Tuesday, June 6th, 2017

Time	Event
12:00p	Vyatta Is Solid Tech, but AT&T May Be Late to the Game Two announcements from Brocade Communications Systems last week could augur a power shift in the support and delivery of virtualized infrastructure. The first announcement was that Pulse Secure, a San Jose-based developer of secure access and mobile security tools, agreed to acquire assets of Brocade’s Virtual Application Delivery Controller (VADC) business. This product was developed at Juniper and spun off into its own company in 2014. Brocade acquired the VADC product line as part of its 2015 acquisition of Riverbed Technology’s SteepApp technology. The second announcement was that AT&T agreed to purchase the Vyatta network operating system and virtual firewall business unit of Brocade, which includes the vRouter product line. Vyatta has been around for more than a decade selling virtualized firewalls and routers, and AT&T has some solid reasons behind this acquisition. First, as the cloud and SaaS apps have increased, Vyatta has become a leader in this space. Also, the deal helps AT&T make good on its promise to move to a completely virtualized network stack. AT&T stated in the Vyatta press release: “We expect to virtualize and software-control 75% of our network by 2020. Our plan is to hit 55% by the end of 2017.” If that comes to pass, it could make AT&T’s transformation and virtual networking products more coherent and attractive to enterprise IT managers. Next, network function virtualization could become such a commodity in a few years that AT&T could become the lowest-cost provider, given the tremendous size, capacity, and reach of its global network. And finally, there is always the chance that Cisco could wake up from its deep sleep in the virtualized networking arena and become a major force. See also: Brocade CEO: Specialized Data Center Network Gear on Its Way Out Financial terms of the two deals were not disclosed, but some of the engineers and product managers attached to both product lines will be moving with the transactions. The two product lines are somewhat complementary, and it remains to be seen if having them housed in two separate companies will be better than being ignored inside of Brocade. Now the downside. The AT&T-Brocade deal is reminiscent of the Verizon-Yahoo deal: Both are being done almost too late, by telcos that wanted some internet luster but ended up with getting a bunch of technologies they may be ill-equipped to promote, sell, and enhance. AT&T used to be associated with innovation (remember Bell Labs?) but could provide so many management layers as to prevent real innovation going forward. See also: Telco Central Offices Get Second Life as Cloud Data Centers AT&T will face some stiff competition to do more with the Vyatta brand for enterprise users. First, its presence in the data center, beyond its own dmarc, is almost nil, and that won’t change overnight. Second, Brocade has sold its Vyatta vRouter software via the AWS Marketplace since December 2015, and it has also been available from Rackspace; those are probably the two more likely places where enterprises will purchase this product in the near-term. AT&T will also face some competition from the hypervisor vendors, such as VMware and Microsoft (Hyper-V), both of whom have integrated virtual firewall offerings. And then there are the hyperconverged vendors that will bundle a virtual firewall into their own products and have huge data center contracts and well-developed channels. Finally, the virtual networking space is getting crowded, with vendors such as Catbird, Hytrust, Beyond Trust, and others (including the traditional endpoint AV vendors such as Kaspersky and Bitdefender) selling similar products. Opinions expressed above do not necessarily reflect those of Data Center Knowledge and Informa. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Blackstone Backs Ascenty to Fund Data Center Construction in Latin America Data center provider Ascenty has secured an investment from the multinational private equity giant Blackstone and SDC Capital, an investment firm led by data center industry veteran and longtime Ascenty investor Todd Aaron. The new capital will fund additional multi-tenant data centers in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, the company said this week. The amount was not disclosed, but it comes on the heels of a $190 million loan provided to the company by ING, Itaú BBA, and two international banking institutions to complete the construction of five new data centers in the region and to pay down debt. “Blackstone is excited to partner with Ascenty and Great Hill Partners, Ascenty’s majority shareholder, to accelerate the company’s growth and support its clients,” Jasvinder Khaira, senior managing director at Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, said in a statement. See also: Ascenty Secures $190 million to Fund Data Center Construction in Latin America Founded in 2010, Ascenty owns seven data centers in Brazil that are operational and another under construction in Santiago, Chile. The facilities are interconnected using the company’s proprietary 4,000 km fiber optic network. Other markets the company is looking at are in Mexico and Colombia. “This new capital will allow us to expand not only in Brazil but in other Latin American countries,” Chris Torto, CEO at Ascenty, said in a statement. “Latin America continues to be a vastly under-served market and our focus is to provide world-class data center infrastructure with outstanding customer service for companies looking to deploy in the region.” (Comment on this)
