Monday, April 10th, 2017

Time	Event
12:00p	Digital Realty: Trump’s Climate Order Won’t Change Firm’s Clean Energy Goals The push to repeal climate regulations by the White House will have no effect on the renewable energy agenda of Digital Realty Trust, according to the data center provider’s director of sustainability. Digital Realty is second of the world’s two largest data center providers to have vowed to continue looking for ways to source renewable energy to power their global footprint after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that seeks to roll back Obama-era environmental regulations. Equinix, the other data center giant, sent us a statement earlier saying it would stick to its renewable energy goals too. “My mandate hasn’t changed in terms of the priorities that I’ve got, and we’re still hearing from customers that they want renewable energy, so we’re still moving ahead,” Aaron Binkley, sustainability head at San Francisco-based Digital Realty, said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. Demand for data center services powered by renewable energy from the likes of Equinix and Digital has been on the rise, as corporations like Adobe, Bank of America, Oracle, Facebook, and Salesforce execute their own sustainability programs. The renewable energy price drop in recent years has made it easier to provide such services. Read more: Bank of America Endorses Data Center Clean Energy Buying Principles Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft – companies that operate the largest clouds in the world – issued a joint statement two days after Trump signed the order, reiterating their belief that climate change is “one of our most significant global challenges, and strong action is critical to meeting the serious threat posed by greenhouse gas emissions.” These companies have invested billions collectively in renewable energy generation to offset energy consumption of their own data centers. But in addition to those facilities, their clouds are also hosted in data centers operated by service providers like Digital Realty and Equinix. Without those providers onboard, they can never reach their goals of powering their clouds with 100 percent renewable energy. Digital projects that the cost of renewables will remain low at least over the next several years, Binkley said. “What we see today is attractive.” The expected repeal of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a new set of emission standards for existing power plants, isn’t likely to cause any significant market changes since it hasn’t yet come into effect, he said. “We still see a lot of opportunities in the market.” Digital’s long-term goal is to make 100 percent renewable energy available to all its customers around the globe. The first step was its Clean Start program, through which the provider buys renewable energy credits and passes them on to customers. But Binkley’s team is working to move the program beyond buying credits, since they’re untethered from actual generation and in most cases do nothing to clean up power supply of the data centers. The more difficult but more effective option is to sign long-term, utility-scale power purchase agreements with wind and solar farm developers, which gives them the financing necessary to bring new generation online on the utility grids that power a company’s data centers. Digital signed its first major renewable power purchase agreement last year, agreeing to buy about 400,000 megawatt-hours per year from a wind farm operator in Texas. The company said the deal would offset all energy consumption by its retail colocation data centers, most of which are facilities it gained in the Telx acquisition. But while there are Telx data centers in Texas, there are also Telx data centers in Chicago, Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, and other locations. The next step would be to source renewable energy closer to where the company actually consumes it, and Binkley said to expect Digital Realty to make such deals in the future. (Comment on this)
4:42p	Bye-bye, Big Box: Hyper-converged Infrastructure Waking Up Storage Market Lee Caswell is Vice President of Products, Storage & Availability Business Unit, for VMware Enterprise storage has been the sleepy part of IT. While servers and networks have been completely reimagined over the past ten years, big-box storage has changed relatively little and is more often viewed as a necessary evil than a business driver. But there is reason to be excited about storage today as Moore’s Law rouses storage in the same way that it revolutionized servers a decade ago. What’s driving the storage revolution is the advent of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), a new approach to data center IT that consolidates software-defined storage services with virtual servers. The HCI approach is being championed by VMware and a growing set of startups now that fast flash drives and cheap servers provide a powerful, converged hardware base that can be “software-defined.” We’re still in the early phases of HCI adoption, but we can expect the compelling management and TCO benefits to push HCI into mainstream market adoption. The disaggregation of custom storage systems will look familiar to industry veterans who tracked UNIX server market fortunes following the advent of x86 servers. In many ways, HCI market adoption is an exact parallel where expensive, complex RISC architectures and custom local area networks were abandoned for cost-effective, industry-standard servers.  In fact, if you examine the market trends that shook up the server market back then, what is beginning to happen now in the storage market seems almost inevitable. Big Servers, Big Price Tags Back in the UNIX server days, when you needed to expand compute capacity, “scale up” was the norm. When your workloads began to outpace the performance of your hardware, you bought bigger boxes – typically big, proprietary RISC-based servers from the likes of DEC, HP, IBM or Sun Microsystems. Over time, however, the economics of this model began to break down as industry-standard x86 hardware designed for high-volume desktops became redeployed as server engines for the data center.  The rapid increase in performance of x86 processors from Intel and AMD was an important driver. But equally important was the availability of enterprise-ready operating systems for the x86 architecture including Microsoft Windows NT and Linux. What really put the nail in the coffin of the custom, proprietary model of server infrastructure, however, was the rise of virtualization. Once high-quality hypervisors became available on industry-standard server platforms, creating unprecedented efficiencies in resource utilization, it was increasingly difficult to justify huge capital expenditures on proprietary servers that locked in customers to a single vendor’s platform. HCI similarly repurposes high-volume hardware, in this case industry-standard x86 platforms with local storage, from the server market to the storage market using a natural extension of virtualization software.  