Category Archives: Datacentre

5G, Datacentre, Intel, News & Analysis

Intel announces new infrastructure to support 5G cloud development

Tablet PC with 5GIntel has announced new infrastructure products for the cloud-based 5G networks that it claims will run tomorrow’s telecoms and data centre services.

The 5G cloud will be built on its new offerings in the Xeon Processor D-1500 product family, according to Intel, which says processors are the key to extending intelligence from the network core to the edge. By doing so, the new 5G cloud will perform better and interactions will be subject to less delay and lower levels of latency.

Nine new processors will pave the way for the migration of intelligence from the core to the edge of the network of the future. In order to be stationed at the edge of the network, the new processors must characteristically be high performers but low users of power and with twice the maximum memory of previous generations in an integrated System-on-a-Chip, says Intel. This means they can

network, store cloud and enterprise data and run IoT applications in dense, rugged environments. Intel said 50 networking, cloud storage, enterprise storage and IoT systems that use the new additions to the Intel Xeon Processor D-1500 product family are in development.

Among the new inventions are a new Ethernet Multi-host Controller FM10000 range for use in high performance comms network applications and dense server platforms. It has up to 200Gbps of high-bandwidth multi-host connectivity and multiple 100GbE ports for packet processing and the mass movement of data traffic. The new Intel Ethernet Controller X550 family, on the other hand, is a cheap, low power, 10 Gigabit Ethernet connector for data centre servers and network appliances.

Meanwhile, Intel said it is actively driving a networking ecosystem and has grown the Intel Network Builders program to more than 180 companies. Red Hat has become the first ISV to actively contribute to all key focus areas of the Intel Network Builders Fast Track.

“Networks are facing extraordinary demands as more devices become connected and new digital services are offered,” said Sandra Rivera, Intel Data Center Group VP. “Building cloud ready networks calls for more intelligence.”

Amazon, AWS, Datacentre, News & Analysis, UK

AWS announces UK will be its third region in the EU by 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to add a UK region to its empire. On its opening date, mooted for the end of 2016 or early 2017, it will be the third region in European Union and the 12th in the world.

The presence of an AWS region brings lower latency and strong data sovereignty to local users.

Amazon organises its ‘elastic computing’ by hosting it in multiple locations world-wide. The locations are, in turn, sub divided into regions and Availability Zones. Each region is a separate geographical area with multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. The rationale being to give instant local response but geographically diverse back up to each computing ‘instance’ (or user).

Announcing the new UK base in his blog, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels promised that all Britain’s ranges of local and global enterprises, institutes and government departments will get faster AWS Cloud services than they have been getting. The new region will be coupled – for failover purposes – with existing AWS regions in Dublin and Frankfurt. This local presence, says AWS, will provide lower latency access to websites, mobile applications, games, SaaS applications, big data analysis and Internet of Things (IoT) apps.

“We are committed to our customers’ need for capacity,” said Vogels, who promised ‘powerful AWS services that eliminate the heavy lifting of the underlying IT infrastructure’.

The UK government’s Trade and Investment Minister Lord Maude described the decision as ‘great news for the UK’. The choice of the UK, as the third european presence for AWS is, “further proof the UK is the most favoured location in Europe for inward investment,” said Maude.

By providing commercial cloud services from data centres in the UK AWS will create more healthy competition and innovation in the UK data centre market, according to HM Government Chief Technology Officer Liam Maxwell. “This is good news for the UK government given the significant amount of data we hold that needs to be kept onshore,” said Maxwell.

Yesterday, AWS evangelist Jeff Barr revealed in his blog that AWS will be opening a region in South Korea in early 2016, its fifth region in Asia Pacific.

Datacentre, Infrastructure as a Service, Lenovo, News & Analysis, Nutanix

Lenovo and Nutanix combo to run private cloud over hyperconverged datacentres

datacentreDatacentre hardware maker Lenovo is to install Nutanix Software in a bid to speed up the process of building the infrastructures that support private clouds.

The new family of hyperconverged appliances will be sold by Lenovo’s sales teams and its global network of partners.

Nutanix makes its own units that converge storage, server and virtualisation services into an integrated ‘scale-out’ appliance, but in this partnership Lenovo will use its own hardware devices to run the Nutanix software. The objective is to simplify data centre building, by pre-engineering most of the integration tasks and make data centre management easier. This, say the manufacturers, will cut down both the building costs and construction time for creating the foundation for a private cloud. It also, claims Nutanix, lowers the cost of ownership by creating modules in which moves and changes are easier to conduct and management is simpler.

