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.

Merger and Acquisition Targets

Mergers and acquisitions are always fun to speculate on. In this industry it seems like a week doesn't go by where some M&A activity is happening. With the recent Equinix acquisition of Switch and Data I have to wonder if more data center industry acquisitions will happen before the end of the year. Both Google and Cisco have said that shopping sprees will continue to gain speed in 2010.

thedeal.com had a Barron's article summary that intrigued me today about M&A speculation. The article points to 10 technology companies that are potential takeover candidates, including several that I have thought of:

1. Riverbed (RVBD | $1.53B market cap): major competitor to Cisco's WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. I've always thought Cisco would buy them, but perhaps HP is better suited.
   
2. NetApp (NTAP | $9.63B market cap): another possible target for Cisco. Otherwise maybe HP or Dell?
   
3. F5 Networks (FFIV | $3.73B market cap): No idea; maybe HP or EMC
   
4. Brocade (BRCD | $3.69B market cap): seems like HP is the lead candidate... if not, maybe EMC or IBM
   

and others.... Check out the complete article and list here.

Monday Links - March 30, 2009

LOTS of news today, and not much time, so here you go.....


NYT: Rackable vows to outlast price war with Dell. Interesting story about Rackable and their history and strategy against Dell. I like Rackable....I don't think they are the right solution for 'everyone', but there is a lot of potential.

Rackable, along with Intel, Netapp and Akamai have probably bought a few steak dinners for Facebook executives lately. Data Center Knowledge reported today about them seeking up to $100 million to expand data centers. To compliment that post and the Businessweek article, I found these interesting:

• Niall Kennedy has a very nice write-up with an amazing amount of detail about Facebook operations, user stats and data centers.
• Fool.com also has a nice commentary about the TriplePoint Capital conversations and overall troubled state of banks with tech companies.

At the Intel Xeon 5500 launch today, Intel also announced a Data Center Efficiency challenge. It should be interesting to see what people submit for videos. Check out the Facebook page with contest rules and details here.

I can just feel the momentum going for container data centers.... and apparently CRG West gets it also. Data Center Knowledge reports on a partnership with CRG West and HP to deploy the HP POD container. Very cool stuff. Check out the press release here.

"Data Center Fabric" is fast becoming a big term for 2009. Juniper Networks outlined their vision and strategy today for the next generation data center fabric. David Yen's blog at Juniper also has some details on project 'Stratus' .... here.

"PFB Seeks 40 million pounds in Data Center Financing" . If my currency conversion is correct, that's about $57 million. Pinder Fry and Benjamin is a London-based real estate firm with an interesting data center investment portfolio. The Data Center Dynamics article states that "The company said this third round of funding would be used to invest in the sites to which it has already committed and new data center investments." The March 9 Offer Summary can be found here.

A magnitude 4.3 earthquake hit the bay area this morning -- about 16 miles east of San Jose. The interesting thing was that a new fault was discovered. No major damage was reported. Lots of tweets surrounded the event this morning as well. No news or impact on data centers that I have read about yet.

Check out the Phase 2 notes from Michael J. Morris on his data center project - with networking based on the Cisco Nexus-series line. It sounds like a very fun project

Finally -- this is an Iowa blog, so I have to say GO Gov. Culver Go! :) Governer Culver announced he had a positive, productive meeting with Microsoft today. The status of the West Des Moines data center hasn't changed, but at least it isn't cancelled. I am still SUPER curious to see if the Iowa facility will be the test bed for their 4th generation design.

5 days, 19 hours and 12 minutes until opening night of Baseball!!

AST-Global Data Center Container

Data Center Knowledge had an interesting article today on the AST-Global data center container, displayed at CeBIT. Does anyone know what the tie is between AST and IBM (i.e.: the IBM PMDC container is made by AST, or the AST container is made by IBM)?

I did a search for AST-Global, not being very familiar with them and found an interesting Power Point presentation by Pablo Fernandez of AST. Slide 53 is interesting... "The future is MOBILE" and then he lists how containers are better than traditional data centers: "Short term projects, disaster recovery, remote locations, hostile environments, space limitations and expensive real-estate".

Slide 55 goes on to talk about the "PMDC Data Center Park". This is an entire data center park, built with multi-PMDCs -- no building, just concrete slab. This of course made me think of the Microsoft 4th Generation data center concept from Michael Manos back in December last year.

Scalability and mobility, along with protection and potential efficiency gains are really making the case for data center containers. I never thought I would list 'mobility' as an attractive feature of a data center, but it is growing on me. After a phone call I had today discussing containers, I think I will sit down and really pour through the container offerings from IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Rackable, Verari and others. It may not be the solution for every need or company, but I think (at this stage) there is definately more to it than what I am seeing.

Dell's Containerized Data Center

Just a quick link to an article at The Register about Dell's recent entry to the container market. I think Dell has really thought this through and not just delivered a basic container, but a solution to the needs expressed by their clients.

The Register has some nice facts about the product, and an additional picture I had not seen before of a cutaway view of the container.
Check out the article here

Level3 Cuts 8% of Workforce

As many have said now.... the economy will get worse before it gets better. Level3 announced that they are cutting 450 jobs in North America, about 8% of their work force. Maybe they should apply for a bailout. :)

Tech stocks in general were up today, as my data center stock index showed -- it was up $1.67 from just last Friday, closing at $19.87. The Dow Jones Internet Composite Index was up $2.76 from Friday, closing at $60.35.

As another indicator of tough times -- The Tribune Company, publisher of The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, filed for bankruptcy. I have to wonder if other major newspaper companies won't be far behind. The sale of the Chicago Tribune could mean the sale of the Cubs would be opened up to new prospective buyers.

In other tech news.... at least now we have a double-wide analogy to apply to containers. :)

SuperComputer 2008 Conference

SC08 (The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis) has been going on this week and there are a number of interesting links as a result:

• Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm points out that the conference is really (or has become) a Data Center conference.
• The Austin American-Statesman previews the conference and points out that Sun will bus people to their Ranger installation at UT, and Dell will bus people to UT's main campus to see Stallion, their advanced computer visualization system.
• Nortel 100G to carry critical network traffic for SC08 conference.
• MercuryNews.com reports that Intel, Cisco and Sun are helping develop a supercomputer for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
• NVIDIA announces Tesla "personal supercomputer"...... umm...... ok
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory selects DataDirect Network Storage to power one of the largest and fastest file systems in the world. "48 S2a9900 High Performance storage platforms deliver up to 240 Gigabytes per second of performance across 10 Petabytes". Wow!
• DataDirect Networks also won the HTCWire's Editors' Choice Award for best HPC Storage Product for 2008.

Finally -- I have a YouTube video to share. It's not SC08 related, but you would need a supercomputer to do some of the stuff this guy is talking about. It's the latest Google TechTalk, and even the title of the talk is over my head: The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted to Be
Enjoy