Tuesday, December 27th, 2016

Time	Event
6:38p	Here are the Top Data Center Stories of 2016 Here are the 10 most widely read and shared stories we covered on Data Center Knowledge this year: Netflix Shuts Down Final Bits of Own Data Center Infrastructure It’s done and dusted. Since someday in January month, (almost) everything Netflix does runs on Amazon Web Services, from streaming video to managing its employee and customer data. That is everything except the company’s caching servers, which, according to a source involved in Netflix infrastructure operations, still run in numerous colocation data centers around the world. In early January, whatever little bits of Netflix that were still running somewhere in a non-Amazon data center were shut down, Yuri Izrailevsky, the company’s VP of cloud and platform engineering, wrote in a blog post. Inside a Verizon data center. (Photo: Verizon) Verizon Shuts Down Public Cloud, Gives Two Months to Move Data Verizon Communications, which several years ago had huge public cloud ambitions, has shut down its public cloud service, which attempted to compete head to head with giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The company notified its cloud customers of the plan in February, giving them two months to move their data or lose it forever. Verizon’s NAP of the Americas in downtown Miami (Photo: Verizon) Equinix Agrees to Buy Verizon Data Centers for $3.6B Equinix didn’t buy all data centers Verizon was hoping to sell, cherry-picking sites that were a good strategic fit. The telco has been looking to divest more than 50 facilities, including assets in Europe and Asia, but Equinix was only interested in North and South American markets. Facebook data center under construction in Fort Worth, Texas (Photo: Facebook) What Facebook Has Learned from Regularly Shutting Down Entire Data Centers Jay Parikh, who oversees engineering and infrastructure at Facebook, believes a company has to have a set of leaders who push their teams outside of their comfort zone so they can learn something new. An important quality of such leaders is willingness to embrace failure. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images Here’s How Much Energy All US Data Centers Consume It’s no secret that data centers, the massive but bland, unremarkable-looking buildings housing the powerful engines that pump blood through the arteries of global economy, consume a huge amount of energy. But while our reliance on this infrastructure and its ability to scale capacity grows at a maddening pace, it turns out that on the whole, the data center industry’s ability to improve energy efficiency as it scales is extraordinary. Pigeon, LinkedIn’s first-generation 100G data center switch (Image: LinkedIn) LinkedIn Designs Own 100G Data Center Switch Following examples set by other web-scale data center operators, companies like Google and Facebook, the infrastructure engineering team behind the professional social network LinkedIn has designed its own data center networking switch to replace networking technology supplied by the major vendors, saying the off-the-shelf products were inadequate for the company’s needs. Microsoft data center modules, called “ITPACs,” deployed in Boydton, Virginia Microsoft Moves Away from Data Center Containers Google has taken the container route for building out data center capacity in the past but eventually decided against it. Now, Microsoft has also found that containers just aren’t the best way for it to scale. Cooling pumps at the French telco Illiad’s data center outside of Paris. The data center relies primarily on mechanical cooling but does use free cooling about 30 percent of the year (Photo: Yevgeniy Sverdlik) ASHRAE Strikes PUE from Data Center Efficiency Standard The data center industry spoke, and ASHRAE listened. The society moved away from its proposal to use PUE to set data center efficiency standards in its latest data center efficiency standard document. The cloud pavilion of Amazon Web Services at the 2016 CeBIT tech fair in Hanover, Germany (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning The world’s top cloud providers made $11.2 billion in revenue selling raw compute and storage power as virtual services last year, but, according to a market analyst report published this year, it’s only the beginning. Network cables run along a ceiling in a server room in New York City. (Photo by Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images) Google and Level 3 Interconnect Network Backbones Level 3 operates one of the world’s largest internet backbones, but Google has also built out a formidable global backbone to deliver its services. Google’s backbone interconnects its massive data centers around the world and delivers traffic from those data centers to its 70-plus edge locations, where the content is cached for delivery to end users. Now, the two have agreed to help each other deliver traffic more efficiently under a bit-mile deal, with no money changing hands. The agreement also means the two operators’ networks will interconnect in more locations than currently, improving overall performance of the internet. Stay current on data center industry news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook or join our LinkedIn Group – Data Center Knowledge (Comment on this)
