Friday, July 17th, 2015

Time	Event
12:00p	ByteGrid’s New CEO on Expanding Beyond Wholesale Data Center Services ByteGrid’s executive-team changes reflect the changing nature of the data center provider business. The company started as a wholesale data center services play but has recently been moving up the stack into compliance-focused services. The new CEO and CFO both come with experience in developing a services business alongside a data center facilities business. Michael Duckett, who was named CEO in June, took over for the company’s co-founder Ken Parent, who became vice chairman of the board. Duckett was formerly COO at CyrusOne. His other prior roles included president and COO at CoreLink Data Centers and senior vice president for Terremark, a data center provider Verizon acquired in 2011. “What attracted me to ByteGrid was the platform that they put in place both organically through data centers, then inorganically through services acquisition of NetRiver and Sidus,” said Duckett. “They’ve really positioned to bring a full service capability to market. I’m focused on how we attack the business on a national basis versus just a local regional.” New CFO Jay Sinder formerly worked with Duckett at Corelink. Sinder joked it was a “three-year job interview between the two of us.” Sinder is fairly new to the data center space — with six years under his belt — but he was a telecom executive for over two decades. Duckett said his career has largely involved companies moving up the stack to accelerate growth. During his time at Terremark the company was beginning to move up the stack, acquiring hosting provider Dedigate. “When you think about wholesale, it’s a low-touchpoint, landlord-tenant-type relationship,” said Duckett. “In the services arena, it’s high-touch in how you’re serving from a technology standpoint. It runs at a different knowledge, skill, and expertise, so it’s hard path ahead to bridge that gap.” The push beyond wholesale data center services isn’t so much a change in direction for ByteGrid, as it is an aggressive push along the same path. ByteGrid acquired Maryland-based Sidus in March, getting into compliant hosting and cloud services. ByteGrid previously acquired Seattle data center provider NetRiver in July 2014, which also came with a managed services capability. What started as a real estate play has morphed into a real estate and IT solutions play. The trend of expanding into multiple disciplines isn’t limited to regional and secondary-market wholesale providers. Digital Realty, the biggest wholesale data center provider in the world, acquired colocation and interconnection specialist Telx just this week, for example, and Duckett expects it’s a trend that will continue. “It’s a great industry to be in, with endless opportunities, and it’s morphing a bit, “ said Duckett. “The big deal this week is an example of that; there’s a transition happening again.” Duckett said ByteGrid will maintain its differentiation through focusing on highly compliant and secure data center services. “The acquisition of Sidus and what they’ve accomplished with healthcare and life sciences is the foundation of that,” he said. “When you look at the requirements to be successful and the rigor on the compliance side needed in healthcare, that bridges well to so many industries and companies. Foundationally, Sidus started where it’s hardest to start. We’re integrating that into all our data centers.” (Comment on this)
3:00p	IBM, Nvidia, Dept. of Energy Team Up to Reinvent Supercomputers As part of a multi-year effort that promises to yield advances in high-performance computing, IBM, Nvidia, and two US Department of Energy national laboratories announced this week they have created two centers of excellence for supercomputing. Announced at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt earlier this week, the alliance calls for IBM and Nvidia to work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop a new generation of HPC technologies based on IBM OpenPower processors and graphic processor accelerators and interconnects from Nvidia. Dave Turek, VP of technical computing at IBM, said the two centers will work on complementary projects intended to find ways to embed compute engines directly within a massively distributed network of storage systems. Rather than moving data to some central location to process it, Turek said, IBM and its partners are working on building a constellation of hardware and software technologies that would make it feasible to move compute engines into both the network and storage layer. “As the amount of data that needs to be processed continues to grow, we need to find new approaches to memory and storage I/O,” he said. “We’re also going to need software to maintain coherence across the environment.” The end goal, said Turek, is to make HPC systems much more broadly accessible to developers by masking as much of the complexity associated with the underlying parallelism involved in running HPC systems at an unparalleled level of scale. Collectively, Turek said, IBM, Nvidia, and