Thursday, December 29, 2016

Data Center Links: December 29, 2016

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:


  • Inside Amazon Hyperscale.  I am a little behind - but catching up on watching AWS re:Invent talks from the event last month. I think the world of AWS VP James Hamilton, and his talk at the event about the inner workings of AWS data center operations is absolutely fascinating. Putting the hyper in hyperscale, James talks about all of the components of their data center architecture, innovation and the things one can do when your unit of measure is in a category of its own. Global network details, 100 waves @ 100G, 32MW data centers with 50-80k servers each, making their own network and compute hardware, machine learning, and just how their massive scale came into being for the cloud giant. Watch the video...  or catch up on a much better article on it at Data Center Frontier.
  • Number of hyperscale data centers reach 300. Citing research from Synergy Research Group CBR reports that the number of hyper scale data centers is expected to reach the 300 mark this month. The report analyzed the data center footprint of major cloud providers and internet service companies. With an average of 13 data center sites each the U.S. accounted for 45% of the number and China and Japan following at 8% and7% respectively. 
  • OneWeb raises $1.2B for satellite-based internet. The race to deliver satellite-powered internet is moving fast. After Tesla asked for permission to launch satellites, OneWeb has raised $1.2 billion to fund a "high volume satellite production facility" that will hopefully produce 15 satellites each week. 

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Data Center Links: December 7, 2016

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:


  1. Equinix buys Verizon data centers.  I 'think' I saw this one coming... but the biggest player in the industry just got bigger.  Just 5 years after Verizon paid $1.4 billion to acquire Terremark, it has sold 24 data centers to Equinix for $3.6 billion. It seems hard to top this asset sale, but I guess we'll see what 2017 brings. I liked Equinix co-founder Jay Adelson's link to the 1998 story about Equinix as a Cisco-backed upstart.  
  2. HPE and Schneider Electric partner on Micro Data Centers. HP Enterprise and Schneider are partnering to deliver a complete pre-fab solution for drop-in-place modular data center. I always liked the previous respective versions of a modular solution that were offered, but this partnership makes sense (targeting the edge and IoT, etc).  Bonus points for not referencing the solution as a 'virtual data center'. Last week Schneider launched the next generation of its EcoStruxure architecture and platform.
  3. Cray and Microsoft partner for deep learning.  At the 2016 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference this week Cray announced the results of a deep learning collaboration between Cray, Microsoft, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) that expands the horizons of running deep learning algorithms at scale using the power of Cray supercomputers.  Research at CSCS utilizes the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on a Cray XC50 with more than 1,000 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators. 
  4. Dell EMC and VMware launch new Hyper-converged systems. Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation Dell launched the VxRack SDDC as a turnkey hyper-converged solution for both traditional and cloud-native workloads. The total lifecycle offering is built on Dell PowerEdge servers and VMware infrastructure software (vSAN, vSphere, and NSX) and VMware SDDC Manger. 
  5. Micron announces 8TB SATA SSD. Micron launched a 8TB Enterprise 5100 series solid state drive this week with random write performances up to 74k IOPS.