SolidNode

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.

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Amazon S3 Now Hosts 100 Billion Objects

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The mobile revolution is coming. and the world’s infrastructure isn’t ready yet. That’s the clear message from Equinix CIO Brian Lillie, who says new devices like the iPad are making mobile video a reality.

“Think what happens when the iPad takes off,” Lillie said. “People are surfing the Internet and streaming video on their mobiles, and it’s just starting. As prices come down for these new devices, the growth of traffic will surpass expectations.”

Lille was the keynote speaker this morning at Data Center World Spring 2010 at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, Tenn. He warned the audience of 800 data center professionals that the coming tsunami of mobile traffic will be disruptive to their networks and facilities.

“The mobile Internet will have a profound impact,” said Lillie. “We’re just at the beginning, but we’re not ready. This is the message we’re bringing to the carriers. And they know it.” He said some carriers are preparing to increase their network capacity ten-fold over the next decade.

Lillie said the growth is being driven by the development of mobile apps for the iPhone, Blackberry, Android phones and other mobile devices. As these new apps bring a universe of everyday tasks into the palms of users’ hands, usage is accelerating – along with the data traffic streaming across global networks.

As these apps and devices proliferate, network latency will become an increasingly important challenge for corporate IT departments and data center managers.

“We believe the mobile wave will be bigger than the fixed Internet wave,” Lillie said. “It has the potential to change the way we do business.” An example: Lillie said Equinix is redesigning its systems for mobile access, including customer management portals and capacity planning tools for the iPhone and Blackberry.

A similar transition awaits many of the companies represented at Data Center World, he said. “What are you doing to handle this growth?” Lillie asked. “You have to think about your networks and how they may need to grow. The numbers (for traffic volume) are getting to be extraordinary. Most of it is video, and it’s just starting to kick off.”

One technology likely to see broader adoption as a result of mobile traffic is WAN optimization, which can help companies better manage their existing network infrastructure to (See our WAN Optimization Outlook for an overview of the major players in this niche).

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Lillie: Mobile Growth to Have ‘Profound Impact’

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Here’s a roundup of data center headlines from around the world – Singapore, South Africa and Australia:

• ACTIV expands to Equinix Singapore.  Equinix (EQIX) announced last week that ACTIV Financial, a provider of market data content and technologies, will expand operations to Equinix’s Singapore International Business Exchange (IBX) data center as a part of its global expansion.  Being in close proximity to the major trading venues and exchanges in Asia allows ACTIV to provide customers with low latency access to its high-volume market data services.  ACTIV currently leverages Equinix facilities in Chicago, New York, Frankfurt and London.  “ACTIV delivers more than one million updates per second including hard to process content such as equity options depth feeds, order book data, and the latest feeds from exchanges around the world,” said Timothy Neo, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, ACTIV Financial.
• Photo tour of the Polaris Data Centre. Australian iTnews has a photo gallery of the Polaris Data Centre, built in the newly-developed town of Springsfield, Queensland.  The five story, $241 million data centre is among five data centres shortlisted by the Australian Federal Government.  The facility opened in January 2009 and houses equipment from companies such as NEC, HP, Suncorp and others.  Polaris was designed for 20 megawatts at full capacity, holds 1.5 million litres of water in onsite water tans, and is served by a dual ring of diverse dark fibre.  The iTnews article contains photos inside the Queensland data centre.
• PIPE International selects Equinix Sydney.  Equinix (EQIX) announced that PIPE International has selected it as a key interconnect provider for its new PIPE Pacific Cable (PPC-1) undersea cable.  PIPE is also currently located in Equinx data centers in Tokyo and San Jose.  The newly laid PPC-1 undersea cable runs 6,900 km from Guam to the Equinix Sydney campus and has a capacity of 2.56 terabits per second.  “The new PPC-1 cable system will also enable our customers to increase the resilience of their international network and provide additional redundancy,” said Samuel Lee, President, Equinix Asia Pacific.
• TeleHouse launches data center in South Africa. TELEHOUSE Europe, a subsidiary of KDDI announced that they will open the data center TELEHOUSE CAPE TOWN in Cape Town, Republic of South Africa.  KDDI is a large Japanese telecommunications provider that has been growing its business in developing countries; including a recent partnership with Bangladeshi bracNet.  TELEHOUSE Europe is a part of KDDI Group’s European local subsidiary and will be the first data center opened by a Japanese telecommunications carrier in Africa.  The new data center is based on a partnership between TELEHOUSE Europe and Teraco Data Environments, the first carrier-neutral data center in South Africa.

