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Friday, May 27th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Microsoft, Facebook Build Undersea Cable for Faster Internet (Bloomberg) — Microsoft and Facebook are teaming up to build an undersea cable in the Atlantic Ocean to deliver fast online and cloud services to customers of both companies. The cable, designed to have a bandwidth of as much as 160 terabytes per second, will be the highest capacity one of its kind under the Atlantic, the companies said in a statement Thursday. It will be operated by Telxius, a unit of Telefonica. It will stretch 6,600 kilometers (4,100 miles) from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao, Spain. Microsoft is seeing increased demand for speedy and reliable access to services like Skype and its cloud-based Office programs while Facebook needs faster speeds as video plays a bigger role in social media. Microsoft purchased a stake in Facebook in 2007 and the two companies have worked together on initiatives like search in the past. Construction of the cable, called MAREA, the Spanish word for tide, will start in August 2016 and is expected to be completed in October 2017, according to the statement. See also: Amazon’s Cloud Arm Makes Its First Big Submarine Cable Investment |
| 6:47p | QTS Appoints Carpathia’s Jon Greaves as CTO Data center provider QTS Realty Trust has appointed Jon Greaves, formerly a top technologist at Carpathia Hosting, which QTS acquired last year, to the role of CTO. The company also announced that former Carpathia CEO, Peter Weber, who led the integration efforts following the acquisition, has left. Greaves, a technologist with more than 25 years of experience, joined Carpathia as CTO in 2008, following three years in senior engineering roles at Sun Microsystems. He was “a key driver to Carpathia’s success,” QTS said in a statement. QTS acquired Carpathia for $326 million. The deal gave the data center provider a well-developed managed hosting business and more than doubled the amount of data centers in its portfolio, including the company’s first international footprint in Canada, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Former CEO Weber also joined Carpathia in 2008 following a three-year run at Sun, which in 2005 acquired an IT management startup he co-founded called SevenSpace. “The primary goal for the integration of QTS and Carpathia was to strengthen QTS’ ability to deliver the nation’s only fully integrated technology platform, and Peter Weber played a key role in helping us achieve that goal,” QTS CEO, Chad Williams, said in a statement. |
| 7:08p | IT Innovators: One City Makes Strides with Hybrid Cloud
Jonathan Feldman, CIO for the city of Asheville, North Carolina, admits that over a decade ago, a worry was keeping him up at night. “We weren’t confident enough that we could get business up and running in a reasonable time, should a disaster take out our main data center, which was just a couple blocks away,” he says. Indeed, during a time when natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina were unfolding, and the dangerous consequences were serving as abrupt reminders about the vulnerabilities of IT, Feldman’s concerns were certainly justified. To fuel his fears, Feldman says his background in public safety led him to become hardwired to think about worst case scenarios. “When I came into this role, the present solution to disaster recovery was that Asheville had a disaster recovery (DR) center, but I knew it was too close,” Feldman says. Meanwhile, in what could be called just a coincidence or a blessing in disguise, the city’s proposed new data center, which was going to be an add-on to a planned fire station just 12 miles away, eventually fell through. “I began to think, maybe what we really need is a data center not just a few miles away, but nowhere near us,” Feldman explains. The answer, Feldman believed, was the cloud. The team’s first instinct was to try to script their own solution, but they quickly decided it was too complicated and that they could be spending their time more effectively on other matters. “It felt like we were building a fragile artifact that could quickly break if there were changes in the environment,” Feldman says. As a result, they began looking into vendors, and after finding one they were comfortable with, proceeded slowly, step-by-step, by first deploying one low-risk server, then one mid-risk server, and then a mid-risk n-tier application. In a nutshell, Feldman enlisted automation software to do real-time syncing of production systems to cloud storage. This involved paying for the software and the storage, but no compute, until it was needed. “One of the things that really appealed to me was having the automated process working all the time to update the server in the cloud,” Feldman says. “When you go to fail over, that server image is only minutes old, not hours old, which is fantastic.” The journey; however, certainly wasn’t smooth from start to finish, Feldman admits. He says the biggest challenge was getting the staff to think differently and embrace the hybrid cloud solution. In fact, there were two looming fears. One fear was openly discussed: concerns about security in the cloud. Then, there was another concern that was largely unstated. The team feared that outsourcing to the cloud could make their own positions less relevant. To ease staff anxiety, Feldman assured employees that neither concern was legitimate. He also proposed taking a slow approach and having an auditor come in and evaluate how things were going. He promised, “if the external system in the cloud fails the audit, I’ll apologize to all of you and we’ll all go our merry way without talking about the cloud anymore.” Once the first audit was finished, problems were found—but not with the cloud-based solution. The issues were only with the internal systems, Feldman explained. Today, Feldman says if there’s an outage at 9 a.m., the system is back up and running by, say, 9:15, as opposed to ensuing downtime that drags on for hours or most of the business day. As for the cost savings, Feldman didn’t specify, but gave us a hint: “Well, we didn’t have to build a new DR data center, so that’s a pretty big deal,” he says. “It’s been a good run for sure.” Renee Morad is a freelance writer and editor based in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Discovery News, Business Insider, Ozy.com, NPR, MainStreet.com, and other outlets. If you have a story you would like profiled, contact her at renee.morad@gmail.com. The IT Innovators series of articles is underwritten by Microsoft, and is editorially independent. This first ran at http://windowsitpro.com/it-innovators/it-i |
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