Wednesday, January 4th, 2017

Time	Event
12:26a	Watts to Bits: Your Daily Data Center News Briefing Here are the enterprise technology and data center news stories you need to know about today. HP Labs Builds Uber-Complex Optical Chip Hewlett Packard Labs has built what it claims is the world’s most complex and biggest optical chip in which “all the photonic components work together to perform a computation.” The silicon chip integrates 1,052 optical components and in the future such chips could be used as accelerators, similar to the way GPUs and FPGAs are used today to provide supplemental computing power for CPUs. Details at IEEE Spectrum Google Translates Cloud for Data Center Pros Google has released a guide to its cloud platform written specifically for data center professionals with minimal cloud experience. Like its competitors Amazon and Microsoft, Google is coveting the enterprise cloud market, wanting companies housing IT infrastructure in their own or colocation data centers to migrate as many workloads as possible from those facilities onto its cloud platform. Details on Data Center Knowledge Clearlake Buys Enterprise Security Firm LANDesk for $1.1B Private equity firm Clearlake Capital Group has agreed to acquire cybersecurity company LANDesk Software from Thoma Bravo, also a private equity firm. Companies involved in the transaction did not reveal the price tag publicly, but anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal that it was $1.1 billion. Details at The Wall Street Journal Qualcomm Joins SoftBank’s $100B Tech Fund San Diego-based chipmaker Qualcomm has joined the list of investors in SoftBank’s cutting-edge technology fund, whose goal is to reach $100 billion. The Japanese conglomerate, which owns a majority stake in Sprint Corp. and recently acquired ARM Holdings, plans to use the fund, one of the largest pools of private capital in the world, to finance artificial intelligence, robotics, and other next-generation technologies. Details at The Wall Street Journal Intel Buys Stake in Mapping Firm HERE Maps Intel is buying a 15-percent stake in Here Now, a mapping company acquired from Nokia in 2016 by a group of German automakers. Mapping is a core capability for self-driving cars, and Intel has been investing heavily in what are thought to be next-generation technologies, such as virtual reality, the Internet of Things, and machine learning, among others. Details at recode 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)
5:00p	Sponsored: Designing PDU Density for Next-Gen Digital Data Centers There is a digital revolution happening within the modern data center. New types of workloads – IoT, Big Data, cloud – are all changing the way we deploy and control our data center infrastructures. Through it all, demand around resources continues to increase as well. In fact, data centers have grown from virtually nothing 20 years ago to consuming about 3% of the global electricity supply. Because of these demands, we’re also seeing greater utilization around data center resources. With that in mind, power consumption in the data center continues to be a rising trend. Consider this, a recent Data Center Knowledge article pointed out that the demand for data center capacity in the US grew tremendously over the last five years: US data centers consumed about 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2014, the most recent year examined, representing 2 percent of the country’s total energy consumption, according to the study. That’s equivalent to the amount consumed by about 6.4 million average American homes that year. This is a 4 percent increase in total data center energy consumption from 2010 to 2014, and a huge change from the preceding five years, during which total US data center energy consumption grew by 24 percent, and an even bigger change from the first half of last decade, when their energy consumption grew nearly 90 percent. Efficiency improvements have played an enormous role in taming the growth rate of the data center industry’s energy consumption. Without these improvements, staying at the efficiency levels of 2010, data centers would have consumed close to 40 billion kWh more than they did in 2014 to do the same amount of work, according to the study referenced in the DCK article, which was conducted by the US Department of Energy in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Carnegie Mellon University. The latest AFCOM State of the Data Center report showed that 70% of respondents indicated that power density (per rack) has increased over the past three years. And 26% indicated that this increase was significant. With that in mind, it’s important to ask: What can data centers do today to support power and PDU density requirements of a demanding market? Well – there’s good news. The future of rack PDUs is here. Leveraging High Density Outlet Technology (HDOT). High power densities and reduced cabinet space require new and innovative PDU systems. Now, there’s a new outlet technology that provides industry standard C13 and C19 outlets in a drastically reduced footprint. In