Monday, August 1st, 2016

Time	Event
9:00a	Report: Data Center Market Trends ‘Strong Demand, Smart Growth’ The recently published Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) North America Data Center Outlook revealed absorption numbers which are shockingly high for the first six months of the year. Notably, this leasing avalanche is accelerating despite sophisticated tools used to optimize server layouts and design data center space more efficiently, according to the JLL report. Northern Virginia’s “data center alley” led the way with 78 MW, including 55 MW of deals signed during Q2 2016. The Bay Area/Silicon Valley tallied 57.6 MW of net absorption, followed by Chicago and Dallas, at 32 MW and 18 MW, respectively. Source: Jones Lang LaSalle – July 2016 Data Center Outlook The spike in demand from the large public cloud providers which began in 2015, has remained a persistent theme during the first two quarters of 2016. JLL Report Highlights Here are a few key takeaways: The acceleration of cloud adoption will double the size of the data center industry over the next five years. Rapidly evolving data sovereignty laws will influence demand for space and were a way to boost local economies, especially in Europe. The first wave of multi-tenant data centers will be dealing with 10-year lease expirations, adding more fuel to an already dynamic leasing environment. New subsea cables linking Northern Virginia with Africa, Europe and Latin America will continue to boost demand in this interconnection focused market. Concerns regarding climate change continue to drive innovation, including data center microgrids actively under discussion for Manhattan, and already in service in Arizona and Colorado. Read more: Digital Realty Buys Wind Energy for Its Entire US Colocation Footprint One Expert Weighs In If you follow the data center industry closely, there really is no consensus on how long this cloud leasing bonanza will last. Have the last few quarters ushered in a “new normal,” as more enterprise customers join the cloud bandwagon, or will absorption revert back to historic levels? Data Center Knowledge recently spoke with Bo Bond, a Dallas-based managing director at the commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle. According to Bond, most of the “big sticks,” including the publicly traded data center REITs, have put on their “land hats,” and are actively looking for sites. Bond hinted there will be more significant cloud leasing deals announced prior to the end of this year. In a nutshell, he felt that demand remained strong, and that build-to-suit and phased projects should help keep supply in line with demand. Mixed Signals – Partially Cloudy Forecast? However, the distant drumbeat of oversupply concerns has gotten louder recently. CoreSite CEO Tom Ray has taken a conservative stance on buying land for future development in Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley. He discussed his concerns regarding overbuilding relative to historical demand during CoreSite’s Q2 earnings call, where he also announced he would be stepping down. Read more: CoreSite Realty: Strong Q2 Overshadowed By CEO Tom Ray’s Departure It remains to be seen if the CoreSite management team and board will take a slightly more aggressive approach under new CEO Paul Szurek, who is taking over the reins effective September 10, 2016. However, management teams which are completing powered shells or beginning construction on new projects sounded confident that there was plenty of demand for projects being delivered during the second half of 2016, and early 2017. Industry bellwether Digital Realty had a slow second quarter on the wholesale leasing front, but reported blockbuster July leasing to kick off what Digital expects to be a strong second half of the year. Digital Realty will be delivering space in Dallas and Chicago markets, where a lack of wholesale inventory was also a factor impacting Q2 leasing. CyrusOne previously announced its intention of building a 500,000 SF data center on the 15 acres adjacent to the recently acquired CME Group Globex data center, located outside of Chicago in Aurora, Illinois. Read more: CyrusOne Plans Huge Expansion at CME Data Center Campus in Chicago DuPont Fabros reportedly plans to repurpose a Chicago industrial property into an 18 MW data center facility, located near its successful CH1 and CH2 wholesale data centers. During Q2, DuPont Fabros closed on a 46.7 acre land parcel located in Hillsboro, Oregon. The company also has 20.6 acres outside of Toronto under contract, with a closing scheduled for later this year. QTS Realty hosted a grand opening for its new Chicago facility, built on the 30 acre campus previously occupied by the Chicago Sun Times press. Additionally, QTS expanded in New Jersey, with the acquisition from DuPont Fabros of its Princeton, NJ campus. QTS is currently modifying the NJ1 infrastructure to facilitate leasing space to colocation and smaller turnkey wholesale customers. There is so much activity reported in Ashburn, Northern Virginia and adjacent counties that it would require an entire article to detail. Data center projects are underway or on the drawing boards from major players, including: Digital Realty, Equinix, CyrusOne, DuPont Fabros, Sabey Data Centers, Raging Wire, DBT Data Trust, Corporate Office Property Trust, Iron Mountain, and Infomart. Read more: Report: Microsoft and Oracle Gobble Up Data Center Space in Virginia The former 128 acre Verizon campus, renamed Quantum Park, is also being redeveloped by American Real Estate Partners. Investor Takeaway Interest rates are close to all-time lows, while data center leasing and net-absorption in many markets has been at record levels. This created a perfect storm for the six publicly traded data center REITs. Read more: Another Huge Quarter for Data Center REITs: What’s Next? The JLL report pointed out that the second half of the year could see a decline in corporate spending due to uncertainty surrounding the UK Brexit vote and the upcoming US presidential election. (Comment on this)
