Equinix Opens State-of-the-Art Data Center In Amsterdam

Equinix, Inc. has  announced the opening of its new International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center in Amsterdam at its Science Park campus. The $113M facility, called AM4, supports the increasing demand for interconnection capacity to accelerate business performance.

According to Cisco, global IP traffic is set to increase nearly threefold in the next five years.¹ This growth in IP traffic will accelerate the need for greater connectivity for organizations hoping to create business value as they undergo digital transformation. AM4 enables companies to extend network infrastructure to the digital edge and enhance workload performance by shortening the distance between services and users.

The European Commission’s Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) 2017² ranks the Netherlands as the 4th most advanced digital economy in the EU, and the Netherlands also ranks 4th on the Global Competitiveness Index 2016-2017 (WEF).³ Digital infrastructure and interconnection capacity facilitates the flow of global data in and out of this market which opens up new business opportunities across markets and drives the larger digital economy.

The Netherlands has connections to more than 150 global submarine cables networks and Equinix data centers in Amsterdam represent one of the densest network concentrations in the world. This massive amount of network connectivity combined with the latest advancements in data center technology provides Dutch businesses with significant choice when strategizing future IT deployments. For this reason, multinationals looking to expand into Europe also consider Amsterdam a top destination, as it locating there facilitates connectivity to 80% of Europe within 50 milliseconds to maximize performance.

“With its connectivity to continental Europe as well London and the Nordics, Amsterdam has become a key hub for cloud and other service providers to offer enterprise interconnection. European enterprises are starting to realize their current network architecture is no longer optimal for digital transformation as they journey to the cloud. A deployment in a network-dense interconnection-oriented facility such as that being offered in Amsterdam could be a viable option to support their digital transformation,” said Penny Jones, senior analyst, European Services at 451 Research.

Today Equinix operates multiple Amsterdam data center campuses and the addition of AM4 further increases capacity to meet growing demand for hybrid cloud, interconnection, and connectivity to business ecosystems across a number of vertical markets and internet exchanges. High connectivity makes Amsterdam Science Park an attractive location and cloud hotspot in Europe, which handles approximately 38% of the Dutch data traffic, making it the second-largest data route in the Netherlands.

The initial phase of AM4 includes space for 1,555 cabinets and is planned to have four expansion phases. At full build the vertical facility will represent a total investment of $189 million and provide 4,200 cabinets across eight floors with more than 125,000 gross sq ft (11,500 square meters) of data center space.

Amsterdam is considered the digital gateway to Europe⁴ and Equinix Amsterdam has more than 700 customers, providing connections to over 150 network service providers and access to an established cloud ecosystem which includes leading CSPs such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Oracle, and IBM Softlayer. This broad choice of cloud options enable businesses to flexibly create a multi-cloud environment to meet their changing IT needs. Additionally, Equinix brings together buyers and sellers of cloud services via the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ in more than 20 markets globally including Amsterdam.

“The Netherlands is one of the leading drivers of data centers in Europe. Thanks to its excellent connectivity, Amsterdam is the world’s largest internet hub, making the digital sector one of the three main ports, next to Schiphol and the port of Rotterdam. Equinix’ new data center AM4 ensures that Amsterdam remains the global internet hub and that European organizations are supported in their digital transformation,” said Nina Tellegen, director, Amsterdam Economic Board.

Equinix has a long-term goal of using 100% clean and renewable energy for its global platform and continues to make advancements in the way it designs, builds and operates its data centers with high energy efficiency standards. For example, Equinix’s Amsterdam data centers at Science Park realize significant energy savings and reduction in their CO_² footprint using an in-ground Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage, instead of mechanical cooling, and has one of the lowest operating PUE’s in the retail colocation sector.

1. Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021, http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/complete-white-paper-c11-481360.html
2. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/desi
3. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GCR2016-2017/05FullReport/TheGlobalCompetitivenessReport2016-2017_FINAL.pdf
4. Dutch Digital Infrastructure 2016, by Deloitte Consulting, November 2016. https://www.dinl.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/17112016-Dutch-Digital-Infrastructure-Report-2016.pdf

Source: CloudStrategyMag

CloudMigrator365 Launches New Cloud Management Platform

CloudMigrator365 has launched its new Office365 management platform, CloudManager, at Microsoft Inspire 2017 in Washington D.C.

CloudManager is a public cloud management platform which, for the first time, enables organizations and Service Providers the ability to control multi-tenant Office 365 deployments in a very intuitive and cost-effective way.

The initial release of the CloudManager platform simplifies administration of Office365 users and licenses while enhancing the control and efficiency of large Office365 deployments.

CloudManager benefits organizations of all sizes and has proven to dramatically lower daily administrative cost and Office365 support ticket escalations. The new software product is particularly suited to fast-growing or large distributed organizations with substantial license needs and continuous staff recruitment and attrition.

The intuitive platform offers a number of advanced Office365 administration features including bulk transaction processing, advanced hierarchical management capability and Role Based Access Control, providing advanced security around Office365 administration. With simplicity and ease of use at its core, CloudManager also provides a comprehensive audit and reporting dashboard which captures all administrator and customer actions.

“CloudManager gives organizations more control, simplicity and access. This signals our intent to move into other areas of the cloud sector with product development that is complementary to our CloudMigrator365 solution which has successfully migrated over 6 million people to the cloud across 57 countries worldwide,” said Darren Mawhinney, managing director, CloudMigrator365.

“We recognize that as more and more cloud services are adopted by large organizations, administration is becoming a significantly more costly and complex problem. CloudManager aims to remove this headache and provides organizations with a simple, cost-effective solution.

“We have already had many existing and potential clients signing up for the cost-effective platform and we are looking forward to rolling CloudManager out globally,” he added.

Headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the cloud migration company provides simple, secure and cost-effective Microsoft-based migration for companies of all sizes with customers including global brand leaders to SMEs across all sectors.

CloudMigrator365 is growing rapidly, most notably adding world-class organizations including LinkedIn, YMCA (Canada) and The University of Bristol to its ever-expanding global client-list. Designed to simplify and automate migration for clients to Office 365, it has proven particularly popular with a growing number of IT partners as well as professionals worldwide who now rely on the solution.

In addition to its Belfast Headquarters, CloudMigrator365 is also located in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

IBM Report: Half Of Surveyed CEOs Plan To Adopt Cognitive Computing By 2019

Cognitive computing has nearly endless possibilities to improve business processes and functions with 73% percent of surveyed CEOs in a recent IBM study citing it will play a key role in their organizations’ future and all executives in the study anticipating a 15% percent return on investment from their cognitive initiatives.

According to the new IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study, “Accelerating enterprise reinvention: how to build a cognitive organizations,” while investment in cognitive is expected to yield significant competitive advantages, surveyed executives are prioritizing its application in specific business functions including information technology, sales, information security, and innovation. The study is based on a survey from more than 6,000 executives across industries with further analysis from leaders of each business function to determine the organizational priorities for applying and adopting cognitive computing.

Cognitive computing is a next generation information system that can understand, reason, learn, and interact with humans in natural language. While traditional analytics can provide data-based insights, cognitive more easily turns these insights into actionable recommendations. A new IDC spending guide found global spending on cognitive platforms will climb from around USD 3 billion in 2016 to more than USD 31 billion by 20191. Concurrently, the IBV report found half of surveyed global CEOs plan to adopt cognitive computing by 2019.

This new study provides insight into how surveyed business leaders intend to prioritize cognitive investments within individual business functions to accelerate their business transformation. The study found the top three functional priorities to apply cognitive computing by surveyed CEOs include:

Information technology: to support faster, more efficient planning, development, and testing of enterprise software to enable greater agility and accelerated solution design.

