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Thursday, January 5th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 1:55a | 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. Singtel Launches Humongous Singapore Data Center Singtel has launched a massive, seven-story, 570,000-square-foot data center in Singapore, its eighth in the city state. The telco is the largest data center provider in Singapore, and its new DC West facility is one of the largest data centers in Asia. Details at DatacenterDynamics Hacker Wipes 2,000 MongoDB Instances, Demands Ransom A hacker who goes by the name Harak1r1 has been wiping unprotected instances of MongoDB, a popular NoSQL database, leaving in place of the stolen data ransom notes, demanding about $203 in bitcoin to restore it. According to one expert, MongoDB instances running on AWS are especially vulnerable. Details at IT Pro Rutgers University Struggles with Oracle Expense Management Outage An expense management system put in place as a stepping stone in Rutgers University’s transition to Oracle’s cloud is suffering a prolonged outage. As a result, the school was unable to pay some of its bills to vendors and service providers, reportedly leading to power being cut to some offices. Details at The Register Apple Invests in SoftBank’s $100B Tech Fund Apple has confirmed plans to participate as investor in the fund created by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group to invest in next-generation technologies, such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. The SoftBank Vision Fund’s goal is to raise $100 billion. Details at The Wall Street Journal SQL Server’s Popularity Grew Faster than Any Other Database’s in 2016 SQL Server, Microsoft’s already popular database, grew in popularity faster than any other database product last year, an Austrian IT consulting firm found. It’s unclear what exactly caused the surge, but potential reasons include the company’s announcement in the first half of 2016 that it would soon launch a version of SQL Server that runs on Linux, a popular OS among web developers. Details at Wired 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 |
| 1:55a | 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. Singtel Launches Humongous Singapore Data Center Singtel has launched a massive, seven-story, 570,000-square-foot data center in Singapore, its eighth in the city state. The telco is the largest data center provider in Singapore, and its new DC West facility is one of the largest data centers in Asia. Details at DatacenterDynamics Hacker Wipes 2,000 MongoDB Instances, Demands Ransom A hacker who goes by the name Harak1r1 has been wiping unprotected instances of MongoDB, a popular NoSQL database, leaving in place of the stolen data ransom notes, demanding about $203 in bitcoin to restore it. According to one expert, MongoDB instances running on AWS are especially vulnerable. Details at IT Pro Rutgers University Struggles with Oracle Expense Management Outage An expense management system put in place as a stepping stone in Rutgers University’s transition to Oracle’s cloud is suffering a prolonged outage. As a result, the school was unable to pay some of its bills to vendors and service providers, reportedly leading to power being cut to some offices. Details at The Register Apple Invests in SoftBank’s $100B Tech Fund Apple has confirmed plans to participate as investor in the fund created by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group to invest in next-generation technologies, such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. The SoftBank Vision Fund’s goal is to raise $100 billion. Details at The Wall Street Journal SQL Server’s Popularity Grew Faster than Any Other Database’s in 2016 SQL Server, Microsoft’s already popular database, grew in popularity faster than any other database product last year, an Austrian IT consulting firm found. It’s unclear what exactly caused the surge, but potential reasons include the company’s announcement in the first half of 2016 that it would soon launch a version of SQL Server that runs on Linux, a popular OS among web developers. Details at Wired 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 |
| 1:00p | One-Third of AT&T’s Network is Now Virtualized More than one-third of AT&T’s customer-facing network is now virtualized, which means the company can provision services for that portion of the network as simply as downloading them from an app store instead of buying and installing hardware appliances. That’s according to John Donovan, AT&T’s chief strategy officer and group president, who reported on progress of the telco’s multi-year network virtualization project while speaking at an industry conference in Las Vegas in December, FierceTelecom reports. “To hit 34 percent of our network functions in software really bodes well for us for 2017 to get the things done that we want to do,” he said. The project to virtualize 75 percent of AT&T’s network is now in its third year. The company first announced it in December 2014. AT&T says the effort is a response to a massive increase in data traffic on its wireless network over the last eight years, driven