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Wednesday, July 6th, 2016
- Wind Power Deals to Bring Equinix to 100 Renewable in N. America
- Switch Contracts for Solar for Its Entire Data Center Footprint
- Cleaning Up Data Center Power is Dirty Work
| Time | Event |
| 12:30p | Aligned Adds SDN Dimension to On-Demand Data Center Your data center capacity is only as elastic as its least elastic component. Aligned Data Centers, the Phoenix-based data center provider that has found a way to address the problem of elasticity in the least elastic component of any data center – the power and cooling infrastructure – is taking things a step further by offering clients what its management believes is the most forward-looking approach to introducing elasticity to network provisioning. Aligned has partnered with Plexxi, the data center networking technology startup that has to date raised more than $80 million from venture capital firms, including most recently from Google’s VC arm, called GV (formerly Google Ventures). The data center provider will offer its customers the option to buy a bundled data center solution that includes on-demand data center space, power, and cooling capacity as well as an elastic, software-defined networking solution. While it has solved for enabling customers to provision power and cooling to any rack on-demand – going from 1kW to 25kW for example – many of the provider’s customers are still using traditional, inflexible networking architectures, dampening the value of its on-demand data center offering, Jakob Carnemark, founder and CEO of Aligned, said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. Read more: Modular Cooling System Enables On-Demand Data Center Capacity Giving them a modern SDN solution as an option helps Aligned advance its “pure utility model for the data center infrastructure,” he said. “In our opinion Plexxi is at the forefront of the networking solutions.” The data center management software Aligned uses to provision power and cooling for its customers will be integrated with Plexxi’s network provisioning software. Customers that want to use this functionality, however, will also have to buy Plexxi’s hardware switches. While Plexxi software only runs on Plexxi switches, they can be used with non-Plexxi software, Plexxi CEO, Rich Napolitano, said. This aspect reduces the fear of single-vendor lock-in potential customers may feel or the fear of investing in a solution by a startup whose future may appear to be less certain than the future of say Cisco Systems. The company builds its own switches or integrates its software with so-called “brite-box” switches, which are essentially branded but software-agnostic commodity switches. “If you don’t like us, just boot Cumulus,” Napolitano said, referring to Cumulus Networks, one of the better-known makers of Linux-based data center network operating systems for open networking hardware. Plexxi addresses on the networking side the same problem Aligned addresses on the data center infrastructure side: the problem of overprovisioning. Network architects usually overprovision bandwidth to data center racks because they cannot predict what the future demand of their applications will be. While this is an effective way to ensure you don’t run out of capacity, it’s not the most cost-efficient way to do it. Plexxi’s software allows a user to move available bandwidth around your network dynamically, based on actual demand, Napolitano explained. Like Cumulus, it is based on Linux, and DevOps staff like it because it uses a commonly understood and well-used RESTful API and ST2 interface to communicate state of infrastructure components and applications, he said. While Aligned will be a Plexxi customer, the companies plan to do a lot of joint sales activities, Napolitano said. The deal with Plexxi doesn’t mean Aligned is “moving up the stack” or becoming a managed service provider, Carnemark said. Both companies are relatively new. Aligned, a subsidiary of Aligned Energy, launched its first data center, in Plano, Texas, last year and kicked off construction of its second site in the Phoenix market. While Plexxi has been around for six years or so, “last year was really our first year of substantial revenue,” Napolitano said. |
| 3:00p | Military is Second-Biggest Buyer of Renewable Energy in US While it comes as no surprise that Google buys more renewable energy than anyone else in the US, the name of the second-biggest buyer of clean power in the country is surprising. The Pentagon has amassed close to 600 megawatts of renewable generation capacity through long-term power purchase agreements, which is less than Google’s total but more than any other company or government organization in the country, according to Bloomberg. A lot of the generation capacity represented on the list of top 20 renewable energy buyers in the US, based on data collected by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, either already powers or will power data centers. Google and Amazon Web Services, which is third on the list, both use most of the energy they buy to power their data centers, and so do Facebook and Apple, both of whom are included as well. See also: Here’s How Much Energy All US Data Centers Consume Also on the list are Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and the two data center providers that have committed more money than others in their industry to renewable energy: Equinix and Switch SuperNAP, ranking sixth and 12th on the list, respectively. Read more: As the Bloomberg article points out, the tech sector overall is responsible for an outsize portion of the total amount of renewable energy purchased in the US. A study by the US government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory also made that conclusion in a report published about a year ago. While the US military and Google have vastly different missions, they have similar reasons for spending a lot of money on renewable energy. Its price has gone down enough to compete successfully with coal and gas energy, while long-term PPAs secure stable energy rates for long periods of time, sometimes decades. Both the government and the tech industry also have sustainability goals, and for both energy security is an important strategic objective. Read the full article here. |
