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Wednesday, August 31st, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Inside EdgeConneX’s Massive European Data Center Buildout When EdgeConneX, the company that has positioned itself as a specialist in building and operating edge data centers, announced its first project in Europe early this year — a data center in Amsterdam — the move appeared to be little more than a cautious and relatively small first step into a new market by the Herndon, Virginia-based data center provider. The company did say at the time it had plans to replicate its US model in Europe and go into many more European markets, but it didn’t say exactly how fast it would do it and wasn’t specific about the scale of its European expansion. Turns out, it is stepping into multiple key European data center markets all at once, already building data centers at massive scale. It has mega-scale data center projects underway in Amsterdam, Dublin, and London. These facilities are build-to-suit projects designed together with anchor tenants but sized to support a multi-tenant enterprise-focused colocation business. EdgeConneX is known in the US for operating a big network of smaller, purpose-built facilities offering low-latency solutions for content distribution in secondary, or edge data center markets. It builds data centers in places with many digital-content end users that are underserved by incumbent data center providers. In those facilities, content companies like Netflix or Google cache their content, while local internet service providers deliver it to the end users. Read more: How Edge Data Center Providers are Changing the Internet’s Geography Not surprisingly, some of its biggest financial backers are media, cable, telecommunications, and content delivery network companies. EdgeConneX is a portfolio company of Comcast Ventures, and other investors include: Charter Communications, Akamai, Cox Communications, and Ciena, as well as private equity firms Brown Brothers Harriman and Providence Equity Partners. Similarly, cable and telecom giant Liberty Global is playing a big role in EdgeConneX’s big bold move into London, the biggest European data center market.
Source: EdgeConneX – Aug. 23, 2016 Big Plays in Dublin and AmsterdamThe initial three buildings in Amsterdam were designed to draw a 55MW critical load at full build-out, Phill Lawson-Shanks, EdgeConneX chief architect and VP of innovation, told Data Center Knowledge in an interview. Additionally, the company has reserved another 20MW of future capacity from the incumbent electric utility to support the planned development program through 2019. In a story similar to the data center landgrab by cloud giants in the US, a hyperscale cloud company, whom Lawson-Shanks could not name due to confidentiality agreements, selected EdgeConneX to build a large-scale data center adjacent to Grange Castle Business Park near Dublin, Ireland, where Microsoft has a data center. Besides Microsoft, cloud giants Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are all active in Dublin. Speed to market is critical for EdgeConneX’s anchor customer in Dublin, and the data center provider has been delivering its larger European facilities in about nine months. Unlike Amsterdam, where existing buildings are being renovated and upgraded, the Dublin project is a ground-up build. EdgeConneX is using a modular approach with key electrical and structural components fabricated off-site and delivered by truck to accelerate the building schedule. The first building in Dublin is drawing 10MW from the national grid plus 8MW from natural-gas turbines, which are supplementing its power supply while the utility company is building out more infrastructure to support it, Lawson-Shanks said. This will allow EdgeConneX to bring the data center online to meet the requirements of the anchor tenant. Liberty Global Anchor Tenant in LondonAnother massive-scale European data center project by EdgeConneX is underway outside of London. Liberty Global, the corporate parent of Virgin Media, will be the anchor tenant there as well as in a network of smaller EdgeConneX data centers elsewhere in the UK. Liberty is the world’s largest international TV and broadband company with operations in more than 30 countries across Europe, Latin America. and the Caribbean. Earlier this year it completed the acquisition of Cable & Wireless to augment its Latin America and Caribbean business. It is also currently going through the process of launching a joint venture in Holland with Vodafone. Liberty operates in 12 European countries under the consumer brands Virgin Media, Ziggo, Unitymedia, Telenet, and UPC. Notably, Virgin Media’s “Project Lightning” in the UK involves building out its broadband network to provide service to 4 million new users. Liberty serves markets in over 20 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean under the consumer brands VTR, Flow, Liberty, Mas Movil, and BTC. The LiLAC Group (the collective name for Liberty’s Latin America and Caribbean operations) also operates a submarine fiber network in more than 30 markets throughout the region. A Disruptor in European Data Center Markets?While it has so far stayed largely out of their way in the US by building in secondary markets, EdgeConneX is becoming a serious competitor to the big data center providers in Europe. Like the big providers, it is pitching its facilities as cloud on-ramps for enterprises, and it is building close to where they are. In a recent interview with Telecom Ramblings, EdgeConneX’s chief commercial officer, Clint Heiden, said the first phase of its Amsterdam facility would be 8MW and that the two following phases, which were “mostly sold out,” would be larger. Its Amsterdam campus is located within 24 km from downtown Amsterdam and 9 km from Schiphol Amsterdam Airport.
