Monday, August 8th, 2016

Time	Event
6:32p	Delta Data Center Outage Grounds Hundreds of Flights Delta Airlines hasn’t yet explained what exactly caused its data center outage in Atlanta this morning, which led the carrier to cancel hundreds of flights scheduled for the day. It said a power outage “impacted Delta computer systems and operations worldwide,” but a spokesman for the utility whose service territory includes the Atlanta site told the Wall Street Journal that there were no power outages in its territory on Sunday evening or Monday. The utility, Georgia Power, did dispatch some workers to the data center to help Delta fix a problem with switch gear early Monday morning, the spokesman said. Delta has been posting regular updates on the incident and flight cancellations and delays. The last update, posted at 1:30 p.m. ET, said 451 flights had been cancelled due to the power outage, and 1,679 of the 6,000 or so scheduled for today were being operated so far. Ed Bastian, the airline’s CEO, apologized for the incident in a video posted on the company’s website. While the immediate impact of any data center outage is disruption of business and its customers, there is also the longer-term cost impact. For a data center service provider, the bulk of that cost may be compensation to customers for not delivering on service level agreements. The cost of data center outages for airlines is somewhat similar: Delta customers are entitled to refunds for flights that are cancelled or significantly delayed. It’s difficult to calculate the total cost of data center outages, and they vary widely depending on the nature of the business. Emerson Network Power has been funding periodic surveys by the Ponemon Institute that attempt to quantify and track average costs of data center outages across different business verticals. According to the most recent survey, the average cost of a single data center outage in 2015 was $740,000. The most expensive reported outage last year was about $2.4 million. While problems with electrical infrastructure have for many years remained the most common cause of data center outages, the number of outages caused by cybercrime is now rising more quickly than any other type, according to Ponemon. Read more: Cybercrime Fastest-Growing Cause of Data Center Outages Airlines grounding flights as a result of data center outages is a fairly regular occurrence. In January, a power outage at a Verizon data center caused flight delays for customers of JetBlue, which was hosting infrastructure at the facility. Last year, United Airlines grounded flights for about an hour, attributing the disruption to network connectivity issues. (Comment on this)
7:21p	Apple Said to Buy AI Startup Turi for About $200M (Bloomberg) — Apple acquired artificial intelligence startup Turi for about $200 million, according to people familiar with the situation, in the latest deal by the iPhone maker to accumulate advanced computing capabilities for its products and services. Turi helps developers create and manage software and services that use a form of AI called machine learning. It also has systems that let companies to build recommendation engines, detect fraud, analyze customer usage patterns and better target potential users, according to the Seattle-based startup’s website. Apple could use this to more rapidly integrate the technology with future products. Apple’s move Friday is part of a broader battle among Google, Facebook and Amazon to gain an edge in AI, particularly in the field known as pervasive computing, where software tries to automatically infer what people want, one of the people said. Turi’s technology could feed into Apple’s Siri digital assistant, the person added, and help define new ways computers interact with people. “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” Apple said in a statement. GeekWire earlier reported the acquisition. Apple sees its Turi acquisition as a way to better tap into the growing community of AI researchers, said a person familiar with the deal. Apple has been criticized by researchers for being too secretive about its AI work. In contrast, Turi held a two-day machine-learning conference in July in San Francisco for data scientists and academics. Formerly known as Dato, Turi raised more than $25 million from venture capital investors including New Enterprise Associates and Madrona Venture Group, according to CrunchBase. Turi couldn’t be reached for comment on the deal. The Turi team will remain in Seattle, one of the people familiar with the situation said. More about Turi (formerly Dato): GraphLab Becomes Dato, Raises $18M for Machine Learning Apple has purchased multiple firms over the past couple of years that specialize in artificial intelligence. The company has also begun to integrate these technologies into products such as its iPhone software and Siri. In January, Apple acquired Emotient, a startup that uses AI to recognize and act upon facial expressions. Last year, Apple acquired a pair of voice-centric AI startups, VocalIQ and Perceptio, to bolster Siri. VocalIQ specialized in using machine learning to allow voice assistants to engage in more realistic conversation. Perceptio focused on helping AI systems run on devices while sharing limited amounts of personal user data. See also: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill With DeepMind-Powered AI Machine learning and AI help computers automatically understand images, videos, and spoken words. The technologies also allow systems to take actions or make recommendations on such data. Apple has already begun to show the fruits of its AI investments via better keyword recognition by Siri across multiple product lines. Apple will release a new version of its photo-management program for iPhones and iPads that uses AI to recognize objects in photos. For example, a user will be able to search for “sushi” and photographs of the food will appear. Apple will also bring machine learning capabilities to its iMessage application by adding a feature this fall that translates words in texts into emoji icons. (Comment on this)
