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Friday, October 7th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Friday Funny: Bats Under the Raised Floor – I knew we should’ve gone with overhead cooling! Here’s the cartoon for this month’s Data Center Knowledge caption contest. This is how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon, and we challenge our readers to submit the funniest, most clever caption they think will be a fit. Then we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Submit your caption for the cartoon above in the comments. Congratulations to Dan, whose caption won the Groundbreaking edition of the contest. His caption was: “So the goal is to have this site up in two months… What do you think?” Some good submissions came in for last month’s Open Plan edition – all we need now is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below!
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| 3:00p | Chinese Data Center Provider GDS Files for IPO on Nasdaq As US-based data center giants are enjoying a favorable stock market, one of their Chinese counterparts wants to enter the fray. GDS Holdings, which offers data center services from facilities in Mainland China and Hong Kong, recently filed for an IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The company is hoping to raise up to $200 million through an offering on Nasdaq. China is a huge growth market for data center providers. The market is still developing, and there are relatively few quality third-party data center options, according to GDS. There was about 7.4 million square meters of data center space in service in the country in 2015, the company said in its SEC filing. Only 1.2 million of that space is in colocation facilities, and GDS expects to ride a wave of outsourcing, as enterprises increasingly find that they are better off leaving the job of data center operation to specialists like itself. GDS has a partnership with Aliyun, cloud services arm of the Chinese internet giant Alibaba, which hosts cloud infrastructure in its facilities, and wants to strike similar deals with more cloud service providers, according to its SEC filing. In addition to outsourcing, the company, which currently serves about 300 customers, expects to benefit from growth of the Chinese cloud services market. Its strategy is to attract cloud service providers as customers to its facilities and offer managed cloud services. Like most of the world’s leading data center providers, it wants to turn its data centers into hubs where enterprises can access cloud services and set up hybrid infrastructure that mixes on-prem servers with cloud. GDS has six data centers – five in Mainland China and one in Hong Kong – totaling close to 50,000 square meters of data center space in service. It also has more than 30,000 square meters under construction in existing locations and holds about 22,000 square meters of land for development. See also: Hong Kong: China’s Data Center Gateway to the World Its biggest rivals are state-owned Chinese telcos. The three carriers – China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile – control 59 percent share of the data center services market in the country, GDS said, citing market data by 451 Research. It differentiates from these competitors mainly by providing access to more than one carrier in its facilities, but there are numerous carrier-neutral data center providers in the market the company is competing with as well. They include domestic providers, such as Sinnet, Dr. Peng, and 21Vianet, and international players, such as US-based Equinix and Japan’s KDDI and NTT. One of the major investors in GDS is a subsidiary of ST Telemedia, a Singapore-based data center provider that serves clients in Singapore, China, and the UK. ST Telemedia, backed by Temasek Holdings, the Singapore government-owned investment company, recently acquired majority stake in Tata Communications’ data center business in India and Singapore. |
| 3:30p | Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: September To help you keep up to date, here are the 10 top data center stories of September from Data Center Knowledge: Ex-eBay Infrastructure Chief Takes Over Uber Data Center Strategy – As Uber expands from being a provider of a mobile app that connects drivers with passengers into everything from restaurant deliveries to on-demand helicopter rides and self-driving cars and trucks, it needs to expand its data center infrastructure to massive scale. Last month, the man the company has appointed to lead that expansion is starting his new job. Delta: Data Center Outage Cost Us $150M – The number is extraordinarily high, illustrating that major airlines have a lot more at stake when designing and managing critical infrastructure than most other data center operators. Digital Realty Challenges Equinix With Cloud Connectivity Platform – Digital Realty Service Exchange will enable private, direct connections between enterprise data centers and the Big Three public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Emerson Data Center Unit Execs “Bullish” on Post-Spinoff Freedom – Executives at Emerson Network Power, the business unit Emerson Electric has agreed to sell to a group of investors led by a private equity firm, expect the unit to have more freedom to pursue longer-term plays, such as building entire data centers for customers, once the acquisition is closed. Why Michael Dell is Smiling – Both Dell and Pat But Gelsinger, who previously had spent 30 years as point-man for Intel’s strategy to build x86 architecture into the center of the enterprise, are now betting their businesses on the notion that most enterprise data centers will be defined digitally, not physically.  Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware (left), speaking with Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, on stage at VMworld 2016. Can EdgeConneX Disrupt Incumbent Data Center Providers? – It might seem counter-intuitive that a private data center company building in secondary markets could impact future earnings for the big publicly held data center REITs, but it appears there are some game-changing developments underway.  A look down an aisle at an EdgeConneX data center (Photo: EdgeConneX) Latest Microsoft Data Center Design Gets Close to Unity PUE – Innovation in data center design by cloud giants has widespread implications for their users as well as for the data center industry in general. Improving data center efficiency is one of the main levers cloud providers can pull to lower the price of their services. As they innovate in pursuit of lower and lower cost at greater and greater scale, many of those innovations eventually get adopted by companies designing data centers for other purposes.  Microsoft data center campus in Quincy, Washington (Source: Microsoft video) How Facebook Made Its Data Warehouse Faster – 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.  A technician at work in a data hall at Facebook’s Altoona, Iowa, data center. (Photo: Facebook/2014 Jacob Sharp Photography) Silicon Valley Billionaires’ Wealth Manager Enters Data Center Market – Iconiq Capital, the investment management firm whose clients include the likes of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman, and Napster co-founder Sean Parker, has registered a subsidiary that will focus squarely on investing in data center assets. Stay current on data center industry news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook or join our LinkedIn Group – Data Center Knowledge. |
| 5:43p | The Intercept: There’s an NSA Data Center in the UK Technology has always played an inextricable role in spying, and today, that means one or more data centers underpin any spying operation. It comes as no surprise that a US surveillance outpost in the UK has a data center, as revealed by a story published last month by The Intercept, the aggressively anti-NSA investigative online magazine published by First Look Media. The story reveals an unprecedented amount of detail about the activities taking place at Menwith Hill Station, relying on classified US government documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Glenn Greenwald, one of The Intercept’s founding editors, was one of the key journalists who wrote the first series of stories based on the Snowden leaks in 2013. Greenwald wrote his for The Guardian. Menwith Hill Station in North Yorkshire is the largest base NSA spies have built outside of the US. The facility’s scope has widened from its original purpose of monitoring Soviet communications during the Cold War to playing a key role in the NSA’s global surveillance network. The 10,000-square foot data center was built between 2009 and 2012 as part of a new $40 million operations building at the base, according to The Intercept. No further details have been revealed about the server farm, other than its purpose of storing and analyzing data collected through intercepted communications. Its size pales in comparison with the massive NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah, which became a focus of public outrage following the original Snowden leaks, and the agency’s newer, $860 million data center in Maryland. The Intercept’s latest story talks little about the infrastructure at Menwith Hill, however. Its thrust is the nature of activities at the outpost — whose legality it questions — and the UK government’s potential complicity in those activities. The station’s primary role appears to be monitoring global satellite communications. It has been instrumental in the US government’s anti-terrorism activities in North Africa and the Middle East, where cable infrastructure is scarce and much of the population relies on satellites for internet connectivity. The site questions the legality of using equipment at the station to locate targets in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, with whom US isn’t officially at war, to help drone pilots kill enemy operatives. The US drone program has come under criticism for civilian casualties it has reportedly caused in addition to killing actual enemy targets. Read the story in full at The Intercept. |
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