Wednesday, August 17th, 2016

Time	Event
4:37p	CenturyLink Data Center Team Keeps Eye on the Ball Despite Uncertain Future While it may be interesting to ponder what will happen to CenturyLink’s data center colocation business once the company finalizes whatever ends up being the outcome of the “strategic review” it announced last year, David Meredith, who oversees that business, has work to do. He and his team have data centers to expand, certifications to complete, and carriers to attract to their facilities. “We really haven’t stopped any of the things that we’re doing,” he says. “These are all strategic initiatives that we continue to do. We’re actually doubling down in a lot of these areas.” CenturyLink CEO Glen Post said in November that the company could sell some or all of the assets that make up its colocation business. That would be one of several options that were on the table. CenturyLink management were clear that they didn’t want to get out of the colocation business completely. They just weren’t happy with the expense of keeping all those assets on the books. The colo business, whose inception in its current form was CenturyLink’s $2.5 billion acquisition of Savvis five years ago, has struggled to grow revenue. But the company provides lots of services “up the stack” from the basic physical data center capacity, a variety of cloud and managed services, and often sells hybrid bundles that may or may not include both colocation and some of those higher-level services. Read more: Why CenturyLink Doesn’t Want to Own Data Centers So it needs the colo space, regardless of whether it owns and operates it or outsources all that to someone else. CenturyLink never stopped expanding its data center capacity around the world. It added 14MW across eight sites last year. This year, Meredith’s team is working on expansion in key markets like Phoenix, Chicago, and London. Another initiative that kicked off before the CEO’s announcement last year was to get Uptime Institute’s Management & Operations certification for all CenturyLink data centers. More than half of the 57 sites included in the M&O plan announced in 2014 have been approved, and the company is close to having a total of 40 certified in the near future, Meredith says. It’s All about the Network In a statement issued today CenturyLink wants to draw attention to its efforts to expand the variety of carriers and network service providers you can access at its data centers, as well as interconnection ecosystems in those facilities. It had about 78 carriers and network service providers total around this time last year. Today it has 99, or about seven per site on average. CenturyLink, which of course is a carrier itself, wasn’t always carrier-neutral in the true sense of that piece of industry jargon. Carrier neutrality (or carrier diversity, in the company’s own parlance) became part of the strategy after the Savvis acquisition, when it appointed a dedicated team that would go after new carriers. “We had set a goal to drive more carrier diversity across our data center footprint, and we exceeded the goal that we had set,” Meredith says. On the other side of the coin, CenturyLink has been actively pursuing extension of its own network to as many data centers as possible. Today, it is active in about 280 data centers, including its own. The most recent win was plugging into a number of CyrusOne facilities. The third dimension here is interconnection. Like Equinix, which has perfected the art of building entire interconnection ecosystems inside its data centers, and others in the data center colocation market, CenturyLink wants customers to come to its facilities and link their networks to other customers there. Not only do colo providers get additional revenue for providing those inter-customer cross-connects as a service, these interconnection ecosystems make existing customers stick around longer and make the sites more attractive for new customers. It would be hard for CenturyLink to compete with Equinix on interconnection and colocation alone, but Meredith believes CenturyLink’s other IT services, such as network, managed, services, public and private cloud, all provided as integrated solutions, through a single contract, make a big difference. “We still have our hybrid IT solution stack,” he says, “which is a big differentiator from what Equinix has.” (Comment on this)
4:52p	Cisco Shares Fall After CRN Report of as Many as 14,000 Job Cuts (Bloomberg) — Cisco Systems shares fell after a report in CRN said the largest maker of networking equipment will cut as many as 14,000 employees worldwide, or about 20 percent of its workforce. San Jose, California-based Cisco will announce the cuts in the next few weeks, technology website CRN said on Tuesday, without naming its sources. Andrea Duffy, a spokeswoman for Cisco, declined to comment on the report. CEO Chuck Robbins, who took over in July 2015, has been working to boost growth by shifting Cisco’s offerings toward software-based networking, security and management products, which customers increasingly prefer because they’re less expensive and more versatile. The job cuts stem from Cisco’s transition away from