Colocation: Make the Future of IT a Reality

The movement to colocation-or colo-is accelerating and will have profound implications for enterprises and service providers. Colocation involves renting space in a third-party data center and can also include a mix of hardware, software, and services. The tactic is surging at a 16% compound annual growth rate through 2020, from $25.70 billion in 2015 to $54.13. By 2018, 65% of companies’ IT assets will be off-site in colocation, hosting, and cloud data centers, according to IDC, while 33% of IT “staff” will be employees of third-party service providers.

“Colocation continues to be the bedrock for much of Cloud 2.0,” says Katie Broderick, research director, 451 Research. “The global colocation market is the physical (facilities and networking) underpinning of both enterprises’ off-premises computing, as well as hosting and cloud service providers’ value-add services.”

A big reason for colocation’s success is the opportunity to shift from a pricey CapEx (capital expense) budget line item to a much less expensive OpEx (operating expense) model. However there are a number of other benefits—and implications—to consider before going colo.

Top considerations when deciding to go colo—and picking the right partner—include location, pricing, security, and offerings. Location is key, because the facility has to be easily accessible by your IT staff, close to a power source, and should be in a safe area—i.e. hurricane belts, flood plains, and earthquake zones should be avoided.

Pricing is important because colo users are typically looking to lower their costs and make them more manageable from a budgeting perspective, i.e. usage-based pricing and monthly fees. Other factors that come into play include real estate, power, redundancy, and risk mitigation costs.

Read More@ http://www.cio.com/article/3087609/cloud-computing/colocation-make-the-future-of-it-a-reality.html

US Data Center Construction Update

September turned out to be a big month for big data center construction project announcements in the US. Facebook has finally decided to build in New Mexico, SAP is stepping into Colorado Springs in a big way, and data center providers Data Foundry and TierPoint are expanding their empires in Texas.

Here are the details:

New Mexico Scores $250M Facebook Data Center Build

After a tax-break war with the State of Utah, New Mexico has secured a commitment from Facebook to build its next data center in the Village of Los Lunas.

WORLD HYPERSCALE DATA CENTER MARKET EXPECTED TO REACH $71.2 BILLION BY 2022

According to a new report by Allied Market Research titled World Hyperscale Data Center Market, the world hyperscale data center market is expected to reach a revenue of $71.2 billion by 2022, with a CAGR of 20.7% from 2016 to 2022. Hyperscale data centers are most widely adopted by cloud service providers to house cloud-based resources and cloud services, accounting for a market share of around 63% in 2015. North America is the largest revenue-generating region for hyperscale data centers, followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific in 2015.

Data Center SDN: Comparing VMware NSX, Cisco ACI, and Open SDN Options

The data center network layer is the engine that manages some of the most important business data points you have. Applications, users, specific services, and even entire business segments are all tied to network capabilities and delivery architectures. And with all the growth around cloud, virtualization, and the digital workspace, the network layer has become even more imporant.

Most of all, we’re seeing more intelligence and integration taking place at the network layer. The biggest evolution in networking includes integration with other services, the integration of cloud, and network virtualization. Let’s pause there and take a brief look at that last concept.

DATA CENTERS: MAKING THE BUSINESS AND CONSUMER WORLDS GO ’ROUND

Today, a connection to the Internet is absolutely critical. Many activities require network support, from checking social media and sending emails to video conferencing with colleagues and accessing an employer’s online tools. Each time you take part in processes like these, you’re using a data center to do so.

The rise of the micro-data center

The recent 451 Research London conference threw up some interesting thoughts on how data centers might develop over the next few years, where micro-data centers – down to and including the ‘Bring Your Own’ variety – could play an important role.

Some interesting thoughts came to the fore during the recent `Business of Cloud, Data Center and Hosting Summit’ run by analyst firm 451 Research. While the background was painted from sets of figures based on solid research of trends in cloud usage across the cloud services marketplace, the best thoughts were of the still-arguable, ‘we-reckon…’ variety.

Commercial HVAC Contractors Keep Data Centers Healthy

According to Internet Live Stats, around 40 percent of the world’s population has an Internet connection today. In 1995, less than 1 percent had access.

How data center vendors and operators can maximize their facilities’ performance

Power usage effectiveness has been an important metric in the data center world for some time now. Companies running data center facilities typically strive for the lowest PUE they can achieve in order to reduce their operating costs and promote their green environmental credentials.

