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Friday, December 9th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:39a | Demand for Drones Drives Data Center Construction in North Dakota It’s hard to ignore an industrial park with its own airport. In Grand Forks, North Dakota, some 217 acres of a 5,400-acre tract originally built as a fighter interceptor base, were carved out and set aside for civilian commercial purposes. A very big rectangular plot, somewhat bigger than a shopping mall parking lot, has been paved over — too small for landing single-prop planes, too large for hosting a rock concert. It’s for unmanned drone aircraft — specifically, unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Indeed, the Grand Sky Industrial Park complex may already have become the nation’s premier research and training facility for the operation of UAS drones. Two of its anchor tenants are Northrop Grumman and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. At an airfield adjacent to the old fighter jet runways, Grand Forks-based Grand Sky Development Co. and New Braunfels, Texas-based renewable energy development firm Infinity Development Partners, have been constructing a 1.2-million square foot office facility, complete with four hangars. And in a development that plays more into our bailiwick, Grand Sky announced Wednesday that it is investing $10 million into the construction of a dedicated data center facility, for the tenants of that complex. The co-builder is not one you’ve heard of: another Grand Forks firm named EdgeData. Its key product is actually a software-based analytics tool called BladeEdge, designed to gather analytics data from wind farm turbines. You see, a key method for inspecting the operational capability of a wind turbine is to send up a camera. The only truly reliable and safe way to do that is with drones — which indicates how Grand Sky and EdgeData got together. This also suggests that wind power will very likely be a key component of the project. The two firms’ plan is to construct a new, 16,000-square foot complex, with 6,000 feet hardened and conditioned. With the goals they’ve set forth, the facility will likely be fully operational by the first quarter of 2018. Spokespersons for EdgeData had yet to respond to Data Center Knowledge’s request for comment, by press time. |
| 6:55p | SUNeVision Pledges to Build Largest Hong Kong ‘Mega Plus’ Facility The South China Morning Post reported Thursday that SUNeVision, the Hong Kong-based technology arm of major real estate developer Sung Hung Kai Properties, has committed to building what its CEO boasted to be the province’s largest data center, in the Tseung Kwan O province at the mouth of Junk Bay. According to the publication, the firm’s “Mega Plus” facility is being built on a 7.5-acre plot, and will offer 470,000 square feet of space when completed. If you do the math, you discover SUNeVision needs a minimum of three stories. As Data Center Knowledge’s Yevgeniy Sverdlik reported in February, there’s plenty of activity among Hong Kong’s 40 data center providers, but not a tremendous lot of real estate for them to work with. A Structure Research report published at that time listed SUNeVision as among the province’s four leading data center providers, and Tseung Kwan O as capturing about one-third of the region’s data center developments. As a result, connectivity is at a premium. Only two weeks ago, SUNeVision announced its carrier-neutral Mega facilities would be enabling direct connection to Amazon Web Services. While SUNeVision has touted the growth of demand for cloud services in the province, only now is it getting the cross-connection capability its businesses desperately need to host hybrid cloud deployments. Because the government there imposes strict districting, certain specific areas of land are set aside for building data centers. Arguably, that makes a provider’s choice of location somewhat easier. Tseung Kwan O in particular has its own data center districts. Theoretically, that should make the job of routing fiber optic access simpler as well. But what geographical and geological barriers may already have been removed from the problem of attaining fiber optic access, the local bureaucracy there has evidently replaced. While Hong Kong’s fiber business has been said to be booming, regulators there have recently opened up investigations as to whether those claims were artificial. In 2011, when Google famously backed out of a building project it launched in Tseung Kwan O, it cited a lack of available land. That might have been euphemistic. The land is certainly there; it’s already been parceled. It’s the government that has done the parceling, and that’s where the problem probably lies. Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s economic growth pattern manages to slip a few points, according to the World Economic Forum, now behind Singapore. Asia/Pacific analysts have noted that Hong Kong has been relatively late to the game, with respect to cloud services adoption. What Hong Kong businesses need now is a booster shot. Hybridization and virtualization could help, providing hybrid cloud functionality to the enterprise while also pooling together SUNeVision’s “Mega” and “Mega Plus” resources to become, perhaps, mega plus plus. Indeed, SUNeVision has already been advising its customers that its various “Mega” campuses are all virtually interconnected, and that customers should think of them all as one contiguous unit. To accomplish this, Hong Kong needs better local connectivity. Partnerships such as the new pact between Microsoft and NTT Communications, and between SUNeVision and Amazon, could go a long way to help. So while Hong Kong’s data center providers continue to build out and build up, the challenge facing the region remains just getting through. |
| 7:26p | AWS Heads North, Launches Central Canada Cloud Region  Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud AWS announced the launch of its “Canada Central” region with two Availability Zones at an event in Toronto on Thursday. AWS CTO Werner Vogels told the audience at AWS Executive Insights that focusing on customers is driving innovation at the company. AWS only opened its Canadian office a year ago; even so, there were already “tens of thousands” of AWS customers in Canada, including major financial, retail, media, and government organizations. The company also added CloudFront locations in Toronto and Montreal in August to meet that demand. The new region is offered from its Montreal data centers, which were announced in January. “For many years, we’ve had an enthusiastic base of customers in Canada choosing the AWS Cloud because it has more functionality than other cloud platforms, an extensive APN Partner and customer ecosystem, as well as unmatched maturity, security, and performance,” Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS said in a statement. “Our Canadian customers and APN Partners asked us to build AWS infrastructure in Canada, so they can run their mission-critical workloads and store sensitive data on AWS infrastructure located in Canada. A local AWS Region will serve as the foundation for new cloud initiatives in Canada that can transform business, customer experiences, and enhance the local economy.”
Director of AWS Canada Eric Gales said at the event there has been a shift in the initial conversation with organizations interested in adopting the cloud, even within the past year. From “What is it about?”, through “Why is it for me, given my commitments to infrastructure and staff?” and, “When do you think we should start thinking about doing this?” Gales hears more organizations now asking “How do we start?” Unique Customer Requirements Drive InnovationGales gave examples of different kinds of Canadian companies benefiting from AWS, including Porter Airlines and the National Bank of Canada. “We’re customer obsessed,” he said. “We care about every customer. We care about their unique requirements, and as we get feedback from our customers as they use the platform, we put that feedback into our hugely scalable innovation engine, to deliver new features and services to our customers. As we’ve done so, the rate of adoption around the world has continued to increase. Now every type of customer, and every kind of workload, we can see being supported around the world, and it’s no different in Canada.” Vogels said that not just regulatory compliance but also “emotional barriers” were removed by adding the Canadian region. He also pointed out that it benefited not just Canadian companies, by addressing those concerns, and reducing latency, but also helps its customers like Box and Salesforce that have their customers in the country. Box announced a Canadian zone in August. Vogels said that barriers to adoption continue to fall, while the incentives, such as an improved awareness of the security of public cloud, are increasing. Money drives all business, of course, and Vogels said “survival is a big driver.” “Going to talk to your CFO and asking for $2 million for a particular project because you need to buy hardware for it is a very difficult conversation to have, especially because cloud is there,” he said. Vogels also downplayed the value of private cloud, telling the audience that “dressing up your cage doesn’t make you free,” and saying that the ability to get rid of CapEx and the full benefits of cloud are only realized with a public cloud model. When asked about the future of AWS, Vogels said that he is excited about the massive and democratized potential of data analytics. AWS made a number of launches last week at its AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, including a new security tool for cloud customers and an image recognition service, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly and Lex. This article originally appeared here at Talkin’ Cloud. |
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