centers on application hosting (email and business applications), managed services (backup and disaster recovery) and security services (threat management). This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-r |
| 5:45p | Go on a Virtual 360-Degree Google Data Center Tour Google builds some of the largest, most sophisticated, and energy efficient data centers in the world. Unfortunately for data center professionals who don’t work for the company, Google data centers are closed to them. Today at the first user conference for Google’s cloud infrastructure services in San Francisco, the company launched a 360-degree video tour of one of its data centers. The conference, called Google Cloud Platform Next, is where the company’s top management are attempting to make the case to the industry that Google is not only serious about enterprise cloud but plans to lead in the space, currently dominated by Amazon Web Services and, in a distant second position, Microsoft Azure. The company also announced at the event the launch of two new cloud data centers, in Oregon and Tokyo, and plans to launch 10 more between now and the end of 2017. Here’s the 360-degree Google data center tour. Use a tablet or a smartphone to view, but Google recommends that the best way to view it is on Google Cardboard: |
| 9:35p | Diane Greene: Google is “Dead Serious” about Enterprise Cloud In Google’s first big public attempt to build the case that it is a formidable competitor to Amazon and Microsoft in enterprise cloud services, some of the company’s top execs took the stage at its first cloud user conference in San Francisco Wednesday. From Google CEO Sundar Pichai and chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt to senior VP Diane Greene, senior VP of technical infrastructure Urs Hölzle, and VP of product management Brian Stevens, it was an all-hands-on-deck kind of keynote at Google Cloud Platform Next 2016. “We are dead serious about this business,” Greene, the founder of VMware who joined Google last year to lead its enterprise business, said during a press conference after the keynote. The company has invested a lot of money in its data centers and continues to do so, and “we’re going to put them to work as much as we can.” Reiterating what he has said before, Hölzle said during the press conference that cloud and IT services have the potential to become a much bigger business than online ads for Google, since the addressable market is “much larger.” Google execs were careful not to mention the competition by name during the keynote, referring to Amazon Web Services only once, when they announced Stackdriver, the new cloud management tool that combines monitoring and logging for both Google Cloud Platform and AWS. They built their case primarily by focusing on high performance of Google’s infrastructure, low cost of its cloud services, and the variety of services and features, all designed to let developers do what they do without worrying about infrastructure. Google also highlighted some new big customers, inviting Coca-Cola CTO Alan Boehme and Spotify’s VP of infrastructure Nicholas Harteau on stage to talk about their use of its cloud services. The Walt Disney Company was another major recent customer win. New Cloud Data CentersCompeting with the other cloud giants means trying to keep up with them in geographic scale. While Google’s data center infrastructure is already enormous and global in nature, the number of physical locations, or availability regions its cloud services can be hosted in, is well lower than Amazon’s or Microsoft’s. “Our data centers and our systems infrastructure are invisible to our customers and partners, but they really underpin everything we do,” Greene said. Google and its biggest cloud competitors have been lowering prices of their cloud services over the past several years, and data center efficiency has been one of the primary weapons in this cut-throat price war. It is the efficiency of Google’s infrastructure that enables the company to deliver a leading price-performance ratio, Greene said, echoing what Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has said about AWS. See also: Go on a Virtual 360-Degree Google Data Center Tour This week, in conjunction with the conference, Google announced it would launch two additional cloud regions, in Tokyo and Oregon, later this year and said it would launch new data centers to support 10 more cloud regions between now and the end of next year. The company did not say where those 10 upcoming regions would be. It generally doesn’t announce cloud locations too much ahead of time, Hölzle said. Asia will be an important focus in this expansion, however. “You can definitely expect quite a few [cloud data center locations] in Asia as well,” he said.  Attendees at Google Cloud Platform Next 2016 conference in San Francisco in March viewing the 360-degree virtual tour of a Google data center (Photo: Yevgeniy Sverdlik) If it thinks geographic reach is important for competing in the cloud services market, Google has a lot of catching up to do. Today, it has only four cloud regions, Central US, Eastern US, Western Europe, and East Asia. There are four availability zones in the Central US region, and three in each of the other ones. Microsoft’s Azure cloud runs in 22 regions around the world, including sites in North and South America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, and five more are in the works. Amazon Web Services provides 12 regions, including a region dedicated specifically to serving US government agencies. AWS also has plans to add five more regions before the end of 2017. |
| 10:18p | Qualcomm Backs Stratoscale in $27M Series C Funding Round By Talkin’ Cloud Qualcomm was one of several investors who helped cloud-based data center solution developer Stratoscale raise $27 million in the company’s Series C funding round, bringing the company’s lifetime total to $70 million. This week’s round of funding marks the first time that Qualcomm has expressed interest in the Israeli enterprise software company. Qualcomm said their backing of Stratoscale is indicative of the company’s belief in the growth of cloud-based data centers solutions, according to Mony Hassid, senor director of Qualcomm Ventures, the company’s venture capital arm. Stratoscale said it plans to use its latest shot of financing to bolster efforts surrounding Stratoscale Symphony, the company’s hardware-agnostic Software Defined Data Center solution, especially as the company looks to help customers switch from legacy infrastructure to cloud-based storage and networking. “This investment enables us to accelerate our adoption in the market and expand operations more quickly to meet the demand for an all-inclusive data center cloud offering that is scalable and efficient,” said Ariel Maislos, CEO of Stratoscale, in a statement. “We continue to deliver on the promise of what data centers should be without the burden of being locked into legacy infrastructure that doesn’t grow with your business.” Existing investors such as Cisco Investments, Intel Capital and SanDisk Ventures have also backed Stratoscale over the company’s brief three-year history. Earlier this month, Qualcomm and Red Hat announced an extension of their current partnership that would allow Qualcomm to make its 64-but ARM server chips available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-storage/qua |
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