By Sarah Pollock, May 17, 2013

Joe McKendrick, a technology contributor for Forbes Magazine recently wrote an article based upon the findings from the latest annual report on the future of the software and services industry.  The report, which was based on 37 top executives at software and cloud companies, was originally produced by the Software & Information Industry Association in an attempt to delve into the minds of tech vendors and find out who are the cloud providers and who are the cloud consumers?

In the article, McKendrick dives deeper into four areas of observation that came about from the report and concludes the following:

IT shops are becoming service providers themselves. 

• A number of software executives point to the fact that IT departments themselves are becoming software or service companies. “Fundamentally, large enterprises continue to be run by IT departments tucked behind a firewall,” says David Roth, CEO of AppFirst. “However, these IT shops are realizing the value in becoming the service providers of private cloud offerings: they can provide the agility that their departments require, while ensuring that their security and governance standards are being met.”

If not solutions providers themselves, then IT departments are becoming cloud gatekeepers. 

• There has also been a push for IT departments “to bring value add benefits around some of the business selected cloud products,” Roth continues.  IT leaders need to take the initiative with wrapping data integration services, security and governance around outside cloud solutions. Their role is to ensure “that the entire portfolio of applications is living up to their firms’ standards.”

“Private SaaS” will emerge within the enterprise.

• Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technology, also points to the role of IT as internal cloud vendor. Such cloud services “can be offered by the office of the CIO and effectively treat the corporations’ sub-entities as tenants. The private SaaS model can be extended to outside entities such as franchisees, suppliers and partners of the enterprise, to establish invitation-only communities to a SaaS application, and will become a mechanism to strengthen enterprise relationships.

BYOT — Bring Your Own Technology:

• Still, the consumption of tech services is boiling down to individuals, and not necessarily even organizations. Bill McNee, founder and CEO of Saugatuck Technology (not a tech  vendor but an independent analyst firm) says “Bring Your Own Device” is too narrow a way to look at the trend that is shaking up the enterprise IT industry – it’s about “Bring-Your-Own-Technology” (BYOT). “We are using this term, rather than the popular ‘BYOD,’ as what is happening in the enterprise – and what ISVs need to enable and support – is not just about mobile devices, but also personal applications, clouds, services, and data within the enterprise.” Saugatuck’s research shows that BYOT is poised to become the next major development in the way enterprise IT is delivered, enabled by cloud, along with social computing, analytics and mobile. “What sets BYOT apart within the enterprise is that it marks a relinquishing of hardware ownership in addition to software and business process ownership.”

What do you think of the reports findings?  From your experience do you believe it’s true that there is no longer a clear line between who is a cloud provider and a cloud consumer?  Feel free to comment below!

A report entitled China Colocation 2013 released by DCD Intelligence forecasts that the carrier-neutral colocation market in China will grow at a 40% compound annual growth rate over the coming few years – some 380% by 2016.

Click HERE to view data centers in China on Data Center Mapping! 

According to DCD Intelligence analyst Hawkins Hua, the Shanghai-based author of the report: “Inherent complexities involved in network interconnectivity in the country have led to bottlenecks as internet traffic has increased. This has led to increased use of colocation facilities by enterprises wishing to bypass traditional interconnection routes. Although the market is still dominated by the state owned telecom carriers, there is a growing market of carrier-neutral providers who are proving popular with enterprises”.

Although dominated by the state owned telecoms carriers – who between them represent two thirds of the colocation market in China – the country has witnessed an influx of carrier neutral colocation providers. Many of these are reliant on the state-owned giants for space and network provision.

The report estimates that the carrier neutral colocation market in China will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40% through to 2016. This is in stark comparison to the country’s 20% CAGR for the data center market as a whole.

Stringent regulations regarding foreign ownership of China-based companies — together with difficulties in establishing a business presence in the country — has to a certain degree prevented a mass influx of international colocation providers. However, multi-national providers are gaining a foothold in the market through strategic partnerships with local based companies.

Growth drivers

The key drivers of growth in the use of colocation in China mirror those elsewhere in the world – including the increasing complexity of IT infrastructure and applications leading to companies choosing to outsource rather than operate their own facilities.

As throughout the world, power costs and staffing Issues are also strong drivers toward the use of colocation.

In addition there are drivers unique to China, such as the serious bottlenecks in terms of interconnecting network traffic that have occurred as internet traffic has grown. The use of colocation facilities has increased because of their better connectivity – enabling colocation customers to bypass some of these traffic bottlenecks.

According to the report, the three key factors involved in a company’s decision to choose a colocation provider within China include:

1) Interconnectivity between networks.

2) Infrastructure reliability, security and scale.

3) Geographic coverage of facilities.

Source: Consultant Specifying Engineer, originally posted on 4/8/2013

Check out this awesome infographic on how much data is generated every minute by some of the world’s most popular websites!  Are you surprised by these numbers or do you think they should be reportedly higher or lower?

Source: DOMO 

Want to learn more about what’s happening here at Data Center Mapping on one or all of your favorite social media sites?  Well, now you can!

