Our winner for last week’s caption contest was Juan Garcia who submitted:”Didn’t they tell you? Power was restored hours ago.” Congrats to Juan! We will contact you and make sure you get a signed print of the cartoon from the artist.

Thanks to all our readers who submitted very funny captions, and thanks to those who voted on the final captions. This week, we are asking for submissions on a new cartoon below. Diane writes, “I’ve heard numerous stories about how people find everything under the raised floor so I couldn’t help but draw a comic were you decide what Kip discovers under the floor!”

Click image for larger view.

Data Center World promises to assist experienced industry professionals in both data center and facilities management increase their knowledge and insights about how IT goals and business goals can be aligned to improve operations. The conference will provide attendees with educational sessions facilitated by some of the most respected minds in the data center and facilities management fields, allowing participants to leave with not only a solid action plan, but valuable business contacts.

The conference’s keynote speaker, Vivek Kundra, formerly the United States’ Chief Information Officer and now with Salesforce.com, will discuss the challenges he faced while leading the federal government’s information technology bureaucracy at a time when cutting costs, increasing efficiency and driving innovation was of great importance. His keynote presentation will focus on the use of technology to create lasting change, tapping the creativity of people to keep innovation optimal, and confronting the tough decisions to keep your organization growing and competitive.

Data Center World will also include:

• More than 80 informative presentations
• An engaging keynote presentation
• Powerful networking opportunities and luncheon
• Expo welcome reception
• Data Center Manager of the Year Award ceremony and dinner

The presentations fall into these topical groupings:

• General Data Center Management
• Disaster Recovery/Security
• Cloud Computing
• Data Center Builds/Expansion and Design
• General Facilities Management
• Power and Cooling

Visit the Data Center World calendar page on Data Center Knowledge for more details.

For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar.

Opengate Data Systems Opens Silicon Valley Office – Opengate Data Systems, a Massachusetts company providing data center infrastructure solutions, has opened a new office in Palo Alto, California under the direction of Wenda Puzzo, Regional Sales Manager for Mountain & West Coast Regions. The Palo Alto office has the capability to provide solutions and services that maximize data center utilization as well as improve operational efficiency around today’s critical challenge of power and cooling for owners and builders of high tech facilities, hospitals, government facilities, educational institutions and other mission critical facilities. Press release.

ATI Picks Phoenix NAP for Disaster Recovery - Assessment Technology Incorporated (ATI), a leading provider of online instructional improvement tools and data analysis, has selected the Phoenix NAP data center for its additional disaster recovery (DR) site. The group cited Phoenix NAP’s full redundancy, multiple service providers and timely and professional staff as key influences in its decision to place its DR solution with Phoenix NAP. Press release.

Healthcare Software Firm Picks Immedion – RecordQuest, a Charleston based healthcare software solutions provider,  today announced it has selected Immedion’s Charleston data center to provide data center and managed services as part of an enhanced disaster recovery plan. The Charleston facility will be open early summer 2012. Immedion, with locations in Asheville, NC, as well as Greenville and Columbia, SC, is a leading provider of data center and managed hosting services. RecordQuest provides next generation release of information software and services to the healthcare industry allowing for the secure exchange of patient information between medical facilities and third-party entities including attorneys, insurance companies, other providers and federal and state agencies. Press release.

HP announces OpenFlow-enabled switches.  HP (HPQ) announced a portfolio of OpenFlow-enabled switches, providing customers with the broadest choice in the industry for simplifying network management while meeting a wide range of bandwidth, performance and budget needs. The sixteen model portfolio includes the HP 3500, 5400 and 8200 series switches.  Later this year HP will have support for OpenFlow across all switches in the HP FlexNetwork architecture. “To help enterprises uniformly manage network traffic flow across the data center, HP became an early innovator of the OpenFlow standard, supporting more than 60 universities and research centers in trials, development efforts and practical real-world applications,” said Bethany Mayer, senior vice president and general manager, Networking, HP. “With more than 10 million OpenFlow-capable switch ports deployed and the broadest portfolio currently available on the market, HP is leading the move to the OpenFlow standard and further simplifying networks for our enterprise clients.” HP is a founding member of the Open Networking Foundation which continues to advance the OpenFlow standard.

