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.

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.

Google says welcome to the Cloud 2.0

Now that enterprises are in the cloud, they want to analyze that data

Enterprises' initial entrance into the cloud is over and they witnessing the arrival of the Cloud 2.0. That's the word from Diane Greene, senior vice president for Google's cloud businesses.

The first phase of the cloud involved testing the waters, figuring out how companies could save time and in-house effort by having apps and services run in the cloud and using the cloud to store data. The top concerns were security and reliability.

Google and the war of the clouds: IoT isn’t the point

At London’s Cloud Expo, Barak Regey, Google’s director of cloud platforms for Europe, recommended that cloud companies simply abandon trying to predict how their data and cloud capacity needs will evolve over the next five years.

The cloud expert stated that with the explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the pace of innovation and change in the technology industry, cloud organisations simply won’t be able to calculate and prepare for how much cloud capacity they’ll need.

Hybrid Cloud Industry Overview 2020

The global hybrid market provides features of both private and public cloud computing which gives organizations the flexibility to store their data. Global cloud computing market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 26% with revenue of $38 billion by 2015. Hybrid cloud is projected to have the highest share in the revenue as it provides features of both cloud computing services. The key driver for growth of the market is the ability to use multiple features of public and private cloud resulting in reduction in of deployment cost. For example, an organization can save sensitive client data using the private cloud feature and interlink that data through public cloud for billing purpose.

However, using the public and private features can create networking issues, which is a key restraint for the market growth. The APIs used for hybrid cloud require complex networking that can lead to interruption in data transfer and affect the productivity. Additionally, hybrid cloud increases the dependability on internal IT infrastructure. Cloud service providers are involved in research to overcome this challenge.  Some of the key companies profiled in this report are Amazon Web Services, Akamai Technologies, Cisco Systems, Google Inc., IBM Corp, Hewlett Packet, Dell, Microsoft Corporation, VM Ware, and Yahoo Inc.

KEY BENEFITS

• This report provides market intelligence with respect to type, delivery model, industry vertical and geographies so that companies can make precise decisions about their investment options
• Enable informed decision making process by offering market analysis based on current market situation, expected future trends and market intelligence
• Assess and rank the top factors that are expected to affect the growth of the market
• Value chain analysis provides inputs about the role of the all stakeholders of the market
• Porter’s five force analysis provides the competitive scenario, threat of new entrants and substitutes along with the potency of suppliers and buyers

Read More: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/hybrid-cloud-market

3 common cloud pitfalls IT should avoid

It can be difficult these days to come up with sensible reasons why businesses shouldn't embrace cloud-based productivity tools such as Google for Work or Microsoft Office 365. The benefits of the cloud are many and expanding. However, a number of common pitfalls for IT professionals exist and can have lasting negative implications on any organization.

Cloud email gaining momentum

The cloud email market is still in the early stages of adoption with 13% of identified publicly listed companies globally using one of the two main cloud email vendors, according to Gartner.

A recent study by Gartner found that 8.5% of public companies in the sample use cloud email from Microsoft's Office 365 service, while 4.7% use Google Apps for Work.

The remaining 87% of companies surveyed have on-premises, hybrid, hosted or private cloud email managed by smaller vendors.

Gartner used the email server addresses in the domain records of nearly 40,000 public companies globally, to find out which ones point to cloud email services from Google or Microsoft.

"Although it is still early days for cloud email adoption, both Microsoft and Google have achieved significant traction among enterprises of different sizes, industries and geographies," said Nikos Drakos, research VP at Gartner.

Four Top Picks for the Cloud in 2016

We see several opportunities to continue to play the dynamic changes that are occurring in enterprise software as enterprises adopt the Professional Cloud.

The Professional Cloud requires significant capital expenditures. Therefore, only the largest companies with the greatest cash resources and cash flows can play in the Professional Cloud. Cloud titans like Microsoft (ticker: MSFT), Amazon.com ( AMZN ) and [Alphabet’s] Google ( GOOGL ) are likely to dominate, but strong opportunities should continue for more specialized Professional Cloud providers like Salesforce.com ( CRM ) and ServiceNow ( NOW ).

As a result, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is likely to see further consolidation around a few platform leaders. The consolidation may occur through merger activity, but it is also occurring as companies develop more applications. SaaS leaders like Salesforce.com, HubSpot ( HUBS ), Zendesk ( ZEN ), Workday ( WDAY ) and Veeva Systems ( VEEV ) are all continuing to add functionality, which enables them to consolidate their leadership.

