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Friday, August 12th, 2016
- Amazon Kinesis Analytics: fully managed service for continuously streaming data using standard SQL; integrates with Kinesis Streams and Kinesis Firehose; automatically provisions, deploys, and scales the resources required to continuously run queries
- Elastic Block Storage Updates: AWS reduced the price of snapshot storage by 47 percent, and increased the number of IOPS customers can provision
- Application Load Balancer: According to Vogels, this service “gives you complete control over how to send traffic to individual components in your system.” AWS says that “web sites and mobile apps, running in containers or on EC2 instances, will benefit from the use of Application Load Balancers.”
- AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Update: AWS KMS users can now bring their own keys, giving them “local control over the generation and storage of keys” to “meet their security and compliance requirements in order to run their most sensitive workloads in the cloud,” AWS evangelist Jeff Barr says.
- Snowball Updates: AWS launched the Snowball Job Management API which allows users to build apps that create and manage Snowball jobs, while the S3 Adapter lets users access a Snowball appliance as though it were an S3 endpoint.
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Microsoft Invests in Flow Battery Research for Data Centers Finding an effective way to store vast amounts of energy is one of the most important and toughest pieces of the renewable-energy puzzle. Until it’s solved, users that need power around the clock will have to rely on regular grid power to pick up the slack when sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing. It is this piece of the puzzle that Microsoft is going after with its latest investment in research of alternative energy sources for its data centers. The company has partnered with two companies and a university on a pilot program to research and test a new battery technology to see if it could provide a viable way to provide effective energy storage for its enormous global data center fleet. See also: Amazon Piloting Tesla Batteries to Power Cloud Data Center Instead of storing energy in an electrode material the way conventional batteries do, flow batteries rely on chemical components dissolved in liquids. The technology promises to provide energy storage with more longevity, but its current implementations are less powerful and more complex than the incumbent alternatives. Flow batteries can also be recharged almost instantly by replacing the liquid. Data Center Knowledge recently asked customers of data center services how important renewable energy is in their data center selection strategy. Download results of the survey in full here: Renewable Energy and Data Center Services in 2016 Microsoft buys about 3,500GWh of electricity a year to power its global operations, according to a US government announcement, and it has publicly committed to work toward being able to rely exclusively on renewable energy. If the pilot project is successful, flow batteries could bring the company much closer to that goal. Its partners on the project are flow-battery startup Primus Power, Houston-based energy company NRG Energy, and University of Texas at San Antonio. “Multi-hour duration flow batteries, like those pioneered by Primus, are being evaluated for their ability to deliver uniform power for 20 years without fade or component replacement,” Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist, wrote in a blog post. See also: How Renewable Energy is Changing the Data Center Market Microsoft has committed $1 million to this research, and NRG ha matched Microsoft’s commitment, San Antonio Business Journal reported. Microsoft has a number of ongoing research and pilot projects with the goal of identifying viable alternative energy sources for data centers. One of them is using fuel cells to convert waste from a wastewater treatment plant in Wyoming to energy for a data center module. Another is installing small gas-fueled fuel cells directly into data center racks. The flow-battery project is one of many energy storage initiatives by federal and state-level agencies, utilities, and private-sector companies President Barack Obama’s administration announced out in June. Other initiatives include federal investment in utility-scale battery and renewable energy generation projects for military bases in the US and other federal buildings as well as research by Department of Energy’s national labs. See also: Used Electric Car Batteries to Power Data Center in France The administration is a big proponent of developing renewable energy sources and technologies that enable more renewable energy use. Of all those technologies, energy storage is one of the most important and difficult areas. Effective utility-scale energy storage enables big electricity users to take advantage of intermittent renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar. The White House announcement touted the fact that US had doubled the installed capacity of advanced energy storage in 2015 to 500MW. |