$200,000 Cray Supercomputers.  Cray announced that it is revitalizing its efforts to provide affordably priced, world-class Cray supercomputers to customers in the midrange supercomputing market. With prices starting at $200,000, new entry-level midrange configurations combine the lower cost with a range of software application support previously reserved for the much larger petascale technologies. The new offering features enhancements to Cray’s Cluster Compatibility Mode (CCM), which gives customers the ability to run applications from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) without modification. ”The Cray CX line was a success for us as it allowed us to reach a new segment of users in a broader set of industries,” said Peg Williams, Cray’s senior vice president of high performance computing systems. “For some time, customers have been looking for us to combine the strengths of both of our product offerings into a single architecture and we’ve now accomplished that goal. By adding the final pieces to the puzzle — low starting prices, broad ISV applications support, scalability and a tightly integrated architecture – we now have an ideal supercomputing product to successfully meet the needs of the midrange market.”

UPSL expands PowerWAVE 6000 UPS.  UPS Limited, a Kohler company announced that the PowerWAVE 6000 UPS is now available in both 400 and 500 kVA power ratings, parallelable up to 5 MVA. The new UPS was specifically designed to meet the growing power protection demands of mission critical applications within the data centre, IT, telecommunications and financial services sectors. “We have seen demand for the existing PowerWAVE 6000 continue to grow, especially within the small to medium sized data centre arena, where space and efficiency are key considerations,” said David Renton, UPSL’s Managing Director.  ”However, feedback from both existing and potential customers, regularly asked if there was a UPS which maintains the same advanced characteristics, but with a larger kVA rating. In response, we extended the range to produce a UPS that met the required power capacity but without impacting the unit’s performance or efficiency credentials. This class-leading UPS system is now available in ten power ratings, ranging from 60 to 500 kVA, and boasts an output power factor rated up to one – ensuring compliance with all modern IT equipment like blade servers.”

The new designation from the Uptime Institute provides third-party assurance that the site management satisfies industry-recognized criteria for 24 x 7 uptime. The evaluation criteria was developed by and for the data center industry and validates staffing levels, a training and professional development assessment, preventative maintenance program and processes, operating conditions and housekeeping, and planning management and coordination practices and resources. To have a site awarded the Management and Operations Stamp of Approval it must be an operational data center, have 24×7 uptime, have a significant cost of downtime, be a non-Tier certified design and facility, and have a commitment to excellence in operations.

Equinix

Equinix (EQIX) announced that  it is the first company in the Americas to receive the new Management and Operations (M&O) ‘Stamp of Approval’ Award. Equinix was a key member of the Uptime Institute’s eleven member M&O Coalition that developed the assessment criteria for its new Management and Operations Program and Site Assessment Service. “Equinix’s exceptional uptime is one of the most important reasons our customers choose us and our work with the Uptime Institute helps us become even stronger in the critical area of management and operations,” said John Shultz, vice president, global product management and development at Equinix. The site award was given to the  Equinix Ashburn data center.

Colt

Colt announced that it has been awarded the Management and Operations Stamp of Approval for its London 3 site. Colt underwent an intensive audit which scrutinized every aspect of how it manages and operates its data center site. The audit took into consideration everything from the processes for servicing equipment and investment in training through to the effectiveness of its communications to staff and subcontractors.
“This is a milestone, not only for Colt but for the industry as a whole,” said Guy Ruddock, VP of Operations at Colt. “This standard is industry-led and directly links staffing, maintenance and operations to uptime and through it we have proved our people and processes are world class.”

“Colt’s participation in the coalition went above and beyond our expectations,” said Julian Kudritzki, Vice President at the Uptime Institute, “not only helping clarify those behaviours that need to exist in a data centre, independent of the infrastructure, but opening up access to staff and facilities for hands-on validation.”

The Facility Technician will perform first responder duties for all facility infrastructure incidents and emergencies, coordinate and maintain performance maintenance activities and schedules, assist facility manager in producing scheduled and ad hoc reports by gathering data and maintaining facility databases, and support regulatory compliance by updating the facility operations handbook, training and other SAS70 documentation.  To view full details and apply, see job listing details.

