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Tuesday, December 20th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:31a | Azure Stack Hopes to Succeed Where Private Clouds Fail  Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud Last month, Microsoft partner HPE told attendees of its HPE Discover conference in London that Azure Stack – Microsoft’s data center operating platform – would be available within the next six months. This week in an interview with Network World, Microsoft Azure corporate vice president Jason Zander expanded a bit on Azure Stack and how it will address the challenges that companies have had implementing private clouds. “What we’ve tried to do is figure out what are the things that make private cloud implementations fail. If people have tried using other software solutions or building their own, why have they failed?” Zander said. Azure Stack’s converged appliance is being worked on with Microsoft partners HPE, Dell, and Lenovo, and will include the hardware and software – two key elements that it must get right to succeed where other private clouds may have failed. “We try to make sure you have software that can really deliver a cloud pattern, not just VM automation, but an actual cloud pattern with containers and PaaS and all the rest of the things you expect in a cloud. The other piece is hardware and getting that right, making sure it can handle the new cloud patterns. We put those two things together and that is what Azure Stack represents.” “You’ve also seen from us Project Olympus and some of the work we’ve done with the Open Compute Project. Those are also part of that same strategy to make sure that that kind of converged hardware/software solution that we’re making is something that we can both share with the industry and also drive to scale.” The hope is that Azure Stack will enable a consistent cloud environment for on-premises and the public cloud. “It’s not so much that we’re just tacking things together as much as we’ve actually made very deep R&D investments to make sure that that the hybrid world is something you can actually materialize and get a lot of value out of on day one.” This article first appeared here, on Talkin’ Cloud. |
| 2:46a | MSPs Must Prepare in Case AWS Managed Services Targets SMBs  Brought to you by MSPmentor The entry of Amazon into managed services is a logical business development that could evolve into a play for managing the IT infrastructure of not just large enterprises, but organizations of all sizes. Those were among the thoughts of Charles Weaver, CEO of MSPAlliance, a coalition of technology services providers. Last week’s launch of AWS Managed Services, aimed at enterprise-grade users of AWS public cloud, might represent the first in a series of falling dominos that could ultimately lead to eroding public cloud revenue for MSPs. “This changes things,” Weaver said. “What I think every MSP has to ask themselves is, what if Amazon continues to expand this managed services program down into midmarket; small and medium businesses?” Amazon’s move into managed services – and the potential that its key public cloud competitors, like Microsoft, Google and IBM could soon follow – is not completely unexpected, Weaver said. “Not only am I not surprised, I expected it,” he said. “This is the behavior of the vast majority of hardware and software vendors throughout the channel for the last 10, maybe 15 years.” “They have been steadily moving into managed services, literally offering managed services, and telling partners ‘you don’t have to do this, just resell ours,’” Weaver explained. “(MSPs) are resellers again.” He cautioned that his comments are not intended as anti-vendor or anti-channel, and that he doesn’t discourage vendors from making sound business decision, just because they might be disruptive to MSPs. “I don’t mind them doing it,” Weaver said, adding that tech services providers just need to understand the implications of their partnerships. “I think that gets to the mentality that (some) vendors have that managed services providers don’t really add value.” He offered two thoughts on how MSPs should respond to the new potential threat. First, recognize the vulnerability of a practice that disproportionately relies on white labeling or reselling the offerings of other vendors. “My advice to MSPs is if they look at giving up – through a strategic relationship – a part of their managed services to another third party…it begs every MSP who partners with that company to ask, what is my risk?” Weaver said. “They (could) be partnering with a direct competitor.” Additionally, MSPs should look to opportunities in private and hybrid cloud, marketing against the growing trend of public cloud cyberattacks. “Public cloud is under assault globally,” Weaver said, citing recently publicized attacks against Yahoo!, and U.S. nuclear installations. “I think it’s undeniable that private or hybrid (cloud) computing is making a big comeback, or at least is presenting itself as a very compelling alternative to public cloud.” This article first ran here, on MSPmentor. |