| 5:44p | Romonet Wants Its Data Center Software to Learn on Its Own Machines are better than humans at many things, and data center management may be on its way to becoming one of them. Romonet, a London-based maker of data center management software, is preparing to file a number of patents that describe machine learning capabilities it has devised over the past year or so for its software platform, the company announced Wednesday. The cloud-based platform helps companies analyze cost of their data center assets and trace the impact of infrastructure decisions, such as particular aspects of data center design, on their bottom line. After several years in operation, the company has amassed a deep trove of operational and financial data on hundreds of data centers. The goal is to apply machine learning algorithms to that data in combination with Romonet’s modeling and predictive-analytics capabilities and generate more accurate predictions and recommended actions for data center operators. Data center management is a perfect application for machine learning. Analyzing the huge amount of variables and constant changes happening in the environment to make optimization decisions is an overwhelming task for a human operator, regardless of the amount of expertise they may have. There are already examples of machine learning being applied successfully to data center management. The most well-known one is Google’s application of machine learning algorithms to fine-tune its data centers for maximum efficiency. Read more: Google Using Machine Learning to Boost Data Center Efficiency There are also several software startups that are using machine learning in applications designed for data center management. One of them is Coolan, which applies machine learning to things like helping data center managers make informed decisions about selecting server components or predicting when a particular hard drive might fail. Read more: When is the Best Time to Retire a Server? Another example is LitBit, which uses machine learning as part of its platform for managing and analyzing data from countless types of connected devices that make up the Internet of Things. Data center management is one of LitBit’s biggest initial target markets. Read more: This IoT Startup Wants to Break Down Data Center Silos |
| 6:25p | Report: Cloud Providers Will Spend $23B on Data Center Hardware This Year Public cloud providers will accelerate spending on data center hardware (servers, storage, and Ethernet switches), in the second half of the year, while spending on IT gear for traditional on-premise enterprise data centers will decline slightly, according to the latest data from IDC. On-prem IT infrastructure will still account for more than 60 percent of all end-user hardware spending this year, these end users will have spent 4.4 percent less than they spent in 2015, according to the analysts. This is while public cloud providers are projected to increase their annual data center hardware spend by close to 19 percent this year, collectively buying $23.3 billion worth of equipment. Also growing is spending on hardware to build on-premise private clouds. IDC expects spending in this category to increase by more than 10 percent this year, reaching $13.8 billion. About 60 percent of the total will account for on-prem private cloud deployments. See also: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning Here’s IDC’s forecast for how the proportions of data center hardware spending on public cloud versus private cloud versus traditional IT will change from 2015 to 2020:
See also: Slow Waning of the Enterprise Data Center The forecasts are good news for the data center provider industry. Both the projected 19 percent uptick in public cloud hardware spending and the 10 percent uptick in private cloud hardware spending translate for more demand for data center capacity. The biggest data center providers are already enjoying a seller’s market as a result of an ongoing data center land grab by the hyperscale cloud giants, and many of them also have enterprise market strategies, chasing those on-prem deployments by enterprise IT shops and in most cases offering those customers the opportunity to combine their private infrastructure with access to public cloud providers from the same campuses. Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last? |
| 7:04p | DCIM Software News Update: Week of June 6 Vigilent Designs a Crystal Ball for Data Center Cooling Vigilent, maker of data center cooling system management software, has introduced predictive analytics capabilities to its product lineup, meant to help data center operators foresee and prevent cooling-system failures or identify opportunities for efficiency improvements. The software analyzes operational data from hundreds of data centers Vigilent has been deployed in over the years to make its predictions, the company said in a statement. In addition to identifying shortcomings or opportunities, the software can now also generate a list of step-by-step instructions to make improvements. Schneider Says Plug Your Data Center into Its Cloud Schneider Electric is taking a remote-assistance approach to data center management for its customers, inviting them to connect their physical infrastructure assets to its cloud, where the data will be analyzed for potential failures, while the company’s personnel will be on hand to either troubleshoot issues remotely or dispatch field service reps to customer data centers. The new service is called StruxureOn, using the branding of Schneider’s line of infrastructure management software tools called StruxureWare, which includes its DCIM software suite, StruxureWare for Data Centers. The company has already rolled out the service in North America and plans to launch it globally in phases “towards the end of 2016 and into 2017,” Schneider said in a statement. See also: Who is Winning in the DCIM Software Market? Partner to Take Device42 to Asian Markets DCIM software vendor Device42 has partnered with Olive Data Centre, an Asian IT solutions provider, which will take its software to customers in Malaysia, Philippines, Middle East, and India. Olive will provide Device42 software and support services around it, the companies announced. The US software company was highlighted in last year’s DCIM software market report by IDC as one of the newer, smaller players on the market that have been successful at making DCIM deployments cheaper and easier for customers to get off the ground. For more news and in-depth information about the DCIM software space, visit our DCIM InfoCenter. |
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