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.

Monday Links

Just some quick links to things I found on the net today -- no time to comment; just things I found to be interesting.....

Check out the drawing in this IEEE Spectrum article. It looks like another approach to the Microsoft 4th Generation data center (outdoor container park)! The article is good also --- although it is kind of a summary of what has gone on the last 6-12 months....nothing new.

Power Grid Found Susceptible. I'm a big fan of SmartGrids, but like anything else they need to be EXTREMELY careful with this. Security firm IOActive is offering the security lesson....maybe a few rants from Christopher Hoff would help as well.

Just to show I'm not a complete Cisco fan-boy.... Force10 announced some big iron today. They unveiled a new line of switches and routers "designed to improve the performance, management and cost effectiveness of virtualized data center and cloud computing environments." Pretty cool stuff from an initial quick glance.

As many of you know, I blog from Iowa and simply can NOT escape the stupid stereotype about farmers. I've worked on a few IT projects in the past that were for, or benefited farmers, and so I thought this was interesting..... it's a map showing broadband in america -- percentage of farmers with high speed internet.

March 19 announcement from Rackable: "The CloudRack C2 servers can run at 104 degrees inside the data center, and they offload power supply to the rack to reduce energy wasted in converting AC electricity from the wall to DC electricity used by the box to 1 percent"

I'm usually on the same page as Om Malik.... but have to disagree with him on this one. He thinks Cisco should buy Sun, not IBM.

Cisco Cisco Cisco!

Cisco Cisco Cisco!!! ....said in the tone of a Brady Bunch "Marsha Marsha Marsha!"

Cisco certainly has had the spot light for some time now and certainly shows no sign of slowing down. Many have stated that economic recessions will foster tremendous innovation, and I think John Chambers got a head start on that in 2008. 2009 is full-steam ahead. They recently announced that they were venturing outside of their core market, by entering the server market (NY Times | SF Gate).

I honestly don't know what to think of the announcement just yet. I don't think IBM, HP and Dell will be as upset as some are making it out to be, but it will be interesting to watch. Chambers mentioned at C-Scape that their 2009 acquisitions will be scrutinized a little more and there may not be as many executed as in years past. With $26 Billion to spend, there are plenty of options:

1. EMC - I just don't think so. It's been analyzed and blogged to death, but I just don't see it.
2. Sun Microsystems? -- Maybe; but if I had to guess, I don't think that would happen.
3. Netapp? possibly. MarketCap is $4.49B and if Cisco makes 4 or 5 acquisitions this year that could be a good fit. Very solid company, large customer base (many Internet companies as well), and Cisco has pushed storage networking technologies for some time.
4. Rackable? With a MarketCap of $116.57 Million it is pocket change for Cisco, but could work. In the Unified Computing blog post Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrier talks about eliminating "manual integration" and I wonder containers are in the picture somewhere. Purchasing Rackable would give Cisco the commodity hardware for their servers and the ICECube to package their servers, storage and network gear into.

Padmasree mentions "open standards" a few times. I wonder if we'll see some announcement with Cisco and Eucalyptus - the open source cloud computing solution. I would hypothesize about a cloud computing company acquisition, but there are too many think of at this late hour. To me, the smart move would be to buy a company that specializes in cloud computing / virtualization security.

Padmasree Warrior may have a new job soon though -- as she is one of two candidates for the first U.S. CTO position.

GreenTech 2009

I didn't make any predictions for 2009, but a some what obvious one is that renewable energy sources and Green technology for the data center should certainly have a good year. I have a number of items I have been saving up for GreenTech and the data center that I found to be pretty interesting:

• This quick announcement should impact data centers in 2009: ASHRAE and an alphabet soup of other groups are forming a consortium to advise the DOE on high-performance building issues.

• Treehugger.com always has good articles -- just too much for me to keep up with. They reported last week on a Yale Environment 360 opinion piece about the US as a renewable energy world leader.

• Treehugger.com : 76% of Federal renewable energy support went to Ethanol in 2007.

• 500 MW Wind Farm in Iowa Announced

• There was an interesting article about pressure in gas pipe lines to power London. A UK startup works with National Grid to generate 20 MW using 'geo-pressure' by 2010.

• Last Wednesday it was announced that the DOE invested $6 Million to address the technical challenges of wind development and market acceptance barriers.

• This weekend Intel unveiled its first solar electric installation in New Mexico. They hope the "array will demonstrate the potential to power such things as data centers." There was also a mention of containerized data centers:

  "He also said experiments will be done under the solar array with containerized data centers, in which computers are racked inside a tractor-trailer rig-size container. For example, a filmmaker might want to have a computer graphics system on site during a shoot, Miner said."

