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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).

From:
Lillie: Mobile Growth to Have ‘Profound Impact’

Popularity: unranked [?]

Skytap claims it is the first enterprise private cloud provider to offer network automation features to customers, enabling them to create multiple secure networks that support advanced virtual routing and IT policies.

Sundar Raghavan, Skytap chief products and marketing officer said the automation features, which the company has been working on for the past six months, gives Skytap a lead over other private cloud providers that are working on similar functionality. Cloud providers are currently only able to offer a single network in the cloud, Raghavan said.

“We enable customers to run their enterprise applications unchanged,” said Ian Knox, senior director of product management. The network automation features enable customers to build a computing environment with application images and complex networking topologies using firewall-based security policies. Access to the cloud is through self-service Web UI and APIs.

According to Skytap, examples of complex network topologies could be server machines with multiple network adapters; server clusters with fail-over configurations and shared services; and the ability to add virtual routers, firewalls, and gateways. The self-service network allows customers to save network topologies and virtual data centers as templates, and provides role-based access for users to deploy pre-packaged data center building blocks.

Customers pay for the virtual machines and computing hours they consume, which typically runs at $2,000 a month for 25 machines.
Customers are not limited to the number of networks that they build but Raghavan said customers typically build five or six networks. The networks are included in the price.

From:
Skytap: Automating Networks in Clouds

Popularity: 6% [?]

Open source content management systems are beginning to gather quite a reputation and customer base lately thanks to the recent announcement by the White House of its move from proprietary solutions to open source CMS heavyweight, Drupal.  Full service hosting provider NeoSpire has been a long time advocate of open source software and specializes in solutions incorporating Drupal.

Do It With Drupal Seminar

From December 9^th to 11^th, 2009 in New Orleans, the Do It With Drupal Seminar will take place and NeoSpire is not only one of its top sponsors but will be exhibiting as well.  The seminar promises to have some of Drupal’s top developers on tap to teach more about the program as well as information from community building experts.

Patrons of the event can expect to see successful Drupal sites and meet with like-minded professionals, developers, designers and more all intertwined within the Drupal community.  The event will allow interested participants the chance to see the actual workings behind the architect and building of a Drupal web site.  Topics such as building and growing successful web sites with Drupal will be covered.

The cost of this three-day event is $1195 until December 8^th.  Thereafter, walkup registration is $1295.

NeoSpire

NeoSpire managed hosting provides a number of hosting solutions designed to meet the demands of organizations needing a 100% guaranteed up-time.  NeoSpire has been in the web hosting business since 1999 and continues to provide extremely secure and reliable solutions for their hosting customers.  The hosting provider offers several managed hosting options, co-location services, application hosting and more.

One of the more interesting offers by this company is its Drupal CMS Hosting.  NeoSpire offers fully managed Drupal hosting that covers everything from simple web sites to load balanced and redundant set-ups.  The company even has a specially dedicated Drupal support team that are considered the best server admin and tech support people in their field.  Not many web hosting companies available on the Internet sport the same offering or specialized support team.  It is a testament to the security and reliability of both NeoSpire and Drupal.

Drupal

Drupal is an open source CMS program that was initially created in 2000 by an enterprising man, Dries Buytaert.  What initially began as a small news site allowing friends to leave notes to each other gradually grew into the full-blown content management system available today.

The Drupal CMS is extremely extendable with several hundreds of modules to add onto the main program and hundreds of themes to change the overall look.  As an open source project, many third party programmers are heavily involved with the project creating new and innovative modules almost every day.  Drupal users can expect to be able to find just about anything they require within the Drupal module download area.  Administration, e-commerce, file management, statistics, and spam prevention are just a small percentage of what can be found.

Conclusion

A world-class open source CMS program coupled with a world-class hosting solution provider is a dream combination.  NeoSpire and Drupal are, indeed, doing it.

Popularity: 12% [?]

One of the more popular reasons to have a web site is blogging.  Blogging allows web users the ability to report news, express commentaries on various subjects or simply write about their personal experiences.  Online companies and businesses are beginning to see the usability of blogs and not only are incorporating them into their web sites but also expanding and desiring to be able to produce multiple blogs.  This is where a product like B2Evolution steps in – a multi-blog program that is free and open sourced.

All user types

B2Evolution caters to several different levels of bloggers.  There are many types of bloggers – those that are new and those who have been at it for quite some time.  This program works for all.

For the absolute virgin in the world of blogging, B2Evolution allows users to simply type in what they wish to say into a form, click “post this,” and the new post is automatically placed on the web site.  No fuss, no muss.  All posts are arranged by date and category within themes that users can choose and customize.

B2Evolution works well for those who are old hats at blogging as well as IT professionals.  It allows for multiple blogs, full user management, internationalization, and more.  The program utilizes PHP  and MySQL and is stable in its latest release.

