Wednesday, September 7th, 2016

Time	Event
7:01a	Brexit Doesn’t Stop Microsoft from Launching UK Data Centers In what may be the starkest illustration of the fact that Brexit will not put the biggest companies’ data center plans in the UK on hold, Microsoft announced the launch of its first cloud regions in the UK. Not only are these the first Microsoft data centers that support its cloud services in the UK, they are also the first data centers any cloud provider of Microsoft’s caliber has launched in the country. Amazon Web Services, the world’s biggest cloud provider, is expecting to launch its first data center in the UK by early next year, and Google, which is on a mission to prove that it can be a serious competitor to both AWS and Microsoft, hasn’t publicly voiced plans to launch a data center there. That’s not to say that no major global cloud providers have data centers in the UK besides Microsoft. IBM SoftLayer, Rackspace, and DigitalOcean all operate cloud data centers in London. Following the vote by UK citizens in June to leave the European Union, there was a lot of concern that the referendum could lead to fewer companies choosing to build data centers in Britain. An Amazon official addressed this concern about one week after the vote, saying the company continued to be on track to open its first UK data center next year. The new Microsoft data centers in the UK are in three locations, according to a company spokesman: The new Azure regions are: UK West – Cardiff, Wales UK South – London, England The new Office 365 region includes data centers in the following locations: London, England Durham, England While far behind AWS in terms of revenue, Microsoft has more cloud data centers around the world than any of its competitors. Including the new UK locations, its cloud services are now available from 28 regions, and six more are in the works, according to a blog post by Takeshi Numoto, the company’s corporate VP of cloud and enterprise. The new Microsoft data centers already have their first customers, including the UK’s Ministry of Defense. The MoD is using Office 365 and Azure, the two services initially available from the new regions, with Dynamics CRM Online coming in the first half of next year. Other customers include the country’s largest mental health trust, as well as a number of private-sector companies, such as Aston Martin, Capita, and Rosslyn Analytics. Being able to store its data locally meant South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (the mental health organization) could use Microsoft’s cloud more, the trust’s CIO, Stephen Docherty, said in a statement. One of the issues that raised concerns about the post-Brexit future of the UK’s data center industry was whether the country would adopt similar data privacy regulations as the UK. Along with Google and Salesforce, Microsoft has endorsed the EU-US Privacy Shield, the EU’s set of rules created to replace Safe Harbor, the framework for governing data privacy for companies that move private information between data centers on different sides of the Atlantic that was recently annulled. Britain’s exit from the EU has not been implemented at this point, and it’s unclear how different or how similar the country’s data privacy regulations will be in comparison to Privacy Shield. Read more: Don’t Let Brexit Choke Internet Traffic With EU, Operators Urge The issues of privacy and data protection are front and center for Microsoft execs. For the last several years the company has been battling the US government in court over access to private customer emails stored in the company’s data center in Dublin, Ireland. The emails belong to a suspect in a criminal investigation, and the government feels that Microsoft is required to comply with a warrant seeking to access them. The latest decision by an appeals court, which came in July, was in Microsoft’s favor, overturning an earlier ruling by a lower court that the company was required to hand over the emails, even though they were stored in a data center overseas. Correction: Microsoft’s new cloud regions are in three new locations in the UK, not four as this article previously said. (Comment on this)
4:43p	Dell, EMC Complete Largest Tech Deal, Look to Invest (Bloomberg) — Dell Technologies wrapped up the acquisition of EMC Corp. in the largest technology deal in history, positioning the company to use its size to invest in new areas and fend off competition from the cloud and other rivals. The combination creates a $74 billion business that serves 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies, Dell said in a statement Wednesday. It also takes EMC out of the glare of the public markets as the company is privately controlled. The tie-up, valued at about $67 billion when it was first announced almost a year ago, brings together the leading provider of key storage products and one of the top makers of servers and personal computers as both companies grapple with rising interest in cloud-based services from rivals such as Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Dell Technologies plans to invest $4.5 billion a year in research and development going forward after cumulative investments of more than $12.7 billion over the past three years, according to the company. “We’ve got the ability to innovate at scale and invest — not for next quarter, but we have the agility and speed of a startup, but the scale and reach of the largest company in the industry,” Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer of the company, said in an interview. “Being private gives us an ability to focus on our customers like no other competitor can.” Dell plans to invest in areas including products linked to the Internet of Things — or the effort to connect various devices, from cars to refrigerators. “As you have this instrumentation and making everything intelligent — that’s a huge opportunity,” Dell said. “The PC and smartphone revolutions have reduced the cost of microelectronics to the point where these small computers, effectively, can be embedded in anything.” See also: Michael Dell Plans to Keep On Making Deals After EMC Acquisition The new company has 140,000 employees. While Dell didn’t deny there could be job cuts, he said the tie-up was more about revenue growth. “We have more, what I would call, revenue synergies than cost synergies because of the complementary nature of the businesses; we’re not putting together businesses that are the same — and taking costs out,” he said, declining to give any estimate for layoffs. “There are some overlapping functions and that sort of thing — that’s not the primary feature of this, but there is some of that.” EMC shareholders will receive $24.05 per share in cash and a tracking stock linked to a portion of EMC’s economic interest in VMware Inc., its majority-owned software business. Shares of the tracking stock, which has the ticker “DVMT,” began trading Wednesday. The merger comes a day after Dell Technologies reported its financial results for the quarter ended July 29. Dell said it had revenue of $13.1 billion from continuing operations, an increase of 1 percent from a year earlier. It also had operating income of $63 million, reversing an operating loss in the previous year. (Comment on this)
