Box Enhances Data Center Capacity With Equinix

Box has enhanced its global presence by leaps and bounds with its Equinix deal. Box will use 6 Data Centers that belong to Equinix to serve clients. This announcement comes shortly after Box’s announcement of having established end points in a few global locations. The 6 data center facilities are spread all over the world and will help Box meet clients’ demands for better storage and file sharing capabilities.

With this deal, Box gets data center capacity outside the USA which is even more important when one considers the fact that more than half of Box customers are outside the USA. Box will now run Equinix IBX data centers in places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Chicago and Amsterdam. The IBX facilities of Equinix play host to multiple internet service providers and carriers and networks.

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How Pandora, Alibris slashed their data-center power needs

Its no secret that data centers consume large amounts of energy. Between powering and cooling all the equipment found in a data center, including servers, networking gear, and storage, a lot of electricity and money goes into maintaining our digital world. With so much budget focused on keeping datacenters running at top speed finding a green solution is a lofty goal, particularly since few companies will go green if it means sacrificing responsiveness to customers.

The call for greening the world’s data centers is not new. In 2006, a congressional study released by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) showed U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy each year. This usage accounted for about 1.5 percent of the total electricity consumed in the U.S. in 2006. The report also said data centers cooling infrastructure accounts for about half of that electricity consumption.

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NetApp launches Oregon data center

NetApp launched its new data center in Hillsboro. The data center will house IT infrastructure for the storage vendor’s customer support monitoring and corporate IT services. NetApp designed the facility together with Digital Realty Trust, a global San Francisco-based developer and provider of wholesale data center space.

The data center is part of NetApp’s efforts to modernize its IT infrastructure. Key tenets of this transformation are automatic provisioning and optimization of storage resources, 100% data accessibility and seamless storage-resource scaling capabilities. Describing the infrastructure, NetApp CIO Cynthia Stoddard said, To achieve the growth objectives we have, we need to enable an environment where the data is essentially immortal. it is always available never having to worry about scheduled downtime or gaps in our ability to support our customers. NetApp installed its own storage clusters at the facility using its Data OnTap operating system. The hardware is NetApp FAS6200 arrays providing about 1.5PB of clustered storage total.

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New NetApp Data Center Enables Business Agility and Forms Backbone of ... - Marketwire (press release)

NetApp will launch a new data center facility in Hillsboro, Oregon, that will play an integral role in the company's aggressive plans to expand the services it provides for its more than 12,000 employees and thousands of customers. The data center will be the hub for all NetApp global customer support monitoring and corporate IT services and will leverage the NetApp® agile data infrastructure architecture to deliver nonstop, infinitely scalable operations. At the heart of this agile data infrastructure is NetApp Data ONTAP®, the world's #1 storage operating system. The energy-efficient data center was designed in partnership with Digital Realty, a leading provider of data center solutions.

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Fast Five Ways to a High-Efficiency Data Center - The Data Center Journal (blog)

The “Fast Five Ways to a High-Efficiency Data Center” represents a series of best practices and technologies involved in operating a high-efficiency data center.IT professionals must review their network designs in the data center with experts able to ensure it is built to run according to a modern data center operating model. This should include support for wide-area network (WAN), network-attached storage (NAS), local-area network (LAN) and storage-area network (SAN) resources. And it must include the proper redundancy to support a 24/7 data center operation. Rationalization can also mean an in-depth review of data center distribution models and creating zones following new industry standards to optimize cabling and networking efficiency.

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Cisco Patches Vulnerabilities in Data Center and Web Conferencing Products - Threatpost (blog)

Cisco is warning its customers about a remote command execution vulnerability in its Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager. The product manages Ethernet and storage networks and troubleshoots for performance issues on Cisco products running NX-OS software. Versions prior to 6.1.1 are vulnerable to remote exploits on the underlying system that hosts the application, Cisco said.

An attacker could send abitrary commands via the JBoss Application Server Remote Method Invocation (RMI) service, which is exposed to unauthenticated users. Cisco said no exploits are in the wild, but there is a Metasploit module that would exploit the JBoss configuration in question.