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on theData Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed.

enStratus releases new version of cloud management solution. enStratus announced the latest release of its cloud management solution that extends its leadership in enterprise cloud management. This new release includes a new configuration management user interface, support for leading configuration management systems and extended on-premises capabilities. New features in the release include tighter integration with open source projects Chef and Puppet, a new configuration management user interface, and drag and drop configuration management. ”In comparison to our competitor’s proprietary configuration management systems, enStratus has always supported a variety of configuration management options, including both native Chef and Puppet,” said James Urquhart, VP of Product Strategy. ”With this release, we build upon that support with new capabilities aimed at making it even easier for enterprises to choose which configuration management tools are right for them. This approach, as well as expanded on-premises deployment options, will enable enterprises to better meet their cloud management needs across their private and public clouds.”

CA releases new Erwin products.  CA Technologies (CA) announced new CA ERwin products and releases that help a wider audience of stakeholders accurately visualize data assets across the enterprise, from on-premise platforms to the cloud.  The new CA Erwin Data Modeler for SQL Azure manages and integrates Microsoft SQL cloud database environments. CA Erwin Web Portal gives full visibility into the metadata that describes the business context of data assets. CA Erwin Data Modeler r8.2 facilitates collaboration across the enterprise with new concurrent licensing and Active Model template functionality. “IT is under relentless pressure to rapidly deliver new business services across an ever-changing landscape of old and new platforms,” said Mike Crest, general manager, Data Management, CA Technologies.  “By providing essential data management capabilities to the full range of users who need them, CA ERwin empowers IT to meet its escalating challenges with a new level of control, reliability and efficiency.”

Interxion welcomes European Cloud Partnership. Interxion (INXN) announced that it welcomes and supports the invitation from Neelie Kroes at the World Economic Forum in Davos to create a European Cloud Partnership. Accomplished in a collaboration among cloud providers the first phase is to establish common requirements, the second, to build and deliver Proof of Concepts, and the third, to build reference implementations. With cloud hubs in 11 countries and 13 cities, Interxion facilitates the exchange of information between cloud environments. “There is a need for the European industry to start working together proactively and to make it easier for enterprises to benefit from cloud services.  The cloud provides an important opportunity to increase the efficiency of IT resources and lower their cost. Due to the fragmentation of the European market, the transition to cloud-based service and consumption models may be slower in Europe compared to other world economies. We see this initiative from the European Commission as a positive stimulation to the industry to speed up the IT transition process” says Kevin Dean, Chief Marketing Officer, Interxion. Interxion published its Cloud Survey 2011 last year, explaining how  decision-makers and influencers view cloud computing.

The Steelhead CX series is a dedicated WAN Optimization appliance and like its predecessors in the xx50 series, overcomes bandwidth and geographic limitations to make users more productive, data transfers faster, and applications perform seamlessly regardless of location. The new CX series however has greater throughput and offers more capacity, all for the same total cost of ownership. The Steelhead EX adds a robust platform with more memory, disk, and CPU to support the Virtual Services Platform (VSP) and Granite, a new architecture also announced Wednesday.

“In an effort to simplify management, increase resource utilization and reduce costs, organizations have been actively consolidating and virtualizing IT environments into centralized data centers,” said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “While these consolidation efforts provide numerous benefits, it is imperative that organizations ensure that these consolidated IT environments are adequately protected and available. Furthermore, these consolidation efforts can introduce inherent performance over distance challenges. Riverbed’s enhanced Steelhead product family enables organizations to centralize virtually all applications, driving down operational overhead and costs, yet still maintain high levels of availability and improve end-user satisfaction.”

Steelhead-CX and Steelhead-EX series are expected to be generally available this quarter.

Riverbed Granite

Riverbed also announced a new architectural approach called edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI) that does for edge servers what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) did for desktops. Riverbed Granite is the new offering that enables edge-VSI. With Granite, global enterprises can achieve complete consolidation of edge applications, servers and storage to the data center, while delivering services to the edge of the enterprise as if they were local. Edge-VSI is complementary to wide area network (WAN) optimization, accelerating performance for applications and use cases not addressed by any WAN optimization approach today.

