In an analysis of recent revenue and profit trends of HPE’s various businesses, The Next Platform’s Timothy Prickett Morgan points out that enterprise technology services are a people-intensive, low-margin business, and says that this is probably the biggest reason CEO Meg Whitman has decided to get out of it.

While its bread-and-butter server business has been essentially flat, it’s generated a lot more profit for HPE than Enterprise Services. Second to servers in terms of revenue is Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing, which is being shed as part of the Enterprise Services unit.

The only clear way for the company to drive meaningful revenue growth now appears to be simply selling higher volumes of commoditized data center hardware, Prickett Morgan concludes. Driving volume in hardware sales is HPE’s first line of defense against the market behemoth that is about to be born as Dell closes its $67 billion acquisition of EMC.

Original article appeared here: HPE Bets on Core Data Center Hardware Sales to Drive Profits

Source: TheWHIR

QTS acquired Carpathia for $326 million. The deal gave the data center provider a well-developed managed hosting business and more than doubled the amount of data centers in its portfolio, including the company’s first international footprint in Canada, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Former CEO Weber also joined Carpathia in 2008 following a three-year run at Sun, which in 2005 acquired an IT management startup he co-founded called SevenSpace.

“The primary goal for the integration of QTS and Carpathia was to strengthen QTS’ ability to deliver the nation’s only fully integrated technology platform, and Peter Weber played a key role in helping us achieve that goal,” QTS CEO, Chad Williams, said in a statement.

Original article appeared here: QTS Appoints Carpathia’s Jon Greaves as CTO

Source: TheWHIR

Stone has a lot of experience in both data center services and web-scale data center infrastructure. At CenturyLink, he oversaw a global portfolio of 60 colocation data centers. Prior to joining CenturyLink in 2011, he oversaw global operations at Global Switch, which provides data center services in Europe and Asia. Before that, he spent nine years managing data centers at Microsoft.

Reno, Nevada-based RagingWire was attractive to him because he buys into the company’s new business strategy, Stone said in an interview. “They’re making their mark in the wholesale industry,” he said. “I have a great opportunity to come in and help them with their strategy to grow the business.”

He left CenturyLink at a time of uncertainty for the Monroe, Louisiana-based telco’s data center business. Since last year, the company has been exploring alternatives to owning its extensive data center portfolio, which it increased substantially in 2011 when it acquired data center provider Savvis for $2.5 billion.

The company’s execs said that while they have no plans to get out of the colocation business, they are weighing apotential sale of some or all of its data center assets.

Stone declined to comment on CenturyLink’s data center plans.

His focus at RagingWire will be on expanding the company’s existing campuses in Sacramento, California, and Ashburn, Virginia, completing the massive-scale data center construction project the company kicked off last year in Texas, and building in new markets. RagingWire is eyeing expansion into New York, Silicon Valley, Chicago, and another West Coast market – Los Angeles, Phoenix, or eastern Washington – the company’s president, Doug Adams, told DCK earlier.

There isn’t a single particular type of data center design that works for all cloud providers, Stone said. “Some cloud providers require very strict architecture, and they really don’t want to deviate from a true 2N-type of style. Others have more of a single-cord [approach] and they have geographic redundancy.”

For RagingWire, the key differentiation will be scale, since that’s what all the major cloud providers are after today. They’re racing to expand data center capacity, and they expand in multi-megawatt chunks, so scale is important to them.

“From our perspective, it’s all about scale,” Stone said.

Original article appeared here: CenturyLink Data Center VP Joins RagingWire as COO

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: IBM’s New Cloud Data Center in India to Serve Its Exploding Developer Population

ST Telemedia has agreed to buy a 74-percent stake in Tata’s data center business in the two countries for $633 million, gaining control of 14 data centers in India and three in Singapore, as well as recurring revenue from contracts with companies using those facilities, which include blue chip Asian enterprises, e-commerce firms, and multinationals, according to the announcement.

“The acquisition of Tata’s data center assets gives STT’s data center portfolio a stake in the two Asia-Pacific markets with the most long-run growth potential,” Jabez Tan, research director at Structure Research, who specializes in Asian data center markets, said.