planning for future designs, HDOT helps combat the limited physical space that PDUs compete for in the data center rack. Solutions like those from Server Technology now leverage High Density Outlet Technology (HDOT). Utilize “super” small form factor PDUs. The HDOT PDU technology leverages the smallest form factor outlet. This design significantly increases real estate in the back of the rack by fitting as many as 42 C13’s in a 42U high network managed PDU device—that’s over 20 percent smaller than a comparable PDU using standard outlets Incorporating smart cabling designs. The HDOT design also provides high native cord retention of over 12 pounds pull strength, reducing or eliminating the need for custom and costly ancillary locking cord devices. Working with PDU systems that can scale with power, density, and heat demands. With increasing outlet density comes increased power, and potentially increased heat. HDOT is manufactured with robust high-temperature materials carrying a UL94 V-0 flame rating, making these outlets ideally suited for the harshest data center environments. Remember, with growth in cloud come new requirements around rack, server, and power density; placing even more requirements around advanced PDU systems. A 2015 NRDC report indicates that data center electricity consumption is projected to increase to roughly 140 billion kilowatt-hours annually by 2020. This is the equivalent annual output of 50 power plants, costing U.S. businesses $13 billion annually in electricity bills. Organizations must design their data center power systems around new digital requirements. A major part of that is creating density without giving up performance or capabilities around scale. With increasing outlet density comes increased power, and potentially increased heat. Server Technology’s HDOT is manufactured to meet all the modern data center challenges. Keep in mind – small form factor PDUs and HDOT solutions aim to specifically ease density challenges while still allowing both the business and the data center to remain very agile.  This article was sponsored by Server Technology (Comment on this)
6:37p	Japan’s Once-Dominant Carmakers Face Pay Hikes to Lure Data Center Geeks (Bloomberg) — Headhunter Casey Abel spent four months trying to hire a data center architect for a Japanese automaker, including five meetings with the client — one with the top executive. In the end, the IT specialist joined an e-commerce company abroad for significantly more money. “There’s just a massive mismatch in salaries,” said Abel, managing director at recruiter HCCR K.K., who has spent as long as a year trying to land some IT candidates. “You’ve got some engineers making 20 million yen ($170,000) a year. Then you try to fit them in the traditional manufacturer-based salary structure where it should be 7 to 9 million yen.” Attracting the best information technologists is becoming increasingly important for Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. as they seek a bigger share of revenue from IT-driven services such as ride-sharing and cloud-based monitoring of vehicles. Nissan Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn has said Japanese carmakers can’t afford to lose the “ global war for talent” to new rivals like Uber Technologies Inc. and Tesla Motors Inc. See also: Ex-eBay Infrastructure Chief Takes Over Uber Data Center Strategy Luring such talent requires big pay bumps in Japan because the companies are chasing the same experts that banks, tech companies and everyone else needs, said Abel. The automakers “operate within extremely strict budgets and the business is generally low margin.” Japanese companies suffer from a dearth of domestic talent and the perception their business is more “mature and slow moving” than the new wave of tech startups. Honda said it will adopt a more flexible salary policy at its new Tokyo lab, while Nissan declined to comment specifically on pay at its new Tokyo data office. Toyota located its so-called connected-car business unit and AI research center in the U.S., which a spokesman said offer competitive compensation. Hunt for Professionals Japan has had the most severe talent shortages in the world since 2010, with IT professionals among the top three hardest positions to fill, according to Manpower Group’s annual market survey. The country is short of an estimated 171,000 IT staff in 2016 and the number may more than quadruple to 789,000 by 2030, according to a survey by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). That race for staff is accelerating. Nissan said in October it plans to hire about 150 engineers in Tokyo by 2018 for software, cloud computing, data analytics and machine learning. Honda starts operation next year of a Tokyo research center mainly for artificial intelligence and IT. Volkswagen AG said this week it will hire more than 1,000 IT experts, tapping high-technology sectors, gaming industry and top-level research centers, in the next three years. Toyota last month announced its connected-car strategy, which includes building a big data center to create new business using