Wednesday, August 10th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: July To help you keep abreast of the latest developments in the data center industry, here are July’s top 10 stories from Data Center Knowledge: Equinix Data Center Outage in London Blamed on Faulty UPS – Studies show that UPS failure is the most common cause of data center outages. Google Devs Get to Run Google Infrastructure for Six Months – If you’re a Google software developer working on the company’s products, the company not only wants you to know how its global-scale infrastructure operates, it wants you to run that infrastructure yourself. Singapore Data Center Startup to Challenge Asia Pacific Players – Asia Pacific as a whole is viewed as a major growth market for cloud services. As such, it is also a major growth market for data center service providers, who give cloud companies based overseas a lower-risk way to get started in new markets than building their own data centers. A view of the Marina Bay Sands and the Singapore River. (Photo by Scott Halleran/Getty Images) 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. Performance Indicator, Green Grid’s New Data Center Metric, Explained – Performance Indicator builds on PUE, using a version of it, but also adds two other dimensions to infrastructure efficiency, measuring how well a data center’s cooling system does its job under normal circumstances and how well it is designed to withstand failure. Former DuPont Fabros CEO Fateh Starts New Data Center Company – CloudHQ is described as a company that leases data center space. Like DFT, it says it builds data centers at “massive scale.” How to Choose a Colocation Data Center Provider – Once a company decides to make the move to a colo, it takes a lot of careful planning to ensure the right strategy is selected for the business. To determine the best approach for their corporate needs and objectives, companies should take five key considerations into account. Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill With DeepMind-Powered AI – In recent months, the Alphabet unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. Chillers and cooling towers of the Google data center campus in St. Ghislain, Belgium (Photo: Google) New Microsoft Data Center in Iowa Will Be 1.7M Square Feet – 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. Another Huge Quarter for Data Center REITs: What’s Next? – While it would seem unlikely for data centers to be able to top first quarter’s performance, the second quarter proved to be even stronger, with an average gain for the data center sector of about 50 percent through June 30, 2016. Stay current on data center news by subscribing to our daily email updates and RSS feed, or by following us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Mirantis Forges Closer Ties with SUSE to Promote OpenStack Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud Mirantis wants to become the “one-stop shop” for users of OpenStack on enterprise Linux. The company this week announced a new partnership with SUSE, adding another Linux option alongside its existing Red Hat and CentOS offerings. Mirantis is a major distributor of OpenStack, the open source platform for building cloud infrastructure on top of a Linux-based operating system. Mirantis seeks to distinguish itself in the crowded OpenStack market by delivering what it calls a “pure-play” OpenStack distribution, allowing users to deploy any type of Linux platform in conjunction with OpenStack. While Mirantis can support any Linux distribution, it has now forged closer ties with SUSE, which develops SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. On Tuesday, the companies announced a partnership that aims “to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Mirantis OpenStack,” according to a statement from Mirantis. The companies say they will contribute the code they develop as part of their collaboration back to the main OpenStack project, making the enhancements available to the broader open source cloud community. See also: Mirantis to Fuse Kubernetes, CI/CD with Commercial OpenStack One-Stop OpenStack Shopping (Minus Modern Ubuntu?) Mirantis’s strategy is to allow companies that use multiple Linux distributions in their cloud-enabled datacenters to choose a single OpenStack distribution for use on all of those platforms. “Many of our larger customers run two or three different Linux flavors,” Mirantis CMO Boris Renski said. “Now OpenStack users can get support for their major Linux distributions in one place from Mirantis.” Mirantis OpenStack is not the only OpenStack distribution that can run on top of more than one type of Linux platform. Since OpenStack and Linux are both open source technologies, it’s easy enough for users to modify the platforms in order to make virtually any type of OpenStack-Linux pairing work. Still, Mirantis’s focus on flexibility could help it to appeal in the open source cloud market, where many other OpenStack distributions are tied to particular Linux distributions. The SUSE partnership may also be an attempt by Mirantis to forge a close partnership with another enterprise Linux vendor in the place of Canonical, the company that develops Ubuntu Linux. Canonical and Mirantis previously collaborated closely, and Ubuntu remains a popular platform for running Mirantis, but the most recent version of Ubuntu, 16.04, is not validated for Mirantis OpenStack. Only Ubuntu 14.04 and earlier versions are supported. This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/mirantis-forges-closer-ties-suse-promote-openstack (Comment on this)
