Friday, April 28th, 2017

Time	Event
12:00p	Google’s Edge Data Center in Cuba Comes Online Google this week started bringing online servers in Cuba that cache its content to improve performance for Cubans and reduce connectivity costs for the internet giant. It is the first internet company from overseas to extend its network’s edge to Cuba. Here are all the essentials on this news: Says Who? Dyn Research, the research arm of the Oracle-owned DNS giant Dyn that tracks the internet’s health worldwide on a daily basis, noted the launch on Wednesday. Google confirmed that the servers had gone online this week in an email to The Verge. The Why Cubans can now access Google’s content, such as YouTube videos, faster because it is stored locally and doesn’t have to travel over a submarine cable from Venezuela. Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn, told BuzzFeed: “I think this will be very noticeable for Cubans. The internet in Cuba will still be a painfully slow process. This is just another somewhat rare step forward. For Google services, which will be hosted in country, it will be a milestone.” It’s also usually cheaper for a content provider to store popular content locally, since it doesn’t have to pay for long-distance data transport. In other words, it’s cheaper for Google to store Gangnam Style in Cuba than paying to transport the video from somewhere on mainland South America every time somebody wants to see the most popular YouTube video of all time. More on how this works here: How Edge Data Centers are Changing the Internet’s Geography The How Google got to connect its servers to Cuba’s networks by making a deal with ETECSA, the island’s state-run ISP monopoly. It touted the deal in December, following a signing between Google chairman Eric Schmidt and ETECSA president executive Mayra Arevich, as reported by The Guardian. It’s unlikely that Google actually built a data center in Cuba to do this. The company leases colocation space for its edge nodes, and its Cuba node is likely to be hosted in an ETECSA facility. Google has more than 100 caching sites around the world, connected to the same global network as its 15 to 20 central data center hubs. The content cached on Google servers in Cuba likely originates at the company’s core data center in Quilicura, Chile, and makes several hops before it reaches the landing station in Venezuela. More on Google’s data centers here: Google Data Center FAQ As of Wednesday, Dyn’s Madory could not get a remote server in Cuba to connect to Google’s network via Google’s servers on the island, which means the new caching site is a work in progress: “I can see the server is there and I can interact with it, but Cubans are not yet getting automatically connected to it.” More Connectivity and Faster Internet for Cubans? Far from it. Those on the island lucky enough to have regular internet access will see Google’s services perform faster, but the move will make zero to little difference for the majority of the population. Home internet connections are illegal for most, but ETECSA has an ongoing pilot program meant to eventually connect 2,000 homes. Once the pilot is complete, the telco will switch to a paid service, which is expected to cost $15 to access the internet for 30 hours at 128 kbps, according to The Associated Press. Considering that an average Cuban makes $25 per month, it’s hard to expect a flood of new internet users to log on. Most people in the country connect to the internet via public WiFi hotspots, paying $1.50 per hour. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Equinix and Unitas to Bundle Hybrid Cloud Services IT departments are embracing hybrid cloud models at a record pace. IDC reports that more than 82 percent of enterprises will commit to hybrid architectures, mixing owner-operated servers with cloud services by the end of this year. That statistic certainly bodes well for cloud services provider Unitas Global and colocation giant Equinix, which announced a collaboration to deliver bundled hybrid cloud services to the enterprise. The partners describe it as a turnkey, fully managed service, eliminating the need to redesign existing IT architecture or start from scratch. The bundle, based on the Unitas multi-cloud orchestration system, will be available across 150 Equinix data centers around the globe.   See also: Equinix Customers Pushing Global Footprint According to a press release, the bundled solution includes data center space, power, network, compute, storage, cloud software, direct cloud connections via Equinix Cloud Exchange, cross-connects, bandwidth, and management—all dedicated to a single client, offered at one monthly price, and managed by a single vendor. Unitas’ multi-cloud orchestration system connects to Platform Equinix, a platform connecting any number of  providers across its global ecosystem. The announcement comes on the same day Equinix announced its first-quarter earnings. The company reported $950 million for the first quarter, up from $845 million in same period last year. Its net income for the quarter was $42 million, up from a $37 million loss reported in the first quarter of 2016 but down from $61.7 million in income reported for the fourth quarter of last year. See also: 250 Verizon Data Center Employees to Join Equinix (Comment on this)