We are proud to announce that Data Center Mapping now has pages on the following social media websites including:

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/AskDataCenters

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AskDataCenters

Pinterest: 
http://pinterest.com/askdatacenters/

Youtube: 
http://www.youtube.com/user/AskDataCenters

LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/company/data-center-mapping

Google+:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/100643166306315288580/100643166306315288580/posts/p/pub 

For more information about Data Center Mapping’s services, visit our website at www.datacentermapping.com or call us toll free at 877-406-2248. 

By Sarah Pollock, April 15, 2013

MarketWatch recently posted an article highlighting the “Top Ten U.S. Cities for Growing Businesses.”   The research indicated that metro areas with strong ties to energy and technology, especially in the areas of biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industries, did better than those without strong ties. However, MarketWatch’s  research also found that a diverse economy with various industries and companies also positively impacted their results, and interesting enough, climate and quality of life had little impact overall.

So how did these top ten cities rank from a data center facility perspective?  In order to find out the answer, we used Data Center Mapping.com’s mapping tool and looked up each of the cities on MarketWatch’s top ten list.  We then performed a comparison study by ranking them in order by the number of data center locations contained in each city.  Here are the results:

Overall, The Lone Star State came out on top – both on our list and on MarketWatch’s list.  However, Austin moved down from 1st place to 4th place, and Houston moved up from 3rd place to 1st place with an impressive 50 data center locations.

Additionally, we saw very little movement with Washington D.C., which moved from 6th place to 7th place – along with San Jose, which jumped up two spots from 4th place to 2nd place.

The city to make the largest leap on our list was San Francisco, which moved from 7th place to 3rd place with 34 data centers. On the flip side, the city to drop the farthest on our list was Boston, which went from 2nd place down to 6th place with only 20 data centers.

Interestingly enough, Raleigh, Salt Lake City and Bridgeport shifted around slightly from their 8^th, 9^th and 10^th place spots, but all three cities remained in the bottom three on both lists.

Portland was the only city to remain the same and ranked 5^th on both lists with 21 data centers.

So what can we conclude from this comparison study?   First, there is a strong presence of data centers in almost all of the top ten cities (with the exception of Bridgeport, CT which had two data centers located outside of the city limits).   In fact, six out of the ten cities on MarketWatch’s list have 20 or more data center locations listed on Data Center Mapping.com.

Second, overall (with the exception of Boston) the cities with a higher number of data centers ranked higher on MarketWatch’s list and concretely, those with a lower number of data center locations ranked in the bottom three.

Does this mean that the presence of data center locations affects or contributes to the growth of business in these ten U.S. cities.  We believe that it quite possibly has!

Are you interested in finding out when new data centers are added to these top ten cities and other locations around the world? Keep checking back to Data Center Mapping.com. We have over 4,200 locations listed and counting!

By Sarah Pollock, April 10, 2013

Thanks to Liquid Robotics, a California based ocean data services provider, humans and sea creatures are no longer the only ones that can catch a wave!  The company, which currently holds the world record for the longest distance a robot has ever traveled on the earth’s surface, announced this week that it has launched a sea prowling “data center” ocean robot called the Wave Glider SV3.

According to their website, the new SV3 sea prowler comes equipped with datacenter@sea technology that allows for real-time onboard processing of large data sets.  However, the SV3 doesn’t stop at just gathering oceanic information; it can also process, analyze and transmit the collected data via satellite from its wide variety of on-board sensors and servers.

In addition, the SV3’s data center-like architecture allows for a variety of customers to gather information at the same time.  Some of those customers include the oil and gas industry and fisheries, coast guards and even the military.

According to Liquid Robotics’ CEO, Bill Vass, the company is hopeful that the Wave Glider SV3 will become the Amazon Web Services of the open oceans.

Beyond its awesome data center features, the SV3 is the world’s very first unmanned hybrid wave and solar propelled machine to incorporate what Liquid Robotics calls “energy harvesting technology.”  Using the latest advancements in the collection of the planet’s wave and solar energy, this little green robot sea machine can operate for years at sea with regularly scheduled maintenance and transmit ocean data without any need for fossil fuels.

This cool little 270-pound sea robot is able to navigate individually or in a fleet 24/7/365 during all weather conditions including both calm and rough waters.

For more information about Liquid Robotics and their products, please visit their website at: www.liquidr.com

So just how big is this market?  According to Gartner Research, the cloud service brokerage market will reach $100 billion by 2014. Not only does this show the enormous magnitude of the brokerage market, but also the adoption of enterprise cloud services.

The cloud market in general has the potential to reach $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenue and nearly 14 million jobs created globally according to some estimates. It’s a gigantic marketplace filled with complexities, gotchas and unknowns for the inexperienced so you better hire an expert!

In comes cloud service brokerage, the latest “buzzword” to circulate and is often referred to as a “must have” for enterprises migrating to the cloud. According to CIO Magazine, a cloud service brokerage serves as an intermediary between you and your cloud service provider by aggregating multiple cloud services, integrating then with in-house apps and customizing them to meet your needs.

Hiring a cloud service broker to assist in the migration is a no-brainer especially when dealing with mission critical applications and data that run your day-to-day business operations. Furthermore, the majority of small companies, enterprises and government agencies simply do not have the technical background and resources available to drive a successful cloud migration.

