Data Center Links: September 14, 2016

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

• NCSA to lead $110 million NSF project. The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a $110 million award to NCSA at the University of Illinois at Ubana-Champaign and 18 partner institutions to continue, and expand, the activities undertaken through cyberinfrastructure ecosystem XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery).

• Google acquires Apigee.  The APIs have it. Google announced its intent to acquire API management platform leader Apigee. Apigee went public last year and gives Google some big name customers and position against other cloud rivals such as Amazon.

• Iconiq Capital backs technology-related real estate. Iconiq, the wealth management company for Mark Zuckerberg and other tech entrepreneurs has created a new U.S. subsidiary to invest in data centers and REITs. 

• Teradata launches Teradata Everywhere. Analytics solutions company Teradata launched Teradata Everywhere, to bring its massively parallel processing (MPP) analytic database to multiple public clouds, managed cloud, and on-premises environments. Listing most of the major cloud players in that 'everywhere' statement, the comparison to note is AWS, where Teradata says (with benchmarks) it outperforms Redshift by an order of magnitude.

• OpenText acquires EMC's Enterprise Content Division.  At the conclusion of the massive EMC acquisition by Dell, OpenText will scoop up the Enterprise Content Division, which includes EMC's Documentum. OpenText made the purchase for $1.62 billion.

• Carbon Nanotube Transistors outperform Silicon.  Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have used single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) to make a transistor that outperforms state-of-the-art silicon transistors. A Science Advances journal article notes that "researchers were able to achieve a current that is 1.9 times as fast as that seen in silicon transistors."  This video gives a primer on SWCNT and implications of the new research.

• Rackware nets $10M financing. Enterprise cloud management company Rackware announced that they have closed on a $10 million Series B round - from Signal Peak Ventures and additional funds from Kickstart Seed Fund and Osage Venture Partners. RackWare will utilize the funding to enhance and accelerate product development and to expand sales, marketing, partnerships and customer support teams.

• Michigan State to build $46M data center. 

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.

Many IT Conferences Next Week

It seems like every week I am perusing the tech news and can practically guarantee that there are at least a couple of IT conferences or events going on. Next week there are several that make me wish I could be two places at once.

I'll start with the best one, since it is the one I will be attending!! The Uptime Institute Symposium 2011 will be in Santa Clara and is focused on The Disrupted Data Center: Cloud, Cost, Capacity and Carbon. Besides the all-star lineup of people presenting at the conference, the case studies will be discussed by the winners of the Green Enterprise IT awards. Since the original hashtag was hijacked I'll post updates to the new #uisymp11. It should be an amazing event. I don't get out to the bay area much, so I will probably also be checking into Foursquare about every 10 feet! :)

Here are just some of the other conferences going on at/around the same time:

• Interop! May 8-12 in Las Vegas. I would love to stop by here and check out Riverbed and the deep packet inspection with Wireshark workshop. It would be pretty amazing to see Vinton Cerf - who is scheduled to talk with Interop founder Dan Lynch in honor of the shows' 25th anniversary. Over 70 product and news announcements are expected during the week.
• EMC World will also be in Vegas May 9-12. Cloud Meets BIG DATA. Hashtag #emcworld
• May 10-12 Internet World in London
• On May 13th in Seattle Microsoft will host the Cloud Intelligence Technology Conference.
• AFCOM'S Asia / Pacific Symposium. May 15-17 in Sydney
• Also in Santa Clara, CA will be the Smart Power Grid Technology Conference. This will be held May 12th and looks to have a number of interesting topics.
• The International Smart Grid Congress Asia 2011 will be held May 10-13 in Beijing.

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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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.

Tech Industry M&A Activity

It's always fun to speculate about IPO's, mergers and acquisitions. In the tech industry it happens so often it's hard to keep track of who bought who and how long ago it was.

My current train of thought on the topic surrounded the recent news of CoreSite. CoreSite is a Carlyle Group company, which as I mentioned before is a HUGE global private equity company. I wondered if CoreSite would do an IPO in the near future. Carlyle invested in Equinix in 1999 -- their site says "acquired" in 1999. Equinix then raised $240 Million in their IPO a year later.

Some other interesting ones I have seen a few times:

• Savvis and Global Crossing

• Level 3 and Spint Nextel?

With all of the news Cisco has made lately, there could be some acquisitions by the other big players to get deeper into the networking market:

• Either IBM or HP to buy Juniper or Brocade ?

I refuse to believe that Cisco would buy EMC, but do think they could/should buy NetApp. Or maybe Isilon Systems?

Either HP or Cisco could by F5

All speculation -- but the tech industry M&A activity does seem to be picking up.

