Friday, December 16th, 2016

Time	Event
2:00p	Incumbents are Nervous about Hyperconverged Infrastructure, and They Should Be Hyperconverged infrastructure is the fastest-growing category in the data center hardware market, according to Gartner analysts, and while some incumbent vendors have recently introduced their own hyperconverged systems, they are in danger of missing the boat. That boat has already started to crash into racks of their equipment in customer data centers. I heard presentations by two mid-size enterprise end users at Gartner’s data center conference earlier this month, one of whom has already migrated its entire production environment onto Nutanix, while the other is well on its way to replacing a predominantly Cisco Vblock infrastructure with SimpliVity. Both went through the exercise of having their incumbent vendors make the technical and business case for not making the switch and simply upgrading to the next-gen versions of what was in place while giving the hyperconverged vendors room to make their case too. One of them, a transportation and logistics firm called PITT OHIO, spent six to eight months on comparing the options. Both sensed nervousness from the incumbents as they started the exercise. As it turned out, that nervousness was justified. The incumbents lost in the evaluation process, and both end users are happy with the results. PITT OHIO saved $70,000 in the first phase of the project and as of early December was on track of achieving a Phase 3 ROI of $250,000, according to Dave Wunderley, the company’s director of emerging infrastructure and operations support. By switching from Vblock to SimpliVity, PITT OHIO increased its compute and storage capacity and saw 26x savings on storage, all while reducing backup times, and improving productivity because infrastructure management became a lot simpler. North Carolina’s Cardinal Innovations Healthcare, the largest specialty health plan in the country, reduced operational support hours by 20x and shrunk its data center footprint by three racks, Robert Edwards, Cardinal’s IT infrastructure director, said. The company replaced its traditional three-tier architecture – where network, virtualization, local storage, compute, and shared storage each had to be managed by a dedicated specialist – with Nutanix and saw 56 to 70 percent performance improvements in everything from SQL server process time to business intelligence production. The two examples also busted the myth that hyperconvergence is good for some workloads – such as VDI or DR – and not others. Both PITT OHIO and Cardinal are happily running their full production systems on hyperconverged infrastructure. Edwards’ team evaluated SimpliVity, as well as incumbents’ own hyperconverged alternatives, such as Cisco HyperFlex and EMC vxrack and vxrail, before deciding to go with Nutanix. And it’s not just the hardware vendors that stand to be disrupted by hyperconvergence. Wunderley no longer has to pay license fees for software that manages things like back-up and replication – that functionality is already baked into SimpliVity – while Edwards regrets not having switched Cardinal’s entire environment from VMware to Nutanix’s own Acropolis hypervisor and getting rid of what he called the annual “VMware tax.” Asked what their biggest challenge in making the transition was, both IT heads said it was changing the way their organizations functioned. While the role changes did not result in any staff reductions in these particular cases, Wunderley acknowledged that it could be a possibility in a larger organization. Nevertheless, the switch to hyperconverged infrastructure was a “total transformation of how we ran our data center,” Edwards said. (Comment on this)
9:22p	TSO Logic: Cloud Migration Offers Instant Savings Brought to You by The WHIR Nearly half (45 percent) of on-premise virtualized operating system instances could run more economically in the cloud, for a 43 percent annual savings, according to research released this week by infrastructure optimization company TSO Logic. The research makes starkly clear the cost of legacy hardware, and the savings potential of cloud migration. More than one in four OS instances are over-provisioned, the company says, and migrating them to an appropriate sized cloud instance would reduce their cost by 36 percent. Drawn from an algorithmic analysis of anonymized data from TSO Logic’s North American customers, the research also showed that of 10,000 physical servers, 25 percent are at least 3-years-old. The same workload as done on Generation-5 servers could now be done on 30 percent less Generation-9 servers, based only on processor gains, the company says. “The data demonstrates that there is plenty of low-hanging fruit that can easily drive significant savings for many enterprise organizations,” Aaron Rallo, TSO Logic’s CEO said in a statement. “Cloud migration is not an all-or-nothing proposition. By understanding current compute, how it’s used, and the economic differentials between current and future states, you can make smarter decisions about cloud strategies and other transformation investments.” Ultimately, based on historical utilization, updating and correctly provisioning servers could result in the same workload being done with 54 percent less of them, according to the data. This article originally appeared here at The Whir. (Comment on this)