Saving up to 50 percent over traditional approaches to managing distributed infrastructure, Granite decouples storage from its server over thousands of miles, yet works as if the storage were local to the server.  Granite solves bandwidth and latency problems over distributed networks, but lower in the technology stack – at the block level – making it possible to deliver global storage and server infrastructure extended from the data center over the WAN.

“Traditionally, data centers and remote offices have been managed through separate operational processes, procedures and infrastructures,” said Dave Russell, Research Vice President, Storage Technologies and Strategies, at Gartner. “In an ideal world, IT could leverage its investment in building the data center of the future by putting its IT infrastructure into one central data center, with its control, economies of scale, and security. However, with workers at large enterprises distributed across the globe, performance is a key challenge, especially for storage heavy workloads. To make this a reality, a new approach is needed that addresses these currently challenging workloads.”

Granite is expected to be generally available this quarter.

Fusion-io selected by inFrame Designs. Fusion-io (FIO) announced that InFrame Designs, provider of custom-built media servers to accelerate playback of video at live media events, has deployed Fusion’s ioMemory technology in its appliances to reduce latency by up to 100 times when compared to InFrame’s previous architecture. The InFrame Vixen media servers are designed for real-time, on-demand compositing of multiple raw video input sources. With rendering of live video at events surpassing 80GB the Fusion-io microsecond latency was key to improving inFrames’ creative capabilities. “The extremely low latency of the Fusion-io technology has allowed us to access the essential early frames of video that were previously lost in the compositing process because of the lag-time associated with shared storage technology,” said Alex Nadon, President and Founder of InFrame Designs. “By deploying Fusion-io, we were able to improve our production values and deliver better content to our media partners at a much lower cost, while also using less physical space on site. With Fusion-io, we can deliver incredible content to our broadcast customers in near real time to enrich the entertainment experiences of national audiences.”

Raritan launches dcTrack 2.6 DCIM.  Raritan introduced dcTrack 2.6 DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) software with new intelligent connectivity management capabilities to help data center professionals manage both network and power connections more efficiently. To help dcTrack calculate and track power utilization and capacity anywhere along the power path, dcTrack 2.6 and Raritan’s Power IQ energy management software are now available as an integrated solution for customers who want to deploy both software products together. Asset management capabilities are a part of version 2.6 which, with smart asset tracking sensors and tags give real-time tracking of assets with the information and shares it with dcTrack. ”dcTrack helps data center professionals build and manage network and power connections quickly and efficiently, instead of having to rely on tools, such as Excel and Visio, that are not designed to be used as DCIM tools,” said James Cerwinski, Software Manager at Raritan. “It eliminates wasting time physically tracing among the racks how things are connected, each time you want to make a change. dcTrack inspires more intelligent use of resources in a data center.  The intelligent management capabilities in dcTrack provide the tools and information to make data centers more efficient with power, cooling, space and connection resources.  This saves our customers considerable amounts of time and money.”

CommVault unveils new Simpana software innovations.  CommVault announced new, next-generation Singular Information Management innovations that further empower Simpana software customers to lower data management costs, reduce business and compliance risks and easily extract data for better decision making with anywhere, anytime information access. Simpana OnePass is a new capability that reduces the time typically required to backup, archive and report. Snapshot integration is provided by Simpana SnapProtect technology.  New Simpana Edge protection protects data on laptops and desktops with embedded source deduplication for optimized efficiency. “Traditional data backup methods are being replaced as customers demand better ways to protect, manage and access data in order to derive greater value from this information,” said CommVault CEO Robert Hammer.  ”With our latest Simpana software innovations, CommVault continues to lead the industry in helping businesses move rapidly toward more efficient, self-service infrastructures, while redefining how data is managed to increase its ultimate business value. Today’s announcement reinforces our innovation lead, further setting us apart as the standard in modern data and information management.”

KENT CHRISTENSEN
Datalink

Cloud computing is gaining popularity. Yet, we know that only about 25% of IT teams are actively involved in cloud computing within their organization. Why the disconnect? Many IT people tell me they are interested, but just don’t have time to explore what cloud computing could mean to their IT organization.