5:57p	Creating the Hybrid Bridge Between Data Center and Cloud Sponsored by: Dell and Intel       Maturity around cloud computing has allowed organizations to focus on their specific cloud strategies and deployment models. Currently, hybrid cloud architectures is one of the most dominant models and offers the most benefits for IT, your data center and the business. Plus, there are real-world numbers to back this up. According to IDC, the big drivers for increased implementation of hybrid clouds are: IT’s continuing quest for optimized infrastructure, and the ability of solution builders to source application and infrastructure components from multiple providers to construct a hybrid cloud-based solution. Consider this: By the end of 2018, 40 percent of IT spend across hardware, software, and services will be for cloud-oriented technologies. By 2020, 45 to 50 percent of all spend will be for cloud delivered models. However, there are some challenges as organizations shift into a hybrid cloud model. “With increasing cloud spending, many enterprises will have begun use of hybrid solutions without IT’s direct involvement,” said Chris Morris, vice president of Cloud and Services at IDC. “With the business unit managers increasingly buying their own cloud solutions, hybrid cloud architectures can proliferate, and sometimes not be aligned with the enterprise architecture.” So, how do you align your hybrid cloud strategy with the goals of your business? Here are three key planning considerations that will help you bridge your data center with the cloud. 1. Work with a provider that can support your IT and business goals. Recently, the very much anticipated Microsoft Hybrid Cloud product, Azure Stack, experienced a few issues. In fact, the architecture will be a bit more limited than developers were expecting. According to an article in GeekWire, customers have strongly indicated that simplicity and speed of development are paramount, trumping the ability to customize at the infrastructure level. Currently in TechPreview, the architecture (to be released officially mid-2017) will combine software, hardware, support and services. However, until further notice only Dell, HPE and Lenovo configurations will be available. All of this translates to working with a provider that can support your business and IT needs. If you’re looking for greater levels of infrastructure customization, work with a provider who can support it. Otherwise, if you’re standardized on specific hardware models, some hybrid cloud vendors can specifically support your use cases. 2. Develop data center technologies built around scale, efficiency, and predictability. New types of converged and hyper-converged systems allow for greater integration with virtualization and cloud resources. Most of all, teams across the organization can leverage hybrid cloud services for their specific needs. By creating a powerful, underlying data center ecosystem – able to couple with a hybrid cloud  – you enable an architecture that can scale seamlessly between in-premise and cloud data points. These converged infrastructure technologies such as the Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft, allow you to aggregate critical resource points and create greater levels of multi-tenancy, infrastructure control, security, and user experience optimization. 3. Ensure that management remains elastic throughout public and on-premise systems. You must be able to control those systems spanning cloud and on-premise resources. This is especially critical for IT managers controlling applications, desktops, and other types of workloads being delivered to the user. Remember, we’re working with more mobility, more data, very rich experiences, and more cloud services. All of this translates to requirements around proactive, cloud-ready management. Hybrid cloud systems must be properly planned out and managed. In some cases, this requires granular control over underlying server systems. If that’s the case, it’s critical to work with providers that can support those types of services. Most of all, these providers must be able to extend management between their cloud and your data center. Remember, lost resources are expensive, and poor user experiences can cripple productivity. “As the use of cloud services matures and broadens, the emphasis for enterprise IT has moved from technology management to service management and the optimization of workloads. The impact of digital transformation projects on the service delivery infrastructure necessitates that CIOs re-architect their delivery processes to ensure the IT environment is flexible and agile, yet secure and resilient,” said Mayur Sahni, senior research manager for Cloud and Service, at IDC. Moving forward, powerful hybrid cloud systems will provide elasticity and agility for your data center and the business. You’ll be able to create better go-to-market strategies while still supporting advanced IT initiatives. Finally, a good hybrid cloud ecosystem will help create new kinds of business economics that fuel innovation.           (Comment on this)
7:47p	Verizon Still Weighs Terremark Plans After Yahoo Deal The fact that Verizon has the cash on-hand to make a $2.4 billion deal for its Verizon Telematics division to acquire transport management services provider Fleetmatics — as the corporation announced Monday morning — just one week after staking a $4.8 billion claim to the core services of Yahoo, suggests that Verizon is certainly not hurting as a company. You would think both acquisitions were parts of a larger cloud services plan.  Clearly Verizon appears to have an interest in providing cloud facilities that are close to its customers.  Although you can say that Yahoo and Fleetmatics address completely separate customer bases, the common tie is that both incent their respective bases to utilize cloud services that consume compute, bandwidth, and storage.  Taken just unto themselves, both acquisitions look like two parts of a smart, cloud strategy. But at no time during Verizon’s Q2 2016 earnings report last week was the word “cloud” even mentioned.  