Category Archives: data centre

Asia, data centre, Enterprise IT, Enterprise resource planning, ERP, NetSuite, News & Analysis

Netsuite localizes services in Asian markets

The globe close up, Asia pastNetsuite has continued efforts to localize services worldwide, announcing a number of new partnerships at CXO Summit in Singapore, as well as new product launches.

The company launched NetSuite OneWorld for companies based in Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as multinationals specifically doing business across Asia. The NetSuite OneWorld solution provides companies with multi-subsidiary management and global financial capabilities to run business operations in the region in a two tier model. Netsuite suite can be implemented in the cloud at subsidiary level, while maintaining legacy, on-premise systems at the company’s headquarters. The offering is also localised to meet the business, regulatory and tax compliance needs of regional businesses.

“Our long history in Southeast Asia and the dynamic business environment that has emerged in recent years, make expansion in the region a strategic imperative in NetSuite’s next phase of international growth,” said NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson. “Our announcements today demonstrate the success we’ve seen already and our deep level of commitment moving forward.”

Having launched its presence in Singapore in 2005, the company has made healthy gains in recent years, boasting a client list of 212 enterprises and subsidiaries in the city state alone. The new partnerships and product offerings appear to demonstrate Netsuite’s intentions in the region. Netsuite recently reported healthy growth over the course of the last 12 months, Q1 revenues were reported at $216.6 million, up 31% year-over-year, and since that point, Nelson has seemingly indicated the Asia market as a priority.

According to the South China Morning Post, Netsuite will be aiming to establish a number of data centres in the region, with Hong Kong and Singapore noted as possible locations. Netsuite’s tendency in entering new regions has been to open up multiple locations as a fail-safe, which could be seen during the company’s expansion in Europe last year. The company opened data centres in Dublin and Amsterdam within a short period of time during the expansion efforts.

While Hong Kong and Singapore represent healthy opportunities for the company to drive revenues, Netsuite has outlined China as a long-term target, with a Hong Kong platform offering a solid gateway due to its trade and political ties. “Businesses in Hong Kong and Singapore are already reaping the rewards of open trade and global expansion,” said Zakir Ahmed, GM of NetSuite Asia. “NetSuite OneWorld is giving these businesses the flexibility and agility to fully capitalise on the current cycle of growth.”

In terms of local partnerships, the announcement detailed new collaborations with 3PL Total Technology, a cloud warehouse management solutions company,, CuriousRubik, a previous Netsuite partner, and Doji Media, a company which helps local customers expand their remit to international markets.

AWS, CRM, data centre, Database, Datacentre, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce to run some core services on AWS

Salesforce 1Salesforce has announced it will run some of its core services on AWS in various international markets, as well as continuing investments into its own data centres.

The announcement comes two weeks after the company experiences a database failure on the NA14 instance, which caused a service outage which lasted for 12 hours for a number of customers in North America.

“With today’s announcement, Salesforce will use AWS to help bring new infrastructure online more quickly and efficiently. The company will also continue to invest in its own data centres,” said Parker Harris, on the company’s blog. “Customers can expect that Salesforce will continue to deliver the same secure, trusted, reliable and available cloud computing services to customers, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.”

While Salesforce would not have appeared to have suffered any serious negative impact from the outage in recent weeks, the move could be seen as a means to rebuild trust in its robustness, leaning on AWS’ brand credibility to provide assurances. The move would also give the Salesforce team options should another outage occur within its own data centres. The geographies this announcement will apply to have not been announced at the time of writing.

Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud and Analytics Cloud (amongst others) will now be available on AWS, though the move does not mean Salesforce is moving away from their own data centres. Investment will continue as this appears to be a failsafe for the business. In fact, Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio, SalesforceIQ and IoT cloud already run on AWS.

“We are excited to expand our strategic relationship with Amazon as our preferred public cloud infrastructure provider,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base.”

data centre, data protection, data residency, Datacentre, DropBox, EU, News & Analysis

Dropbox opens Hamburg office to reduce US/EU data concerns

Dropbox GermanyDropbox has announced the opening of its latest European office, branching into the German market ahead of plans to open a new data centre in Europe latter in the year.

The company has answered concerns from European customers regarding the transmission of data across the Atlantic by committing to hosting their data within the EU; a region which the company claims is generating the majority of recent growth. This commitment has also been backed up with the company opening new offices in Dublin, London, Paris and Amsterdam, in addition to Hamburg.