9:42p	Winners and Losers in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS Brought to You by The WHIR Gartner has released the results of its Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure as a Service for 2016. The winners in the public cloud space are innovating and adding new features rapidly, while the losers are falling further and further behind. Here’s a look at some of the highlights of the report. Winner: Amazon Web Services AWS is the clear leader in the IaaS space with “a diverse customer base and the broadest range of use cases.” Its partner ecosystem combined with its training and certification programs “makes it easier to adopt and operate AWS in a best-practice fashion,” Gartner says. Gartner notes that optimal use of AWS may require professional services, and recommends the use of third-party cost management tools to keep track of cloud expenses. Of course, all of this is good news for the latest crop of cloud service providers who are positioning their services around providing better support for AWS. Winner: Microsoft Microsoft Azure is considered one of the big three IaaS providers right now. Gartner says Microsoft’s strengths include integrated IaaS and PaaS components that “operate and feel like a unified whole”, rapid addition of new features and services, and becoming more open – including its support of Red Hat earlier this year. And Gartner isn’t the only one that recognizes Azure’s mass appeal: other recent research has predicted that adoption of Azure by CIOs could surpass AWS by 2019. Like AWS, successful implementation of Azure relies on customers forming relationships with partners. But Gartner says that while Microsoft “has been aggressively recruiting managed service and professional services partners… many of these partners lack extensive experience with the Azure platform, which can compromise the quality of the solutions they deliver to customers.” But it’s not necessarily the fault of the partners; Gartner says that “CMP vendors and MSPs report challenges in working with Azure, particularly in the areas of API reliability and secure authentication, which are slowing their ability to deliver solutions.” Winner: Google Google’s capabilities in the IaaS space rely heavily on its own experience running the back-end of its behemoth search engine. In other words, Google allows other companies to “run like Google” which makes it the top contender for cloud-native use cases and applications. But Google is lacking in key areas that could prevent it from further adoption with established organizations and startups; namely, “user management suitable for large organizations, granular and customizable role-based access control (RBAC), complex network topologies equivalent to those in enterprise data centers, and software licensing via a marketplace and license-portability agreement.” Unlike AWS and Microsoft, who have been fairly supportive of partners, Google has focused more on delivering its cloud services direct, even pushing some MSPs to vow to never work with the company. Winner: Rackspace With roots in OpenStack cloud, Rackspace has worked to be more technology-neutral, and shifted away from this to embrace “its roots as ‘a company of experts,’” offering managed AWS support and other managed services for third-party clouds. Rackspace is also strong when it comes to private cloud offerings. What has held Rackspace back? According to Gartner, it has not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation of the market leaders. Gartner also hinted that Rackspace could become an acquisition target – which was at least partially confirmed this week as reports surfaced that it is close to a deal with private equity firm Apollo. Loser: VMware While Gartner acknowledges that VMware is the market share leader in virtualization, vCloud Air has “limited appeal to the business managers and application development leaders who are typically the key decision makers for cloud IaaS sourcing.” “VMware is no longer significantly expanding the geographic footprint of vCloud Air, nor investing in the engineering necessary to expand its feature set beyond basic cloud IaaS,” Gartner says. Loser: NTT Communications Thought NTT Communications (NTT Com) has a strong presence in Asia-Pacific – a challenging market for many IaaS providers – its basic cloud IaaS offering is not enough to set it apart from its competitors. Gartner says it is “missing capabilities that would make it attractive to enterprise IT operations organizations” – which could be somewhat addressed by its CSB portal that includes its offerings and third-party clouds, expected to launch this year. Loser: Fujitsu Gartner says that Fujitsu’s cloud IaaS capabilities “lag significantly behind those of the market leaders” and “it will continue to need to aggressively invest in acquiring and building technology in order to be competitive in this market.” This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/4-winners-and-3-losers-in-gartners-magic-quadrant-for-iaas (Comment on this)
9:58p	Rackspace Sells Cloud Sites Platform to Liquid Web Brought to You by The WHIR There is some M&A action out of Rackspace today, and it’s not the news that many were expecting after reports last week that Rackspace may go private. Liquid Web announced on Monday that it has signed an agreement to acquire Rackspace Cloud Sites business unit in a deal that could provide a peek into Rackspace’s changing strategy. The deal will open Liquid Web up to a new area of customers, including designers, developers and digital agencies who use the Platform as a Service (PaaS) to host high traffic websites, and could indicate that Rackspace is planning to shed its more traditional hosting services while doubling down on its support offerings for third-party clouds. According to Liquid Web, the Cloud Sites unit will remain in San Antonio, and Liquid Web said it is working with Rackspace to ensure a smooth transition for these customers. Liquid Web is also committed to investing in the Cloud Sites platform, Rackspace’s premium hosting service that started at $150 per month. According to the press release, Cloud Sites augments Liquid Web’s portfolio while adding capabilities to further simplify web hosting and cloud services. With the acquisition, the Liquid Web team will grow to 550 employees and 30,000 customers globally. “With the addition of Cloud Sites, we further our mission to empower web professionals all over the world to create content and commerce without worry, free of problems and devoid of even one bit of hesitation by providing absolutely flawless web hosting,” Liquid Web CEO Jim Geiger said in a statement. “Unfortunately, our industry is trending toward unsupported services, which leaves fast-growing developers, digital agencies and designers alone, without a real person to turn to when they really need help. However, at Liquid Web, day-in and day-out our people stand behind the creators of content and commerce and we’re going to continue to stand behind those businesses who rely on the web and cloud. Our job is to delight and every single human being in our company is empowered to do so. Each of them has a relentless devotion to simplifying how our customers experience web hosting and cloud services.” “As Rackspace continues to focus on delivering expertise and Fanatical Support for the world’s leading clouds, and serving more enterprise customers, it made sense for us to sell the Cloud Sites business unit to Liquid Web,” Matt Bradley, vice president, corporate development and strategy, at Rackspace said. “Through the transaction, we are also pleased to welcome Liquid Web to the Rackspace Partner Network as an email reseller.” This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/rackspace-sells-premium-web-hosting-unit-to-liquid-web (Comment on this)

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