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Wednesday, April 20th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Microsoft Moves Away from Data Center Containers The cloud will not be housed in data center containers. Google has taken the container route for building out data center capacity in the past but eventually decided against it. Now, Microsoft has also found that containers just aren’t the best way for it to scale. The Redmond, Washington-based giant went through multiple generations of data center containers, from standard shipping containers it stacked two-high at its Chicago data center years ago to custom-designed ITPACs, which it had been deploying in data centers from Quincy, Washington, to Boydton, Virginia, since 2010. But because it has placed so much focus on growing its cloud services in recent years, Microsoft has had to expand data center capacity around the world at a pace that couldn’t be achieved with containers, Kushagra Vaid, general manager for hardware infrastructure at the company’s cloud and enterprise division, said in an interview. Amazon also has used data center containers to host its cloud infrastructure. In a conference presentation in 2011, one of its top infrastructure engineers James Hamilton showed a picture of two containers, one stacked on top of the other. The presentation was a rare look inside the cloud giant’s computing platform. The company is extremely secretive about its infrastructure strategy, and it’s unclear whether that strategy still includes containers. About two years ago, Microsoft’s infrastructure team made a radical change to its hardware approach, going from different product teams making their own hardware decisions to standardizing on a handful of server designs that took cues from server specs Facebook open sourced through its Open Compute Project initiative. The team also realized it would gain a lot from standardizing on the data center design as it scaled globally, but standardizing on the ITPAC wouldn’t make sense. It used ITPACs in data centers it built for itself, but to scale at the pace that it wanted to scale, it would have to take colocation space from data center providers, so standardizing on a non-containerized colo design made a lot more sense, Vaid explained. This design can be used across both the huge data centers Microsoft builds for itself and the facilities it leases from commercial providers. Microsoft considers time to market a key differentiator for its cloud services, and it has been ahead of both Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform (its biggest competitors in this space) in terms of the number of locations that support Azure. To maintain this edge, the company has been taking down colocation space at a maddening pace. In North America alone, it signed three leases for nearly 30MW of capacity total in 2015, according to the commercial real estate firm North American Data Centers, and three more amounting to 47MW just in the first quarter of this year. Most of the data center capacity Microsoft takes down is to support Azure and Office 365, Vaid said. Both are growing with tremendous speed, and the company has to make sure it has enough capacity to support the demand. Containers were a way to implement some key design concepts, such as containment and busbar power distribution. “We realized that we can do the same thing in a colo,” he said. Microsoft’s next-generation colo design uses learnings from the container experience, providing the “best of both worlds,” Kushagra said, the efficiency of containment and power distribution of ITPACs and the short time to market of the leased data center model. |
| 4:56p | Intel Doubling Down on Data Center Business, Cutting 12,000 Jobs  By Talkin’ Cloud Intel will lay off 12,000 workers, or 11 percent of its total workforce, as it restructures to move away from manufacturing chips for personal computers to focus on cloud hardware for data centers and the Internet of Things (IoT), the company announced along with its first quarter results on Tuesday. Intel said that growth from those two sectors combined to nearly offset its decline in PC revenues last year. Data center and IoT business grew by a combined $2.2 billion in revenue last year, 40 percent of Intel’s total and the majority of its operating profit. Amid the talk of efficiency and fueling revenue growth, Intel says it will invest in those growth areas, as well as its memory and connectivity products, 2-and-1s, gaming, and home gateways. Since Intel is not about to become a video games publisher, or get into smart home installation, that means memory, connectivity, and processors that will (more explicitly) be its core will be powering cloud infrastructure. Wired points out that it already does so for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and that ODC reports that it holds 99 percent of the cloud server chip market. The same article points out that Intel’s strategy may depend on how it meets the challenge of spiking GPU demand as deep learning is adopted by companies providing cloud services. There were six companies offering GPUs in the cloud as of mid-2015, according to NVIDIA. The bulk of the cuts will take place in the next 60 days, but they will continue through mid-2017, and come through site consolidations, a re-evaluation of programs, and both voluntary and involuntary departures. It hopes to save $750 million in 2016 and an annual run rate of $1.4 billion by the time the cuts are finished, while it will pay out $1.2 billion in the quarter of this year to make that happen. “Our results over the last year demonstrate a strategy that is working and a solid foundation for growth,” said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in an email (PDF) to Intel employees. “The opportunity now is to accelerate this momentum and build on our strengths.” “These actions drive long-term change to further establish Intel as the leader for the smart, connected world,” he added. “I am confident that we’ll emerge as a more productive company with broader reach and sharper execution.” Intel’s Xeon E7 v3 processors power AWS’ X1 instance, a high-performance cloud for memory-intensive workloads, which is expected to roll out this year. This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/i |
| 6:01p | Data Center Guru Mark Thiele Makes a Switch, Joins Cloud Startup Mark Thiele, a well-known figure in the data center industry, has joined an enterprise cloud technology startup called Apcera. He was previously executive VP of ecosystem development at Switch, the company that builds and operates some of the world’s largest data center campuses.  Mark Thiele Thiele has been a prolific blogger and conference speaker on all things related to data centers and IT infrastructure. In the past, he has led data center strategy at VMware and overseen global IT infrastructure at Brocade. Here’s an article on data center containers Thiele wrote for Data Center Knowledge in 2012. He is president and founder of Data Center Pulse, a non-profit that promotes sharing of best practices between companies in the data center industry. Thiele joined Apcera as chief strategy officer, a role in which he will be involved in everything from developing and executing strategic initiatives to developing the company’s roadmap and partnerships as it scales. The startup’s technology helps enterprises manage complex hybrid IT environments that consist of on-premise infrastructure and cloud services. He started at Switch about five years ago, when the company’s only site was its massive SuperNAP campus in Las Vegas. Since last year, Switch has been expanding aggressively, announcing big builds in the Reno, Nevada, area and Michigan, as well as internationally, in Italy and Thailand. |
| 7:19p | Yahoo Japan to Run on OpenStack, Cloud Foundry Yahoo Japan, the other crown jewel besides an Alibaba stake in the US-based web company’s otherwise troubled portfolio, is preparing to undertake a complete revamp of its IT platform. The company, a joint venture between Yahoo and Japan’s SoftBank Group, is planning to build what it says will be the world’s largest private cloud powered by OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. The unified platform will support Japan’s most popular web company’s shopping, auction, media, and other services. Yahoo Japan is the top web property among PC users in the country and is a close second to Google among mobile users, according to the Wall Street Journal. US-based Yahoo’s 35.5-percent stake in the joint venture will be an attractive acquisition target as potential buyers look at the American company’s portfolio that’s currently up for sale. Read more: Private OpenStack Cloud Replaces VMware at PayPal It is teaming up with Pivotal, the software company backed by EMC and VMware, to build its next-generation infrastructure platform. The platform will run Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a distribution of the open source Platform-as-a-Service technology that came out of San Francisco-based Pivotal. The initial deployment is planned for the second half of 2016. Read more: etcd: the Not-so-Secret Sauce in Google’s Kubernetes and Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry |
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