Thursday, July 21st, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	Ten Simple Ways to Fine-Tune Your Data Center Cooling System Unless your data center cooling system was incorrectly specified, there is probably more than enough raw cooling capacity to meet the projected heat load. Yet very often there are hotspots and other airflow-related cooling issues. These usually plague smaller data centers, especially those in mixed-use buildings, as well as older data centers that pre-date or did not properly implement hot aisle – cold aisle layouts. We have 10 simple recommendations that can help optimize the airflow today and let you keep yourself and your servers cool, without making big investments in new products or services. Download the free Data Center Knowledge guide for improving your data center cooling system’s efficiency here. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Equinix Data Center Outage in London Blamed on Faulty UPS Wednesday’s data center outage at one of the Telecity facilities in London Equinix took over in its recent acquisition of the European service provider was caused by a problem with a UPS system, Equinix told its customers via email, according to news reports. Studies show that UPS failure is the most common cause of data center outages. The company did not say what exactly went wrong with the UPS, but the outage caused connectivity problems for many subscribers to internet services by BT, whose spokeswoman told the Register that about one in every 10 attempts to reach a website by its users failed during the outage. The data center outage affected a portion of BT subscribers in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, according to the review of affected areas posted on BT’s status page by the BBC. Equinix issued a press statement by Russell Poole, its managing director for the UK, confirming the outage at the former Telecity LD8 data center. “This impacted a limited number of customers, however service was restored within minutes,” he said. A spokesman for the London Internet Exchange (LINX) told the BBC that the outage lasted from 7:55 am to 8:17 am BST. The Telecity LD8 data center, now called 8/9 Harbour Exchange, is one of five data centers that make up the Telecity campus in the London Docklands that was the crown jewel in the data center provider’s portfolio acquired by Equinix for $3.6 billion in a deal that closed earlier this year. The campus hosts a substantial portion of the LINX infrastructure, as well as many financial services firms, cloud providers, and companies in other business verticals. A data center outage impacting a user like LINX can have effects that reach wider than even an outage that impacts a major internet service provider like BT. Internet exchanges are where many network operators and internet content providers interconnect their networks to more effectively deliver traffic to their end users. BT is one of 700 LINX members. The LINX spokesman, however, pointed out that there are usually redundant network routes that ensure traffic continues to flow when there is an outage on one of them. “Over 80% of our traffic continued to flow and it immediately started to recover even before the power was restored,” he said. UPS failure has for years been the most frequently cited cause of data center outages, according to studies by Emerson Network Power and the Ponemon Institute. Last year, UPS and UPS battery failures caused 25 percent of outages – up from 24 percent in 2013 but down from 29 percent in 2010, according to their most recent study, released earlier this year. (Comment on this)
3:30p	China’s Biggest Exchange Launches Colocation Data Center The biggest stock exchange in China recently brought online a new data center, where it will lease colocation space to financial services firms like its counterparts overseas do. The Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s colocation data center has capacity to support 5,000 server cabinets for customers, Bloomberg reported. Its launch is one of a series of major technological upgrades the government-owned exchange made recently to bring it more in line with technology other exchanges around the world have. It is common practice for stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, or London Stock Exchange, to sell colocation data center space to companies in the trading ecosystem, who want to run their servers as close to exchange trading engines as possible to reduce latency of their connections to those engines. The biggest and most important of the recent upgrades in Shenzhen was speeding up the exchange’s order matching engine. Its response time is now 1.1 milliseconds, and its order processing capacity is now 300,000 trades per second. See also: Inside NYSE’s New Jersey Data Center While the new response time is one-hundredth of what it was with the previous system and the new order processing capacity is three times what it used to be, however, these results aren’t even close to the kinds of speeds exchanges like Nasdaq and Bats Global Markets have. Both of the US exchanges have response times below 100 microseconds, according to the report. The Osaka Exchange in Japan can process an order in about 100 microseconds. The Chinese exchange has different priorities than its foreign counterparts, however. Unlike Nasdaq or NYSE, it is government-owned, so its priority is market stability rather than profit. See also: Configuration Issue Halts Trading on NYSE The government is also not a huge fan of high-frequency trading. Brokers do use algorithms to trade on the exchange, but it’s nowhere near the speed or volume of what is considered high-frequency trading in other markets. In Bloomberg’s words, “HFT is effectively absent from the stock market.” Read the Bloomberg article in full here (Comment on this)
