Friday, August 18th, 2017

Time	Event
12:00p	In Moving Production Workloads to Cloud, VMware Professionals Prefer AWS, Azure Brought to you by IT Pro VMware customers are far along on the path to cloud adoption, with many opting for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their preferred cloud platform as they shift VMware production environments off-premises. According to a report released today by Druva, a cloud data protection and information management firm, 47 percent of respondents said that AWS is their chosen cloud platform for these projects. Druva, which delivers a cloud platform which combines data protection and information governance capabilities under a single pane of glass, surveyed 433 VMware professionals for the report. Last year AWS and VMware jointly announced VMware Cloud on AWS, a solution in Technology Preview to make it easy for customers to run VMware workloads on AWS. It is the only VMware-delivered, sold and supported service on a leading public cloud. While the migration of VMware production environments to the cloud is happening, 78 percent of respondents said that they will take a hybrid approach in their environments with both on-prem and cloud infrastructure. See also: VMware, Once “the Easiest Value Proposition in IT,” Defines Its New Role AWS is overwhelmingly the preferred cloud vendor for VMware professionals, with Microsoft Azure as the preferred cloud for 25 percent of respondents. Other respondents said they preferred vCloud Air, IBM Softlayer, and Google Cloud for their cloud migration projects. Druva said that “a surprisingly large number of respondents are considering re-architecting their application to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the cloud platform (like AWS) to start to enhance their VMware environment.” “As a result of the ever-increasing number and complexity of data centers that are expanding to meet the needs of the business applications running on them, there is a growing desire to build applications using many of the cloud service products to augment the VMware environments on public cloud platforms,” the report said. The reasons for migrating VMware production workloads to the cloud are as part of an IT initiative (22 percent), ease of management (16.7 percent), and because it is less expensive (15.6 percent), as compared to on-premise workloads. Respondents also said that the cloud offers better security (13.5) and compliance (12.6 percent). It also found that 82 percent of respondents believe that disaster recovery (DR) for virtual machines (VMs) will be a core need, regardless of where the VM resides. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Maersk Says June Cyberattack Will Cost It up to $300M Christian Wienberg (Bloomberg) — A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S said a cyberattack that hit the owner of the world’s biggest container shipping company at the end of June will wipe as much as $300 million off profits in the third quarter.The announcement was made in connection with second-quarter earnings, which showed Maersk missed analyst estimates after taking a writedown at the tankers unit that’s part of the energy business management has said it wants to get rid of. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Chief Executive Officer Soren Skou said the industry outlook was bright, despite the disruptions of cyberattacks and writedowns. Management at the Danish company sees “very healthy fundamentals” for container shipping, Skou told Bloomberg’s Matt Miller and Guy Johnson. Frode Morkedal, the managing director of Clarksons Platou Securities, said the report was “slightly on the negative side, but we find solace in their positive market comments,” in a note to clients. Of the 31 Maersk analysts tracked by Bloomberg, 15 are telling investors to buy the stock, 12 suggest holding on to it, and four say clients are better off selling. David Kerstens, an equity analyst at Jefferies, said the fact that Maersk Line reported its first profit in five quarters shows that “fundamentals in container shipping continue to improve,” according to a note. Kerstens is among analysts advising clients to buy. Clarksons has a neutral rating on the share. Ebit was $302 million in the second quarter, missing the average estimate of $896 million in a Bloomberg survey of 10 analysts  Maersk had a net loss of $269 million, when analysts had expected a profit Revenue was $9.60 billion, in line with estimates The June cyberattack will cut about $200-300 million off Maersk’s results, it said The company kept its outlook for the full year Profit was hurt by a $732 million impairment due to lower asset valuations in Maersk Tankers and “a few commercially challenged” terminals in the APM unit, it saidMaersk was among a number of multinational companies that in June was hit by a cyberattack. Its IT systems were disabled, preventing the shipping line from taking new orders for several days. Maersk said on Wednesday it kept its outlook despite the costs of the cyberattack, as the container shipping market improves. Read more: Europe’s cyber victims rack up hundreds of millions in costs “These system shutdowns resulted in significant business interruption during the shutdown period,” Maersk said in the report. The financial impact in the second quarter was “limited,” but “the impact in the third quarter is larger, due to temporary lost revenue in July,” it said. “While the businesses were significantly affected by this cyberattack, no data breach or data loss to third-parties has occurred.” Aside from the cyberattack, Maersk said the industry outlook was healthy. After a decade dominated by overcapacity, the container industry is now benefiting from higher freight rates as some of the biggest companies swallow up smaller rivals. Skou also said stronger global economic growth means container transport is now “doing quite well.” Maersk said “the improvement in market fundamentals in past quarters has started to reflect in the freight rate,” which it said was up 22 percent from a year earlier. Freight rates increased by 36 percent on East-West trades and 17 percent on North-South trades, it said. The company has given itself until the end of 2018 to come up with a plan to separate its energy business, which includes Maersk Oil and Maersk Drilling. The conglomerate wants to focus on its transport division, which, besides Maersk Line, includes port operator APM Terminals. (Comment on this)
