Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is bullish on the Asian data center market, including China and India, at a time when trade tensions are ramping up.
Microsoft operates the second-largest cloud platform and, as such, operates data centers around the world. As one of the world’s largest growth markets, Asia represents tremendous opportunity for the company.
Nadella singled out two countries as especially important to the company’s future: China and India.
“We’re absolutely committed to all of these countries and in China too,” Nadella said. “Today, we primarily work to support multinational companies that operate in China and multinational companies out of China.”
Similarly, while India is important to the company’s future, Microsoft sees significant changes to the market.
“Microsoft’s presence in India was about mostly multinational companies operating in India. But for now, it’s completely changed,” he said.
“It’s the reverse where these companies who are innovating in India, whether it’s the big large conglomerates, or the new startups, are all using [artificial intelligence] cloud technology to be able to innovate and create services that are obviously popular in India and elsewhere,” he added.
In all, Nadella said Microsoft plans on investing in at least 11 different regions.
Silicon Valley may be the tech center of the world, but Virginia is the undisputed data center capital, with more capacity than China or Europe.
According to Synergy Research Group, the US has the majority of the world’s data centers, coming in at 53%. Impressively, Virginia alone accounts for more than one-third of the country’s capacity and surpasses both China and Europe.
“In Europe, the Netherlands and Ireland have always punched far above their weight, beating out countries with larger economies like Germany and the UK,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “But globally, the standout region is the US state of Virginia. Virginia has far more hyperscale data center capacity than either China or the whole continent of Europe. However, our analysis of the future data center pipeline shows that the relative importance of these hot spots will tail off a little over the next five years, as hyperscale infrastructure permeates a broader geographic footprint.”
Analysts believe Cisco may have to spend big on acquisitions if it wants to remain competitive in a changing tech landscape.
Cisco built its business on networking equipment for the enterprise, the kind of equipment companies need to run data centers and on-premise networks. As Business Insider’sAaron Holmes argues, however, Cisco is facing an existential crisis: the cloud.
Cloud computing is on the rise now more than ever. While the transition was already well underway, the pandemic and rise of the remote workforce sent the transition into overdrive. As more and more companies rely on cloud computing to handle their basic operations, the need for expensive, enterprise-grade equipment to support on-premise networks and data centers drops precipitously.
As a result, many analysts believe Cisco will need to make additional acquisitions to remain competitive and adapt to the changing industry. Such an acquisition could be of an up-and-coming startup that offers a product or service complimentary to Cisco’s ambitions, or it could be a larger acquisition of an established rival.
Fortunately, as Holmes points out, this is nothing new for Cisco. The company has a long history of making acquisitions and isn’t shy about ponying up when the need arises. Hopefully, company leadership realizes the current cloud transitions represents one of those times.
Oracle has added five new cloud regions as it works to take on Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market, according to a company press release.
According to the announcement, Oracle has“added local regions in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah), Australia (Melbourne), Japan (Osaka), Canada (Montreal), and The Netherlands (Amsterdam). As of today, all of them are open for business and available in the Oracle Cloud Console.”
The company has added 10 new regions in the last six months, making a total of 21 locations offering Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud. The company’s goal is to reach 36 by the end of 2020 and, with this announcement, it says it is on target to reach that goal.
The company is also focused on redundancy to meet customers mission-critical needs.
“To that end, four of these new regions—Osaka, Melbourne, Montreal, and Amsterdam—give customers a second site within the same country (or, in the case of Amsterdam in the EU, a second jurisdiction paired with Oracle’s existing Frankfurt region),” the press release reads. “The fifth region, in Saudi Arabia, will be joined by a second region later this year.
“Oracle plans to put a minimum of two regions in almost every country where we operate, and these new regions mark a big step toward this goal. The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, India, and Brazil will also have two regions live by the end of 2020.”
It remains to be seen if Oracle can compete long-term with Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon currently dominates the cloud market, but Microsoft has been making significant headway, with some analysts predicting it could overtake Amazon. In the meantime, Oracle is one of the companies seen as most vulnerable to continued gains by Microsoft.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it is planning on opening data centers in Spain, making it AWS’ seventh infrastructure region in Europe.
