Friday, September 23rd, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	IBM, Microsoft Tap New European Markets With Cloud Data Centers Microsoft and IBM both recently launched new cloud data centers in Europe, each adding a new country to the list of markets users can choose to store their data in. Through a partnership with Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems, Microsoft launched its first cloud region in Germany, served out of data centers in Magdeburg and Frankfurt. By giving T-Systems full control of Microsoft cloud customers’ data stored in the region, the company hopes to avoid another legal run-in with American law-enforcement officials over access to private customer data stored overseas. IBM launched a data center in Norway, its first cloud data center in the Nordics and its 48th cloud data center worldwide. The company has been expanding physical infrastructure that powers its cloud services aggressively since 2014, when, following acquisition of SoftLayer the year before, it earmarked $1.2 billion for global cloud data center buildout. While they aren’t leading the cloud services market in terms of revenue, both IBM and Microsoft have more data centers supporting their cloud services than any other player in the market, including Amazon Web Services. The expansion announcements come as competition continues to heat up in the cloud services market, especially in the market for enterprise cloud services. In addition to competition from AWS, the leader in the space, Microsoft and IBM are up against Google, which recently decided to put more resources behind pursuing enterprise cloud customers, and Oracle, which earlier this month announced a renewed push for capturing a bigger piece of the enterprise cloud pie, and which has reportedly been expanding cloud data center capacity. Read more: Oracle’s Ellison Takes Shot at Amazon With New Cloud Services The Oracle announcement is especially relevant for IBM. A big part of the announcement was the launch of a new bare-metal cloud. Bare-metal cloud services are one of the things that set IBM SoftLayer apart from giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The new IBM cloud data center is in Fetsund, 30km outside of Oslo. The company said it will support growing cloud adoption in the Nordic region and emphasized the ability to now store data that belongs to customers in the Nordics locally. Data sovereignty is a big part of the Microsoft announcement too. Germany has some of the strictest data sovereignty rules in the world, and top cloud providers have been opening data centers there to ensure they can serve German customers who cannot store their data outside the country. In an unusual arrangement with T-Systems, Microsoft designated the data center provider as a “data trustee,” meaning the German company is the one controlling access to Microsoft customers’ data stored in the new region, not Microsoft. The move is in response to the protracted legal battle Microsoft has waged with the US Justice Department, which has been seeking access to a customer’s data stored in Microsoft’s Dublin, Ireland, data center to assist the department in a criminal investigation. Because Microsoft is based in the US, the government argued, it should be required to comply with a US warrant seeking access to the data. In July, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in Microsoft’s favor, reversing an earlier ruling by a lower court, which said Microsoft had to comply with the warrant. The government may appeal the latest ruling, but it theoretically will not be able to put Microsoft in a similar situation in Germany, where a German company now controls access to Microsoft’s customer data. See also: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning (Comment on this)
4:04p	Microsoft, Google Downtime Offers Reminder That Cloud Isn’t Perfect Brought to you by MSPmentor Hardly a week goes by that headlines aren’t touting some tale of a major cloud services provider suffering an outage that leaves customers hanging for hours or days. In recent years, massive cloud disruptions have hit all the major players, fromMicrosoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Salesforce.com. A pair of massive service outages involving two of the largest cloud players this month comes at a time when the industry is arguably on the verge of eradicating any lingering concerns about the security or reliability of public cloud. And even as reliability increases on paper, the stream of reports can make it seem like there’s no shortage of new cloud crashes. “There’s a paradoxical dynamic taking place in the cloud: while outages have become less common, their impact is more widespread and damaging than ever,” Joseph Tsidulko wrote for CRN in “The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages of 2015.” In one illustration of the potential impact of a recent cloud service outage, Salesforce.com customers lost about four hours of data when a database instance became corrupted in May and was repaired by restoring a prior backup. Experts agree that unscheduled IT downtime is unavoidable, regardless of whether on-premises or in the cloud. Today, cloud service status websites and dashboards make it easier than ever to monitor uptime and outages for all the major providers. In last week’s outages, Google’s Apps for Work went down Sept. 14, rendering U.S. and U.K. customers unable to use the software-as-a-service products for about 90 minutes. The following day, on Sept. 15, Microsoft suffered a large-scale disruption of its Azure Cloud Platform that crippled critical components, like databases and backup, for nearly two hours. The implications of public cloud reliability are immense, with many of the largest businesses on the planet migrating increasingly significant parts of their businesses out of their own data centers. Complete information about all cloud outages is available in real time on the status pages for Microsoft and Google. This first ran at http://mspmentor.net/msp-mentor/cloud-outages-microsoft-google-downtime-offers-reminder-cloud-isnt-perfect (Comment on this)
