Friday, July 22nd, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	Why Salesforce Bought Coolan, a Data Center Optimization Startup Salesforce made a surprising move Thursday, acquiring Coolan, a three-year-old Silicon Valley startup whose software uses Big Data analytics and machine learning to help companies make smarter data center management and hardware buying decisions. In a blog post, Coolan’s co-founder, Amir Michael, who used to design servers for Google and later for Facebook, and who co-founded Facebook’s open source data center and hardware design initiative, the Open Compute Project, said Coolan would work to optimize Salesforce’s infrastructure. So far, the deal appears to be mostly about Salesforce looking to improve the way it builds and manages its own data centers. The company’s core business is selling cloud-based business software tools, and it’s unlikely – although not impossible – that it will sell data center management services based on Coolan’s platform to others. “Once the transaction has closed, the Coolan team will help Salesforce optimize its infrastructure as it scales to support customer growth around the world,” Michael wrote. “I will continue my work with the Open Compute Project to further its mission of making hardware open, efficient, and scalable.” If it wasn’t clear already, the acquisition confirms once more that Salesforce’s announcement earlier this year that it would use Amazon Web Services to deploy its core products to select international markets did not mean Mark Benioff’s cloud software giant was thinking of getting rid of its own data centers, which it leases from data center providers. Neither company has shared much detail about Salesforce’s plans for Coolan beyond Michael’s blog post. Reached by phone Thursday, Michael said he could not talk about the deal and was instructed by Salesforce to direct all inquiries to them, while a Salesforce spokesperson, responding to a request for comment, referred us back to his blog post. Salesforce Rethinking Data Centers Salesforce has recently been revamping its approach to data center infrastructure, seeking to adopt a strategy similar to that used by the likes of Google, Facebook, and several others. Their strategies rely among other things on custom, stripped down hardware, little variation between hardware SKUs that support different services, and lots of automation. Both Coolan’s technology and its team, some of whom were deeply involved in building and running infrastructure for those web-scale data center operators, will be useful to Salesforce’s current infrastructure efforts. Read more: Salesforce Latest Convert to the Web-Scale Data Center Way Coolan’s Platform Lowers Data Center Costs Salesforce likely sees Coolan’s software platform as a competitive advantage. The platform, which the startup has been providing to customers as a cloud-based service, helps companies save a lot of money in their data centers. In one recent project for a customer, Coolan identified that power supplies in the customer’s servers were grossly overprovisioned, resulting in 300,000 kWh of data center energy waste per year. This customer, whose name Coolan did not reveal, had 1,600 servers. A company like Salesforce, which has global data center infrastructure that continues to scale, can get a lot more savings out of such improvements. Read more: How Server Power Supplies are Wasting Your Money Another example is identifying the best time to replace a server. There isn’t a magic number that works for every company, and total cost of ownership changes differently over time for different businesses. Being able to pinpoint when a multitude of factors – things like server cost, data center CAPEX and OPEX, cost of data center infrastructure, networking equipment, and cost data center racks – all line up in a way that makes keeping an old server more expensive than replacing it with a new one is the kind of thing Coolan is good at. Read more: When is the Best Time to Retire a Server Machine Learning in Data Center Management To arrive at its conclusions, the platform analyzes operational data from the present customer’s data centers as well as historical operational data it has collected from past customers’ facilities. It stores all the data it collects on Amazon’s cloud, where much of its computing also takes place, Michael told Data Center Knowledge in a recent interview. Coolan uses machine learning to help with everything, from identifying inefficiencies to predicting failure in server components, he said. By applying machine learning to data center management, Coolan is taking a page out of Google’s playbook, although it’s unclear whether there are any similarities at all in the ways the two companies apply it. Google has been using machine learning to optimize its data centers for some time now. Its latest effort to apply its Artificial Intelligence technology called DeepMind to improving data center energy efficiency has reportedly resulted in a 15 percent improvement in Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). Scaling Smart Acquiring Coolan, Salesforce gets its hands on some sophisticated, cutting-edge data center management and optimization capabilities and a team of experts who are likely to have a lot of influence on the way the world’s biggest cloud CRM company builds out its infrastructure going forward. Scale is crucial for today’s cloud providers, and scaling infrastructure in a smart way is everything, affecting both the company’s ability to serve its customers with high performance and minimal downtime and its ability to make a profit. (Comment on this)