By running the jointly created convergence appliances on Lenovo hardware, they can take full advantage of Lenovo’s close ties with Intel and run its latest processor inventions. Lenovo said it is making ‘sizeable investments in a dedicated global sales team to support the new converged appliances for datacentre builders. Lenovo and Nutanix say they are jointly planning more co-development in platform engineering and coding, as well as joint marketing initiatives.

“Lenovo can bring a new perspective to the global enterprise space,” said Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing, “Nutanix’s well recognised technology leadership can dramatically reduce complexity in data centres of all sizes.”

The Lenovo OEM partnership with Nutanix goes well beyond typical alliances, said analyst Matt Eastwood, Senior VP for IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter Group. “This partnership will accelerate the reach of hyperconverged infrastructure,” he said.

Datacentre, Europe, Hosting, News & Analysis, OVH, Public Cloud

OVH promises undeniable public cloud service in the UK

cloud exchangeEuropean hosting giant OVH has launched a public cloud service in the UK with customisable security as protection against cyber attacks becomes a major selling point alongside open systems mobility.

The service is aimed at developers, system administrators and DevOps, and promises triple data replication, hosting in European data centres and a ‘five nines’ service level agreement (SLA). The OVH Public Cloud is based on OpenStack which, says OVH, will make integrating applications, migrating to the Cloud and moving between cloud providers easier for system builders who want to keep their options open. For this reason, it will also monthly and hourly payment mechanisms so clients aren’t forced to over commit resources. Those that can make monthly payments will get a 50% discount however.

The two main offerings will be Public Cloud Instances and Public Cloud Storage.

Public Cloud Instances provides a choice between two types of virtual machines. RAM instances (starting at £25 a month) are designed for memory-hungry apps such as software as a service (SaaS), multimedia creation and managing large databases. Cloud CPU instances, at £21/month, are designed for managing processing-heavy tasks such as data analytics, computer simulations and managing peak server loads.

The Public Cloud Storage service offers high-availability object storage, to save software developers from the complications involved in setting up network file system or file transfer protocols. Classic and high-speed storage options are also available.

All the Public Cloud packages have automatic, unlimited distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection against all types and lengths of attacks, with detection and auto-mitigation and a back up service of triple data replication. All services will have access to OVH’s global fibre optic network OVH Net.

“We want UK businesses to adopt the cloud with confidence,” said Hiren Parekh, director of sales and marketing at OVH UK. “Our aim is to give users the freedom and flexibility they need as their businesses evolve.”

Datacentre, Flash, Huawei, News & Analysis

Huawei’s OceanStor could make European data centres deliver cloud in a flash

datacentre1Huawei has launched a drive to put flash memory in Europe’s data centres in a bid to speed up the delivery of cloud services.

The OceanStor Flash Strategy in Europe aims to popularise the adoption of flash memory in data centres and drag customers into the all-flash era of high performance and reliability.

Huawei’s strategy is to concentrate on partners in the industry supply chain, persuading them to make a commitment by inventing new flash controllers, media chips and enterprise storage systems based on all-flash technology, it has said. The launch of the OceanStor Flash Strategy took place at the Huawei CIO Forum and Network Congress took place in Lisbon, Portugal last week. The European drive follows in the wake of a similar programme launched in China in September.

The core of the strategy involves Huawei integrating solid-state drives (SSDs) into the storage products sold throughout Europe. The equipment maker signed its first collaboration agreement under the new strategy with flash memory provider Micron at the 2015 Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai in September.

For the same price a data centre might spend on a 15000 revs per minute hard disk, they can get an SSD that’s five times faster and has less environmental impact, argued Yuan Yaun, CTO of Huawei IT Solutions Sales in Western Europe.

“Optimal user experience and low power consumption is well suited to customers’ business needs now and in the big data future,” said Yaun. Unlike conventional enterprise storage vendors, Huawei wants to future-proof software architecture, he said, because Huawei wants to keep in line with emerging data application trends, whereas traditional storage vendors have a legacy business model to protect. Huawei is free to adopt the latest technology and to work with multiple parties in the supply chain to develop new solutions, Yaun argued.

“We cannot achieve innovation by ourselves. Everything we have created, obtained and achieved would not be possible without the joint efforts of our partners and the unflinching trust of our customers,” said Yuan.

cloud exchange, Datacentre, Equinix, News & Analysis, Oracle

Equinix creates direct link to Oracle Cloud Services via Cloud Exchange

CloudData centre operator Equinix has agreed to give its Cloud Exchange users direct access to Oracle Cloud Service, the software vendor’s public platform for infrastructure services.

