Microsoft has announced universities on the Janet network will be able to connect directly into its Azure cloud data centre in Dublin, thanks to a peering project. Janet is a private network used by UK universities. At its heart it provides its own network connections, rather than relying on the public Internet, so Janet users can enjoy better speed and security.
Despite all the hype around software-defined networking (SDN), it won’t really provide any cost savings, according to Juniper Networks. There has been much debate over the potential for SDN, especially surrounding cost savings. As SDN puts a virtualised layer across networking infrastructure, giving control over switches and routers to IT in a single console, it should bring greater efficiency.
Salesforce has confirmed a deal has been signed to build a UK data centre here in England, almost three years after it promised to deliver one. The data centre will be based in Slough, Salesforce’s chairman for Europe Steve Garnett (pictured) told TechWeekEurope this morning. A contract has been signed with NTT Europe, a subsidiary of Tier 1 networking provider NTT Communications, and the facility, Salesforce’s sixth global data centre, should be active in 2014.
IBM is betting big on flash storage for the data centre, announcing a $1 billion initiative to research the technology and releasing a line up of all-Flash storage appliances.
Big Blue said flash could unlock plenty of Big Data potential, due to its ability to speed up read and write processes, compared to standard disk drive technologies still widely used by businesses today.
Facebook and Open Compute Project partners have sent shockwaves through the server community, announcing a host of initiatives designed to break up the “monolithic” hardware of yore. The Open Compute Project was set up in April 2011 and has made great strides in setting new standards for data centres, as it looks to bring the efficiency of Facebook facilities to the general market. It has a host of powerful backers too, including Dell, Intel and HP, amongst many others.
Telefónica is to use Joyent software to power its Infrastructure-as-a-Cloud (IaaS) service to challenge Amazon Web Services’ dominance of the public sector cloud market in Europe. Joyent only entered the UK IaaS market itself in April, hoping its SmartDataCenter and SmartOS software would help lure customers into its Amsterdam data centre. Now it is loaning that same software for use in Telefónica’s public cloud data centres powering the Instant Servers offering.
Reddit, foursquare and Pinterest ware among the large sites hit yesterday thanks to escalating issues at Amazon Web Service’s data centre in northern Virginia. It marks the third time major outages have occurred as a result of Amazon problems in that region in the last five months. The biggest cloud provider in the world saw storms hit its northern Virginia data centre in July this year, disrupting power and taking out major services, including Netflix. In June, the same data centre lost power, thanks to multiple backup failures.
Salesforce.com tells TechWeekEurope no date has been set and it is unsure whether the data centre will materialise this year
Yesterday’s 40 minute Twitter fail was caused by breakdowns at three data centres, which left many users unable to Tweet, the microblogging service has admitted. Twitter apologised to users for the outage, which was caused by failure of its resiliency measures, and came on the same day that numerous cloud-based services went down, including Microsoft Azure and Google Talk. The company said the downtime was not caused by an upsurge in traffic because of the Olympics, as some had suspected. Once one of its data centres went down, another one was supposed to take over. But that parallel system failed, as did another one, making for a triple whammy.
Like any IT behemoth, EMC wants to protect its market dominance. At the same time it has to prove it is on the cutting edge of the industries in which it plays. If you don’t innovate when you’re at the top, you risk losing your crown to market revolutionaries.
Two years ago, it was arguable EMC was not the most creative-minded tech giant, as it was pushing private cloud data centres, where its super-charged boxes were still needed. It was not backing the scale-out, web-scale data centres that companies and service providers hoping to build cloudy infrastructure were getting hot under the collar about.
But that has changed. EMC is opening its mind – as the EMC World 2012 logo showed last week (see left). It is now, wisely, backing the hybrid model that so many analysts and industry players believe is the right option for enterprise. To shift ...
EMC is talking up its flash storage game claiming it is pushing it into all the right areas, announcing a number of products including a VNX product that it claims cuts the entry cost of flash by 38 percent.
The VNXe3150 model, part of EMC’s unified storage lineup aimed at “IT generalists” managing virtual environments, delivers 50 percent more performance and capacity per rack unit, according to vendor, which was making the announcement at EMC World 2012.
In addition, EMC is going to work with its subsidiary VMware to integrate VNX with the analytics of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. The VNX Storage Analytics Suite and VNX Connector for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite will be available in the second half of 2012, according to EMC.
Talking about the kit, Rich Napolitano, president of EMC’s unified storage division, talked of how “a little bit ...
EMC has been teasing delegates at its EMC World conference today about what it is going to do with its XtremIO acquisition, but it is being reticent about the details of ‘Project X’.
From the details thus far, it appears Project X will deliver a fully-flash array sitting on the storage side of a data centre.
EMC president and chief operating officer Pat Gelsinger revealed a Project X offering will be going into beta in the fourth quarter of this year, with a general release set for 2013.
There have been questions over what would happen to Project Thunder, another EMC initiative that would do a very similar job to the XtremIO technology, but Gelsinger said the technologies would be complementary. That’s because one sits on the server side, whilst the other is on storage. One could assume having both would give IT teams some super ...
EMC has hinted it won’t be putting its name to the Facebook Open Compute Project in an official capacity anytime soon, as the storage giant told TechWeekEurope businesses were not using the project’s storage designs for mission critical loads. The Open Compute Project was launched by Facebook in April 2011, releasing low-energy data centre and server specifications used in its Oregon data centre, effectively open sourcing the custom hardware it was using in the facility. A number of big name storage players have pledged to take part in the initiative, with HP and Dell recently pledging to create server and storage boxes to fit with the new, spacier, greener Open Rack design.
Communications firm Daisy Group has completed a £1 million upgrade of its Manchester data centre, which sits behind a bomb proof door.
The 12-tonne bomb-proof door sits where a former Bank of England vault was in Manchester’s city centre, according to the Manchester Evening News, which revealed the extra investment in the data centre has increased capacity by 50 percent.
Daisy Group has upped the number of servers in the centre from 2000 to 3000, whilst extra cooling equipment has been brought in, which should allow for another 1000 servers to be introduced at some point in the future. There are two-metre thick granite walls protecting the site as well, whilst 70 CCTV cameras monitor the centre.
The data centre is located 25 feet below the ground, and also features a 60cm bomb blast corridor around the facility for an extra layer of protection, according to ...
Facebook is cracking on with its Open Compute Project, introducing the Open Rack, which is designed to bring cheaper hardware to IT teams, whilst freeing them from vendor lock-in and giving them some more efficient kit.
By 2013, Facebook is planning to merge the standard with Project Scorpio, a similar spec being developed by Chinese search giant Baidu and web portal Tencent, whilst HP and Dell have pledged to create server and storage boxes to fit with the new rack design.