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Thursday, September 1st, 2016
- No SMART Goal Setting (or Weak Goal Setting)
- No Buyer Personas
- No Buyer’s Journey
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Three Social Media Mistakes Data Center Leaders Make In the time it takes to write a blog post like this, approximately 150,000 LinkedIn profiles will be viewed, 12,000 new users will join LinkedIn, 200,000,000 Twitter searches will be conducted, and 400,000,000 YouTube videos will be viewed. Now granted, only a small sliver of these searches will be the IT professionals, business executives, and other stakeholders that you’re trying to attract to your data center. However the sheer magnitude of what it represents — and how much of a game-changer this is for how your prospects evaluate data center providers and make purchase decisions — simply can’t be ignored. When it comes to diving into social media, it seems like the leadership of many of those in the data center industry is making every mistake in “the book.” What are those mistakes? And how you can avoid them? Are you using social media to drive meaningful business outcomes? Perhaps this includes new leads, opportunities, clients, revenue, channel partners, or job applicants. Or are you just on social media to be “cocktail party compliant?” So that when one of your buddies asks you at a networking event, “so are you on Twitter?” you can reply “Yes, sure we’re there.” In the back of your mind you wonder, just why are we on social media? And are there SMART goals for your data center that would better focus our efforts on areas that matter to the bottom line? (SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound.) Who are you trying to attract or communicate with on social media? And why the heck should they pay attention to you, among all the different media and people clamoring for their attention? What’s in it for them? So many data center leaders that do participate on social media frequently try to use a one-size-fits-most approach — lumping everyone into one category. The problem with that, however, is that it ignores critical differences in people’s goals, plans, challenges, and favored resources. Would you talk to the CIO of a healthcare tech scale-up the same way you’d talk with the superintendent of schools of the largest school district in your region? Customize your approach for who they are and what they care about most — or one of your competitors will. (Side note: Approached correctly, buyer personas help you prioritize which social media platforms matter most and which specific areas within each platform. Without this research, you’ll just be spinning your wheels based on your personal assumptions.) What’s the average length of your sales cycle? What are the distinct stages that someone goes through in between the time when they first learn about your data center and become a client? And are you aware that as much as 70% of the decision-making process is over before you even get to that first conversation with prospects for data center services? The buyer’s journey for data centers is vastly different than it was as recently as five years ago. Mainstream adoption of search engines, social media, mobile devices, and cloud services have severely disrupted the traditional marketing and sales playbooks. Is your company aware of these realities? Or burying its head in the sand? To be successful on social media, you’ve got to have relevant content to share for each of the three stages of the buyer’s journey: Most data center leaders are sabotaging themselves by acting as if everyone they come into contact with is at the Decision stage — which is about as absurd as walking into a singles event and assuming that everyone in attendance wants to elope and get married that night. How do you currently use social media? Is LinkedIn your primary channel? Or are you driving measurable business outcomes from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare, or other places? Let us know in the Comments section. If you’re attending Data Center World later this month, be sure to catch Joshua Feinberg’s session on How Data Centers Use Thought Leadership to Attract World-Class Clients and Talent on Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 10:20 am in room R215 of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. About the author: Joshua Feinberg is Vice President and Co-Founder of SP Home Run, Inc. — which helps data center, managed service, hosting, and cloud providers grow their leads, client base, revenue, and profitability. |
| 3:00p | Cloud News from VMworld: Software, Software-Defined Infrastructure and More  Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud VMworld 2016 is underway in Las Vegas this week. Here are the latest news and product announcements related to cloud computing that have emerged from the event so far. The VMworld conference is now in its twelfth year. That makes it pretty old for a technology event. And in an era when virtual machines are old news, VMworld lacks some of the luster of its earlier days. See also: VMware Reassembles Its Cloud Stack with a New ‘Foundation’ But that doesn’t mean there have been no notable announcements from the event. In the realm of cloud computing, the interesting announcements so far have centered on the following areas… Cloud StorageHigh-performance solid state disk (SSD) storage is a hot topic at VMworld this year. Samsung and VMware have announced a partnership to build data center server racks based entirely on solid state disks, along with software-defined software. Kingston also took advantage of VMworld to announce a new SSD product tailored for the data center. In a similar vein, Tegile Systems unveiled a cloud storage platform composed of flash. No one is saying that SSD storage is cheaper than commodity storage. But with more SSD options than ever on the market, running data-intensive cloud servers on SSD storage should become feasible for more organizations. With SSD storage also comes higher performance, since SSD support much faster read and write cycles. Scale-out storage that can support large volumes of data is also a focus of vendors at VMworld. Scality announced a partnership with OVH to deliver perabyte-scale storage pools, with the aim of making cloud storage easier in the age of big data. Software-Defined InfrastructureNot surprisingly, vendors are also