Storage Networking World

Storage Networking World is going on this week, and (big surprise) there is a lot of press and new product launches going on in the storage industry.  The most interesting ones to me are EMC's FCoE products and the CloudNAS from Nirvanix.  I am really intrigued by Nirvanix and intend to dig a little deeper into their service in the near future.  

Here are the highlights I've seen for storage news this week:

• SearchStorage.com -- almost live from Storage Networking World

• Byte & Switch -- EMC, Cisco Target Data Center Needs at SNW

• Isilon - Cloud Computing Pioneer Chooses Isilon IQ

• StorageMojo (this one is awesome): building a 1.8 exabyte data center

• This wasn't a news release - but check out the solid state drives (SSD) at Intel!  They come in 80GB and 160GB capacities and the first enterprise class SSD is expected to ship by the end of the year.  I think 2009 will be a big year for SSD.

• Nirvanix announces general availability of cloudNAS: enterprise-class storage software.  This software allows instant access to the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network.

Wednesday Links

Too many stories -- too little time to comment.

Some of these are on the current Wall Street situation (hard to avoid that topic recently).  On a side note to that -- I am building my own stock index for data center companies.  Google Spreadsheet makes this amazingly easy.  I want to get a full week of data before blogging about it though, so more on Monday....

Wednesday Links:

• GigaOm: Sequoia Capital Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley is in Trouble.   I especially liked the comment near the bottom -- "Start-ups will have to start developing legitimate business plans and actually execute upon their strategy to monetize.  How Horrible.  This is good for tech, not bad".

• Forbes.com -- Tech Earnings Loom

• New York Times - Venture Capitalists are Hearing Footsteps.

• Stratus Technologies Survey: 20% of businesses with Business Continuity Plans have no idea if they will actually work.

• Veritas Cluster Server One -- Symantec Delivers new High Availability Disaster Recovery platform

• Terremark to provide core infrastructure solutions to WiMAX

• Eleven things you didn't know about EMC

• IBM Creates new data center certification

• Sun Microsystems recognized by EPA for surpassing agressive greenhouse gas emissions goal.

whew!

Fortress, Cisco and HP Links

I have a number of links from recent web surfing that I thought I would share:

• Fortress International (Total Site Solutions) was awarded additional contracts with existing clients totaling $6 million. Additionally, two other fast-track projects were awarded for a potential future value in excess of $100 million. The two design projects will be completed by subsidiary Total Site Solutions. Check out the press release here.

• Cisco has been in the news a fair amount recently. Continuing the annual acquisition spree, they acquired E-mail and Calendar software company PostPath last week for $215 million. CEO John Chambers was on CNBC's Squawk Box this morning, explaining his vision of visual networking as the backbone for the second phase of the Internet. Finally, one analyst suggests that Cisco should buy Qlogic, and Barron's Eric Savitz notes that the rumor of Cisco acquiring EMC has come full circle.

• Hewlett Packard has also been some press lately. Yesterday the "encouraged CIO's to Rethink Virtualization in Buiness Terms. HP company EYP apparently thinks there is a data center services market in the Philippines. Finally - I ran across a new HP patent, that is, well....interesting.... It's for "configuring a physical platform in a reconfigurable data center". I'll let you read/digest it for yourself. :)

Monday Links

In an attempt to clean up the growing number of Firefox tabs I have open, I thought I would share some of sites of interest I have run across lately:

• TechCrunch reports that LivePlace.com is set to launch a photo-realistic virtual world rendered in the cloud. It may be using the Otoy engine -- a very impressive 3D rendering company. I played around with Google's new virtual world Lively a little bit the other night.....pretty cool, but I think they should just buy Otoy and LivePlace and really give SecondLife a run for their money.

• It has been confirmed that AOL will sell X-drive. I worked for an online storage company in the dot-com days and X-Drive was always the one to chase. I think the evolution to storage cloud offerings may be almost complete.
  

• EMC to buy StorageTek? ChannelWeb explores the reasoning behind this rumor. It makes sense to me - StorageTek is better suited for a company like EMC than Sun.
  

• For some reason, I keep forgetting about a company on my "cool-companies" list. DataSynapse continues to make some nice products and has a lot going on. Recently they were awarded the best clustering or Grid solution at Next Generation Data Center conference (I really need to get to this one next year). They announced a partnership with Adaptivity and the results of a survey that showed High Performance Computing ranking higher than cloud computing as a driving IT initiative.

• I think everyone should click through to this Douglas Gourlay post. :) Douglas - the only thing missing is an acronym (GSOVCaaS) : everything in IT must be an acronym. BTW - MY all-time favorite post and definition discussion of what Cloud Computing is, is given by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. I think he sums up the topic very nicely.