This isn’t the first time. Intermediaries like “brokerages” have shined with the adoption of new technologies. System integrators in the past helped ensure a smooth transition when computers first arrived on factory floors and in control houses.  That same shift is occurring with today’s technologies.

“For enterprises today, it’s all about a successful, painless migration to the cloud,” said Mike Armstrong, VP of Sales and Engineering for Global Communications Group, Inc.

It’s common sense but just remember that not all cloud service brokerages are created equally. Make sure to do your homework when selecting one. You will want to interview several brokerages and extensively examine their cloud provider offering, solution offering and client references.  Call (877) 406-2248 to speak to a cloud broker today.

Nemertes Research released an interesting study in 2012 that examined the supply and demand for colocation data center space.  What’s shocking is a potential shortage of colo space in the United States by 2015.  Nemertes’ study revealed that while supply is growing, demand for colo is growing much faster.

There was an estimated 67.7 million total square feet dedicated to colo in the US in 2011.  Growth projections based on data center feedback showed that square footage will grow to an estimated 144 million by 2015.  That’s 212% increase in just four short years.

The study also examined the current demand for colo space and revealed even more shocking results.  Only 8.75% of total enterprise data center space was allocated to offsite colocation data centers in 2011.  That number is anticipated to swell to 14.11% by 2015.  A shortfall between new space available and new space required occurred in 2012 and is expected to only increase in the future.

So what does it all mean?  Enterprise colocation demand has and will continue to outstrip supply so unless data centers expand at a faster rate than current growth rates indicate, there will be a “colo crunch.”  This has the potential to drive up colo prices for premium data centers in sought after markets like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Denver.

If you are considering colocation, make sure to visit www.datacentermapping.com to search for available data centers.  Have specific questions about colocation?  Speak directly to a colo expert by calling 877-406-2248.

By Sarah Pollock, March 27, 2013

In an effort to satisfy the growing demand for premium interconnection and data center services, Equinix, Inc. announced today that it has signed an agreement with Mapletree Industrial Trust to build its third International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Singapore with a projected launch scheduled for the second half of 2014.

Click HERE to view all Equinix Data Center Locations!

According to the official press release, the new data center, Singapore IBX, will reside in close proximity to Equinix’s SGI data center at one-north and each center will be interconnected through a dedicated fiber network to allow customers in SG1 to expand their business within the Equinix platform.  It will feature 385,000 square feet of of gross floor area and 5,000 cabinets over multiple phases.

“Singapore is growing in importance as a cloud hub for the region. Global and multinational companies have seen Singapore as a gateway for diverse connectivity to the other Asia Pacific markets,” said Clement Goh, managing director of Equinix South Asia. “Equinix is committed to catering to the increasing demand for data center and interconnection services in Singapore. Our new data center will help our financial and cloud customers drive new business and collaboration opportunities, improve performance and reduce operational cost with low latency and high proximity.”

About Equinix
Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), connects more than 4,000 companies directly to their customers and partners inside the world’s most networked data centers. Today, businesses leverage the Equinix interconnection platform in 30 strategic markets across the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific. www.equinix.com.

By Sarah Pollock, March 25, 2013

As data centers spring up all around the world, their impact on the environment has heavily come into question by environmental agencies and groups.  The fact that inefficiently run data centers not only cost more to operate, lose more energy than their efficient counterparts and damage our planet has lead to the development of cooling tower water treatments to help offset these negative effects, but some of them are not as environmentally friendly as others.

The Downside of Data Center Water Cooling Towers
Because data centers absolutely require cooling measures to keep servers running in top condition, it is important to utilize the best practices to keep water usage under control and prevent harm to the environment   When it comes to most data center’s cooling towers, the amount of energy, water and maintenance needed to effectively cool the center can be reduced if the water is treated properly to reduce bacteria, scale and corrosion.

If left untreated, the bacterium that grows within the walls of cooling towers has been known to spread disease including Legionnaire’s disease and also microbial slime.  Scale, a calcium buildup that is a lot like plaque buildup in the human heart, will also grow within the towers if left untreated.   Corrosion takes place simply because water and metal do not work well together.  Eventually the water will cause the metal to rust and decay creating leaks within the tower.

Water Cooling Tower Treatment Solutions
Traditional data center cooling tower treatments out there on the market mostly consist of hazardous chemical treatments that kill bacteria along with eliminate scale and corrosion; however, these treatments are dangerous to the environment.   There have been non-chemical water treatments in the past, but they were unsuccessful at treating bacterial, scale and corrosion simultaneously.

Therefore, new technologies have developed that exclude these awful chemicals and replace them with electrochemical devices that use the air from outside and pump it through processing sleeves that break down oxygen molecules into single oxygen ions.  When the negatively charged ions are pumped back into the water, they bond with the water molecules and form hydrogen peroxide, which kills over 99% of the bacteria and act as a magnet to attract the scale away from the walls of the cooling towers thus preventing corrosion.  Water usage is also reduced by thousands of gallons because the method naturally increases the cycles of concentration.

For more information about this new technology, please visit www.silverbulletcorp.com.