Silicon Valley Data Center Market Poised for Growth

An illustration of what the Vantage Data Centers campus in Santa Clara will look like upon completion. The company is building two new data centers on the campus. (Image: Vantage Data Centers)

We continue our series of stories on the leading geographic markets for data center space. Data Center Frontier is partnering with DatacenterHawk to provide in-depth market reports on each city we profile.

Silicon Valley is America’s leading engine of business innovation. It is also one of largest and most important data center markets in the U.S., providing space to deploy new hardware and services from the Valley’s marquee technology companies, as well as a legion of fast-moving startups.

Software-Defined Networks Promise Innovation

SDNs complement software-defined servers and storage in agile, cost-effective data centers.

Among colleges and universities that have made the move to software-defined servers and to software-defined storage, many find that a third option — software-defined networking (SDN) — fits right in. The virtualization of these three pillars of the IT function into a software-defined data center (SDDC) offers high yield for less cost, making it a promising solution — think more agile, more efficient and cost-effective.

Indeed, as traditional networks have grown more complex, they risk becoming more hindrance than help. SDNs empower IT staff with the same agility they find in virtualization, offering big shortcuts in the amount of time it takes to deliver services. Software updates replace manual configuration of hardware components. Staff also benefit from the increased control of centralized network management. What’s more, SDNs provide these advantages at a lower cost than traditional networks, thanks to increased automation and reduced equipment costs.

Samsung Snaps Up Joyent, the Best-Kept Secret in Cloud Computing

ONE OF THE best-kept secrets in cloud computing has just found a new home. Samsung Electronics announced Wednesday that it will acquire Joyent, a vital but lesser-known player the cloud hosting market—and one with quite a history behind it.

Joyent sells hosting services that enable customers to run their software in the cloud, not unlike those offered by Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, and also helps companies build their own cloud-style systems in their own data centers. It has also boasted marquee clients such as Adobe and European telco giant Telefónica. But it’s perhaps best known for incubating a software development platform called Node.js, which is now one of the most popular programming tools on the planet.

Global Cloud Services Market is Expected to Reach $555 Billion, Globally, by 2020

According to the new report by Allied Market Research, titled "Global Cloud Services Market (Services, Type, End User and Geography) - Global Analysis, Industry Growth, Trends, Size, Share, Opportunities and Forecast, 2013-2020", the global cloud services market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.6% from 2014 to 2020, reaching a market size of $555 billion in 2020. In 2014, the overall cloud services market revenue will reach $209.9 billion, led by public cloud services. The community cloud services segment is gaining momentum and is expected to garner revenue of $1 billion this year, thanks to its adoption in healthcare segment.

Global Colocation Market is Expected to Reach $51.8 Billion by 2020 - Allied Market Research

According to a new report published by Allied Market Research titled, "World Colocation - Market Opportunities and Forecasts, 2014 - 2020", the global colocation market is expected to reach $51.8 billion by 2020, registering a CAGR of 12.4% during 2015 - 2020. Global colocation market for energy sector would exhibit highest CAGR of 14.3% during the forecast period.

North America has emerged as the most promising region, exhibiting a huge demand for colocation by adoption in the sectors of banking, telecom and IT sector in order to manage their dedicated data servers. In 2014, the market for colocation in North America was valued at $11,779.9 million and would continue to consolidate its market position during the period 2015-2020. Key factors such as shrinking IT budgets and the high cost associated with the development of dedicated data centers would largely drive the market by 2020.

Public cloud vs. on-premises, which is more secure?

Which is more secure: the public cloud or on-premises infrastructure?

“Is it more secure to run in the cloud or more secure to run in my data center?” asks John Treadway, senior vice president at consultancy Cloud Technology Partners. “I can do it better. You can do it better… It becomes a religious debate.”

Large enterprises invest a lot in security, Treadway says and so do large cloud providers. “Whether it's more secure or less secure, [the cloud is] at least as secure as most enterprise environments,” he concludes.

As the cloud market continues to mature in 2016, organizations are more willing than ever to use cloud-based services. At Amazon Web Service’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in October, the CIOs of Capital One and General Electric spoke about how they’re gaining tremendous advantage by using the public cloud. Officials from Bank of America and Goldman Sachs admit they too are using cloud services and other emerging technology like containers.

But this question about cloud security remains. A recent survey of 1,500 IT professionals by 451 Research Group found that security, compliance and data sovereignty are the three biggest issues holding back their usage of the public cloud.