• Michael Morris has an interesting post on Cisco LISP (Locator/ID Seperation Protocol) at NetworkWorld.

This week in Storage 05.22.08

There was a lot of news in the storage industry this week. Here are just some of the items coming across my screen:

• Reldata offers a DR solution for Fiber Channel SAN. It "replicates FC SAN data to a remote IP SAN without disrupting existing production environment". The Reldata 9240 Unified Storage Gateway can be used for either local or WAN replication. I plan to do some posts on WAN replication, WAN optimization, WAN accelerators, etc.... in the near future. I think the whole cloud computing movement will accelerate this market pretty fast.

• Content storage software provider Caringo has a couple of new press releases: Their CAStor software was selected by CMWare to be the primary storage solution behind skyTuneZ. They also have a brief interview that talks about Caringo taking on IBRIX and Isilon.

• Web2Storage Corporation announced the general availability of its Web2Drive software. Their software allows "Windows Vista users secure, remote, and seemingly local access to their data at home or from anywhere with Internet access."

• EMC World was this week -- lots of press here surrounding new backup offerings.

• Rumors of a Cisco - EMC merger? Hmmmmm.... no comment (for now)

EMC Raises Offer to Acquire Iomega

It looks like EMC has raised the offer to $205.5M to acquire Iomega. Iomega's board has authorized them to enter into discussions with EMC.

Check out the press release here

Busy day for EMC

EMC had a busy day in press releases today. They announced the acquisition of Australia based ITSM software company Infra. Infra compliments EMC's data center operations family of software and gives them an ITIL solution that automates IT Service Management.

EMC also announced that 2007 was the 8th consecutive year that they were named the market share leader in storage software. This was according to the latest IDC worldwide quarterly storage software tracker.

Now -- if we only knew what to do with all of this data on EMC storage! :) Last week the press release was about the new AIIM survey revealing that organizations continue to struggle with unstructured information.

Finally -- Today Iomega "received an unsolicited and non-binding proposed offer" from EMC. EMC's $178.1 Million bid represents a 22% premium over the stock's closing price on Friday. Check out the Iomega press release here.

Iomega stock closed up 20.3% and EMC closed down 2.2%

Storage Service Provider (SSP)

A post from the Burton Group made me nostalgic tonight. They brought up the idea of a potential revival in Storage Service Providers. InfoWorld also writes about the new storage cloud and how it will undercut the market dominance from EMC, HP and IBM. I think Nik Simpson states it pretty well: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I immediately went to check blogs from Chuck Hollis and Dave Hitz to see if they had anything to say on the topic. They didn't. Why? Because it is silly. First of all it's a term....nothing more. Journalists and marketing geeks like nothing more than to coin a term to spin the hype machine and see who will pay attention. Storage Service Provider (SSP), SAAS (Storage as a Service), storage cloud, Managed Storage Service....whatever. It is all just 1's and 0's on platters.

Reading the article took me back a bit, as a number of years ago I was a part of a dot-com company that offered online storage. We were like the rest of the dot-coms and offered 1gb, 5gb and 10gb plans, and then had a backup tool that would take your data directly to your online account. We ran the site for many years, and I always remember looking to one company as 'the' big dog of the industry. Storage Networks was the SSP of the time and (I think) had grown quite a large business. They took the enterprise side of the market, while sites like idrive, xdrive, swapdrive and others took the consumer side. Take a look to see what Storage Networks site looked like in 2000.

Today, we have Amazon's S3. I'm still amazed at this offering and almost equally amazed that it hasn't caught on more than it has. I was trying to think if S3 had any real competition and the only thing I could come up with is an equally intriguing offering from Cleversafe. It is fun to see how people are using S3 though. Check out this article about Stardust@home:

The Stardust@home project uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store and deliver the tens of million of images that represent the data collected from the dust particle aerogel experiment.

Anyway....back to the SSP model. The model is an enterprise one. I really believe that S3 and other online storage services that have survived can only truly cater to home/office users, small companies and some aspects of the hosting world. Enterprise customers want their data close to them and want to know it is managed, protected and monitored at all times. Regulations and data leakage incidents have ensured that enterprise storage is on a short leash at all times.

I do believe that managed storage services (see - even I can't stop from using IT lingo) have a place for some. Inside the data center, or between trusted parties and elaborate SLA and other agreements, it would potentially be beneficial to let someone else manage the scalability, reliability and a few other 'ilities of your storage. If nothing else, perhaps the consumer side of the market will help to push down some of the insane prices that the enterprise players push. Maybe a colo or integrator could offer a pay-for-what-you-use model to the SMB market and see if it flies.