India: Promising but Hard to Enter

According to 451 Research, Asia Pacific has more operational colocation space than any other region of the world (40 percent of the total). 451 doesn’t break out India in publicly available data, but according to Gartner, total IT infrastructure spending in the country will grow from $1.91 billion in 2015 to $2.14 billion in 2020. That’s total spending on networking, storage, and server hardware that will have to be housed in data centers.

India is unquestionably an attractive long-term growth market, and many data center providers based elsewhere have been eyeing it but shying away because of its operating challenges, Tan said. Power grid infrastructure in the country is relatively unreliable, and it is difficult to build local market presence there from outside.

By acquiring a stake in Tata’s business, ST Telemedia gets a foothold in the market without having to address those hurdles. “In acquiring Tata’s data center assets and partnering, STT has given itself a platform, complete with scale, capabilities and footprint, to jumpstart its presence in this market,” Tan said.

Expanding in Asia’s Key Network Hub

Singapore is another key Asian data center market where ST Telemedia started building presence just last year, when it announced plans to construct a 150,000-square foot data center. It followed the announcement with acquisition of a 70-percent stake in Shine Systems Assets, which is building another major data center in Singapore called MediaHub.

The Singapore data center market was $963 million in 2014, according to Structure. The firm expects it to surpass $1.2 billion this year.

The small island nation is a major interconnection hub for networks carrying traffic throughout Southeast Asia and China and between Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. Like Hong Kong, it’s considered a network gateway to Asia’s biggest market: mainland China.

Series of Deals Paints Picture of Global Ambition

China was the first pin on the map of ST Telemedia’s current push into the global data center services market. In 2014, it acquired a 40-percent stake in GDS, one of China’s biggest data center providers with 17 facilities in key metros on the mainland and in Hong Kong.

Last year, ST Telemedia also entered the European data center market, buying a 49-percent stake in UK data center provider Virtus Data Centers.

All these recent deals are investments in businesses focused solely on data center services. It’s worth noting that ST Telemedia also holds a stake in Level 3 Communications, one of the world’s biggest network carriers, which operates more than 350 data centers around the world.

This isn’t ST Telemedia’s first foray into the data center services market. In the late 1990s, it provided internet exchange services in Asia, and in 2000 it launched i-STT, a data center provider that later merged with Equinix, which has since grown into the world’s biggest provider of colocation services by revenue, currently holding about 8 percent of market share, according to 451. ST Telemedia became Equinix’s largest shareholder following the merger but later divested its interest in the company.

The series of acquisitions it has made over the last two years is a new push into a market that is very different from what it was in the early 2000s and a much bigger one. Its new ambitions are hefty, and it’s clear that the company is eyeing further expansion. In a statement issued along with the deal’s announcement, its CEO Sio Tat Hiang said entering India “will be a major impetus to advance the company’s ambition to be a significant global data center provider.”

Original article appeared here: Tata Deal Big Boost to ST Telemedia’s Global Data Center Ambitions

Source: TheWHIR

Like most other companies with corporate sustainability goals, which usually include carbon-neutrality commitments, Microsoft buys Renewable Energy Credits to compensate for renewable energy it cannot source to reach those goals.

RECs can be decoupled from the renewable energy that was generated to produce them, so they do nothing to clean up the fuel mix on a utility grid supplying a particular data center if they were produced elsewhere.

Microsoft and other big cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google, are in rapid data center expansion mode to support growth of their cloud services. In the blog postannouncing the new green data center goals goals, Microsoft VP and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, acknowledged that “data centers will rank by the middle of the next decade among the large users of electrical power on the planet.”

The job of cleaning up energy supply of these cloud data centers is made more complicated by the fact that the cloud providers don’t own many of the facilities they use to host their infrastructure. Expanding quickly around the world means having to lease capacity from data center providers, whose sustainability ambitions are often not aligned with their clients’.

See also: What Cloud and AI Do and Don’t Mean for Google’s Data Center Strategy

While there are signs that some major data center providers have made renewable energy a bigger priority than in the past, the industry as a whole still has a long way to go.

Akamai, one of the world’s largest Content Delivery Network providers, is currently wrestling with this issue. The company announced earlier this month a goal to source renewable energy for at least half of its 200,000-server infrastructure, which is highly distributed, consisting primarily of small deployments in colocation data centers across 126 countries.