4:00p	Intel Profit Falls With Slow Growth in Key Data Center Unit (Bloomberg) — Intel, the world’s biggest semiconductor maker, reported slower growth in its server-chip division, creating concern that the company’s most profitable business won’t be able to make up for weakness in the personal computer market. The shares fell. Key Points Data center group revenue was $4 billion in the second quarter, up 5 percent from a year earlier but the third quarter below the company’s target level. It’s also the second quarter that growth in that unit has fallen below 10 percent, putting it well behind progress needed to reach its prediction of a mid-double-digit percentage increase for the unit this year. The Client Computing Group, which supplies more than 80 percent of processors used by the personal computer industry, had revenue of $7.3 billion, down 3 percent from a year earlier. That division generated an operating profit of $1.9 billion. Second-quarter net income fell 51 percent to $1.3 billion, or 27 cents a share in the quarter ended July 2, from $2.71 billion, or 55 cents, a year earlier. Profit for the quarter was hurt by a $1.4 billion charge after Intel cut 12,000 jobs. The shares dropped 2.9 percent to $34.67 in extended trading. The stock had climbed 3.6 percent this year through Wednesday’s close. See also: Intel: World Will Switch to Scale Data Centers by 2025 The Big Picture Under CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel is trying to find new uses for its processors as the personal computer market, its main source of revenue, suffers a fifth straight year of shrinking sales. But the results Wednesday show the company’s biggest growth driver, the data center unit, is also slowing. “While we remain cautious on the PC market, we’re forecasting growth in 2016 built on strength in data center, the Internet of Things and programmable solutions,” Krzanich said in the earnings statement. On a conference call with analysts, Krzanich said he expects the PC market to decline in the “high-single-digit” range this year, but that should be offset by double-digit growth from other businesses.The server market should stabilize in the second half of this year, Krzanich said. He said Intel has customer signals that server buying will kick in. The Detail Revenue in the second-quarter was $13.5 billion, up 2.6 percent from last year. Analysts had predicted sales of $13.5 billion. Third-quarter revenue will be $14.9 billion, plus or minus $500 million. That compares with an average analyst estimate of $14.65 billion. Gross margin, or the percentage of sales remaining after deducting the cost of production, will be 62 percent in the third quarter, plus or minus a couple of points. It was 61.8 percent in the second quarter. Street Takeaways “It’s a problem that has to be explained,” said Kim Forrest a senior equity analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group, referring to the slowing growth in the data center division. “Yes, there is some data moving to ‘the cloud’ but they need to show that Intel supplies that area too.” (Comment on this)
5:45p	Week’s Second London Data Center Outage Disrupts Connectivity Another day, another data center outage in the London Docklands. Ironically, some reports mistakenly blamed Telehouse for internet connectivity problems in parts of the UK Wednesday morning. It quickly became clear that an Equinix-owned Telecity data center was to blame instead. Well, there were more connectivity problems in London today, and this time the Telehouse North data center in the Docklands appears to be the culprit. Coincidentally, the Equinix data center that went down yesterday is also located in the Docklands. Telehouse, which operates many data centers around the world, is owned by Japanese telecommunications and system integration services company KDDI. Like Wednesday’s data center outage, downtime at Telehouse on Thursday morning affected BT, a major provider of internet access and telephone services in the country. Loss of phone and broadband services started at 9:32 am BST, according to BT’s service-status page. The telco told the Register that the problem was affecting 5 percent of its customers. Yesterday’s outage reportedly affected 10 percent of all attempts by customers to reach websites. BT isn’t the only customer in the Telehouse North data center, where a group of customers was affected, according to the data center provider. Telehouse said on Twitter that the data center outage was caused by a tripped circuit breaker, and that the problem affected “a specific and limited group of customers within the building.” We are aware that there has been an issue with the tripping of a circuit breaker within Telehouse North that has affected a specific… — Telehouse Europe (@TelehouseEurope) July 21, 2016 As of around 6:30 pm BST, about seven hours since Telehouse’s last update, it was unclear whether power was restored to this group of customers and whether things had gone back to normal at the facility. BT’s status page showed that its broadband and phone problems were still ongoing at that time. Telehouse representatives did not respond to a request for update or comment by publication time. (Comment on this)
