Tuesday, April 12th, 2016

Time	Event
9:00a	Under the Hood of Hadoop: Its Journey from Open Source to Self-Service Raymie Stata is CEO of Altiscale. Apache Hadoop has transitioned from a Silicon Valley innovation to a critical technology for businesses around the world. What started as an in-house project at Yahoo has become the de facto-standard for Big Data processing. It is making deep impacts in industries that historically haven’t had Big Data embedded into their DNA, such as finance, healthcare and energy. What’s even more impressive is the staggering amount of innovation surrounding Hadoop with the growing ecosystem of software built on top of it. In the Hadoop ecosystem, evolution is to be encouraged, and as Hadoop continues to move beyond its Internet roots, it is also evolving. The question: “What is Hadoop?” has become a trick question of sorts given it can be defined in a number of ways. Hadoop is both an Apache project and an ecosystem of technologies. Hadoop the project was the catalyst for an entire ecosystem of Big Data-related projects, which fall under the umbrella broadly called the “Hadoop ecosystem.” This ecosystem does not stand still. There exists an incredible network of software built on top of Hadoop that exemplifies the staggering innovation surround Hadoop and is a testament to its value in today’s data-driven world. This software includes those such as Hive, HBase, and, more recently, Spark and Kafka. And that just scratches the surface of what’s out there. With discussions around Hadoop comes the question of Spark and whether it is a replacement for or successor to Hadoop. Spark is certainly a potential successor for MapReduce. While it still has a way to go in terms of scalability and robustness, it is making fast progress and will eventually completely replace MapReduce for any new code. But in Hadoop 2.0, MapReduce is just a small part of Hadoop. The main components of the Hadoop project today are the YARN resource manager and the HDFS storage system. Spark has neither a resource manager nor storage system, but it needs both to operate. Hadoop and Spark are tremendous complements to each other, and they will co-evolve for years to come. In terms of adoption, Hadoop has matured beyond early-adopter Internet companies to span enterprises considered more mainstream, such as those in finance and healthcare. As Hadoop infiltrates the enterprise, more and more organizations are putting business-critical processes on top of it and committing significant budgets toward it. While Hadoop adoption is on the rise, those using it waste way too much time doing the equivalent of janitorial work with large amounts of data. Data scientists are bogged down by administrative tasks, including wrangling data and wrestling Hadoop clusters. The next big wave of innovation in the Hadoop ecosystem will be in self-service and we’re already starting to see solutions that help data scientists manage the complexities of Hadoop so that they can focus on uncovering meaningful insights from their data. Hadoop-based data analytics lends itself more to self-service capabilities as compared to traditional Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW). Self-service gives programmers, data scientists, and business analysts direct access to all of the data in the enterprise, bypassing the high priests of data that slow everything down and drive up costs. This trend toward self-service will continue to accelerate, which in turn will drive the emergence of new tools for data management and engineering, as well as on-going work in security and new approaches to data governance. Like all of IT, Big Data is migrating to the cloud. Historically, companies were cautious to put sensitive data in the cloud. However, more and more IT leaders today are growing comfortable and confident in the cloud and testing the waters with hybrid deployments of Hadoop. Hadoop adoption is unmistakably trending up. While it may take time for Hadoop to supplant existing data investments in more conservative organizations, it’s likely that any enterprise today building a data infrastructure from the ground up will consider Hadoop. And as its popularity grows, so will its journey toward self-service and cloud-based deployments. What started as a small open source project, is now a critical component in today’s data-driven landscape. 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)
1:00p	Canara Adds ‘-as-a-Service’ Option to Power Monitoring There’s a general consensus that almost any degree of regular power and performance monitoring of the power supply systems of the data center will eventually result in cost savings. However, how soon will organizations reach that critical break-even point? In an effort to address customer concerns about up-front costs, facilities management service provider Canara announced on Tuesday it has begun offering its UPS power management service, called Insight+ for Batteries, on optional terms where the annual fee is replaced with a periodic subscription model. “When you take a look at the battery monitoring industry as a whole, it really is not keeping pace in growth with the rest of the data center industry,” said Tom Mertz, Canara’s CEO, in an interview with Datacenter Knowledge. The