The best advice I can give them comes from American Revolutionary Thomas Paine, himself:

“Lead, follow or get out of the way.”

Now’s the time to move forward with plans for your own internal, private cloud. If you don’t, you may find yourself — and your IT organization — left behind.

Migrating to Cloud

Here are five reasons to move to private cloud computing:

1. You need to do this.

Today’s economic environment will continue to be challenging for IT organizations. Companies are looking at ways to trim IT budgets and staff even further. Many business owners and C-level execs are also actively seeking other ways (outside of traditional IT) to run their applications.

Some public cloud successes include:

• Software as a Service (SaaS) or Business Process (BP) services. These include CRM applications like Salesforce.com, outsourced e-mail services or payroll processing applications from ADP, PayCom, etc.
• Low-cost, agile Web services for everything from block storage to database or virtual server platforms. (Think Google or Amazon Web Services).
• Consumer cloud examples like the highly popular iCloud.

You need to look at the appealing attributes of cloud computing and determine how to offer similar functions within your own IT firewall.

2. You can do this!

You may be closer than you think to private cloud operation. You’re likely running virtual servers, which are backed by data storage. Many may also be using advanced virtualization, where resources are virtualized across servers, network and storage.

Many attributes derived from advanced virtualization closely match those in a private or public cloud. These include:

• Agility
• Elasticity
• Standardization
• Added Efficiencies
• Service-Oriented

All you need is the vision, commitment and IT leadership needed for a cloud initiative. This includes getting cross-functional IT teams (server, storage, network and application support) to work together.

3. Your cloud will be lower cost to begin.

Building your private cloud will likely be 25 percent cheaper than the cost of using an external cloud service provider. Cloud providers need to buy much of the same infrastructure as you do, plus they need to make a profit.

Select cloud offerings (SaaS or BP services) may be cheaper to outsource. But what about the other specialized or security-sensitive applications you run in your data center? I hear from at least 10 companies who say they want to outsource 40 percent of their IT infrastructure ‘to the cloud’ to save costs. When we start asking the tough questions, most realize it doesn’t make sense at this time.

One company planned to roll out a social media application. They thought a public cloud provider would be a highly affordable fit. The provider’s monthly bill; however, showed the company it could run more efficiently and cost-effectively by running the application in their own internal cloud. Planned expansion multiplied the benefit of internal vs. external. This was true even when compared to the cheapest cloud provider.

4. Your private cloud/infrastructure can be shared amongst business applications.

Technology from external cloud providers needs to mature before it can offer the shared infrastructure and level of security, delivery, compliance and qualities of service required for many enterprise IT applications. Most external cloud providers may even require significant application rewrites.

Once you offer similar cloud attributes on your private infrastructure, internal business owners should find your internal IT services more appealing. These are services more closely aligned to your corporation’s internal systems and unique goals. Business application owners can also get easy access to the shared infrastructure while limiting their risk.

5. He who controls orchestration, controls the cloud.

As you move ahead with private cloud computing, you’ll need to learn how best to manage the environment. I summarize this as orchestration. It covers everything from on-demand resource provisioning to life-cycle management of virtual machines. It can even cover which applications should be outsourced to an external cloud provider.

Eventually, you may be called on to manage private clouds, public cloud services or a hybrid scenario (a mix of both private and public cloud services which you’re more than likely to move toward).

Many vendors are willing to step into this role and orchestrate your IT infrastructure for you. As you move ahead with private cloud computing, you’ll have the option to retain control of orchestration yourself.

You want to do this so that you control how much it costs to run an application internally versus outsourcing it. You want to retain control of the application and its resources, even if you choose to outsource peaks in activity to a cloud provider. You want to still be able to compare the cost of your raw materials to what the cloud service provider offers. Orchestration allows you to:

• Determine the best mix of internal and external resources
• Obtain bids surrounding Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based on cost/performance characteristics, versus just the need to outsource an application
• Retain ultimate buying power and control

So, there you have it. Five reasons to own your private cloud (and many more reasons not to delay in getting there).

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.