Features

B2Evolution comes stocked with many great features.

First and foremost, it is one of few blogging software programs freely available that allows for the creation of more than one blog.  Whether it be one or 1000 blogs, B2Evolution can handle it.  As such, multiple users and authors can be created to maintain and administer the program.  Users can be restricted to specific permissions such as read, write, moderate or fully customize one or more blogs.

Statistics are integrated into the program.  Activity graphs clearly indicate referrers, searches, keywords, user log-ins and many other bits of data.

Blogs can be sub-divided into categories and even sub-categories.  This allows users to be able to organize posts by subject or theme.  Posts can even be assigned across more than one category or more than one blog.

B2Evolution is also completely compliant with W3C standards – it is even used by W3C.  The program has an XHTML checker that allows for validation prior to posting included as well.

Extendable

The B2Evolution program can be extended with several hundred plug-ins that cover spam, advertising, widgets and more.  To ensure that no two web sites are exactly alike, there are over a hundred different themes to choose from.  B2Evolution also offers an AdSense plugin for blogs to generate income.

For language extendability, the program current offers language packs in German, French, Russian, Spanish, Finnish, Icelandic, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish and Chinese.  If the language needed is not present, the company provides information on how to translate the program into one’s preferred language.

Final Thoughts

B2Evolution truly is as its web site touts – a multilingual, multi-user, multi-blog program that is easy to use and sure to be an online business favorite.

Popularity: 86% [?]

At the Gartner Data Center Conference we spoke with Pete Van Deventer, the president and CEO of SynapSense Corp., which makes wireless monitoring products that help data center operators measure the environment and optimize their facilities for energy efficiency. Van Deventer discusses the market for wireless monitoring, how it may be impacted by new carbon regulations, and SynapSense’s development of technology to use monitoring tools to automate the management of data center cooling. This video runs about 7 minutes, 45 seconds.

For more coverage of information about energy efficiency, check out our Green Data Centers Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Original post:
SynapSense CEO on Wireless Monitoring

Popularity: 6% [?]

The exterior of the DuPont Fabros Technology ACC5 data center in Ashburn, Va. during construction earlier this year. Facebook has pre-leased additional space in the facility.

Data center developer DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) said today that it has arranged a $150 million loan that will allow it to finish its huge ACC5 data center in Ashburn, Virginia, where it has leased additional space. The company also plans to sell $550 million in notes to build a huge data center project in New Jersey and repay existing debt.

If successful, the debt sale would allow DuPont Fabros to bring new space online in the active New Jersey market without having to sell common stock. Management has expressed a preference to fund construction through debt rather than an equity offering that would dilute the holdings of current stockholders. The company’s confidence in its ability to find buyers for its debt may have been boosted by the successful sale of more than $400 million in debt by Terremark Worldwide earlier this year.

Leasing Remains Strong
DuPont Fabros’ effort to fund its growth has been boosted by the strong leasing activity in its core northern Virginia market. the company has now leased nearly two thirds of the ACC5 data center, where Net2EZ and Facebook have leased space. Today the company announced two new leases at ACC5, with one tenant signing a five-year lease for 1.138 megawatts (MW) of critical load , and another signing a 12-year deal for 2.275 MW.

Here’s an overview of the financial transactions DuPont Fabros announced today:

• The company closed on a $150 million secured loan with a syndicate of lenders led by TD Bank. The loan, which is is secured by the ACC5 data center, has a five-year term at a floating rate of LIBOR plus 4.25% with a LIBOR floor of 1.50%. DuPont Fabros will use $25 million to repay a previous term loan secured by ACC5. DuPont Fabros will use the balance of the funds to complete construction on Phase II of ACC5, and set aside $10 million in reserve.
• The new loan includes an “accordion” feature that allows new lenders to join the existing bank syndicate to increase the amount of the loan up to an additional $100 million if certain leasing and other covenants have been met. DuPont Fabros previously used an accordion feature to restructure loans used to build its Chicago data center.
• DuPont Fabros also today announced that a subsidiary will offer $550 million in senior notes due 2017, a move designed to allow the company to complete construction on a planned 360,000 square foot data center complex in Piscataway, New Jersey, which was postponed last year. Company executives said recently that it would take approximately $75 million to restart construction in new Jersey and complete the project’s first phase. DFT will use the remaining funds from the note sale to repay $50 million that it borrowed to build its ACC4 data center, and pay off a loan for a planned project in Santa Clara, Calif., which is currently mothballed.

“We are pleased to have secured this loan in a challenging credit environment,” said Hossein Fateh, President and CEO of DuPont Fabros Technology. “This loan will allow us to continue to make progress on our development pipeline by completing Phase II of ACC5. We now expect that ACC5 Phase II will be placed in service in October 2010.”