biggest challenge he’s seen throughout the past few decades is that the up-front capital expenditure is great enough that customer organizations have to truly believe in the ROI potential of the service, before they’re willing to make an investment. “We also felt that was a barrier of entry to some of the mid-size, mid-tier data centers,” Mertz added. Large data centers are usually more willing to provide the up-front capital, but the mid-tier and smaller data centers, for both on-premises enterprises and colocation, tend to plan their UPS expenditures every five years — right about when batteries are expected to fail. Acid Test It’s a process Mertz calls “replacing the acid,” not unlike changing the engine oil on an automobile. Car owners pat themselves on the back when they change the oil every six months; data center operators are praised when they replace the acid every five years on the dot. But what seems like vigilance may actually be incurring significant costs. A more pro-active strategy — which involves a periodic, comprehensive report on the data center’s power supply situation — could save, by Mertz’ estimate, as much as $3 out of every $5 spent on data center power. All that being said, Canara (which relocated its headquarters from San Rafael to Atlanta just last month) doesn’t bill itself as a complete DCIM solution. Indeed, Cologix integrates Canara’s monitoring lights and predictive analytics into its own DCIM platform. The jewel in Canara’s crown up to now has been predictive analytics, which some might find unusual given the fact that battery failure patterns tend to be predictable, following an identifiable pattern. A 2014 global study by battery manufacturer BAE actually dubbed this pattern the “bathtub diagram:” the plot of failure rate over time. “Attention to proper maintenance will have the biggest influence on achieving the desired lifetime result, wrote the BAE researchers. That was BAE’s definition of a proactive strategy, which involved following the care guidelines provided by the manufacturer (being a battery manufacturer itself, one would expect little else). What Canara would add to this picture is a system that alerts the operator when a failure pattern is being recognized. Acid Asset Management But is full-scale predictive analytics (PA) truly necessary, when all a battery manufacturer suggests is that operators check the scale frequently and keep an eye out for bathtubs? “While batteries, you would think, are all manufactured the same way and all have predictable trends associated with them,” responded Canara’s Tom Mertz, “that’s not necessarily the case. Because the battery has become a consumable, the general consensus is that the battery is just lead-acid, it decays, creates energy, and how complex is that? Well, there are a variety of different manufacturing levels and different processes that take place; so therefore, you get different trends and different scales.” Those differences are recorded in Canara’s own database, said Mertz, whose details stretch back well over the past 20 years. “In order to predict what happens on a battery,” the CEO told Datacenter Knowledge, “you have to be able to look backwards through the trends, apply those trends to the battery performance that’s currently going on. And then you can predict when that battery’s going to have a problem going forward.” In a typical data center, he explained, there are passive monitors in place (some of which are Canara-branded) that can signal when a battery has reached a specified temperature, ohmic value, or voltage, and raise an appropriate alert. Usually that alert comes well before a complete battery failure — Mertz agreed that 30 days is a reasonable expectation, although some clients could set the thresholds as narrow as a few days. Canara’s PA will raise an issue prior to such a threshold being reached. Could this be too proactive? Not if the objective of operators is to maintain the nominal state of the data center as a whole, as opposed to focusing on individual incidents. This more holistic approach is critical to a cost containment strategy, he said, where operators hope to demonstrate return on investment. That ROI goal will only be accelerated, Mertz maintains, if up-front costs can be eliminated — which is the objective of Tuesday’s announcement. “Data centers are very expensive facilities to build and operate,” the CEO reminds us. “So if you have a battery asset that’s worth $6 million, and that asset gets turned over every five years… if you have somebody who’s predictively and proactively monitoring that asset, and we can defer $3.5 million of that $6 million and put (it) into new electrical equipment that’ll make them more efficient, or build out more white space for clients;0 that’s where that return on invested capital becomes important in an asset like that. If we’re going to be able to help contribute to that, then I believe predictive analytics is a big part of the asset management that we provide.” 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)
