SolidNode

A look at the dashboard for Nimsoft NMS Unified Monitoring.

CA today continued its cloud computing buying spree, announcing that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire monitoring provider Nimsoft, Inc. for $350 million in cash. The deal follows CA’s recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore and the planned acquisition of 3Tera.

Nimsoft offers “unified monitoring” that can monitor and benchmark data center environments as well as Google Apps, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and EC2, Salesforce.com and other cloud environments services. A complete API is available to both customers and third party developers to enable extensions to NMS.

CA said buying Nimsoft will boost its offerings for enterprises and MSPs. “With our planned acquisition of Nimsoft, CA will be equipped to capture several important growth market segments—including emerging enterprises, emerging national economies, and the MSPs who are providing these customers with IT management services via the cloud,” said Chris O’Malley, CA’s executive vice president, Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line. “Penetration of these markets will further expand our global leadership in IT management and complement our existing strength with large enterprise customers.”

Nimsoft was originally established as Nimbus Software in 1998 and renamed Nimsoft in 2004. It has approximately 800 customers, including nearly 300 MSPs and operates primarily in the United States and Europe.

“CA and Nimsoft are a perfect match,” said Gary Read, Nimsoft president and CEO, who will be joining CA. “We are joining a company that wrote the book on enterprise management. We’re bringing a very strong track record of success in the hosted and managed services segment and with mid-market enterprises. CA clearly shares our commitment to address customers’ evolving requirements for the management of their IT systems, including their move to virtualization and the cloud.”

Nimsoft’s operations will report under CA’s Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line. It is anticipated that the majority of Nimsoft’s approximately 120 employees will remain with CA after the completion of the transaction, which is expected to close by the end of CA’s fourth fiscal quarter, ending March 31, 2010. The acquisition is expected to have minimal impact on fiscal year 2010 results and to be dilutive to earnings per share in fiscal year 2011.

From:
CA Buys NimSoft As Cloud Spree Continues

Popularity: unranked [?]

Amazon Web Services has quietly passed an interesting benchmark: the company’s S3 storage service now hosts more than 100 billion objects. This factoid was noted this morning at Data Center World, when keynote speaker Brian Lillie of Equinix said that Amazon now is hosting 102 billion objects in S3 (Simple Storage Service).

Over the past year, the number of objects stored on S3 has grown from 54 billion to 100 billion, according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who mentioned this startling growth curve in his recent presentation at the Cebit computer trade show in Germany.

It’s a fuzzy milestone, to be sure, as we don’t know how much infrastructure is required to store those 100 billion objects, or how much revenue Amazon is generating from them. But in an industry where we’re used to big numbers, 100 billion is an eye-popping total. By any measure, that’s a huge storage cloud, and likely a sign of things to come.

From:
Amazon S3 Now Hosts 100 Billion Objects

Popularity: unranked [?]

Microsoft had one of its data center containers on display at the University of Washington Thursday as CEO Steve Ballmer spoke to students about his vision for cloud computing.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today emphasized that “when it comes to the cloud, we are all in.” He shared that message first in a speech at the University of Washington, later in an all-staff email, and also in a major ad campaign the company is launching today.

Most of Ballmer’s talk focused on the end-user experience of cloud computing services. But he brought a data center with him: one of the next-generation containers that Microsoft data center GM Kevin Timmons described yesterday in a presentation in New York. The prototype (seen above) is the latest in a series of evolving designs for Microsoft’s containers, also known as an IT-PAC (pre-assembled component). The design is likely to undergo additional refinements as Microsoft continues scouting locations for its next major data center.

“It includes the equivalent of about 10,000 servers,” said Ballmer .”It’s a cool, next-generation concept. We used to have to stick fire hoses into these things to cool them down. (With this) next generation technology, you can put a garden hose in to one of these things to cool down.”

From a data center perspective, one of Ballmer’s most interesting comments came during the question-and-answer session with students, in which he hinted that Microsoft may offer a container packed with Azure technology as a product for on-site installation.

“When you walk outside and see one of those containers, it would be OK with me if we have to dump one into every country or sell some to some people who want to implement them,” said Ballmer.