its hardware roots, according to the CRN article. Cisco has been facing a “day of reckoning” for a while now as the commoditization of its switching business reduces profit over time, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst Rod Hall. Cisco fell 1.8 percent to $30.58 at 9:56 a.m. in New York. The shares were up 15 percent this year through the close of trading Tuesday, before the report was published. In the near term, the deep job cuts could could have a “large potential positive impact” on the company’s results, boosting 2017 earnings by 9 percent to 13 percent per share, Hall wrote in a note. Cisco will report fiscal fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday after the close in New York. Analysts project a 2 percent decline in sales to $12.6 billion. The job cuts will overshadow the earnings results, Hall said. If confirmed “we would see it as a sign that Cisco is finally beginning to behave like a company facing technological disruption,” Hall said. The move implies “that the new management team is willing to make the tough decisions necessary to navigate what we believe are going to be very choppy waters in the next 3-5 years.” Cisco had about 73,100 employees as of April, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The company last announced a large round of firings in August 2014, when it eliminated 6,000 positions. The new emphasis on software is requiring staff with a different set of skills, CRN reported. Many early retirement plans have already been offered to employees, according to the website. Cisco has shown its appetite for software with recent acquisitions, such as Jasper Technologies, which makes programs that let companies connect all manner of electronic devices. Results released in May showed that Robbins is making headway in rejiggering Cisco’s businesses. The company projected sales growth of as much as 3 percent in the period that ended in July, compared with analysts’ projections for a revenue decline. Even so, Robbins said the company still has a long way to go and that earnings are not where they should be. Cisco’s biggest division, switching, had third-quarter sales of $3.45 billion, a decline of 3 percent from a year earlier. Its second-largest division, routing, suffered a 5 percent drop in sales to $1.89 billion, the company said. Newer units including security, service-provider video and collaboration all posted sales increases of more than 10 percent. (Comment on this)
6:23p	Intel Building Next-Gen Xeon Phi for Artificial Intelligence Intel is designing the next-generation chip in its line of supercomputer processors to power artificial intelligence. Code-named Knights Mill, the next processor in the Xeon Phi family is expected to be available in 2017, the company said Wednesday. Diane Bryant, executive VP and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, made the announcement at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco. As tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, as well as Elon Musk’s non-profit OpenAI, are investing tremendous sums of money in AI research, fighting tooth-and-nail to attract top minds in the field, a battle to supply hardware for the software those minds will create is nascent. In this battle, Intel is up against the likes of Nvidia, whose GPUs are a popular way to deploy algorithms for machine learning (a common type of AI technology), and the tech giants themselves. Google has developed a custom processor for its machine learning applications on its own, saying nothing was available on the market that met its performance and price requirements. Read more: Google Has Built Its Own Custom Chip for AI Servers Intel has a different set of concerns than Google does when designing its processors for machine learning. It wants to create a general-purpose chip that will support machine learning and other workloads, Charles Wuischpard, VP of the Data Center Group, said on a call with reporters in June, which was the first time the company discussed its AI chip strategy publicly. While he had little familiarity with Google’s Tensor Processing Unit, Wuischpard said it appeared to be a highly specialized part designed for a specific workload. Another big part of Intel’s AI chip strategy is to make it scale out rather than up. The latter is the most common architecture for machine learning, he said, which makes it difficult to scale. Knights Mill “is optimized for scale-out analytics implementations, and will include key enhancements for deep learning training,” Intel said in a statement Wednesday. (Comment on this)