Legacy enterprise vendors should continue to move as quickly as possible to the Professional Cloud. Adobe Systems ( ADBE ) and Autodesk ( ADSK ) continue to provide good examples of companies that are making that transition. Conversely, Oracle ( ORCL ) and SAP ( SAP ) have been more challenged by the transition to the Professional Cloud, and they are lagging their peers.

As result, we continue to recommend Adobe, Autodesk, Salesforce.com, HubSpot, Microsoft, Veeva, Workday and Zendesk. Our best ideas for 2016 include Microsoft in large caps, Autodesk in mid-caps, and HubSpot and Zendesk in small-caps.

Read More: http://www.barrons.com/articles/four-top-picks-for-the-cloud-in-2016-1452195897

Amazon Launches Its First Cloud Data Centers in Korea

Promising to reduce cloud latency for its Korean customers, Amazon Web Services has launched several cloud data centers in the country, establishing a fifth availability region in Asia Pacific. The other four are Sigapore, Beijing, Tokyo, and Sydney.

The company didn’t specify how many data centers the new region consisted of or where exactly they were in Korea. They’re likely in or just outside of Seoul, since it’s called the Seoul region. The region currently has two availability zones, and each zone usually consists of one or more data centers.

Amazon said existing customers who are either based in Korea or do business in the Korean market have requested that the provider launch physical data centers there. Because of latency and in some cases for data-sovereignty reasons, providing infrastructure cloud services globally has become a race to expand geographic reach of the physical infrastructure that only a few players have the resources to participate in.

So far, Amazon and Microsoft have been the two main contenders in the race. Google, considered to be the third cloud giant, doesn’t have nearly as much of its global data center capacity dedicated to its cloud infrastructure services, which may start to change this year.

IBM, following its acquisition of data center service provider SoftLayer, went on a global cloud data center expansion push last year and the year before. Many others, such as HP and Dell, have dropped out of the race, while big telcos, including CenturyLink, Verizon, and AT&T, are reassessing their future in the cloud and data center services market, exploring alternatives to owning the massive data center portfolios they built out in recent years to chase the cloud opportunity.

Read More: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/01/07/amazon-launches-its-first-cloud-data-centers-in-korea/

2016 cloud computing forecast: Private, hybrid, and automation

As we look forward to 2016, there is a lot to reflect on and forecast in cloud. Below you will find my top predictions for the year ahead.

RIP private cloud

The biggest missed story of 2015 has been the profound failure of the private cloud.

Just a few years ago, the private cloud was IT’s solution to remaining relevant to their business partners. I remember attending OpenStack Boston 2011 at the height of the private cloud movement, where everyone seemed convinced of the inevitability of the self-managed private cloud. But after years of incredible innovation in the public cloud and disarray in private cloud, 2016 will be the year that the private cloud as a primary strategy will finally go to its grave.

I expect some big shake ups in the private cloud, especially in the OpenStack community. Unless the private cloud substantially changes its pace of innovation, it will become a speed bump for enterprises on their way into the public cloud.

Google still doesn’t figure it out

If there was ever a company that should own the public cloud, it would be Google. They were building cutting-edge cloud infrastructure while the rest of us were still talking about our type 1 hypervisors. They even introduced the term “cloud computing” into our lexicon. I don’t know about you, but with the exception of a handful of mobile companies that built their businesses on AppEngine, I rarely run into a Google cloud customer.

While I believe Google has the vision, financial resources, and technical capacity to be a top cloud provider, I predict they will continue to lose more ground in 2016. To take liberty with the famous Wayne Gretzky quote, in the process to skating to where Google thinks the puck will be, companies like Amazon and Microsoft are busy putting the puck in the net.

Read More: http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2016/jan/04/2016-cloud-computing-forecast-private-hybrid-and-automation/

Cloud Services are Eating the World

The cloud revolution is impacting the technology sector. You can clearly see it in the business results of companies like HP and IBM. For sure, legacy technology providers are embracing the cloud. They are transforming their businesses from building and running on-premise infrastructures to delivering cloud-based services. The harsh reality is that this is a destructive transformation. For every dollar that exits legacy environments, only a fraction comes back through cloud services. This is the great promise of the cloud – maximizing economies of scale, efficient resource utilization and smart sharing of scarce capabilities.