Sell a container? These kind of statements are sometimes parsed out of context by media. So here’s the full transcript of the exchange:

QUESTION: “So, I’m curious that we shouldn’t care where information is because it should be completely abstracted away, but it seems the laws and regulations do care where information is. I’m just curious how we should manage and take care of that.”

STEVE BALLMER: “That’s why we talk about a partner cloud, a customer cloud and a public cloud. I mean, I think for a lot of reasons it will be many years before many government organizations will grow comfortable with the notion of their data or citizen data living outside of the jurisdiction.

As technology people we can talk about whether that makes sense or doesn’t make sense, and why the protections can be the same, but it turns out the regulatory environment, as you highlight, is imperfect. I mean, the truth of the matter is – our guys were trying to explain this to me a week or two ago – the same data held in the same place but under different operating circumstances has different regulatory blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And we can’t assume all of the world’s important countries are going to even standardize the regulatory framework. That’s why when you walk outside and see one of those containers, it would be OK with me if we have to dump one into every country or sell some to some people who want to implement them.

I love Slovenia, it’s a great country, but there’s only a million and a half Slovenes. This company is not likely to build part of our public cloud in Slovenian anytime soon. So, somebody should be able to implement a Windows Azure cloud in that country. They should be able to buy a device that looks like that or a set of devices and go do that and have that be affiliated for the rapid advance of technology with other things going on in the world.

So, I hear you and I agree that there’s a set of issues, but they don’t have to be constraints.

Here’s just one simple way to think about it. Will all of the world’s centralized compute, storage and networking infrastructure all be built out by four or five companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, the cloud guys? Will we buy every server computer and every piece of storage in the world? No, that isn’t going to happen. I don’t think that – if you just think about the level of capital investment that involves.

We need to permit the private cloud, and the kind of thing we’re showing, the kinds of things we’re doing with Windows Azure is about making sure there’s a public version and there’s a customer version, and there can be a government version, all based on the same core technology, and there’s some innovation to go make that happen.”

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie stands in front of a portable Microsoft data center outside the Microsoft Atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science at the University of Washington, where CEO Steve Ballmer spoke Thursday.

From:
Microsoft ‘All In’ on Container-Powered Cloud

Popularity: unranked [?]

Amazon Web Services experienced an outage in one of the East Coast availability zones for its EC2 service early Wednesday due to power problems in a data center in northern Virginia. Failures in a power distribution unit (PDU) resulted in some servers in the data center losing power for about 45 minutes. It took several more hours to get customer instances back online, with all but a “small number” of applications restored within five hours.

The issues started at 4 am East Coast time Wednesday, and affected one of the three availability zones in Amazon’s East Coast operation. The zones are designed to provide redundancy for developers by allowing them to deploy apps across several zones.

“A single component of the redundant power distribution system failed in this zone,” AWS said in its status report. “Prior to completing the repair of this unit, a second component, used to assure redundant power paths, failed as well, resulting in a portion of the servers in that availability zone losing power. Impacted customers experienced a loss of connectivity to their instances. As soon as the defective power distribution units were bypassed, servers restarted and instances began to come online shortly thereafter.”

Amazon is known to operate a major data center in Ashburn, Virginia. EC2 previously experienced brief downtime in both June and July.

Original post:
Power Outage for Amazon Data Center

Popularity: 12% [?]

Anthony Wanger is the President and Founder of i/o Data Centers. He directs the company’s strategic affairs, handles acquisition activities, and oversees the company’s marketing, HR and legal functions.

The transition from physical, “offline” processes to digital, online processes is referred to as digitization or dematerialization. Processes that are digitized produce less carbon emissions than their analog counterparts. Data centers provide the infrastructure that enables this digitization to occur, serving as the foundation for the energy efficient enterprise.

ANTHONY WANGER
i/o Data Centers

Over the past 20 years there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of offline processes that have been digitized – everything from software distribution to financial transactions to medical record keeping. The combined effect of all of these digital processes is a macro-scale reduction in the overall use of materials and a more efficient distribution of the materials.

