Virtual Intrusion Prevention Appliance

A short while back I linked to a presentation by Christopher Hoff about virtualization and security.  Those that attended VMWorld a few weeks back reported that security was a big theme at the show.  Well, the trend continues.... with IBM offering a peek at the future of its Proventia Network Virtual Intrusion Prevention System appliance.  It looks like this product (and maybe others) will be out early next year.

Check out the Network World article here  and more from IBM here

HP POD Container Video

The idea of data center containers continues to really grow on me. At first I had a hard time seeing the true benefit for a non-Fortune 100 company, but I think I'm coming around. GigaOm has a nice video of an exclusive first look inside the HP POD (Performance Optimized Data center) container. It shows the layout inside their container and since the person being interviewed is a thermal engineer, the cooling solution is discussed.

I think my biggest road block for containers is still security -- but that's a post for another day. Check out the GigaOm video here.

Cloud Services and Data Center Design

James Hamilton had a blog post yesterday about "Embarrasingly Distributed Cloud Services".  It points to a paper that he and some others at Microsoft wrote to present at the ACM Hotnets 2008 Workshop in Calgary. The paper is pretty amazing and besides some pretty deep formulas and theory for networks a number of good points are made on mega data centers versus newer, geo-diverse, distributed or containerized designs.  It's a paper about trends in the data center industry and what models will work best for particular types of processing and applications.  To me, it was incredibly insightful and you can tell that the authors have not only done their research, but have been seen what works and what doesn't, as well as have the vision for what the future holds.   I (obviously) recommend reading the paper (here), but also have a few comments/observations of my own:

1.  Products -- maybe I've had too much caffiene today, but I can see a mix of software products that are ideal for a predictive and scalable deployment across the new, geo-diverse containerized data center designs.  3Tera continues to be a hot company with their Applogic software and recent global cloud computing expansion.  I thought of them several times when reading the paper.  I also thought about another cool company (that 2 of my friends work at) called Cariden.  I don't know if my description of what they do would do it justice -- let's just call it network simulation and traffic planning/engineering software.

2. I haven't done a plug for my almost year-old white paper in while, so what better opportunity.  If these geo-diverse, smaller data centers are built in closer proximity to the end user, then site selection becomes an issue that many have not thought of before (because they never ventured outside of their region of the country).  So -- check out my Data Center Site Selection white paper.

3. It might be a stretch to relate this one  to the paper -- but it was something I ran across recently that could come into play with containers and an increased need for sensors and environment data.  I was browsing around the Dust Networks website a few days back, via a link from the IP for Smart Objects website.  Dust Networks makes embedded wireless sensor networking for monitoring and control.  Co-founder Kris Pister helped coin the concept of "smart dust" to describe a network of miniture wireless sensors called "motes".  The 12 millimeters square devices can run on micro-batteries for up to 10 years.  Check out the product lines and technology at http://www.dustnetworks.com/

4.  The day before at the Interop 2008 New York conference NeworkWorld reports that today's networks won't cut it as foundations for real-time applications.  

What is a Good Network?

My latest column is out at Systems Management News. I decided to do another column on networks, as I was inspired by a LinkedIn.com question I ran across.

Check out the column here

Acive Power - 12 Megawatt Sale

Yesterday Active Power announced that it received its largest single order from a "large search engine".  The order was for twelve 1200kVA CleanSource UPS Systems.  

“This particular customer’s order further substantiates the market acceptance of high performance and high efficiency flywheel UPS solutions for large mission critical data center applications,” said Jim Clishem, president and CEO of Active Power. “We continue to see rapid adoption of our flywheel technology particularly among major data center owners and operators who recognize the value proposition and performance benefits inherent with systems of this design. Active Power delivers better space and power efficiencies which result in substantial economic savings while at the same time providing a more reliable and green solution.”

