Friday, June 17th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	Equinix Breaks Ground on Eighth Silicon Valley Data Center Equinix has kicked off construction of its eighth Silicon Valley data center, expecting to bring online new capacity next year in one of the hottest data center markets. The building, SV10, will be constructed at the company’s data center campus on Great Oaks Boulevard in San Jose. The company is in the middle of a global expansion push, building new data centers and expanding existing ones in the US, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, and in multiple European countries. It acquired the property on Great Oaks last year. Read more: Equinix to Open New Data Centers on Four Continents Silicon Valley is currently one of the tightest data center markets in terms of available supply. Karl Strohmeyer, Equinix president for the Americas, agreed: “It’s why we’re investing so much in new data centers (in Silicon Valley).” He expects the first phase of SV10 to come online in the middle of next year. The building will eventually support 14.4MW, but the first phase will provide room for about 800 IT cabinets. Equinix will build it out in three phases, Strohmeyer said. The company is not out of available inventory in Silicon Valley, as it recently launched the final phase of the SV5 data center on the Great Oaks campus. “We have capacity, so it’s not like we’re in a dark situation,” he said. Read more: Silicon Valley: a Landlord’s Data Center Market Equinix doesn’t run out of capacity as quickly as wholesale data center providers, who today are having trouble keeping up with demand for large chunks of space in key markets like Silicon Valley, coming primarily from the biggest cloud service providers. Karl Strohmeyer, president for the Americas, Equinix (Photo: Yevgeniy Sverdlik) Equinix is a retail-colocation player with a lot of emphasis on network interconnection. As such, the company is very selective about the type of customers and deployments it pursues. It covets customers that need access to the ecosystem of network and cloud providers present in its data centers, such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure. “They use us to get access to all the counterparties they want to interconnect to,” Strohmeyer said. It also prefers that those customers don’t require a large footprint at any one facility. “I’m not going after their compute. That undifferentiated colo we can leave to the wholesalers out there. I want that interconnection dynamic.” Equinix has turned down many customers because they didn’t fit its criteria, he said. “We’re very selective.” Every customer whose business model values the interconnection ecosystem is valuable to other customers that make up that ecosystem. There are about 200 customers in one of the buildings on the Great Oaks campus. If one new interconnection-focused customer comes in, the facility’s value increases for all 200 of those existing customers, Strohmeyer explained. “Over time the yield on the deployment goes up, because the number of interconnections per cabinet goes up,” he said. A city government official and a group of high-level infrastructure staff from several major technology companies, including Google, Oracle, Autodesk, and Netflix (all Equinix customers), attended a groundbreaking event at Equinix’s Great Oaks campus Wednesday. While Netflix has moved its core infrastructure from its own data centers to the public cloud operated by Amazon Web Services, the caching infrastructure that makes up the video streaming company’s content delivery network continues to occupy colocation data centers around the world operated by multiple providers, including Equinix. Equinix, the world’s biggest data center provider, has spent $13 billion on building data centers since it founded in 1998, CEO Stephen Smith said while speaking at the event. Today, the company has about 8,000 customers, according to him. San Jose vice mayor, Rose Herrera, also spoke at the event. The data center industry is very important to the city government, primarly because of the significant tax revenue it generates for the municipal coffers, she said. “To me, [Equinix] is number one,” Herrera said. They certainly are the hub of hubs.” (Comment on this)
3:00p	Evil SAN Will Always Triumph Because Good JBOD is Dumb Tom Lyon is Chief Scientist for DriveScale. “Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.” — Dark Helmet, Spaceballs A colleague of mine (jokingly?) claimed that it has been a longtime ambition of his to find a way to use this classic film line in a work context. Well, here it is! And it even makes sense: SANs are evil, and JBODs are dumb. Now, obviously, SANs don’t triumph in all situations, but they are a pretty foundational element of many data center deployments. They build in a lot of intelligence to magically make failures disappear, provide a host of features such as dedupe, and allow you to pool your storage resources. Sure they are expensive, but you get what you pay for, right? You probably aren’t thrilled to be forking over the amount of cash that’s needed for purchase and maintenance and there is a lot of “proprietary” written all over them but they are a necessary evil (okay, not pure evil) if you want storage consolidation. A JBOD, on the other hand, is “just a bunch of disks” whether deployed as internal server DAS or alongside a server in an enclosure. They are “dumb” as the name even implies. No RAID, just pass-through. In other words, it’s a poor man’s storage solution, so caveat emptor. Now, it is important to point out that not all JBOD enclosures are really JBODs. I think of a JBOD enclosure as literally a bunch of disks, some storage expanders, and sheet metal housing, but some folks slap some processors into the box as well. I, as a purist, think that doesn’t sound like “just a bunch of disks” but rather “a bunch of disks with some processors”, but that’s just me. For the purposes of this article, anytime I refer to a JBOD enclosure, I am specifically referring to a purist’s definition of a JBOD enclosure. What are JBODs Used For? It’s useful to understand the advantages of a JBOD first. The two main advantages of JBODs are that they allow you to get at all the space on the drives (since they don’t use RAID), and they