With the advent of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, companies have improved how they interact with their customers, partners and employees. Prior to the World Wide Web and email, businesses and government transacted in mostly inefficient and unconnected ways. For example, in order to pay a bill, a buyer would send a paper-based check by mail, which would be delivered to the recipient by way of a network of carbon-emitting postal vehicles.

Today, bills can be paid online in a matter of minutes. By digitizing this offline process, the need for material (i.e. paper) to be created and transported has been eliminated. This in turn has resulted in a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.

The impact of dematerialization has been quantified by a number of prominent corporations and research institutions including Microsoft, Intel, Lawrence Berkley Labs and Stanford University.

• A recent paper by Dr. Jonathan Koomey, senior researcher for Lawrence Berkley Labs, studied the impact on CO2 emissions resulting from the purchase of music online as compared to the purchase of a compact disc at a music store. Their research shows that the process of purchasing music online can reduce CO2 emissions, on a conservative basis, between 40%-80%.
• A comparative carbon footprint study of Microsoft’s Office 2007 product suite found that the digital delivery of their product to customers reduced carbon emissions by 88%.
• According to NPG Group, Apple leads the U.S. with 25% of all music sold, surpassing both Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Apple’s iTunes music service has materially changed the way music is purchased and in so doing has eliminated a substantial portion of the carbon footprint related to the offline distribution of music.

iTunes, software distribution, online bill payment and many other digital services are delivered by a complex array of IT systems including servers and telecommunications networks. These servers and networks are located in data centers. Data centers provide the infrastructure (i.e. power, cooling, network access) required by these digital services to function.

Most corporate data centers are built to accommodate the IT needs of a single business unit or department. Large, commercial-grade data centers leverage the economies of scale to reduce energy consumption. Instead of operating ten smaller data centers, an organization could consolidate their IT infrastructure into one or two large data centers and reduce the costs and energy associated with operating separate cooling, UPS, backup power and network access systems.

Modern data centers use the latest technologies and engineering best practices including variable frequency drives, light-emitting diodes (LED) fixtures, thermal energy storage, photovoltaic (PV) solar arrays, ultrasonic humidification and sealed cabinets. Collectively, these systems contribute to a significant reduction in energy consumption – especially during peak load periods.

Conclusion
By combining digitized processes with the economies of scale recognized at large, modern, commercial-grade data centers, today’s enterprise can materially reduce the energy it consumes and greatly improve its efficiency. As consumers, businesses and government look for more efficient ways to communicate and transact, dematerialization and the data center will provide the foundation for a more energy efficient enterprise.

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

Original post:
How Digitization Drives Energy Efficiency

Popularity: 13% [?]

You’ve probably heard it many times before: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The benefits of monitoring energy usage in the data center are well-established, and have been highlighted at virtually every industry event for the past two years. So why are so many companies still not monitoring their facilities and using one of the emerging data center metrics to track their progress?

Christian Belady of Microsoft discusses this question today at the MS DataCenters blog, picking up on some Gartner data we reported last week. Christian has been actively involved in industry conversations on efficiency, and has some thoughts about the low numbers for adoption of data center metrics.

“Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that maybe the respondents should have been weighted by their relative data center sizes,” he writes. “I would argue that any company where a bulk of their costs are driven by their IT operations (which by the way are likely to be huge operations such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, etc.) are further to the left on the graph because it has such a large impact on profitability. Similarly, those who have either small operations or their IT costs are low relative to other costs are further to the right. So in essence, we have a polarization of the data center industry: the Leftists and the Rightists.”

Will this split continue if carbon regulation alters the price of energy and the cost of inefficiency? Read The Polarization of the Data Center Industry for more.

Original post:
A Tale of Two Data Center Industries?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Gear6 today announced a Web Cache Server for Cloud, offering a memcached service running atop the Amazon EC2 cloud compute platform. Memcached is an open source caching system that improves the performance of many large database-driven sites. That includes Facebook, where memcached is important enough that CEO Mark Zuckerberg can give seminars on the technology.

Memcached helps database performance by storing commonly requested data in memory. Since memcached is open source, developers are free to build their own implementations on cloud platforms like EC2. Gear6 says its service can simplify the deployment of memcached on EC2, and is the first cloud caching service to leverage Amazon’s High-Memory Instances on Amazon EC2, which are designed for memory-intensive workloads. Gear 6 has supplied a use case featuring Glam Media.