7:50p	Intel Rolls Out First Silicon Photonics Products for Data Center Networks Silicon photonics, a technology that’s reportedly been in development for about 16 years, is finally here as a product, and if it wasn’t for the world’s hunger for cloud services (and cloud service providers’ eagerness to provide them), the technology could have remained an interesting science project for many more years to come. Machine-to-machine traffic in cloud data centers is “exploding,” as Alex Bjorlin, VP of Intel’s Data Center Group and general manager of its Connectivity Group, put it. The systems inside these facilities have to crunch through more and more data, which means more data than ever is being shuffled from server to server. So much, in fact, that cloud service providers are desperate for better ways to interconnect servers in their data centers than using copper wires. They need to transfer more data faster and use less power doing it, which are all things silicon photonics promises to give them. It replaces copper wires with optical cables and electrons with light, while using the same manufacturing methods companies use to make processors. Today, these laser-based systems are capable of shuffling 100 Gigabits per second over cables up to 2 kilometers long. You’ll struggle to push 25Gbps over a 10-foot-long copper cable, Kushagra Vaid, who oversees infrastructure engineering for Microsoft’s cloud, said from stage at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco Wednesday. Vaid was speaking alongside Diane Bryant, executive VP and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, who announced availability of the chipmaker’s first two silicon photonics products: 100G optical transceivers for interconnecting data center network switches. According to Vaid, silicon photonics is the future of interconnection inside Microsoft’s cloud data centers. Intel’s announcement is just the first step. The company said the 100G technology will be followed by 400G interconnects for data center switches “within a couple of years.” The first two transceivers simply plug into switch front plates, but the company envisions future-generation products that are embedded in switch motherboards and eventually integrated with switch silicon itself. In the same keynote Wednesday, Bryant also announced that the next generation of Intel’s Xeon Phi processor for supercomputers will be designed specifically with artificial intelligence workloads in mind. Read more: Intel Building Next-Gen Xeon Phi for Artificial Intelligence (Comment on this)
8:31p	Women in the Data Center – NOT! Having attended Data Center World on and off over the past 25 years, I’ve noticed two overwhelming trends in the makeup of IT professionals: There are more and more gray and/or balding heads, and the younger and newer generation is growing in numbers—in both cases, predominantly male. While this changing of the guard certainly warrants attention, the fact that women were few and far between at my first conference more than two decades ago and continue to be scarce today, is troubling on many fronts. I thought it might just be a figment of my imagination, but research from Deloitte Global helped prove my point … and some. Back in 1991, women filled 36 percent of IT roles. However, Deloitte predicts that by the end of 2016, fewer than 25 percent of those jobs in developed countries will be held by women. So, the gender imbalance is actually getting worse by the year. Why? Aspects of the educational pipeline, recruiting and hiring, paying and promoting, and retaining all contribute to this gap. Lisa Huff, a principal analyst for research firm Discerning Analytics, offered her perspective. “When I graduated from college, only 11 percent of my class was women. That percentage has actually gone down over the last 30 years. I think there are many factors. One major one is that many women take off work to raise a family and find it very difficult to get back into the workforce years later when they’re ready. This is particularly difficult in technical fields like engineering and data centers.” Huff is one of four panelists who will discuss “Women in the Data Center” (PL 7.1) at Data Center World on Tuesday, Sept. 13 from 9:25 a.m. to 10:25 a.m. She will be joined by Jennifer Cooke, research director for IDC’s Datacenter Trends & Strategies Group; Theresa Simpkin, head of the department of Lord Ashcroft International Business School for Anglia Ruskin University; and Donna Manley, IT senior director at the University of Pennsylvania. Think about it, in high school or college, most women steer clear of math and science because their interests and strengths often lie elsewhere perhaps as a result of societal or parental pressures. In the UK, a 2012 survey showed that only 17 percent of girls had learned any computer coding in school; half as many as the boys. And, in the US, women only represented 18 percent of university computer science graduates in 2013, actually down from 37 percent in 1985. So, engaging and exposing girls in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) subjects is paramount to having them pursue computer-related degrees and jobs later in life. Once a woman actually decides on an IT career, an equally qualified man is twice as likely to be hired for a job based on a various studies from multiple countries. Maybe we can chalk it up to unconscious gender biases. If that’s the case, the technology will be hard-pressed to change “human” nature. Huff’s offered a slightly different perspective. “I think actually getting the job is rather easy if you are qualified. It’s the fitting in that can be very difficult. Many people think you get the job solely because you are a woman and may not give you a chance to show how qualified you really are,” she said. “My challenges have typically been relating to older co-workers in the data center that haven’t necessarily worked with many women and don’t really know how – or they think they need to treat women different than their male coworkers.” That’s spot on, according to Simpkin. “Sadly, the need to continually reiterate capability, particularly in a technical role, is more prevalent for women in non-traditional sectors.  