Schneider Electric has launched a first of its kind wall-mounted micro data centre designed to support large edge servers in smaller environments or those without robust physical security measures.

The 6U unit is the latest in the company’s EcoStruxure Data Centre range and is designed as a self-contained single-rack enclosure that incorporates remote monitoring, management services, an uninterrupted power supply, and cooling systems inside a low profile cabinet.

This can then be either mounted onto a wall out of the reach of potential interference or placed on the ground, depending on the size and requirements of a room. With this, the company said  smaller businesses, or those with offices and factory floors that are generally not optimised for IT equipment, are still able to put their networking technology nearer to their employees or customers.

The 6U wall-mounted unit also comes with a security camera to monitor for physical security threats

“With the EcoStruxure Micro Data Center 6U Wall Mount’s creative design and functionality, we are able to open up new possibilities to deploy resilient IT at the edge, making digital transformation a reality,” Jim Simonelli, SVP of Emerging Businesses at Schneider Electric’s Secure Power division, told delegates at the company’s Innovation Summit.

Schneider said it’s best used in those environments that want to deploy modern digital systems closer to their customer base, such as a supermarket using the unit to power its point of sale systems.

“No one else can provide the full, standardised IT infrastructure solutions that Schneider can along with the partner ecosystem to ensure simplified deployment and compatibility. A fully integrated EcoStruxure Data Center Solution, including EcoStruxure IT and Asset Advisor 24/7 remote monitoring and services, ensures resiliency in the cloud and at the edge.”

The unit designed to be self-contained and requires very little maintenance once deployed

The 6U Micro Data Centre unit also comes with pre-installed dust filters and fan ventilation, making it suitable for light industrial environments, the company explained. It’s also shock-resistant and can, therefore, be safely shipped to multiple partners who can then install components before it reaches the end customer. This means that businesses are able to use pre-configured units to standardise the rollout of edge technology tailored to their specific requirements.

Although it is sold as a 6U unit, the company explained to IT Pro that it could be deployed as a modular system, provided the wall that they are attached to can support the weight. It’s possible to route cables into multiple units to share power and network traffic, therefore potentially doubling or tripling the available rack space.

The unit is also yet to make use of any liquid cooling, although the company suggested that it would be compatible with its next-gen liquid cooling system, currently in development, once it becomes available.

S-Series, C-Series and R-Series versions of the unit are available offering varying configuration options.

Alongside the new unit, the company also revealed its Device Security Vulnerability Assessment tool, available as part of the EcoStruxure IT Expert cloud software suite. The assessment tool is designed to help with the rollout of edge networks by helping administrators monitor the various devices connected to the network and reduce the possibility of data loss or downtime. Vulnerabilities, security policies, ongoing regulatory compliance checks, firmware versions, device age and device performance can all be monitored from a single dashboard.

Schneider Electric has said it has entered into a strategic partnership that will see the company collaborate on the development of cutting-edge data centre liquid cooling technology.

The energy and automation giant will work alongside Iceotope, a company known for its chassis-level liquid cooling technology, and Avnet, a global technology services provider that will help deliver the products to market.

The aim is to produce chassis-level liquid cooling that’s able to keep pace with the increased use of high-power graphical processing units within data centres, which are by far the most efficient processors for powering AI, IoT and big data analytics but often overheat when paired with traditional air cooling systems.

“Compute intensive applications like AI and IoT are driving the need for better chip performance,” explained Kevin Brown, CTO and SVP of Innovation in Schneider Electric’s Secure Power division.

“Our quantitative analysis and testing of liquid cooling approaches shows significant benefits to the market. This partnership is the next step in solution development and we are excited to be working with Avnet and Iceotope.”

In closed testing, early analysis of the proposed liquid cooling technologies produced CapEx savings of around 15% and energy savings of at least 10%, when compared with traditional air-cooled systems. If deployed, this would lead to total cost of ownership savings of over 11% over a 20-year period, the company claimed.

Schneider has invested directly into Iceotope through its SE Ventures investment arm, which historically has overseen agreements with Habiteo, Element Analytics, Sense and Qmerit. The agreement will essentially see Iceotopes’ current liquid cooling technology, which is already in use across the IT stack, including cloud and edge deployments, brought to the data centre environment for the first time.

Schneider said it was increasingly finding that the sort of GPU chips required for AI and edge deployments often came with thermal design power ratings of 400 watts or more, making air cooling too expensive and inefficient to use extensively.

To combat this, Schneider said it would work towards creating systems capable of being partially submerged in a dielectric fluid. This, it claims, will make cooling systems entirely silent and drastically reduce the form factor, making it also suitable for less power-intensive systems, although it’s unclear how much up-front investment will be required to make this feasible.

David Craig, CEO of Iceotope, said his company was eager to work with Schneider and Avnet to create a product that is able to deliver on the promise of liquid cooling for the data centre.