Read More: http://www.networkworld.com/article/3016673/public-cloud/public-cloud-vs-on-premises-which-is-more-secure.html

Cloud computing for e-governance

The Internet has changed our lives in terms of the way we work, learn and interact. These changes are also influencing the very organization of the government, its relationship with its citizens, institutions and businesses and cooperation with other governments. Increased access to technology brings expectations and demands on government from its citizens and organizations. At the same time, we can notice that the governments are also proactive and are planning new ways of interacting, improving services, optimizing processes and revitalizing democracy by increasing the IT spend. It aims to deliver more interactive services to citizens and businesses through e-governance.

For this, cloud computing may lead to significant cost savings. It entails use of computing hardware and software infrastructure and apps that are remotely hosted. However, governments have been slower in realizing the potential benefits of IT and the cloud to provide its services to the citizens. Cloud computing provides a new service consumption and delivery model inspired by consumer internet services.

Cloud based e-governance

E-governance with cloud computing offers integration management with automated problem resolution, manages security end-to-end, and helps budget based on actual usage of data. At a global level, cloud architectures can benefit government to reduce duplicate efforts and increase utilization of resources. This helps the government going green, reducing pollution and effective waste management.

Enterprises and SMBs are already reaping the benefits of cloud by using the “pay-as-you-use” service model, its massive scalability and readily availability. Since government requires a massive infrastructure it is important for government to use cloud computing on long-term basis.

H-P Winds Down Cloud-Computing Project

Hewlett-Packard Co., after a five-year effort, has decided to shutter its cloud-computing competitor to Amazon.com’s AWS service.

The service, called Helion Public Cloud, will power down at the end of January, said Bill Hilf, H-P’s cloud chief.

Mr. Hilf said in an interview the company would focus on so-called private-cloud computing, enabling corporations to build their own AWS-type capabilities using servers they own rather than public-cloud offerings that use shared infrastructure. H-P will also help customers run their software on existing public-cloud services such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, he said.

“Our own public-cloud offering is not really a core area for us,” Mr. Hilf said.

By acting as a broker for other public-cloud services rather than as a competitor, H-P is playing to its strength as a seller of hardware and managed information-technology services, said Cassandra Mooshian, an analyst with Technology Business Research Inc. “This was a well-thought-out, strategically positive move,” she said in a research note published Thursday.

H-P is the latest of several companies to retreat after trying to challenge Amazon in the cloud. Dell Inc. in 2013 shut down its public-cloud business, and Rackspace Inc. announced earlier this year that it would no longer sell such services.

The move frees H-P to focus on its $28 billion hardware business, which is under threat. Hardware sales declined 1% in the company’s most-recent quarter, while on Thursday Amazon reported that its AWS unit scored year-on-year growth of 78%. The research firm Gartner Inc. said that the public cloud is outpacing corporate data centers in taking on new workloads as measured by computing capacity.

Read more : http://www.wsj.com/articles/h-p-winds-down-cloud-computing-project-1445624977

Now IBM unveils Blue Box Local on-prem OpenStack private cloud service

IBM aims to simplify the private cloud for businesses. Image: Shutterstock
Having earlier this month rolled out the Bluemix Local platform as a service for firms to run behind their own firewall, IBM today has taken the wraps off an OpenStack on-premise private cloud service - a fruit of its June acquisition of Blue Box.
The new on-premise environment, IBM Blue Box Local, will absorb features from the existing IBM Cloud OpenStack Services offering which it replaces, when it becomes available from November 30.

With IBM Blue Box Local, after a site survey to determine the deployment capacity required, the customer buys the hardware as prescribed in a compatibility list. IBM then builds the rack and delivers it to the customer site. Once the power and network connections are made, the entire environment is then managed remotely by Blue Box and IBM.

"If you look at most private-cloud installations, they're measured in months or years to get up and running," IBM Blue Box CTO Jesse Proudman said.

"There are sites where typically the customer goes and buys a software distribution from a vendor, and they have to figure out how to train their people in that software distribution. They have to figure out how to operate that environment - what do they do when they get a monitoring alert?

"It becomes challenging to derive immediate value from that cloud.

"We're trying to take all that out of the mix and put a small portion of the IBM cloud footprint in that customer site," he said.

Having been in business since 2003, Blue Box created its OpenStack-based hosted private cloud some two years ago. Before the IBM acquisition, that product ran on dedicated hardware in four Blue Box datacenters around the world.

Following the IBM purchase, the first jointly-released product was the porting of that dedicated offering onto IBM's Softlayer cloud in early September. IBM Blue Box Local is essentially that same technology but placed within a customer's datacenter.

IBM launches Bluemix Local, aims to bridge public, private clouds with data center
IBM launches Bluemix Local, aims to bridge public, private clouds with data center

Read More: http://www.zdnet.com/article/now-ibm-unveils-blue-box-local-on-prem-openstack-private-cloud-service/