Akamai acknowledged that its goal will be hard to reach and said it would start by testing a financial instrument called Contract for Difference, where the energy user agrees to pay the difference between the cost of regular grid power and the cost of generating renewable energy to the producer whose solar plant or wind farm is on the same grid in exchange for RECs.

Microsoft recently hired Jim Hanna, former head of environmental affairs at Starbucks, to lead its green data center strategy.

This month, the company announced it had joined an alliance with environmental groups and Facebook, which will promote renewable energy development. The Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance’s goal is to push for development of 60 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2025, which is enough to replace all US coal-fired power plants that are slated for retirement in the next four years.

Original article appeared here: Microsoft Expands Green Data Center Ambitions

Source: TheWHIR

One of the investors participating in the funding round is Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn, one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers. Ingrasys co-developed DriveScale’s hardware and will act as its manufacturer. The Foxconn subsidiary is also one of the startup’s first customers, a group that also includes AppNexus, ClearSense, and DST Systems.

The other investors in DriveScale are Nautilus Venture Partners and Pelion Venture Partners. Pelion led the Series A round.

DriveScale is calling its architecture “composable,” a term HPE also used to describe its recently launched product line with many similar aims, including the flexibility to adjust compute or storage capacity independently from each other.

Read more: HPE Rethinks Enterprise Computing

The approach is often referred to as “rack-scale architecture,” which is something internet giants like Google and Facebook use in their data centers. Now, the startup is promising enterprises the kind of rack-scale infrastructure the web giants have been enjoying for years.

DriveScale’s three-person founding team has deep roots in the IT infrastructure industry. Two of the founders, CTO Satya Nishtala and chief scientist Tom Lyon, held key engineering roles at Nuova Systems, a startup acquired by Cisco in 2008 whose technology became the basis of Cisco’s UCS servers and Nexus switches, according to founder bios on DriveScale’s website.

All three founders have deep ties to Sun Microsystems, the legendary Silicon Valley hardware company whose engineering legacy continues to command respect in the industry, despite its business troubles in the years between the dot-com crash and its acquisition by Oracle in 2009.

The third founder is VP Duane Northcutt. He ended up at Sun after it acquired Kealia in 2004, where he was VP of technology. Kealia was a startup launched by one of Sun’s founders, Andy Bechtolsheim, who had left Sun but rejoined it following the acquisition. The Kealia deal was the basis for Sun’s entry into the x86 server market, according to DriveScale.

Original article appeared here: Scale-Out Infrastructure Startup DriveScale Raises $15M

Source: TheWHIR

This is the first time Google has shared any information about the hardware backend that powers its AI, which will play a central role in the company’srevamped cloud services strategy, announced earlier this year. TPUs will be part of the infrastructure that supports its cloud services.

Related: Google to Build and Lease Data Centers in Big Cloud Expansion

Pichai shared little detail about the TPU, saying only that its performance per watt was “orders of magnitude higher” than any commercially available CPU or GPU (Graphics Processing Unit):

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on stage at Google I/O 2016 (Source: Google I/O live stream)

“Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is a custom ASIC for machine learning that fits in the same footprint of a hard drive, and was the secret sauce for AlphaGo in Korea,” Google said in an emailed statement.

TPU gets its name from TensorFlow, the software library for machine intelligence that powers Google Search and other services, such as speech recognition, Gmail, and Photos. The company open sourced TensorFlow in November of last year.

Original article appeared here: Google: AlphaGo Powered by Custom AI Chip

Source: TheWHIR

Digital has had data centers in London and Amsterdam, but Frankfurt is a new market the company has been eyeing for some time. Earlier this year it announced a land acquisition in Frankfurt where it plans to construct a three-building data center campus. Ownership of Telecity’s Lyonestrasse facility in Frankfurt and contracts with its tenants are likely to accelerate capacity take-up on the future campus as those existing customers look to expand in the market.

Related: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last?

This Tuesday, Digital will join Dow Jones’s S&P 500, one of the most widely tracked stock market indexes, becoming the second company in the index focused solely on data center services. The other one is Equinix, which joined the index last year. Digital will replace Time Warner Cable, which is being acquired by Charter Communications.

