Monday, May 15th, 2017

Time	Event
12:00p	Report: IO Ahead of Schedule on $500M Phoenix Data Center Expansion Last year, IO said it wanted to expand its $200,000 million, 11-acre Phoenix data center site within six to eight years, but it looks like the company’s goal will be achieved much sooner. According to the Phoenix Business Journal, the Phoenix City Council just approved a $500 million, 500,000-square foot expansion to IO’s high-tech complex near Van Buren and 48th streets and the Loop 202 freeway. The journal reported that it will be a three-story development. The region is one of the hottest data center markets in the US. eBay operates a data center in Phoenix, and Apple has a data center in nearby Mesa, while many top data center providers have facilities in the area. “IO looks forward to working with the city of Phoenix and other relevant partners as we make considerable investments in our economy and in our community,” said IO COO Rick Crutchley. Today, the company has two data centers in the Phoenix market – one in Phoenix and the other in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale . Other data centers are located in Springsboro, Ohio (just outside of Dayton), and another one in a former New York Times printing plant in Edison, New Jersey. The company also operates data centers in Slough (near London) and Singapore. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Fire Causes Partial UniSuper Data Center Outage in Port Melbourne It’s not yet known why a fire at UniSuper’s Port Melbourne data center last week caused a partial shutdown, or which of three providers is responsible–Vocus, NextDC, or Equinix—all with facilities in the area, reported iTnews. Although the fire triggered a shutdown of key systems, no data was lost or compromised; however, the company’s nearly 400,000 customers were not able to access the member portal of UniSuper’s website for more than one day, according to the company’s hotline. As a provider of financial and retirement advice and tools for the education and research sector, the outage also meant that members could not access investment accounts. UniSuper also owns one of the largest super funds in Australia with $57.5 billion in net funds under management. A message recorded on UniSuper’s support hotline said the problems were caused by a fire at a data center that triggered the shutdown of key systems. “Early Wednesday morning, an incident at one of our data centers triggered a partial system shutdown. A number of our systems and services were impacted,” said UniSuper spokesperson Catherine Dohrmann. “The direct impact on our members was limited to the outage of our telephony system and MemberOnline portal.” Dohrmann said UniSuper’s team worked throughout the night of the fire to restore the provider’s systems for member services, which were brought up the next day. She did not reveal the provider’s name, and said UniSuper is waiting to receive a report from the “mystery” company as to what happened during to cause systems shutdown. (Comment on this)
5:21p	Should You Go With AWS or Azure? That May Be the Wrong Question Ellen Rubin is CEO and co-founder of ClearSky Data. It wasn’t long ago that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the de facto choice in every public cloud conversation. No matter your market or the size of your business, if your IT team was talking about capturing better economics in the cloud, they were talking about AWS. As Microsoft Azure picks up momentum, especially among enterprises, those conversations are following a different pattern. Instead of asking, “Should we move to AWS?,” as they have for nearly 10 years, CIOs are often asking, “Should we move to AWS or Azure?” Unfortunately, this is the wrong question. We’re now living in a multi-cloud environment. The future is not one in which IT leaders will choose which cloud to embrace, but rather, which clouds to embrace for which applications. How Choosing a Public Cloud Provider Became an Either/Or Proposition When AWS first came on the scene, enterprises were wary. While AWS was becoming a mature public cloud offering, and devOps professionals rose up as primary consumers, enterprise IT didn’t “know” Amazon, and CIOs didn’t want to get locked into relationships with an unfamiliar vendor. Meanwhile, the competition was lagging far behind Amazon in terms of features and functionality. Today, that is no longer true. Azure now stands up convincingly against AWS, and Microsoft has the advantage of long-standing connections with enterprise IT leaders. The CIOs and VPs of infrastructure who balked at going all in with Amazon have known their Microsoft reps for years, and they’ve relied on Microsoft solutions throughout their careers. Azure’s ascent is clear in RightScale’s “2017 State of the Cloud” report. The latest statistics show Azure adoption climbing from 26 percent to 43 percent, while AWS had a modest bump from 56 percent to 59 percent. When you drill down into those numbers and focus solely on large enterprises, Azure looks even stronger. Given this shift, it’s easy to see how the market conversation might boil down to, “AWS or Azure?” But in practice, it seems users continue to resist tying themselves to one provider or another. RightScale’s “2017 State of the Cloud” report also indicates that 85 percent of enterprises have multi-cloud strategies, a three-point rise over the previous year. This is as it should be. Competitive Cloud Future Benefits the Enterprise The public cloud is not one-size-fits-all, no matter whether you’re considering AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM SoftLayer or another provider. This is a good thing. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a tenet of IT stewardship, and leaders should apply it to cloud services as they move ahead with transforming their operations. That transformation is well underway, with nearly 75 percent of organizations reporting hybrid cloud use, according to RightScale. Hybrid cloud is becoming a necessity, as enterprises seek to deliver true data mobility to their users, including access to data on demand – without the cost or complexity of traditional enterprise data storage. Multi-cloud strategies are central to this evolution, which should come as welcome news to IT leaders. You don’t need to ask, “Which cloud is better?” when the question that delivers value is: “Which cloud is better for my applications and my enterprise?” 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)
6:05p	Build 2017: Prepare for an Ecosystem of Devices Connected Through Windows Brought to you by IT Pro During Build 2017, which was held in Seattle last week, there were plenty of sessions that talked about how new tools and services could impact your companies DevOps approach to managing your own applications and services. Many of these DevOps related sessions are already online at the Channel 9 Build Event website and others will be coming online shortly so there is plenty for you to watch and catch up on for sure. However, I think there is a broader message from last week’s event that will impact you as IT Pros and System Admins and you will need to start looking at these changes early in order to be ready when your users come forward and ask for these capabilities. It was the Build 2017 Day Two keynote led by Microsoft Executive Vice President Terry Myerson and other members of the Windows and Devices Group presented about the upcoming Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Their message was simple – any ecosystem of devices will be better if there is a Windows device connecting them together. By using Cortana as the connectivity between devices they want to enable end users to have access to all of their data on any of these devices along with the capability to pick up where they were at anytime, on any device, and any program/app. Some work has already been in place for this and with the Creators Update, which was released back in April, users can already take advantage of a small element of the Pick Up Where You Left Off feature. Currently that enhancement will show you websites and work you were doing on another device within 30 minutes of logging in on another device with the same Microsoft Account. Here is what that looks like in the Action Center: Pick Up Where You Left Off via Cortana on Windows 10 Creators Update When this feature expands in the Fall Creators Update, which is expected around September of this year, it will be named Timeline and become more like ALT+TAB on steroids because the feature will show the user what they have been working on across all of their devices. It will also extend to and from iOS, Android, Windows 10 Mobile devices, and of course other Windows 10 devices. Users will also still see items on Cortana using the Pick Up Where You Left Off feature as they do now in the Creators Update. Based on the images in the demos at Build 2017, it appears Timeline will be a full screen transparent overlay interface to review those items. You will also see that it appears other widgets will be available, such as weather, for quick access to that type of information. Windows 10 Fall Creators Update – Timeline Another feature that will connect data across the devices in a users ecosystem will be a universal clipboard. We have seen official and unofficial attempts at this over the last couple of years and it looks like it is finally coming to Windows 10 in the Fall Creators Update. During the keynote this was referred to as the Cloud-powered Clipboard and in the associated blog post from the Windows team it is called simply Clipboard. No matter what the official name is, this is a clipboard that will give you access to the different things you copy to your devices clipboard across all of your connected devices. Once again, I believe Cortana and a Microsoft Account is going to provide the channel between devices since it already has the ability to identify what mobile devices are tied with your Microsoft Account. Windows 10 Fall Creators Update Cloud-powered Clipboard If someone works from multiple devices and needs this info on another device that means it will be accessible without needing to email images or links to yourself. This feature will also be integrated into the various Office apps/programs to facilitate easy access to that data across devices. For your users who need access to Linux it is now going to be even easier to get that support to them through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as Ubuntu is now available through the Windows Store. Very soon SUSE Linux and Fedora Linux will also become available through the Windows Store for the ease of managing them within WSL. Windows Subsystem on Linux (Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora Shells) As you can see, there is a tremendous focus on a users ecosystem and stable of devices and it does not matter what platform they are on be it iOS, Android, or Windows. The Redmond company believes that users need/should have access to their data and work across those devices in a seamless way and these changes are the steps they are taking to start that transition. If you want to learn more be sure to check out the Build 2017 Day Two keynote video on-demand, read the announcement blog post about the Fall Creators Update and these features, and join the Windows Insider Program to get early access to these capabilities to begin testing them in your organization. Consumer and Business variations of the Windows Insider programs are available. This article originally appeared on IT Pro. ———- But, wait…there’s probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+. ———————————- Looking for an awesome, no-nonsense technical conference for IT Pros, Devs, and Devops? Check out IT/Dev Connections! (Comment on this)
6:46p	FireEye, Symantec Jump as Ransomware Hack Seen Boosting Spending Molly Schuetz and Stephen Sweeney (Bloomberg) — FireEye Inc., Symantec Corp. and other cybersecurity stocks jumped Monday as a global computer hacking attack entered its third day, suggesting higher corporate and government spending on their technology will follow. A wave of threats demanding a ransom of $300 to unlock the computer or risk losing data hit more than 200,000 computers in at least 150 countries from the U.S. to Europe to Asia. The malware used a technique purportedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency. The victims were given 72 hours to pay the ransom in bitcoin. FireEye, which provides software security services, rose as much as 8.8 percent in New York. Analysts at Oppenheimer Securities said the Milpitas, California-based company could be the biggest beneficiary of higher cybersecurity spending, due to its exposure in Europe, where the most high-profile of the attacks occurred. At the height of the crisis Friday and early Saturday, 48 organizations in Britain’s National Health Service were affected, and hospitals in London and elsewhere urged people with non-emergency conditions to stay away as technicians tried to stop the spread of the malicious software. New Cases The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre said new cases of ransomware are possible “at a significant scale.” The so-called WannaCry attacks “could serve as a wake-up call for many organizations and countries delaying a review of their cybersecurity hygiene,” said Shaul Eyal, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., in a note to clients. A new version of the ransomware may have also been spreading over the weekend. Companies including Palo Alto Networks Inc., Symantec, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.,  Cisco Systems Inc. and Oracle Corp. are others that are likely to benefit, according to Pierre Ferragu, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. The $967 million PureFunds ISE Cyber Security ETF, or HACK, jumped the most in six months. Symantec rose as much as 5.3 percent, the most since August, to $32.65 in New York. Just last week the company reported revenue forecasts for the current quarter that missed analysts’ estimates. It has been struggling with falling sales of its Norton antivirus to consumers. Proofpoint Inc., rose as much as 8.9 percent to $87.32, its highest intraday price since November. ‘Incrementally Positive’ The weekend’s attack, as well as President Trump’s Cybersecurity Executive Order, signed last week and aimed drawing attention to security improvements, are both incrementally positive for the cybersecurity sector, Ferragu said. Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith, in a blog post Sunday, said the attack is a “wake-up call” for governments around the world. “This attack is a powerful reminder that information technology basics like keeping computers current and patched are a high responsibility for everyone, and it’s something every top executive should support.” He said the attack “demonstrates the degree to which cybersecurity has become a shared responsibility between tech companies and customers.” (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2017/05/15 [Calendar]

Next Day >>