“Working with great partners that share the same passion for innovation, solution-focused thinking and quality is a pleasure,” said Craig. “Our ability to bring our IP to combined solutions that manage the pressing challenges of chip density, energy and water consumption, space and location challenges and the ever more complex issues relating to harsh environment and climate will be game-changing in the industry.”

Schneider Electric revealed the news at its annual Innovation Summit, held this year in Barcelona.

Oracle said it plans to appeal a recent court decision that saw the dismissal of its challenge against the US’ JEDI cloud contract, the company confirmed on Monday.

Oracle has consistently argued that the procurement process of the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, awarded by the US Department of Defence, contravened federal laws and unfairly favoured AWS over other providers.

The company filed a lawsuit against the DoD in December last year, arguing that there were conflicts of interest between former Pentagon and AWS employees. Before a ruling was made on that lawsuit, Oracle was removed from the bidding process in April when it failed to meet the requirement of having three data centres with FedRAMP Moderate ‘Authorised’ support.

The Federal Claims Court ruled in July that because Oracle was unable to qualify for the bid criteria, it lacked the legal standing to challenge the procurement process and therefore dismissed its lawsuit.

Oracle believes the latest dismissal fails to address federal laws that prohibit the awarding of contracts to a single provider.

“Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the Court in its opinion clearly found DoD did not satisfy these requirements,” said Dorian Daley, general counsel for Oracle.

“The opinion also acknowledges that the procurement suffers from many significant conflicts of interest. These conflicts violate the law and undermine the public trust. As a threshold matter, we believe that the determination of no standing is wrong as a matter of law, and the very analysis in the opinion compels a determination that the procurement was unlawful on several grounds.”

JEDI, a contract said to be worth up to $10 billion, will see the winning bidder take charge of hosting and distributing DoD workloads, including those related to classified military operations. Currently, Microsoft and AWS are the only providers being considered for the contract – Google dropped out of the running early after an employee protest claimed the deal would contravene company ethics.

Earlier this month the DoD announced it would suspend the awarding of the contract while it investigates allegations of bias towards AWS.

Google and Firefox developer Mozilla will block attempts by the government of Kazakhstan to intercept the web traffic of its citizens, the companies announced on Wednesday.

The joint action follows reports in July that the Kazakh regime had started forcing internet service providers to adopt custom web certificates, allowing officials to decrypt HTTPS internet traffic.

Despite claiming the certificate would provide greater protection for users against fraud and hacking attempts, the decision sparked widespread condemnation, with many arguing it severely undermines privacy.

Google and Mozilla have both said they distrust this certificate and as such have introduced “technical solutions” that will prevent traffic from being intercepted. For Mozilla’s part, it has revoked the certificate using OneCRL, said to be a “non-bypassable block”.

Google has said it will also block the certificate the government required users to install and added it to the list of those blocked inside Chromium’s source code.

Mozilla, known for its staunch support of user privacy, described Kazakhstan’s methods as an “attack” on user privacy.

“People around the world trust Firefox to protect them as they navigate the internet, especially when it comes to keeping them safe from attacks like this that undermine their security,” said Marshall Erwin, senior director of Trust and Security at Mozilla. “We don’t take actions like this lightly, but protecting our users and the integrity of the web is the reason Firefox exists.”

Google’s senior engineering director Parisa Tabriz said her company would “never tolerate any attempt, by any organisation – government or otherwise – to compromise Chrome user’s data”.

“We have implemented protections from this specific issue, and will always take action to secure our users around the world.”

This marks the second time Mozilla has worked actively against the Kazakh government. In 2015 government agencies asked to have its root certificate included in Mozilla’s root store program, its list of approved certificates that can be used with its browsers. However, the request was eventually denied after it was discovered the certificate would be used to intercept user data.

Further government attempts then ended in failure after a number of organisations took legal action against the administration.

Mozilla is known for taking a stand against state surveillance attempts, maintaining a section on its company website showcasing its latest investigations and providing support for those concerned about privacy.

2019 is set to be another record year for data centre mergers and acquisitions, with 52 such deals being signed in the first six months, up 18% on the previous year.

A further eight deals have been closed during the past month alone, as well as a further 14 acquisitions awaiting formal closure, with the total number for 2019 now having exceeded the entirety of 2016.

Research by market analysis firm Synergy found that since the start of 2015, there have been over 300 M&As in the data centre space, said to be worth over $65 billion in total.

Data centre M&A closures since 2015

Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale believes the figures represent a clear trend of companies not wanting to operate their own data centres, preferring instead to hand them off to specialists.

“As enterprises either shift workloads to cloud providers or use colocation facilities to house their IT infrastructure, more and more data centers are being put up for sale,” said Dinsdale. “This in turn is driving change in the colocation market, with industry giants on a never-ending quest to grow their global footprint and a constant ebb and flow of ownership among small local players.”