Equinix claims that Oracle users will get quicker response times and better performance as data is accelerated through its Cloud Exchanges in its Amsterdam, Chicago, London, Singapore, Sydney and Washington data centres.

It should also provide a better framework to support the hybrid cloud systems that most enterprises run, as well as solid support for migrations to the cloud, according to Oracle. “It gives Oracle’s enterprise customers the flexibility to pick the network services best suited to their diverse workloads,” said Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s president of product development.

The Oracle Cloud aims to simplify the building of new applications and migration of existing on-premises applications to the cloud. The Oracle Cloud Platform offers customers and partners the same platform as a service (PaaS) foundation upon which Oracle runs its own software as a service (SaaS) offerings. According to Oracle 19 of the world’s top 20 SaaS providers now use its Cloud service. In October it announced that Oracle Cloud Services it launched 24 additional PaaS and IaaS services.

Oracle’s 400,000 customers include all 100 of the Fortune 100 companies and it has sold 1,000 ERP systems running in the cloud. By offering direct access on Equinix Cloud Exchange, Oracle said it can create much faster connections between the on-premise systems many companies still use and the Oracle public cloud.

“The addition of Oracle Cloud to Equinix Cloud Exchange helps our customers execute on their business strategies,” said Equinix CEO Steve Smith.

Cloud is the fastest growing part of Oracle’s business. It supports 62 million users and 23 billion transactions each day. Oracle Cloud runs on 30,000 devices and 400 petabytes of storage in 19 data centres around the world.

Datacentre, IBM, Intel, News & Analysis, OpenWorld 2015, Oracle, server

Oracle and Intel announce plans to ramp up the offensive on IBM in the cloud

Oracle openworld 2015Intel and Oracle are to build on a previous collaboration which saw them jointly take on IBM in the cloud computing hardware market. Now they are conspiring again, this time to target Oracle’s database and software customers, in a bid to get them to ditch their IBM computer servers and buy Oracle/Intel servers instead.

The new pact was announced at the opening of Oracle’s tech conference as Intel CEO Brian Krzanich took the stage of Sunday with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. Project Apollo, in which the two manufacturers pooled engineers in a joint bid to investigate how massive cloud computing data centres can run faster using Oracle hardware with Intel chips, was pronounced mission accomplished.

On Sunday Hurd and Krzanich announced the new hardware partnership and a back up conversion programme. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said ‘thousands’ of customers have dropped IBM for Oracle when running Oracle software. To back this up, Oracle launched a migration support programme. The ‘Exa Your Power Program’ (EYP) is aimed to help customers move their Oracle Database from IBM Power systems to Oracle Engineered Systems using Intel technology.

The EYP is a free database migration Proof of Concept study in which Oracle will assess a customer’s environment, create a database migration results report and show how it thinks the customer could significantly cut the time and costs of running critical database workloads.

“CSC has successfully migrated dozens of customers’ enterprise workloads,” said Ashish Mahadwar, Executive General Manager of Oracle’s Emerging Business Group. “We recently migrated an Oracle Database for a major insurance provider from IBM Power 7 to an Exadata X5 engineered system as a Proof of Concept.”

Mahadwar claimed that test results showed a Siebel Application runs four-to-ten times faster and ETL Processes running up to 12-times faster on Exadata.

Transformation of the enterprise is already underway with the continuous improvements in a vast software ecosystem that Intel and Oracle jointly deliver according to Mahadwar. “The Exa Your Power program will make it easier for customers to realize the benefits of moving to Intel architecture,” said Mahadwar.

Amazon, AWS, Datacentre, Financial Results, News & Analysis, Q3 2015

AWS profitability quadruples as revenue surges 78%

amazon awsAmazon Web Services’ revenue grew by 78% year over year to $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2015 and its operating profit more than quadrupled to $521 million. Its high profits – attributed to 500 new inventions and eight price cuts – contributed to earnings which surpassed analyst expectations and created a surge in parent company Amazon’s stock price.

The high growth rate in AWS profitability could be accounted for by last year’s low margins caused by a competitive price cuts on AWS services.

Meanwhile parent company Amazon reported an overall third-quarter operating profit of $406 million on $25.4 billion of sales. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky answered criticism that AWS is keeping the company profitable and that, in the face of cloud competition, it may have to cut prices again to ensure further growth.

“I will point out that this quarter showed a lot of innovation, a lot of new products and features and a lot of investment,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts. “Globally we are investing very heavily in our Prime platform. We’ve launched multiple devices including e-readers, tablets priced under $50, Echo dash buttons, so there’s a lot of investment going on, and there will continue to be, especially related to prime. Innovation and investment will continue and can be lumpy over time.”

