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Friday, August 11th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Schneider Makes It Big in Hollywood What do military bases, oil companies, and Hollywood visual effects studios have in common? Lumpy compute needs. I’m sure that’s not how they would say it (you’re more likely to hear that kind of language on a Digital Realty earnings call), but these are the types of organizations that don’t need a whole lot of computing horsepower until they do; and when they need it, they need a lot of it, and they need it yesterday. It’s these kinds of shops that made prefabricated all-in-one container data centers a thing. Instead of the years-long process of site selection, permitting, designing, building, and commissioning a brick-and-mortar data center, you order a container from a vendor, who builds and ships one to you, wherever you need it. All the computing equipment you need and the necessary power and cooling infrastructure to support it is already in place, and you simply need to prepare a concrete pad and connect the box to power, water, and network feeds. It’s slightly more complicated than buying a laptop. (OK, it’s a lot more complicated, but not nearly as complicated as building a proper server farm.) Here’s how they actually say it:
That’s Alex Timbs, head of IT at Animal Logic, the visual-effects studio whose list of credits includes movies like The Matrix, The Great Gatsby, The Lego Movie, and Happy Feet. What he means is when the studio gets a contract, it sometimes finds that it needs more data center muscle than it has at the moment. Video rendering is one of the most compute-intensive workloads, and the more sophisticated visual effects get, the more number-crunching power you need. How quickly do they need it? Schneider Electric recently delivered a data center container for Animal Logic in 4.5 months, and Timbs appears to be happy with that time frame. So happy, that he agreed to star in a Schneider-produced promo video for the French energy management and automation giant and bestow upon it the honorable title of “a partner in making movies.” Take a look: |
| 3:45p | SpaceX Rocket to Fire Hewlett Packard Supercomputer Into Orbit |
| 4:30p | Security Researchers Inject DNA with Malware — But Don’t Panic Yet  Brought to you by IT Pro Between startups like 23andMe, makers of an at-home saliva-based DNA kit that promises to help users learn more about their health and family history, and Embark Veterinary, which helps pet owners and breeders learn about ancestry and disease risk of dogs through saliva swabs, DNA testing is having a bit of a moment. But beyond the consumer craze for DNA testing, there is now an interesting example of how DNA is being used in security research. This week security researchers detailed how they were able to hack software using DNA that has been injected with malware. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle call the hack the first DNA-based exploit of a computer system. In their paper that will be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium in Vancouver next week, the researchers explained how they were able to encode malware in a DNA sequence through a DNA processing program. “We then designed and created a synthetic DNA strand that contained malicious computer code encoded in the bases of the DNA strand. When this physical strand was sequenced and processed by the vulnerable program it gave remote control of the computer doing the processing. That is, we were able to remotely exploit and gain full control over a computer using adversarial synthetic DNA,” the researchers said. While this kind of malware could be a potential security risk in the future, the researchers said that there is no reason for any concern yet. They hope that their research will encourage the DNA sequencing community to be more proactive in addressing computer security risks and follow secure software best practices when coding bioinformatics software. “The DNA sequencing community, and especially the programmers of bioinformatics tools, should consider computer security when developing software. In particular, we encourage the wide adoption of security best practices like the use of memory safe languages or bounds checking at buffers, input sanitization, and regular security audits,” the researchers said in a FAQ. “Another issue to consider is how to best maintain and patch bioinformatics software. Much of it is written and maintained by many entities, which makes it difficult to patch and has led to a high prevalence of out-of-date software.” |
| 6:24p | COO Jarrett Appleby Leaving Digital Reality Trust The giant data center provider Digital Reality Trust announced today that its Chief Operating Officer, Jarrett Appleby, is stepping down effective September 15. According a company press release, Appleby is leaving “to pursue other opportunities.” The company indicates that a search for his replacement is already underway, and that it plans to engage the services of an executive search firm to assist with the search. Until a replacement is found, the company says that members of the company’s management team will assume Mr. Appleby’s duties on an interim basis. Appleby has put in nearly two and a half years at Digital Reality, and was the company’s first COO when he signed on in April, 2015. Previously, he had served a two year stint, starting in 2012, as COO for data center operator CoreSite Reality. The departure from Digital is evidently amicable. “On behalf of the entire Digital Realty team, I would like to thank Jarrett for his service to the company and wish him all the best in his future endeavors,” Digital’s CEO, A. William Stein, said in a statement. “As Digital Realty’s first Chief Operating Officer, Jarrett helped to launch and advance several important initiatives, such as expanding and standardizing our global product offerings in addition to streamlining our property and technical operations to drive operating efficiencies, all while maintaining and extending our track record for ‘five nines’ of uptime to a 10th consecutive year. As we search for his successor, we are looking for someone who will be able to build upon this solid foundation and further enhance our global operating platform to meet our customers’ growing and evolving needs for data center solutions.” San Francisco-based Digital Realty Trust is the world’s largest wholesale colocation data center operator, with its market share in January reported to be 20.5 percent. According to the company’s website, it operates 156 data centers in 11 countries and serves over 32 global markets. |
| 8:30p | Facebook Thought to Be Behind New Ohio Data Center According to the Columbus Dispatch, Facebook is behind a planned $750 million data center to be located in New Albany, Ohio. The newspaper cites “sources familiar with the plans,” who have indicated the social network giant will formally announce plans for the project next week. In addition to 1,000 construction jobs, the project is expected to create 50 permanent jobs with an average salary of $80,000. On July 31, a company called “Sidecat” — now thought to be Facebook — was approved for Ohio state tax incentives of more than $37 million for the project. Media reports indicate that the vast majority of that figure is in the form of sales and use tax incentives on IT hardware that will be deployed in the facility. By 2023 the data center is expected to contribute $1.4 million to the local tax kitty. Until Facebook makes an announcement, very little is known about the planned facility. It will sit on a 345-acre parcel of farmland owned by the city of New Albany and will measure 900,000 square feet. Evidently it will be the neighbor of another large data center in the region that’s owned by Amazon, and it’s expected to be operational by 2022. Other than than, it seems to be wait and see. Facebook currently operates six data centers — four in the US and one each in Sweden and Ireland — and along with Intel, Nokia, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others, has made aspects of its data centers’ physical design “open source” under the Open Compute Project. Speculation abounds as to the whys and wherefores of this project, with one website opining that the new facility could be planned to meet expected demand from Watch, Facebook’s new video project. In any event, the company’s number of registered users reached the two billion mark in June, so demand is increasing whether or not the video project flies. Stay tuned. |
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