the DoE expect the downstream dividends that will be derived by those advances to have broad implications for the IT industry at large. Instead of relying on centralized computing models that revolve around a data center, the industry is on the cusp of a paradigm shift in terms of how massive amounts of data is both processed and managed. As part of that effort, IBM and Nvidia have committed to deliver Summit and Sierra supercomputer systems to Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore, respectively, in 2017 with the goal of making them operational in 2018. The first prototype of the advanced supercomputers is expected to be available to developers in late 2015. The work of the centers is managed by a technical steering group, which includes participants from IBM, Nvidia, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Argonne National labs. (Comment on this)
3:30p	Friday Funny: The Bright Aisle? They say white cabinets can really brighten up a data center… Here’s 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. Congratulations to Darrell, whose caption for the “Hot Aisle” edition of Kip and Gary won the last contest with: “I set the servers to low power mode to brown the buns.” Several submissions came in for last week’s “Data Center Birthday” edition – now all we need is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below! Take Our Poll For previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! (Comment on this)
4:07p	Weekly DCIM News Roundup: July 16 No Limits Software integrates its RaMP DCIM solution with Cisco UCS and Oracle Enterprise Manager. Tier 44 integrates its data center monitoring software with Server Technology PDUs. Schneider Electric and HP do a proof of concept to tie ITSM and DCIM together. CommScope advances its iTRACS DCIM suite with SimpleView interactive interface. No Limits integrates with Cisco UCS Manager and Oracle 12c. No Limits software announced that its RaMP DCIM solution now provides auto-discovery and monitoring of Cisco UCS servers and fabric components through Cisco UCS Manager. The integration auto-discovers detailed information about all UCS components, providing RaMP users with a single platform to manage all Cisco devices. No Limits also announced that RaMP is the first to integrate with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c through their plug-in architecture. Tier 44 announces integration with Server Technology PRO2 PDUs. Tier 44 Technologies announced the latest update to its EM/8 data center monitoring software, with direct integration of Server Technology PRO2 series of PDUs. The company says that combining the two will get continuous metrics across the racks and outlets wherever a PRO2 PDU is installed. Schneider Electric and HP bring DCIM and ITSM together. In a proof of concept teams from Schneider Electric and HP integrated Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare for Data Centers solution with HP OneView Advanced 1.2 to enable automatic detection of new hardware to prepare for monitoring and management. Phase two of the project will look to achieve bidirectional, real-time communication that will push alarms and data, such as power and cooling capacities and their potential impact, to HP OneView. CommScope advances iTRACS DCIM suite. CommScope announced release 4.1 of its iTRACS DCIM suite, featuring a new interactive interface called iTRACs SimpleView and better role-based management to provide privacy and security. (Comment on this)
4:30p	EnterpriseDB Partners with Chinese Cloud Provider Aliyun for Relational Database This article originally appeared at The WHIR EnterpriseDB has partnered with Aliyun, the cloud computing arm of China’s Alibaba Group, to make Postgres Plus Advanced Server database available as a relational database as a service on the Aliyun cloud platform. The partnership will give Aliyun customers a more diversified relational database suite, according to an announcement by the companies on Wednesday. PostgreSQL is an open source relational database, and EDB has developed performance, security and compatibility improvements as part of its Postgres Plus Advanced Server database. The company has also developed database compatibility to make migrating easier for customers. “By deploying EDB’s Postgres Plus Advanced Server, Aliyun can provide customers a database-as-a-service with enterprise-class performance and security, but with a significant pricing advantage because of EDB’s open source model,” Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB said. “China represents a huge new market opportunity and Aliyun will be an influential partner in China as adoption of cloud computing continues to soar there.” “We are partnering with the most respected brands in the marketplace as we roll out new products and services across our cloud platform,” said Yunfei He, product director, Aliyun in a statement. “Together with EnterpriseDB, Aliyun strives to meet the growing demand among users for a high-performing database on the cloud.” Aliyun launched a partnership program in June, called the Marketplace Alliance Program, to expand its international reach and offer localized hybrid cloud services. This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/enterprisedb-partners-with-chinese-cloud-provider-aliyun-for-relational-database (Comment on this)