Containers, The Economy and Telecom

OK-- bad title maybe, but I wanted to avoid the "Tuesday Links" vagueness.

Containers -- for anyone that has followed this blog for a while knows, I am fascinated by containers. Initially I just couldn't figure it out, but through Sun, Rackable and Michael Manos I am fully on board now. Although..... now I am racking my brain for the non Microsoft / Fortune 200 idea that makes the container solution applicable to the rest of us. More on that later.

The video that Data Center Knowledge posted last week was really excellent. I watched the full hour and appreciated the knowledge and insight provided. My highlights/comments:

• It was interesting to see some new things come into the site selection and data center equation: jurisdiction for placing containers and the classification of the space. Daniel Costello from Microsoft noted that they were able to classify theirs as "unoccupied spaces".
• Focus can shift quickly to container solutions for the rest of the infrastructure as well -- what about the emergency need to ship a container somewhere and have an equally quickly deployed power solution available? (i.e.: Active Power)
• The one thing that would have been hilarious (to me) for an audience member to ask is what the panel thought about putting containers on cargo ships. :)
  

The Economy -- All eyes are on the economy now days and President-elect Obama's plans in the making. I personally think the data center industry is going to pull through the recession just fine and GreenTech within data centers should really blossom in 2009. I ran across a video from Financial Times that I thought was interesting; it compares the worst bear markets in history and how they were punctuated by rallies that made a lot of money for those lucky enough to time them correctly. Global Crossing also had an interesting blog post recently about Stimulating Ideas - commentary about telecom investment ideas from Paul Kouroupas. There was also a nice story early last week in the New York Times about Venture Capitalists and how innovation will continue to drive the technology industry out of the recession. The last paragraph is especially interesting:

“Cisco was founded two weeks before a stock market crash. Oracle was founded during the Reagan recession,” Mr. Holland said. “In bad times, that’s when the best opportunities come up."

Telecom -- Level3 is off to a good start in 2009. Rob Powell at the Telecom Ramblings blog speculates why they have been doing so well. Fourth quarter and full year 2008 results are set to be released on February 11th. If my math is correct 4 VPs and the CEO of Level3 sold 23,265 shares January 5th.

View the full LVLT chart at Wikinvest

2008 Review

I feel somewhat obligated to do an end of the year post. It's in fashion, it's that reflective time of year, and well....why not. I've been saving up a bunch of items, so here we go.....

First - there have been any number of '2008 review' articles and blog posts, but here are some of my favorite year-end stories:

• MIT Technology Review: The year in Computing
• CIO Magazine: The Top 10 Cisco Stories of 2008
• Seeking Alpha: What's Next for the Colocation Sector?
• Data Center Knowledge - Top 10 Stories of 2008

The big story of the year (for me anyway) was the Iowa floods in June. I witnessed a lot during those few weeks/months and was very fortunate to not be directly affected. I saw both good and bad business continuity plans being executed and came out with a number of very valuable lessons learned.

I am a big picture person. I like to see the 10,000 foot view and then analyze the heck out of it to the associated impacts, outcomes and possibilities. A short while back I ran across a report from the National Intelligence Council titled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. Although I didn't read the entire 120 pages, here are some things that stood out to me:

• Page 33: ".... nine factors can contribute to a modern National Innovation System: fluidity of capital, flexibility of the labor pool, government receptivity to business, information communication technologies, private sector development infrastructure, legal systems to protect intellectual property rights, available scientific and human captial, marketing skills, and cultural propensity to encourage creativity."

• Page 40 has a an interesting map showing world population by age range, in 2005 and 2025.

• Page 63 has a chart breaking down likely energy sources (coal, gas, hydro, oil, nuclear, biomass, others) from 1980 to 2025.

In October I started tracking data center stocks a little closer. I created a Google spreadsheet and used the capitalization-weighted method to make an index of the stocks I chose to track. The stocks are all data center industry companies and I post regular updates for what the price is as often as I can. It started in October at $23.13 and closed today at $19.63

I have a few million feeds in my Bloglines account. I removed a couple dozen the other day and need to work on prioritizing what I read in there. My favorite new blogs that I am reading are:

• Stevey Clayton : Geek in Disguise
  
• John Gannon - Yet Another VC Blog
  
• Errata Security
  
• Microsoft Data Centers
  
• Gianpaolo's blog
  

This blog had a pretty good year overall....the biggest problem is just finding the time to sit down and write. Coverage of the Michael Manos speech at the Spring Data Center World conference was by far the most read post of the year. Much of this was due to a link from the popular blog by James Hamilton. I was happy to see that my Data Center Site Selection white paper from 2007 had the second highest number of visits. The top states that visited my blog (in order) were California, Iowa, New York, Texas, Washington, Illinois, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

As many of you know, I live in Iowa and am a big advocate of the upper Midwest. Iowa had a lot of activity in 2008 with the Google data center in Council Bluffs, the Microsoft West Des Moines announcement and TEAM Companies making several announcements (opening Madison data center and breaking ground in Des Moines).