Source: EdgeConneX – EDCAMS01 Koolhovenlaan 12 1119 NE Schiphol-Rijk, Netherlands These new EdgeConneX facilities are located very close to the corporate headquarters of Amsterdam-based Interxion, one of the biggest European data center providers, and four of its Amsterdam data centers. Interxion is currently completing the construction of AMS8 adjacent to its exiting campus. Along with InterXion, the two largest US-based data center REITs, Equinix and Digital Realty Trust, also own and operate significant data center assets in Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere around Europe. |
| 3:00p | Cisco Moves into the Container Market with Latest Acquisition  By The VAR Guy Networking giant Cisco has made its first big step into the container market. Today, the company announced its intent to acquire virtual container startup ContainerX. The terms are not disclosed. ContainerX, which is based in San Jose, Calif., says its technology provides the capability to control containers running under Linux or Windows. In addition, it is compatible with bare metal or virtual machines and can be deployed on a public or private cloud. Containers simplify deployment of applications and operating systems for developers on the back end, and Cisco’s entry into the emerging market is part of its larger strategy to establish a firm foothold in a cloud-based ecosystem. However, the company’s foray into adding administrative capabilities to container technology comes into a somewhat crowded market, with several players such as Red Hat and Docker offering similar tools. “Another key part of our cloud strategy at Cisco is helping our service provider customers with network function virtualization. They’re actually virtualizing various functions in their network and trying to virtualize software to gain a lot more flexibility and agility,” Kip Compton, VP of Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Services organization, told The VAR Guy. “So we see this as a sort of technology and platform ingredient for us for a number of our customer segments when it comes to their cloud deployments. “ Cisco hopes to provide networking and security capabilities to ContainerX technology that will enable it to reach an enterprise grade status for enterprise NFVs, Compton says. ContainerX will surely benefit from Cisco’s vast partner network and established relationships, but its CEO, Kiran Kamity, was frank about his hesitations in a blog post on the acquisition. “I write this note with a feeling of unfettered excitement coupled with gut-wrenching anxiety,” he wrote. “As with any acquisition, there are a few things we need to figure out as we join forces with Cisco.” Like many traditional IT bellwethers, Cisco has been actively acquiring new technologies in order to compete in emerging markets. This is the sixth buy Cisco has made this year. In the last year since Chuck Robbins became CEO, the company has made 16 acquisitions, predominately in security and software-as-a-service (SaaS). “We’ve pivoted our acquisition strategy to focus on security and software and cloud. You can see that especially over the last year,” says Compton. “We think our acquisitions obviously complement our internal research and development and enable us to bring more and better products to market more quickly. That’s a key benefit for our partners, as well.” Two weeks ago, Cisco announced plans to eliminate approximately 5,500 jobs, or about 7 percent of its workforce, in order to focus on emerging markets such as security, the Internet of things, software-defined data centers and the cloud. |
| 3:47p | Huawei Aims to Sell the Nuts and Bolts of Global Cloud Computing (Bloomberg) — Huawei Technologies intends to become a major provider of gear and software to global cloud computing providers, aiming for a $10 billion business by 2020. The Chinese company will keep investing in the cloud, its fastest-growing business, as it seeks to supply chips, servers and other equipment to a booming market, said Ken Hu, the rotating chief executive overseeing the fledgling division. Read more: Huawei to Pump $1B into Cloud Services Business Huawei has begun working with foreign firms including SAP and Intel to crack the market for cloud services. Unlike providers such as Amazon and Alibaba, it wants to supply the basic components of computing infrastructure, as domestic industries from education to health care begin to move data online. China’s largest telecommunications gear company, also the world’s third-largest smartphone brand, may benefit from the local government’s preference for local over foreign technology. “Cloud will penetrate in industries, including traditional industries globally. Adopting cloud computing is how they digitize their businesses,” Hu told reporters at the company’s annual cloud computing conference in Shanghai. “There are many different models for entering the global cloud computing market.” Spending on cloud computing services in China alone could reach $20 billion by 2020, consultancy Bain & Co. estimates. Huawei will eventually target the global market, despite suspicions about Chinese espionage that have kept its networking gear out of the US. Hu said Huawei can rely on a large in-house research and development effort as well as its expertise on telecommunications equipment. “Huawei’s experience and ability to integrate technologies in different areas is a unique advantage,” he said. |
