Tuesday, July 12th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	Here’s How Much Water All US Data Centers Consume Like energy, growth in data center water consumption in the US has slowed down since about a decade ago. A recent US government study for the first time made an attempt to quantify water consumption of all data centers in the country. The study focuses primarily on data center energy consumption, but it also uses its electricity consumption estimates to extrapolate the amount of water it takes to power and cool data centers. Water is one of two major resources data centers consume, and this fact drew a lot of public attention last summer, as the drought in California grew especially acute. While, thanks to this past winter’s El Niño, water levels in the state’s reservoirs are higher than they have been in years, the drought continues, and water consumption by the state’s various industries, including the high-tech industry, continues to be an important issue. The data center industry is far from being California’s biggest water consumer. In 2010, the biggest portion of daily water withdrawals (about 61 percent) was used for irrigation, according to the most recent data available from the US Geological Survey. Generation of electricity, however, is a major water consumer, and data centers use a lot of electricity. In 2014, data centers were responsible for 2 percent of all electricity consumed in the US, according to the recent government study. In 2010, the second-largest portion of daily water withdrawals in California (about 17 percent) went to thermoelectric power generation, according to USGS. While data centers consume relatively little water directly – compared to farming or other industries – the water it takes to generate electricity to power them has to be taken into account as well. Read more: Here’s How Much Electricity All US Data Centers Consume The study, whose results were published in a report in June, was conducted by the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Carnegie Mellon University. As the report points out, far more water is used to generate electricity that powers data centers than to cool them. It takes about 7.6 liters of water on average to generate 1kWh of energy in the US, while an average data center uses 1.8 liters of water for every kWh it consumes, according to the researchers. Combined, US data centers were responsible for consumption of 626 billion liters of water in 2014, which includes both water consumed directly at data center sites and water used to generate the electricity that powered them that year. The researchers expect this number to reach 660 billion liters in 2020: Direct versus indirect US data center water consumption. Source: United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, LBNL, 2016 The government’s estimates rely on averages because water consumption per 1kWh at different data center sites varies greatly, depending on the climate and the type of cooling system used, and so does water consumption associated with energy generation. Different generation sources use different amounts of water, and some power plants are more efficient than others. The estimates take into account water losses at thermoelectric and hydroelectric plants, as well as losses at data center cooling towers due to drift and blowdown. They also assume that IT closets and IT rooms don’t consume water, being cooled by direct-expansion, or air-cooled chillers. See also: How Much Water Do Apple Data Centers Use? Trends in data center water consumption between 2006 and 2020 mirror closely trends in data center energy consumption described in the report (which isn’t surprising, since energy consumption was used to calculate water consumption). Hence, just like with energy, data center water consumption has been growing at a slower rate than it did before 2007. Also, similar to energy trends, as hyperscale data centers built by internet and cloud giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon constitute a bigger and bigger portion of total data center capacity, they will be responsible for a progressively bigger portion of the industry’s total water consumption. Total US data center water consumption by space type. Source: United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, LBNL, 2016 Read the full DOE report here. (Comment on this)
3:00p	T-Systems Raises €100M-Plus to Expand German Data Center T-Systems, the data center services subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, has secured a loan from a consortium of three German banks to finance construction of the second phase of what it claims is already the largest data center in Germany. The data center in Biere, launched in 2014, currently has capacity to support about 30,000 servers and is nearly full, according to an announcement issued by KfW IPEX-Bank, one of the three banks. The expansion, slated for completion in 2018, will add capacity to support 45,000 servers more. The bank didn’t disclose the loan’s exact amount, saying only that it was in “triple-digit million euros.” The other two members of the consortium are BayernLB and Landesbank Baden-Württemberg. The same consortium also financed the first phase of the facility. KfW IPEX-Bank said demand for data center services that keep data in facilities within the country’s borders has been on the rise among German companies. It has accelerated since Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified information about the US National Security Agency’s digital surveillance practices, the bank said. Some of the documents leaked by Snowden, however, also suggest that German intelligence official have reportedly cooperated with US intelligence by collecting and sharing metadata from German networks. Germany is known generally to have stricter regulations around data