6:24p	MSPs Warned of BYOD Security Threat From Pokémon GO Brought to you by MSPmentor The maker of the hit mobile video game Pokémon GO says its engineers are working to fix a flaw that grants the company access to all Google files and data of users who play the game on iOS devices. Players who sign in with their Google accounts must agree to a privacy policy that allows Niantic access to users’ email, photos, videos, web page viewing data, GPS navigation histories, and all documents contained in Google Drive. Cybersecurity concerns were heightened even further following reports that a weekend crash of the Pokémon GO servers was the result of multiple hacking attacks. Niantic and Google, which has a stake in the game developer, said only User IDs and email addresses are being tracked, and denied accessing or collecting any of the more sensitive player data. “Once we became aware of this error, we began working on a client-side fix to request permission for only basic Google profile information, in line with the data that we actually access,” Niantec said on its website. “Google has verified that no other information has been received or accessed by Pokémon GO or Niantic.” BYOD Data Concerns The augmented reality game, in which graphics from smartphone cameras are projected in real world locations, became the biggest mobile game in U.S. history last week, with 21 million daily active users, according to a post in SurveyMonkey intelligence blog. That staggering number is raising questions about whether some of those devices are unprotected enterprise phones or personal BYOD devices that could expose sensitive business data. The vulnerabilities pose challenges and opportunities for managed services providers (MSPs) and managed security services providers (MSSPs). “As an MSP, you can use apps like Pokémon GO as an example to show clients and employees the security risks involved with unprotected mobile devices and the growing need for managing these endpoints,” according to a post on Continuum’s MSPblog. “By leveraging a mobile device management (MDM) solution, you can reduce these risks by remotely wiping an individual’s data if a device is compromised,” the post continues. “An MDM solution will also allow you to implement endpoint security policies and put restrictions on app purchases from non-validated markets.” Several government agencies have issued advisories regarding the game. One blogger posted an unclassified memo to his Twitter feed entitled “U.S. Government operation security guidance for intelligence officers and friends playing Pokémon GO.” “Don’t use your personal Gmail account to log in, as this not only links your personal information with your Pokémon GO activity (which includes GPS data), it could also expose your Google credentials to the app owner,” the advisory states. Instead, players in sensitive government roles are advised to sign into the game using the alternate Pokémon Trainers Club account method or create a “throw-away” Google account just for gameplay. Hackers Target Game’s Maker Niantic has offered no timetable for when the flaw might be repaired. Though the game’s maker has vowed not to misuse the unsecured information, the Pokémon GO privacy policy also grants the company permission to sell the information it obtains from users, share it with third parties or turn it over to law enforcement. If the personal data and other Google user files were somehow to end up in Niantic’s huge user database, the danger of a catastrophic cybersecurity breach would increase exponentially. Over the weekend, the Pokémon GO servers suffered a major outage, which Niantic blamed on too many downloads as it expanded the game to 26 new countries. But two separate hacker groups claimed the outage was a result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and vowed that more were being planned in the near future. PoodleCorp, one of the hacker organizations, said another attack would occur on Aug. 1. The hacker group OurMine – which previously hacked the social media accounts of Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey – sent an email to PCMag.com, saying they also attacked the Pokémon GO servers in an effort to help improve security. “We wrote we will stop the attack if (Niantic) staff talked with us,” the web article states, citing an anonymous OurMine representative, “because we will teach them how to protect their servers.” (Comment on this)
9:25p	Salesforce Buys Data Center Optimization Startup Coolan Salesforce has acquired Coolan, a data center management software startup co-founded by Amir Michael, a former Facebook and Google hardware engineer and one of the founders of the Open Compute Project, Facebook’s open source data center and hardware design initiative. Salesforce’s initial plan is to use Coolan’s technology to optimize its infrastructure, Michael said in a blog post announcing the deal. It’s unclear whether the San Francisco-based seller of cloud-based business software has any commercial plans for the startup’s software platform that uses analytics and machine learning to minimize the cost of data center infrastructure and maximize its reliability. “Building a startup is an awesome journey, and I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done,” Michael wrote. “Once the transaction has closed, the Coolan team will help Salesforce optimize its infrastructure as it scales to support customer growth around the world. I will continue my work with the Open Compute Project (OCP) to further its mission of making hardware open, efficient and scalable.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed. A Salesforce spokesperson referred us to Michael’s blog post in response to a request for comment. Examples of things Coolan’s software helps with include answering questions like when is the best time to retire a server or what is the most efficient server power supply type and configuration. The platform relies on historical data collected from Coolan customers’ data centers to help companies make better infrastructure decisions. Salesforce has recently been making efforts to transform its data center strategy to introduce more standardization on fewer types of servers and more automation. This strategy is similar to the way other internet and cloud services giants, such as Facebook and Google, have been building out their infrastructure. Read more: Salesforce Doubles Down on Data Center Automation We interviewed Michael earlier this year at length on his thoughts about the future of data center hardware and the future of Open Compute in smaller enterprise IT shops. Read the full interview here. (Comment on this)

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