5:29p	Data Center Power: Product News Roundup Emerson and Eaton make additions to backup data center power product lines, and Power Analytics secures patents for its arc flash protection software. Emerson Redesigns Mid-Range Switchgear Emerson Network Power, soon to be a stand-alone entity, separate from Emerson Electric, claims to have redesigned its ASCO 4000-series paralleling switchgear for backup generators. Thanks to the redesign, the product line now provides “high-end, custom capabilities in a mid-range system,” the company said. Monitoring and control features are now independent of the operator touch screen, and generator control is independent from the master controller. Serves to improve reliability, the hard-wired generator control circuit is separate from the master controller. The switchgear has advanced diagnostics for monitoring power meters, gen-set controllers, automation controllers, automatic transfer switches, and circuit breakers. The company has also worked on making interfaces on the screens more user-friendly, with simple-to-read “one-lines, charts, graphs, and pictograms.” Eaton Improves Circuit Protection Eaton rolled-out a new fused disconnect switch for data center circuit protection. The new Bussmann Low Profile Compact Circuit Protector is designed for faster panel installation and simpler selective coordination requirements. It accepts branch circuit-rated fuses that are current-limiting and have interrupting rating up to 200 kiloamperes. Designed for deployment globally, a variety of configurations provide AC voltage ratings up to 600 volts. Mounting and panel layout dimensions match common low-profile circuit breakers. Power Analytics Beefs Up Arc Flash Patent Portfolio Data center power management software company Power Analytics has received a number of new patents for technologies used in its arc flash protection software. An arc flash is an electrical explosion that happens when a low-impedance connection is made accidentally to ground or another voltage phase. It’s a dangerous, sometimes deadly occurrence in electrical rooms, including electrical rooms in data centers. Power Analytics’ arc flash software continuously monitors electrical systems for potential arc flash hazards. Called Paladin Real-Time Arc Flash, it’s part of the company’s Paladin Live software suite. (Comment on this)
6:55p	DuPont Fabros Launches Second Chicago Data Center DuPont Fabros Technology this week announced it has opened a new 336,000-square-foot data center facility in the Chicago area that at full build-out will have critical load capacity totaling 25.6 MW, according to the company. Built across the street from an existing data center facility the wholesale data center provider operates in Elk Grove, the new CH2 facility is smaller than its predecessor but considerably more energy efficient, Scott Davis, the company’s executive VP of operations, said. To achieve that goal, DuPont is employing a new data center design that employs medium voltage to generate more current. Davis said that higher level of current allows it to employ smaller generators that ultimately wind up creating more watts than the original CH1 facility. The design debuted inside one of the provider’s data center in Ashburn, Virginia. In the first phase of CH2, DuPont is making available 7.1 MW of critical load capacity across five computer rooms totaling nearly 45,000 square feet. Customers can rent entire rooms or opt to share a room. The CH2 facility is already 20 percent leased, while CH1 is 100 percent leased. All customers using CH2 have to agree to make aisle-containment architecture around which the data center design is based. Davis said the new design also eliminates the need for raised floors and enables DuPont to only have to run chillers about 25 percent of the time during the warmer months of the year. The CH2 data center, he said, has a PUE rating of 1.15, which compares to 1.31 to 1.38 for most of its other data center facilities. Davis also noted that the data center design enables them to take advantage of oil-based power distribution units that are deployed outside the computer room. “We excited about the PDUs because they give us an additional two percent efficiency,” said Davis. “There is also now more space available in the computer rooms for IT equipment.” Finally, Davis noted that one of the reasons DuPont opted to build its facilities so close together is that it makes it easier to move staff between the facilities as needed. He said that while the company plans to continue expanding its operations in the Chicago, Northern Virginia, and Silicon Valley markets, the company is also looking at expanding into other geographies, including Dallas, Portland, Toronto and Phoenix. (Comment on this)

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