The pace of innovation in AWS and the scale of its business has allowed it to do the ‘heavy lifting for Amazon’ said one Wall Street blogger.

By constantly re-inventing itself AWS has been able to cut its prices eight times since April 2014, said Phil Hardin, Amazon director of investor relations, in an analyst conference calls. “The company rolled out 539 new features and services in the past year alone, many of which have been designed so that its customers can access enterprise-grade services for a fraction of what they would traditionally cost on-premise,” said Hardin.

Big Data, Datacentre, HPC, IBM, News & Analysis, UK

IBM to create HPC and big data centre of excellence in UK

datacenterIBM and the UK’s Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) have jointly announced they will create a centre that tests how to use high performance computing (HPC) for big data analytics.

The Hartree Power Acceleration and Design Centre (PADC) in Daresbury, Cheshire is the first UK facility to specialise in modelling and simulation and their use in Big Data Analytics. It was recently the subject of UK government investment in big data research and was tipped as the foundation for chancellor George Osborne’s northern technology powerhouse.

The new facility launch follows the government’s recently announced investment and expansion of the Hartree Centre. In June Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson unveiled a £313 million partnership with IBM to boost Big Data research in the UK. IBM said it will further support the project with a package of technology and onsite expertise worth up to £200 million.

IBM’s contributions will include access to the latest data-centric and cognitive computing technologies, with at least 24 IBM researchers to be based at the Hartree Centre to work side-by-side with existing researchers. It will also offer joint commercialization of intellectual property assets produced in partnership with the STFC.

The supporting cast have a brief to help users to cajole the fullest performance possible out of all the components of the POWER-based system, and have specialised knowledge of architecture, memory, storage, interconnects and integration. The Centre will also be supported by the expertise of other OpenPOWER partners, including Mellanox, and will host a POWER-based system with the Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform. This will provide options for using energy-efficient, high-performance NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators and enabling software.

One of the target projects will be a search for ways to boost application performance while minimising energy consumption. In the race towards exascale computing significant gains can be made if existing applications can be optimised on POWER-based systems, said Dr Peter Allan, acting Director of the Hartree Centre.

“The Design Centre will help industry and academia use IBM and NVIDIA’s technological leadership and the Hartree Centre’s expertise in delivering solutions to real-world problems,” said Allan. “The PADC will provide world-leading facilities for Modelling and Simulation and Big Data Analytics. This will develop better products and services that will boost productivity, drive growth and create jobs.”

Datacentre, M&A, News & Analysis, TierPoint, Windstream

Tierpoint buys Windstream’s data centre business for $575 Million

Cloud datacentreCloud service provider TierPoint has entered into a definitive agreement with comms vendor Windstream to buy its data centre business for a pure cash transaction of $575 million.

As part of the deal the two will enter a reciprocal partnership, selling each other’s products and services to their prospective customers through referrals. This structure will allow Windstream to focus on its telecom offerings while continuing to offer traditional data centre services to enterprise customers.

The boards of both companies have approved the transaction, which is expected to close within the next two to four months, subject to customary conditions and approvals.

Cloud service provider TierPoint will inherit invaluable data centre support expertise according to CEO Jerry Kent. “This is a great strategic fit for TierPoint and our customers,” said Kent, “Windstream Hosted Solutions and its employees have a reputation for providing excellent customer service and enterprise-class solutions. We value these team members as a key asset in the acquisition and their expertise adds to our strength.”

The long-term strategic partnership with Windstream allows both the comms vendor and the service provider to concentrate on their own strengths and complement each other’s contributions and data centre services are still an integral component of enterprise service explained Windstream’s CEO Tony Thomas. “We expect the divested data centre business to continue its significant growth under the leadership of TierPoint, and we look forward to partnering closely with them to provide advanced data centre services to our enterprise customers,” said Thomas.

The deal has a certain logic, but it’s also illogical in some aspects, said Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom. “A smaller company trying to compete on non-core data centre activities will always be at a disadvantage, so selling to a data centre expert gives much greater capabilities and flexibility, so at this level, it makes sense,” said Longbottom.

However, he questioned the rational of specialisation followed by duplication of effort. “It leaves Windstream to focus on its comms business on one hand, except it says it won’t, as it will resell data centre services through Tierpoint. And Tierpoint will sell comms services through Windstream. Two companies, selling the same offering, but with overlapping and redundant back office costs, so driving the cost to the customer up,” said Longbottom, “it would make far more sense for the deal to be a merger with two divisions, to my mind.”