3:30p	The Rise of Edge Computing Tyler McMullen is CTO of Fastly. When you take a look back at the history of networked applications over the past five decades, it’s easy to see what seems like a cyclical pattern of centralization and decentralization. There were mainframes from the 1960s and 1970s, early internet of autonomous systems in the 1980s,  the centralized architectures of early websites in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the cloud-based present day. However, for once, it appears that the next step is actually to become more distributed, rather than contracting back to a centralized model. Edge computing is on the rise because of changes in the way that we use the internet every day; or, rather, because of the internet-connected devices that we use to order food, monitor our homes, and change the color of the light bulbs. Edge computing is on the rise because it is necessary in order to run the real-time services we’ve come to expect across the internet. We’ve had “smart” devices for many years now: Tiny computers have been embedded in our consumer devices for quite some time. These early smart devices led to what we have begun referring to as the Internet of Things (or IoT). What makes IoT different is that now those devices need to communicate across the internet. The original form of “smart devices” was a more isolated experience. This meant that the user experience with those devices was reliant on the hardware and software. See also: What’s Behind AT&T’s Big Bet on Edge Computing Now that they’re connected to the internet, things are trickier. The user experience now involves the user’s local internet connection, ISP, backbones of the internet, and servers in a data center somewhere. If an IoT device relies on both its local hardware and software, as well as a multitude of remote systems, you run into an interesting problems. The more systems that must be up, functioning, and accessible for a product to work, the higher the likelihood of failure. If it relies on, say, 10 systems, each with 99 percent availability, the overall ability falls to 90 percent. It’s easy to see that the user is going to have a bad time. This is where edge computing comes in. Developers must make sure that their device performs as many functions as it can without an internet connection. (A degraded user experience is still better than none at all, of course.) But not all functions of IoT devices can be performed locally. Imagine, for instance, a home security system that you can control remotely via your mobile device. Clearly, if you are not at home and you want to control the security system, it will need to be connected to the internet so it can receive commands from you. Here, edge computing can used by doing the necessary routing of commands and retrieval of information as close as possible to the user, via an edge cloud platform. The key part here, though, is that for devices people rely on every day, slow response time and outages are unacceptable. We saw this last summer with the outage of a major IoT thermostat provider: The air conditioning suddenly shut off at many homes around the world because the device could not communicate with a centralized service—exactly the type of problem that edge computing is meant to prevent. Again, by moving logic as close as possible to the device—be that in the device itself or at the edge of the internet—we can prevent such outages. Forty percent of people will abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load, and both Google and Facebook prioritize fast-loading webpages — the difference between a fast and slow user experience can be one that makes or breaks a company. The next step in ensuring faster page loads is to avoid having to talk to a centralized server at all. By moving computation and logic as close to users as possible we minimize the amount of communication they have to do and the time it takes to do it. However, the danger and potential pain of centralization is worse than unhappy customers: Centralized systems are an easy target for distributed denial of service (or DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks have been increasing both in size and frequency. According to Arbor Networks, attack size has grown 1,233 percent in the past five years, and attacks are up 44 percent from last year. The past two years in particular have seen a rash of extortion attempts against small and large companies where the threat is that the attacker will use a botnet to take down the business’ website, as was widely reported in 2015 and 2016. Worse still are attacks against critical infrastructure, which we saw last October when major DNS provider Dyn was hit with a massive DDoS, taking down many major sites. Our response to these security concerns needs to be a stronger push toward decentralization. Well-designed systems that are widely distributed and capable of operating independently are both better for our users’ experience, and also much more difficult to take down with attacks. Edge computing—moving computation to the edges of the network and toward the users—is both a natural progression and ideal solution to the challenges the internet will face in the coming decades. Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Informa. 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)

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