using VMworld to highlight converged software-defined infrastructure solutions. That means platforms that combine software-defined networking, storage and hardware virtualization in order to build more agile and flexible clouds. Dell made several announcements in this vein. The most significant is expanded support for Dell’s VMware Virtual SAN product suite. Dell also unveiled support for the VMWare Blast Extreme protocol, a solution for building thin client desktop infrastructure on Windows. In addition, Nexenta has debuted the general availability of software-defined storage platform, NexentaFusion 1.0. The platform combines virtual storage with data analytics. Disaster Recovery (as a Service)Last but not least, Axcient announced an updated disaster recovery product, which is delivered as a cloud service. Called Fusion, the product has been enhanced with automation and orchestration features that are designed to simplify the data recovery process. This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-e |
| 4:19p | Huawei Plots to Seize Market for Data Center Gear: Gadfly (Bloomberg Gadfly) — Chinese hardware company Huawei laid waste to a once fertile computing sector in Europe and then took over the smartphone industry in China. And now it aims to break into another corner of the tech business. Attention Dell, Cisco, Lenovo and others: Be afraid. Be very afraid. Huawei is training its sights on selling computing gear for the world’s biggest data centers, which are the invisible locomotives of the digital world. These giant buildings packed with racks of computing equipment and miles of data-carrying cables enable every moment in the digital world, from the Facebook photo you shared this morning to the databases managing Walmart’s supply chain. You’d think the digital explosion would be great for companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell, EMC, Lenovo and Cisco that sell the computing equipment for data centers. Nope. The number of buyers for their wares has grown more concentrated, shifting power to demanding customers including Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Those companies gobble servers by the truckload, but they tend to shun most equipment from traditional hardware makers and buy made-to-order gear from no-name Taiwanese factories. Companies from GE to Uber are following the lead of Amazon and its ilk, demanding the opportunity to buy different types of data-center equipment at lower costs — or else. The changes have caused revenue for data-center equipment makers to shrink or grow slowly, and their once enviable profit margins have become far less enviable. Huawei’s Goal for Data Center Equipment Sales by 2020: $10 billion And now here comes another existential threat. Huawei said at an event that it was aiming to sell about $10 billion worth of gear and software to the global data-center powerhouses by 2020. For context, that figure is about one-third of the estimated 2015 worldwide spending on hardware for cloud computing, according to research firm IDC. That is an ambitious goal for a relative newcomer to data-center gear. But Huawei should not be underestimated, because it has already wreaked havoc in two computer hardware industries. In telecom equipment, once powerful European hardware makers like Alcatel and Ericsson lost sales to Huawei, which grabbed about one-quarter of the market for wireless network gear, according to IDC. Huawei’s gains have badly damaged its rivals. Alcatel was forced to sell to Nokia. Industry leader Ericsson’s operating profit margins were in the 20 percent range before Huawei entered the market. Last year, its operating margin was 9 percent. Huawei’s success in breaking the backs of European telecom equipment makers helped the company’s revenue double from 2010 to 2015, to 395 billion yuan, or about $60 billion at current exchange rates. Huawei’s revenue in the first in the first six months of this year puts in on track to generate roughly $74 billion in annual sales, or 50 percent more than Cisco’s expected revenue. (Cisco is far more profitable.) Huawei has also became the biggest seller of smartphones in China and the world’s third-biggest smartphone maker. In data centers, it’s hard to imagine Huawei will have much luck selling equipment to big data-center owners in the U.S. Fairly or unfairly, Huawei’s telecom equipment is persona non grata in America because of fears China would use it to spy on U.S. companies and computer networks. But China and the rest of the world are a different story. Now, Western companies including Cisco, Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise account for a majority of data-center equipment sold in China, which is the world’s second-largest buyer behind the U.S. of computer hardware, software and other digital products. China’s spending on information technology, including data-center equipment, rose 14 percent in 2015. That’s far faster than the overall market for global IT, which is growing by a few percentage points a year. Buyers of data-center equipment in China account for 30 percent of the world’s spending on computer servers and 20 percent of total spending on data-storage equipment, according to estimates from IDC and Bloomberg Intelligence. At least some of that is up for grabs for Huawei. The Chinese government has been urging the country’s companies and government agencies to buy more computing equipment from domestic suppliers. As we know, the Chinese government can move mountains, and Huawei is a company the government can get behind. Even if Huawei only manages to make inroads in data-center equipment sales in its home country, that will add to the big pile of sadness for the traditional hardware companies. Huawei has turned the headaches of Cisco, EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise into a pounding migraine. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners. |