Data residency has been an issue for European customers for a number of months since the Court of Justice of the European Union declared Safe Harbour void last October. Since then, there have been a number of efforts to sooth the relationship between the US and the EU, though the issue still remains contentious and newer drafts Safe Harbour have been criticized by various European quarters.

As Europe represents a healthy growth region for the Dropbox, it would appear the team are not prepared to wait for the EU/US data storm to blow over. Opening a new data centre in Germany has the potential for Dropbox to avoid the repercussions of the long-standing dispute.

“From manufacturing to professional services to healthcare, industries in Europe and around the world are discovering the benefits of increased collaboration on Dropbox,” said Thomas Hansen, Global VP of Revenue at Dropbox. “And the opening of our Hamburg office is just a part of our European commitment.

“From co-working spaces to corporations, people bring Dropbox to work, and adoption in Germany has been phenomenal. The top three cities in terms of Dropbox signups are also the largest: Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. But Karlsruhe and Dresden are the real hotspots when measuring users per capita.”

As with other freemium business models Dropbox has reportedly found difficulties in upgrading customers to the paid-for services. The company launched a new relationship with Adyen last year to offer localized payment models in 12 European countries, build around a direct debit payment mechanism, a more popular model in the European markets, as opposed to PayPal or credit card models.

data centre, Datacentre, Expansion, India, News & Analysis, ST Telemedia, STT, Tata communications

ST Telemedia continues expansion in data centre market

Location India. Red pin on the map.ST Telemedia Global Data Centres has expanded its data centre footprint through a joint venture with Tata Communications, where it will now take a 74% majority stake in Tata’s data centre business in India and Singapore.

The new deal expands ST Telemedia’s already healthy presence throughout the world as it adds 14 data centres in various cities across India, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Pune, and its three Singapore facilities. The company now has a presence in four major regions, including a strong footprint in two of Asia’s fastest growing economies, India and China.

Tata will retain a 26% share of the joint venture, but will focus on advanced services within the data centre that enable digital transformation. Tata highlighted the new partnership will enable the business to refocus investments on area such as cloud enablement and unified communications.

“This partnership marks another key milestone in STT GDC’s growth,” saod Sio Tat Hiang, Executive Director at ST Telemedia. “Since ST Telemedia’s initial investment in the data centre business in mid-2014, we have made remarkable progress in building a formidable data centre footprint internationally with strategic presence in key economic hubs to capture industry demand.

“The latest addition of India to the STT GDC network will be a major impetus to advance the company’s ambition to be a significant global data centre service provider. We are pleased to partner with an established company like Tata Communications, to pursue opportunities in the growing data centre market.”

ST Telemedia’s data centre market portfolio currently contains a number of organizations including GDS Services, MediaHub, Level 3 Communications and Virtus Data Centres, the latter of which has doubled in size for two consecutive years, making it one of the largest data centre providers in the London area. The company ambitions are to develop the largest global platform of advanced, integrated and carrier-neutral data centres in every major economic centre.

While ST Telemedia has seemingly prioritized the data centre market, the team have made a number of investments additional growth areas including IoT, with an investment in software and managed services company Greenwave, and also big data following its investment in Datameer, an analytics and visualisation company earlier this year.

Cisco, Collaboration, data centre, Financial Results, IoT, News & Analysis, software

Cisco reports 3% growth for Q3 and sets targets on IoT market

Cisco corporateCisco has reported 3% year-on-year growth for Q3, topping $12 billion for the quarter, with its security business leading the charge, though the team have reconfirmed IOT, software cloud and collaboration markets are priorities for the future.

The security portfolio demonstrated revenue growth of 17% while deferred revenue grew 31% driven by the ongoing shift from hardware to more software and subscription services. The Collaboration portfolio grew 16%, while the team were also confident in the performance of its next generation data centre portfolio. The ACI platform grew revenues approximately 100%, exceeding a $2 billion annualized run-rate.

“We delivered strong Q3 results against the backdrop of the Macro environment that continues to be uncertain,” said CEO Charles Robbins. “Despite this uncertainty we executed very well, with revenue growth of 3%. The operational changes we continued to make will further enable our customers to leverage strategic role to network as they transform their businesses to become digital.”

Regionally, the America’s accounted for a 4% lift, whereas EMEA and APJ were slightly less at 2% and 1% respectively. The emerging markets demonstrated healthy results for the business, as BRICs increased by 4%, Mexico by 4%, China up 22% and India up 18%. The team highlighted while there was good growth in the public and service provider segments, the enterprise was not as positive as the team pointed towards pressure driven by macro uncertainty as the reasoning.