I would have to think that "a large search engine" could really only mean Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.  If I had to guess, I would say it is for Yahoo, but with their containerized power systems I have to wonder if it is for Microsoft.

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.

Grand Opening of Madison Data Center for TEAM Companies

Wisconsin Technology Network reports that TEAM's Madison data center could help accelerate IT in the area. Microsoft and Google have opened offices in Madison recently, and last week TEAM Companies held grand opening ceremonies for the new Tier 3 Fitchburg facility. When all 3 phases are complete the $40 million data center will have 60,000 square feet of space.

"TEAM Companies now has data centers in Fitchburg and Cedar Falls, Iowa, storing and protecting information for regional and Fortune 500 businesses. The “fail-safe” Fitchburg center has security features such as retina scanners for personal identification, and 14-to-24 inch concrete, steel-reinforced walls that are built to withstand an F4 tornado with winds in excess of 200 miles per hour."

Check out the Wisconsin Technology Network article here.

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. :)

Human Capital and the Data Center

The topic of Human Capital has intrigued me lately, so I thought I would do a little research/commentary post on it. By no means do I want to declare that the data center has a human capital "crisis", but I think a little more attention and action on the topic are perhaps in order. A good starting point would be a definition -- and I found that on LinkedIn I believe. Human Capital is the process of driving business value and improving performance by maximizing capability and engagement of staff. It is different from human resources and work force planning and as many would tell you, the people are the most important asset of a company. Human Capital has actually been in the news quite a bit lately:

1. Microsoft chose Iowa for the "quality work force"
2. Systems Management News reported on a joint study between the Human Capital Institute and IBM that extolls "It Takes a Human Touch for Business to Succeed".
3. Michael J Morris wrote a post about "Good Jobs Are Out There..."
4. On June 16-17 the Human Capital Institute, Sun Microsystems and the New Learning Playbook hosted the innaugural meeting of a new executive round table focused on learning innovations and managing Milennial talent.
5. The IBM CEO study I mentioned yesterday listed "people skills" as something that 48% of the CEO's surveyed mentioned as a change driver.
6. A real shocker: "Both Presidential candidates cited a weak jobs report as an argument for their economic proposals."

The IBM study also had an interesting quote from a financial markets CEO: "we're making acquisitions for the people, not the assets". A virtual data center conference that I attended today also noted that there is a lot of "gray hair" management and senior staff that will be retiring in the very near future. This then implied that the younger IT workers would be left with a knowledge gap and a big challenge ahead of them. I think all of the data center automation that is under way will certainly help fill some of that gap, but the over-arching concern is that perhaps data center staff wouldn't know what to do (manually) if all of that automation broke!

The Human Capital/IBM study was interesting for a number of reasons. Just as we have heard that the CIO role is rapidly changing, the study noted that 84% of respondents know that putting people in the right roles is key to business success. Talent Management was also mentioned a few times and is sure to be the buzz word d'jour for a while. So the challenge at hand is to understand and apply human capital theories/methodologies/whatever, analyze the talent economy within the organization and re-strategize work force planning. Note the correlations within the definition of work force planning and human capital. Work force planning is the process of forecasting and preparing for changes in an organization’s workforce. This is done by mapping the current workforce structure and capabilities, deciding what the future needs of the business are in terms of long term strategic goals, undertaking gap analysis and implementing a plan to alter the workforce structure in order to meet the longer term corporate objectives.

Mission: Engage in work force planning in the data center industry to better profit from human capital and devote more time managing the engagement of staff.