7:30p	DCIM Will Get Hot, Pigs Will Fly, and Other Predictions for 2017 Chris Crosby is Founder and CEO of Compass Data Centers.  It’s rumored that the great prognosticator, Nostradamus, once said, “Predicting the rise of Hitler and 9/11 is easy. Figuring out what the wife wants for Christmas, now that’s hard. Woe be to the man who doesn’t save his receipts.” Now that the holiday season is over, I think we can all agree with that one. For those of you who were just positive that the Mrs. wanted that mixer instead of those diamond earrings, there’s always next year. After all,  isn’t that really the beauty of predictions? No matter how wrong we are, there’s always another chance for us to redeem ourselves. For those of you who eschewed the earrings for the deluxe model, with all the attachments, in the color that matched the cabinets, I would suggest that this year’s holiday prediction be something along the lines of “new car.” It’s got a high success rate and, let’s face it, you’ve got more than a few rungs to climb on the ladder of domestic tranquility. Having dispensed with the “free advice” portion of our program, let’s get down to the business at hand and kick-off the new year with my predictions for the data center industry in 2017: Until your refrigerator can call your phone to let you know you need to pick up more beer, everyone is going to be talking about IoT, but no one is going to sure that they’re using it. We will see several more DDOS attacks similar to the attack on Dyn’s internet directory servers. We’ll blame the Russians. Containers will surpass virtualization in new server implementations. DCIM will finally realize its full market potential. Pigs will fly (see #4 above). The government will eliminate subsidies to “alternative power” developers. Google, Facebook and Microsoft will be featured in natural gas advertising campaigns across the country. 100Gbps will become the default internal networking speed in new data center implementations Residents of Northern Virginia will begin to ask themselves, “Would it kill someone to build a Pizza Hut around here?” The public Internet will officially break due to a new enhanced reality release of game less understood than Pokémon Go! The government’s data center consolidation project will continue. In related news, the sun will burn out in 5 billion years. There you have it, my predictions for the next 365 days of all things data centers. As you can see, there’s a little something for everyone, so stop your groveling, donate that mixer to charity, keep an eye on those new car ads and enjoy what the new year has to offer. Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Penton. 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)
9:00p	Brexit Hits Home as U.K. Government Grapples With Microsoft Hike (Bloomberg) — Brexit’s cost is hitting close to home for those drawing up the divorce papers as Theresa May’s Cabinet Office has been forced into negotiating with Microsoft Corp. to minimize the impact of a January price hike that could cost the government hundreds of thousands of pounds. In October, Microsoft announced its cloud services would go up by 22 percent in 2017 to “harmonize” its prices across Europe following the sharp fall in the pound. Sterling has plunged 17 percent against the dollar, the currency in which Microsoft books its revenues, since Britons voted to leave the European Union in the June 23 referendum. The company is now in negotiations with the Common Technology Services division of the Cabinet Office, which coordinates between the prime minister’s office, other departments and the civil service, according to Freedom of Information requests submitted by Bloomberg. The division “is negotiating with Microsoft in order to secure a pan-governmental commercial advantage for the purchase of some of these licenses,” the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a response. It said it had no estimate of the impact of the price increases on the department. Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The company provides software to some of the biggest businesses in the U.K. as well as government departments, which use products including Microsoft Visio, Office, Visual Studio, SharePoint, Project and CRM Dynamics Online. The newly created Department for Exiting the European Union was unable to provide details as it is still operating on Cabinet Office infrastructure. The Cabinet Office paid Microsoft 624,570 pounds ($771,000) this year, according to online statements, and said it will be unaffected by the price increases. The Department for Education cited current annual costs of 808,545 pounds for Microsoft services. The Home Office and the Department for Work and Pensions both declined to disclose current costs or future estimates, citing commercial sensitivity. (Comment on this)

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