Friday, June 2nd, 2017

Time	Event
12:00p	Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: May 2017 Here are the 10 most popular articles that appeared on Data Center Knowledge in May: Oracle Closes Big Cloud Deal With AT&T, Inks Equinix Partnership – AT&T is planning to move “thousands” of Oracle databases running currently in the telco’s own data centers onto Oracle’s cloud platform in a deal that includes both Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service. The Fat New Pipes that Link Facebook Data Centers – The amount of traffic traveling between Facebook data centers today is many times bigger than the amount of traffic that travels between its infrastructure and the internet, where its 2 billion monthly active users access the social network. Cyxtera Puts a Fresh Spin on CenturyLink’s Former Data Center Empire – The new company former Terremark CEO Manuel Medina is building on the former CenturyLink platform, differentiating with a very specific focus: cybersecurity. Inside a former CenturyLink data center, now owned by Cyxtera (Photo: CenturyLink) Massive, Six-Story Data Center in a Norwegian Mine Comes Online – Situated within a deep fjord—much like the neighboring Green Mountain facility at Stavanger—the servers will be cooled using seawater cooling systems. The saltwater brought from the depths of the fjord is 45 degrees and cools less corrosive fresh water. Inside the Lefdal mine data center in Norway, rendering (Image: Lefdal) Furious Land War Erupts Outside CME Data Center – It’s the latest, and perhaps boldest, salvo in an escalating war that’s being waged to stay competitive in the high-speed trading business. The war is one of proximity — to see who can get data in and out of CME the quickest. The Aurora I data center in Aurora, Illinois, CyrusOne acquired from CME Group in April 2016. CME is a tenant at the facility, hosting the CME Globex trading platform there. (Photo: CyrusOne) Facebook’s Data Center Powerhouse Spawns another Startup – Facebook’s data center team attracts some of the brightest minds in the space, who often see business opportunities of their own and eventually leave to pursue them. LinkedIn’s Data Center Standard Aims to Do What OCP Hasn’t – While fomenting a full-blown revolt against the largest American hardware vendors’ once-outsize influence on the hyper-scale data center market, by many accounts Facebook’s Open Compute Project has yet to make a meaningful impact in smaller facilities that house the majority of the world’s IT infrastructure. Open19 server chassis (Photo: Open19) Switch Plans Gigantic Atlanta Data Center Campus – The future data center in Atlanta will be to Switch’s Grand Rapids, Michigan, site what its Las Vegas campus is to the one in Reno, Nevada, meaning it will be one of two East Coast locations that are far enough from each other to enable a resilient, redundant application topology across two geographically separated sites for its customers. DCK Investor Edge: CyrusOne — Catch Me If You Can – The inability for hyperscale cloud providers to forecast their own customer growth is at odds with their need to seamlessly provide them with unlimited servers “on-demand.” This has created a new playing field for resourceful landlords: The opportunity to co-create wholesale data center solutions to meet increasingly tight schedules that can deliver on contractual service level agreements, or SLAs. CyrusOne’s Houston West data center (Image: CyrusOne) Verizon to Sell Cloud and Managed Hosting Business to IBM – The telco began pulling back from being a cloud service provider last year, when it shut down its public cloud but held on to its virtual private cloud business. Verizon and other telcos (such as CenturyLink and AT&T) have been divesting costly infrastructure assets that support their enterprise IT services, switching to less capital-intensive models for some services and pulling out completely from others, namely public cloud. Inside a Verizon data center. (Photo: Verizon) 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   (Comment on this)
6:15p	In the World of Digitized Business, the Data Center Reigns Supreme Antonella Corno is Senior Manager of Product Strategy for Learning@Cisco. Today’s data centers bear little resemblance to those of the past in terms of the responsibility they carry. For digitized businesses, the data center is the hub of a whole new realm of possibilities. It serves as a versatile reservoir of data and software and must remain up and running to serve the organization and its customers. Enterprises need access to data from anywhere. They must analyze it instantly and then use it to make rapid decisions closer to where the data came from in order to fuel innovation and reach their desired business outcomes. Thus the business need has changed from simply connecting devices. It is now about securing, aggregating, automating and drawing insights from the data these devices generate. All done in a way that opens up new markets and new business models. Spending on data centers will rise to $16 billion by 2019, according to IDC. The research firm also forecast that by 2018, 60 percent of companies will rely on highly instrumented data centers that use automation to boost efficiency and tie data center and IT spend to business value. In such an environment, the skills that data center professionals must have are changing rapidly. Those who embrace this development and learn new skills will be rewarded. The ones who don’t will be left behind. Skills Needed in Modern Data Center Infrastructure To upgrade data center architectures for today’s digitized world, data center professionals need advanced skills. While deep product and technical knowledge is still necessary, IT professionals focused on data center are expected to have skills and knowledge depth and breadth with multiple technologies that enable the data center for “IT-as-a-service” agile infrastructure. Professionals in the today’s data center will be expected to cover a much broader area of knowledge and expertise. A few specialists will remain, but more and more they will need new skills and be expected to take advantage of new technologies focused on data center infrastructure. These infrastructure-oriented skills span servers, storage, networking and hardware. Other skills cover software, the cloud, virtualization and secure date center and data protection. Shouldering these new skills enable you to turbo-charge your value to the organization. Automating