4:48p	Survey Finds UK IT Shops Scrambling to Deal With Brexit By IT Pro Last month, we reported on how IT firms around the globe, but particularly in the UK, were preparing for the changes that Brexit would usher in. A new survey has found more of the same, with IT professionals whose companies do work in the United Kingdom having to rethink everything from their future budgets to which clouds they can safely use without running afoul of European Union data protections. The survey, done by Spiceworks, found that IT professionals around the world were worried the UK’s withdrawal from the EU would delay IT projects and hurt budgets, while discouraging technology professionals from entering the UK job market. Spiceworks noted five key takeaways from their survey: Things are going to get more confusing in the IT market Many IT departments will delay spending  The UK IT industry could suffer and lose global influence Organizations will worry about the effect on data storage (especially if they’re based in the UK) Brexit will change overall usage of cloud services Source: Spiceworks Read the full survey results here, and read on IT Pro’s feature on how IT departments can best prepare for the shifts. See also: US Data Center Giants in Europe: the Brexit Effect This first ran at http://windowsitpro.com/cloud/survey-finds-uk-it-departments-scrambling-deal-brexit (Comment on this)
5:40p	Delta System Failure Marks Wake-Up Call for Airline Industry (Bloomberg) — The failure of Delta Air Lines Inc.’ worldwide computer network this week spotlights the vulnerability of the information systems sustaining the biggest U.S. carriers, each of which has contended with major disruptions during the last year. Complex networks cobbled together over the decades need major overhauls requiring significant new investments, said Bob Edwards, a former chief information officer for United Continental Holdings Inc. Recent flaws in computer systems quickly escalated into corporate black eyes that exacted costs in both money and reputation. “I don’t believe the flight ops, maintenance, passenger service systems, crew and dispatch applications are engineered with the level of redundancy needed,” Edwards, who retired in 2014 under pressure after several service disruptions at United, said by telephone. More disruptions are a near certainty: “Mistakes will happen, devices will malfunction.” The Delta debacle marks a wake-up call for an airline industry in which outdated information systems can strand thousands of passengers. The Atlanta-based airline, which had been leading major carriers in reliability, is far from alone in stumbling. Southwest Airlines Co. said a computer failure July 20 would cost it “tens of millions” of dollars after more than 2,300 flights were canceled. See also: Delta Data Center Outage Grounds Hundreds of Flights Cancellations Mount Delta scrapped about 800 flights on Tuesday, after about 1,000 cancellations Monday. The airline began Wednesday with about 150 cancellations and said it expected to resume normal operation by mid-to-late afternoon Wednesday. Check-in, boarding and dispatch systems were working normally, with most delays related to crew location and limits on hours worked. Delta spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” on technology upgrades and backup systems in the last three years to avoid such an outcome, Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian said in a video message to customers Tuesday. “I’m sorry that it happened,” he said. “This isn’t who we are.” Transformer Surge Chief Operating Officer Gil West said equipment controlling the flow of electricity at Delta’s base in Atlanta malfunctioned early Monday morning, “causing a surge to the transformer and a loss of power.” Though electricity was restored quickly, “critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to backups. Other systems did. And now we’re seeing instability in these systems.” The cost of lost revenue, accommodating passenger on other flights and other issues may cut the airline’s third-quarter earnings by as much as 10 percent, Dan McKenzie, an analyst at Buckingham Research Group, said in a note Tuesday. Unlike a factory hit by a disruption or strike, airlines already running near capacity have limited ways to make up lost revenue. Carriers Struggle Delta isn’t the only airline struggling with outdated technology, said Mark Jaggers, an analyst at technology research firm Gartner Inc. “A lot of airlines have been struggling with legacy systems that they are not able to shut down — decommission to move through their life cycle — because they have a 24/7 operation,” Jaggers said. “As they’ve grown in importance and stature with more flights and customers, taking time to do maintenance becomes a bigger issue.” The starting point for preventing computer