What’s more, when a Morgan Stanley analyst asked executives about their plans for Terremark, whose global data center network Verizon acquired in 2011, CFO Fran Shammo deferred talk on the topic until Q3, at the earliest. “On the data center sales, we are coming to an end of the process,” said Shammo [our thanks to Seeking Alpha for the transcript].  “And we will probably come to a definitive answer in the third quarter as to whether we’re going to move forward or we’re not.” Black Mark Financial analyst Trip Chowdhry, who runs Global Equities Research, LLC, caused a stir after last week’s Yahoo announcement by comparing it with the Terremark deal.  In an analyst’s note that was picked up by Barron’s last week, Chowdhry called the Terremark deal “a total disaster” for Verizon, and predicted déjà vu with respect to Yahoo:  “Basically, we are seeing a replay of the previous movie, VZ buys Terremark, but with a different actor, YHOO replacing Terremark.” Chowdhry did not go into specifics about the causes of this disaster, as he perceives it.  It’s quite possible that Terremark’s failure to perform, from many perspectives, is not endemic to the cloud service provider industry. Indeed, back in 2013 — just one month after Terremark put forth its plans for a sophisticated, multi-tier cloud network architecture — the provider took the fall for having hosted the original edition of Healthcare.gov.  This despite then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius blaming Verizon, not Terremark, by name, for having forced her department for dealing with IT issues for which, she said, Verizon should have assumed responsibility. Say what you will about Yahoo — having squandered its opportunities with Tumblr, having missed an opportunity to capitalize on Big Data, having under-utilized Katie Couric — the media company and would-be SaaS services provider (now by way of a subsidiary named Aabaco) has never had to escape a stain as indelible as being roasted before Congress as the root cause of everything wrong with Obamacare. Still, one would think there may be some value yet to be harvested from a strategic pairing of Yahoo’s services with Terremark’s infrastructure.  While analysts with Technology Business Research have plenty of praise for Verizon, and hope for the Yahoo deal, in a conversation with Datacenter Knowledge today, they cautioned that selling or spinning off Terremark may still make the most sense for the telco. “Infrastructure integration is a whole, separate ballgame,” stated Stuart Williams, TBR’s vice president for research.  “Even with all the cloud abstraction layers that you can wrap around something, sometimes it’s just easier to jump from one to the next.” Apples and Orange-colored Apples Yahoo’s data center infrastructure, Williams agreed, is largely homegrown.  Verizon has its own services infrastructure which, due to the nature of pre-existing telco services (at least, prior to the advent of CORD) will already be distinctly different from that of both Terremark and Yahoo.  So welding services together on the same platform, in an attempt to discover what synergies may lie there, may not be as viable a plan for Verizon as building new cloud services around the most advanced infrastructure in its portfolio.  Maybe that’s Yahoo now, and maybe not. “I think the challenges are in the engagement models, not so much in the infrastructure,” said Williams.  The business arrangements that Terremark’s customers have made up to now are based on large enterprise-oriented services consumption models, he explained.  Yahoo has been dealing with a different class of customer altogether.  So, Yahoo’s infrastructure and its service agreements will be constructed and supported entirely differently. Advertising technologies, streaming media, user profile data — all these profiles that Yahoo brings to Verizon, are all serially interrelated use cases, he continued.  One leads to the next; each link in the chain was designed to integrate with the link before and after.  So Yahoo’s infrastructure model will have been built to support its business model (as, arguably, was that of AOL, another recent Verizon acquisition). While cloud infrastructure, at least theoretically, is not supposed to take on a different texture with respect to different classes of customers/consumers, from Williams’ perspective, it unavoidably does.  And that makes Terremark and Yahoo, in his opinion, fundamentally different cases from one another — meaning, the latter may not necessarily follow the trail of the former.  “That’s why I’m a little bit more optimistic about it,” said Williams. “The data layer that flows within, and all around — the e-mail, the portal, search, news, finance, sports, etc. — all the engagement that goes on within that little ecosystem, is extremely valuable,” said Seth Ulinski, TBR’s senior analyst for advertising technology.  “They’re monetizing not just their media assets, but also monetizing other publisher assets.” Ulinski pointed to Yahoo’s 2014 purchase of video ad technology provider BrightRoll, and its private exchange of assets from video content owners, as more of an incentive for Verizon to make its purchase than anything infrastructural.  Today, it’s too easy and relatively inexpensive for any organization to grow its data infrastructure organically, Ulinski and Williams agreed. It’s the integration of existing data center assets with one another, and the amalgamation of the business models around them, that typically gets sticky.  Service providers and consultants may offer assistance and guidance for small to medium enterprises … which Verizon is certainly not.  Given this fact, and under these circumstance, it may end up being to Verizon’s benefit to let Terremark go. (Comment on this)