privacy and physical location of stored data than other countries. Since Snowden’s leaks in 2013, several major US-based cloud service providers launched data centers in Germany, including Amazon Web Services, VMware, and DigitalOcean. Last year, Microsoft announced it had chosen T-Systems to host its cloud services in Germany. In an unusual arrangement, Microsoft named T-Systems its “data trustee,” giving the German company control over the data of Microsoft customers it stores. The move was a response to the US government’s attempts to strong-arm Microsoft into handing over personal data of one of its cloud customer – the customer is the subject of a criminal investigation in the US – stored in a Dublin, Ireland, data center. Microsoft claims the government’s jurisdiction doesn’t extend to data stored overseas and continues to fight the government in US courts. By making T-Systems its data trustee in Germany, Microsoft allegedly puts customer data stored in Germany further out of the US government’s reach, since the German company is not subject to US law. T-Systems hosts Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure in data centers in Magdeburg and Frankfurt. The Biere data center that’s being expanded provides backup for the Magdeburg site, according to T-Systems. (Comment on this)
6:13p	Equinix to Build Huge Amsterdam Data Center Equinix announced a plan to build a $190-million, eight-floor data center in the Amsterdam Science Park, a location the company claims is within 50-milisecond network reach of 80 percent of Europe. This will be the Silicon Valley-based giant’s second data center in the Science Park, after it was forced to give up a TelecityGroup facility there to rival and landlord Digital Realty Trust. Amsterdam is one of the world’s densest network interconnection hubs, where more networks interconnect in various data centers and network facilities and exchange traffic than in most other places. About 38 percent of all Dutch data traffic travels through facilities in the Amsterdam Science Park, according to Equinix, which makes it one of the most valuable data center locations in the world. Equinix plans to invest $113 million in the first-phase buildout of AM4, which will support 1,555 IT cabinets, according to an announcement issued Tuesday. The total price tag for building Phase One and four future expansion phases is expected to reach $189 million. The facility, which will stand 70 meters tall, will provide space and power for 4,200 cabinets at full build-out. The Redwood City, California-based data center provider also announced availability of direct network connectivity service to Amazon Web Services from all seven of its Amsterdam data centers. The AWS Direct Connect node will reside in AM3, its existing facility in the Amsterdam Science Park, but customers in the other Equinix facilities in the city will have access to it through Metro Connect, the Equinix network that links all of its sites in the metro area. The announcement makes Amsterdam the third European market from where Equinix offers direct private access to Amazon’s cloud. Actual AWS cloud data centers in Europe are in Dublin and Frankfurt. In 2014, following the launch of the Frankfurt site, Equinix announced that all of its German data centers would provide direct connectivity to the facility. Last November, Equinix announced availability of AWS Direct Connect from its London data centers. In a blockbuster deal that was closed earlier this year, Equinix acquired European data center services giant TelecityGroup for $3.8 billion, becoming the largest data center provider in Europe. Telecity’s portfolio included a data center in the Amsterdam Science Park, but European market regulators required Equinix to sell eight data centers in Europe in exchange for their approval of the merger, and the Science Park facility became one of those eight, sold eventually to Digital Realty. Read more: Why Equinix Data Center Deal is a Huge Win for Digital Realty In addition to being a major competitor to Equinix, San Francisco-based Digital is Equinix’s landlord in many markets around the world. As of the end of the first quarter, Equinix, Digital’s third-largest tenant, leased wholesale data center space from the landlord in 14 locations, occupying about 1.7 million square feet total, according to Digital’s report to investors. (Comment on this)
9:41p	WPC2016: With Windows in the Cloud and Host of New Partners, Microsoft Finds Its Cool By IT Pro TORONTO — Microsoft is cool again. This is according to Facebook CIO Tim Campos, who made a guest appearance at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2016 keynote on Tuesday to talk about how Facebook’s 13,000 employees around the world are now using Office 365 to communicate and collaborate. Microsoft flexed its enterprise muscles on Tuesday, the second day of its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Toronto, highlighting the security and compliance of its cloud services including Azure and Office 365. “For us enterprises are not an afterthought,” Microsoft Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise Group Scott Guthrie said. “It’s not just the technology; we have decades of experience; we really understand the enterprise cloud.” Guthrie said that Azure’s 34 unique regions give it a bigger footprint than AWS and Google combined; “no other cloud out there offers the breadth and depth of what Microsoft cloud delivers,” he said. See also: Microsoft and Oracle Gobble Up Data Center Space in Virginia According to Guthrie, 85 percent of the Fortune 500 companies run their business with Microsoft cloud services, including Walmart, Samsung, BMW, and GE, which announced a partnership with Microsoft on Monday. To support these customers and their growth, Guthrie said Microsoft continues to invest billions of