3:30p	Deutsche Telekom Said to Weigh Sale of IT Outsourcing Business Stefan Nicola and Manuel Baigorri (Bloomberg) — Deutsche Telekom AG is considering selling part of its T-Systems unit in a move that could see the German phone company shed a legacy IT business, according to people familiar with the matter. Deutsche Telekom’s management is considering a sale of the outsourcing business of T-Systems’ information technology division, which services computer systems for corporate clients, because of poor operating performance, said the people, who declined to be identified because the discussions are private. The Bonn, Germany-based carrier hasn’t made a final decision and may still decide against a sale, they said. A representative for Deutsche Telekom declined to comment. The unit has come under significant pressure as an increasing number of services and products move into the cloud where they’re available for customers at a lower cost. That’s hurting margins and stifling growth at T-Systems, whose first-quarter sales fell 8.3 percent from a year earlier to 1.7 billion euros ($1.9 billion). The entire T-Systems business had about 43,000 employees at the end of last year, according to Deutsche Telekom’s annual report. See also: T-Systems Raises €100M-Plus to Expand German Data Center Deutsche Telekom Chief Executive Officer Tim Hoettges said this week it “annoys” him that T-Systems failed to report a positive cash contribution, “ruining” its results for 2016. While he praised the T-Systems leadership for cutting costs and introducing new products, “we still have not achieved what we set out to do,” he said Wednesday at the company’s shareholder meeting in Cologne. Deutsche Telekom isn’t the only phone company contending with challenges from big cloud-services providers like Amazon.com and Microsoft Corp. BT Group Plc is restructuring its global services division after a January profit warning that sent the stock reeling. CEO Gavin Patterson said last month that the company may dispose of one or two units outside the U.K. Asset sales may help raise cash for future spectrum auctions in Europe and the U.S., while also reducing the company’s debt of about 50 billion euros. Deutsche Telekom is aiming to sell a 49 percent stake of its 5 billion-euro Deutsche Funkturm tower business by year end, German magazine WirtschaftsWoche reported Friday. See also: IBM, Microsoft Tap New European Markets With Cloud Data Centers (Comment on this)
4:00p	Three Big Misconceptions About Secondary Storage Steve Pao is Chief Marketing Officer at Igneous Systems. Secondary storage continues to evolve as hybrid cloud goes from novel approach to standard best practice. Protecting unstructured data through backups and archiving is critical for enterprises for a number of reasons, including securing intellectual property in the event of a worst-case scenario. Hope for the best but plan for the worst is a smart strategy in life and on the job. However, misconceptions cause many enterprises to approach secondary storage with caution instead of with the enthusiasm I believe they could – and should – have about it, especially given the significant money savings from offloading data from pricey primary storage. In my experience talking with enterprise executives, three big misconceptions about secondary storage prevent them from welcoming its many benefits: Misconception #1 – End Users Can’t – Or Shouldn’t – Be Involved When it comes to data storage decision-making, many enterprises don’t tap the expertise of those closest to the data – their business users. As a result, sometimes these organizations don’t archive inactive data at all, keeping data that is never accessed on expensive, higher performance storage. Other companies try to automate retention policies on performance storage. But their automated policies are either too conservative to achieve the desired cost savings, keeping data in performance storage that doesn’t need to be there. Or, they’re too aggressive, confusing both users and applications. Even when enterprises recognize the value of partnering with business users on data storage, they are limited by complex storage systems that aren’t end user-friendly. But these reasons shouldn’t block enterprises from the cost savings of offloading data to secondary storage. As the subject matter experts on their data, end users are valuable partners in making the right decisions for the business. They know best which data can be archived and which data should stay on primary storage. Involving them can pay off big for the business. Misconception #2 – Archive Data And It’s Lost Forever The great void. A black hole. The big abyss. Whatever nickname IT professionals give to data archives, these names illustrate IT’s frequent belief that once data needs to be “restored” from backup media, they’ll discover it’s gone forever. Most enterprise executives don’t care about backup or archives; they care about the access and restores. For example, one of our customers – a large Silicon Valley-based software vendor – used to keep all customer-created files for reproducing software defects in higher-performance primary storage. The reason? The company needed to occasionally access and restore this data to validate that known defects hadn’t returned. Data recovery wasn’t possible with traditional backup software and tape archives so the enterprise moved these test cases into a lower-cost