The quarter also saw Cisco as one of the more active players in the M&A market, completing five acquisitions over the course of the quarter. The $1.4 billion acquisition of Jasper Technologies now makes Cisco the largest cloud based IOT service platform in the industry, the team claims. Cisco also completed the acquisitions of Acano, Synata, Leaba and CliQr during the period, the latter a $260 million orchestration platform to help customers simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployment. Cisco had already integrated CliQr with its Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing systems (UCS) prior to acquisition.

“These acquisitions are clearly focused on our key growth areas including IOT, software cloud and collaboration as well as continuing to strengthen our core,” said Robbins.

The IoT market has been a long time target of Cisco, with the Jasper deal adding to the ParStream acquisition last year. The acquisition offered the opportunity for instant analysis of masses of data at the network edge with minimal infrastructural or OPEX repercussions, the company claimed.

data centre, Datacentre, hybrid cloud, London, News & Analysis, Virtus

London’s Virtus Data Centres doubles annual revenues

VirtusLondon based Virtus Data Centres has announced it has doubled its revenues over the last twelve months, though the team haven’t released any specific numbers to substantiate the claim.

The company has recorded a healthy number of new customers throughout the period, including T-Systems which runs its private and public cloud operations from the London2 location in Hayes, as part of a five year transition project to close its private data centre in Feltham. Virtus has 40MW of capacity across its three locations, having acquired the London4 site in Slough during the latter stages of 2015 from Infinity SDC.

“Our aim is to combine cutting edge design and technology with transparent and agile commercials to offer the very best tailored solutions and service for our customers,” said Neil Cresswell, CEO at Virtus Data Centres. “This unique approach to data centre service delivery is the reason we see continued growth across all business lines with the likes of T-Systems and Symantec collocating in our leading facilities. It’s been a fantastic start to the year, and one which we seek to improve upon.”

The company, which has been in operation since 2008, offers traditional retail and wholesale colocation models, through three locations in the London area (Enfield, Hays and Slough) will a fourth set to open early next year. Virtus also boasts to have the highest total colocation MW sales of any operator in the London market throughout 2015, according to findings from CBRE, and is only one of four data centre operators in London to have been awarded Tier III design certification from the Uptime Institute. Virtus has also been expanding its credentials and capabilities in recent months, achieving supplier status with the Crown Commercial Service as part of the G-Cloud 7 initiative.

Recent expansion initiatives have been driven through investment from ST Telemedia, which was announced last year in June. As part of the agreement, ST Telemedia will make what it claims is a ‘significant investment’ into Virtus committing to a 49% via a Joint Venture with Virtus’ existing owner Brockton Capital. ST Telemedia has a healthy track record when it comes to data centre companies having launched i-STT in 2000 which was later merged into Equinix (it has now divested), as well as investments in Level 3 Communications and GDS Services.

data centre, Datacentre, Dell, Digital Era, EMC, IoT, Merger, News & Analysis

Welcome to the cloud party – Michael Dell launches Dell Technologies

Michael Dell at EMC World

Dell Founder and CEO Michael Dell

Speaking at EMC World in Las Vegas, Dell CEO Michael Dell and EMC CEO Joe Tucci outlined the rationale behind one of history’s largest mergers, and announced the name of the industry’s latest tech giant – Dell Technologies.

The group itself will be known as Dell Technologies upon the completion of the reported $67 billion merger, though there will also be several individual operating brands. Dell’s client services group will continue to be known as Dell, with the soon-to-be merged enterprise business known as Dell EMC.

“There are certain times once every two or three generations where everything changes,” said Tucci. “The industrial revolution went on for more than 100 years and changed everything they knew back then. Many new companies were born out of the opportunities that were created, and many failed as they didn’t. We are now on the cusp of an even bigger revolution, the digital revolution.”

Tucci, speaking at what he seemingly disappointingly admitted would be his final EMC World, highlighted the vast scale of change at which the world is undergoing currently. IoT and the connected world specifically are redefining not only the way in which individuals communicate with each other, but also the way in which enterprise organizations are structured and operated. The merger enables two companies, which could potentially be perceived as being stuck in a traditional IT world, to create a new brand which can capitalize on digitalization trends.

“We have to change rapidly to be on the wave of this revolution,” said Tucci. “The merger with Dell allows the company to change the concept of the business and capitalize on the opportunities presented by the digital revolution.”