5:20p	Amazon Said to Be Mulling Data Center Construction in Italy In addition to its plan to build a €150 million storage and logistics center outside of Rome, Amazon is considering building data centers in Italy on the sites of retired power plants, Reuters reported citing two anonymous sources. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was reportedly expected to meet with Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, in Florence Friday to discuss the online retailer and cloud giant’s big planned investments in the country. The series of investments would total €500 million or more. Amazon is one of the companies interested in buying three old power stations from the government-controlled utility Enel, the utility’s CEO, Francesco Starace, said earlier. Power stations make for good mega-data center sites because a lot of the electrical and mechanical infrastructure can be adapted to data center use. Google, for example, is building a data center on the site of an old power plant in Alabama. Enel is a key player in Renzi’s plan to improve residential broadband connectivity in the country, which ranks last in the European Union for internet usage. The utility will reportedly build new fibre-optic infrastructure along its electrical transmission lines. Currently, Amazon Web Services, the Seattle-based company’s cloud arm, has data centers in two European countries: Ireland and Germany. An Amazon data center in the UK is in the works. Although Italy is the EU’s fourth-largest economy, it isn’t known for a big and active data center market, at least not as big and active as places like London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or Dublin. One recent expansion into Italy by a major US data center company is a project by Las Vegas-based Switch in the Milan area. (Comment on this)
8:06p	Gartner: Cloud Shift to Account for $1 Trillion in Spending by 2020 Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud Surprising no one, Gartner said this week that cloud computing will be one of the “most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.” Just how disruptive? The research firm predicts that more than $1 trillion in spending will be directly or indirectly impacted by the shift to cloud over the next five years. Gartner said it compares IT spending on cloud services with traditional cloud services in the same market categories to come up with cloud shift rates. Other research has noted the decline in spending on non-cloud environments; IDC said that cloud will account for almost half of all IT infrastructure spending by 2020. See also: Cloud Providers Will Spend $23B on Data Center Hardware This Year “Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world,” Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner said in a statement “The market for cloud services has grown to such an extent that it is now a notable percentage of total IT spending, helping to create a new generation of start-ups and ‘born in the cloud’ providers.” In 2016, the aggregate amount of cloud shift will reach $111 billion, ballooning to $216 billion in 2020. “Cloud shift is not just about cloud. As organizations pursue a new IT architecture and operating philosophy, they become prepared for new opportunities in digital business, including next-generation IT solutions such as the Internet of Things,” Anderson said. “Furthermore, organizations embracing dynamic, cloud-based operating models position themselves better for cost optimization and increased competitiveness.” Despite the increase in cloud spending, spending on hardware will continue to exist for some time, particularly when you look at the kind of infrastructure that will be required to support these clouds. To that end, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said this week that it will meet demand for Azure with more international data center locations. Indeed, changes in IT spending are not happening overnight; according to a recent survey by IDC, on-premise IT infrastructure will still account for more than 60 percent of all end-user hardware spending this year. This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-research/gartner-cloud-shift-account-1-trillion-spending-2020 (Comment on this)
9:20p	New Microsoft Data Center in Iowa Will Be 1.7M Square Feet While the news that a third massive Microsoft data center was coming to West Des Moines, Iowa, has been out since Wednesday, it wasn’t clear just how massive this future cloud facility will be. According to an official statement the city issued Friday, Microsoft is planning to erect the server farm in four phases, 256,000 to 583,200 square feet each, adding up to 1.7 million square feet at full build-out. Microsoft and its rivals in the cloud services space have all been investing billions of dollars in data center expansion around the world to support growth of these businesses. Microsoft is currently ahead of others in terms of the scale of its global cloud infrastructure. Just this week, on the company’s latest earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said there would be no hard limit to the amount of data centers Microsoft will build for its cloud. Read more: Nadella: We’ll Build Cloud Data Centers Wherever Demand Takes Us The company expects to spend between $1.5 billion and $2 billion on the latest Iowa project, generating, at a minimum, $307 million worth of tax revenue for the city and bringing Microsoft’s total investment there to nearly $3.5 billion. Cities and states often use tax incentives to lure big data center construction projects. In this case, however, Microsoft has negotiated a deal whereby instead of a flat-out tax abatement, the company will use its property-tax money to fund municipal infrastructure upgrades for its data centers in the city, such as power lines, streets, water lines, and sanitary sewer lines. West Des Moines officials expect these upgrades – which will include 10 miles of new roadway and a new bridge – to help accelerate development on thousands of acres of land in the area. Iowa is one of a handful of American states where internet and cloud giants have built huge data center campuses in recent years. In addition to the two existing Microsoft data centers in West Des Moines, Iowa is home to Google and Facebook data centers. These giants have also made big investments in wind farm construction in the state. Both Facebook and Google have signed long-term utility-scale power purchase agreements with wind farm developers in Iowa to compensate for carbon footprint associated with energy consumption of their data centers. (Comment on this)

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