In an earlier article, my colleague Srikanth Murugan demonstrated how to cut through the marketing hype of competing claims about PUE performance. I would now like to take the subject a little further and focus on the economics of PUE and how data center vendors and operators can maximize their facilities’ performance.

Selecting the ideal location

Stable power grids, low energy prices and year-round access to “free cooling” drove a number of large Internet companies to build data centers in the Nordics where conventional wisdom dictated they could most easily achieve extremely low PUE values. Google in Finland and Facebook at The Node Pole in Sweden are two such examples. However, increasingly relaxed data center temperature and humidity ranges – as defined by ASHRAE – have now made low PUE deployments possible for a much wider range of geographical locations.

Cooling developments

A key area of technical development here are evaporative indirect free air cooling systems, now available from an increasing number of cooling technology suppliers. Using an evaporative cooler, dry outside air of 32 degrees can still be used to cool down air in the data center to 22 degrees, thus delivering meaningful savings from reduced electricity needed for powered cooling.

Even more exiting from an economic perspective is that for some locations this enables the use of outside air for cooling all year round, resulting in a lower maximum PUE and bringing significant capital expenditure savings.


Read More: http://www.rcrwireless.com/20151208/opinion/reality-check-the-economics-of-data-center-power-usage-effectiveness-tag10

Here’s why LTE networks are about to become much more useful

There’s more to LTE than just speeding up communications between mobile devices, and its increasingly faster speeds – now at 150 Mpbs and expected to hit 600 Mpbs by 2018 – is beginning to benefit enterprise networks.

In a recent webinar, 451 Research analyst Christian Renaud noted that many conference attendees are eschewing the free WiFi offered at event facilities in favor of tethering to an LTE network because it’s faster.

“It’s getting far faster and more ubiquitous,” he said. At this rate, the speed of wireless connections will begin to exceed the speed of wired connections in the next few years.

In addition, the worldwide footprint has grown to 422 LTE networks in 143 countries, and all but 12 countries globally have committed to LTE networks, said Renaud. This footprint is now poised to become a platform for innovation and growth in applications as cloud computing, mobility in the workforce, the Internet of Things (IoT) and security have an impact on networks, he said.

Industrial IoT is now becoming a reality, said Renaud, and it means operational technology that historically wasn’t connected to the network is going to be, and it’s going to add further complexity to enterprise networks. Data center and WAN congestion is increasing pressure to offload non-core applications to the cloud, he said, while existing MPLS and private WANs are too “brittle” and interfering with the ability to quickly respond to new applications and services.


Read More: http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/heres-why-lte-networks-are-about-to-become-much-more-useful/378966

Sound waves could power hard disk drives of the future

Our need to store data is growing at an astonishing rate. An estimated 2.7 zettabytes (2.721) of data are currently held worldwide, equivalent to several trillion bytes for every one of the 7 billion people on Earth. Accessing this data quickly and reliably is essential for us to do useful things with it – the problem is, all our current methods of doing so are far too slow.

Conventional hard-disk drives encode data magnetically on spinning discs, from which the data is read by a sensor that scans over its surface as it rapidly rotates. Their moving parts introduce the potential for mechanical failures, and limits the speeds possible. This slows everything down.

Much faster are solid-state storage devices, which have no mechanical parts and store data as tiny electrical charges. Most modern laptops, all modern smartphones and digital cameras, and many other devices use this technology – also known as flash memory. However, while solid-state devices are much faster they have a much shorter lifespan than hard disks before becoming unreliable, and are much more expensive. And despite their speed, they're still far slower than the speed at which data travels between other components of a computer, and so still act as a brake on the system as a whole.

A solid-state drive that encodes data magnetically would be ideal. IBM is developing one variation, known as racetrack memory. This uses collections of tiny nanowires hundreds of times thinner than a human hair. Data is magnetically encoded as strings of ones and zeros along the nanowire, but although it can move data through it far faster than typical hard disks, a key challenge is to find ways to make the data "flow" through the nanowires in order to pass it across the sensors that read and write data to the wire. This can be achieved by applying magnetic fields or electric currents, but this generates heat and reduces power efficiency, affecting battery life.