Original post:
DuPont Fabros Reveals Funding, New Leases

Popularity: 6% [?]

“e107, It’s a candy store (and you’re 8)” proclaims the web site of the open source CMS program e107.  One of the older and more well-known open source content management systems around, e107 strives to be a community based program with a lot of input from its users.

Beginnings

What began as a web site related to the Windows shell replacement Litestep, quickly started gathering speed and evolved into e107 (the seventh project taken on by the owner of this content management system).  Officially open to the public in July 2002, e107 was already a few months old and into its 2.1 version.  As with most CMS programs, attempting to do it alone is never a good idea so the program owner brought on board a few seasoned developers.  Several updates and revisions late and e107 has its current stable 0.7.16 release available to the public (the owner changed version numbering partway through its early production stages).

Plugins

Once e107 is installed and running, enhancing this content management program is a breeze.  The site is affiliated with e107 Plugins (separate entity but tied in with the main web site) and this area is overflowing with downloadable files to add to the base core of e107.  Administration tools, e-commerce, file and directory, and multimedia are a few of the categories covered in this plugin web site.

Themes

e107 has two design web sites affiliated with its main core program – e107 Themes and e107 Designs.  This is where the one downfall with this CMS program may lay.  While there are a number to of designs to choose from, the total number is limited to under 200.  This makes the likelihood of having a unique e107 run web site fairly slim.  However, the program is based on PHP and if the user of the program has a bit of experience with PHP coding, creating a unique web design for the program should be a fairly easy task.

Community

As e107 depends heavily on community input and feedback, the forum area of this open source program’s web site is extremely active.  Covering topics such as third party coding, support, theme request and more, e107 keeps tabs on what users want, what they don’t like and what they have to offer to enhance the software overall.

Sites

e107 is proud to showcase the many web sites utilizing their open source software.  Among the more diverse sites to be found on their webring are Waves of Faith, KISS 105 FM of Indonesia, and CuartoPoder.com.mx (touted as the first newspaper site powered by the CMS).

Conclusion

While not one of the top heavy hitters when it comes to open source content management systems, e107 is a great product with quite a lot to offer.  If one is in need of a CMS that has more than a couple hundred designs to choose from, this program may not be the best choice.  However, for those with a bit of PHP knowledge and some time on their hands to create their own design, e107 can be a great addition to help create and maintain a business web site.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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: 8% [?]

Andy Ingram is vice president of product marketing and business development for the Fabric and Switching Technologies Business at Juniper Networks.

Cloud computing represents a new way to deliver and consume services on a shared network and IT infrastructure. Previously, IT hardware and software were acquired and physically provisioned on site. With cloud computing, the value of these same software and hardware products are delivered on-demand in the form of services over the network. Cloud computing is not only relevant to network service providers or internet-based service providers offering cloud services to customers, enterprise or public sector IT organizations are becoming acutely aware of cloud computing’s relevance to their own internal operations.

ANDY INGRAM
Juniper Networks

It is now possible for IT to build out private clouds or augment their resources with public clouds that enable their data centers to benefit from this powerful computing model. The lessons learned from cloud computing can vastly improve the scale, agility, and application service levels of enterprise data centers as well as reduce costs. Achieving these results requires close examination of the network itself, which is the foundation of the cloud-ready data center.

It can be daunting to interconnect a growing number of virtual and physical devices while trying to simplify the network to manage these resources at scale. Management complexity increases exponentially as more devices are added. This often necessitates physical segmentation, which runs counterintuitive to building large, shared resource pools that maximize economies of scale.

Overcoming these obstacles requires a fundamental shift in the way enterprise IT organizations build-out their legacy data center networks. Success in building a scalable, cloud-ready data center network requires following three critical steps: (1) simplify, (2) share and (3) secure.

Simplify
Simplification starts with reducing the number of autonomous devices. In the future, a single logical switch will be able to scale securely and reliably across the data center to connect all servers, storage and appliances. Until that happens, interim measures can be taken to consolidate network layers, increase scale and performance without adding complexity and reduce costs:

• Leverage device density to reduce the number of physical devices.
  Employ technologies that enable multiple physical devices to act as one logical device.
  Reduce layers of switching to two or less.
  Ensure reliable routing connections into and out of the data center.
  Maintain a common OS and a single point to monitor and manage the network with open APIs.

Share
With a simpler, scalable network to support large resource pools, the next step enables the dynamic sharing of resources for greater agility. This necessitates virtualization at two levels:

• The virtualization of servers, storage and appliances
  The virtualization of the network itself

Virtualization minimizes the need for physical segmentation, allows capacity and bandwidth to be shared efficiently and flexibly for multi-tenancy and high quality of service. VLANs, zones, MPLS and VPLS offer effective ways to virtualize the network within and between enterprise data centers.