It is just the latest phase of the destructive force that technology applies to all parts of our economy. Traditionally, technology vendors touted benefits such as personnel efficiencies and operational savings as part of the justification for purchasing new technologies – a politically correct way to refer to fewer people, offices and the support systems around them. This has now inevitably impacted the technology vendors themselves. Early indicators were abundant: Salesforce.com has displaced Siebel systems, reducing the need for costly and customized implementations; and Amazon AWS is increasingly displacing physical servers, reducing the need for processors, cabinets, cabling, power and cooling.

Cloud is Eating the World

Marc Andreseen argued in his 2011 Wall Street Journal article that, “software is eating the world.” In my view, this observation is now obsolete. Today, cloud services are eating the world. Cloud services encapsulate and commoditizes the entire technology stack (software, hardware, platforms and professional services). This model is so impactful and irresistible that even capturing only a part of the value is a big win. This is how cloud services now include platforms – including Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com; and infrastructure, provided by such vendors as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM/Softlayer.

Read More: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/01/04/cloud-services-eating-world/

6 Changes to Expect in Data Security, Cloud and Mobile Tech

Several industry analysts have forecast that 2016 will be the ‘year of action’ on many technology fronts, as several recent trends become commonplace strategies. Cloud computing, data security and mobile are tops among them.

Indeed, “2016 will be a challenging year for IT as mobile and cloud force CIOs to adopt a more agile model of information security, policy design, technology evaluation, and lifecycle management,” says Ojas Rege, vice president of strategy at MobileIron. “This new approach overturns 30 years of legacy process and mindset but it can no longer be avoided. As a result, 2016 will be the first year of true transformation.”

Rege offered Information Management his six top predictions for what we can expect in 2016 on the mobile technology and cloud computing fronts. They are:


A brewing battle between modern and legacy

“In 2016, tension is building between the mobile and desktop teams in enterprise IT,” Rege says. “The catalyst will be Windows 10, which will allow organizations to adopt enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions to secure the next generation of laptops and desktops. Over time, this approach will replace the traditional system image for many use cases because it promises greater security, agility, and cost-effectiveness. However, it will also disrupt existing desktop operations and create technology, budget, and organizational tensions between the splinter mobile team and the established desktop team.

An issue of end-user identity

There are many players and many approaches to the problem of end-user identity. Two of the key participants are Microsoft and Google, and this will be a long-term conflict. Both companies believe that identity is the foundation upon which services are provided to the user community. Both believe that if your platform is the authoritative source of that identity, then you will have a better chance of providing those services than the other company.”

“One battle line was drawn in 2015 when Microsoft did not support Google’s Android for Work initiative for most of the year, in part because it brought Google identity into the enterprise. Microsoft sees identity as its central control point for the cloud - the “who / what / where / how” of all enterprise services,” Rege notes.

Read More: http://www.information-management.com/news/data-management/6-changes-to-expect-in-data-security-cloud-and-mobile-tech-10027970-1.html

How green is your cloud?

With the recent climate talks in Paris, energy consumption is a pressing topic. Unsurprisingly, cloud vendors have touted their infrastructure at scale as a way to reduce IT's carbon footprint due to the efficiencies gained from running such huge deployments.

That doesn't change the reality that data centers remain a large source of carbon emissions through their intense energy and cooling requirements. So when it comes to energy usage and renewables, how do the cloud providers stack up?

Amazon Web Services

AWS has committed to 100 percent renewable energy, but has not offered a date by when it plans to achieve that. As of December 2015, the energy mix across AWS is 25 percent renewable with a plan to reach 40 percent by the end of 2016. This will come from some newly announced generation facilities: wind farms in Fowler Ridge (online in Jan 2016), U.S. East (Dec 2016), and U.S. West (May 2017) -- plus a solar facility in the U.S. East due online in October 2016.

Amazon participates in a number of programs, including Buyer's Principles to help increase purchasing power for low-carbon energy sources (which also includes Microsoft and Google) and the American Council on Renewable Energy.


If you want to be green on AWS now, you have two public regions to choose from that are 100 percent carbon neutral: U.S. West (Oregon) and Frankfurt. AWS's GovCloud region is also carbon neutral.