Read More: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-technology-metal-wires-solar-cells.html

Modular data centers new target for Aecom and Project Frog

The announcement of a partnership between Project Frog, an innovator in the design and delivery of smart buildings, and Aecom, a global infrastructure firm with more than two decades of experience building data centers, has led to the announcement of their combined Rapid Deployment Team focused on the delivery of data center buildings with a modular infrastructure to customers who would not be well served by the traditional build process for a major data center facility.

Based around the Project Frog Converge flat-pack data center building platform with the addition of Aecom's integration expertise the partnership expects to be able deliver rapidly constructed modular data center structure suitable for builds in the 1 MW to 50 MW range, which covers the vast majority of data center projects.

The two companies expect the standardized, two-story data center structures with stacked data center modules to reduce the costs associated with design, construction and deployment as well as allowing for leaner operational costs. Ease of construction and deployment could also encourage customers to scale data center builds in a more on-demand fashion, reducing the tendency to over provision data center builds.


Read More: http://www.zdnet.com/article/modular-data-centers-new-target-for-aecom-and-project-frog/

IBM vs. Intel Corporation: The Data Center Battle Escalates

IBM (NYSE:IBM) used to sell Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) -powered low to mid-range servers. But last year, IBM sold that unit to Lenovo to focus on selling high-end servers and mainframes powered by its own Power processors instead.

Since then, IBM has positioned its remaining data center businesses directly against Intel, which holds a formidable 99% market share in server chips. In July, it announced the creation of a 7nm chip, which seemingly targeted Intel's plans to launch 10nm chips in 2017. It also expanded its "Open Power" initiative, which shares processor specs, firmware, and software with partners to fuel the third-party production of Power-based servers.

That's why it wasn't surprising when IBM recently partnered with Xilinx (NASDAQ:XLNX), a maker of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), to counter Intel's acquisition of FPGA maker Altera. FPGAs are less powerful than IBM's or Intel's server chips, but they can be reprogrammed, making them well-suited for custom uses in connected cars, consumer devices, and airplanes. IBM and Intel are both using FPGAs to complement their server chips by accelerating workloads.

What Big Blue wants
IBM's revenue has fallen for 14 consecutive quarters, due to sluggish demand for its core IT services, software, and hardware. Big Blue wants investors to focus on the growth of its "strategic imperatives" -- cloud, analytics, mobile, social, and security -- which posted 17% annual sales growth last quarter, or 27% on a constant-currency basis excluding its divested System x (Intel-powered server) business. That growth was solid, but it wasn't enough to offset the steep declines in its other aging businesses.

Last quarter, IBM's hardware revenues plunged 39% annually and accounted for less than 8% of its top line. Power Systems revenues slipped 3% and system storage revenues fell 19%, but z Systems mainframe revenues rose 15%. The decline in Power Systems revenue was expected, due to Intel's dominance of the data center market. But the growth in mainframes was surprising, since analysts had predicted the death of fridge-sized mainframes for decades.

Read More: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/11/24/ibm-vs-intel-corporation-the-data-center-battle-es.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004

Readying Your Data Center for the Internet of Things

As 2015 draws to a close, companies are looking ahead to the New Year and crafting business plans for a successful 2016. As you look to refine your ever-evolving Internet of Things (IoT) strategy, it would be wise to position data center infrastructure at the core of your plan.

As IoT continues to develop, computer systems and communications networks are in overdrive trying to keep up with the demand and scale of all the data that is being generated. In order to meet these increasing infrastructure capacity requirements, a growing number of organizations are moving away from traditional on-premises corporate IT facilities and turning to service providers that deliver data center services such as colocation and cloud computing. In fact, market research firm IDC reports IoT alone will generate the need for 750 percent more data center capacity in service-provider facilities than consumed today.

What Colocation Delivers
For companies that may be new to data center colocation, its benefits range from security to transparency. With colocation, instead of maintaining computing systems in a private data center, an organization houses them in a data center owned and managed by a colocation provider.

The colocation customer organization retains all control over its systems, but the colocation provider manages the data center security, network connections, power, and cooling. In some cases, the colocation provider offers value-added services to customers, such as a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) system that provides additional layers of visibility and control.

One of the top benefits of colocation is scalability. Additional capacity can be brought on quickly, which is a key requirement for fast-growing IoT deployments. Colocation also allows for lower total cost of ownership, meaning organizations can typically maintain their data center operations for much lower total cost than they could build and operate a private data center.

Read More: http://www.iotevolutionworld.com/fog/articles/413555-readying-data-center-the-internet-things.htm