[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Thursday, May 18th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Facebook’s Data Center Powerhouse Spawns another Startup “Do you believe network is storage?” That quote is one of the only clues we have about the nature of the latest startup launched by former members of Facebook’s cutting-edge data center team. Over the last six or seven years, Facebook has become one of the handful of companies whose scale means they’ve had to innovate at every level of data center infrastructure, pushing the envelope in data center and hardware design further than most data center vendors and their customers as a result. And that means the company attracts some of the brightest minds in the space, who often eventually see business opportunities of their own and leave to pursue them. The quote above is the only full sentence on the current one-page website of RStor, a stealthy startup headed by CEO Giovanni Coglitore, Facebook’s former senior director of hardware engineering. See also: How to Get a Data Center Job at Facebook While at Facebook, Coglitore played a key role in development of cold storage technology using Blu-ray disks. Frank Frankovsky, another important figure in Facebook’s data center hardware story, launched a startup around the technology. The startup was called Optical Archive, and it was quickly acquired by Sony, which Coglitore later joined as CTO, according to his LinkedIn profile. Here’s Coglitore giving a demo of the cold storage technology while still at Facebook: RStor also recently brought on board Ken Patchett, who oversaw Facebook data center operations on the US West Coast over the last five years and was one of the key people who presided over development of the first data center the social networking giant designed and built for itself — its Prineville, Oregon, facility. Patchett left Facebook in March and joined RStor as VP of data center operations, according to his LinkedIn profile. The fact that the startup needs a man with a skillset like Patchett’s likely indicates that the company requires substantial data center horsepower, which means it’s probably planning to be more than a technology vendor. We’ve reached out to both Patchett and Coglitore to learn about RStor and will write a follow-up piece once we get more details. The startup’s VP of engineering is Conor Malone, who joined in February after a five-year stint at Hyve, one of the biggest suppliers of data center hardware based on designs that came out of the Open Compute Project, the open source data center and hardware design community Facebook launched in 2011. Malone has been one of the most active OCP members and contributed multiple designs through Hyve. Both Coglitore and Frankovsky have also been key figures within OCP, which brings us to another startup that was launched by Facebook and OCP alumni and quickly gobbled up by a giant. Coolan, started by Amir Michael (who led Facebook’s earliest in-house server design efforts and was one of the founders of OCP), his brother Yoni Michael, and Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s former VP of infrastructure and technical operations, applied analytics and machine learning to help data center operators optimize hardware costs. Last year Coolan was acquired by Salesforce, and both Michael brothers are now working in top infrastructure roles for the cloud software giant. |
| 3:00p | Report: Stream to Build $250M Minneapolis Data Center for US Bancorp Dallas-based Stream Data Centers announced that it is building a new $250 million, 56,000-square foot data center for U.S. Bancorp in the Minneapolis metro area, expected to be complete by the year’s end, reported the Dallas Business Journal. The single-story data center, designed to support IT loads of 2.4 MW across two halls, will offer redundant utility power from two separate substations. The new facility brings Stream’s total delivered capacity in the market upward of 10 MW, according to area-info.net. Stream is also in the process of building a 210,000-square foot data center in Legacy, its sixth facility in Texas. “The Twin Cities are rapidly becoming a major national data center market,” said Rob Kennedy, co-managing partner of Stream. “This new facility demonstrates the strength of a talented local workforce, robust incentives, available power and growing connectivity.” In the past five years, more than 25 new or refurbished data centers have been completed in Minnesota, according to officials with The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). Ninety-percent of the projects, worth more than $2 billion in investments, are in the Twin Cities. |