| 4:14p | Equinix Completes $42M London Data Center Expansion Equinix has completed a $42 million expansion of one of its London data centers, more than doubling capacity at LD6 in Slough. About one quarter of European equities trades flow through Equinix data centers, and LD6 is one of the key facilities in that ecosystem, hosting equipment for more than 170 financial services companies, according to Equinix. The Redwood City, California-based data center provider has added capacity for 1,385 cabinets at the facility, bringing its total capacity to 2,770. In a statement, Equinix said the expansion was an indicator of its “continued commitment to the UK,” apparently addressing uncertainty about the future created by the nation’s decision to exit the European Union. See also: US Data Center Giants in Europe: the Brexit Effect Don’t Let Brexit Choke Internet Traffic With EU, Operators Urge According to Equinix, the facility in Slough hosts more than 90 network service providers and provides access to numerous transatlantic submarine cables. A packet of data can get from LD6 to New York in 30 miliseconds and to Frankfurt in 4 miliseconds, the company said. Another connectivity feature of the facility is LINX. LD6 hosts one of the nodes for the London Internet Exchange. Equinix has seven sites in the London data center market. Including the recent expansion, its Slough campus now has more than 408,000 square feet of colocation space. See also: Inside EdgeConneX’s Massive European Data Center Buildout |
| 7:33p | What Facebook Has Learned from Regularly Shutting Down Entire Data Centers As we have reported before, Facebook has one of the boldest approaches to testing its infrastructure resiliency. The Facebook data center team regularly shuts down entire sites to see how its application will behave and to learn what improvements can be made. During his keynote this morning at the Facebook @Scale conference in San Jose, California, Jay Parikh, the company’s head of engineering and infrastructure, shared some of the big lessons his team has learned so far from these fire drills. The idea to do these kinds of stress tests was born after Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on internet infrastructure on the East Coast in 2012, Parikh said. Many data centers went down and stayed down for prolonged periods of time. Read more: In Sandy’s Aftermath, Epic Challenges for Data Centers Facebook data centers weathered the storm – its two East Coast sites in North Carolina and Virginia are far from the hardest hit areas – but the team started wondering what would happen if the social network lost an entire data center or availability region due to a disaster of similar proportions. They created a swat team called Project Storm for this purpose, but the periodic “massive-scale storm drills” usually involve the entire engineering team and “a lot of the rest of the company,” Parikh said. Needless to say, it’s not easy. A single Facebook data center processes 10s of terabytes of traffic per second, draws 10s of megawatts of power, and runs thousands of software services. “This is a pretty hard problem, and it’s really hard to decompose this and figure out how are we going to solve this, how are we going to build a more resilient service,” he said. “Things didn’t go that well the first couple of times we did this.” Facebook users didn’t notice that something went wrong, “but we learned a lot.” One of the biggest things they learned was that traffic management and load balancing were “really, really hard” during an outage. Traffic patterns were chaotic, as illustrated in this graph Parikh displayed:
If you’re an engineer and you see a graph like this, you conclude that you either have bad data, your control system is not working, or you have no idea what you’re doing, he said. Once Parikh’s team got a better handle on the traffic management problem, they were able to get a more normal, boring graph:
Another big lesson was that it takes a long time to bring a data center back up after an outage. “When we take a data center or a region down, that actually happens much faster,” Parikh said. It’s a similar lesson to the one you learn as a child, when you realize a toy is much easier to take apart than to put back together, he said. Only this is less like putting together a toy and more like putting together an aircraft carrier. Facebook has developed an automated runbook that includes every step for turning a data center off or for turning it back on. The runbook includes both automated and manual tasks. During each drill, the team times itself on every individual task to continue looking for improvement opportunities. “You really want to time this kind of like a pit stop at a race,” he said. Proper tooling is one of Parikh’s three key tenets for building infrastructure at scale and planning around resiliency. The other two are commitment and embracing failure. There has to be a set of leaders in the company who push their teams outside of their comfort zone so they can learn something new. This means that leadership team has to embrace failure. Commitment is important in terms of going through with a drill regardless of what else is happening. Delaying a drill because of a product launch would be an example of breaking that commitment. Product launches are going to happen, and you don’t know how your application will behave during a product launch if one of the data centers goes down. “There’s only one way to find out,” Parikh said. |
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