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Wednesday, April 12th, 2017
- A flash-native perspective that legacy data creation and management tools like parallel file systems do not
- Understand how to get the most out of flash – and how to avoid its particular performance and longevity pitfalls with HPC applications
- Shed dependence on data creation and access techniques that no longer work at speed
- Maintain application interfaces and present standard application interfaces – including support for POSIX, MPI-IO and others
- Support a variety of customer hardware choices
- And not be server or OS specific
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: March 2017 Here are the top stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge in March: AWS Outage that Broke the Internet Caused by Mistyped Command – “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.” Here are the Submarine Cables Funded by Cloud Giants – These investments by hyper-scale companies and by other cable builders looking to serve their bandwidth needs have spurred a submarine cable construction boom. Everything You Wanted to Know about Google Data Centers – The company’s executives recently shared at a conference that it spent $10 billion per year over the last three years in capital, mostly on data centers. Wondering where and how Google is spending that money? Switch Launches Its Pyramid-Shaped Data Center in Michigan – Besides the fact that it’s probably the only pyramid in the world whose sole purpose is to house internet infrastructure, bold red pipes outside contrast with the pyramid’s grey walls, giving it a futuristic, sci-fi look, while dramatic lighting inside makes it feel like a cross between a modern corporate lobby and a night club. Why Microsoft Says ARM Chips Can Replace Half of Its Data Center Muscle – Coming from the world’s second-largest cloud provider, that kind of announcement should give Intel a lot to think about. As more and more corporate applications are headed for the cloud, the number of servers traditional hardware vendors sell to enterprises is on a gradual decline, while cloud providers are buying more and more processors to support those migrating workloads. Meet Microsoft, the New Face of Open Source Data Center Hardware – Microsoft — a company whose relationship with open source software has been complicated at best — has emerged as a pioneer in applying the open source software ethos to hardware design. How Linux Conquered the Data Center – Some of the people who worked to create the original Linux operating system kernel remember this time with almost crystal clarity, as though a bright flashbulb indelibly etched its image on the canvasses of their minds… N. Virginia Landgrab Continues: Next Amazon Data Center Campus? – A typical single-story data center footprint might cover just 35 percent of the land. The high price of land in Loudoun County may begin to accelerate a trend toward two-story or three-story data center designs, which would help new development compete, since higher floor area ratios help reduce cost per square foot. Digital Bridge Buys Vantage, Silicon Valley’s Largest Wholesale Data Center Firm – Santa Clara-based Vantage becomes the wholesale data center platform for Digital Bridge, a communications infrastructure investor that got into the data center space last year, intending to become one of the forces driving the current wave of consolidation in the market. Cisco Pushes Unique Hyperconverged Infrastructure File System – One thing hyperconverged infrastructure architectures clearly are not doing is converging. 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. |
| 3:00p | Amazon Finds It Hard to Make Friends It Will Crush Later Shira Ovide (Bloomberg Gadfly) — Amazon is taking over the world. And paradoxically that may hurt Amazon’s ability to take over the world. It’s been clear for a while that Amazon’s ambitions know few bounds. Sure, Amazon is a global shopping mall. But it’s also making its own household products like baby wipes and batteries, becoming a silent giant in advertising, opening its own bookstores and grocery outlets, perhaps offering internet service, entertaining us with streaming music and TV, and tackling package delivery by land, sea, air and drone. Amazon wants allies for its industry-spanning growth agenda, but it won’t be easy. Amazon has a reputation as a steamroller. Its success and suspicions about the company’s intentions may cost Amazon the customers or partners it needs to fulfill its manifest destiny. For example, there are signs that retail companies are reluctant to use Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing service that is a favorite of Amazon investors. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote recently that Google’s competitor to AWS has a chance to land retail customers that are fearful of using AWS. It makes sense that retailers are wary about paying one part of Amazon to finance the retail-killing playbook of another part. For the same reasons, some retailers also haven’t been eager to use Amazon’s digital payment tools or its marketplace for product sales by independent merchants. Amazon’s reluctant allies go way beyond retailers. Amazon is trying to pitch the makers of household goods like cereal and cookies to remodel their product packaging and supply chain for online orders rather than optimize for sales in physical stores. Remaking packaging is a reasonable idea that helps both Amazon and the household product companies as more people shop from their computers. But it’s also understandable if makers of laundry detergent and coffee might not believe Amazon has their best interests at heart, when Amazon is also making its own laundry detergent and coffee. Amazon wants shipping changes at FedEx to quicken the brutal path from digital clicks to home delivery. It sounds great, until Amazon