failures is to ensure reliable electricity sources, said Ron Peri, CEO of Radixx International, which provides passenger-service systems to airlines including FlyDubai and Air India Express. Radixx’s data center has backup power provided by three jet engines, Peri said. See also: Verizon Data Center Outage Delays JetBlue Flights The challenge of keeping systems upgraded is particularly steep because they operate around the clock and jetliners are in the air almost constantly these days. “You’ve got these big systems and maintaining them is kind of like maintaining an aircraft in flight because they can’t go down,” Peri said. “The core design comes from an era when the presumption was the systems would go down every night.” Southwest Disruption Customers probably won’t hold the inconvenience against Delta long term because of its recent history ahead of other major airlines in reliability, said Rick Garlick, global travel practice lead for J.D. Power, which ranks airlines on customer satisfaction. Delta offered $200 travel vouchers for passengers with flights that were canceled or delayed by more than three hours. It also has waived change fees and any fare differential on tickets. Last month at Southwest, computers were restored after about 12 hours but flights continued to be canceled or delayed for several days as the carrier worked to get crews and planes in the right locations. The carrier also fell victim to a reservations-system glitch in October. Connectivity Flaw A connectivity flaw at American Airlines Group Inc. halted flights at its Chicago, Dallas and Miami hubs in September. A United Continental computer fault last summer lasted two hours and disrupted travel for thousands of fliers. It began with a router malfunctioning and prevented the carrier from ticketing passengers and dispatching crews. The cost of having duplicate software and hardware at different locations is minor when compared to the expense of having a system down for several hours, not to mention the damage to the airline’s reputation, said Ahmed Abdelghany, a professor of operations management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “We shouldn’t talk about the cost of making your system reliable because you live on that system,” Abdelghany said. “It’s like an operation room at a hospital: You can’t say I don’t have power or I don’t have a backup for the system.” (Comment on this)
7:14p	Digital to Convert Motorola’s Former Chicago HQ to Data Center Digital Realty Trust has acquired a former Motorola headquarters property in the Chicago suburbs, which it plans to convert for data center use to expand its capacity in the high-demand Chicago data center market. Real estate brokerage Imperial Realty Company, which brokered the sale, announced it on its website last week. San Francisco-based Digital, one of the world’s largest data center developers and landlords, has so far kept quiet about the transaction. The property in Franklin Park includes a 270,000-square foot office building and a 490,000-square foot industrial building, according to Imperial. Motorola developed it in the early 1950s as a TV assembly plant and later moved its headquarters to the property as well, but left for nearby Schaumburg in the 1970s. Its users since have included Matsushita Industrial, Telecom Central, and Houston Foods. Digital also owns a 22-acre data center campus that’s adjacent to the former Motorola property, called Digital Chicago. See also: Digital Buys Eight Equinix Data Centers in Europe The Chicago data center market is one of the biggest and most active ones in the country, and Digital Realty is a key player there, thanks to its ownership of the region’s most important carrier hotel at 350 East Cermak in downtown Chicago. Access to the high concentration of networks at 350 is a major draw for data centers in the area. The market saw a lot of absorption of available supply last year, so supply is tight nowadays, Jim Kerrigan, managing principal and founder of real estate brokerage North American Data Centers, told Data Center Knowledge earlier. While there are numerous 1MW options for companies looking for space in the Chicago data center market, the likes of big cloud providers, who typically take down multiple megawatts at a time, are hard pressed to find such options in Chicago that are ready to go. To address demand, multiple data center providers are building in the market. Among them is CyrusOne, which recently acquired the Chicago Mercantile Exchange data center and announced plans to build a 500,000-square foot facility on the property. Read more: CyrusOne Plans Huge Expansion at CME Data Center Campus in Chicago Another example is QTS, which recently brought online some capacity at the data center it built on the site of the former Chicago Sun-Times printing plant the company acquired in 2014. (Comment on this)