9:39p	Bitcoin’s Rally Crushed Every Other Currency in 2016. Here’s Why (Bloomberg) — Bitcoin, that nebulous digital currency that trades in cyberspace and is “mined” by code-cracking computers, emerged as a better bet this year than every major foreign-exchange trade, stock index and commodity contract. The electronic coin that trades and is regulated like oil and gold surged 79 percent since the start of 2016 to $778, its highest level since early 2014, data compiled by Bloomberg shows. That’s four times the gains posted by Russia’s ruble and Brazil’s real, the world’s top two hard currencies. After its 2008 creation, enthusiasts hailed bitcoin as the next big thing in foreign exchange markets and an obvious monetary evolution in an increasingly digital world. But by 2014, its value tumbled 58 percent as governments cracked down on its use and a major exchange lost account-holders’ funds. There are a number of reasons the hard-to-track currency is staging a comeback now, from capital controls in places like China to isolationist rumblings in the U.K. and U.S. as well as, bitcoin supporters say, increased adoption by companies and consumers. “Bitcoin is coming into its own,” says Tim Draper, a venture capitalist who’s bought thousands of bitcoins over the years. “There are starting to be consumer uses for bitcoin, and if people have any concerns about their own fiat currency — the rupee, for example — they flee to bitcoin as an alternate currency.” The rationale behind bitcoin’s booms and busts can be difficult to pinpoint, but here’s what might be responsible for the cryptocurrency’s stellar surge this year: 1. Capital Controls Global restrictions on sovereign currencies are playing a major role in driving increased bitcoin demand. The Chinese government, for example, made it more difficult for people to move the nation’s currency and spend it overseas, leading to trapped liquidity. That’s made bitcoin, which is not controlled by any government or central bank, more attractive. 2. An Anticipated Reduction in Remittances Isolationist policies by some governments to restrict remittances are pushing consumers into bitcoin as well. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said during his campaign that he’d limit or halt remittances to Mexico until the Latin American nation agrees to pay for a border wall between the two countries. 3. Slowing Supply Growth The explosion of bitcoin supply growth is slowing, with so-called miners getting fewer electronic coins in exchange for letting the network use their computing power. The payment to owners of the computers that verify bitcoin transactions and record them in a public ledger known as the blockchain fell by half in the middle of this year. 4. Increased Acceptance More consumers are using bitcoins and more companies are accepting it as a means of payment. The use of bitcoins by investors and online shoppers is growing at a steady clip, with more than 1.1 million accounts known as wallets added in the third quarter, even with the second quarter and compared with 1.2 million a year earlier, CoinDesk says. 5. Corruption Crackdown and the War on Terror India and Venezuela banned their largest-circulating bank bills in a bid to make it harder to pay bribes and buy contraband in cash. Governments all over the world are boosting reporting standards of assets abroad and allocating more resources to figuring out how and where illegal cash moves around. It’s part of efforts to combat terrorism financing and corruption following graft scandals from Europe to Brazil. That’s boosting demand from people who want to receive and send cash without all the oversight. Going into 2017, miner Marco Krohn sees more of the same. Many of the factors that drove bitcoin up this year will continue. “My personal expectation is that bitcoin will at least gain another 100 percent,” said Krohn, chief financial officer of Hong Kong-based Genesis Mining, which deploys server farms to mine the currency. (Comment on this)
9:52p	United Internet Acquires German Hosting Provider Strato Brought to You by The WHIR United Internet AG has reached an agreement to acquire Berlin-based web host Strato AG from Deutsche Telekom, according to a Thursday announcement. United Internet will purchase 100 percent of Strato’s shares for approximately €600 million ($629 million), or just under 12.4 times the hosting company’s expected 2016 EBITDA of €48.5 million. Strato has over 2 million customer contracts, mostly in Germany and the Netherlands, and is forecasted to earn revenues of €127 million in 2016. It provides domains, email hosting, and a variety of web hosting and server packages, with an SMB focus, and owns two data centers in Germany. “The acquisition of Strato will enable us to expand our leading market position in the European hosting and cloud application business and drive the consolidation of a market which is currently still strongly fragmented. In future we will offer our customers products and services with even greater performance,” Ralph Dommermuth, CEO of United Internet said in a statement. The acquisition will be made via a holding structure which is being set up as part of Warburg Pincus’ investment in United Internet’s Business Application’s unit, which was announced in November. It was the Business Applications unit that had been preparing for an IPO to raise funds for acquisitions before the investment. That deal sparked speculation about more acquisitions, as it enhanced United Internet’s access to financial resources at a time when it was rumoured to be considering bids for several companies in a bid to consolidate hosting assets to compete with SMB market leaders. Those targets were thought to possibly include Host Group Europe, which Go Daddy announced last week it will acquire for €1.69 billion, or roughly 11 times its EBITDA. Deutsche Telekom also reportedly explored acquiring Host Group Europe, possibly to merge it with Strato. Warburg Pincus managing director Rene Obermann, who is a former CEO of Deutche Telekom, joined United Internet’s advisory board as part of the Warburg Pincus deal. “We are delighted by United Internet’s investment. The cultures of the two companies fit perfectly together,” Dr. Christian Böing, CEO of Strato said in a statement. “We will use the resulting potential and synergies from the combination to drive growth in the hosting market and offer our customers even better products.” This article originally appeared here at The Whir. (Comment on this)

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