Michael Dell’s contribution to the opening keynote focused more on the rate of innovation, normalization and implementation of new technologies which are driving the digital revolution. EMC World has now been running for 15 years, debuting in 2001, the same year which saw the launch of the iPod, Sun E25k as the state of the art data centre technology and the first availability of 3G networks. Dell commented that while these once-innovations could now be seen as relics, it raise the question of what is possible during the next 15 years.

Joe and Michael

EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Dell CEO Michael Dell on stage at EMC World

“Think about 15 years from now, to the year 2031,” said Dell. “Currently, if you want to code the human genome it takes around 36 hours. In 2031 it will take 94 seconds. In 2031 more than half the cars on the road will be driverless, and there will be more than 200 million connected devices. There will be thousands of innovations which we can’t even begin to perceive. I believe that it could happen sooner as well. The marginal cost of making something intelligent is fast approaching zero.

“The new digital, connected world will require data centre infrastructure to be architected in a different way. It’s going to be cloud native and operated on a Devops methodology. EMC and Dell are merging to create a company which can deliver this concept.”

“We are combining Dell and EMC to help you navigate a successful path, to modernise your IT, reduce costs and helping you create your digital future.”

The merger itself could be evidence of the weight of the digital world and the expectations which are placed on companies to succeed in the new ecosystem. Rather than attempting to change the perception of the organization which they oversee, like IBM and Intel for instance, the merger enables Tucci and Dell to create a new brand which can be defined as how and where they desire. Unlike companies who are in the process of redefining themselves for the cloud era, Dell Technologies can position itself where-ever it chooses in the market, without worry of legacy perceptions.

Dell also claimed the new company will have a significant advantage over competitors due to the fact it will be private. Leaning on the idea Dell Technologies will not have outside influences to be concerned about as publicly trading organizations do, Dell believes the new company can invest for long-term ambition, as opposed to short-termist aims which could be perceived to damage technological innovation.

The IoT wave is continuing to grow, and as we see more devices deployed, more data collected and more cloud-orientated behaviour infiltrating the boardroom, the role of the data centre is likely to become more evident. Dell believes the modern data centre will be the centre of the new technology world, enabling innovation in an increasingly competitive market, and the merger has created a new organization which can capitalize on these trends. The success of the new company remains to be seen, though the new proposition and brand does have the potential to remove perceived doubt as to how traditional IT players can operate in “The Next Industrial Revolution” as Michael Dell highlighted.

data centre, Database, flash storage, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM expands flash storage portfolio in continued transition to cloud positioning

Cloud storageIBM has announced the expansion of its flash storage portfolio, to bolster its position in the cognitive computing and hybrid cloud market segments.

The FlashSystem arrays combine its FlashCore technology with scale-out architecture, in the company’s continued efforts to consolidate its position as a vendor to power cloud data centres which utilize cognitive computing technologies. Cognitive computing, and more specifically Watson, has seemingly formed the central pillar of IBM’s current marketing and PR campaigns, as it continues its journey to transform Big Blue into a major cloud player.

“The drastic increase in volume, velocity and variety of information is requiring businesses to rethink their approach to addressing storage needs, and they need a solution that is as fast as it is easy, if they want to be ready for the Cognitive Era,” said Greg Lotko, GM of IBM’s Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure business. “IBM’s flash portfolio enables businesses on their cognitive journey to derive greater value from more data in more varieties, whether on premises or in a hybrid cloud deployment.”

The company claims the new offering will provide an onramp for flash storage for IT service providers, reducing the cost of implementing an all-flash environment, as well as scalable storage for cloud service providers. Another feature built into the proposition, will enable customers to deal with ‘noisy neighbour’ challenges and other network performance issues which can be present in a multi-tenant cloud environment.

“The workloads our department manages include CAD files for land mapping, geographic information system (GIS) applications and satellite imagery for the over 9.2 million acres of State Trust lands we’re responsible to oversee. The data we manage is tied directly to our goal to make this information available and to increase its analytical capabilities,” said William Reed, CTO at the Arizona State Land Department, one of IBM’s customers. “After exhaustive, comparative proof of concept testing we chose IBM’s FlashSystem, which has helped to increase our client productivity by 7 times while reducing our virtual machine boot times by over 85 percent.”

data centre, Datacentre, Intel, IoT, News & Analysis

Intel prioritizes cloud, IoT and 5G in new business strategy

IntelIntel has outlined a new business strategy to capitalize on new trends within the industry including cloud technology, IoT and 5G.

