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Friday, May 13th, 2016
- Alibaba’s Cloud Ambitions Taking Shape for Investors
- Alibaba Launching Second Silicon Valley Data Center
- Alibaba to Put Cloud Data Centers in Europe, Middle East
- Telx Acquisition Closed, Here’s Digital Realty’s Plan
- Digital Realty Takes Foot off Brake Pedal on Expansion
- Digital Realty Leans on IBM, AT&T to Hook Enterprises on Hybrid Cloud
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Amazon’s Cloud Arm Makes Its First Big Submarine Cable Investment Amazon Web Services has made its first investment in a submarine cable project, looking to improve capacity on the global network connecting the data centers that host its cloud services. When the Hawaiki Submarine Cable comes online – target live date is in June 2018 – it will provide considerably more bandwidth between the US, Australia, and New Zealand than available today. The cable is expected to reduce latency for AWS users operating between these three countries. Amazon has agreed to become the cable’s fourth anchor customer, and its financial commitment provided the last bit of funding necessary to kick off the submarine construction project, a person familiar with the deal who wished to remain anonymous told Data Center Knowledge. The 14,000-kilometer cable will provide a much welcomed third competitor to the two submarine cable systems on the US-Australia route today: Telstra Endeavour and Southern Cross Cable Network.
Telstra Endeavour (above) lands in Hawaii on the US side and in Paddington in Australia. (Image source: TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map)
Southern Cross (above) will land in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Oregon, and California. (Image source: TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map)
The Hawaiki cable (above) will land in Oregon, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, as well as American Samoa. (Image source: TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map) Oregon’s Pacific shore is an important place on the global connectivity map. A lot of transpacific network traffic enters the US through the high concentration of submarine cable landing stations in the Oregon towns of Hillsboro, Nedonna Beach, Warrenton, Pacific City, and Warrenton, from where it is carried south to data centers and carrier hotels in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles or inland. Because of this, there is a fairly large data center cluster in Hillsboro and the surrounding area. Amazon’s US West cloud availability region is hosted in data centers in Oregon, as well as GovCloud, its dedicated cloud region for government agencies. Intercontinental connectivity is crucial to cloud service providers of Amazon’s caliber, who try to offer customers as many global location options for hosting their virtual infrastructure as possible. As more and more companies start using cloud services and the amount of data created and exchanged in general keeps growing rapidly, demand for this kind of connectivity is on the rise, and so is construction of submarine cables to address the demand. “We are seeing a resurgence of subsea cable projects to support global cloud deployments and growth of international data traffic,” Equinix CEO Stephen Smith said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call this month. “There are more than 50 global submarine cable projects under consideration over the coming two years, which places Equinix in a great position to win a portion of this next generation of submarine cable investment.” Amazon’s biggest rivals in the cloud services market, Google and Microsoft, have both made big investments in submarine cable construction projects. The Faster cable system, backed by Google and several Asian telecommunications and IT services companies, is expected to come online this year. Another big project is the New Cross Pacific Cable System, which is backed by Microsoft and a group of Asian telcos. NCP is expected to come online in 2017. Both will land in Oregon on the US side. The three anchor customers of the Hawaiki cable besides Amazon are British telco Vodafone, REANNZ, a government-backed New Zealand research and education network, and the American Samoa Telecommunications Authority, the US territory’s government-owned incumbent carrier. |
| 5:40p | Alibaba, SoftBank Team up on Cloud Services in Japan (Bloomberg) — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. teamed with its largest shareholder SoftBank Group Corp. to form a cloud computing service venture targeting Japanese customers, as the Chinese e-commerce giant expands one of its fastest growing businesses. The venture known as SB Cloud Corp. will open a new data center in Japan to tap SoftBank’s customers ranging from startups to global organizations, extending a battle for customers with Amazon.com Inc. Alibaba will provide services including data storage and processing services, the companies said in a joint statement. See also: Alibaba’s cloud unit almost tripled revenue to more than 1 billion yuan ($153 million) in the March quarter. The business could account for more than $1 billion of Alibaba’s revenue by 2018 and the public cloud presents a $120 billion global market opportunity, according to research by SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Inc. SoftBank, owner of Japan’s third-largest phone business, will have a 60 percent stake in the new venture while Alibaba will hold the rest. Alibaba’s Japan venture follows last month’s announcement of a partnership with one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates SK Holdings Co. China’s biggest e-commerce operator earlier teamed up with Accenture Plc to target clients in China and Southeast Asia, and it said in April it would work with Germany’s SAP SE. It has data centers in countries including Singapore and the U.S. and is planning to open another in Europe as soon as this year. |