More at Cisco Patches Vulnerabilities in Data Center and Web Conferencing Products - Threatpost (blog)

DataDirect Networks (DDN) Expands Its Big Data Infrastructure Technical ... - Virtual-Strategy Magazine (press release)

DataDirect Networks, the leader in massively scalable storage, today announced the launch of the company's official technical certification program. The three-level curriculum is designed to enable organizations to develop in-house resources to manage DDN's scalable portfolio of SAN, NAS and object storage appliances.

Available immediately, customers and partners can enroll in multi-level courses that are held either within DDN's facilities around the world or via custom onsite classes. Additionally, the company announced expanded support for all DDN partners to develop a minimum of two DDN Certified Storage Professionals on staff as part of the DDN PartnerLink ecosystem

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Samsung Produces New High-performance Enterprise SSDs for Data Centers - The Herald | HeraldOnline.com

Samsung's new data center and enterprise SSDs deliver extremely high performance with low power consumption in providing the most efficient storage solutions for data center applications,” said Myungho Kim, vice president of memory marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics. Samsung will aggressively produce its new line-up of SSDs beginning this month to accelerate SSDs’ move into not only the server but also the storage marketplace, as we continue to affirm our leadership in the SSD market.

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University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chooses Steadfast Cloud Platform for Video ... - Broadcast Newsroom

Steadfast, a data center services provider based out of Chicago and New York with server management, disaster recovery and cloud hosting has been chosen as the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater's College of Business and Economics data host for its online streaming. "This partnership underlines how important managed services and 24/7 accessibility to content is in academia," says Joe Bong, Chief Revenue Officer for Steadfast.

The largest business school in Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater has been making video recordings since its online MBA (Masters of Business Administration degree) program's inception in 1999. In 2004 all of the media went online and in 2009 they implemented a college-wide lecture recording system that allows faculty to make recordings directly from their classrooms.

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New Novell file service could save hosts on storage - DatacenterDynamics

Novell has launched Dynamic File Services (DFS), which it claims will help data centers and hosting providers to tackle the problems created by unstructured data in enterprises and slash the cost of management.

The product aims to automatically manage data down to an individual file basis, said Novell, meaning that companies can archive data to cloud storage providers like Amazon S3, Box, CloudMe and Dropbox. The stand-alone software runs on servers in the background and, Novell said, is virtually invisible to users, managing files without disrupting workflow.

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Seagate Launches 3 New Enterprise-Class HDDs for Data Centers, Cloud ... - IT News Online

Seagate Technology has announced three new enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDD) optimized for traditional data centers and emerging cloud infrastructures. Perfect for cloud bulk data storage, the Seagate Enterprise Value HDD provides up to 3 TB of storage in a low-power configuration that is perfect for efficiently and affordably storing the ever-growing amount of unstructured data typically stored in the cloud.

The company also announced its next generation of highly-reliable hard disk drives, the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD featuring the industry's widest range of capacities (1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB) of secure data storage for robust data center usage and the Seagate Enterprise Performance 10K HDD, which delivers best-in-class performance and built-in security for optimized storage efficiency and data protection.

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Impacts of UA Research Computing Data Center could go beyond academics - Inside Tucson Business

The University of Arizona has unveiled its updated supercomputer facility, the Research Computing Data Center, which has greatly increased the capacity in high-throughout computing, high-performance computing and data storage.

The computing capacity the new center provides is relevant to researchers across most of the hard-sciences including those in astronomy and planetary sciences, biological sciences and agriculture because supercomputers, like those at the Research Computing Data Center, can process massive calculations and help researchers analyze data in ways that would not be possible using conventinal computers.The power of large-scale computing systems like that at the University of Arizona is so great as to be almost incomparable to a standard PC.

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Data Center Industry's Biggest Green Challenge Is Storage - The Data Center Journal (blog)

The data center industry has been rife with efforts at making servers more efficient and greener but there is one more area that is going to be an even bigger cause for concern as far as green challenges go and that is storage.This is going to be a challenge within a short time frame of 5 years. One of the biggest reasons for this challenge is the fact that more and more people are using information and storing the same in the cloud as well.

They are using mobile solutions and they are sharing that information across several areas. Technology is also aiding the process of collection of different kinds of data and all this means storage nightmares pretty soon.