drivers’ data such as tailoring insurance policies to drivers’ habits, and hired former U.S. defense scientist Gill Pratt to set up and lead an AI research institute in the U.S. “You need really good talents to do those really complicated things,” said Jeremy Carlson, an analyst of autonomous driving at IHS Markit. “Japan has an educated and intelligent population, but many highly motivated and capable individuals in these fields flock to areas like Silicon Valley.” Japan came last in METI’s survey in terms of the proportion of respondents who thought IT was an interesting area to work, while Indonesia, India and the U.S. ranked highest. The Japanese corporations are following the lead of U.S. rivals Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. Ford established a science lab in Silicon Valley in 2012 to develop software, while GM has built two data centers since 2013 to streamline product development, manufacturing, marketing, sales as well as connectivity services. Honda is trying to address the salary issue by adopting a more flexible work and pay system at its new Tokyo lab, rather than the rigid, seniority-based pay grades used elsewhere within the company, said Yoshiyuki Matsumoto, president of Honda’s research arm, which operates largely autonomously. With the intense competition for staff in Japan, Toyota in April set up its Toyota Connected Inc. data unit in Plano, Texas. The division works with Microsoft Inc. to develop data management and services for its operations worldwide, including systems for connected cars that help make it easier for people to use automotive technology. Then there’s the problem of attention span. Design Cycle The development cycle for a car usually last years, which can be frustrating for programmers used to building a system in weeks, said Mandali Khalesi, Asia-Pacific chief of Netherlands-based digital map-maker HERE, owned by German automakers Audi AG, BMW AG and Daimler AG. “These people are from complete IT backgrounds and they don’t expect these long-time cycles,” he said in an interview in Tokyo. Nissan decided to try to turn that to its advantage. It’s building the 150-person connectivity division in Tokyo, partly in the belief that the long-serving work attitude is Japan’s edge over Silicon Valley, according to Ogi Redzic, head of the unit. About half the IT professionals in Japan have never changed jobs, compared with 14 percent in the U.S. and 21 percent in China, according to the METI survey. “We cannot afford to have people that only come here for a year or two,” said Redzic, a former executive of HERE, who joined Nissan and alliance partner Renault SA this year to head the group’s IT service for connected cars. “The way that people are going to get remunerated is going to be tied to the type of work that they do,” said Redzic, declining to give details. “We fully get it that if you want to build data-analytics themes there are certain market conditions around what those people expect.” (Comment on this)
7:35p	Leap Second Causes Brief Hiccup for CloudFlare DNS Brought to You by The WHIR CloudFlare spent the first hour and a half of the new year thinking it was one second further into 2017 than the rest of the world, resulting in a handful of DNS resolution failures which impacted a small number of machines. According to CloudFlare, whose representatives offered an explanation and apology in a blog post on Sunday, some of its customers who use CNAME DNS were affected when its custom RRDNS software confronted a negative number caused by neglecting to account for the leap second. At peak, only 0.2 percent of DNS queries and 1 percent of HTTP requests to CloudFlare were affected, and by 0645 UTC the fix was applied across the its global network. The most affected machines were patched in 90 minutes, CloudFlare says. A blog post explaining the error and its fix provides some background on CloudFlare DNS, as well as a section on “falsehoods programmers believe about time.” “Cloudflare customers use our DNS service to serve the authoritative answers for DNS queries for their domains. They need to tell us the IP address of their origin web servers so we can contact the servers to handle non-cached requests,” CloudFlare CTO John Graham-Cumming wrote. CNAME is one of the two ways origin server information is provided. “When a customer uses the CNAME option, Cloudflare has occasionally to do a lookup, using DNS, for the actual IP address of the origin server. It does this automatically using standard recursive DNS. It was this CNAME lookup code that contained the bug that caused the outage.” The company applied a fix preventing negative numbers from being recorded, and restarted its RRDNS servers to fix any recurrence. CloudFlare is inspecting its code for any other possible leap second issues. Azure suffered a glitch on February 29, 2012, that lasted more than 12 hours. This article first ran here, at TheWHIR. (Comment on this)