On to 2009!!

Data Center Containers were a huge story in 2008 and I think that will continue in 2009. I saw the Sun Blackbox again this year, and the Rackable Icecube at Data Center World. I have a number of posts in mind to review and analyze containers, but more on that later...

A few blog posts back I mentioned that video was going to be the killer app. While this is not any big revelation I realize, I think it has been a gradual thing that has many side affects and will continue to grow rapidly in 2009. I've read things about Cisco really attacking the home entertainment market, YouTube , Hulu , Joost , Vimeo and others had great years, and the infrastructure market to support video distribution is growing. The CDN market (I believe) is set to have a great 2009 and we may see some M&A action here. Video podcasts (or what ever you want to call them) are growing in number as well. Some of my regulars include:

• Cisco TechwiseTV
  
• TED Talks
  
• Google Tech Talks
  
• Hak5
  

Kevin Rose from digg.com cut the cord and ditched cable in favor of the Internet, TiVO and Netflix. TiVO recently announced that they will offer the ability to watch YouTube videos on TiVO. I got an iPhone about a month ago and have to say....it is the best cell phone I have ever had. I mention this because I discovered I could use qik.com on it and find the application and streaming video ability pretty amazing. The end result though....bandwidth is going to HAVE to get better in 2009!! More on this at the New York Times article about Internet usage growth.

Happy New Year!!!

Inspiration is for amateurs ; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
-Chuck Close

HP POD Presentation

Just a quick link to a presentation I ran across on the HP POD (Performance-Optimized Data Center). For some reason I always forget that they entered the container market and that it is a decent solution. As it seems to be a blogger reqirement, I am working on an end of the year blog post and you can bet containers are a big part of it.

The PDF is from Eva Beck from EMEA Hewlett Packard. Check it out here.

Data Center Videos

Backing up my statement from the Cisco C-Scape post that Video is indeed THE killer app, here are a few data center favorites:

• Episode #40 of Cisco's Techwise TV is out today. Switching Secrets for Multimedia

• Cisco: Understanding the Latest Secuirty Trends in an Evolving Landscape

• DataCenterKnowledge: Inside the HP POD container
  

• Intro to FCoE by EMC

• Layered Tech TV - Episode #1. AP - you'll have to tell me about the bet you lost. :)

• FORTRUST on a local news segment in Colorado. I love it when news anchors have absolutely ZERO idea what a data center is.

• Here is one for the what "not to do" file in employee training.

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

The Lego Cloud

Christian Belady and David Gauthier from Microsoft have started a blog on Microsoft data centers. They start off with a bang by building on the Michael Manos blog post about Generation 4 data centers. Christian and David sit down with Adam Bomb from the Edge Technet site and answer a fair amount of questions that came as a result of people reading the Gen4 ideas.

They talk about the fact that it is truely a modular solution for the entire data center, and not just the server containers. David mentioned legos as building blocks, so I couldn't resist the title to my blog post. :)

The only question un-answered that I can think of is about natural disasters. I would have to think that the containers are some how anchored down in order to protect against tornadoes.

The only other comment I'll make on this follow-up information is that David mentioned how much shorter the build time is for Gen4. Instead of 12-18 months for construction, they expect the Gen4 sites to be ready in 3-6 months! Christian then mentioned that they are 'piloting' the modular concepts, and pulling together specs, etc. Then...... earlier today I read a brief article from the Des Moines Register stating that the plans for Des Moines data center were still on track. The article says that construction is due to begin this Spring or Summer. I think that is enough time to really nail down the supply chain process and get those containers rolling into Des Moines! At the August press conference Michael Manos said “We are implementing a very new design that’s just coming out of our research and development department, so we need to get that finalized”. The other clue is that the Register article describes it as a "150,000 sq. ft. facility". I imagine this goes back to changing the entire model for a data center.... if they would have told the press they were building a 42-acre "yard" for containers they probably would have had some puzzled looks.

But.....if San Antonio is 470,000 sq.ft. and Chicago is 441,000 sq.ft - why is the Des Moines site only 150,000?

I'll be in Des Moines in a couple of weeks and see what other clues I can find on-site.

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. :)

Friday Links - IBM and Wireless at Fiber Speeds

IBM is in the news recently regarding two foreign centers. PC World reports that IBM plans to open a new data center early next year in Scotland. This facility, at $3.52 million, is suited for medium-sized businesses. Check out the PC World article here.

IBM also recently (today) announced that they awarded Schneider Electric the contract to design and provide electrical distribution, building management/security system, high density cooling and critical power solutions for their India data center. Schneider Electric is a pretty huge company, and thanks to acquisitions has all of the necessary parts to fulfill such a large contract. The facility should be complete by March 2009. Check out the article here.

MIT Technology Review has a story about new millimeter-wave technology that sends data at 10 gigabits per second. The article is fascinating and I recommend reading it -- here.

ReadWriteWeb has an article on 5 Big Data Center Trends for 2008. Blades, Green, Virtualization, Clouds, Enterprise Linux. Maybe it's just me -- but I would throw the container model in that trend list. I think we are just starting to see containers in the data center and that there is a lot more to come. Check out the article here.

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.

IDS - Ship based Data Centers - Update

I'm not sure if the idea is growing on me or what, but the notion of a data center on a ship doesn't sound as silly as it did the very first time I heard it. Back in January of this year IDS (International Data Security) introduced us to the idea of putting containers on ships that were due to be scrapped.

There is an update now on how the company is coming with the idea, and they also do a nice job of explaining how it is accomplished and some of what the value proposition is. I asked questions about the business model, security and fiber, and they have addressed those in the comments section.

Check out the update and answers here.

Containers, Clouds and Rumors

There has certainly been a lot of news in the industry this week and although I haven't completely caught up yet (I'm attempting to take vacation this week), here is a quick run-down of what I have seen so far.....

• First and foremost, my apologies for getting some figures wrong in my Systems Management News article. I said that Microsoft has 220 containers and 30,000 servers ; well, let's just say I need to stop writing articles so late at night. :) Going back to my own post of the AFCOM keynote that Michael Manos gave, at 1000 to 2000 systems per container it is more like 300,000 servers total.
  

• Containers were a hot story today, as HP announced the POD (Performance Optimized Datacenter).
  

• There were a couple of good articles on Cloud Computing I ran across. The first one, from Douglas Gourlay at Cisco is a nice wrap-up of the hype-filled term and how it is really just a technology shift that is happening across many layers and industries. I agree that the term cloud doesn't really mean much today -- I think we'll look back in a few years and realize that things were really just getting moving in terms of true Cloud Computing. He mentions workload portability, which I have been intrigued with for a while and was why I followed Platespin, who was acquired by Novell back in February. Doug's mention of the fictional Skynet made me realize that Cisco is so good that aiming for clouds isn't enough - they are into outter space newtorking!

• Another Cisco story this week is the press release about enhancements to IP over DWDM. I am still (somewhere in my spare time) trying to pursue my CCDA certification and DWDM technology is well..... pretty cool stuff. You should read the press release for yourself, but the main news is that they have doubled the reach of the CRS-1 40Gbps IPoDWDM to an industry leading 2,000 kilometers without regeneration.

• The second cloud computing article was very interesting -- for some rumors! Reuven Cohen from Enomoly gossips about project "Red Dog" from Microsoft. I remember reading about this before (because of the Clifford the Big Red Dog reference). It's basically saying that this project is meant to be an "EC2 for Windows" cloud offering. The second rumor is that of a Chinese cloud project "under a hydro dam", which when complete may exceed a million servers. For whatever reason, my hunch is that Sun is involved in this.

That's all for now -- I've upgrade my Ipod Touch to version 2.0, so I am having fun with the AppStore. I'm still bummed that the National League lost the all-star game, but excited that next year it will be in St. Louis!!

BastionHost Debuts Dataville

I ran across an interesting company tonight - and upon further reading on their site discovered that they offer what I have envisioned ever since I read about containers. I work in the colo industry and although the vision is a bit cloudy (pun intended), I think there is a colo play for containers.

Check out Bastionhost - a Canadian company that offers Dataville - a "secure closed system campus of data centers, ideally situated on the Great Circle route between New York City and London." They offer a number of services, have a pretty experienced management team and advisors, and claim to offer protection from "the prying eyes of big brother, while meeting the stringent standards of the European Union." On top of that - their web site has a cool spinning globe (lower right corner) -- yes I was into the animated GIFs in the late 90's. :)

The most interesting part (to me) was what they call Hot Parking. It looks as though they offer the Sun and Rackable container systems, and then give you the sheltered, conditioned environment in which to run it. These "mini modules" can be returned to BastionHost to be serviced, upgraded, or provisioned elsewhere in the world where it may be needed. I think this is an extremely cool idea --- it might take a bit to catch on, but knowing what I do of the containers, knowing the efficiencies and setup speed they offer, I think there is some huge potential for customers and colo's alike.

The company is based in Halifax, Canada; which I admit, I had to look up in Google Maps. If I had Google Maps and Google Earth when I took 8th grade geography I know I wouldn't have been as bad at it as I am now.