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Roundup: Equinix, Telehouse, Polaris

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Northern New Jersey has been an active data center market, driven by demand the financial sector. It looks the area will soon have yet another large data center, and a financial firm is rumored to be the tenant. Last Thursday the Passaic County Planning Board gave conditional approval for a plan Russo Development to build a 284,342 square foot data center in Clifton.

The project is slated to be built in a former Automatic Data Processing facility on Main Avenue in Clinton. Russo Development has not identified the potential occupant, but Clinton officials have told local media they expect the tenant to be Credit Suisse, which has met with township economic development officials.

Russo has built more than 1.4 million square feet of data center space in northern New Jersey, including two recent projects for global financial institutions and another for managed hosting provider Cervalis. These data center projects have all been “greenfield” new construction developments with the shell/core and utility infrastructure designed and built by Russo. The Cervalis site is Russo’s sixth data center project since 2001.

Clifton is already home to the Mountain Technology Center, which houses data centers for Telx and Automated Logic. Equinix, Switch and Data, Savvis, HCL America, New York Internet, Datapipe and NYSE Euronext are all building or expanding their data center operations in northern New Jersey.

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Russo Plans Large North Jersey Data Center

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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.

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European Data Center Revenue May Double

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The 3rd International Finance and Investment Forum for data centres will take place in London on Dec. 3 at King’s Place, and will focus on the emergence of data centres as a new asset class. Panels at the event will examine the financing options for data centres, investment performance and the focus of future investment, a review of market demand and drivers, financing expansion and M&A, the importance of internationalisation in data centre expansion and a special review of Data Centres in Emerging Markets.

Researched and produced by BroadGroup Consulting, the forum brings together data centre owners with investors, financiers, analysts, private equity and law firms. Although Data Centres are holding up relatively well in the slowdown and investment appears to continue from existing players. Speakers at the event will include Harry Beusker (Equinix Europe), Anthony Foy (Interxion), Guy Willner (Teraco South Africa), Steve Wallage (BroadGroup Consulting), Peter Hopper (DH Capital), Mark Lambourne (TREGlobal) and Chris Crosby (Digital Realty Trust).

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Finance & Investment Forum for Data Centres

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Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• Ciena acquires Nortel Ethernet assets. Ciena Corporation announced that they were selected as the successful bidder in the auction for all of the optical networking and carrier Ethernet assets of Nortel’s Metro Ethernet Networks business.  Ciena has agreed to pay $769 million for the assets.  Ciena CEO Gary Smith said the purchase is “bringing together complementary technologies in switching and transport to create an innovative powerhouse with the scale to challenge the industry status quo and offer customers a practical path for transitioning to automated, optical Ethernet-based networking.”  In 2008 Nortel saw $1.36 billion in revenue from the assets to be acquired.
• Equinix adds to European Ethernet Exchange.  Earlier in the month Equinix announced that submarine transport cable provider Hibernia Atlantic was expanding with Equinix in New York. Now European-based carriers Exponential-e and Tinet have signed up to participate in the recently announced Carrier Ethernet Exchange platform.  The initial deployment locations include London, New York, Chicago and Silicon Valley.  The goal of the project is to provide Ethernet Network to Network Interconnections (E-NNI).  VP of Engineering at Exponential-e Mukesh Bavisi said “Equinix already plays a strategic role in our peering relationships with other Tier 1 service providers, so it is a natural choice that we leverage its carrier-rich interconnection hubs to develop an Ethernet interconnection infrastructure.”  According to Infonetics Research demand for carrier Ethernet services is set to double within five years.
• Rackspace offers complete Verisign SSL line.  Rackspace announced that they expanded an agreement with Verisign allowing them to directly sell, install and renew Verisign SLL Certificates to their customers.  Additionally the entire line of certificates is now available as a self-service option via the MyRackspacecom customer portal.  “Trust is the most valuable currency on the Internet today, and trust is what VeriSign SSL and EV SSL protection delivers for Web site operators the world over,” said Michael Lin, vice president and general manager of SSL at VeriSign.