Google Cloud Platform

Google has been carbon neutral since 2007 and now sources its energy from 37 percent renewables, following announcements this month to buy another 842 megawatts of renewable energy. It plans to triple its renewable energy purchases by 2025 on the road to 100 percent renewables (also, no date).


Read More: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3015632/cloud-computing/how-green-is-your-cloud.html

Google cloud outage caused by failure that saw admins run it manually ... and fail

A mistaken peering advertisement from a European network took Google Cloud's europe-west1 region offline last week for around 70 minutes.

The slip-up happened when an unnamed network owner connected a new peering link to Google, and in the process, it advertised reachability for far more traffic than it could handle.

As a result, as The Chocolate Factory explains in this post, most of the lost traffic carried destination addresses in eastern Europe and the Middle East.

“The peer's network signalled that it could route traffic to many more destinations than Google engineers had anticipated, and more than the link had capacity for. Google's network responded accordingly by routing a large volume of traffic to the link. At 11:55, the link saturated and began dropping the majority of its traffic”, the post states.

That kind of error, Google's report continues, would usually be caught by automated safety checks, but “the automation was not operational due to an unrelated failure, and the link was brought online manually, so the automation's safety checks did not occur”.

“To prevent recurrence of this issue, Google network engineers are changing procedure to disallow manual link activation”, the post notes.

Route announcement errors are a continuing headache on the Internet.

In June, Telekom Malaysia mis-advertised routes to Level 3, causing the US provider to sling most of its traffic onto a network that couldn't cope and dropped the packets.

Read More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/30/euro_network_gobbles_googles_cloud/

Amazon is offering a year of unlimited cloud storage for just $5

There are plenty of options for keeping your digital media safe and easily accessible in the cloud. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo all have services that will let you back up tons of old files. Amazon is a major player in providing cloud services to other companies and has leveraged that expertise to create offerings for average consumers and perks for its Prime subscribers. Today it's rolling out a limited-time offer just in time for Black Friday: $5 for unlimited online storage.

The deal may be of particular interest to users of Microsoft's OneDrive. Previously that company had been offering unlimited storage to Office 365 subscribers, but recently downgraded that to 1 TB of space, stating that a few extreme users were taking advantage of the system well beyond the needs of average users. "A small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings,” the company said. "In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average."

Google Drive has unlimited storage for people who are signed up through a work account, but caps free consumer accounts at 15GB before asking for payment. The copious amount of free storage out there from companies with other principle revenue streams explains why Dropbox, which makes all its money charging for storage, is in danger of losing its luster among investors.

Read More: http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/26/9805438/amazon-one-year-unlimited-storage-five-dollars

Google Has a More Flexible Way to Buy Its Cloud

Google on Wednesday announced a set of new custom cloud capabilities that should make it easier for customers to select the cloud resources that best meet their needs, while cutting down on a common problem—buying more capability than needed.

The new Custom Machine Types let developers select up to 32 virtual central processing units (called vCPUs), and allocate memory from 6.5 gigabytes per vCpU on up. The new model means that customers can move a job to another, more appropriate, vCPU configuration if the job changes, according to Google.

Customers can pay for these machine types by the minute or run them for a month at a time, adjusting the number of vCPUs they use as needed. In the latter case, if their job runs at 100% capacity, Google’s “sustained use discount” automatically kicks in, which can bring the price down significantly.

Amazon Web Services is the pioneer in public cloud—a model in which massive compute services are divvied up for use by many customers who typically pay by the hour. Amazon [fortune stock symbol=”AMZN”] offers a huge array of instance types and several pricing models. Google  GOOG 2.03%  and Microsoft [fortune stock symbol=”MSFT”] are playing catchup in that field, investing billions in infrastructure.

Read More : http://fortune.com/2015/11/18/google-cloud-price-calculator/

IT pros should focus on largest public cloud providers

The cloud has seen massive rates of adoption among IT professionals this year, and it will spread even deeper into entrenched industries over the next 16 months, according to a new report from Forrester Research. Despite ongoing consolidation, the research firm reports that the cloud vendor landscape is too crowded and IT professionals should increasingly hedge their bets on major public cloud providers such as Amazon, IBM and Microsoft.

CIOs and IT leaders should be wary of small, specialized players due to their narrow focus and the increased risks these companies carry around longevity and security, Forrester reports. The market research firm predicts there will be a significant decline in the number of players providing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services and management software by the end of 2016.