6:31p	Cologix Building $130M Data Center in Growing Columbus Metro Data center provider Cologix has kicked off construction of a $130 million data center in Columbus, Ohio, which will be the third facility on the company’s campus in the Midwestern business hub. The company expects to launch the first phase of what it expects will ultimately be a 160,000-square foot, 18MW data center in mid-2017. Columbus is a good example of secondary US data center markets Cologix has primarily focused on. While it isn’t as big as New York, Northern Virginia, or Silicon Valley, it has a growing population and a robust business ecosystem. The Denver-based data center provider also has facilities in Dallas, Jacksonville, Minneapolis, New Jersey, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Lakeland, Florida. New Jersey is the latest market it added to its portfolio when it acquired a data center provider called Net Access in October 2015 after raising $225 million in debt to finance expansion. The company is targeting cloud providers and traditional enterprises with the most recent Columbus build. Its existing data centers in the city already host many network and cloud service providers, whose services other customers can access from the facilities. The Columbus metro has a strong economy and a quickly growing population. The area crossed the 2 million population mark last year, when it also recorded the fastest wage growth in the nation, which at 6.2 percent surpassed wage growth rate in the San Francisco-Oakland region. A recent study found that startups in Columbus grow their staff faster in their first 10 years than in any other major US metro. One cloud provider building data centers in Ohio is Amazon Web Services, which last year finalized a plan to invest $1.2 billion to build data centers across three townships in the state. Also last year, Amazon signed a long-term energy purchase agreement with the developer of a future 100MW wind farm in Ohio. (Comment on this)
7:11p	Are Pentagon’s DC Data Centers First on the Chopping Block? The Pentagon’s newly re-energized data center consolidation push seeks to shut down 60 percent of the Defense Department’s data centers by 2018. The question now is which ones. That question isn’t likely to have been answered at this point, since the team that will lead the effort has yet to be appointed, but the goal is to close the “costliest and least efficient facilities.” According to Bloomberg Government, the DOD spent about $194 million on data centers in fiscal 2015 alone, and it clearly would like to see that number come down and come down quicker than it did after the department shut down 18 percent of its data centers instead of the planned 40 by last September (previous goal). A Bloomberg Government blog post suggests that if the Pentagon is going to go after the costliest data centers, its facilities in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area may end up as the first ones on the chopping block because of the area’s high real estate costs: “Using the maximum per diem rates for fiscal 2017 as a proxy for rent prices, the Washington metropolitan area is the costliest location with data centers.” See also: Audit Finds DOD Cloud Use Poorly Defined, Tracked The post’s author acknowledges there are other factors to consider, such as proximity of the data centers to the Pentagon. There are also factors that influence total cost of a data center to a greater degree than the cost real estate, such as energy rates. If the DOD does decide to go after its DC-area data centers, the list of affected contractors would include Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Clark Enterprises, and Science Applications International. Read the full Bloomberg Government article here See also: Military Second-Biggest Buyer of Renewable Energy in US (Comment on this)
9:16p	HPE to Spin Off Software in $8.8B Deal With Micro Focus (Bloomberg) — Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. said it’s spinning off and merging some non-core software assets in a deal with U.K.-based Micro Focus International Plc valued at about $8.8 billion. As part of the deal, HPE said it will receive $2.5 billion in cash and its shareholders will have 50.1 percent ownership in the new merged company. The software assets include areas such as application delivery management, big data and enterprise security, the Palo Alto, California-based company said Wednesday in a statement. See also: HPE Wants to Give Data Center Automation a Fresh Start Micro Focus, based in Newbury, England, can use the assets to bolster its software products that help companies on a variety of fronts, including business applications, security and with data centers. The combined company will be led by Kevin Loosemore, executive chairman of Micro Focus. Micro Focus expects to improve the margin on Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s software assets by about 20 percentage points by the end of the third full financial year following the close of the transaction, the companies said. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been considering a sale of some of its software assets, people familiar with the matter said in July, in an effort to slim down its operations. Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman — who split HPE from sister company HP Inc. in November — is looking for more ways to pare down her company. Her aim is to make Hewlett Packard Enterprise nimbler to woo customers with more options from cloud-computing providers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2016/09/07 [Calendar]

Next Day >>