6:28p	Power Lines for Data Centers Continue Causing Rifts in N. Virginia Data center construction projects along a stretch of highway in Loudoun County in Virginia will now face additional public hearings before they can be approved. Loudoun is located in Northern Virginia, one of the biggest data center markets in the US, and there are more data centers in the county than anywhere else in the region. As more construction takes place in Northern Virginia to support today’s unprecedented growth in demand for data center capacity, there have been more and more clashes between residents and data center builders. The new requirements for more public scrutiny of data center projects along Route 50, approved by the county Board of Supervisors last week, is the culmination of one such clash that took place recently, when some residents were opposed to new power lines the utility that serves the area would have to build to serve a future large data center campus near the Washington Dulles International Airport. The residents who were opposed to construction of the power lines complained that they would be unsightly. The usual skepticism around economic-development value of data center projects – i.e., they create relatively few jobs – also came up. In response, the utility, Dominion Virginia Power, proposed several alternative routes for the power lines. Finally, one of the alternative routes, called Alternative 6, got the green light. The Virginia State Corporation Commission (which regulates utilities among other industries in the state) approved it in August, saying the new power line would promote economic development “by serving an area that is rapidly growing, including the additional load requirements associated with the new data centers being developed.” The spat with residents over power lines is a familiar one to Dominion and Amazon. They face similar controversy in Prince Williams County, where Vadata, Amazon’s data center building subsidiary, wants to build a 500,000-square foot data center, which requires construction of a new transmission line by Dominion. It’s unclear who will be using the future data center campus near the airport and who will be building it. The name of the developer is omitted from public records filed around Dominion’s application for construction of the new electrical infrastructure. Multiple companies recently announced land acquisitions for future data center construction and actual data center construction projects in Northern Virginia, including CyrusOne, DBT-DATA, Digital Realty, Equinix, and CoreSite, among others. Much of the demand for data center capacity in the region comes from tech giants like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Uber, Google, and Amazon. Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last? The new process for data center projects along Route 50 will include public hearings before the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors, giving local officials more control over land use there. Data center projects in the area did not have to face such hearings before because of a zoning by-right. Supervisor Matt Letourneau told Loudoun Times that the area used to be zoned for commercial and light industrial (CLI) development, but over time officials rezoned many of the parcels as residential, resulting in a patchwork that mixes residential and CLI. From Loudoun Times: “What has happened over time is boards have rezoned [commercial and light industrial] property into residential property, including South Riding and Stone Ridge,” Letourneau said. “There are some orphan parcels in between that are CLI parcels. So you have residential, then you have CLI, then you have residential … which has not only created land use issues, but also necessitated the need for giant power lines, which the county just spent the better half of the last couple years fighting.” (Comment on this)
8:11p	Google Cloud Joins Amazon, IBM in Serving Blockchain Clients (Bloomberg) — Google’s cloud services will be used to test blockchain technologies for banks, an area where IBM, Microsoft and Amazon have been courting clients for the past year. Royal Bank of Scotland Group has employed Google servers in a trial of a new blockchain application for clearing and settlement, the consulting firm GFT said Friday in a statement. The company’s cloud services will also be used by other bank clients of the firm, Stuttgart, Germany-based GFT said. Until now, International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have been most active in rolling out special developer tools and inviting banks and start-ups to test the new database technology in their massive data centers. Amazon.com Inc., the leader in cloud service, has also been working with blockchain startups. GFT is a member of Google Cloud Platform’s Partner Program. The blockchain is a distributed ledger where multiple companies — such as banks — can record transactions securely. The database’s strength lies in its trustworthiness: the difficulty of reversing or changing any transactions that have been recorded. By facilitating trust and collaboration, the technology promises to make many industries more efficient, and reduce costs on everything from international money transfers to paying a supplier. As companies in the financial, supply-chain, health care and other industries rush to try out blockchain uses, they’re opening up a potential new growth area for cloud-services players, like Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Testing in the cloud is often easier and can be done faster than tests on a bank’s own computers. If the tests are successful, cloud services could potentially play a role in blockchain deployments, since a database shared by multiple companies is more easily managed in the cloud. Worldwide, the public cloud services market should reach $204 billion this year, up from $175 billion last year, according to researcher Gartner Inc. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2016/09/23 [Calendar]

Next Day >>