It’s likely that this trend is going to continue as a small group of data centre operators seek to consolidate their hold on the market.

The majority of acquisitions during the 2015-19 period have involved Equinix, which famously acquired Verizon’s data centres in 2017, and Digital Reality, which has been on a recent spending spree with facilities in Seoul and Frankfurt. The two colocation providers accounted for 36% of the total deal value over the period.

Data centre operators such as US-based CyrusOne, Iron Mountain, Digital Bridge, Carter Validus, as well as Japan’s NTT, have all been on similar spending sprees in 2019.

VMware has said it is in talks to buy Pivotal Software, the virtualisation company revealed in a filing on Wednesday.

The deal would see VMware acquire all outstanding shares of Class A common stock of Pivotal, priced at $15 per share, although all aspects of the agreement are subject to change and VMware is permitted to walk away at any time.

However, if agreed, that price would be substantially higher than Pivotal’s recent share price, which naturally rebounded to around $14 following news of the deal. It would also be the exact same price it listed during its IPO.

The deal is quite unique in the industry, given that Dell continues to own a majority stake in both VMware and Pivotal. Since being spun off from EMC Corporation (now Dell EMC) in 2012, Pivotal has worked to champion the Cloud Foundry, an open-source software platform used by most of the Fortune 500.

Despite seeing initial growth, with stocks rising to as much as $30, the company has struggled of late, and a disastrous financial quarter in 2019 saw stocks drop to as low as $8, losing $31.7 million in the process.

For its part, VMware has continued to work closely with Pivotal. Alongside Dell EMC, VMware remains a Cloud Foundry Foundation platinum partner, which includes sales of Pivotal services to its customers.

“VMware regularly evaluates potential partnerships and acquisitions that would accelerate our strategy,” the company said in a statement. “Pivotal is a long-term strategic partner and we’re already successfully collaborating to help enterprises in their application development and infrastructure transformation.

“VMware’s Board of Directors will continue to act in the best interest of all shareholders. There can be no assurance that any such agreement regarding the potential transaction will occur, and VMware does not intend to communicate further on this matter unless and until a definitive agreement is reached.”

Salesforce has said it’s acquiring field service software firm ClickSoftware for around $1.35 billion as it seeks to maintain growth in its Service Cloud division.

The company reported in June that its Service Cloud unit, which includes its Field Service Lightning product, managed to pass $1 billion in revenue, something it hopes to improve upon over the coming year.

The acquisition comes just days after the signing of a $15.7 billion deal to purchase data visualisation firm Tableau, by far the largest deal in Salesforce’s history.

“Delivering exceptional field service is an increasingly important priority for companies across industries with more than 70 percent of customer service leaders making significant investments to transform their mobile workforce,” said Bill Patterson, EVP and GM at Salesforce Service Cloud.

“Our acquisition of ClickSoftware will not only accelerate the growth of Service Cloud, but drive further innovation with Field Service Lightning to better meet the needs of our customers. We are thrilled to welcome the ClickSoftware team to Salesforce.”

Field Service Lightning was first introduced in 2016 and since then Salesforce has partnered with ClickSoftware to help develop its division. With its current product, if mobile employees find themselves stuck in traffic, a dispatcher is able to use the platform to quickly direct another technician to the job. This data is then updated across the entirety of the Salesforce suite, so that customers, sales, and the service departments have visibility.

The acquisition of ClickSoftware will “create strategic synergies, technological unity and new innovation opportunities for Salesforce to better meet the needs of existing and new customers around the world”, according to a company statement.

The deal is said to be a mix of cash and Salesforce common stock, and is expected to close during Salesforce’s fiscal quarter ending in October.

A ban on the use of Office 365 products in German schools has been temporarily lifted following a series of talks between Microsoft and the Hessian Data Protection Commissioner, according to an updated statement released today.

The German state of Hesse imposed restrictions on the use of Microsoft software in July after ruling Office 365 exposed information on students and teachers to potential access from US officials, and was therefore in breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The decision followed several years of debate around whether German public authorities should use such cloud software at all, given that a large chunk of data is funnelled back to the US.

Office 365 was largely tolerated so long as Microsoft continued to invest in a local German cloud service, removing the need to send data back to the US. However, last August the company decided to shutter this service, leading officials to eventually conclude last month that Office 365 use no longer complied with data laws.

Yet, in another twist, the Hessian Data Protection Commissioner, Professor Michael Ronellenfitsch has now decided to “provisionally tolerate” the use of Office 365 in German schools, provided a series of conditions are met.

“The legality of using Office 365 is not yet fully understood,” said Ronellenfitsch, in a statement. “In my opinion dated 09.07.2019 I have drawn the conclusion and explained that according to the state of the checks, the use of Office 365 in Hessian schools can not be tolerated.