dollars each year in infrastructure. Despite the focus on enterprise adoption, Guthrie emphasizes how critical its partners are to its growth. According to Guthrie, $45 billion of partner services revenue attached to Microsoft cloud. “Partners have always been the backbone of our success,” Guthrie said. The Changing Face of Productivity While Microsoft is relying on its enterprise experience to lead it to cloud dominance, it acknowledges how quickly demands of productivity solutions are changing, pointing to a number of factors, including remote workers and millennials in the workforce demanding solutions that work anywhere and are device agnostic. “One key trend we’re seeing is teams who want to work together more effectively,” Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate Vice President, Office Marketing said. “We see Office 365 as core to reinventing productivity for the digital transformation.” Koenigsbauer pointed to four areas of focus for Microsoft in this area: collaboration, mobility, intelligence (which will help employees “get insights out of a sea of data” with bots and other intelligent improvements), and trust. In addition to showcasing how Facebook uses Office 365, Koenigsbauer said that in the five years since its launch Office 365 now has 70 million monthly active users. Year-over-year paid seats of Office 365 have grown 57 percent. Recent research out of Gartner that finds Microsoft has an 80 percent share of companies using cloud email bodes well for its continued growth. In December Microsoft released its Office 365 E5 Suite to deliver new enterprise value around voice and analytics and Koenigsbauer said that partners offering this suite have already made up to 1.8x service revenue. Koenigsbauer said Microsoft is making “a number of different investments” in its “intelligent, built-in security and protection” including advanced ediscovery that uses machine learning, advanced security management, and Customer Lockbox which offers audit control and approval. “Every customer meeting we go to we see security at the top of the agenda. Partners can help coach customers through the security journey,” he said. Windows 10 Comes to the Cloud In one of the biggest announcements on Tuesday, Microsoft said that it would offer Windows 10 cloud subscriptions starting in the fall through its Cloud Solution Providers Partner program. The offering starts at $7 a seat per month. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Windows and Devices Group, said that 96 percent of its enterprise customers are piloting Windows 10. Ahead of the new release, which is expected to happen at its upcoming Ignite conference, Mehdi said to expect a “huge amount of technical change to Windows 10.” The anniversary update brings new security features, as well as enhancements to Cortana and Surface Pen. On the security side of things, Windows Hello will allow users to log in to websites with their fingerprints – or even their faces. In an example of the technology and a colorful demo that involved sawing and drilling into a brand new tire, Microsoft Executive Demo Lead Bryan Roper showed how the latter would work for a Bridgestone mechanic who may have their hands full and need to log in to their workstation using only their face. Partner Opportunities During the two-hour keynote, Microsoft executives including Guthrie outlined a number of opportunities – both new and existing – for partners to take advantage of in the cloud. These include: AppSource: Guthrie said AppSource helps deliver users to Microsoft partners, and offers the ability for partners to show off their solutions. Customers can use the AppSource marketplace to find business applications that meet their business needs. According to Guthrie, partners can easily list an app from the AppSource website. Microsoft Cloud App Security: Companies can use Microsoft Cloud App Security to discover the number of SaaS apps being used and apply appropriate policies. Microsoft Operation Management + Security: “Customers are going to grapple with how to manage their cloud,” especially if they’re using multiple clouds, or hybrid clouds, Guthrie said. Microsoft OMS helps these customers manage VMs and servers in a multi-cloud world. Windows 10 in the Cloud: Available through Cloud Solution Provider Partners, will offer Windows 10 cloud subscriptions starting in the fall, starting at $7 a seat per month. Surface as a Service: Not to be confused with Software as a Service, Surface as a Serviceis a managed service offering available Cloud Solution Providers. This first ran at http://windowsitpro.com/windows/wpc2016-windows-cloud-and-host-new-partners-microsoft-finds-its-cool (Comment on this)
11:45p	Are Data Centers and MSPs Like Oil and Water? Or Peanut Butter and Jelly? With so many doing so much self-directed research on search engines and social media to help address problems and identify solutions, in many cases as much of 70% of the decision-making process is now over before potential clients are ready for a conversation with a data center’s executive- or sales team. Today’s data centers face a very different buyer’s journey where the traditional marketing and sales playbooks have been severely disrupted. Why? People got tired of being interrupted by obnoxious marketers and sales reps. So fed up that it’s fueled massive changes in consumer preferences that have powered selective-consumption platforms like iTunes, Netflix, SiriusXM, and TiVo. This cultural shift presents major challenges for companies with leadership entrenched in old-school, interruption-focused tactics. But it also presents many opportunities if you can get found early enough by the right stakeholders, in the right places, at the right time, and in the right context. Scaling Up with Managed Service Provider Channel Partners To help address these challenges, many