| 7:46p | Study: Number of Costly DoS-Related Data Center Outages Rising While UPS system failure is the number-one reason for data center outages, cybercrime comes in a close second, and Denial of Service, or DoS, is the most common form of cyberattacks on data centers. That’s according to recent survey findings by the Ponemon Institute, a Michigan-based research center that studies issues of privacy, data protection, and information security. Earlier this year, Ponemon looked at the costs and reasons of data center outages, but a more recent study focused on costs associated with outages caused specifically by DoS attacks, since they are on the rise. Also see: How to Create a Reliable DR Strategy The institute conducts data center outage studies yearly. These studies are sponsored by Emerson Network Power, which is one of the biggest data center infrastructure equipment vendors. DoS attacks as a root cause of unplanned data center outages have skyrocketed over the past six years:  Source: Cost of Denial of Service Attacks. Ponemon Institute. 2016 These attacks can be quite costly to the victim organization, most of the cost going toward recovery and detection activities. Of the 270-plus organizations surveyed, the lowest-cost attack was about $14,000, while the highest-cost attack was $2.35 million. The average cost of a DoS attack to the organization has risen since 2010:  Source: Cost of Denial of Service Attacks. Ponemon Institute. 2016 In 32 percent of the DoS attack incidents survey respondents reported, their data centers suffered a partial outage, while 17 percent suffered total outage. The study considers impairment to one or more servers a partial outage:  Source: Cost of Denial of Service Attacks. Ponemon Institute. 2016 The extent of the outage affects its cost to the victim organization. The average cost of DoS attacks that did not lead to outages was $36,800; the average cost for partial DoS-related data center outages was $302,920; and a total outage caused by a DoS attack cost an average of $610,300. The study also found that organizations that avoid outages following a DoS attack have some common characteristics. They include a command and control governance structure, high data center redundancy, network intelligence tools, advanced threat intelligence, well-defined incident response plans, and enterprise deployment of anti-DoS tools. |
| 8:11p | Configurable, Extensible Universe of IoT Expands  By WindowsITPro While Microsoft happily shared the news that it would now help you brew up big data along with your latté, Amazon and HPE had some IoT news of their own this week. First, HPE announced its “Universal IoT Platform” at IoT World 2016 in Santa Clara, with the goal of letting companies “accelerate, simplify, and connect your Internet of Things.” Their offering integrates with the open oneM2M standard which should help it integrate with a variety of hardware vendors, as well as quickly test and scale up different IoT strategies within the business. You can read more about the platform on HPE’s Universal IoT Platform page. At a much smaller scale, Amazon began offering generic AWS IoT buttons that let developers easily create a physical trigger for some kind of digital action. They’re pretty much the same hardware that Amazon used for its push-to-order buttons that let you restock on diapers without ever touching a computer, but designed to be generic for developmental use.
Even before Amazon made official IoT buttons, eager DIY’ers had already hacked the devices to do a little data-driven parenting. It’ll be interesting to see what companies can do with the devices now that their custom use cases are officially supported. This first ran at http://windowsitpro.com/industry/configu |
| 11:24p | Data Center Services Giant Digital Realty to Join S&P 500 Digital Realty Trust, the San Francisco-based global data center provider, will join Dow Jones’s S&P 500, one of America’s most important stock indexes whose health is generally viewed as indicative of the health of the US stock market in general. Digital (NYSE: DLR) will replace Time Warner Cable on the list, S&P Dow Jones Indices said in a statement. The telco is in the process of being acquired by Charter Communications and will be replaced on May 17. The San Francisco-based data center REIT will become one of two companies on S&P 500 dedicated solely to providing data center services. The other is Equinix, whose stock was added to the index in March of last year. “We are gratified to be included in the S&P 500,” John Stewart, senior VP of investor relations at Digital, said in an emailed statement. “Given that the index is designed to be representative of the broader US economy, it’s a remarkable milestone along the data center industry’s journey to becoming a mainstream asset class.” Related: The index is based on market capitalization of 500 big US companies that trade on NYSE or NASDAQ. It is one of the most widely tracked stock market indices because of the diversity of industries it represents. S&P 500 includes all major US tech stocks, including internet giants like Microsoft, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook, to IT vendors like HPE, IBM, Cisco, and EMC. Digital’s stock was up 3.4 percent in after-hours trading Friday evening following the announcement. Read more: Data Center REITs Scored Big in 2015 Despite Weak Markets |
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