7:57p	Clinton Campaign Says Hackers Accessed Data Program It Used by Chris Strohm and Margaret Talev (Bloomberg) – Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign confirmed that one of its data programs was accessed by hackers, the latest development in what cybersecurity experts call a broad operation by Russian operatives to infiltrate U.S. political organizations. “An analytics data program maintained by the DNC, and used by our campaign and a number of other entities, was accessed as part of” a previously disclosed attack on the Democratic National Committee, campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Friday in an e-mailed statement. “Our campaign computer system has been under review by outside cyber security experts. To date, they have found no evidence that our internal systems have been compromised.” The FBI has begun a review of whether the Clinton campaign was hacked, according to a person familiar with the probe who asked not to be identified discussing an internal inquiry. The campaign’s announcement came hours after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which raises funds to elect House Democrats, said that it, too, was “the target of a cybersecurity incident.” Meredith Kelly, press secretary for the organization, said the DCCC was “cooperating with the federal law enforcement agencies with respect to their ongoing investigation.” Stolen E-Mails Attacks on Democratic organizations, including the DNC, have roiled the 2016 political campaigns. The disclosure by WikiLeaks of purloined party e-mails forced the head of the DNC to resign as Democrats gathered for their presidential convention. The breach has stirred allegations that Russia is seeking to meddle in the U.S. election, an assertion Russian officials have repeatedly denied. “Any of the allegations that circulate here in the U.S. about Russia’s involvement are groundless,” Yury Melnik, a spokesman for Russia’s embassy in Washington, said Friday in a phone interview. “There’s no attempts whatsoever to meddle with the political process or the results of the election. The Russian government is ready and willing to work with the current administration and any future administration.” FBI Response In a statement Friday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it’s “aware of media reporting on cyber intrusions involving multiple political entities, and is working to determine the accuracy, nature and scope of these matters.” “The cyber threat environment continues to evolve as cyber actors target all sectors and their data,” the agency said. “The FBI takes seriously any allegations of intrusions, and we will continue to hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace.” The hackers who got into the analytics program used by the Clinton campaign had access to its server for about five days, according to a campaign aide who asked not to be identified. The program, one of many used to conduct voter analysis, doesn’t include Social Security or credit card numbers, the aide said. “Analytics data program” is a broad term that could mean many things and a key question is whether the data was breached or the program itself compromised, Herbert Lin, a cyber research fellow at Stanford University, said by phone. “If it’s data, it’s data on people who would have been likely targets for a campaign,” Lin said. That might include details from their home addresses to their spending habits, he said. Internet Traffic The attack on the Democrats’ House campaign committee affected visitors who went to its website from June 19 to June 27, cybersecurity company FireEye Inc. concluded, based on an analysis of internet traffic. Those visitors were steered to a server controlled by a hacking group known as APT 28, said John Hultquist, FireEye’s manager of cyber espionage intelligence. Other cybersecurity researchers have said APT 28 is an arm of Russia’s military intelligence service GRU, he said. The DCCC website was altered so that visitors seeking to make a donation were redirected to a server controlled by hackers linked to the Russian government, Hultquist said.The cybersecurity company hasn’t been able to determine if the hackers intercepted the donations or succeeded in planting malware on the computers of those visitors, Hultquist said. The attack on the DNC resulted in the theft of e-mail and internal reports, some of which have since been published by WikiLeaks. Russia is a leading suspect in that intrusion, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the probe who asked to not be identified because the inquiry is continuing. Private cybersecurity companies have said they traced the DNC attack to groups in Russia. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign after a firestorm over leaked e-mails that showed committee staffers favored Clinton and attempted to undermine Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Electronic Voting In response to speculation that Russia is attempting to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential race — and might even seek ways to tamper with electronic voting — Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman, said Friday, “As we’ve seen in the past, Russia has tried to influence elections in Europe. We take seriously their past record on this. We also take seriously the integrity of our voting system.” Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan said Wednesday that the nominee has been briefed on hacking of the DNC and has been told that the weight of expert opinion is that Russia was involved. “She does not view this as a political issue, she views this as a national security issue,” he told reporters gathered in Philadelphia for this week’s Democratic National Convention. Russia has a history of interfering in elections in other countries, he said. “Unlike Donald Trump, who praises Putin” and adopts his positions, “Secretary Clinton will stand up to Putin,” Sullivan said. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, this week urged Russia to make public “30,000 e-mails that are missing” from the private server that Clinton maintained when she was secretary of state. He later said he was being “sarcastic.”       (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2016/08/01 [Calendar]

Next Day >>