3:30p	China Telecom Partners with Global Switch and Daily-Tech Telecommunications giant China Telecom Global this week announced partnerships with data center operators Global Switch and Daily-Tech. Under the terms of the deal, CTG and Daily-Tech will gain access to Global Switch’s 10 existing data centers, which includes capacity, services, development and management expertise outside China. According to the trio, the partnership should result in better customer services and allow for global expansion. The businesses will also work together to collaborate in new market development; contribute to Global Switch’s footprint and capacity, service and system access, and data center, network, and systems integration services. London-based Global Switch, the world’s second-largest wholesale data center provider, majority-owned by the British billionaires David and Simon Reuben, currently operates in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney, with a combined space of 3.2 million square feet. The announcement follows acquisition of just under half of Global Switch by an Asian investor consortium called Elegant Jubilee in December. The consortium was put together by Li Qiang, a Chinese telecommunications and internet entrepreneur who holds a stake in Daily-Tech. Investors in the consortium include China’s largest privately owned steel company, Jiangsu Sha Steel Group, Singapore-based asset manager AVIC Trust, as well as institutional investors Essence Financial and Ping An Group. John Corcoran, CEO of Global Switch, said in a statement on this week’s announcement: “It represents another core building block in our future growth strategy, and is a further demonstration of the springboard and connectivity we can offer to companies seeking to expand within a secure, professionally managed and world class environment.” At a signing ceremony this week, Li commented: “This is an innovative, enabling, and global cooperation agreement between three large-scale businesses with significant experience. Ultimately, we aspire to serve more Chinese and international customers by working together.”   (Comment on this)
6:48p	Cloud Giants Disagree on the Future of Corporate Data Centers We heard two very different perspectives on the future of on-premise enterprise data centers from top executives on this week’s earnings calls by two of the world’s largest cloud providers. Microsoft, which has a huge – and growing – on-premise data center software business in addition to a quickly growing cloud one, is continuing to pursue a hybrid strategy, pushing the idea that companies will want to continue using their internal data centers while augmenting them with cloud services. Alphabet subsidiary Google, which never had the need for an on-premise software business, is playing up wholesale shift of enterprise workloads from corporate data centers to its cloud. Here’s Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on the company’s earnings call Thursday: “Over the last several months, we have noticed a change in the types of conversations that Diane (Greene, head of Google’s cloud business) and her team are having with customers. Increasingly, we are being asked to partner for mission-critical projects and full migrations, moving data from on-prem data centers to the cloud. We are seeing a meaningful shift, and this momentum is resulting in a fast-growing business.” Microsoft’s server product revenue grew 7 percent in the first calendar quarter (or third quarter of Microsoft’s fiscal 2017), indicating that its hybrid play is about more than protecting a legacy business. See also: Can Google Lure more Enterprises Inside Its Data Centers? The Cloud’s Edge The concept of on-premise infrastructure for Microsoft has evolved beyond just core enterprise data centers. It’s that, plus edge nodes for processing data generated by the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, retail stores and other sources of data. The company is building its next generation of on-premise data center software to bring artificial intelligence (in the form of neural networks) to customers’ edge nodes, so they can analyze and make decisions on the spot, while being part of a distributed infrastructure, which also includes the cloud and core enterprise data centers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday’s earnings call: “Right when everyone’s talking about the cloud, the most interesting part is the edge of the cloud. Whether it’s IoT, whether it’s the auto industry, whether it’s what’s happening in retail, essentially compute is going where the data gets generated, and increasingly data is getting generated at the volumes in which it’s drawing compute to it, which is the edge.” The strategy rests on two key on-prem products: Azure Stack and SQL Server. Azure Stack is the hardware and software appliance designed to act as a private extension of the public Azure cloud in corporate data centers and as edge nodes of this hybrid network. Following several instances of postponing its release, Microsoft’s latest expected general availability launch date is sometime around mid-2017. SQL Server 2017, expected this fall, is designed to run across customers’ own data centers, both core and edge, and their public cloud resources. It will support both Windows and Linux, as well as R, Python, and other programming languages widely used for machine learning and big data analytics. Here’s Nadella again: “The innovative work we’re doing is what I would characterize as the future of true distributed computing, which is it will remain distributed. And that’s what we are building towards.” Google and Microsoft remain far behind Amazon in terms of cloud revenue. However, virtually all major contenders for enterprise cloud market share, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Alibaba, reported faster cloud revenue growth than Amazon’s. More on that here: Despite Growing Faster Than AWS, Top Cloud Contenders Still Far Behind What’s Amazon’s Take? Amazon Web Services acknowledged the importance of on-premise data center infrastructure in a big way last year by striking a partnership with Dell Technologies-controlled VMware, whose server virtualization software is ubiquitous in corporate data centers. VMware’s software will be sold as cloud services on top of AWS, at which point the companies promise seamless integration between those services and customers’ on-premise VMware environments. (Comment on this)

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