“Since then, there have been intensive discussions with Microsoft about the privacy compliance of Office 365’s use in the school, which has led to a privacy-related assessment and has invalidated a significant proportion of the concerns.”

The ruling allows schools that have already purchased version 1904 of Office 365 and its various apps to continue using the software “until further notice”.

However, those schools are also required block the transmission of any kind of diagnostic data themselves, although Microsoft is required to provide support with this – that is until the data protection authorities are able to provide a more permanent solution.

The Hessian data authority has also promised to conduct an audit of the current arrangement over the next few months, and will deliver a more permanent data protection assessment for the school sector, the statement added.

The decision appears to be something of an attempt to limit any potential disruption an outright Office 365 ban might have. However, it’s likely that the ban will return unless Microsoft comes up with a way of preventing diagnostic data from leaving the country.

Facebook is set to remodel its pricing structure for its collaboration service Workplace in what equates to a price hike for users currently paying for the service.

Since its launch in 2016, the two million paying users the company has attracted have been on a $3 per user per month plan, the only ‘premium’ tier available, with a basic version given to users for free.

As of September, Workplace will offer three pricing tiers instead, including a rebranded premium tier – Workplace Advanced – that raises the cost of the platform to $4 per user per month. The basic package has also had a name change, now called “Essential”, and a new tier known as “Enterprise” will run at $8 per user per month and will offer priority support services and early access to new features.

The “per user per month” format is also a change for the company, having previously charged based on how many users were currently active on a company’s account. Charging a flat fee will generally result in higher overall costs, but this will also mean customers will pay the same predictable rate each month.

Facebook has confirmed that existing paying users will continue to pay $3 per user per month until 30 September 2020, after which time the new pricing structure will come into effect.

Interestingly, Facebook is also introducing a new add-on package called Workplace Frontline, specifically designed to cater for those frontline workers who engage directly with the general public, such as a cashier or those on a shop floor, who may sometimes feel disconnected from the rest of the business.

Organisations on the Advanced or Enterprise plans can bolt-on these users to their price plan for an additional $1.50 per user per month, regardless of whether they are active or not.

According to Facebook, workers are classed as frontline if they spend less than 50% of their time at a desk, are paid hourly, or do not have an email address. Nurses, doctors, facility workers, those in public services, couriers, warehouse staff, and those in the hospitality industry would all qualify for this status.

Aside from these changes, the individual features assigned to the tiers will remain the same.

The platform currently boasts over two million paid users, having attracted big brands like Walmart, Nestlé and Teléfonica, as well as the likes of Spotify, Grab, WWF and Save the Children.

While a price hike is never a welcome change, the restructure is the first in the platform’s short history and somewhat necessary given the fierce competition in the market. It needs to mature in the face of the rapidly growing Microsoft Teams, which recently passed Slack in terms of subscribers and offers similar services targeting both backend and frontline workers.

Slack, for its part, is also garnering a great deal of attention following its decision to become a publicly traded company, particularly as stocks sold far higher than expected. It, too, will be looking to compete against its rivals, but doubts remain as to whether it has the business model and infrastructure clout to remain competitive.

AWS has made its Control Tower and Security Hub services generally available to all customers, designed to make it easier for organisations to manage security policies across their cloud environments.

Both platforms aim to ease the process for organisations looking to shift over to the cloud by removing a great deal of the heavy lifting involved, something that is being echoed by rivals in the industry.

In the case of Control Tower, automated and preconfigured services allow organisations to deploy a set of guardrails for their cloud environment, safe in the knowledge that these are built to AWS best practices. Importantly, AWS isn’t charging extra for this tool, and users can apply it to any AWS service that they currently pay for.

Once set up, organisations are able to build a secure AWS environment using these preconfigured best practices, defining policies around areas such as compliance and permissions. Control Tower should be especially useful for those organisations who need more prescriptive guidance on how to set up secure environments across multiple accounts, as the guardrails will prevent users from deploying tools that don’t conform to security policies.

The second release this week, AWS Security Hub, aims to solve the problem having too many disparate security packages running across an organisation and being unable to manage them centrally. Now, AWS customers can access all security tools within a single dashboard view, including those provided by third-parties.

The platform is similar to those offered by rivals Microsoft and Google, in the form of Azure Security Center and Google Cloud Security Command Center respectively, however even smaller companies such as Box are pushing for all-in-one windows for security management.

The cloud giant says it already has companies such as GoDaddy, Rackspace, Splunk and PagerDuty, T-Mobile, Uber and Sony Interactive signed up to either Security Hub or Control Tower.

AWS Control Tower is available to all customers using US East (N Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) data centres, with additional regions coming in the near future.

While Control Tower is free, Security Hub is generally available to all customers on a per-usage pricing scheme, although there is a 30-day trial for new users.