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Roundup: Ciena, Equinix, Rackspace

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As NYSE Euronext pushes deeper into data center services, many industry-watchers are gauging the impact upon the market for low-latency colocation in Northern New Jersey. Colocation providers say the larger role for the NYSE and other exchanges will bring further segmentation to a fast-growing market, and predict that traders will continue to seek require colocation partners beyond the NYSE.

Securities analysts are keenly interested in whether NYSE Euronext’s new data center in New Jersey will disrupt the status quo for providers like Savvis, Equinix and Switch and Data, which have invested heavily in large data center in north Jersey, supported by strong demand for high frequency trading.

“I don’t think this is a winner take all market,” said Phil Koen, the CEO of Savvis (SVVS), in the company’s recent earnings call. “I just don’t buy into that belief. I think you can have a bifurcation between what I’ll call exchange-captive centers and venue-neutral centers.”

‘A Lot of Activity Here’
“In the grand scheme of things, there is going to be room for the NASDAQs and the NYSEs and the Equinixes and the other players in this field, because there is a lot of activity here,” said Equinix CEO Stephen Smith. “We have a very small percentage of this market. There are thousands of these companies looking for places to deploy this gear. And so we just don’t see any impact on that, specifically from the New York Stock Exchange.”

Wall Street analysts aren’t so sure. Although the NYSE’s colocation offering will be more expensive, its cutting-edge network will offer some of the fastest connections in a speed-hungry industry.

“According to our industry checks, the new NYSE Euronext data center is increasing competition in the financial services markets,” said a recent research report from Canaccord Adams. “Customers are researching the new product and it appears to be causing hesitation within the customer base.

“While speed is a factor, our checks are indicating that the NYSE is charging 3-7x what Savvis would charge for proximity hosting,” the report added. “Are the microseconds of speed worth the cost? Probably for the larger high speed trading firms, but it will not be for less active traders.”

Low Latency Arms Race in NJ
The accelerating arms race in high frequency trading is a major driver for the growth of the data center business in northern New Jersey. Equinix (EQIX) is building out the final phase of its huge NY4 data center in Secaucus, and has announced plans to acquire Switch & Data (SDXC), which is building out a financial data center in North Bergen. Meanwhile, Savvis has announced a major expansion of its Weehawken trading hub.

In its most recent earnings report, Savvis disclosed that two financial customers would be departing its Weehawken facility, but said it expected to replace them and emphasized the overall health of its high-frequency trading business.

“The fact of the matter is that we’re a real player and we have already a lot of gravity just by the way of whom we already have in that facility,” said Koen. “So unlike a greenfield (data center) experience where you always have the ‘chicken and egg’ problem, we don’t have that.”

Trading Ecosystem Has Value
Equinix, which specializes in peering, said its business model offered access to a huge ecosystem of connectivity providers and trading specialists.

“The network neutrality and network density that we have is a whole different proposition than what NYSE can offer to their end clients,” said Smith. “You would have to ask NYSE how they’re doing on their (customer) builds. But we are accumulating at a pretty rapid pace some very key trading venues, matching engines and execution venues that are going to be attracting lots of members coming in.

“We are watching all those activities pretty closely and quite frankly, I have seen no impact to the business to date,” said Smith.

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Can High Frequency Colo Support Many Players?