6:51p	Box Partners with AWS, IBM to Comply with Local Cloud Storage Laws By Talkin’ Cloud Box is getting more enterprise-friendly with the launch of Box Zones. According to an announcement at Box World Tour Europe on Tuesday, Box Zones give enterprises the choice to store data regionally across Europe and Asia, which will address compliance concerns of data storage. Box has partnered with AWS and IBM Cloud for content in Box to be stored in Germany, Ireland, Singapore and Japan. Complying with regional laws can get complicated so being able to host data within the respective countries where data is stored provides peace of mind to business customers. Box is used by more than 57,000 businesses for secure content management and collaboration. “Businesses today are more connected, collaborative and global thanks to the power of the cloud,” Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box said in a statement. “Yet for many companies, local laws and regulations have forced them to make technology tradeoffs that limit their success and place a drag on employee productivity and collaboration. Box Zones will help power digital transformation for enterprise customers across Europe and Asia and accelerate our international presence.” By leveraging third-party infrastructure, Box is taking a different approach than its competitor Dropbox, who recently outlined its plan to migrate fully away from AWS. Box said it will continue to operate its own data centers in the US. “Box Zones has been a key focus of our engineering team for the past couple of years, with the core goal of separating our application and service from how and where we store encrypted files,” Levie said in a blog post. “Box Zones, and its corresponding architecture affords us the flexibility to leverage both our own data centers and select cloud partners to accelerate our footprint in new geographies.” Box Zones will be available in May for an additional fee, leveraging Amazon S3 on AWS Regions in Germany, Ireland, Japan and Singapore. The service is scheduled to be available via IBM Cloud in Europe and Asia. “Security is the top priority for AWS and our customers. With the recent launch of Box KeySafe running on AWS, Box offers companies of all sizes greater control over their business-critical, sensitive content, and furthers that mission with today’s introduction of Box Zones,” Terry Wise, Vice President of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, Amazon Web Services, Inc said in a statement. “We believe customers should have the freedom to choose where and how their data is stored. With Box Zones leveraging Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), customers can better meet the highest levels of security and regulatory compliance required in their respective geographies.” Original article appeared at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-storage/box-partners-aws-ibm-comply-local-cloud-storage-laws (Comment on this)
10:27p	Emerson Files Papers to Shed Network Power Business It’s official: Emerson filed papers with the SEC today announcing its intent to spin off its Network Power business after the unit suffered a 28 percent slump in sales from 2011-2014, according to a Bloomberg article. The slowdown can be attributed to more and more companies turning to third-party data center services instead of buying their own servers and related networking equipment. For years it was a lucrative arena for Emerson and hardware heavyweights like Hewlett-Packard and Schneider Electric. Shedding the unit, valued around $4 billion according to analysts, will allow Emerson to focus on its more lucrative businesses mostly focused on equipment for controlling industrial processes and components for heating and air-conditioning systems. Newly named Vertiv, the unit is expected to operate as a separate public company after 100 percent of outstanding common stock is distributed tax-free to Emerson shareholders, according to a press release. There is talk on the street, however, that Siemens AG has shown interest in acquiring the network power business as well as some private equity firms, according to a Reuters’ article. Regardless of whether that acquisition pans out, Emerson Network Power’s Business Leader Scott Barbour is very optimistic about the spin off, which should be completed in September 2016, according to a press release. “Our years as part of Emerson have given us a tremendous foundation from which to launch and grow Vertiv as an independent company. Our team is looking forward to the opportunity to concentrate on our core competencies, expand our global customer base, strengthen our industry leading positions, and create value for our future shareholders.” Emerson CEO David N. Farr concurs: “Today marks another step forward in a process we began in early 2015 focused on strengthening Emerson and preparing the Company to capitalize on future growth opportunities. The spinoff of Vertiv will sharpen Emerson’s focus on high-growth markets and establish Vertiv as an industry-leading public company under Scott Barbour’s strong leadership.” Vertiv offers a broad range of products in both power and thermal management and provides lifecycle management services and solutions for deploying, maintaining and optimizing these products. It also provides infrastructure management, monitoring, controls and software solutions for its customers’ critical applications. (Comment on this)

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