primarily by video. It includes implementing both Software-Defined Networking, which enables the telco to automate infrastructure management and service delivery, and Network Function Virtualization, which enables it to replace expensive dedicated hardware appliances for services like firewalls and VPNs with virtual functions that can run on regular servers. See also: How Enterprise Cloud and Virtual Networking are Changing the Telco Market The project also includes converting many of AT&T’s central offices to data centers to house the hardware those virtual functions run on. In an earlier interview, the company’s VP of innovation and ecosystems, Igal Elbaz, referred to these telco facilities-turned-data centers as a “distributed cloud.” Read more: Telco Central Offices Get Second Life as Cloud Data Centers AT&T isn’t the only telco doing this. Its peers, including Verizon and Japan’s NTT, have been transforming their networks in similar ways to make them more flexible and to be able to provide network services similar to the way companies like Amazon and Microsoft provide cloud infrastructure services. Needless to say, re-architecting a telco network takes a long time. “Our target for last year was to be at 30 percent, so we hit 34 percent, which we’re really thrilled with,” Fierce Telecom quoted Donovan as saying. “The hardest part of how big-scale projects go is you have a year of planning, a year at 5 percent and a year at 30 percent, and a year that takes you to 50 percent, and then you start to burn down the tail.” See also: AT&T to Open Source Network Hardware, NFV Software |
| 4:00p | Public Cloud Providers Begin March to Bare Metal Starting in 2017 Danial Faizullabhoy is CEO of Cypherpath. As we move into 2017, it’s interesting to reflect on how the public cloud is really coming into its own. While AWS has been and still is the far-and-away leader in public cloud, options like IBM, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform have come on as strong competitors. My top prediction for 2017 is that we’ll start to see bare metal cloud offerings from virtually all the public cloud providers by the end of the year. Fueling this shift is the fact that enterprises rightfully want and need to be in control of their own destiny, their applications and data. Public cloud providers will need to respond to this market demand with new services and products giving their clients that control. By running enterprise applications and data on bare metal, organizations that are in the cloud gain speed and agility. Enterprises’ need for agility is spurring greater demand for the ability to move infrastructure and apps from one bare metal cloud to another, thereby preventing vendor lock-in — which is essential to their plans. In addition, enterprise operations teams that run heterogeneous hypervisor environments alongside new app-based microservices are looking for holistic solutions to better manage the accessibility of these collections of IT resources. The growth of microservices will lead to investments in bare metal if the solution can seamlessly integrate enterprise tools with these microservices; otherwise, the operations teams run the risk of infrastructure sprawl, security breaches, and poor user experiences. To be sure, agile software development methodologies have been with us for some time now, with businesses moving away from big, annual software releases and embracing constant iteration. And microservices — an approach to developing a single application as a “suite” of small services, or breaking a monolithic application down into smaller pieces — allow for a rapid, continuous deployment of applications and services. The most efficient and reliable way to deploy microservices is to use a software-defined infrastructure technology installed directly on the hardware so you can avoid using VMs to run the new apps. This solution provides a near-zero latency service while embracing enterprise security and the operational tools needed to run your business without compromise. In the mix, of course, are Docker, Mesosphere, Kubernetes, and other container and orchestration tools that enable the apps to be easily deployed to today’s modern data centers and bare metal providers. Enterprises’ demands for control drive new growth for microservices to run on software-defined infrastructure stacks, making it possible to easily and incrementally deploy and run both legacy and modern apps without infrastructure sprawl, security risk, and loss of business continuity. This is a big win for the enterprise. By completely removing the physical layer from the equation, all hardware becomes commoditized and replaces the expensive and rigid proprietary hardware and software solutions of just a few years ago. Again, the rise of the bare metal architecture creates much greater value in the market. With on-demand provisioning and unlimited scaling you can’t go wrong. We’ve seen infrastructure at the compute, network and storage levels deployed in a consistent manner over the last decade, even as DevOps fostered the evolution of applications and services running on those infrastructures. On top of that, apps teams now require