| 2:46a | MSPs Must Prepare in Case AWS Managed Services Targets SMBs Brought to you by MSPmentor The entry of Amazon into managed services is a logical business development that could evolve into a play for managing the IT infrastructure of not just large enterprises, but organizations of all sizes. Those were among the thoughts of Charles Weaver, CEO of MSPAlliance, a coalition of technology services providers. Last week’s launch of AWS Managed Services, aimed at enterprise-grade users of AWS public cloud, might represent the first in a series of falling dominos that could ultimately lead to eroding public cloud revenue for MSPs. “This changes things,” Weaver said. “What I think every MSP has to ask themselves is, what if Amazon continues to expand this managed services program down into midmarket; small and medium businesses?” Amazon’s move into managed services – and the potential that its key public cloud competitors, like Microsoft, Google and IBM could soon follow – is not completely unexpected, Weaver said. “Not only am I not surprised, I expected it,” he said. “This is the behavior of the vast majority of hardware and software vendors throughout the channel for the last 10, maybe 15 years.” “They have been steadily moving into managed services, literally offering managed services, and telling partners ‘you don’t have to do this, just resell ours,’” Weaver explained. “(MSPs) are resellers again.” He cautioned that his comments are not intended as anti-vendor or anti-channel, and that he doesn’t discourage vendors from making sound business decision, just because they might be disruptive to MSPs. “I don’t mind them doing it,” Weaver said, adding that tech services providers just need to understand the implications of their partnerships. “I think that gets to the mentality that (some) vendors have that managed services providers don’t really add value.” He offered two thoughts on how MSPs should respond to the new potential threat. First, recognize the vulnerability of a practice that disproportionately relies on white labeling or reselling the offerings of other vendors. “My advice to MSPs is if they look at giving up – through a strategic relationship – a part of their managed services to another third party…it begs every MSP who partners with that company to ask, what is my risk?” Weaver said. “They (could) be partnering with a direct competitor.” Additionally, MSPs should look to opportunities in private and hybrid cloud, marketing against the growing trend of public cloud cyberattacks. “Public cloud is under assault globally,” Weaver said, citing recently publicized attacks against Yahoo!, and U.S. nuclear installations. “I think it’s undeniable that private or hybrid (cloud) computing is making a big comeback, or at least is presenting itself as a very compelling alternative to public cloud.” This article first ran here, on MSPmentor. |
| 10:20p | Mega-Clouds Drive Shift to Mega-Data Centers in Singapore While Singapore has for years been the default data center location for US and European companies wanting to serve clients in Asia, the rise of the mega-clouds is changing market dynamics there as it has done in other major data center markets around the world. Companies like Microsoft and Google have built their own data centers in Singapore and leased capacity from data center providers there. Social networks LinkedIn (now owned by Microsoft) and Facebook occupy leased data center space on the island. There’s also demand from Asian mega-clouds, such as Alibaba. As they do elsewhere around the world – in places like Northern Virginia, Dallas, Chicago, and Dublin – these companies are generally after big multi-megawatt data center leases, driving more demand for wholesale data center services in Singapore than there has been historically. That’s according to recent data on the Singapore data center market from Structure Research, which says the market profile has shifted to “one that is increasingly geared to wholesale deployments.” Most of the 150 or so megawatts of new data center capacity that would be coming online in 2016 and 2017 was being built for wholesale deals, Jabez Tan, research director at Structure, told us in an interview. As Tan notes in an article for Data Center Knowledge that also ran this week, the trend toward wholesale can be observed in all major Asia-Pacific markets. The Singapore data center market has been growing steadily over the last several years, but the analysts’ data shows its next phase of growth is being driven primarily by wholesale data center demand from cloud giants, pushing providers to build data centers at massive scale. That 150-plus megawatts would be delivered across only eight data centers. Structure expects the Singapore market to generate $811 million in revenue in 2016 and grow 9 percent in 2017. The research firm projects the market will reach $1.6 billion in size by 2020, growing at a compound annual rate of 9 percent. In addition to being one of Asia’s primary commercial and financial hubs, Singapore is a hub for international connectivity, with landing stations for submarine cables linking it to major Asia-Pacific markets in India, China, Japan, and Australia, as well as the numerous emerging markets in the region, such as Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Singapore’s next-door neighbor Malaysia. In short, if you want network access to virtually all Asia-Pacific markets from one place, that place is Singapore. The city-state’s robust infrastructure, political stability, and a business-friendly government also help. There are 45 data center providers in Singapore as of 2016, with 53 unique operational data centers, according to Structure. Together, their critical power capacity is 240MW. The two top providers in the market are local telco Singtel and the Redwood City, California-based colocation giant Equinix. The two companies have a combined share of 55 percent in the Singapore data center market. Other top providers are Digital Realty Trust, Keppel Data