Speaking on the company’s blog, CEO Brian Krzanich outlined the organizations new strategy which is split into five sections; cloud technology, IoT, memory and programmable solutions, 5G and developing new technologies under the concept of Moore’s law.

“Our strategy itself is about transforming Intel from a PC company to a company that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices,” said Krzanich. “But what does that future look like? I want to outline how I see the future unfolding and how Intel will continue to lead and win as we power the next generation of technologies.

“There is a clear virtuous cycle here – the cloud and data centre, the Internet of Things, memory and FPGA’s are all bound together by connectivity and enhanced by the economics of Moore’s Law. This virtuous cycle fuels our business, and we are aligning every segment of our business to it.”

Krzanich believes virtualization and software trends, which are apparently redefining the concept of the data centre, aligns well with the Intel business model and future proposition, through the company’s position in the high-performance computing food chain. Through continued investment in analytics, big data and machine learning technologies, the company aims to drive more of the footprint of the data centre to Intel architecture.

The company’s play for the potentially lucrative IoT market will be built on the phrase of ‘connected to the cloud’. Intel has highlighted it will focus on autonomous vehicles, industrial and retail as our primary growth drivers of the Internet of Things, combining its capabilities within the cloud ecosystem to drive growth within IoT.

While were a number of buzzwords and trends highlighted throughout Krzanich’s post, Moore’s Law appeared to receive particular attention. While generally considered a plausible theory, Moore’s Law itself would appear to be underplayed within the industry, a point which Krzanich did not seem to agree with.

“In my 34 years in the semiconductor industry, I have witnessed the advertised death of Moore’s Law no less than four times,” said Krzanich. “As we progress from fourteen nanometer technology to ten nanometer and plan for seven nanometer and five nanometer and even beyond, our plans are proof that Moore’s Law is alive and well. Intel’s industry leadership of Moore’s Law remains intact, and you will see continued investment in capacity and R&D to ensure so.”

Krzanich’s comments provide more clarity to last week’s announcement on how it would be restructuring the business to accelerate its transformation project, and also it quarterly earnings. The data centre and Internet of Things (IoT) businesses would appear to be Intel’s primary growth engines, delivering $2.2 billion in revenue growth last year, and accounting for roughly 40% of revenue across the period.

The transformation project itself is part of a long-term ambition of the business, as it aims to move the perception of the company away from client computing (PCs and mobile devices) and towards IoT and the cloud. The announcements over the last week have had mixed results in the market; following its quarterlies share price rose slightly, though has declined over the subsequent days.

data centre, Datacentre, News & Analysis, NFV, OpenStack, SDN, Verizon

Verizon launches NFV OpenStack cloud deployment over five data centres

VerizonVerizon has completed the launch of its NFV OpenStack cloud deployment project across five of its US data centres, alongside Big Switch Networks, Dell and Red Hat.

The NFV project is claimed to be the largest OpenStack deployment in the industry and is currently being expanding the project to a number of domestic data centres and aggregation sites. The company also expect the deployment to be adopted in edge network sites by the end of the year, as well as a number of Verizon’s international locations, though a time-frame for the international sites was not disclosed.

“Building on our history of innovation, this NFV project is another step in building Verizon’s next-generation network – with implications for the industry,” said Adam Koeppe, VP of Network Technology Planning at Verizon. “New and emerging applications are highlighting the need for collaborative research and development in technologies like NFV. We consider this achievement to be foundational for building the Verizon cloud that serves our customers’ needs anywhere, anytime, any app.”

Verizon worked with Big Switch Networks, Dell and Red Hat to develop the OpenStack pod-based design, which went from idea to deployment of more than 50 racks in five data centres in nine months, includes a spine-leaf fabric for each pod controlled through a Neutron plugin to Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The multi-vendor project uses Big Switch’s SDN controller software managing Dell switches, which are orchestrated by Red Hat OpenStack platform.

“Dell’s Open Networking initiative delivers on the promise of bringing innovative technology, services and choice to our customers and Verizon’s NFV project is a testament to that vision,” said Tom Burns, GM of Dell’s networking business unit. “With the open source leadership of Red Hat, the SDN expertise of Big Switch and the infrastructure, service and support at scale from Dell, this deployment demonstrates a level of collaboration that sets the tone for the Open Networking ecosystem. This is just the beginning.”