| 3:30p | So, You Want a Career in DevOps? Sarah Lahav is CEO of SysAid. Aspiring technologists sometimes ask me how to pursue a career in DevOps. My first question is, “Which DevOps?” The term has become loaded almost beyond recognition, like a camel carrying your entire set of living-room furniture. You see what the animal is hauling (often, an entire company), but you can’t see the creature beneath. DevOps means different things to different people. However, all “shades” of DevOps have similarities and demand comparable skillsets. Understanding this common ground will help you land a DevOps’ job with any company. Let’s start with the basics: DevOps is a mashup of Development and IT Operations. Traditionally, these two factions worked independently and didn’t get along well. DevOps became the “agile” approach to practicing Dev and Ops. Agile is a whole separate camel and beyond the scope of this discussion. Let’s just say that DevOps took technology production from horse-and-buggy speed to a space-age pace. Saying, “I want to pursue a career in DevOps,” is equivalent to saying, “I want to pursue a career in libertarianism.” DevOps is just a set of ideas about how an organization should produce software, just as libertarianism is a set of ideas about how governments ought to run. The question is, would a DevOps culture be a good fit for you? Honestly, it’ not for everyone. Some people get into technology because they don’t want to communicate with people. If that’s you, DevOps won’t fit. It’s 50 percent coding, 50 percent interacting with people. The five to 10-member teams makes human contact unavoidable. You sit so close together you can practically smell each other. That environment fosters speed and flexibility (and hopefully daily showering). DevOps strives for continuous change and improvement. Teams might ship code once every three weeks or as often as multiple times daily. Thus, it’s a high-pressure, unrelenting, unpredictable environment. If you don’t enjoy that intensity, DevOps may be your personal hell. The nature of DevOps is experimental. You don’t have time for focus groups and market research. You can’t anticipate what will work. You ship and fail rather than spend months proving what you should or shouldn’t do. If you’re a perfectionist and want the space to get things “right,” stay clear of DevOps. I’m not trying to scare you away. I happen to really enjoy DevOps. And yes, DevOps pros are in high-demand, but so are dozens of other job roles! Only pursue DevOps if you love creating digital technology and feel that the work style is a good match. If you are set on DevOps, you might wonder, “What should I study in college?” Don’t worry, whatever they teach you is going to become obsolete quickly. In DevOps, you’ll be winging it until you retire. Learn to write good code and document it. But more importantly, become a stellar self-learner. Every organization that creates technology will, eventually, use a form of DevOps. Assume that your potential employers do, and ask questions to discern their shade of DevOps. How do you structure your teams? How often do you ship code (and why)? How do you measure tasks, progress, and overall success? How has adopting DevOps affected your business and company strategy? What technologies and vendors do you depend on? Ignore all the stuff loaded on the camel. Wherever you practice DevOps, it’s going to be collaborative, fast, and experimental. And you’ll have to teach yourself the skills. Enjoy the ride! 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. |
| 4:49p | Microsoft to Open Africa Data Centers to Seek Edge in Cloud Push Loni Prinsloo (Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. will offer cloud-computing services from data centers in Africa for the first time, seeking an edge over rivals in targeting local customers. The software maker said Thursday it plans to open two data centers in Johannesburg and Cape Town as part of an expansion that stretches across 40 regions globally. Previously companies in Africa had to rely on Microsoft’s European data-center hubs such as Ireland and the Netherlands. “We’re excited by the growing demand for cloud services in Africa and the ability of the cloud to act as a catalyst for new economic opportunities,” Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president for cloud and enterprise, said in a statement. See also: Cloud Giants Disagree on the Future of Corporate Data Centers By moving data centers closer to customers, Microsoft is able to speed up cloud-service delivery and comply with laws that require certain data to be stored locally. The expansion in Africa will allow Microsoft to get a jump on its larger cloud rival Amazon.com Inc. The availability of cloud services from within Africa will spur entrepreneurship and fuel business growth, Guthrie said. Microsoft will sell Azure computing power and Office 365 internet-based apps from South Africa starting in 2018, the company said. African customers using Microsoft’s cloud include Standard Bank Group Ltd., one of Africa’s largest lenders. “We greatly value Microsoft’s commitment to invest in cloud services delivered from Africa,” Standard Bank Chief Information Officer Brenda Niehaus said in the statement. See also: Microsoft Takes Hands-Off Stance on LinkedIn Data Centers, for Now |
