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. 

Data Center Links: August 31, 2016

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

• VMWORLD.  VMware's annual event in Las Vegas this week.  I really wanted to attend - but just couldn't ; it looks like an eventful week. Lots of news releases, conversations and partner announcements. VMworld videos can be found on their vmworld TV channel.

• Dell to continue M&A. The now closed $67B deal for EMC just wasn't enough -- Michael Dell says the company will continue to do acquisitions.
• Tegile launches IntelliFlash Cloud.  At VMworld Tegile introduced its IntelliFlash Cloud Platform, a rack scale all-flash platform meant to serve as the foundation of optimized, cost-effective private clouds. 
• Nutanix acquisitions. #NutanixAtVMworld.  Lots of activity at VMworld, but just as the event was getting started Nutanix announced that PernixData and Calm.io will help further the vision for an enterprise cloud by joining the Nutanix family. 
• Virtustream and Iron Mountain join forces. Virtusteam announced that Iron Mountain will use Virtustream to power its cloud-based service offerings. Virtustream's xStream and Viewtrust software will orchestrate, automate and secure cloud storage services for IronMountain.

• Cloud Technology Partners funding round. CTP announced the close of a Series C funding round - unknown amount. Existing investors Rackspace, State Street Bank and Pritzker Group Venture Capital participated in the round. The company will use the funding to expand cloud adoption program, expand CTP's digital innovation practice, build its managed service capabilities, and expand their sales and delivery teams.

• Cisco acquires ContainerX. As its first venture into the container market tech giant Cisco announced its intent to acquire early stage startup ContainerX, for an undisclosed amount. ContainerX is a group of container geeks with PhDs that have a patent-pending approach called Elastic Container Clusters. 

• Dynamic Network Slicing.  Interesting article on network slicing - SDN+NFV+orchestration+analytics.

• Ericsson wins hybrid cloud deal. Ericsson will be the lead partner (with EMC, Telia, OpenNode and Cybernetica) to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure in Estonia. 

• Open AI Infrastructure. The Open AI blog has a nice post on the infrastructure model used to support their deep learning research. Top-end GPUs, AWS cloud donations, Ubuntu, Chef, Kubernetes, OpenVPN and Terraform.

• Elon Musk progressing on Neural Lace Brain hack.  This is just cool - as most things Elon does are.  On Twitter Elon Musk said that he is "making progress" on his neural lace design, which is designed to augment human intelligence.

Cisco To Showcase Allen Texas Data Center

In June 2009 I wrote about a new data center being built in Allen, Texas for Cisco. On Friday, April 15th they will showcase this new facility, including a live broadcast on Ustream.

See this site for a nice chronicle of the facility. The project won the Dallas Business Journal's Best Real Estate Deal award.

Cisco IT at work has a piece on the specifications for the facility and how they are using all of the latest Cisco gear as well as well as ecosystem partners EMC, VMware and NetApp.

Some interesting facts about the Allen, TX site:

• 162,000 square foot
• 10MW
• It will run Cisco's IT Elastic Infrastructure Services - their own internal enterprise cloud
• 10 Cisco UCS Seed clusters, or over 400 servers total
• Will run as a 'metro virtual data center' - applications running simultaneously with those in their neighboring Richardson, Texas facility.
• Diesel Rotary UPS System (DRUPS) presumably from Euro Diesel

It is a pretty interesting case in applying lessons learned and really gearing a data center for massive scalability and with as much 'future-proofing' as possible.

Finally - not that any IT work in this facility should have any long wait times -- but just in case, it looks like there are 'just a few' outlet stores nearby.

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Data Center Stock Market News

Just a couple of items I noticed today in regards to the data center stocks I monitor. First, is an update to the data center stock index I started last year. It has been a roller coaster -- here is the latest graph:

More details on what the index is comprised of can be found here.

The Dow Jones Internet Composite Index has also been graphing quite nicely the last 3 months.

The second story was one I some how missed last week -- Wachovia resumed coverage of the data center space. They immediately rated Equinix and Switch & Data with OUTPERFORM.

"Both companies have high visibility into its revenue base and low churn driven by 1 – 3+ year contracts with escalators. EQIX, SDXC, and other network neutral data centers benefit from a supply demand imbalance due to growth in IP and internet traffic and limited available space close to fiber hubs for telecom equipment and networking gear"

Also late last week submarine transport cable provider Hibernia announced they have expanded into Equinix's LD4 London Slough IBX data center.

Earlier today Datacenterknowledge reported on VMWare taking a 5% stake in Terremark. In terms of institutional ownership, that puts them in 2nd place, behind Ashford Capital Management, who has a 7.98% stake. I thought the comment on the BusinessWeek investing site was interesting:

"There is significant interest in TMRK by institutional investors. The 29.13% of the shares outstanding that they control represents a greater percentage of ownership than at almost any other company in the Specialty Telecommunications industry."

Misc. Tech News - March 1, 2009

34 days and 20 hours left until the opening night of Major League Baseball!

Outside of the fun little newspaper generator mentioned above, I ran across a number of interesting stories this weekend....

• The Data Center Pulse Summit presentations and videos have been graciously posted on their site. There are a number of interesting things mentioned here. NetworkWorld also has a nice write-up of the Top 10 Industry Requests generated at the summit.