For those new readers to my blog I want to note that I have a slight bias towards the Midwest (and Iowa particularly). Michael Manos declaring that a "quality workforce" was a reason that Microsoft chose Iowa came as no surprise to me. I became involved in a new program recently that I wanted to tout here briefly and give as an example for something that could be a very beneficial program most anywhere in the U.S. It is called HyperStream and it is built as a "tech hub for Iowa students". The idea is to engage young kids in technology and really help guide them into the right technology jobs. There are clubs, camps, programs, internships, mentoring and competitions -- all to help keep the kids engaged and excited about technology. The IT Olympics that I served as a mentor for last spring was a part of this program. I have heard some of the early success stories of this program and it is really inspiring to see how well it is doing. Check out the program and further details at http://www.hyperstream.org/

Well....I suppose that is enough for one night. I just had some random thoughts and opinions that I thought I would get out there. My Dad spent a lot of his career in work force development and "human capital" issues -- maybe it rubbed off on me just enough to author this post. :)

Inc. 500 and IBM's CEO Study

Just two quick links to things I ran across tonight. The first is that the 2008 Inc 500 list is out! I like this particular list because I can relate to the companies and their growth potential more than those listed on the Fortune 500. There are some interesting stories and new companies listed this year. They have a nice map of the Inc. 5000, but I'm not sure why they didn't provide it as a Google Maps mashup.

Congratulations to Midwest data center services company TEAM Technologies - entering the list this year at 212.

IBM released a study they did called "The 2008 Global CEO Study: Implications for the CIO". It was a Global study of CEO's and this particular section discusses the implications for CIOs, the statistics from the surveys and discussion about what the enterprise of the future will look like. I found it through a CIO magazine ad - so my link is ibm.com/doing/cio3

The Four Horseman of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse

I definitely need to get to the Black Hat conference next year. It was just a few weeks back in Vegas and it looked to have a ton of good sessions. One of my absolute favorite bloggers, Christofer Hoff, was nice enough to post the slides from his session on "The Four Horseman of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse". Although, as he points out, the slides are meant to go with his speaking, I went through all 176 slides and it was AWESOME!! I highly recommend anyone interested in virtualization, security....or otherwise take a minute to read through his presentation.

Check out his blog and the presentation PDF here.

Microsoft Data Center Coming To West Des Moines

I just finished watching the official announcement from Microsoft - saying that the new (~$500 million) data center will be in West Des Moines. The location cited, is just down the road from a new $300 million campus that Wells Fargo built. It is a large plot of land with plenty of room for expansion or other potential uses for renewable energy sources. I also noted that the location is near the railroad -- to, oh I don't know.....bring in containers! The red tape was rolled out as Senators, the Governor and Mayor were all at the announcement. Michael Manos from Microsoft was there as well.

View Larger Map
As DatacenterKnowledge points out, Iowa has had a lot of data center activity recently, and I certainly think there is more to come. A source of mine indicates that there is another big player bringing a data center to Iowa, more North and East from where Microsoft is at - but I couldn't squeeze any more details out of him (but I'm still trying).

Data Center Stocks

While the Dow, S&P and NASDAQ were all down today, I believe the tech stocks are going to continue to be a bright spot in an otherwise bleak market. I found a new web site tonight that I really enjoyed playing around in and researching data center stocks and the industry as a whole. So as to help justify the hour plus that I spent on the site I thought I would share some of the information I discovered.

The site ( MFFAIS) lets you en ter a stock symbol and it then tells you information about financial institutional/fund ownership of the stock. The numbers that interested me were the number of funds that owned the particular stock and the percentages bought or sold over the given time period. For a small group of data center stocks that interested me here are the results.

Format: Stock --- Shares owned by funds --- % buying --- % selling

Equinix --- 399 --- 48.45% --- 45.37%
Level3 --- 347 --- 40.95% --- 37.41%
Digital Realty Trust --- 310 --- 55.28% --- 39.02%
Savvis --- 214 --- 46.91% --- 43.82%
DuPont Fabros --- 160 --- 51.47% --- 41.91%
Internap --- 108 --- 41.17% --- 45.13%
Terremark --- 90 --- 58.97% --- 26.92%
Switch&Data --- 8 --- 0 --- 0

I assume that anything within +- 5% probably isn't of too much concern given how much regular trading activity happens. I still believe though that this is further evidence that the data center stocks are doing good and are seen favorably by fund managers. For the sake of comparison take a look at Cisco and Intel. Besides Microsoft they were the only two other tech stocks on the MFFAIS "top 10 Most U.S. most held stocks" list. Cisco stock is held by 2,077 funds and Intel by 2,009 funds!