Having a local infrastructure region will be a boon to Spanish companies, giving them the ability to address data residency issues and keep complete control over sensitive data. Similarly, the new data centers will provide customers creating applications that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) another EU-based, secure infrastructure region.
“Cloud computing is already powering innovation within businesses, educational institutions, public administrations, and government agencies across Spain, and with this AWS infrastructure region, we look forward to helping accelerate this transformation,” said Peter DeSantis, Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. “Opening an AWS Region in Spain will drive more technology jobs and businesses, boosting the local economy, while enabling organizations across all industries to lower costs, increase security, and improve agility. We’re excited to have AWS contribute to the future growth of Spain.”
The announcement follows years of AWS investing in Spain, with their first in-country presence dating back to 2012. In the intervening years, AWS has continued to build its presence in the country, reflecting the growth it has experienced in the region.
The announcement was welcomed as great news for the country by Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. “This investment from AWS will allow Spain to fully adapt to the digital transformation and develop as an international center of innovation and technology. Cloud computing, in addition to promoting technological progress in the private sector, will enable the Public Administration to improve the services it provides to citizens. A secure cloud is an essential tool for the development of our economy, as well as for the generation of jobs in our country. We highly value AWS’s commitment to the technological development of Spain and the upskilling of our citizens.”
Neal Mueller, Security and Networking lead for Google Cloud, recently was interviewed about security and other important aspects of using the Google Cloud Platform to host websites, online retailers and other data intensive applications.
Should I move our online applications to the cloud and is it secure?
We get that question less and less these days. There are big advantages to moving to the cloud. You get to have all of the scale that you want immediately when you want it. You don’t pay for it when you don’t use it. And you don’t have to worry about the maintenance of the underlying machines. The advantages are so big, in fact, that we seldom get the question of, should I move to the cloud? More often, the question that we get is, how can I move to the cloud safely?
Where does Google’s responsibility for security begin?
It’s simple. Google’s responsibility is to control the underlying infrastructure. Your responsibility is to secure the data on top.
Why use Google as a cloud provider?
One of the reasons that we talk about a lot is that Google is the right cloud provider for you because we’ve got over 500 security engineers. These are 500 people that are foremost in their fields. They’ve been in peer-reviewed journals, they’re experts at security.
Let me give you an example of just one team within the 500. It’s called Project Zero. These are forward-facing engineers whose job it is to discover 0-Days, that is, new vulnerabilities, never before seen or disclosed. They discovered Heartbleed, which affects anybody with a browser. It’s a TLS vulnerability. They discovered rowhammer, which affects anybody that has a computer with RAM and they discovered 15 of the last 21 KVM vulnerabilities, which is really important to Google because we use KVM as our chosen hypervisor technology. All of these vulnerabilities, as soon as we discover them, we immediately disclose them so that the world is a safer place thanks to the work of Project Zero.
Can you tell us more about this?
Let’s talk about the word provenance. It’s a word in English that means come from. It’s a fundamental tenet of how we think of secure systems. We don’t just buy hardware that’s off the shelf. We return to first principles, figure out what functionality we need from the hardware and which ones we don’t, because functionality that’s included in the hardware off the shelf might introduce vulnerabilities that we don’t want. This leads us in many cases to custom-build secure systems. So we have custom-built ASICs, custom-built servers, custom-built racks, custom-built storage arrays inside custom-built data centers. All of this leads to a much more secure data center.
Infrastructure security, doesn’t that go beyond hardware?
Sure. It extends to the people inside that data center, too. These are full-time, badged Googlers that have submitted to a background check and have an array of physical security to make their job easier. We’re talking about stuff that you’ve seen in “Mission Impossible”– biometrics, lasers, vehicle barriers, bollards. All of this is custom-built, also, to make the data center more secure.
So is this unique to just Google?
Yeah, it’s unique to Google, but not for long. Part of being Google is giving back to your community. So as part of the Open Compute Project, just last week with Facebook, we released our design for a 48-volt rack. This is a very high-density, highly efficient, highly green rack. And although Google is the only one that can build it, now that everybody has the designs, everybody can build data centers as efficient.
What other cool stuff is Google Cloud doing?