continuous delivery of service and the operations teams are diligently working to cater to the resource demands to drive better and faster business growth. Compromise has been a solution in the past, but with software-defined infrastructure solutions the entire infrastructure stack is manipulated and provisioned in seconds at scale. Lastly, the advantage of bare metal in the cloud is the elimination of the “noisy neighbor” problem. In public cloud environments, many virtual machines and tools sit next to one another that may “belong” to another public cloud application or customer, lowering performance because of competing and uneven demands for compute, disk I/O and bandwidth. But if the applications and other tools are running directly on top of the hardware, the workloads and infrastructure are “owned and controlled” by the organization from soup to nuts. The bare metal solution is uniquely able to provide all of these characteristics and more. From my vantage point, cloud providers are at the forefront of this change — because their customers are starting to demand it — and they will be adopting bare metal sooner rather than later. Forward-looking companies can also expect leading software companies like SAP and Oracle to adopt bare metal more broadly very soon, which will increase pressure on today’s leading public cloud providers to follow suit. 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. |
| 4:30p | Cloud Vendor Revenues Hit $148 Billion in 2016  Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud Though many were eager to say goodbye to 2016, cloud vendors and operators are likely hoping 2017 brings more of the same, at least when it comes to revenue growth. According to a new Synergy Research Group report, operator and vendor revenues for the four quarters ended September 2016 reached $148 billion, which represents 25 percent revenue growth on an annualized basis. The report shows that the two cloud service segments with the highest growth are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), at 53 percent. Hosted private cloud infrastructure services had annualized revenue growth at 35 percent, and enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) at 34 percent. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft were the big winners in IaaS and PaaS, while IBM and Rackspace were market leaders in hosted private cloud infrastructure. In terms of enterprise SaaS, Salesforce and Microsoft came out on top. In 2016, spend on cloud services overtook spend on cloud infrastructure hardware and software, according to Synergy. “In aggregate cloud service markets are now growing three times more quickly than cloud infrastructure hardware and software,” the report says. Synergy notes that investments in infrastructure by cloud service providers paid off; CSPs generated almost $30 billion in revenues from cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, hosted private cloud services) and over $40 billion from enterprise SaaS. “We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and I’d say that 2016 is the year that cloud started to dominate many IT market segments,” Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst Jeremy Duke said in a statement. “Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, especially on the public cloud side. Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for technology vendors and cloud service providers and yet there are still many years of strong growth ahead.” Synergy says that “UCaaS, while in many ways a different type of market, is also growing steadily and driving some radical changes in business communications.” A recent report by Gartner said that overall IT spending will reach $3.5 trillion in 2017, with software and IT services spending to grow 7.2 percent and 4 percent, respectively. This article first ran here, on Talkin’ Cloud. |
| 5:00p | Nvidia to Offer New PC Gaming Service Hosted in the Cloud (Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp., the biggest maker of graphics chips, announced a new version of its Shield set-top box and the debut of an online service designed to bring millions of new consumers to high-end computer games. The new Shield will display high-resolution video and feature Google Assistant technology capable of recognizing natural-language commands and controlling other devices. Chief Executive Officer Jen-Hsun Huang made the announcement in a presentation late Wednesday at CES in Las Vegas. Nvidia was the best performer on the Nasdaq 100 last year, riding investor optimism that the company is making progress in its push to find new markets for graphics chips, such as in data centers, consumer electronics and self-driving cars. Huang said the continuing expansion of gaming gives his company the ability to spend on adapting the graphics technology to fresh uses. The new GeForce Now service will allow the 1 billion PC owners whose machines can’t play high-end computer games to access that capability over the internet, he said. The service will charge $25 for 20 hours of gaming. It will work on PCs and Apple Inc. computers. The new $199 Shield will get an accessory, called Nvidia Spot, which will