| 5:58p | How Facebook Made Its Data Warehouse Faster Facebook says it’s time to change the way we compress digital files because the methods used in nearly all compression today were created in the nineties, when both hardware and the problems compression needed to solve were very different. The company has created a new compression algorithm – addressing a similar problem the fictional startup Pied Piper became famous for solving in the TV series Silicon Valley – which has already resulted in a significant reduction of storage and compute requirements in Facebook data centers. Facebook open sourced the algorithm, called Zstandard, this week, hoping it will replace Deflate, the core algorithm in Zip, gzip, and zlib – in other words the data compression standard that’s been reigning for more than two decades. Zstandard enables faster compression that results in smaller files and allows for more options when balancing the essential compression tradeoffs of speed versus compression ratio. Another big advantage: it scales. When Deflate was created, the global scale of data center infrastructure at which internet giants like Facebook operate today was unimaginable. Facebook’s new compression algorithm was created by Yann Collet, who started working on Zstandard’s earlier version, called lz4, in his spare time, while working in the marketing department of the French telco Orange. Last year, he moved from Paris to Menlo Park to work for Facebook. He has made more than 1,350 commits to lz4 on Github and 400 to Finite State Entropy, a method for transforming symbols to bits during compression that’s alternative to the method used in Deflate. Finite State Entropy is instrumental to making Zstandard both faster and able to deliver better compression ratios, according to a blog post by Collet and his colleague Chip Turner, a software engineer at Facebook. Compression at Exabyte ScaleThe new algorithm has been running in production in Facebook data centers for the last six months, Collet said Tuesday during a presentation at the company’s @Scale conference in San Jose. “We don’t have to sacrifice compression,” he said. “We get more compression with speed.” Facebook uses it to compress data stored in its Exabyte-scale data warehouses. A single Facebook data warehouse is thousands of server cabinets, according to Collet. At this scale, even a small optimization can turn into significant demand reduction. “One percent of an Exabyte is still a huge amount of infrastructure,” he said. “So we pay attention to any efficiency gain we can get.” Replacing zlib with Zstandard resulted in six percent storage reduction in Facebook data warehouses, 19 percent reduction in CPU requirements for compression and 40 percent reduction in CPU requirements for decompression, Collet said. Taking Advantage of Modern HardwareUnlike processors that were around when Deflate was created, which did one task after another, in order, modern CPUs are very good at doing many things at once, and Zstandard takes advantage of this capability, called parallel execution. Another modern CPU trick it exploits is called branchless design. Put simply, if performing a task depends on the outcome of another task, instead of waiting for that outcome the processor tries to guess what the most likely outcome is and performs the task. “Today’s CPUs gamble,” Collet and Turner write. “They do so intelligently, thanks to a branch predictor, which tells them in essence the most probable result.” The problem is when they guess wrong, in which case the CPU has to stop all operations that were started in this speculative way and start from scratch. Called a “pipeline flush,” it is very costly in terms of CPU resources. Zstandard is designed specifically with such branchless algorithms in mind. It also uses a lot more memory than zlib, which was limited to a 32KB window. Technically, there is no limit to the amount of memory Zstandard can take advantage of, but to make it compatible with lots of different receiving systems, Collet recommends limiting its memory usage to 8MB. “This is a tuning recommendation, though, not a compression format limitation,” he and Turner write in the blog post. |
| 8:09p | Ten Most Connected Data Centers Data centers are perennially difficult to rank, due mostly to the fact that different data center users place different amounts of value on each server farm characteristic. Electrical and mechanical infrastructure redundancy may be more valuable to a bank than to a cloud startup, for example, while a big cloud provider may emphasize the site’s capacity for expansion. The one characteristic that’s emerged as paramount in recent years is data center connectivity. More precisely, the variety of connectivity options available at a site. As companies increasingly have to deliver digital services at global scale, having access to as many network providers as possible that will help them do that is more important than ever. Data center connectivity is one of the ways a new online directory, launched by the Australian internet entrepreneur Bevan Slattery, ranks the world’s data centers. Slattery’s company Megaport, whose software platform automates the process of connecting to various service providers in a data center, went public in Australia last December. He co-founded a telco called Pipe Networks and founded NextDC, one of Australia’s biggest data center providers, which went public in 2010. His new company, called Cloudscene, wants to bring clarity to the convoluted data center market by creating a directory of some 4,700 data centers and 4,200 cloud and internet service providers across 110 countries. In a statement, Slattery said he was frustrated with “the traditionally long and difficult buying process for data centers and enterprise cloud services.” “Prospective tenants or home buyers haven’t needed to visit individual websites of real estate agents to get listing information for over a decade,” he said. “So, why is the tech industry stuck in the past when it comes to enterprise IT services?” There is at least one other website that aims to be a comprehensive listing of the world’s data centers (http://www.datacentermap.com/), but it doesn’t rank sites by data center connectivity, service providers, network fabrics, and markets the way Cloudscene does. Here are the top 10 most connected data centers, according to Cloudscene: 1. SG1Operator: Equinix
2. LA1Operator: CoreSite
3. FR5Operator: Equinix
4. DenverOperator: 910Telecom
5. Telehouse NorthOperator: Telehouse (subsidiary of KDDI)
6. SY3Operator: Equinix
7. SY1Operator: Equinix
8. Paris VoltaireOperator: Telehouse
9. DC2Operator: Equinix
10. HK1Operator: Equinix
All images taken from websites of the data center providers on this list. Disclaimer: this ranking does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Data Center Knowledge or its parent company Penton. |
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