Thursday, October 20th, 2016

Time	Event
10:45a	Iron Mountain Entering N. Virginia with Massive Data Center Build Iron Mountain, the company known for its underground caverns that house everything from classified government documents and Hollywood movie reels to data centers, is expanding into Northern Virginia, the largest and most active data center market in the US. The company recently kicked off construction of a 150,000-square foot data center in Manassas, which it expects to be the first of at least four buildings on a future 83-acre, 60MW data center campus, according to a news release. The facility is slated to come online in August 2017. It first announced plans to build a data center campus in the region in March. Already one of the most in-demand data center locations, Northern Virginia is expected to see annual demand growth in the high double digits over the next five years, according to real estate brokers. That growth will be driven by demand from cloud providers and managed services companies. The first building is designed to support 10.5MW of critical power. The design is flexible to “meet the exacting requirements of cloud services providers, federal government agencies, systems integrators, financial services firms, and healthcare companies,” the company said in a statement. Federal agencies are a major target for Iron Mountain, which has designed the data center to comply with the latest federal requirements for efficient data centers, such as the ones outlined in the ongoing Data Center Consolidation Initiative. The campus will have high-speed connectivity to nearby Ashburn, which is where the bulk of the region’s data center capacity is. See also: Amazon Wind Farm to Help Power Iron Mountain’s Underground Data Centers (Comment on this)
3:00p	At Dell EMC World, Michael Dell Lays Out Three Steps Modernize IT Brought to you by IT Pro It’s been just over a year since Dell announced its plans to acquire EMC, and Michael Dell seems pretty pleased with the progress Dell Technologies has made since then. “Go big or go home,” he said, helping kick off the annual conference now known as Dell EMC World. “It turns out, no one went home.” Freed from the quarterly thinking that he says “plagues” public companies and armed with some of the biggest names in enterprise technology, Dell said his company is ready to help lead the digital transformation ahead. And that transformation comes in three phases: Data center modernization IT automation Transform IT to act more like a service provider See also: Why Michael Dell is Smiling Not surprisingly, Dell has products and services (and often whole companies) focused on servicing each step, like VMware for automation and Virtustream for service provider transformation. And that transformation is hitting companies across every industry. “You go to bed as a software company, and wake up as a data and analytics company,” said Dell. “It’s the sunrise of a new era, a digital dawn.” One of the features of that new dawn, of course, is the cloud, but Dell reiterated that it’s not just one cloud, but an array of service providers and options for companies to take advantage of. “The cloud is an operating model for IT, it’s not a place,” said Dell. “The public cloud has grown, and it will continue to grow, because it provides a fully automated, self-servicing model. But anyone with a cloud-first, cloud-only strategy … will find themselves uncompetitive with predictable workloads.” Enter Pivotal, VMware, and Virtustream, which work to make it easy to move workloads between AWS, Google, Azure, as well as on-premise. “You will live in a multicloud world, and we will provide the software to help you manage through it,” he said. See also: VMware Gives AWS Keys to Its Enterprise Data Center Kindgom This first ran at http://windowsitpro.com/industry/dell-emc-world-michael-dell-lays-out-three-steps-modernize-it (Comment on this)
3:30p	The Four Cs for IT and Security Ecosystem Success Paula Long is CEO and Co-founder of DataGravity. In life and in business, you are generally more successful when you have friends. You are able to share the load, bounce ideas off each other, and have each others’ backs, if you will. The goal is that the sum of the parts is greater than indicated by the math. Companies that are trying to address large problems will find it lonely if they don’t surround themselves with an ecosystem, the technology equivalent of friends, to fill in the gaps. The idea of an ecosystem isn’t new – it’s a core reason most industries exist. Ecosystems in the technology space succeed for some of the same reasons most of us tend to have a higher score when we play “best ball” in golf, compared to playing solo. For example, there may be a woman who can drive the ball down the fairway, another guy that chips it onto the green, another guy who is a whiz with the putter, and then there’s me – the designated golf cart driver. In tech, when vendors, partners, customers, and thought leaders collaborate, they can set higher standards for innovation and push the limits with the solutions they create. If you’ve attended an RSA Conference in the last few years, one of the consistent themes is that the good guys aren’t winning. This is partly because the data security ecosystem is still immature. You see some amazing point solutions and a feature-rich API, but most of them don’t work together in ways that maximize data protection. To achieve the goal of protecting sensitive data, IT and security teams need to join forces and support ecosystem growth. Doing so is simple, as the requirements for any successful ecosystem can be broken into four Cs: companies, customers, cooperation, and a commitment to industry standards. Companies That Build the Ecosystem’s Foundation Some of the biggest names in tech aren’t just companies; they’re forces of nature, thanks to their ecosystems. VMware dominates virtualization to the point where it’s nearly impossible to launch a successful data center business without supporting its technologies and leveraging its resources in the process. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the public cloud space by a landslide, and has helped launch a new generation of SaaS applications and third-party services that accomplish specific goals while furthering Amazon’s growth. The data security ecosystem is still growing, but the example set by these tech giants remains clear – when an ecosystem exists in an industry, startups can join it or prepare to fail. Customers That Drive Ecosystem Growth Smart companies listen to their customers. As a customer, one of the most straightforward ways to support integrations and ecosystem harmony is to seek it from the vendors you’re already working with. If a security solution applies to certain areas of your IT infrastructure but leaves others unprotected, it could leave sensitive data exposed. Don’t settle for an incomplete scope of protection. Instead, bring the issue to your solution providers – vendors can then turn such requests into plans to integrate with new solutions and technologies. Next-generation firewall vendors, such as Palo Alto Networks and Cisco, have created a set of APIs so that other IT infrastructure appliances can provide insights into what they’re seeing in the network, and consume input from other devices that make them smarter. Additionally, most security insights feed into some form of security information and event management (SIEM) solution, which collects threat information. Next-generation SIEM systems can not only report incidents, but defend against them, furthering the solution’s ability to improve security and support ecosystem growth. Cooperation With Security and IT in Mind Vendor lock-in doesn’t do any favors for end users; and in an ecosystem-driven industry, it harms vendors, too. In the IT ecosystem, companies don’t build single-use products and businesses anymore. Anything they create and provide is part of the market’s bigger picture, and innovation will never be possible if every company is only thinking of itself. Vendors need to offer solutions that avoid locking customers in. By using open APIs and cooperating with other companies, IT and security providers can better serve their customers while positioning their organizations for future growth. Commitment to High Standards Between Customers, Vendors and Partners One downside to a major ecosystem is that it’s easy to wake up and find too many cooks in your kitchen. When 10 different companies come together and provide a complete end-to-end solution, it’s important that all of them uphold the same standard of quality in terms of service levels, technology, integrations and more. If one company in an ecosystem isn’t holding up its end of the deal, it risks bringing down other companies in its space. Not every industry is meant to have an ecosystem. Compliance regulations or other restrictions could stand in the way, or some core technologies within the space may lag behind the development curve. However, this isn’t a factor when it comes to the data security landscape. There are a lot of opportunities. Data security events can cause smaller companies to fail, and larger companies to lose millions of dollars and reputations. Worse, security incidents can put customers, who entrusted these companies, at risk. When the security ecosystem reflects the urgency of every company’s need to protect sensitive data; and vendors, customers and partners in the space commit to getting educated about threats and building solutions that can work together, they can lead the way to a more communicative, collaborative future. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
5:02p	Oracle’s Cloud, Built by Former AWS, Microsoft Engineers, Comes Online The first availability region of Oracle’s new cloud platform, designed by some of the same people who built Amazon’s, Microsoft’s, and Google’s cloud infrastructure, has been launched, hosted by three data centers in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The bare-metal cloud platform will serve as the foundation for upcoming cloud VM and container services. While Larry Ellison has been touting the might of Oracle’s cloud for years, the company has been far behind its rivals in the cloud infrastructure services market in terms of revenue. This latest attempt is its biggest effort yet to catch up, leveraging its experience in the enterprise, its hardware design and global supply chain expertise, and the cloud infrastructure know-how of the biggest players in the market. “I am surrounded by several hundred people who came from Amazon, Microsoft, Google,” said Deepak Patil, Oracle’s VP of development, who joined earlier this year after 15 years at Microsoft, where for the last 10 years he worked in senior engineering roles for data center and cloud infrastructure. “We all built very large-scale, global, elastic, highly available cloud platforms for the better part of the last decade.” Deepak Patil, VP of development, Oracle (Photo: Getty Images/Bob Adler) To Patil and his colleagues, joining Oracle was an opportunity to build a cloud platform from scratch, applying lessons they learned while building the other hyper-scale platforms, he told Data Center Knowledge. Virtual Network as Differentiator Ellison, Oracle founder and CTO, announced the bare-metal cloud at the company’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco in September, promising the best price-performance combination in the industry. That advantage comes as a result of the design decisions Patil’s team has made, Patil said. “The offer to use that clean slate allowed us to make some really differentiated decisions in how we designed infrastructure; how we designed the network; and how we designed the software platform,” he said. One of the most important elements of the platform is the Software-Defined Network, which makes the platform extremely scalable. Patil describes the SDN as “an extremely flat, non-blocking, non-oversubscribed virtual relay network that allows us to scale in a really big way.” The SDN, capable of both Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking is a differentiator for Oracle, Lydia Leong, a Gartner analyst who has received a detailed