Tuesday, November 29th, 2016

Time	Event
11:00a	Plan Hybrid IT Like You Would Plan Your Family Vacation   Christine Shriver works in marketing for CoreSite. Whether we are talking about technology or travel, one thing is clear: It’s 2016, and we want things to be efficient, safe and flawless. We plan our vacations around these requirements, why not plan our IT infrastructure the same way? So, if hybrid IT were a vacation, what would the travel options look like? Option 1: A Family-Owned Vacation Home on a Remote Island. IT equivalent: Managing your own data center. The perks? You can avoid rental fees, which is especially great if you inherited the space from your family and didn’t have a down payment (or, in technical speak, perhaps it’s an IT closet in your existing office). You invest in a space you own, and can oversee the property. The negatives? If anything breaks, you have to fix it. If anyone tries to break in, it is on you to protect your belongings (or your data, rather). Additionally, on a remote island you don’t have many transportation options. If you need to get to the store (reach the cloud), you will pay a hefty fine for boats or taxis, which may prove unreliable and slow (like being limited to the public internet from your building). Option 2: A Hotel Outside of the Main Strip IT equivalent: Leasing data center space with few tenants and/or in a remote area. The perks? You now have all the amenities that a hotel has to offer, including security, service and maintenance. If anything breaks, it is on the hotel to fix it (or, the data center provider). The negatives? There may be one restaurant within walking distance, but it’s not usually one you want to frequent (these would be the clouds you can connect to within the facility). If you want to visit better restaurants (clouds), you once again are relying on third party transportation (networks). The fees rack up. Option 3: An All-Inclusive Resort in the Middle of Town IT equivalent: Leasing space with a cloud-enabled colocation provider. The perks? The same as option 2, except now you have access to several restaurants—anything from popular chains (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, SoftLayer) to local cafes (smaller cloud providers). Many of these restaurants are competing for your business and offer discounts for their services within the resort (within the colocation facility). If you do decide to leave the hotel, there are several options for transportation that also compete with one another on price: subways, ride share services, taxis, shuttles and more (these represent the hundreds of network providers that offer anything from T1 to dark fiber services). The negatives? Sometimes you don’t need all of these amenities. If you are just going for a few days (not planning for future years of requirements) or just have a small family that wants to stay on-site (small data requirements that aren’t sensitive and don’t require cloud connectivity), this option wouldn’t make sense for you. Recommendation Plan your hybrid IT solution as you would plan your family vacation. Never move forward without the following considerations: What’s the size of your party (how much data do you have)? How demanding are they (what are your security and uptime requirements)? Where do you need to go once you are settled in (which clouds do you need to connect to)? How will you get to those places (which networks will bring you there, and how long will it take)? How long is your stay and will your requirements change as the trip extends (are you planning for future data requirements)? 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)
4:07p	HPE to Offer Flash Storage ‘as-a-Service’ to Compete with the Cloud In a kickoff announcement just prior to its annual Discover conference in London, HPE told attendees it has begun offering its 3PAR StoreServ flash-based on-premise storage platform on an “as-a-Service” basis, at prices starting at 3 cents per “usable gigabyte” per month. There are telltale asterisks accompanying that announcement, suggesting that customers may be subject to qualification terms.  We’re waiting to hear more from HPE as to whether setup fees or minimum purchase requirements may apply. The company says it intends to be competitive against public cloud-based storage options.  The phrase, “less than half the cost of public cloud” appears in today’s announcement, and it will be interesting to see HPE’s formula that yields these results.  As of December 1, Amazon Web Services’ price for standard S3 storage will start at 3¢ per GB per month, and progress downward to 2.75¢/GB/month in quantities over 5 PB. HPE’s rack-mounted 3PAR StoreServ 8000 array maxes out at 3 PB of raw capacity for its model 8440, consuming 2U of space with two nodes side-by-side.  Its complete rack form-factor 20000 series maxes out at 9.6 PB of raw capacity.  For HPE’s claim of less-than-half public cloud cost to be accurate, the company should be willing to charge enterprises less than $42,750 monthly for a fully formatted 8440 array, and less than $132,000 per month for a fully formatted 20000 series rack. The new service, which HPE will market under the brand 3PAR Flash Now, is available now, according to the company.  A similar service offering tape-based backup on HPE’s StoreEver platform, with a base price of 1¢/GB/month, also launches today. The move this week by HPE is far from the premier entry for flash storage being offered as-a-service.  This time two years ago, Nimble Storage began offering what it called its “Adaptive Flash Platform,” blending solid-state and magnetic storage under what it described as a “pay-as-you-grow” model.  Competitor Tegile Storage also began offering a similar service at that time. (Comment on this)