| 4:42p | HPE Buying Supercomputer Specialist SGI for $275M (Bloomberg) — Hewlett Packard Enterprise is buying Silicon Graphics International for about $275 million in cash, adding high-performance computing capabilities that improve data analytics. HPE expects the deal to be neutral to earnings in the first full year and will add to profit thereafter, the companies said Thursday in a statement. SGI, whose machines helped create advanced computer-generated images for Hollywood movies in the 1990s, brings products that aid customers with computing, data analytics and data management. “At HPE, we are focused on empowering data-driven organizations,” said Antonio Neri, the company’s executive VP and general manager for the enterprise group, in the statement. Its technology will “complement HPE’s proven data center solutions designed to create business insight.” CEO Meg Whitman is investing in products that help customers crunch growing reams of data. The high performance computing industry, an $11 billion market, is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 6 percent to 8 percent in the next few years, according to industry researcher IDC, the company said. SGI’s operating assets were sold to Rackable Systems in 2009 for $42.5 million. Rackable took on SGI as its global name and brand. Shares in SGI surged 28 percent in late trading in New York to $7.65. They had fallen more than 70 percent from a peak in August 2013. The agreement with HPE will support private and public sector customers, including US federal agencies as well as companies. The two companies are complementary, said Jorge Titinger, CEO and president of SGI, in the statement. “This combination addresses today’s complex business problems that require applying data analytics and tools to securely process vast amounts of data.” The deal, whose per-share price is $7.75, is expected to close in the first quarter of HPE’s fiscal year 2017. See also: HPE Wants to Give Data Center Automation a Fresh Start |
| 5:17p | Friday Funny: Data Center Groundbreaking Say, where is the press? And where is my golden shovel? I told you we should’ve pushed harder for those tax breaks. Here’s the cartoon for this month’s Data Center Knowledge caption contest. This is how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon, and we challenge our readers to submit the funniest, most clever caption they think will be a fit. Then we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Submit your caption for the cartoon above in the comments. Congratulations to Brad Hawkins, whose caption won the Safety Net edition of the contest. His caption was: “I don’t think that’s what they meant when they said to connect the racks to the web.” Some good submissions came in for last month’s Underwater edition – all we need now is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below!
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| 6:55p | AWS Summit New York: What You May Have Missed  Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud The ability of Amazon Web Services to rapidly expand its offerings has pushed it far ahead of its competitors in the IaaS space, according to Gartner’s latest research. The public cloud company continued this pattern with several new offerings announced at its AWS Summit in New York on Thursday. During the keynote, AWS CTO Dr. Werner Vogels brought CTOs from Lyft and Comcast, as well as a devops engineer from Sean Parker’s messaging startup Airtime, to share their successes with AWS, before introducing new AWS products and services. Lyft CTO Chris Lambert outlined the journey that the ride sharing company has taken since its launch in 2012 when it had only three servers. Fast forward to today and it’s still 100 percent on AWS, but it has just completed 14 million rides in July 2016 – meaning a lot more infrastructure. See also: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning Lambert highlighted how Lyft uses autoscaling to help it save significantly on infrastructure costs, while Amazon RedShift Data Warehouse helped it launch Lyft Line – which is a huge part of its growth strategy moving forward. Vogels said that the purpose of AWS Summit is education, and providing customers the opportunity to talk to one another to learn more about their AWS use cases. Here are all the new AWS services and features: This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-e |
| 7:30p | More Trust Public Cloud Security Than Private Data Centers  Brought to you by MSPmentor More than half (51 percent) of IT managers polled recently said that data security is better in public cloud infrastructures than in their own corporate data centers, according to a new report released today. The SADA Systems survey of more than 200 enterprise IT professionals also found that 43 percent of respondents use third-party consultants to manage public cloud infrastructure. Cost savings appear to be a major motivator for outsourcing, with 45 percent of respondents reporting it was more cost-effective to hire out those activities. “All signs point to public cloud adoption growing and enterprise IT becoming more comfortable with the prospect of running their most sensitive data on public cloud infrastructure,” SADA Systems CEO Tony Safoian said in a statement. “Security and reliability will always be primary concerns – as they should – and companies should lean on expert consultants and integrators to guide them in addressing these issues,” he said. “The convenience of public cloud, coupled with easy access to proven resources for managing these environments, make the option of moving to public cloud too compelling to ignore.” Other highlights from SADA’s Summer 2016 Public Cloud Survey include: — 84 percent of respondents are using public cloud infrastructure today. Google Cloud Platform was the most popular (49 percent), followed by Microsoft Azure (48 percent) and Amazon Web Services (42 percent). — 45 percent of companies said it took 3-6 months to migrate to public cloud, while 23 percent said it took less than three months. — 50 percent of respondents said they’re likely to increase their use of public cloud by at least 25 percent over the next 2-3 years, and 25 percent of respondents would increase their use by 50 percent over the same time period. — 58 percent cited the ability to ramp up or dial back their use of infrastructure as the primary driver for increased public cloud usage, while 51 percent said public cloud would save them money on equipment, facilities and staffing. — 51 percent said concerns about data security prevented them from adopting public cloud sooner. SADA Systems is a privately held IT and cloud solutions provider. Click here to view the full survey. This first ran at http://mspmentor.net/msp-mentor/more-tru |
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