CEOs and sales leaders of data centers are looking to a grow a channel partner ecosystem. Sometimes they’re looking to attract non-competitive colocation providers — perhaps from other geographic areas. Most of the time these data centers want to build out a channel program with managed service providers (MSPs) and other MSP-ish technology providers including integrators and IT consulting firms. Why? Savvy data center CEOs and sales leaders recognize that MSPs have a very coveted asset with their clients: a long-term trusted advisor relationship. In small companies that lack a true CIO, as is often the case below 100 employees, the MSP’s lead person on the account essentially is the outsourced, virtual CIO. Assessing Potential Conflicts of Interest If you poll the sales directors of small- and mid-sized data center providers, you’ll find that many offer a limited menu of managed services to their clients. The consensus on the menu of managed services offered will vary quite a bit depending on the size of the data center, the size of its target clients, its locations, and the vertical markets it serves. One common theme, however, is that most data centers’ managed services focus on off-premise- or cloud-based assets, rather than equipment located on-premise at client sites. The line of demarcation seems straightforward enough. But at data center providers that are too small to have a full-time product manager, let alone a product management team, it’s very common to wobble all over the place in which managed services are core to the data center business and which managed services should be the domain of its MSP partners. Achieving Product/Market Fit When a data center grows to the point that it hires a true product manager, one of that person’s first missions will be to figure out if the company has achieved product/market fit. Product/market fit is simply the degree to which you know, with a high level of certainty, who your ideal clients are, what products and services they buy, at what price points these products and services are sold, and in what ideal quantities. Having product/market fit is a critical prerequisite to profitably scaling Inbound marketing and Inbound sales. All too often, a data center has been able to achieve respectable growth, well into the low seven figures in annual revenue, sheerly based on the principal’s personal networking and word of mouth. But is that truly scalable? That’s where a more disciplined strategy becomes critical. Completing the Checklist So how can you tell if your data center is ready to launch its MSP-focused partner program, so you gel together like peanut butter and jelly, rather than oil and water? Do you have a list of which core managed services your data center provides? Do you have a list of the non-core managed services your data center would never provide — and instead refer to its MSP partners? Do you have buyer personas built out for at least two of your most important kinds of ideal clients? Do you know your average client lifetime value (LTV) of your most important kinds of ideal clients? Do you know the average cost of client acquisition (COCA) for each buyer persona? Do you know your average sales cycle length for each buyer persona? Do you know your buyer’s journey deal stages for each buyer persona? Do you have a buyer persona built out for your ideal MSP partner? Do you have a channel partner growth plan? Does your channel growth plan include a way to attract your ideal partners using educational content, blog posts, keywords, and social media? Does your channel growth plan have a way to convert strangers into early-stage partner leads — seeking educational content on awareness stage and consideration stage problems? Is there a way to nurture and accelerate prospective partner leads into highly-qualified partner applications? Do you have a well-defined partner onboarding, training, certification, continuing education, and coaching program designed to help your partners succeed in working towards your mutual goals? Have you defined how you’ll resolve potential conflicts between your internal sales team and your channel partners? The Bottom Line As the data center industry continues to mature and consolidate, and the buyer’s journey for data center services becomes more self-propelled, data center providers need to get found early enough to earn a trusted advisor seat at the table. For many, part of the solution to this challenge is building a robust channel partner program that focuses on MSPs. But a lot of data center providers get this wrong out of the gate. While their goal is to get along like peanut butter and jelly, the result feels more like oil and water. In this post, you’ve been introduced to how you can stay relevant, scale up with partners, assess potential conflicts, achieve product/market fit, and address key prerequisites. If you need to make sure that you have the basics in place to create more scalable, predictable revenue growth, be sure to watch the recording from the Data Center Sales Growth Q&A Webinar. If you’re attending Fall Data Center World, be sure to catch Joshua Feinberg’s related session on How Data Centers Use Thought Leadership to Attract World-Class Clients and Talent on Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 10:20 am in room R215 of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. If you have not yet registered, visit www.datacenterworld.com. Joshua Feinberg is Vice President and Co-Founder of SP Home Run, Inc. — which helps data center, managed service, hosting, and cloud providers grow their leads, client base, revenue, and profitability. To find out how your sales, marketing, and revenue growth strategy stacks up, schedule a complimentary consultation with Joshua Feinberg. (Comment on this)

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