Sales: to improve the efficiency of customer-facing services, expand customer account management capabilities, increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and improve efficiency of lead management — all with richer contextual understanding.

Information security: enable faster, more reliable fraud detection or other activities within volumes of structured and unstructured data. By accelerating threat detection and reducing resolution time, this can save up to thousands of staff-time hours, freeing personnel to focus on more business-critical initiatives.

When it comes to accelerating enterprise innovation with cognitive, the IBV recommends businesses to:

• Envision the future: outline a 18-to-24-month digital strategy for adopting cognitive with a limited set of initiatives that paves the way for smaller, more exploratory investments with finite objectives and time frames. Define enterprise or business unit reinvention case, KPIs, and targets. Apply a targeted operating model and governance that support this strategy.
• Ideate: focus on thorough and periodic assessments in the market and with target users. Experiment and educate the rest of the enterprise on how cognitive capabilities are being used — such as the use of natural language processing or machine learning for large data analysis and insights. Create common use cases and applications, and design the basic standards and architectural considerations tailored to the organization. As the strategy progresses, assess market and user needs, define future experiences, end-to-end processes, and capabilities that cognitive can facilitate accordingly.
• Incubate and scale: during the shift from planning and design to execution, apply cognitive to specific use cases, rapidly explore and prototype solutions to solve specific and measurable business challenges. Design and execute pilots with agility and limited risk to existing customers and operations. When these concepts are incubated, commercialized, and scaled, use a lean governance model to periodically review progress and value. Monitor the business case value realization and make adjustments, as necessary.

1. Daquila, Marianne and Jessica Goepfert. “Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive SystemsSpending by Vertical Market 2016–2019 Forecast.” IDC press release. March 8, 2016. http://www.idc.com/ getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41072216

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Equinix And Oracle Offer Direct Access To Oracle Cloud In Asia Pacific

Equinix, Inc. has announced the immediate availability of dedicated, private access to Oracle Cloud in its Sydney, Australia, International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center. Available via Oracle Cloud Network Service – FastConnect and the Equinix Cloud Exchange™, access will be available for Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS). This direct access enables enterprise customers in this growing region to migrate compute, applications and data to Oracle Cloud in a high-performance, low-latency manner for an optimal user experience.

This builds on previous announcements between Equinix and Oracle to offer direct connection to several Oracle PaaS and IaaS services, including database, Java, integration, analytics, compute and storage — in multiple regions around the globe. The addition of Sydney brings the total number of markets that Equinix is offering private access to Oracle Cloud to five, globally.

“We are excited to continue our collaboration with Oracle and bring this service to the Asia Pacific market. The ability to connect directly to Oracle is an essential strategy for companies as they deploy workloads to the cloud. By providing direct access, our mutual customers can create a high-speed, dedicated, and low-latency connection that allows them to fully realize the benefits of hybrid deployment. We look forward to ongoing collaborations with Oracle, bringing this solution to additional Equinix data centers across the globe,” said Robert Blackburn, global managing director, Oracle strategic alliance, Equinix.

Cloud deployments in Asia Pacific, and specifically Australia, are on the rise. According to a recent report by IDC*, 67% of all Australian organizations surveyed are embracing cloud, using public or private cloud for more than one or two applications or workloads. Yet, factors such as security and privacy concerns still inhibit public cloud adoption. Through the Equinix Cloud Exchange integration with Oracle FastConnect, customers in Australia can establish direct connectivity between their private IT infrastructure and Oracle Cloud. This enables them to fully realize the benefits of hybrid cloud — moving application, middleware and database workloads seamlessly between private IT infrastructure and Oracle Cloud on a private, dedicated connection resulting in consistent and predictable performance and lower latency.