Secure
Another challenge involves maintaining trusted environments and scaling security for pooled resources. To complement the simplification and sharing of the cloud-ready data center, the security services also should be consolidated and virtualized. It is vital to secure data and services at rest and in transit using these and other security measures:

• Secure flows into the data center. Authenticate and encrypt connections to network endpoints (SSL) and enterprise devices (IPSec) while reducing device proliferation. It is also essential to prevent denial-of-service attacks and deploy firewalls to guard the edge and perimeter.
• Secure flows within the data center. Segment the network with VLANs, zones, virtual routers and VPNs, and use firewalls to protect application-to-application traffic – between servers, between virtual machines and between pods. Also employ application aware and identity-based security policies.
• Set network-wide policies from a central location to ensure security compliance. Centralized reporting engines provide historical and real-time visibility into applications and data, and enable IT to perform scheduled vulnerability assessments.

Conclusion
By rethinking traditional legacy approaches and preparing for the advent of cloud computing, it is possible for IT organizations to build data center networks that offer greater economies of scale, improved application service levels, simpler management and lower costs. Simplifying, sharing and securing the network are critical to achieving success in building-out cloud-ready data centers. As Moore’s Law ensures that technological advances continue to make cloud-ready data center networks a reality, IT organizations can take decisive steps today that drive businesses closer to the promise of tomorrow.

Original post:
Building the Cloud-Ready Data Center Network

Popularity: 12% [?]

Elisabeth Stahl is the Chief Technical Strategist, Performance Marketing for IBM Systems and Technology Group.

Anyone who took Psychology 101 in school remembers Maslow’s hierarchy. In this groundbreaking 1943 paper, Abraham Maslow outlined a pyramid to demonstrate the five distinct levels of human “need.” His pyramid showed basic, physiological needs at the bottom, more sophisticated needs at the top, all leading to the ultimate, final phase characterized by a profound level of “self-actualization” of identity and purpose.

However, this theory assumes that only personal growth can be achieved by moving through the five levels. In an interesting twist, we can actually apply Maslow’s hierarchy to data center energy efficiency, allowing us to ultimately realize the maximum potential for our IT organizations.

ELISABETH STAHL
IBM

The world has grown passionately interested in energy efficiency within the data center in the last several years. As energy prices climb and organizations outgrow their power and cooling limits, it becomes imperative for data center managers to address IT energy efficiency through green initiatives. Many of us have become intimately familiar with recommendations for improving the efficiency of our data centers. Create those hot and cold aisles, use those pillows and baffles, update those cables and that lighting, consolidate and virtualize, and maybe try some innovative water cooling technology.

So what is the hierarchy for IT energy efficiency and how can we realize the full potential? Let’s outline it step by step:

• Level One: The lowest level of this hierarchy is when energy is still seen as a basic commodity; it has no influence on data center choices. The infrastructure is not monitored and many hot spots exist on the data center floor;
• Level Two: The next level assumes that some thermal monitoring is performed. Some simple decisions have been made to help the infrastructure such as straightforward consolidations and elementary server virtualization;
• Level Three: In this stage, organizations have implemented tools to start actively monitoring IT and non-IT assets such as air conditioners.
• Level Four: Next, we focus on more significant optimization including monitoring metrics such as the power usage effectiveness (PUE), more sophisticated virtualizations using storage and the network, and even potentially employing free cooling which can save thousands of dollars in cooling costs while simultaneously cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions.
• Level Five: Finally, the highest level, the “self-actualization” of data center energy efficiency, can be reached. Here we have the ultimate cooling and powering infrastructure. We see exploitation of the virtualized environment with significant workload management capabilities. This level is most notable for introducing the data center finally as an actual Energy Producer.

How cool is that? We can effectively take the heat we don’t want in the data center and basically reuse it where we need it while saving energy and lowering emissions.

Companies around the world are already implementing this innovative heat reuse approach, sometimes referred to as “district heating,” in a concentrated effort to reach their full potential as an energy producer. For example, by working with IBM, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich is building a first-of-a-kind water-cooled supercomputer dubbed Aquasar that will directly repurpose excess heat for the university buildings. The system, which also features a water-cooling system, is expected to cut energy consumption by 40% and carbon-dioxide emissions by up to 85%, resulting in dual IT savings.

Through adopting this final level of the IT energy efficiency hierarchy, we can build a scalable, flexible, and green data center that is dynamic in its infrastructure. Through this “self-actualization” we can potentially save on energy costs; as a producer we might also even be able to make money as well.

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:
Reaching Self-Actualization in IT Energy Efficiency

Popularity: 12% [?]