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McAfee Launches New Data Centre Security Suites - CSO Magazine

McAfee today announced four new Data Centre Security Suites to help secure servers and databases in the data centre. The suites offer a unique combination of whitelisting, blacklisting and virtualisation technologies for protecting servers and virtual desktops. These solutions provide optimal security for servers and databases in physical, virtualised and cloud based data centres, with minimal impact on server resources which is a key demand for data centres.

Performance and security are key concerns for servers in the physical, virtualised or cloud based Data Centres,” said Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst, Information Security and Networking at Enterprise Security Group.The new server security suites from McAfee, based on its application whitelisting, virtualisation and blacklisting and AV technologies, provide an enhanced security posture while maintaining the high server performance needs of the Data Centre.

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Avnet, Inc.'s North American Data Center Stands the Test of Time; Celebrates ... - DailyFinance

The data center has also undergone significant growth during this time too. In 1987, approximately 25 employees worked at the data center; the facility housed approximately five servers; data storage was calculated in gigabytes; and the data center was cooled with a series of pipes pumping water throughout the building. Today, the data center is operated by approximately 100 employees and houses approximately 1,700 servers, manages approximately one petabyte in data storage and is cooled by the first air-side economizer in the Southwest. This air conditioning system uses outside air from the Sonoran Desert and special low voltage motors and compressors to provide an energy efficient way to maintain the low temperatures needed.

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Cloud Data Centers Getting Greener, Motivated By Savings - eWeek

There are also rumblings of solid-state storage being deployed as a resource-saving measure," according to the report.

A final example was prefabricated modular (PFM) data centers, which in themselves aren't more efficient but enable companies to achieve efficiencies by avoiding "infrastructure overcapacity.Greenpeace has been a vocal critic of what it calls "data farms" and in April released a report titled "How Clean Is Your Cloud?" It graded the clouds of major companies, heavily criticized Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, and gave the iCloud owner a D in energy efficiency and an F in infrastructure siting. (Apple, which nearly always ignores the press, responded that it was building the "greenest data center ever built.

 

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Long way before Hitachi's glass storage chip realizes potential

Hitachi has developed a chip which can store data for a long time but industry watchers note while it has potential for usage in data centers and disaster recovery, its material fragility, usage of laser technology and high costs could hinder it from taking off with enterprises.In September, Hitachi developed a glass chip which it said can preserve data for hundreds of millions of years.

The technology stores digital data on slivers of quartz material, which should can store this data "indefinitely" under almost any environmental condition without degradation, the company's vice president and CTO Hu Yoshida, noted in a blog post.

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How To Choose Best SSD For Midsize Data Centers - InformationWeek

One consistent truth we have seen about solid state disk (SSD) is that the technology can improve performance in almost any size data center. The problem for midsize data centers beginning to explore this technology is how to best afford it. The SSD vendors have a seemingly endless set of options for data centers to consider, but which one is best for the midsize data center?

Overall there are three basic ways to implement flash SSD in the environment. First, SSD can be added or installed to a server's drive bays via drive form factor solid state or via a PCIe card slot. Second, an appliance can be added to the network that either acts as a standalone storage system or as a cache for an existing storage system. And finally, SSD can somehow be integrated into a storage system.

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DLR Reopens Renovated Facility - Analyst Blog - NASDAQ

Digital Realty operates data centers and digital storage facilities which are primarily used by telecommunication companies to maintain their Internet presence or augment their data networks. Data centers usually incur high costs for building and maintenance, and as such the supply is relatively inelastic.Digital Realty primarily focuses on investment in institutional quality data center facilities in high barriers-to-entry markets with significant potential to generate attractive risk-adjusted return on investments (ROI).

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GridIron Announces TurboCharger GT-1500 Data Accelerator Appliance - StorageReview.com

GridIron Systems has announced TurboCharger GT-1500, a Flash-based appliance that drastically improves the performance of entire data center Storage Area Networks (SANs) to solid state speeds while avoiding the issue of disrupting servers, storage or software applications. The GridIron TurboCharger is an innovative appliance that does away with conventional storage I/O bottlenecks by intelligently caching and accelerating application data delivery. To make sure applications run at optimum performance levels, TurboCharger continuously profiles the behavior of applications and caches performance-critical data for rapid, low-latency delivery.

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