7:49p	Freshdesk Acquires Indian Startup Pipemonk to Ease Cloud Integrations Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud Freshdesk announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Pipemonk, a Bangalore-based startup that helps companies move data between cloud platforms, for an undisclosed amount. According to TechCrunch, Pipemonk launched in 2014 to help customers move data easily between cloud applications such as CRM, e-commerce, marketing and help desk services. The interface was designed to be easy enough to use that it doesn’t require IT support. As part of the acquisition, all of Pipemonk’s 13 employees will be joining Freshdesk. In October, Freshdesk acquired another Bangalore-based startup, Chatimity, which uses artificial intelligence and chatbot technology to enable user interaction and engagement. Freshdesk plans to leverage this technology in its chat platform. The acquisition of Pipemonk marks Freshdesk’s seventh acquisition since August 2015 when it acquired 1CLICK for an undisclosed sum. It will be interesting to see how well all of these acquisitions and small teams are integrated together to power the next generation of Freshdesk products. Freshdesk closed a $55 million funding round in November to help expand its product line and add more intelligence to its products in 2017. The company has 100,000 customers, mostly SMBs. “Having your apps talk to each other and enabling seamless flow of data plays an important role in any business today, and we at Freshdesk are focused on making that workflow process simple for our customers,” Freshdesk CEO and founder Girish Mathrubootham, said in a statement. Freshdesk has an office in Chennai, India, as well as offices in the Bay Area, London, U.K., Sydney, Australia, and Berlin, Germany. It was founded in 2010 and has grown to over 800 employees around the world. This article first ran here, on Talkin’ Cloud. (Comment on this)
10:35p	If You Aren’t Megascale, It’s Time to Become a Poodle Walker Steven Dreher is Director of Solutions Architecture for Green House Data. There are myriad strategies as a data center service provider, but when it comes to cloud services, it is becoming increasingly clear that if you aren’t a megascale provider, you need to transition your organization into a bunch of poodle walkers. I don’t mean you should quit the industry and walk dogs for a living. Rather, you need to be what at least one Gartner analyst has referred to as a poodle walker: an organization that does everything they can for a customer (up-to-and-including walking the dog). Complete managed services are the name of the game. Amazon knows it, too, which is why the company recently announced its own AWS management services. A mega-provider almost always struggles to offer the same customization and service levels as a midsize business, though, and that’s the piece of the industry you have to carve out for yourself. Continue offering your own combination of hosted cloud, colocation, and as-a-service options. Partner with a variety of other vendors. Familiarize yourself with different platforms. Hire great talent and treat them well. Your ideal customers are now those who know what they need to do, but aren’t sure what kind of hardware, software, or services they might need to accomplish it. They want to get in the cloud, but they don’t have an implementation plan. According to Gartner, more than 50 percent of surveyed CIOs do not have a cloud strategy. To truly add value as a service provider, you can’t wait for them to develop that strategy and then come to you with a specific VM count, licensing needs, and storage and bandwidth requirements. You have to show them that your expertise will help them find the right solution, and then perform the discovery yourself. Work with their IT department to develop the way to move forward. Provide multiple options. Take whatever ungroomed, shaggy, dirty poodle handed to you and show pictures of a few different fancy poodle haircuts. Then wash it, trim it, clip it, and walk that puppy. There will always be companies — even large corporations — that have priorities outside IT solution architecture and support. If you can integrate with their current systems in a hybrid model while supporting a new initiative, migrate them seamlessly to a cloud platform, or just generally fill in any knowledge gaps on their team, you become an invaluable resource in addition to a vendor. The culture you build must be customer-focused in everything. Rethink what it means to be a “managed service provider.” Your role is to keep the data center lights on. Keep applications up to date. Make sure everything just works. The customer’s IT department can then be focus on the user experience and meeting business objectives. More and more analysts are highlighting the poodle-walking model as the way forward for service-driven IT infrastructure providers. If you don’t code the platform itself, you must be able to architect and support it on your own hardware, in other providers’ public clouds, and onsite at customer facilities. Design, build, maintain, and operate the infrastructure — that’s how you remain best-in-show. 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)

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