4:49p	FBI and NSA Poised to Gain New Surveillance Powers Under Trump (Bloomberg) — The FBI, National Security Agency and CIA are likely to gain expanded surveillance powers under President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, a prospect that has privacy advocates and some lawmakers trying to mobilize opposition. Trump’s first two choices to head law enforcement and intelligence agencies — Republican Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general and Republican Representative Mike Pompeo for director of the Central Intelligence Agency — are leading advocates for domestic government spying at levels not seen since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. SEE ALSO: The Intercept: There’s an NSA Data Center in the UK The fights expected to play out in the coming months — in Senate confirmation hearings and through executive action, legislation and litigation — also will set up an early test of Trump’s relationship with Silicon Valley giants including Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Trump signaled as much during his presidential campaign, when he urged a consumer boycott of Apple for refusing to help the FBI hack into a terrorist’s encrypted iPhone. An “already over-powerful surveillance state” is about to “be let loose on the American people,” said Daniel Schuman, policy director for Demand Progress, an internet and privacy advocacy organization. New Hacking Rule In a reversal of curbs imposed after Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about mass data-gathering by the NSA, Trump and Congress may move to reinstate the collection of bulk telephone records, renew powers to collect the content of e-mails and other internet activity, ease restrictions on hacking into computers and let the FBI keep preliminary investigations open longer. A first challenge for privacy advocates comes this week: A new rule is set to go into effect on Dec. 1 letting the FBI get permission from a judge in a single jurisdiction to hack into multiple computers whose locations aren’t known. READ MORE: NSA Contractor Arrest Renews Focus on Risk Posed by Insiders “Under the proposed rules, the government would now be able to obtain a single warrant to access and search thousands or millions of computers at once; and the vast majority of the affected computers would belong to the victims, not the perpetrators, of a cybercrime,” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. Wyden is one of seven senators, including libertarian Republican Rand Paul, who have introduced a bill, S. 3475, to delay the new policy until July to give Congress time to debate its merits and consider amendments. Orlando, San Bernardino Sessions, Pompeo and officials with national security and law enforcement agencies have argued that expanded surveillance powers are needed, especially because of the threat of small, deadly terrorist plots that are hard to detect, like the killing of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June and 14 people in San Bernardino, California, last year. The FBI had at one point opened a preliminary investigation into the Orlando killer, Omar Mateen, but didn’t have the authority to keep it going for lack of evidence of wrongdoing. “What’s needed is a fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities,” Pompeo and a co-author wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary in January. “Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.” Pompeo and Sessions want to repeal a 2015 law that prohibits the FBI and NSA from collecting bulk phone records — “metadata” such as numbers called and dates and times — on Americans who aren’t suspected of wrongdoing. “Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database,” Pompeo wrote. Press aides for Sessions and Pompeo declined to comment. Warrantless Interceptions Sessions has opposed restraints on NSA surveillance and said in June that he supported legislation to expand the types of internet data the FBI can intercept without warrants. Congress is also expected to consider legislation early next year that would renew the government’s ability to collect the content of e-mail and other internet activity from companies such as Google and Facebook Inc. Under the Prism program, investigators pursuing suspected terrorists can intercept the content of electronic communications believed to come from outside the U.S. without specific warrants even if one end of the communications is inside the country or involves an American. Patriot Act Prism came under criticism when it was exposed by Snowden, the former NSA contractor who stole hundreds of thousands of documents on agency surveillance programs. Section 702 of the USA Patriot Act, under which Prism and other spy programs are conducted, is set to expire at the end of 2017 if it isn’t reauthorized by Congress. James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has said he also wants to renew a debate early next year about whether Apple and other companies can resist court warrants seeking to unlock encrypted communications. The agency went to court trying to force Apple to create new software to crack password protection on a phone used by the shooter in San Bernardino. “Boycott Apple until they give up the information,” Trump said at a rally in South Carolina in February. He said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, “is looking to do a big number, probably to show how liberal he is. Apple should give up.” While the FBI dropped that case against Apple after buying a tool to hack into the phone, the increasing use of encryption on mobile devices and messaging services remains a challenge to national security and law enforcement agencies. Browsing History Republicans led by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina are expected to re-introduce legislation requiring companies to give investigators access to encrypted communications. The FBI is also seeking legislation that would allow it to obtain “non-content electronic communication transactional records,” such as browsing histories and computer Internet Protocol addresses, without court oversight or a warrant. Sessions and Burr supported the legislation earlier this year, while it was opposed by major technology groups as well as Google and Facebook. (Comment on this)