Equinix’s blockbuster Telecity acquisition, which closed in January, radically changed data center market dynamics in Europe. By securing the deal, the Redwood City, California-based colocation provider instantly became the top data center provider in the region.

The acquisition disrupted an agreed-to but not yet closed merger between London-based Telecity and the Dutch data center provider Interxion, at the time two of Europe’s largest players. Had the merger gone through, it would have been nearly impossible for Equinix, or any other provider, to take the top spot in the European market in the future.

Digital, which historically focused on wholesale data center services, providing large chunks of data center capacity to the likes of Equinix (still one of its biggest customers), recently pivoted to a strategy that includes both wholesale and retail colocation services, competing more directly with Equinix. Last year it acquired Telx, one of Equinix’s biggest competitors in the US, in a deal that doubled its retail colo business.

Read more: Telx Acquisition Closed, Here’s Digital Realty’s Plan

Besides the acquisition of eight Equinix data centers by Digital, the companies also agreed on a binding option for Equinix to acquire a Digital facility in Paris, where Equinix leases and operates two data centers, for about $215 million. There’s no guarantee at this point that Equinix will exercise the option.

The portfolio Digital has agreed to buy contains about 213,000 square feet of data center space and 24.4MW of IT load total. About 650 customers are using the facilities, occupying 72 percent of available power, Digital said in a statement.

The portfolio also includes the potential to add another 15MW and close to 90,000 square feet of data center space in London and Amsterdam in the future.

Original article appeared here: Digital Realty Buys Eight Equinix Data Centers in Europe

Source: TheWHIR

Amazon has agreed to become the cable’s fourth anchor customer, and its financial commitment provided the last bit of funding necessary to kick off the submarine construction project, a person familiar with the deal who wished to remain anonymous told Data Center Knowledge.

The 14,000-kilometer cable will provide a much welcomed third competitor to the two submarine cable systems on the US-Australia route today: Telstra Endeavour and Southern Cross Cable Network.

Telstra Endeavour (above) lands in Hawaii on the US side and in Paddington in Australia. (Image source: TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map)

Southern Cross (above) will land in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Oregon, and California. (Image source: TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map)

The Hawaiki cable (above) will land in Oregon, Australia, New Zealand, as well as American Samoa. (Image source: TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map)

Oregon’s Pacific shore is an important place on the global connectivity map. A lot of transpacific network traffic enters the US through the high concentration of submarine cable landing stations in the Oregon towns of Hillsboro, Nedonna Beach, Warrenton, Pacific City, and Warrenton, from where it is carried south to data centers and carrier hotels in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles or inland.

Because of this, there is a fairly large data center cluster in Hillsboro and the surrounding area. Amazon’s US West cloud availability region is hosted in data centers in Oregon, as well as GovCloud, its dedicated cloud region for government agencies.

Intercontinental connectivity is crucial to cloud service providers of Amazon’s caliber, who try to offer customers as many global location options for hosting their virtual infrastructure as possible. As more and more companies start using cloud services and the amount of data created and exchanged in general keeps growing rapidly, demand for this kind of connectivity is on the rise, and so is construction of submarine cables to address the demand.

“We are seeing a resurgence of subsea cable projects to support global cloud deployments and growth of international data traffic,” Equinix CEO Stephen Smith said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call this month. “There are more than 50 global submarine cable projects under consideration over the coming two years, which places Equinix in a great position to win a portion of this next generation of submarine cable investment.”

Amazon’s biggest rivals in the cloud services market, Google and Microsoft, have both made big investments in submarine cable construction projects.

The Faster cable system, backed by Google and several Asian telecommunications and IT services companies, is expected to come online this year. Another big project is the New Cross Pacific Cable System, which is backed by Microsoft and a group of Asian telcos. NCP is expected to come online in 2017. Both will land in Oregon on the US side.

The three anchor customers of the Hawaiki cable besides Amazon are British telco Vodafone, REANNZ, a government-backed New Zealand research and education network, and the American Samoa Telecommunications Authority, the US territory’s government-owned incumbent carrier.

Original article appeared here: Amazon’s Cloud Arm Makes Its First Big Submarine Cable Investment

Source: TheWHIR