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Friday, May 6th, 2016
- Alibaba Launching Second Silicon Valley Data Center
- Alibaba to Put Cloud Data Centers in Europe, Middle East
- Alibaba to Launch Singapore Data Center
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Yahoo Data Center Team Staying “Heads-Down” Amid Business Turmoil While the online businesses they support face an uncertain future, members of the Yahoo data center operations team are keeping busy, continuing to make sure Yahoo’s products are reaching the screens of their users. “The data center operations team has a lot of work to do,” Mike Coleman, senior director of global data center operations at Yahoo, said in a phone interview. “The potential review of strategic alternatives … is being explored, but my operations team is heads-down, focused on powering our products and services on behalf of our users.” The struggling company has been soliciting bids for its assets, including its core online business, since earlier this year. Verizon Communications is among interested suitors, according to reports. Yahoo is exploring the sale of virtually all of its assets, which include company-owned data centers in Lockport, New York; Quincy, Washington; La Vista, Nebraska; and Singapore. It also leases data center capacity in a number of locations. So far, however, the “review of strategic alternatives” hasn’t had any effect on the Yahoo data center operations team. “No effect for us at all,” Coleman said. The round of layoffs the company announced in February did affect some Yahoo employees on the Lockport campus, according to reports, but that campus includes both data centers and office space. In fact, Coleman’s team recently brought online the latest data center on the La Vista campus – a $20 million expansion announced last November. The expansion space was launched in April, Coleman said. He declined to disclose how much capacity the project added, but it involved installing 6MW of backup generator capacity. This doesn’t mean the team added 6MW of data center capacity, he pointed out. The expansion was completed relatively quickly, which Coleman attributed in part to a new online environmental quality permitting process the State of Nebraska launched last year. Yahoo’s air quality permit for the 6MW of diesel generator capacity was the first issued after the new process was instated, a Yahoo spokesperson said in an emailed statement. Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts held a press conference on the new process at the Yahoo data center in La Vista Wednesday. The state switched from a physical process of applying on paper to an online one, which has shrunk the process from months to days, Coleman said. Nebraska officials have touted the change, which applies to air quality and storm water permits, as a step to make the state more business-friendly, meant to help the construction industry cut through the administrative red tape. |
| 3:00p | Friday Funny: Herding Cats on the Raised Floor And you thought zombie servers were your biggest problem… Here’s how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon, and we challenge our readers to submit the funniest, most clever caption they think will be a fit. Then we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Submit your caption for the cartoon above in the comments. Congratulations to Todd, whose caption won the St. Patrick’s Day edition of the contest. His caption was: “You may see this as lucky, but I see it as a humidity control issue.” Some good submissions came in for last month’s Tall Cabinets edition – all we need now is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below!  What should the bubble say? For previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! |
| 4:01p | Box’s Government Cloud Gets Security Thumbs-Up  By Talkin’ Cloud Box has launched a new tailored cloud solution designed for government agencies this week, simply called Box for Government, and announced that it has received FedRAMP compliance. The announcement comes as Box has partnered with AWS and IBM to store data regionally in Asia and Europe in an initiative called Box Zones. Box said its government solution uses the core Box platform with additional advanced security and information management capabilities, and an ecosystem of pre-developed integrations with partners like IBM, Salesforce and Microsoft. Box is already used in over 6,500 government agencies, including the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Commerce, and states including New York, California, Washington and Florida. Related: IBM, HPE: Government Cloud Security Process Broken “Box for Government will make it easier than ever for government organizations to deploy Box at scale, become more agile, and drive their digital transformation strategies forward,” Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO at Box said in a statement. “We are heavily focused on bringing the highest level of security and compliance to our customers across all industries. With FedRAMP, we’re now ensuring that the government can get the level of security, protection, and control of data they need to accelerate their move to the cloud and deliver critical government services more efficiently.” Box for Government incorporates several capabilities including Box Governance, which offers retention management, content security policies and defensible ediscovery. According to the Box, its new government solution offers “pre-established partnerships and integrations with hundreds of products, platforms and systems integrators and is available through a variety of channel partners and procurement vehicles including GSA Schedule 70, NASA SEWP and WSCA, and negotiated terms for local compliance.” Related: Dell Gets Major Government Cloud Security Certification This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-c |
| 5:13p | ABB, TSO to Combine Facilities and IT Management Software Data center management software startup TSO Logic has struck a technology partnership with the Swiss industrial automation giant ABB. The companies will integrate their respective software products to give data center operators a holistic view of their infrastructure, from facilities to applications. ABB’s data center infrastructure management software Decathlon, which is designed to monitor and manage the physical facilities infrastructure, will be combined with TSO’s deep IT analytics capabilities in an integration that is promising a powerful set of capabilities for both facilities and IT teams. When there’s a hot spot on the data center floor, for example, the solution will be able to quickly identify the applications and virtual machines running in the zone that’s producing a hot spot and recommend solutions. It will also be able to move workloads to a better location automatically if set up that way. TSO’s software collects as much operational data as it can from data center hardware, from the virtualization layer, from applications the infrastructure hosts, and recently also from VMs running in Amazon’s cloud. It analyzes this data to assess infrastructure utilization levels and cost of running the software and offers suggestions for a more optimal deployment. Read more: Getting to the True Data Center Cost Related: Data Center Technology Startups to Watch in 2016 ABB entered the space market more recently than the companies analysts generally point to as leaders in the space: Emerson Network Power, Schneider Electric, and Nlyte Software. But partly due to its extensive experience in industrial automation, its Decathlon software for data centers is considered a strong competitor in the space. The DCIM software market is relatively small, compared to other data center technologies, but it’s also a relatively young market that’s been growing steadily. IDC predicts it will reach close to $990 million in total revenue by 2019. Its size in 2015 was over $570 million, according to the market research firm. Read more: Who is Winning in the DCIM Software Market? |