bring sensitive microphones to each room of a house and allow users to speak naturally to the device wherever they are. Huang said the aim is to bring Amazon.com Inc.’s Echo-like capabilities to a media and gaming hub, eliminating the need for multiple devices. Trying to further the company’s auto ambitions, Nvidia is testing its new Xavier high-end computing module – which features the equivalent of 8 high-end graphics processors – in a package that draws 30 watts of power. The device is capable of driving cars Nvidia is testing on the roads today without human input, Huang showed in a video. Huang also announced a new artificial intelligence program for cars that will act as an advanced assistant to drivers. The co-pilot system will keep an eye on the road and also on the driver, checking things such as whether the human behind the wheel is paying attention, is upset and has noticed potential hazards in the path of the car. Extending its partnership with Volkswagen AG’s premium brand Audi, Nvidia will supply the computer brains to vehicles, which Huang called AI cars. The vehicles could be on the road by 2020 and be capable of fully autonomous driving. |
| 6:25p | Colocation Startup CentralColo Buys Northern Virginia Data Center A joint venture involving Silicon Valley-based data center provider CentralColo has acquired a large Northern Virginia data center and office complex from real estate investor The Meridian Group. Meridian announced the deal in December. The deal marks entry into a second top-tier data center market for CentralColo, a young company that launched its first data center in Sunnyvale, California, in 2015. Its joint-venture partner on the $96 million deal was Legacy Investing, a Northern Virginia-based real estate investment firm, Virginia Business reported. Anchor tenants on the 280,000-square foot campus in Vienna – a town just outside Washington, D.C. – are defense technology company Leidos and the General Services Administration. Called Tysons Technology Center, the campus includes a nearly 200,000-square foot office and data center building and an 80,000-square foot office building. The property is 90 percent leased. CentralColo, which provides retail and wholesale data center services, was founded in 2015 by Arman Khalili, a long-time internet infrastructure executive and entrepreneur. The company was founded with investment from Industry Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm where Khalili acts as a principal. Last year, CentralColo received an undisclosed but “significant” investment from Safanad Limited, a Dubai-based investment manager, to fund its growth strategy. Around the same time, the company appointed Ken Parent, founder and former CEO of data center provider ByteGrid, as its chief executive. One publicly disclosed customer at CentralColo’s 94,000-square foot Silicon Valley data center is Packet, a bare-metal cloud provider catering to developers with high-performance computing requirements. |
| 7:40p | 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. Cloud Orchestration Startup Fugue Raises $41M Fugue, a cloud orchestration startup unveiled at AWS re:Invent in November, has closed a $41 million funding round. The company was founded by a former Amazon Web Services solutions architect and competes with the likes of Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack. Details at VentureBeat Google Hints at Commercial Release of Its Mega-Scale SQL DB Spanner Google is testing the waters for potentially productizing its home-baked SQL database Spanner as a cloud service. Described in a 2012 paper, Spanner is capable of scaling a single database instance to “millions of machines across hundreds of data centers and trillions of database rows.” Details at The Register Colocation Startup CentralColo Expands to Northern Virginia CentralColo, a Silicon Valley-based data center services startup, has acquired a large data center and office campus in Vienna, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. The company partnered with a local investor on a joint venture, which bought the property from The Meridian Group for $96 million. Details at Data Center Knowledge Latest Nutanix OS is Out Nutanix, one of the hottest hyperconverged infrastructure startups, has released the latest version of its Acropolis operating system, AOS 5.0. The company, which went public last year, has added more than 45 new capabilities in its software and made hundreds of enhancements, calling the release a “huge milestone.” Details on the Nutanix blog See also: Incumbents are Nervous about Hyperconverged Infrastructure, and They Should Be More than 50 Instances of Government Internet Shutdowns in 2016 Advocacy group Access Now has reported more than 50 documented instances of governments around the world blocking internet access for their citizens in pursuit of various ends, which include winning elections, censorship, and in at least one case, to prevent students from cheating on national exams. The number rose from 15 documented shutdowns in 2015. Details at siliconAngle 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 |
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