Whether a customer is looking to incorporate direct connection to Oracle as part of a broader interconnection strategy, or specifically needing to migrate data-heavy applications to the cloud, connection to Oracle Cloud inside Equinix is a highly scalable solution for many enterprise users, that can further a customer’s efforts to address data privacy, regulatory compliance and data sovereignty scenarios. In addition to direct access to the Oracle Cloud, customers in Sydney will also gain access to Oracle Managed Cloud Services to help them determine the best deployment model for their business needs.

In today’s world, business models are increasingly interdependent and enterprises are adopting an Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ (IOA) strategy in order to deliver the level of performance users demand while taking advantage of multiple IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud services. Enterprises bring these services closer to their global end users by putting workloads and application as close as possible to the digital edge of their network in Equinix facilities, co-locating IT hubs adjacent to the various cloud service providers that host their cloud edges in Equinix data centers.

“With interconnection emerging as a catalyst of revenue growth for many Australian businesses, being able to securely and directly connect to cloud and network services is critical. Our goal at Equinix has always been to help our enterprise customers realize the full benefits of the cloud – without worrying about application latency or cost issues. We are thrilled to be bringing Oracle direct access to our customers in Australia. This private, direct access reduces network costs, increases throughput, and provides a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections,” said Jeremy Deutsch, managing director, Equinix Australia.

The Equinix data centers in Sydney are the most interconnected in Australia. Enterprise customers in Sydney are able to establish direct links to both of the continent’s largest peering points, as well as key submarine cable systems, and gain direct access to multiple network and cloud providers such as Oracle, via the Equinix Cloud Exchange. And with the largest selection of international and regional networks in Australia, enterprise customers have the broadest choice of network providers from which to connect to Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Cloud delivers nearly 1,000 SaaS applications and 50 enterprise-class PaaS and IaaS services to customers in more than 195 countries around the world, and supports 55 billion transactions each day. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is also part of the fast growing sector of cloud computing. According to a recent Gartner report the highest cloud growth is expected to come from IaaS, with a growth of 38.4% in 2016.

The Equinix Cloud Exchange is currently available in 21 markets globally – Amsterdam, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, New York, Osaka, Paris, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington D.C., and Zurich.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

ZNetLive To Add Hybrid Cloud Solution In Q3

ZNetLive has announced its plan to expand its product portfolio to include Microsoft Azure Stack based Hybrid Cloud Solution to help users get proficient computing capabilities with increased productivity at reduced operational costs.

The Azure Stack Hybrid Cloud solution expected to be made commercially available by early Q3 this year, will provide users with single vendor support for Azure Stack and Azure public cloud. The solution encompasses Azure’s storage, geo presence and flexible capacity to enable an organization’s expansion on a global level.

The pay per usage solution will be available with one contract and monthly invoicing and the users will get their own client portal, with which they will be able to seamlessly create, deploy and manage their workloads on cloud. The kind of IT automation that this solution will provide will enable organizations maintain crucial business data on premise while getting economies of scale with faster deployment of new services and applications on public cloud.

“This is one more step by ZNetLive in empowering Digital Transformation. The Azure Stack Hybrid Cloud solution combines path breaking ZNetLive’s cloud management services with modern, scalable, and flexible Microsoft Azure Stack capabilities to provide a comprehensive hybrid cloud solution to enterprises seeking digital transformation for modernization, high performance and scalability at low costs,” said Munesh Jadoun, founder & CEO, ZNetLive.  

For those onboarding the solution, the management and support provided by ZNetLive will include cloud strategy formulation, building Azure hybrid cloud following detailed analysis of crucial and routine workloads and customers’ workload migration. It will also include security, back-up and disaster recovery services. 

The company has been implementing integrated Azure Stack and Azure pack cloud solutions for some time now.

The solution also includes Azure ExpressRoute Services to provide users with speedier private Azure connection from production environment for regular data migration, data transfer and thus, helping in expenditure reduction. With it, the users can add storage and compute capacity to their existing datacenter for high throughput and reduced latencies. The solution enables them to build applications spanning on premise infrastructure and Azure without compromising on privacy or performance.

Source: CloudStrategyMag