engineering briefing on the solution, wrote in a blog post. “I would say that smart and scalable choices seem to have been made throughout,” she wrote. Another big design decision was “off-box” virtualization, which places virtualization in the network instead of on the servers, enabling Oracle to give customers true bare-metal cloud servers, machines that have no pre-installed software. The SDN accesses the servers strictly at Layer 2. “What that allows us to do is deliver fairly differentiated governance and security for our customers,” Patil said. “We have no agents on the server. Our servers are not exposed to any hypervisor exploit.” Scaling Several Megawatts at a Time The first availability region, officially launched today, is called US Southwest. The infrastructure that supports the region lives three availability domains. Each domain is a separate data center, and US Southwest is hosted in three facilities in the Phoenix region located within several miles of each other. Availability domains will not be limited to one data center per domain, Patil said. Each domain will have at least one data center and several megawatts of critical power capacity. You can look at a data center as a unit of capacity for each domain, he explained. The next region will be US East and will be hosted in Virginia, where the world’s biggest concentration of cloud data centers is, including the largest availability region for Amazon Web Services. See also: Microsoft, Oracle Gobble Up Data Center Space in Virginia For now, Oracle is using data center providers to host its cloud infrastructure. Patil declined to specify which providers it is using where, saying that the list includes Digital Realty Trust, Equinix, CenturyLink, RagingWire, and CyrusOne. These are the companies that will be enabling global expansion of the new Oracle cloud. “Minimum Viable Product” While acknowledging that the platform was built on sound engineering decisions, Gartner’s Leong said the bare-metal cloud, at this point, is a “minimum viable product” and not a competitive offering. Oracle has laid the foundation for what may become a competitive offering in the future. As a bare-metal cloud, it will compete most closely with the likes of Packet, CenturyLink, and Rackspace, she wrote. Because it is billed by the hour and provisioned in minutes, Oracle’s cloud stands apart from bare-metal offerings that are more “hosting-like,” such as IBM SoftLayer, Internap, and Cogeco Peer 1. Once Oracle launches cloud VM and container services, it will have a lot of catching up to do to expand its feature set and truly compete with the likes of AWS and Google. “Good price-performance is table stakes here,” Leong wrote. “This is not a commodity market; providers compete on their capabilities.” (Comment on this)
5:50p	Company Behind Snapchat Poaches Amazon Data Center Head Snap, the company behind the popular social networking platform Snapchat, has hired Jerry Hunter, who has been responsible for Amazon data centers globally over the last six years. The news was first reported by The Information, and Business Insider got a confirmation from Snap. Snap is one of the major enterprise users Google cloud execs have been touting as part of their efforts to demonstrate the strength of the company’s cloud platform in the enterprise market. It’s unclear whether Hunter’s appointment as VP of engineering means Snap is thinking of adding its own data centers to its infrastructure strategy. Snapchat did recently launch Memories, a feature that allows users to store photos and videos. While this capability requires a lot of data center capacity, it does not necessarily mean Google couldn’t make it cost-effective for Snap to store all that media in Google data centers. See also: Here’s Google’s Plan for Calming Enterprise Cloud Anxiety Oracle’s Cloud, Built by Former AWS, Microsoft Engineers, Comes Online (Comment on this)
7:27p	IBM’s Rometty Almost Turned Down Promotion in Career Life Lesson (Bloomberg) — Ginni Rometty almost turned down a promotion 25 years ago, a move that became a defining lesson early in a career that led her to become chief executive officer at IBM in 2012. Speaking Wednesday at the Grace Hopper Conference celebrating women in computing, Rometty told the story as part of three pieces of advice she wished to impart upon the attendees, the majority of whom were female. At the time, Rometty’s manager told her he wanted to recommend her to replace him. Her first reaction was that she wasn’t experienced enough and didn’t feel ready for the role, she said. But in the end, Rometty did take on the promotion and said she learned a valuable lesson. “I learned growth and comfort never coexist,” she said. “It is true for people, for countries, for companies.” This is Rometty’s first time at the conference, which drew more than 15,000 attendees, a 28 percent jump from last year. She said she decided to appear at the event this year after IBM employees who attended in 2015 sent her a letter asking her to go. As of 2015, women comprised about 32 percent of International Business Machine Corp.’s global workforce. The company said more than 26 percent of executives are women, and about two thirds of female executives also have children. See also: The Data Center Industry Has a Problem: Too Many Men Diversity has been a major issue for Silicon Valley startups and large tech companies, which have been criticized for hiring practices that appear ageist, sexist and racist. White males continue to dominate technical roles and leadership roles in the industry, even as companies have made efforts to hire from underrepresented populations. Only 22 percent of women hold technical positions in 2016, based on a study of 60 companies conducted by the Anita Borg Institute, a nonprofit geared toward women in technology. The organization also produces the three-day Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, which includes panels and workshops about trends as well as diversity issues and a career fair for women seeking roles in the industry. (Comment on this)

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