“Memcached is the linchpin for any ‘web scale architecture’ where rapid dynamic data services are required,” said Joaquin Ruiz, Executive Vice President of Products for Gear6. “As with data center-based Web 2.0 sites, cloud-based dynamic sites need to run from memory in order to deliver a satisfactory user experience. And Memcached is the most effective onramp to memory, period.”

For additional background on Gear 6, here’s a look at our interview from Velocity 2009 with Bill Takacs, the company’s Director of Product Development, whol spoke with us about the importance of memcached and how Gear 6 is approaching the market for memcached solutions. This video runs about 7 minutes, 30 seconds.

Original post:
Gear 6 Expands Memcached Cloud Offerings

Popularity: 8% [?]

Cloud computing is one of the latest internet technologies that affords companies the ability to present their data and information within outside sources.  With recent concerns with regard to cloud computing and security, it is no wonder that many businesses may be a bit hesitant to jump on board.

Rackspace is endeavoring to reverse the latest cloud computing intimidation by offering solutions that will enable businesses to move their applications from in-house to the cloud.

Rackspace

Based in San Antonio, Texas, Rackspace started its services in 1998 and has grown to provide enterprise-level hosting services to businesses both small and large all around the globe.  At the latest count, this web hosting solution provider caters to over 70,000 customers of which over 51,000 are cloud computing clients.  The company specializes in managed hosting, e-mail and applications as well as cloud hosting.

New Cloud Products

In a continuing effort to bring companies onto cloud computing, Rackspace has recently announced a new set of product offerings.

The Rackspace Cloud Drive is the company’s solution to file server management.  With this product, customers can store and share files with ease, backup and restore files without a hitch and can be accessed remotely.  Additionally, all files located on this cloud solution can be quickly synced across teams and desktops.

For those in need of an online backup solution, Rackspace offers the Rackspace Server Backup product.  Powered by Jungle Disk (Rackspace sister division), this product works for both Windows and Linux servers.  Users can backup files and directories onto either the Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files storage services.

A product that has not been released yet (December 2009 release date) is the Rackspace Hosted Microsoft SharePoint solution.  This product will enable customers to utilized a centralized document repository that allows for collaboration, project tracking, content management and other business communication tools.

Best reason to use cloud computing

All online businesses strive to increase their customer base and in doing so, increase the need for resources.  Increased resources means having to purchase and implement new hardware to keep up with the demand and growth.  Cloud computing allows online businesses to increase their productivity and customer base without having to pour out money into either optimizing current hardware or purchasing new equipment.

Rackspace is leading the charge in cloud computing.  With outstanding services the hosting provider already is well-known for, the addition of new cloud computing solutions will place Rackspace as a leader in the cloud.

Popularity: 13% [?]

This is the one time during the year that online retailers need to ensure preparedness for the onslaught of holiday shoppers and it seems as though many businesses may have dropped the ball.  “Black Friday”, one of the busiest shopping days of the season, and the thirty days leading up to this day were heavy monitored by Uptrends, a remote-intelligence performance monitoring service.  The results put out by this web site monitoring company showed that many retail companies with sites online were less than prepared overall.

Companies monitored

Uptrends monitored one hundred of the more popular e-retailers throughout the month of November, up to and including “Black Friday.”  Of those companies monitored, a few came out on top with numerous page errors and long periods of down-time.

The biggest loser out of those monitored was Crutchfield Corporation, an electronics specialty retailer, with a total of sixty-one page errors and over five hours of web site down-time.  Following not too far behind was home electronics biggie, Fry’s.  This store managed to build up a total of forty-three page errors and over three and half hours of totaled down-time.

Out of all one hundred of the monitored web sites, nearly half experienced some amount of down-time.  Fifty-five were able to maintain a 100% up-time, twenty-four came in at 99.9% and twenty-one sported a 99.6% up-time.  Anything lower than 99.6% results in over three and a half hours of down-time in a thirty day period.