Some other interesting web surfing that came up while searching for financial information on the tech industry included:

• The Wells Fargo Advantage Discovery fund certainly looks interesting. The largest stock in their portfolio is Equinix and a story on Yahoo reports that they are seeking big growth in the $406 million fund.

• Market Watch has an article about theJacob Internet fund manager seeing promise in tech companies.
  

• The Wall Street Journal had an interesting blog post about Wall Street analysts leaving for tech startup companies!
  

Forbes has an excellent interview with Diane Bryant, CIO of Intel. I had planned on summarizing more of my favorite points from this interview - but my favorite was her thoughts on a cultural change happening within Intel (and certainly other companies) about everything changing to an IT service versus a "server".

"If you deploy virtualization, you get a cultural change. It's not your server anymore. It's a service provided by IT to your department with a certain service level agreement. Then you can aggregate multiple apps onto that server and your utilization goes up. But you have to get over that cultural element, which is, "Where's my server?"

Finally -- does anyone know of an online tool (preferably free) that will let you build your own stock index? I would love to build my own index of favorite stocks and track it on a regular basis. Please leave a comment if you know of something. Thanks!

Data Centers in Iowa

The Des Moines Register ran an article yesterday about the growing trend of data centers coming to Iowa. There isn't (unfortunately) any new news in this article..... it is just a re-cap of why Iowa is so popular. Iowa being popular and a logical place for data centers is nothing new to me -- but it is nice to see the attention it is getting lately. The article discusses new facilities in the state from Google, Microsoft and TEAM Companies.

The usual factors are listed for why Iowa is ideal: Low costs, green energy, skilled labor, and rich tax incentives. There is a hint in the article that Microsoft will locate in West Des Moines, but I personally still think it is up for grabs exactly where in Des Moines they will land.

Check out the article here.

Security and Compliance In the Cloud

My latest column at Systems Management News is out. I dive (one more time) into cloud computing (it's in fashion you know). This time I talk a little more about security and compliance in the cloud and what is holding back the enterprise from further embracing it.

Check out the article here.

Alliant Energy - Business Continuity Lessons

Wisconsin Technology Network has a Business Continuity Plan article about Alliant Energy and their story of the June flooding in Cedar Rapids. The story basically runs through how they executed their BCP plan and the lessons learned during the event. The interesting part (to me) was the discussion about having contractual assurance of a hot-site for Disaster Recovery and how it is different in a city like Cedar Rapids vs. a large city.

Check out the article here.

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.

Yahoo Omaha Data Center Rumor Confirmed

A few weeks back the Tech Hermit blog wrote about rumors of Yahoo building a data center in Omaha. Today, the Omaha World-Herald newspaper confirms that state and local officials are at a "very serious stage" of negotiations to get Yahoo in to Omaha. The decision could potentially be made in the next five to six weeks.

Maybe Omaha will be one of the six locations for the HP-Yahoo-Intel cloud.

Check out the article here.

Don't Forget the Network

My latest column at Systems Management News is out! I am hoping to get into some more networking topics in future columns. WAN optimization and acceleration tools interest me and dark fiber, carriers and DWDM type stuff are things I would like to explore further. In this column I discuss networking in general and how Microsoft and Google connect their data centers.

Check out the column here.

Also -- Please check out the rest of the magazine - they have a lot of good articles and columnists.

• Information on Microsoft Midori - a legacy free operating system in the works.
• Emerson Network Power - new cooling system
• Networking: Switching to a new design for intelligent LAN
• Windows 2008 Clustering
• The Savvy Manager
• The Storage Rack