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Teams arrived at Switch and Data Tuesday to begin integration plans for the company’s planned $689 million acquisition by Equinix. Switch and Data plans to file its proxy statement with the SEC by the end of November to give out more information surrounding the transaction for an overall vote expected to take place in the first quarter of next year. In the meantime, both companies are keeping busy, issuing a series of news announcements this week.

On Monday, enterprise video solution provider Kontiki announced that Equinix had selected their Enterprise Content Delivery Networking (ECDN) solution to deliver video content to every employee’s desktop worldwide.  Kontiki was deployed in a matter of weeks and will deliver high-quality video for training and employee communications. 

Equinix Adopts Kontiki
“As video becomes more ubiquitous throughout our company, we knew that we’d need a complete video infrastructure in place that could grow with our needs,” said Equinix CIO Brian Lillie. “We adopted Kontiki’s video solution portfolio based on ROI, scalability and ease of use.” 

 On Tuesday Kontiki also debuted the VideoCenter enterprise employee video portal, being demonstrated this week at Streaming Media West 2009 conference in San Jose.  The Kontiki VideoCenter delivers on the promise of “YouTube for the Enterprise” by overcoming the challenges of securing and controlling the communication tool in a way that is consistent with company policies and culture.  The Kontiki VideoCenter will be generally available in February 2010.

Equinix (EQIX) announced that FXall will offer connectivity to its foreign exchange platform within the Equinix New York 4 data center inS ecaucus, NJ. FXall is a leading multibank foreign electronic platform. The service will be available to trading companies within the Equinix Financial eXchange, allowing them the benefit of directly exchanging data within the same physical location. 

“Beyond benefitting our current financial community customers, FXall’s presence will hopefully attract new customers to our NY4 center and serve as a spring board for future FXall growth initiatives,” John Knuff, director, Business Development at Equinix.

Switch and Data announced Tuesday its Alliance Partners Practice. During a two year incubation the program supported leading channel partners with online tools, partner certifications and dedicated relationship managers designed to meet the unique needs of value added resellers, system integrators, and solution providers.  The expansion of this program will enroll additional Authorized Agents looking for new ways to generate reliable revenue.  The Alliance Partners Program is made up of a team of professionals with 50 plus years of combined channels sales experience.

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Equinix, Switch & Data Prep Integration

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Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• Amazon Web Services Asia Expansion.  Amazon Web Service announced Thursday that an expansion of their services into an Asia-Pacific region will take place in the first half of 2010, when developers and businesses will be able to access infrastructure services from multiple availability zones in Singapore, with other zones in Asia following in the second half of 2010.  AWS services included at launch will be Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage (S3), SimpleDB, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Queue Service (SQS), MapReduce and CloudFront.  Pricing for web services in Asia will be announced when launched in 2010.
• Hurricane Electric Expands Infrastructure at Equinix.  Internet backbone and IPv6 provider Hurricane Electric will extend its presence to additional Equinix data centers outside of the United States. Hurricane Electric will expand into Equinix Tokyo-2, Hong Kong-1 and Zurich-1 facilities.  Citing an increasing demand for IPv6 content in Asia and Europe as a reason for global expansion, the Hurricane Electric presence in global Equinix data centers will also allow other Equinix customers to easily exchange IP traffic with more than 500 associated IPv6 backbones.  Equinix chief marketing officer Jarrett Appleby said “operating also within our TY2, HK1 and ZH1 centers will put Hurricane Electric in the middle of an existing community of international and local networks and carriers for its next generation IP access service.”
• Level 3 expands in Atlanta. Level 3 announced Thursday an expansion of operations and enhancing local presence in the Atlanta area.  The initiative will provide mid-market enterprises with greater access to Level 3’s services via its extensive backbone network, metro fiber-optic footprint, and a locally focused sales and customer support team.  Level 3 will expand the network in the Atlanta area that already passes nearly 15,000 businesses today.  Following their “link globally and connect locally” mantra, the move will allow Level 3 to provide a competitive alternative for Atlanta area businesses.  Level 3 has announced similar focused expansions in Chicago, Miami and New York in recent months.

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Roundup: Amazon, Hurricane Electric, Level 3

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