| 6:27p | Cisco Ups Layoffs to 6,600 After Big Forecast Miss  Brought to you by MSPmentor Cisco Systems said it would lay off 1,100 more employees than anticipated after reporting today it expects to miss its fourth-quarter revenue target by as much as 6 percent, year over year. The world’s largest network gear manufacturer had already announced 5,500 job cuts in August of 2016. Cisco now plans to shed a total of 6,600 jobs as the company comes off its sixth straight quarter of declining revenue, amid a pivot from a focus on hardware to software products. “I am pleased with the progress we are making on the multi-year transformation of our business,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement. “The Network is becoming even more critical to business success as our customers add billions of new connections to their enterprises,” the statement continued. “We are laser focused on delivering unparalleled value through highly secure, software-defined, automated and intelligent infrastructure.” Cisco reported revenues of $11.9 billion for their third quarter – ended April 29 – down 1 percent from the same quarter in 2016. Despite the air of gloom, net income was up 7 percent year over year, at $2.5 billion. “We executed well in Q3, delivering $11.9 billion in total revenue, while driving solid profitability and cash generation as we deliver on our strategic priorities,” Cisco CFO Kelly Kramer said. “We will continue to invest in growth areas as we move the business toward more software and recurring revenue and return value to shareholders.” For the coming quarter, however, Cisco said revenue could fall to just over $12 billion, for Q4, which ends Sept. 30. Analysts had expected something closer to $12.5 billion. On an earnings call today, Robbins attributed the revised revenue forecast, in part, to a 4 percent decline in public sector business, which is suffering because of political uncertainty in Washington, D.C. “It’s a pretty significant stall right now with the lack of budget visibility,” the CEO said, according to Reuters. Revenue for Cisco’s cybersecurity products business continued a positive trend, growing 9 percent to $527 million. Still, even that business fell short of analysts’ expectations of more than $545 million. The news sent Cisco shares plunging $1.4 percent today, to $33.83 per share, on a day when the broader Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 372.82 points. Cisco stock fell another 7.7 percent in after-hours trading, to $31.22 per share. This article originally appeared on MSPmentor. |
| 7:00p | SolarWinds Closes Acquisition of Scout Server Monitoring  Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud IT management software provider SolarWinds announced on Wednesday that it has completed the acquisition of Scout Server Monitoring, which will bring deep server monitoring capabilities for DevOps professionals. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Pingdom Server Monitor, formerly Scout Server Monitoring, will join Pingdom website uptime and performance monitoring products, as well as Librato, Papertrail, and TraceView in its SaaS portfolio for monitoring cloud-native applications, servers and other infrastructure. [Download Talkin’ Cloud’s free Essential Guide to Application Performance Management and Monitoring Software] DevOps and the technologies and practices that have come with it have ushered in new goals and requirements for monitoring. With Pingdom Server Monitor, customers are able to track custom metrics and create alerts, and integrate with more than 90 plugins including DevOps tools like Chef and Puppet. The deal will see Scout co-founder and CTO Andre Lewis join SolarWinds. Back in 2015, Lewis said in an interview with The WHIR that its focus on user and developer experience helped it gain loyal customers. “[Scout] started as a labor of love. We were doing consulting for Ruby on Rails development at the time and we built Scout as an internal tool to help keep tabs on some of the software that we were building for customers. We ended up productizing it and as a result I think Scout server monitoring is unusually finely tuned to the needs of developers because it actually grew out of our own needs at the time,” Lewis told The WHIR at AWS re:Invent 2015. “We’re very excited to add Pingdom Server Monitor, formerly Scout Server Monitoring, to our portfolio of products,” Christoph Pfister, executive vice president, products, SolarWinds said in a statement. “With it, developers and DevOps practitioners have access to an affordable, SaaS-based server monitoring solution. We look forward to investing in it and we welcome Andre Lewis to the SolarWinds team to help in those efforts.” “The era of cloud and digitalization is driving exponential application growth and increased complexity,” Pfister said. “It’s clear that cloud-native developers and DevOps teams need faster troubleshooting that enables them to more easily solve problems and improve performance across the full stack, including servers. The goal of our SaaS portfolio, and the market-leading products within it, is to provide just that, and to do so at an affordable price.” Last year, SolarWinds acquired LOGICnow to form its SolarWinds MSP division. This article originally appeared on Talkin’ Cloud. |
| << Previous Day |
2017/05/18 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |