Data Center Links: August 1, 2017

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

• FORTRUST acquired by Iron Mountain.  For approximately $128 million Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM) has acquired Denver data center business FORTRUST. Iron Mountain president and CEO William L. Meaney said, “We continue to see opportunities to expand our business through strong organic growth, new development and acquisition. Together with our existing data centers and completion of the first phase of our Northern Virginia data center campus next month, this acquisition will strengthen the foundation of a long-term growth engine and help accelerate the growth in our Adjacent Businesses.”

• Vertiv sheds ASCO to Schneider Electric. For a $1.25 billion all-cash transaction Schneider Electric has acquired the ASCO Power Technologies from Vertiv, formerly Emerson Network Power.   

• Cray partners with Seagate for ClusterStor.  The two companies have agreed to offload the Seagate ClusterStor HPC array product line to Cray for an undisclosed amount. Cray will continue to support and enhance the product line and to support customers going forward. Cray said it looks to add more than 100 Seagate employees and contractors as a part of the deal. "In 2012 Cray became our first OEM and has continued over the years to be our largest and most strategic ClusterStor partner. Today’s announcement is really the perfect evolution of that continuing, special partnership in HPC," said Ken Claffey, vice president and general manager, Storage Systems Group at Seagate.

• Red Hat acquires Permabit assets.  Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) announced that it has acquired Permabit Technology (the assets and technology anyway). Permabit is a software provider of data reduction technologies such as deduplication, compression and thin provisioning.  Red Hat also recently won two CODiE awards: one for Red Hat 3scale API Management and one for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

• Azuqua nets $10.8 million.  In a series B round led by Insight Venture Partners cloud application connectivity provider Azuqua received $10.8 million to scale sales, marketing and engineering teams. The Seattle based startup says it looks to connect "business functions and SaaS apps across organizations, automating and radically increasing productivity in mission-critical processes by connecting information across departments such as marketing, finance, sales, and operations.

Mariott Shifts Disaster Recovery to Iron Mountain

Mariott International has migrated their disaster recovery plan from a 3rd party contract to their own insourced Recovery and Development Center (RDC). The Mariott RDC will reside in Iron Mountain's 145 acre "underground city", about an hour north of Pittsburgh. The data center is 220 feet underground, is naturally cooled, and highly secure (i.e.: "various government entities" are there).

"John Morency, a research director at Gartner, says the need for quicker response and recovery times is driving many companies to weigh the cost of their existing contracts with external providers against the expense of doing the work internally. Plus, many IT staffs want added flexibility to manage and test their disaster recovery processes, rather than being subjected to the rigid time frames of many third-party agreements."

Mariott found that the cost of the 10 year colo deal was neutral to its existing agreement for disaster recovery. Because the ambient temperature of the mine is 55 to 60 degrees Mariott will be able to reduce energy consumption, as well as lower operating costs.

Now, if they could just make it so you load some container data centers into the mountain, we're set!

Check out the CIO case study here.