Empirical research identifies that women have to continually prove their capacities to do a job, whereas men are often hired or promoted on an illustration of potential.” The Data Center World panelist from Anglia Ruskin University has firsthand experience. “We know that women in non-traditional occupations face the issue of being too feminine to be deemed competent or too ‘masculine’ to be liked and therefore find it difficult to be accepted.  I’m naturally decisive, good at negotiation and take no prisoners when it comes to quality and achieving excellence,” Simpkin said. “I’ve been criticized for not essentially ‘not acting as my gender dictates’ – women are socially acceptable when being consultative, acquiescent, and ‘soft’.  Operating in a more ‘masculine’ manner is often seen by others as being a threat to their role or competence.  Women in this situation can’t win despite the fact that the same behavior initiated by a man is seen more positively.” Finally, beyond pay and promotions, traditional personal roles for women often conflict with professional roles. According to the study, women in IT roles are 45 percent more likely than men to leave in their first year due to family commitments, maternity leave or workplace policies not suited to women. “Organizational culture is often not conducive to supporting career progression for women in tech – not necessarily because of the individuals within the organization per se, but the accepted norms that have developed over time,” Simpkin said. “Networks, advocate programs and other mechanisms designed to provide a desirable career trajectory are often not aligned to alternative labor characteristics (this is not just about gender, but also covers socio-economic factors, race, orientation etc).  This is a highly complex, socially constructed matter that has its roots in organizational structure, culture, social learning and unconscious bias.” There are no quick solutions or easy answers, but the panelists for “Women in the Data Center” will provide a forum for candid discussions between both genders on making data centers attractive to women and treating them as equals in the workplace. “These matters are not just issues for women,” Simpkin stressed. “The way in which organizations need to be structured, managed, developed and changed is not solely in response to gender issues – they are broadly based in response to a new managerial and structural paradigm and it makes sense to reinvent the DC organization with a view to better accommodating a range of voices to expand the potential labor pool.  The only way the sector will be functionally savvy into the near and distant future is to cultivate a highly responsive, capable and innovative workforce with a skilled and engaged pipeline of talent.  This means the labor pool needs to be broader, deeper and more resilient – absorbing individuals from all areas of the community.” Register for Data Center World today! This article first ran at http://www.afcom.com/Public/Resource_Center/Articles_Public/Women_in_Data_Centers_NOT.aspx (Comment on this)
10:29p	Take a Look inside a LinkedIn Data Center (Video) LinkedIn recently started on a journey to transform its data center strategy to one that’s more along the lines of the strategies used by other hyperscale data center operators, companies like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn’s new parent company, Microsoft. These companies customize data center designs and hardware to optimize for their specific applications, which are running at global scale. It’s unclear what LinkedIn’s recent acquisition by Microsoft will mean for LinkedIn’s data center strategy, but the social network’s infrastructure team appears to be pursuing its new hyperscale strategy without looking back, from customizing power and cooling infrastructure at its newest data center in Oregon to designing its own networking switches. The company is even pushing its own open server and rack standard through an initiative called Open19, announced earlier this year in a move that echoed Facebook’s launch of the Open Compute Project in 2011. Microsoft is a big OCP backer and has standardized on OCP-based servers across its data center footprint. Read more: LinkedIn Adopting the Hyperscale Data Center Way More on Open19: LinkedIn Pushes Own Data Center Hardware Standard LinkedIn recently hosted a group of technical standards committee members from International Data Center Authority, a recently formed data center standards and certification organization, for a tour of its data center in Northern Virginia, inside a facility LinkedIn leases from Digital Realty Trust. Here’s a video of the tour, produced by IDCA: (Comment on this)

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