secondary storage tier that let it access data on-demand, and restore the data to high-performance primary storage when necessary. What good is archiving data if there’s no way to ever get it back? With a black hole impression of secondary storage, it’s no wonder that some enterprises don’t archive most of the data that can be archived and pay for more primary storage than they need. But archiving data and accessing data should not be mutually exclusive. An effective archiving solution must offer fast restores so both IT and business users can feel confident archiving data. Misconception #3 – Secondary Storage Is Very Complex Because primary storage is on premises and secondary storage often involves tape archives, offsite vaulting, and even replication to other data centers and the cloud, enterprises may regard backup and archive as less tangible and more challenging to manage. This tendency to view secondary storage as prohibitively complex makes sense when you consider traditional secondary storage systems. While primary storage usually amounts to file systems in the enterprise data center, complex legacy secondary storage options usually involve multiple systems, requiring multiple software licenses and featuring everything from tape robots and offsite vaulting services to silos of replication policies. Complex? No doubt. In contrast, an effective and modern secondary storage solution takes away the complexity and makes secondary storage even more simple than primary storage. A simple and seamless user experience has a lot to do with that. So does cutting out all the required pieces of the secondary storage puzzle. And eliminating silos and tapping the benefits of cloud helps, too. I hope this article has busted a few of the common myths about secondary storage. Just as you wouldn’t judge the complexity of typing based on a typewriter, you’ll be missing out on savings opportunities if you judge the difficulty of backing up and archiving data based solely on traditional secondary storage. 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)
6:50p	British Airways: Engineer Wrongly Disconnected Data Center Power Supply Richard Weiss and Benjamin Katz (Bloomberg) — British Airways pointed to human error as the cause for mass flight cancellations that grounded at least 75,000 passengers last month and led the carrier’s passenger traffic to decline 1.8 percent. An engineer had disconnected a power supply at a data center near London’s Heathrow airport, causing a surge that resulted in major damage when it was reconnected, Willie Walsh, chief executive officer of parent IAG SA, told reporters in Mexico. The incident led BA’s information technology systems to crash, causing hundreds of flights to be scrapped over three days as the airline re-established its communications. The engineer in question had been authorized to be on site, but not “to do what he did,” Walsh said on Monday, according to BBC. He added that an independent investigation into the problem would now be carried out. The comments were confirmed Tuesday by IAG, which separately quantified the slump in BA traffic and pledged that the probe will examine “every aspect” of the power failure. The outage, estimated to have cost as much as 100 million euros ($112 million), put pressure on BA chief Alex Cruz, who has pushed to cut costs since taking charge a year ago. Walsh had earlier defended Cruz’s handling of the incident, saying it was “very unfair” to blame him. Still, the issue remains of how a single technician could cause so much disruption, and why the airline’s backup systems failed. See also: Most Data Center Outages aren’t Caused by Tech Failure Timetable Turmoil British Airways scrapped 479 flights, or 59 percent of its timetable, on May 27 when the failure occurred, together with 193 services the following day and some on May 29. Group traffic still increased 1.8 percent overall in the month, led by advances of 11 percent at Irish unit Aer Lingus and 7.2 percent at Madrid-based Iberia, according to a statement from IAG. BA is IAG’s biggest earnings contributor, and Cruz is on a mission to boost its profit margin amid stiff competition from discount carriers including EasyJet Plc and Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA by cutting legroom, charging for meals on short-haul flights and outsourcing IT functions to firms outside the U.K. The breakdown at BA was another blow to the aviation industry, which has been plagued by passenger outrage, especially after a passenger-dragging incident at United Airlines. Power issues contributed to operational problems at Delta Air Lines Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co. in 2016, while Air France-KLM Group and Deutsche Lufthansa AG experienced outages earlier this year. See also: Delta: Data Center Outage Cost Us $150M Walsh said in an interview in Cancun that there are no plans to acquire re-engined Airbus SE A330neo jets for IAG’s new discount long-haul arm Level, and that the current version of the wide-body model will be competitive with the oil price as high as $70 a barrel. The first batch of seven longer-range A321 single-aisle jets that IAG has agreed to take from Airbus instead of standard planes will be deployed at Aer Lingus, Walsh said, adding that BA could also get the model. The CEO was attending the International Air Transport Association annual meeting. See also: How Amazon Prevents Data Center Outages Like Delta’s $150M Meltdown (Comment on this)

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