IT tasks shortens the time needed to get applications running and to meet business needs better. Data center professionals need to know how to use SDN policies that take into account business needs across physical and virtual networks, servers, storage, security and services. They must also integrate all physical and virtual environments under one policy model. All of this enables businesses to derive greater value from growing volumes of data in a faster timeframe. It also significantly boosts IT responsiveness without additional resources. To validate these skills, the good news is that there are certifications that data center professionals can obtain. IT professionals with data center certifications can tackle challenging roles in today’s complex data centers. New Skills for the Data Center Skill-based certification and training enables IT practitioners to optimally plan, implement, and run IT data center network infrastructure in support of agile and innovative business initiatives. The knowledge and skills should serve learners at all levels, from the beginner to the advanced professional. Training should enable the IT practitioner on topics such as: Basic skills for installing, configuring and maintaining data centers The basics of cloud computing, automation and orchestration of data center infrastructure Unified computing Virtualization Data center virtualization SDN management and monitoring Data center security Policy-driven infrastructure Storage networking Evolving technologies like IoT and cloud Looking Ahead The data center has become the foundation of the digitized business. Investing in the learning and development of data center employees is critical to the life of the business. IT practitioners need to understand how to harness new data center technologies to deliver business agility. By equipping team members to manage the modern data center, businesses proactively prepare for their success. 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)
7:09p	Friday Funny: Modular Data Center Thought we didn’t need a raised floor for one of these… Here’s the cartoon for this month’s Data Center Knowledge caption contest. This is how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon, and we challenge our readers to submit the funniest, most clever caption they think will be a fit. Then we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Submit your caption below in the comments below. Congratulations to Tim Dickey, who won March’s contest for the White Space cartoon. Tim’s caption was: I’m not sure if the Product team understood the meaning of ‘greenfield’ data center. Some good submissions came in for April’s Trade Show edition; all we need now is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below: Take Our Poll Stay current on Data Center Knowledge’s data center 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. (Comment on this)
9:40p	Data Center Optimization: How to Do More Without More Money Data centers are pushing the boundaries of the possible, using new paradigms to operate efficiently in an environment that continually demands more power, more storage, more compute capacity… more everything. Operating efficiently and effectively in the land of “more” without more money requires increased data center optimization at all levels, including hardware and software, and even policies and procedures. The Existing Environment Although cloud computing, virtualization and hosted data centers are popular, most organizations still have at least part of their compute capacity in-house. According to a 451 Research survey of 1,200 IT professionals, 83 percent of North American enterprises maintain their own data centers. Only 17 percent have moved all IT operations to the cloud, and 49 percent use a hybrid model that integrates cloud or colocation hosts into their data center operations. The same study says most data center budgets have remained stable, although the heavily regulated healthcare and finance sectors are increasing funding throughout data center operations. Among enterprises with growing budgets, most are investing in upgrades or retrofits to enable data center optimization and to support increased density. At the same time, server density has increased. Since the mid-1990s when the IBM AS/400 mini-computers were popular and many of today’s data centers were designed, server density has increased by 84-fold. Power needs have increased from about 100 watts per square foot for many legacy computers, to about 600 watts for cutting-edge blade servers. As server density increases and the data center footprint shrinks, any gains may be taken up by the additional air handling and power equipment, including uninterruptable power supplies and power generators. In fact, data center energy usage is expected to increase by 81 percent by 2020, according to CIO magazine. Contracts and Procedures In order to operate in such an environment at NaviSite, “We set our goals annually, targeting a five percent annual savings. That forces us to be creative, because you can only squeeze so much from the turnip,” notes Ron Pepin, global director of data center operations for Time Warner Cable’s business class service, NaviSite. Savings may come from a variety of sources. For example, the Natural Resources Defense Council recommends that data centers “review their internal organizational structure and external contractual arrangements and ensure that incentives are aligned to provide financial rewards for efficiency best practices.” John Miecielica, produce management principal for data center optimization specialist TeamQuest, advises managers to look at risk and efficiency when evaluating contractual relationships. “External agreements are about risks, such as ensuring you have the capacity to meet service level agreements. Review them periodically to ensure they remain efficient. “For example, when Lady Gaga promoted her single on Amazon in 2011, it crashed the servers. She had to halt the promotion until Amazon added capacity. As another example, when Healthcare.gov went live in 2013, the system crashed and was down for six months,” Miecielica recalls. Right-Sizing Often, identifying and decommissioning unused servers during a data center optimization project is a challenge, along with right-sizing provisioning. Virtualization makes it easy to spin up resources as needed, but it also makes tracking those resources harder. The result is that unused servers may be running because no one is certain they’re not being used. A study by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Anthesis reports that up to 30 percent of servers are unused, but still running. Likewise, a system may be provisioned with four CPUs but is really only using two. Such situations tie up compute capacity that may be needed by other machines, Miecielica explains.  “Right-size your environment. Whether it’s physical or virtual is irrelevant,” Miecielica says. “Evaluate the risk of running out of capacity, provisions to meet that risk and resources that may be repurposed to avoid that risk.” Along with right-sizing hardware, Miecielica also advises scrutinizing applications to ensure they’re written efficiently. One company, for example, habitually upgraded its hardware but found it could delay those upgrades by optimizing the applications. A similar principle extends to storage. While data deduplication (removing duplicate files) is widely used, over-crowded storage remains an issue for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Deduplication can free much-needed storage space. Miecielica says it is one of the top two issues (along with security) for SMEs. Facilities “Optimizing operations requires a constant balancing of the environment,” Pepin says. NaviSite looks at LED lighting, air flow, placement dynamics and individual components to optimize individual and overall efficiency. For example, he continues, balancing involves not just heating and cooling but also balancing the air pressure underneath the floor. “As data centers grow, managers don’t consider the open floor tiles or how many are required to produce the best pressure. We conduct monthly efficiency assessments for power and cooling, and determine whether our facilities are still within the guidelines of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).” In considering data center optimization around heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), equipment placement matters. “The air flow is colder where it leaves the HVAC unit, so we place our hotter equipment nearest the source of the cooling,” Pepin says. NaviSite also deployed adiabatic cooling and air side economizers in its last two major buildouts. “This eliminates the need for compressors,” Pepin says. “In our Santa Clara data center, we only use full mechanical cooling 210 hours (about nine days) per year. We use free cooling, filtered for dust, 83 percent of the time. We also eliminated air conditioning in the electrical and utility rooms for further savings. “Deploying free cooling or air side economizers isn’t a major undertaking if you have an underfloor pressurized environment,” Pepin says. It also opens up more floor space because the HVAC equipment can be placed outside the building. After deployment, “Maintenance costs dropped substantially,” he adds. Estimated savings of $23 million in a 15-year period helped NaviSite justify building a new data center. Optimizing air flow is vital for free cooling strategies to work. But, hot aisle/cold aisle containment is not yet ubiquitous, Pepin says. “It’s catching on, though. In July, California became the first state to mandate hot aisle/cold aisle containment for new builds and retrofits.” Rather than build strict hot and cold aisles, NaviSite built upon what it had. As a data center host, NaviSite altered its strategy from caging servers inside hurricane fences to securing them within thin-wall cages that let it contain hot and cold air in smaller segments. “This solid cage suite gives me a better ability to manage the environment for each customer, based on density,” Pepin says. NaviSite also uses LED lighting throughout its data facilities. LEDs use less power than fluorescent fixtures and have come down in price considerably since they were introduced. “We’re retrofitting our data centers now with LEDs and are installing sensors so lights are only on in areas where people are working. That was the only change that occurred in our Chicago data center last year, and it netted a five percent savings in electrical costs. That retrofit saved the 10,000 square foot data center $30,000. Monitor Everything  The other major undertaking managers should consider when going through data center optimization is to institute robust monitoring systems for infrastructure and cloud computing. Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) systems, for example, enable management decisions to be made based upon actual usage rather than on manufacturers’ specifications. NaviSite linked a DCIM to branch circuit monitoring, so managers could see the actual power draw for each rack and device. “That lets us see what’s actually utilized by each customer (rather than merely their contracted usage) and to identify hot spots so we can manage more efficiently.” Pepin says a good return on investment (ROI) for projects is three to five years. “Our ROI was 3.75 years.” In addition to monitoring, managers also need analytics in place to accurately predict and resolve problems. “DCIM and server monitoring, coupled with analytics that link the two, can be very powerful,” Miecielica says. The analytics help managers see, for instance, that moving workflow from X to Y can improve efficiency, but that moving it from X to Z can be even more efficient.” Rather than looking at the data center only as a collective of individual systems to be optimized, Miecielica advises also looking at the data center holistically. “Systems don’t operate in isolation. They are part of a comprehensive package.” As such, synergisms can be identified that may yield additional data center optimization opportunities. Source Creatively If data center optimization is concerned with saving money, managers also should examine their purchasing programs. NaviSite looked for cost efficiencies within volume projects, Pepin recounts. “Look at large commodity items like cabinets, racks, cabling and plug strips.” Pepin eliminated middlemen whenever possible. “For big purchases, we went directly to the manufacturers in China.” He also sought innovative young technology vendors, working with them to design specifications that met all his requirements while significantly lowering the price. Data center optimization, clearly, extends beyond hardware to become a system-wide activity. It is the key to providing more power, more capacity and more storage without requiring more money. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2017/06/02 [Calendar]

Next Day >>