pushes FedEx to spend big to handle a surge in orders that never materializes — or until Amazon competes directly with FedEx. Repeat this pattern in other industries, and you can see a lot of business Amazon might lose because of its power, impatience and aggression. Some of this love-hate relationship with Amazon’s collaborators and customers is a natural consequence of a powerful company with its fingers in many pies. More tech titans are going to confront suspicion as they consolidate power and as more industries depend on them for their livelihood. It is ironic, though, that Amazon’s ambitions, smarts and sheer ruthlessness are what propelled it to its first $100 billion in annual sales. And those same qualities may be a barrier to its march to its next $100 billion. A version of this column originally appeared in Bloomberg’s Fully Charged technology newsletter. You can sign up here. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners. |
| 5:24p | What’s Next for Big Data Flash Storage? Laura Shepard is Senior Director of Product Marketing for DDN Storage. Last month HPE announced its plans to acquire Nimble and double down on its move into “the fast-growing flash market” for the enterprise. Days later Dell EMC announced it would drop its DSSD flash offering for big data and HPC because the market is too small. Although Dell EMC “found little market” for DSSD, don’t be deceived about whether or not there’s a market for big data flash storage. There is and it’s growing. In the HPC space, where DDN Storage plays, we continue to see a clear and growing need for flashed-based innovation. DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME) flash offering is seeing strong demand. Alongside traditional labs such as the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the more traditional high-end academic high performance computing (HPC) research, there’s also growing interest within enterprise organizations who want to to speed up their HPC-like workflows. There’s an evolution coming in how data is managed in these really high-end, performance sensitive HPC-like workflows in the enterprise. New autonomous vehicles programs for example need an HPC-like solution to manage huge volumes of high-resolution image and sensor data and real-time data processing. More broadly, the intersection of machine learning with standard business intelligence (BI) is causing a huge need for performance on very large pools of data, much of it now being unstructured, to quickly and accurately answer business critical questions. Also, in Financial Services new, more complex trading algorithms are using more and more data to obtain faster results that are needed in shorter times. This trend is only going to grow – and with it, there is a growing need to eliminate bottlenecks between server and storage and improving performance. That’s where the right flash solutions can and will help. In a similar, but not the same, way as all flash arrays have eased standard enterprise bottlenecks, adding a flash layer can solve file system bottlenecks in HPC or HPC-like environments. However, unlike standard flash solutions, this new flash layer is different and is all about divorcing performance from capacity and provides a whole new way to manage data, which can live in the flash layer, can protect data, and allows organizations to manage everything in an environment to make sure it’s in the right place, talks to (and accelerates) an organization’s applications, and can maintain a POSIX interface if required. Vendors who get it right will have: Whether or working in a traditional HPC environment or one of growing number of HPC-like enterprise environments, don’t let the departure of DSSD dissuade you from exploring the value of flash. The overall flash market was $15 billion last year. IDC predicts it will grow to nearly $20 billion by 2020. This transition to flash is creating a huge opportunity for positive change in the industry. There are a lot of companies, and products, chasing this transition and the most successful ones will be those who take the opportunity to completely change the game in terms of how data is created and managed. 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. |
| 6:01p | Digital Transformation Leaders Twice as Likely to Meet Revenue Goals, Dell EMC Finds  Brought to You by The WHIR Only 5 percent of large companies are prepared to transform their IT systems to meet digital business needs, despite a large majority (71 percent) that agree they will not be competitive without it, according to research released Wednesday by Dell EMC. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) surveyed 1,000 IT leaders at large companies for the 2017 IT Transformation Maturity Curve report, which shows that 95 percent of those surveyed believe their organizations are at risk of falling behind a small group of industry peers. Those peers are transforming their IT infrastructure, processes and delivery methods to achieve digital business goals. The companies leading in digital transformation are twice as likely to meet revenue goals as the companies with the least mature IT practices, with 96 percent of them exceeding revenue targets last year, according to the report. “These findings mirror how the vast majority of customers are telling us they need to optimize their existing infrastructures to take advantage of digital-age opportunities,” David Goulden, president of Dell EMC, said in a statement. “However, the research shows that most respondents are falling behind a small and elite set of competitors who have cracked the IT Transformation code, and they’re competing more vigorously because of it. As organizations progress in their IT Transformation investments, they can overcome the conflict between legacy IT and digital business initiatives to realize their goals, speed time to market and increase competitiveness.”