Centers, Global Switch, and NTT Communications. Not all demand for data center capacity in Singapore is coming from cloud giants of course. There are plenty of examples of smaller companies, such as system integrators and other IT service providers from China and elsewhere overseas, taking data center space in Singapore to serve clients throughout AsiaPacific. Some of the recent examples include Retarus, a Munich-based messaging service provider, which announced a new data center in Singapore last month. The company lists Adidas, Bayer, Sony, and Honda as its clients. Another one is Fpweb.net, a St. Louis, Missouri-based managed cloud and security services firm, which announced a data center in Singapore earlier this month, promising it would reduce latency for its clients in Southeast Asia. While data center providers building in Singapore are mostly after the lucrative multi-megawatt cloud deals, they generally don’t pigeonhole themselves into being strictly wholesale or strictly retail providers. A company may prefer wholesale deals but it will sign retail colocation deals as well, Tan said. It goes the other way too. Equinix, for example, a company that specializes in retail colocation inside its network-rich facilities, has done some wholesale deals in Singapore, he said. Equinix usually makes the exception if a major strategic customer wants a wholesale deployment. Tan was not confident there would be enough demand for all the new wholesale capacity coming online in the 2016-2017 timeframe. Lots of empty facilities and only so many deals to go around usually means pricing for wholesale data center space will come down. “It’s pretty aggressive in terms of chasing after deals in Singapore,” he said. |
| 10:30p | How Cloudy is the Data Center’s Future? Steve Nunn is Vice President, Global Cloud and Infrastructure Services, Unisys Corp. Those of us who have been active in the IT industry for a while will recall when, in the early 1990s, a respected pundit opined that the last mainframe would be unplugged by the end of the first quarter of 1996. The last time I looked – 20 years after that supposed termination – the great unplugging hasn’t yet come to pass. Despite similar predictions of its impending supersession by cloud computing, the on-premise data center continues to show similar durability At first blush, the persistence of the data center seems something of a conundrum, given the enticements of lower capital expenses and fast, flexible, on-demand access to IT capacity that the cloud delivers. A recent Unisys-sponsored survey of 200-plus U.S. IT and business professionals provides clues to the ongoing viability of the conventional data center. The survey respondents noted that, even as they were generally moving toward the cloud, 78 percent of their organizations’ mission-critical applications remain on-premise. Similarly, 67 percent of their storage and 62 percent of data analytics applications remain on-premise as well. In addition, 42 percent of the respondents cite security as the biggest challenge that migration to the cloud poses. It stands to reason that they would want to rely on a tested, presumably secure data-center environment to continue housing the applications that run their business, the repository of their most sensitive customer and business data, and the analytics applications that enable them to understand and cater to customer behaviors – at least until they can move them and the multimillion-dollar investment they represent to a sufficiently secure cloud. Move they will, inevitably. Sixty-seven percent of the respondents anticipate that at least half of their IT resources will be in the cloud within the next two years, and 44 percent see three-quarters of their resources there in the same timeframe. The motivations are clear: cost reduction, transformation of capital expenditures to operating costs, and increased access to capacity on demand. Based on the respondents’ sentiments, I believe we can expect that enterprises will take a more considered, approach to the cloud than marketplace buzz might indicate – and that’s understandable. As I’ve noted, those organizations have made major long-term investments in IT infrastructure, software and security, and they can’t be expected to transition suddenly to the cloud. The migration will be best undertaken through a prudent, staged approach to a cloud environment that enhances real-time access to vital computing resources while building on existing investments, delivering capital and operational economies and hardening security to protect vital business assets. “Staged” is the key term here. As I noted, 67 percent of our survey respondents said that half of their IT resources would be in the cloud within two years. That means that a third will have just begun moving or will still le considering a move to the cloud within that timeframe. So the final cutover to the cloud will likely take closer to a decade, if it every really happens at all. The on-premise data center may still continue to play a specialized role, complementing the cloud for some applications requiring intensive levels of computing or security. It’s fair to say that the future of the on-premise data center is cloudy. But the data center won’t be blown away by a sudden tempest. It will be pushed along by a slowly building but inexorable weather front that moves it in a new direction at a moderate pace – and with an orderly and beneficial resolution. 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. |
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