| 8:32p | Alibaba’s Cloud Ambitions Taking Shape for Investors (Bloomberg) — If there was one thing that stood out from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s quarterly earnings report, it was a tripling of revenue from its fledgling cloud business. Analysts have highlighted sales from its cloud division, known as Aliyun, which soared 175 percent in the March quarter to more than 1 billion yuan ($154 million). Alibaba now has more than half a million paying customers for its services and Chief Financial Officer Maggie Wu said it’s “getting very close to the break-even point” as it tries to build a challenger to Amazon.com Inc. Like Amazon, Alibaba’s cloud service emerged from the enormous computational power needed to handle millions of online shopping transactions. But unlike its U.S. counterpart, it enjoys home-field advantage in a vast Chinese market where Internet-based computing is still novel to many enterprises. Its push into cloud, where software and services are provided to customers via server farms the size of football fields, prompted a second data center in Silicon Valley in October and preparation for its first in Europe. “Many investors currently undervalue Aliyun’s long-term market opportunity, and we believe Alibaba is well-positioned to be the cloud computing leader in China due to preferential government policy, regional focus, domain expertise,” Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., wrote Friday, adding that it could become the Amazon Web Services of China. Related: Borrowing a PlaybookAlibaba is taking a page from Amazon, which developed internally and gradually expanded into a commercial enterprise that’s now the U.S. company’s fastest-growing and most profitable division. Along the way, Alibaba forged partnerships with industry giants like Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp. In July, the division’s president proclaimed it could match or even surpass Amazon within three to four years. An Amazon spokeswoman didn’t respond to an e-mailed request for comment. To be sure, Alibaba has only recently begun to make inroads beyond China and into a global market dominated by Amazon and Microsoft Corp. Cloud computing has matured in the U.S. and Europe, where margins have come under pressure in the face of heated competition. For now, it’s the growth potential that’s impressing analysts. Even though Alibaba posted a better-than-expected 39 percent revenue rise in the March quarter, its e-commerce operation remains tied to a decelerating Chinese economy and hasn’t made great strides overseas. Investments into new areas such as on-demand services aren’t expected to contribute much to the bottom line for now. RJ Hottovy, an analyst at Morningstar Inc., called Alibaba’s cloud unit a “notable standout” and wrote in a note that he plans to increase his fair value estimate for the stock based in part on a better long-term outlook for the business. See also: From Alimama to Apsara, Alibaba Operates a Powerful Proprietary Cloud Story of PotentialWhile cloud computing remains just 4 percent of Alibaba’s overall business, it could account for more than $1 billion of sales by 2018, according to SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Inc. By comparison, Amazon Web Services’ revenue rose 64 percent to $2.6 billion in the March quarter. It’s got much more potential than the core business, according to Ray Zhao, analyst at Guotai Junan Securities Co. Its expansion will drive up Alibaba’s earnings multiple as investors place more value in the cloud unit, he said. Alibaba is valued at about 24 times estimated earnings compared with Amazon’s 63 times. The Chinese company said its customers hail from industries beyond e-commerce, and is betting on its potential in segments from health care and games to financial services. “When it reaches tremendous scale, it has a tremendous amount of operating leverage,” Wu said on a post-earnings conference call. “We are looking at over the course of this year that this business will not require a lot of additional investment into the business as it’s generating cash flow.” |
| 9:02p | Scott Noteboom’s Data Center Startup LitBit Raises $7M Scott Noteboom has been talking about his data center startup LitBit for three years now without giving up much detail about what exactly the company will be selling. Now the veil has come off. LitBit has launched a software platform for data center management that promises to translate the disparate protocols various data center facilities and IT systems of different eras use to an API most software developers can work with. The goal is to make it easier to automate data center management. Noteboom, who in the past led data center strategy for Yahoo and later Apple, expects the system to be used primarily by data center operators at first, but it is designed for use with connected devices beyond those in the data center, and he expects LitBit’s reach to widen in the future, he recently told Business Insider. Noteboom announced LitBit in 2013, following his departure from Apple, where he led infrastructure strategy, design, and development for two years. He joined Apple after about six and a half years as VP of data center engineering and operations at Yahoo. The startup recently raised $7 million from a group of venture capital firms led by Storm Venture that also includes Illuminate Ventures, Correlation Ventures, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. Users can build their own applications to automate the infrastructure via LitBit’s API, but the company also has several canned solutions for infrastructure monitoring and management. The software, called RhythmOS, can be used as a pure cloud based service or as a combination of on-prem and cloud-based services. More details in the Business Insider story While Noteboom never revealed much detail about LitBit’s plans in the past, the general direction of the company he described when he announced it three years ago was different from the products it recently unveiled. In an interview with Data Center Knowledge in 2013, Noteboom said LitBit would help international companies set up infrastructure in emerging markets, particularly in China, where the regulatory environment is very difficult to navigate for outsiders. Read more: Scott Noteboom: Technology Trapped in Real Estate Prison |
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