The report found that the many companies struggling to advance their digital business agendas tend to measure application cycles in months or even years. They also have siloed infrastructures and grapple with rigid legacy architectures. See also: Microsoft Wants to Help MSPs Win in Era of Hybrid Cloud and Digital Transformation The report breaks out responding organizations into four stages of digital maturity. Legacy companies fall short on many or all dimensions of IT transformation, and make up 12 percent of respondents. Forty-two percent are categorized as “emerging,” and 41 percent are “evolving,” with a commitment to IT transformation and moderate deployment of modern data center technologies and delivery methods. The IT maturity of organizations is reflected in their confidence: 85 percent of “transformed” companies believe they are in a “strong” or “very strong” position for market success, compared to only 43 percent of the least mature companies. The report says transformed companies report progress in improving product innovation and time to market, automating manual processes, and running IT as a profit center rather than a cost center. See also: Equinix Exec: We Spent $17B on Data Centers, but Cloud Giants Spend Much More Over half of all respondents currently use converged or hyper-converged infrastructure to support applications (54 percent), and scale-out storage systems (58 percent), while roughly half are committed to software-defined technologies as a long-term strategy and have begun moving towards their implementation. Successful transformation is associated in the study with self-service capabilities, which 26 percent report are “extensive” or “established,” with progress toward end-users provisioning IT resources as they would from a public cloud provider (65 percent), and with adoption of formal DevOps principles and best practices (43 percent). It is also correlated with an effective relationship between IT and the business, with 36 percent of IT organizations evaluated monthly by the C-suite or board of directors, and 38 percent evaluated quarterly. “The good news is that there are incremental benefits to be had by making any progress along the maturity curve, which can be achieved by emulating the behaviors of these ‘Transformed’ organizations,” said John McKnight, Vice President of Research and Analyst Services, Enterprise Strategy Group. |
| 6:20p | Tech Billionaires in India Take Hit From Trump Visa Reform It’s hard to overstate the importance of the technology industry to India. Over the past three decades, the IT sector has helped drive the country’s economic growth, employed millions and made billionaires out of at least seven founders. Now the industry is at risk from U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies. The administration is promising a clampdown on the work visas India’s tech services companies use to service American customers. In the days since the U.S. government took first steps toward visa reform, all of India’s highest-profile technology tycoons have seen their net worth eroded. Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Ltd. and India’s fifth-richest man, and Shiv Nadar, the sixth-richest person in the country and chairman of HCL Technologies, have seen their shares slide. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani and three other founders of Infosys Ltd., all among the top 100 of India’s richest billionaires, have taken a hit too. IT stocks have dropped about 3 percent over that stretch, while the benchmark index has climbed 0.6 percent. “Whether these changes are a precursor for more radical measures is what is worrying companies,” said DD Mishra, a Pune-based research director at Gartner. Infosys, which reports earnings April 13, may have the most at stake. The Bangalore-based company is most vulnerable to U.S. visa reforms because it has the lowest percentage of local hires in the U.S., Goldman Sachs analysts Sumeet Jain and Saurabh Thadani said in a research note last week. HCL and Wipro also have risks from visa reforms but they hire relatively more Americans, the analysts wrote. Infosys kicks off earnings season for the industry this week, giving investors a chance to get more insight into the challenges and corporate strategies for addressing them. Tata Consultancy Services, the market leader, is scheduled to report results next week. The debate has been over the H-1B visa program, which allows companies to bring 85,000 workers into the U.S. from overseas each year. On March 31, just as companies prepared to file applications for next year’s allotment, the Trump administration rolled out a series of policy measures making it harder for firms to use the program for computer programmers and announced measures to fight what it called “fraud and abuse.” In parallel, the Justice Department warned employers applying for visas not to discriminate against U.S. workers. All of this was in line with promises made during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to overhaul the program he described as bringing cheap overseas labor at the cost of American jobs and salaries. From India, those promises look like threats to the economy. Information technology is the largest employer in the private sector, providing a livelihood to nearly 4 million, and contributes about 9 percent of gross domestic product. India’s software and services exports total about $110 billion, with nearly two thirds of that revenue coming from the U.S. Visa uncertainty could wreak havoc with planning and jeopardize profits in the industry. It may also raise risks for customers that depend on such services, from Wall Street banks to retailers and airlines. “Difficulties in getting visas or rising salaries of H-1B employees will have a material impact on companies,” said Rostow Ravanan, chief executive officer of Mindtree Ltd., a Bangalore-based outsourcer that uses hundreds of H-1B visas every year. Several countries around the world are adopting or considering similar policies. That poses a threat to the business model perfected by Indian companies, Ravanan said. “These trends are dangerous because the IT industry and its talent serve the entire world,” he said. Leading outsourcers including Infosys, Tata Consultancy, Wipro and HCL Technologies declined to comment on the visa issue. Companies have been working on contingency plans. If foreign workers cannot go to the U.S., it will become more expensive to hire local staff. Companies may also try to do more work for American clients from abroad, including India. Nitin Rakesh, chief executive officer of tech services provider Mphasis Ltd. is optimistic. He said the industry has gone through four or five reincarnations since the outsourcing business began. A Trump crackdown may lead to more innovation in the model. “Through leveraging all the possible technology, including mobility and cloud, the growth opportunities are immense,” said Rakesh, warning however that some companies will adapt and others may not. “Growth will not be homogeneous.” |
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