Friday, August 26th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	Data Center Connectivity: Why Your WAN is More Critical Than Ever The rapid digitization of business is driving a lot of changes in the way wireless and WAN technologies are utilized. The latest Cisco Cloud Index report estimates that the amount of data center traffic in 2014 was 3.5 ZB, which would will triple to reach 10.4 ZB by 2019, while the amount of global traffic crossing the Internet and IP WAN networks is projected to reach 2.0 ZB by 2019. Traffic from wireless and mobile devices will account for two-thirds of total IP traffic by 2020, and wired devices will account for 34 percent of it. Wired devices accounted for more than half of all IP traffic last year. Follow that last sentence? Wireless devices are about to eclipse wired devices as the major carrier of IP traffic. This means it’s time to take a hard look at your WAN, how you deploy critical resources, and what you can do to optimize it all. Your Wide Area Network has become the distributed carrier for critical data points supporting a truly distributed user. Let’s look at some ways you can support a new kind of digital user and how you can better control all of that wireless traffic coming into your data center. See also: Data Center Connectivity: How to Use WAN for Competitive Advantage Content Delivery Networks to the Rescue A recent Visual Networking Index report indicated that CDNs will carry sixty-four percent of all Internet traffic by 2020, up from 45 percent in 2015. The reality is you’re delivering richer resources to more users worldwide. These users are utilizing a variety of devices and accessing applications, pictures, desktops, videos, big documents, and much more. Instead of constantly pinging a single data center for big content files, organizations are working with CDNs to intelligently distribute this data. For example, an organization hosting training videos will distribute their content to multiple locations to ensure that this data is available to users closest to the data center. Proper CDN utilization will help ease WAN traffic as users will be able to access content closest to them. Software Defined WAN Tech Will Impact the Data Center A recent IDC study showed that today’s digital transformation and cloud computing trends are driving the need for significant changes to enterprise WAN architectures. “The growing enterprise adoption of SaaS, IaaS, and other cloud services will accelerate and heighten the need for significant architectural changes to the WAN,” said Brad Casemore, director of research, Datacenter Networking, IDC. “However, the need for SD-WAN is not only occasioned by the increased adoption of cloud services but also by the steady migration of enterprise data traffic from the enterprise branch directly to the Internet, and by the requirement to reduce the complexity and cost of WAN provisioning and management.” Software defined technologies help organizations abstract key services from hardware systems. WAN virtual appliances can be deployed for greater WAN control, content delivery optimization, and even for better remote data center controls. The beauty of these technologies is the flexibility. Software-defined WAN systems are agile, easy to deploy, and help optimize a delivery strategy. WAN Optimization (WANOP) is Huge A recent report from MarketsandMarkets shows that the WAN Optimization market was estimated to be $5.2 billion in 2014 and is expected to grow to $12.1 billion in 2019. No big surprise there. We know that there is more traffic traveling over the WAN; we see that there are more digital data points; we are aware of a highly distributed end-user; and we see that the content being delivered is a lot richer. Here’s the reality: WANOP helps organizations categorize WAN requirements based on context. IT admins can granularly control WAN traffic and optimize the delivery of key resources. All of this translates to greater business and IT controls for the organization. Here’s the other cool part: WANOP systems come in hardware or software forms. This means complete flexibility in terms of deployment options and business alignment.  WAN technologies will continue to impact business services and delivery architectures. Organizations that can effectively leverage their WAN ecosystem will be the ones who can deliver the richest content and optimize the experience throughout the process. Cloud computing appeals to a variety of organizations spanning company sizes and verticals. However, the delivery of rich resources and controlling the WAN will translate to real-world competitive advantages. Moving forward, it’ll be critical for you to understand just how important your WAN is to your business and know where you can create powerful efficiencies. (Comment on this)
4:30p	Rackspace Going Private in $4.3B Buyout Rackspace, the company that started as a managed hosting provider and in recent years pivoted to being a “managed cloud” provider, is going private. Investment management company Apollo Global Management has agreed to buy out Rackspace stock at $32 per share – a 38-percent premium over the stock’s closing price on August 3 – in a transaction whose total value is $4.3 billion, according to a statement issued Friday. Rackspace’s board of directors has approved the deal and recommended that the company’s stock holders vote in favor of the buyout. The company expects to close the transaction in the fourth quarter, once antitrust waiting periods expire in the US, the EU, and Israel. “This transaction will provide Rackspace with more flexibility to manage the business for long- term growth and enhance our product offerings,” Graham Weston, Rackspace co-founder and chairman of the board, said in a statement. “We are confident that as a private company, Rackspace will be best positioned to capitalize on our early leadership of the fast-growing managed cloud services industry. Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Barklays, and Royal Bank of Canada are financing the buyout. Rackspace’s stock has been in a state of continuous decline since last April, hitting its all-time low of $17.63 per share this February. Its value shot up following reports in early August that the company may be close to announcing a deal. RAX was trading at $31.48 per share in the early afternoon Eastern Time Friday. See also: Rackspace Pivot to Cloud Support Fails to Impress Investors Founded in 1998, San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace built its reputation by emphasizing extremely hands-on support services. After being considered one of the more promising Infrastructure-as-a-Service players, it was quickly outgrown in that market by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Eventually, Rackspace redefined itself as a managed cloud company, applying its customer-support reputation and capabilities to managing multi-cloud environments on behalf of customers, including managed AWS and managed Office 365. Gartner considers Rackspace to be the leading player in North America in what the market research firm describes as cloud-enabled managed hosting. “We are presented with a significant opportunity today as mainstream companies move their computing out of corporate data centers and into multi-cloud models,” Rackspace CEO and president, Taylor Rhodes, said in a statement. “Apollo and its partners take a patient, value-oriented approach to their funds’ investments, and value Rackspace’s strategy and unique culture.” Rackspace continues to operate an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud of its own, hosted in its own data centers. Its cloud is built on OpenStack, the family of open source cloud infrastructure software in whose creation it was instrumental. See also: What’s Behind Rackspace’s Private OpenStack Cloud Partnership with Red Hat The company has considerable data center footprint, with locations in Dallas, Chicago, Northern Virginia, London, Hong Kong, and Sydney. It leases four of those facilities from Digital Realty Trust, a San Francisco-based data center REIT. Digital lists Rackspace as its 15th biggest tenant, reporting that it occupies about 170,000 square feet of data center space total across the four sites. (Comment on this)
6:47p	IBM Opens Cloud Data Center in Korea IBM has launched its first cloud data center in Korea together with SK Holdings, a Korean IT services company IBM partnered with last year. The company’s ninth cloud data center in Asia Pacific, it is the latest step in IBM’s ongoing expansion of the physical infrastructure that supports its cloud services. The facility in Pangyo, outside of Seoul, is the 47th site in this global cloud data center network. IBM is going after the Korean public cloud services market, which IDC expects to grow from $445 million last year to $1 billion in 2019. Target customers are both Korean enterprises and start-ups, according to IBM’s announcement. See also: IBM to Take Over AT&T’s Managed Hosting Business The cloud data center will have the capacity to support “thousands of servers,” IBM said. Its services include public, cloud, and hybrid environments, as well as IBM’s extensive Platform-as-a-Service portfolio, collectively branded Bluemix. Among them are APIs for the company’s “cognitive computing” capabilities called Watson, which developers can use to build those capabilities into applications they design. Read more: Here’s IBM’s Data Center Strategy for Bluemix PaaS (Comment on this)
7:56p	Why Rackspace is Going Private, According to Its CTO Turns out the rumors were true. This morning Rackspace announced it was being acquired by a New York private equity firm, called Apollo Global Management, for $4.3 billion. Once the transaction is closed Rackpace will become a private company, its shares seizing to trade on NYSE. Read more: Rackspace Going Private in $4.3B Buyout One of the things that stand out about the deal is the buyer itself. Apollo hasn’t traditionally invested in tech companies. It’s invested in cruise lines and Twinkies, but not tech. Rackspace CTO John Engates says Apollo sees a big opportunity in investing into growing in a market where Rackspace has already secured a considerable lead: helping customers get a handle on complex multi-cloud environments. Engates spoke about the deal with the WHIR, our sister site, today. “We think that the timing is right generally because there’s so much change going on in the market right now around cloud and the need for companies to get the cloud, or start or accelerate on the journey of cloud,” he said. “Those conditions are better than ever I think because if you look out into the market to see who is doing what, Amazon is doing great, Microsoft is making a huge transition and doing great, other companies like Google are in the market…there’s lots of opportunity because every day we talk to customers who tell us they need the help.” A big advantage of going private for a company is flexibility, which comes with freedom from pressure to constantly improve stock value. This pressure can make it difficult for companies to make long-view plays that may not pay off in the immediate future. The deal is an opportunity for Rackspace to do more than it has done so far, Engates said, “and do things that might not have been possible under the scrutiny of the public market.” A lot more on this at the WHIR (Comment on this)

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