By aggregating, protecting and accelerating the storage across server nodes, new HCI software converges compute and scale-out shared storage in a single platform.  “Scale out,” rather than “scale up,” becomes the new normal ­– a lesson learned from hyperscale public cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google, who all deploy x86 servers in their approach to public cloud storage. Why the Storage Market Needs HCI The storage component of the infrastructure is ready for a wake-up call. Adding storage capacity often means investing in expensive, proprietary SAN appliances, with proprietary Fibre Channel interconnects. Procurement is a lengthy and risky process because of the massive up-front costs and complexity in configuration.  The big-box approach requires the expertise of dedicated storage professionals. HCI blows that model wide open. Hyper-converged storage, such as VMware vSAN, replaces those costly, siloed storage boxes with flexible, scale-out storage appliances based on industry standard x86 servers. Customers are free to start small and purchase new storage incrementally as performance or capacity needs grows. Capital expenditures are kept to a minimum and guesswork is all but eliminated from storage capacity planning. Equally important, HCI allows the entire IT organization to be more agile and responsive to shifting business objectives. With storage hosted on the same servers as power compute and networking, resource planning is no longer constrained by the availability of storage specialists. For the first time, IT generalists are able to manage the entire data center and can manage storage using a software-defined approach where changes are accomplished through the user interface rather than with hardware changes. Will traditional enterprise storage disappear altogether? The UNIX experience would indicate that big-box storage will not disappear but that these expensive, proprietary systems will occupy a very small market niche in terms of unit volume.  Proprietary enterprise storage will become increasingly difficult to justify, particularly as more organizations embrace modern development practices such as continuous delivery, continuous integration and DevOps. HCI is the perfect implementation for these new ideas and practices. Storage customers looking at HCI solutions have a lot to smile about these days. We’re on the verge of a genuine watershed moment in the storage market, and it will be exciting to see what the next 12 months will bring. 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)
7:45p	Is There a ‘Trump Lull’ in HIPAA Breach Crackdown? Brought to you by MSPmentor After closing three HIPAA breach cases for a combined $11.4 million in penalties during the first six weeks of 2017, federal authorities haven’t announced the resolution of any new cases in the seven weeks since. The start-of-the-year rush came on the heels of a record 2016, during which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) collected $23.5 million in fines, up from $6.2 million in 2015. A recent – relatively clandestine – changing of the guard in the OCR director’s office is raising questions about whether the change in presidential administration has prompted a commensurate pause in the pace of HIPAA audits and settlement agreements. “I believe there are already a lot of investigations in the pipeline that will result in penalties, and an increase in audits, but nothing else really new,” compliance consultant Mike Semel told TechTarget in a recent article. The security and privacy rules of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have become increasingly important to IT services providers working in the healthcare vertical, where newly digitized businesses offer lucrative opportunities. But providing IT services in the healthcare industry carries risk for MSPs, who can be held liable as contracted “business associates” in the event electronic protected health information (ePHI) is handled in a manner inconsistent with federal security regulations. The replacement in recent months of former OCR director Jocelyn Samuels occurred without so much as a news release on the office’s website. Though it’s unclear precisely when she left the office, a Jan. 9 news release from OCR announcing a HIPAA breach settlement contains a quote from Samuels, while similar releases issued Feb. 1 and Feb. 16 carried quotes from acting director Robinsue Frohboese. That same low-key approach was observed on March 22, when President Donald Trump appointed to the post Roger Severino, whose bio appears to have been quietly posted to the OCR website that day. As of this week, there was no photograph attached to his official bio, and his philosophy and approach to the prior administration’s crackdown on mishandling of ePHI remains largely a mystery. The Trump Administration has indicated it intends to dramatically cut federal regulations and it’s unclear whether HIPAA data privacy rules will be among those to be rolled back. “Lessening regulation in the privacy and cybersecurity areas has not been an area that’s been addressed thus far in public statements or actions by the new administration,” attorney W. Reese Hirsch is quoted as telling Bloomberg recently. In 2013, rules went into effect extending financial liability for failure to comply with HIPAA data security rules beyond covered entities – like healthcare providers – to business associates, which essentially includes anyone else who handles ePHI. The following year, OCR launched a regimen of audits aimed at ensuring business associates were engaged with proper contracts and met the obligations of HIPAA regulations. Virtually all of the cases being settled during the past couple of years involve violations by covered entities that date back years. Given the years-long time lapse from the dates of violations until investigations are concluded and cases settled, it’s expected that cash payments involving designated business associates will trend upward in coming years. Semel, founder and CEO of Semel Consulting, opined in the TechTarget article that since this is a presidential transition year, the incoming administration customarily puts a halt to all previous directives – like stepped up audits – until they complete reviews and set their own policies. That could mean a slowdown in HIPAA compliance audits of designated business associates, like MSPs. In the longer run, however, Semel expects the audits to resume with the same voracity as before. “A change at the White House is unlikely to unravel over 20 years of legislation and rule-making,” he’s quoted as saying. Given the President’s ambitious agenda, Semel doesn’t expect HIPAA reform to rise to the attention of lawmakers in the near term. “At no time did I hear any politicians talking about HIPAA, so I don’t think it will get a lot of attention,” he said. This p0st originally appeared here at MSP Mentor. (Comment on this)

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