What’s next? So with 500 security engineers on staff, there’s a lot that’s up next. But let me tell you about just two things that spring to mind. The first one is BeyondCorp. Here, we have separated ourself from the traditional enterprise security model. Traditional enterprise security has a hard firewall to guard the perimeter. However, we’ve seen what happens with recent breaches– what happens when an adversary gets inside that perimeter. He has relatively unfettered access to the resources inside the internet. What Google does is device authentication which allows our applications to be accessible by the internet, but be just as secure as if they were only accessible by the intranet. We believe that this makes our public cloud more secure.
What’s the second initiative?
On Google Cloud Platform, data at rest is encrypted by default. This is a real differentiator for us. We believe it’s good practice and good business. We’ve seen what happens when adversaries get a hold of breached PII and we think that encryption by default is a good preventative measure against that.
Facebook has officially announced a brand new data center in Altoona, Iowa, which they say will be among the “most advanced and energy efficient facilities of its kind” when it’s completed.
The data center will be built with the same Open Compute Project server designs and outdoor-air cooling system of Facebook’s other data centers, but the company says that improvements to the building design and networking architecture will make Altoona’s center stand out in the crowd.
“We’re excited to have found a new home in Iowa, which has an abundance of wind-generated power and is home to a great talent pool that will help build and operate the facility. We plan to break ground this summer and expect to begin serving user traffic in 2014,” says Facebook’s Jay Parikh. “We’re especially appreciative of all the partners who helped make this project happen. Facebook’s mission is to connect the world. Thanks to Iowa, we’re building the global infrastructure to bring the next billion people online. We can’t wait to get started.”
Facebook says that they will break ground this summer and they hope the center will be ready to go in 2014.
Reports of the new data center first hit the web last weekend, with the Des Moines Register saying that the social media giant was behind “the most technologically advanced data center in the world.” That reports suggests that the facility will cost upwards of $1.5 billion.
Altoona, Iowa rests inside the West Des Moines Metropolitan area, and at last census had a population of just shy of 16,000 people. The Altoona data center will be Facebook’s 4th, and 3rd in the United States. Facebook currently has data centers in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden.
“Our goal is not just to deliver you a fast, reliable experience on Facebook every day – we also want to help make connectivity a universal opportunity. Our data centers are essential for making that happen,” says Parikh.
Urs Holzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, this week pointed his followers on Google+ toward a local Oklahoma television news station and a report on an interesting Googler working at Google’s Pryor, Oklahoma data center. From the Google+ post:
Did you know Google had a one-eyed security dog at the Oklahoma data center? I didn’t, until I saw this clip.
The clip Holzle refers to is a heartwarming animal-intrest piece filmed by Fox 23 in Oklahoma. Miss G, a one-eyed guard dog at the Google facility is a stray taken in by the employees there. The security staff at the data center are completely enamored of the dog, who’s name was shortened from Miss Google. Take a look at the report below and see the generosity of the Googlers in Oklahoma:
Last month Google created “The Story of Send” to show off the lengths the company has gone to make its data centers run green, so it’s not surprising that Googlers would take in a stray dog. I, for one, agree with Chris Lichowicz’s comment under Holzle’s post: that dog needs an eye patch. Eye patches are cool.
Greenpeace really likes Google and their commitment to using more efficient ways to power their data centers across the country. I’m sure the conservation group would also be delighted by Google’s recycled water cooling system.
Jim Brown, Google’s Data Center Facilities Manager, posted today on the company’s blog about how they use water from the Chattanoochee River in Georgia to cool their data center in a unique way. The Chattanoochee River is a large river that begins in the northern part of Georgia, runs through Atlanta and then empties out into the Gulf of Mexico.
Anyway, Brown says that Google cools their data centers with half the energy normally required by using a technique called free cooling. They do this by bringing cold water into the data center to cool their servers then release it as water vapor through cooling towers.
Google used to make use of Douglas County’s clean drinking water to cool their servers when the data center first opened in 2007. Soon after, they struck a deal with the county to let them use reuse water instead. This allowed them to use 100 percent recycled water for all of their cooling needs.
It’s get way cooler than that though. Google and the county built a side-stream water plant about five miles west of the county’s main water plant. This allows them to divert up to 30 percent of reuse water to their data center for cooling. What’s left of the water after cooling their servers is treated onsite and released back into the river as clean water.
Google also released a video showing the inner workings of their Douglas County cooling facility.