7:28p	Cloud Price Cuts: Google Slashes Preemptible VMs by 33 Percent Brought to You by The WHIR Algorithm adjustments, improved efficiency, and usage pattern analysis has enabled Google to slash the price of its Preemptible VMs by up to 33 percent, the company announced Tuesday. Preemptible VM instances can now be used for a penny an hour, or 80 percent less than the equivalent non-preemptible VM on Google Cloud Platform. Preemptible VMs are basically Google Compute Engine VMs that the company needs to have in reserve for spikes in demand, but will rent out in blocks up to 24 hours, with the condition that they can be preempted if a spike occurs. The AWS equivalent is EC2 Spot Instances, which it auctions off based on capacity. AWS acquired infrastructure optimizer ClusterK in 2015 to help run Spot Instances efficiently. While not very helpful for most cloud workloads, utilizing excess VMs to run workloads without major time constraints could significantly reduce computing cost. See also: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning “Our customers are using Preemptible VMs to analyze data, render movies, process satellite imagery,analyze genomic data, transcode media and complete a variety of business and engineering tasks, using thousands of Preemptible VM cores in a single job,” Google Product Manager Michael Basilyan said in a blog post. “We believe that the price reduction for Preemptible VMs will unlock even more computing opportunities and enable you to tackle interesting science and business problems.” Google pre-empts more recently launched instances first, to cut down on lost work, and VMs pre-empted in the first 10 minutes are not billed. Preemptible VMs can be launched in several different ways, which are outlined in the blog post, along with tips to get the most out of the service. Unlike many previous cloud price cuts, the niche market and technical controls necessary make it unlikely this change will be copied by other public cloud providers, with the possible exception that Azure may begin offering a discounted way to purchase non-guaranteed VMs in the future. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/cloud-price-cuts-google-slashes-preemptible-vms-by-33-percent (Comment on this)
9:09p	Why Liquid Web Acquired Rackspace’s Cloud Sites Platform Brought to You by The WHIR Rackspace’s change in direction, which puts a heavier emphasis on managed support for third-party clouds, has helped one web hosting provider double down on its efforts to serve the burgeoning web professional market. Liquid Web, the Michigan-based web host that acquired Rackspace’s Cloud Sites platform earlier this week, said the platform as a service (PaaS) will support its strategy on growing its offerings for web-dependent professionals – developers, designers, and agencies who spend hundreds to thousands of dollars per month on hosting services, have revenue of less than $10 million, and rely on hosting providers to be their outsourced system operations team. These customers are not a new target for Liquid Web, but it is an area where it sees significant opportunity for growth – now, of course, helped along by the new technology and team it has inherited from Rackspace. “We realized that a significant amount of the workloads we were running at Liquid Web were WordPress,” Liquid Web CEO Jim Geiger said in an interview with The WHIR. “[We] determined that the strategy going forward would be to complement that movement and we believed we needed a platform as a service for expanding the market.” Geiger joined Liquid Web last year as part of an investment from Madison Dearborn Partners, succeeding Liquid Web founder Matthew Hill as CEO. In this space, Liquid Web will continue to compete with companies like WPengine, and FlyWheel, which offer a more premium hosted WordPress offering targeted at these same types of customers. Joe Oesterling, Liquid Web COO, said that the need for a platform supports the overall trend in the hosting market towards simplification, or the “SaaSification” of the marketplace. “About ten years ago the majority of sites were developed and now they’re designed using tools like WordPress, so what you’re seeing is a newer generation of web creation professional that really doesn’t want to log on to a server: they really want to have a partner that provides products and, more importantly, support that extracts them from that,” Oesterling said. “What we really liked about the Cloud Sites platform is that it was a platform – it didn’t require the customer to know how to log on to the server at the command line or to use a control panel like cPanel or Plesk to actually interact with the server,” he added. As part of the acquisition, Rackspace’s Cloud Sites team will join Liquid Web and stay in San Antonio. “The entire team including their leadership have been in place for many years,” Geiger says, noting the similarity in cultures could be in part why Rackspace chose Liquid Web to be the recipient of its Cloud Sites asset. “One of the things that we’re finding quite amazing is we have a very common culture with the Racksace company. I’ve admired it personally from afar and it’s a very purpose-driven culture and customer-centric culture,” he says. Geiger is quick to point out that Liquid Web is focused on ensuring a good experience for these customers. “We’re not changing any pricing or packaging,” he says. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/why-liquid-web-acquired-rackspaces-platform-as-a-service (Comment on this)

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