are, relatively speaking, cheap. On the other hand (since they don’t use RAID), they lose the redundancy and performance advantages that RAID can provide. As a result, JBODs tend to be used in places where storage capacity is tantamount and failure at the disk level would not be catastrophic. JBOD enclosures stuffed full of disks could provide a server with a storage controller a relatively large number of drives. (Of course, with a JBOD enclosure, if you need RAID functionality for a file server or some such you can have that server’s storage controller be a RAID controller or utilize RAID in software.) JBODs are also sometimes deployed as disk shelves managed by a separate storage head controlling a broader system. More recently, JBODs have become an important part of some data-heavy Scale-Out deployments, where application software can be assumed to manage around drive failure. For example, the Open Compute Project’s Open Vault (original code name “Knox”) JBOD specs are ones that were contributed by Facebook, which utilized variants of them in their data centers. In the case of OCP, JBODs were used as the storage building block in server disaggregation. However, they still live down to their expectation of being a poor man’s storage solution with limited manageability and sharing, plus JBOD enclosures are extraordinarily limited in enterprise penetration, even for Scale-Out use cases. So what’s the point? In scale-out environments, the sheer volume of data can make the use of traditional centralized storage technologies very expensive or even impossible, and the application stacks themselves assume that they have direct access to disk. JBOD enclosures, being the cheap beasts that they are, look tantalizingly attractive for those environments as a way to provide some kind of pooled storage. If they weren’t so dumb it feels like they should be able to offer real value in enterprises with Big Data needs. There has to be a better way. First, JBOD vendors themselves need to start drinking the Kool-Aid around easy machine-driven management for scale-out. Scale-Out environments can get big, and people shouldn’t be forced into individual device management in big environments. Easy to understand device mapping and machine readable unique serial numbers are examples of enabling technologies that have the potential to usher us into an era of machine-driven management. Second, the way in which JBODs are used must change. JBODs should be made into shareable entities and make friends with smarter management systems that can make them sing. At the application level, software-defined storage stacks can make JBOD storage capacity shareable. At the infrastructure level, technologies like DriveScale’s can enable JBODs to provide storage in a transparent way to Scale-Out application stacks broadly. In other words, good can triumph, but it needs friends to help it along. 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)
3:30p	Report: Data Center Provider Peak Hosting Files for Bankruptcy Peak Hosting, an Oregon-based data center service provider, has filed for bankruptcy following the loss of a customer that was responsible for 80 percent of its revenue, Oregon Live reported, citing the company’s bankruptcy filing. The customer is Machine Zone, maker of the popular mobile games Game of War and Mobile Strike. Last year, following a Peak Hosting data center outage, Machine Zone started moving its infrastructure into a different facility in Las Vegas, according to the report. Peak is seeking bankruptcy protection while it undergoes restructuring as well as financing to pay for its lawsuit with Machine Zone. It recently hired a chief restructuring officer and let go most of its staff, according to the report. Peak’s bankruptcy is likely to have an adverse effect on its own data center providers, who are its biggest creditors. According to its website, they include Digital Realty Trust, with whom it recently contracted for space in the Dallas and Silicon Valley markets, as well as Equinix, CoreSite, and Interxion. The managed hosting company has five data centers in the US and one in Europe. Machine Zone has a $14-million-per-month contract with Peak through next October, but it stopped paying for services starting three months ago, Peak said in the bankruptcy filing. Peak is suing the customer for $100 million, saying the agreement between the two companies does not allow for a premature cancelation. Peak says it invested $35 million in equipment to host Machine Zone’s applications and that the customer has been using some of Peak’s proprietary technology. The data center provider has attributed last fall’s outage to a bug in Cisco Systems software. (Comment on this)
4:00p	New Azure Service Makes Microsoft First Big Tech Company to Chase Pot Market Brought to You by IT Pro Early pioneers in the business of legally growing marijuana have run into a number of challenges, including basics such as payment processing. Larger technology companies, wary that federal law still prohibits weed sale, have largely stayed completely away from what could be an extremely large market. Until now: Microsoft has announced an Azure partnership that dips its toes into the growing pot market, though firmly on the side of the law. Microsoft has partnered with a Los Angeles startup named Kind, making it a “preferred software” vendor among the company’s options for government customers. “We do think there will be significant growth,” Kimberly Nelson, the executive director of state and local government solutions at Microsoft, told the New York Times. “As the industry is regulated, there will be more transactions, and we believe there will be more sophisticated requirements and tools down the road.” For now, Microsoft is staying far away from weed selling, instead partnering to offer compliance management software for government agencies in states where marijuana is legal. But the “seed to sale” management tools are a sign that big-business conservatism around the issue might be falling to the side as the market continues to grow — along with the business opportunities. This first ran at http://windowsitpro.com/cloud/new-azure-service-microsoft-becomes-first-big-tech-company-chase-pot-market (Comment on this)

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