Of growing concern is that many of the companies monitored are considered to be household names.  The online public demographic is the same as the general public when it comes to shopping both online and off.  These shoppers expect a certain level of reliability of those in the retail business who have been around for quite some time.

Other affected web sites

It seems as though those companies monitored by Uptrend weren’t the only ones affected by the “Black Friday” holiday shopping rush.  Department store Sears’ online web site experienced multiple and total site crashes throughout the day.  Walmart, Kmart, Amazon, Target and Costco all experience significant web site slowdowns or other internet issues.

According to StorefrontBacktalk, numerous large and well-known retailers were affected in one way or another with the influx of shoppers on “Black Friday”.  Even non-retail product providers were showing as having issues.  Hallmark.com, while stating its web site issues were attributed to improvements, greeted customers with an unavailable message on this day.

Growing market

With more and more retailers joining the online retail crowd, it seems to be a growing concern over whether or not companies are putting in the time and research to improve upon overall reliability.  Day to day operations of an online retail store is not the proper litmus test for reliability.  It is days like “Black Friday” that should be the standard setters.  Perhaps the issues that cropped up on this traditional holiday shopping day should be assessed and scrutinized to better prepare e-retailers for next year’s holiday shopping menagerie.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Several stories from recent weeks highlight the vibrant data center industry in Europe. Here’s a roundup:

European data centre revenue set to double
A report published by Tariff Consultancy Ltd notes that European data centre revenue is “set to more than double over the five year period from 2010 to 2015, with net raised floor space to increase by 70%, driven primarily by price increases.” The report gives pricing and forecasts for 19 of the EU25 countries and analyzes pricing of a standard 19″ rack, a small cage space and a 50 KVA suite of space for each of the countries.  It also dives into trends impacting data centres such as raised floor capacity in markets, revenue per square meter forecasts, electricity pricing, pricing per rack and cage, and the most expensive data centre countries.

Savvis received EuroFIT award
Financial technology publication Waters published their innagural EuroFIT awards earlier in the month, to recognize Europe’s hottest financial IT products and services.  In the category of Best Datacenter Hosting Provider, Savvis (SVVS) took the award as a company capitalizing on the rising demand for data center services.  Equinix was listed as an honorable mention in the category. A little over a year ago Savvis marked the completion of a global data center expansion by opening a 37,500 square foot facility on the outskirts of London in Slough. The award also noted that Savvis services seven of the top ten Fortune 500 financial services and banking firms. Amazon (AMZN) won the Best Cloud Provider award as an “overwhelming leader in the field.”

The Bunker selected by Cimar
The Bunker announced that it was selected by Cimar (UK) Limited to provide managed ultra secure hosting of its radiology image sharing web service. The Bunker delivered a scalable platform to Cimar built on Microsoft technology.  Howard Jenkinson, managing director of Cimar said “absolute information security is a pre-requisite for any digital service carrying sensitive patient information.”  Click here for a video of ‘The Bunker’ and details of a July 2009 130,000 square foot expansion.

Tata Communications London outage
Several reports came in late last week regarding an outage experienced at Tata Communications’ London data center.  Apparently a power cut followed by generator and UPS failures caused the two hour outage Thursday evening in the Stratford facility.  Grid power was restored around 7:30pm that day as servers came back online.  Colocation provider C4L posted a detailed timeline of the Stratford Tata outage. The Register also reported on the outage. They mention that a Tata spokeswoman was still looking into what caused the outage and the subsequent failure of backup power.

Node4 plans fourth data center
Data centre and communications specialists Node4 announced plans for their next data centre site, to be located in Northampton. Plans are being finalized for the facility and customers are expected to move in by the end of 2010.  The DC4 data centre will house up to 600 racks and will feature N+1 or N+N UPS, generators and climate controls. The DC3 facility in Wakefield opened in July 2009.

Investment Forum for Data Centres
Broad Group will host the 3rd annual International Finance and Investment forum for data centres December 3rd in King’s Place, London. In this forum financiers, investors, private equity firms and others will come together to discuss data centre geographic location choices, data storage infrastructure investment and other critical issues, as well as generate new ideas and opportunities for future development.

Original post:
European Data Center Revenue May Double

Popularity: 12% [?]