• Intel and Microsoft are flexing their muscle when it comes to innovation in the current recession. Microsoft recently had their annual TechFest event to showcase what Microsoft Research had been up to. Slide 13 shows the low powered processors we all heard about recently. Intel Research Laboratories have also been up to quite a bit lately. Wireless Power technology, numerous uses for RFID and robotics were displayed -- check out the full story here.

Intel and Samsung are going at it in the Solid-state Disk market. Check out this ComputerWorld article : Samsung's 256GB SSD Offers Capacity, Speed

Several weeks back the TED 2009 Conference was held -- if you haven't checked out the videos from that yet, I Highly recommend it. Also interesting at this conference was the launch of Singularity University - "Preparing Humanity for Accelerating Technological Change". With backers like Google, NASA and Ray Kurzweil, how can this NOT be cool!!

At the VMWorld Europe conference VMWare showed off its MVP (Mobile Virtualization Platform). Basically -- it would give you the ability to run multiple operating systems on your portable device. Sounds like some pretty cool stuff here.

Finally -- it is always fun to see creative help wanted ads : check this one out.

Virtual Blog Post

With some big announcements from Cisco and VMWare, it was a big day for virtualization.  Before getting to the press releases, I went back and searched my blog for posts on virtualization -- and I found some interesting things.  In July 2007 I tried to comprehend all of the virtualization technologies available in a summary post.  I left a place holder for virtual networks because I really didn't get that one yet, but there was a foretelling blog post by Peter Christy on 'how' to virtualize a network.

Well -- all of that IOS engineering that Peter talked about appears to have been worked out and Cisco had a couple of big announcements today.  First, they announced the new Nexus 1000V, a virtual software switch ; an industry first 3rd party virtual distributed switch.  The joint Cisco/VMWare announcement was made today at the VMWorld conference.  Check out the Cisco page on the 1000V - they do a nice job of explaining the technology.  DatacenterKnowledge has a nice post on the announcement as well.

The second announcement was about new Data Center 3.0 technologies for Storage Area Networks.  The new technologies are intended to enhance SAN Services in Virtual Machine environments.  Building on the unified data center fabric:

'The new Cisco SAN technology includes three Cisco MDS 9000 Family 8-Gigabit-per-second (8-Gbps) Fibre Channel switching modules and new capabilities in Cisco’s SAN operating system, which has been re-branded NX-OS.   These new SAN capabilities, combined with Cisco’s data center-class MDS and Nexus platforms, will help IT managers evolve towards a single operating system and a unified data center fabric, simplifying data center management and reducing costs."

 The 3 new Cisco modules are a 24 or 48 port 8-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module, and a 4/44 Port 8-Gbps Host-Optimized Fibre Channel Switching Module.  CNNMoney has an article on the press release here.

Cisco stock fared pretty well today and I found a financial analysis of Cisco through July 2008 at financial-guages.com.

VMWare announced their Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS -- because we need a few more acronyms in the industry).  "The Virtual Datacenter OS allows businesses to efficiently pool all types of hardware resources - servers, storage and network – into an aggregated on-premise cloud – and, when needed, safely federate workloads to external clouds for additional compute capacity.  Datacenters running on the Virtual Datacenter OS are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing."  Check out the complete press release here.  Another announcement they made was their vCloud Initiative for Enterprise-class Cloud Computing.  It's a pretty cool initiative -- the press release can be found here.  In a VMWorld keynote, President Paul Maritz described internal and external clouds, as well as "giant computers" :)  VMWare stock ended up 2.41% for the day.

The blogosphere was busy with all of this news as well:

Cisco Data Center Blog  (also some cool new information on an acronym sure to compete with World of Warcraft -- Cisco's Windows on WAAS)

FountainHead

The Lone Sysadmin

Michael Keen

GigaOm

Friday Links

It was yet another very busy week, and as such I have a number of links and information to share to wrap up the week:

• I'll be in Phoenix next week to (hopefully) become certified in ITIL v3 Foundation. I really like the ITIL framework and am anxious to learn the new version 3 information. I think ITIL should be a major part of any data center operation.
  

• While I'm in Phoenix it looks like some of the bloggers that I regularly read will be at VMWorld in Vegas. It looks like a pretty good show and I'll keep a watch for annoucements or other breaking news. The company I really like, but always seem to forget about has a nice whitepaper out at VMWorld -- it covers server virtualization's match with storage virtualization; from LeftHand Networks.

• A recent IT@Intel brief was pretty interesting on air side economizers. Intel published results about their Proof of Concept for reducing data center cost with an air side economizer. Check out the results here, and a video here.

• I found another interesting post over on the OpenPort blog at Intel. Jason Davidson covers Google Chrome and the Compute Model. Very good read.

• A friend of mine pointed out that I didn't make a blog post on the Google floating data centers. First of all -- I'm busy! :) Second, I felt it was well covered (here and here) and third --- I'm speechless. I really don't know what to think here. I like the container model, I like what Microsoft is doing with containers......I am just really not sure what to think of Google's patent for the floating data center with containers.

• TechTarget has a new site I've made a few trips to so far. It's on a pretty popular topic now days and one that I hope to dive much deeper into in the near future -- Disaster Recovery.

• Forbes has a nice story on Cisco and their "Next Big Bet".

• Finally - Rackable partners with Netapp. I've become a bigger fan of the Rackable container since hearing about it and seeing it in person, and I 'think' partnering with Netapp was probably a pretty good move for the company.