10:19p	Azure Stack in 6 Months, Says HPE Exec The timeframe is finally tightening for the release of Microsoft’s long awaited data center operating platform, Azure Stack, based on the same platform that runs the company’s public cloud service — at least from the perspective of Microsoft’s partners.  In remarks made during the Tuesday general session at the HPE Discover London 2016 conference, HPE Executive Vice President Antonio Neri [pictured left] told attendees that, if their organizations were to sign on to Microsoft’s ongoing preview program today, they would be ready when the limited release of the platform goes live on HPE servers in six months’ time. “The good news is, this is going to be available in the next six months,” said Neri.  “But the reality is that they [organizations] don’t need to wait six months.  They can start planning that journey today.  So we’re already working with customers, already planning for that journey.” Azure Stack is intended to give organizations a platform for deploying new classes of so-called “cloud-native” applications on-premises, with the same tools and automation used to deploy them in the Azure public cloud.  Azure Stack thus becomes a hybrid platform that gives Microsoft a chance to get back on par with OpenStack, the open source hybrid platform based on Linux. Microsoft would have a few advantages at that time, some of them being obvious.  Visual Studio — which for many organizations remains the leading, if not the only, software development suite — would have a direct line to an automated deployment pipeline that works for both cloud domains.  And because its deployment and management tools have already been honed on the Azure public cloud, not only would they be familiar to many users, but likelier to be embraced by DevOps professionals who have yet to become enthused by OpenStack’s cobbled-together, frequently-changing, methods. One not-so-obvious advantage is this:  Microsoft’s increasingly friendlier relations with Docker Inc. are helping to ensure that no innovation in the field of containerization will be unveiled on a Linux platform first, before a Windows Server-based platform gets a crack at it. But Azure Stack’s readiness for prime time has been under heavy scrutiny, as a result of Microsoft continually delaying its general release.  When the platform was first announced in May 2015, it was touted as being just around the corner.  Suspicions of problems were confirmed in July, when the company officially stated it would delay general release until mid-2017, while in the meantime limiting initial releases of the platform to select servers, in joint marketing arrangements with HPE, Dell, and Lenovo. During a session at Microsoft’s Ignite conference in Atlanta in September, private cloud solution architect Spencer Shepler shared what passed for a timeline for the development tracks of Azure Stack’s single-node proof-of-concept and its multi-node integrated systems.  What was missing from the timeline were times, except for a vague reference in the rightmost column referring to general availability in the middle of calendar year 2017. An unmarked milestone pointed to the release of Technical Preview 3, sometime between now and then. Microsoft veterans will recall that, historically, the company’s definition of the middle of a year has sometimes stretched forward into January. In the meantime, the company is making good on its July pledge to let the world’s top 3 server makers unveil the platform first.  At HPE Discover London, Microsoft Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie introduced a video showing what he described as Azure Stack’s management portal integrated with HPE’s OneView management suite, but which looked quite a bit more like Azure Stack than OneView. One interesting technique the video showed was the ability to live-migrate a virtual machine from on-premises hardware to public Azure space, prior to shutting down that hardware for maintenance. “Azure Stack enables organizations to basically run an even richer set of Azure services within their own data centers,” said Guthrie [pictured right in top image].  “It provides a consistent development model, as well as management model and overall ecosystem, across both the public and the private cloud environments, so that you can build applications that leverage the richness of Azure, both from an infrastructure as well as a platform-as-a-service capability, and deploy them wherever it makes the most sense for your business.” Which sounds nice, assuming it all gets delivered.  HPE’s Neri told attendees that their organizations can take advantage of HPE’s early access to “the bits” of Azure Stack, by visiting their local HPE + Microsoft Innovation Center.  Guthrie then followed up to tell the London-based audience that the Innovation Center nearest to them — at least, while Azure Stack remains in technical preview — is in Seattle. (Comment on this)

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