While Google is making headway in the enterprise space with ongoing developments in its Google for Work suite of applications, Forrester doesn’t place the company in the upper echelon of today’s leading cloud vendors. “Despite excellent technology and scale, Google will only begin to develop momentum in large-enterprise business in 2016,” the report’s authors write.

Read More : http://www.cio.com/article/3005606/cloud-computing/it-pros-should-focus-on-largest-public-cloud-providers.html

IT leaders plan to further embrace cloud in 2016

The majority of CIOs plan to foster a cloud-first strategy for enterprise applications next year, according to a new survey from Bitglass. The "cloud access security broker" conducted its survey of 92 CIOs and IT leaders at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo last month, and it released the findings today.

Half of the respondents reported cost savings in 2015 as a result of using SaaS applications, such as Microsoft's Office 365 and Google for Work, but they also continue to face security challenges. In 2016, 87 percent of IT leaders expect to increase security spending, and 77 percent plan to bump up cloud security expenditures for mobile and cloud-based services, according to the survey.

Roughly one in three (34 percent) IT leaders anticipates an increase of more than 20 percent in cloud security spending next year. The biggest cloud security challenges of 2016 will be controlling downloads (36 percent), evaluating cloud provider security (24 percent), external sharing (21 percent) and shadow IT (14 percent), according to the survey.

"CIOs now realize that shadow IT is not an employee attempt at mutiny, but a response to the poor choice of tools provided by IT," says Rich Campagna, vice president of products and marketing at Bitglass. "As the cloud-first mindset has become more commonplace, security concerns have shifted to topics like access from unmanaged devices and external sharing — common gaps in cloud applications."

Read More : http://www.cio.com/article/3001920/cloud-computing/it-leaders-plan-to-further-embrace-cloud-in-2016.html

Investing In The Cloud Is Starting To Pay Off For Tech

The future of computing is in the cloud, and right now the top three companies benefiting are names we're all familiar with: Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Each of these tech giants invested a lot of money into the infrastructure necessary to make its cloud business boom. Last week, each company's earnings report showed that the investments paid off in terms of money and marketshare.

Amazon Web Services brought home $2.1 billion in revenue for Amazon.com — that's up 78 percent year-over-year. The service hosts IT infrastructure mainly for corporate accounts. (Video via Amazon)

Microsoft has also snagged a ton of enterprise cloud users. Revenue in the company's Intelligent Cloud segment, which tracks some of Microsoft's business products, was $5.9 billion. (Video via Microsoft)

But the company can also thank all those Office and One Drive users out there for its cloud gains.

"There are now more that 18 million consumer Office 365 subscribers. ... More than half a billion people manage their documents and photos in One Drive. ... Of note: Commercial Office 365 monthly active users grew to 60 million," CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's earnings call.

Read More : http://www.kivitv.com/newsy/investing-in-the-cloud-is-starting-to-pay-off-for-tech-firms

Google Has Its Head in the Cloud

In Alphabet’s final earnings call as one big company, its executives gave a strong hint of what they sees as a key growth driver for Google’s business beyond search: The cloud.

The company posted better-than-expected third quarter results, plus a juicy $5 billion(ish) share buyback that together shot its stock up more than 10 percent. On the call with analysts, however, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat offered few if any new details on the direction of Google’s core business. There was repeated talk of the work on mobile search, although the execs stressed it was “in the early innings,” in Porat’s words.

The pair were, however, eager to talk about Google’s business selling cloud storage space to companies. After shedding most of its early enterprise efforts, Google dusted off a new cloud service a few years ago under veteran SVP Urs Hölzle. It is still nascent, and competes with a powerful, fast-growing business from Amazon. Yet Pichai stressed that it was a priority for his Google.

“Cloud is also a growing area where we see great opportunity, and we’re building a fantastic service that we’ll keep investing in,” he said on the call.

Like most of its products, Google does not break out revenue for cloud. The service sits inside “Other Revenues,” which grew 11 percent annually during the quarter to $1.89 billion. Google has said that this revenue bucket’s growth is “primarily due” to the Google Play Store. The Information has reported that Google’s cloud business will clock in at $400 million in revenue for all of 2015 (with one big buyer, Snapchat, responsible for around a tenth of that).

Read more : http://recode.net/2015/10/22/google-has-its-head-in-the-cloud/