Exec Guide Datacenter

Executive’s guide
to the 21st century

data center
Copyright ©2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

2 EXECUTIVE’S GUIDE TO THE 21ST CENTURY DATA CENTER
Executive’s guide to the

21st century data center
Copyright ©2013 by CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.
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Contents
04 Introduction
05 Make your new data center a star
06 Don’t let old data center concepts hold your business back
08 Can a data center really drive economic recovery?
09 Choosing a DCIM provider
10 The 21st century data center: Three game-changers
12 Determining the worth of an IaaS VM
14 IaaS provider comparison reveals market trends for the cloud
17 The role of UPS systems in energy efficient data centers
18 Inside the Backblaze data center and its Pod 3.0 architecture
20 Rackspace: An overview of a major cloud player
22 Is data sovereignty a real concern?
24 Google’s new Asia data centers will boost speed of services
25 Hong Kong is planning underground data centers
26 India’s IaaS market to grow 40 percent until 2015

Introduction
Today’s data centers are more critical than ever as the nerve centers of modern business. However, if their
resources aren’t managed diligently, the costs can easily spiral out of control. There are new technologies
that can make data centers more flexible, more powerful, and far more efficient. But most companies aren’t
starting from scratch, so migration projects have to be carefully managed and need to show a clear return-on-
investment. At the same time, cloud and service providers like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are wooing
companies to stop building their own data centers and to purchase data center capacity on-demand and
scale it up and down as needed.
To help you sort out the options and develop the best data center strategies, ZDNet and TechRepublic pulled
together this collection of information, analysis, perspective, and advice. We hope these insights on data
center trends and technologies will help you make smarter decisions and steer your organization in the right
direction.
Sincerely,
Jason Hiner
Editor in Chief

Make your new data center a star

By David Chernicoff
There was a time, in the not too distant past, when your data centers were very much behind-the-scene op-
erations. A few people worked inside, and the outward presentation was whatever applications your users had
that made use of the IT workload of the data center. But data centers have, over the last few years, developed
a much higher profile. It’s not so much that their role has changed, though roles have certainly adapted to
modern technology trends. It’s that data centers have become the high-profile representation of a business’s
approach to the world (and hence, the customers of the business).
The already outdated New York Times article a few months back that painted data centers as the Montgom-
ery Burns of the business world, gleefully wasting power with not a care in the world, highlighted to many
people who don’t have a clue what a data center actually is or does, that data centers were out there, and
with all the power that was being consumed, must be doing something. This type of media coverage has
added another aspect to your data center management—what is now considered a “social” aspect.
While it seems odd to think about the impact of social media on your data center, consider this: The current
drive toward more efficient computing platforms, using sustainable or renewable resources, and being a better
“corporate citizen of the world” isn’t being done in a vacuum. Corporations are spending money to make exist-
ing data centers more efficient, to reduce power consumption, to find ways to reuse waste energy. And new
data center designs tout their ground-up higher efficiencies and how they will provide better ROI and improve
CAPEX and OPEX as they apply to the data center.
But many companies are missing an opportunity to get even more return on their data center expenditures.
While businesses that build datacenters or that are completely data center focused (such as Google and Face-
book) make a concerted effort to play up their datacenters and their efforts to be more environmentally friendly,
it’s not something you hear from more mundane data center operators.
But perhaps it should be. If your company is spending the money to implement more efficient operations,
develop business processes that have a smaller negative environmental footprint, or are just saving the com-
pany significant costs due to improved energy efficiency or operation flow, those are all “feel good” marketing
opportunities for the business. And turning expense into opportunity just makes good business sense.

Don’t let old data center concepts

hold your business back
By David Chernicoff
The traditional data center—that dedicated facility that houses the equipment necessary to support an IT
workload—is clearly going the way of the Dodo. Regardless of how much your business wants to keep direct
control of its IT assets, the concept of the data center simply can’t be what it used to be if you want a suc-
cessful business.
Consider this: The planning for data center construction has

almost always presumed that the facility would have a 20-year The ability to
life span. Ignoring the IT part of the equation for the moment, this respond to changing
meant that the supporting infrastructure was also designed with businesses climates
that 20-year number in mind. Disregarding the items that could by modifying the
be considered consumables, such as the batteries in your backup way IT works has to
systems, no one building data centers expected to make changes be matched by the
to the cooling, power distribution, backup generators, and UPS ability of a facilities
systems during that 20-year lifespan. And it can be conceded that organization to deliver
no one was actually putting up a building that wouldn’t last much that same sort of
longer than the 20-year lifespan of the data center. rapid response.
Conversely, the components that actually performed the IT

workload—servers, storage, networks, etc.—rarely had an
expected lifespan of more than five years. This meant that in your average data center, the IT equipment would
be completely replaced four times over the expected data center lifetime. This also meant that large-scale app
dev projects had an underlying infrastructure issue; there was always the specter of the dreaded hardware
refresh cycle to worry about, plus the potential refresh of operating system software done in parallel.
The rate of technology change has accelerated significantly for both the basic infrastructure of the data center
and the applications running within. A data center built only five years ago, to the standard of the day, is likely
to be hopelessly archaic when it comes to energy efficient cooling and power, especially given that its design
may even be a few years older. Where the focus was once solely on the ability of the data center to deliver the
necessary IT services, there is now a much higher level of concern for what it actually costs to deliver those
services over and above the direct costs of the IT workload.
Where facilities and IT once worked without ongoing interaction, each unit carefully hoarding its perceived
prerogatives, the reality has become that a tight integration of the two delivers the greatest benefit to the
business. The ability to respond to changing businesses climates by modifying the way IT works has to be
matched by the ability of a facilities organization to deliver that same sort of rapid response.

Both IT and facilities have to learn a valuable lesson about when to let go. IT groups threatened by the cloud
are learning to integrate cloud-based development and services into their planning. Facilities related to IT can
no longer be focused strictly on building and infrastructure maintenance and development and need to look
outside the box (literally) for things that will improve their response time to business changes.
Flexibility on delivering data center level services to the business is a requirement for future growth; being
bound to anything, be it technology or a facility or a way of doing business, prevents all parts of your organiza-
tion from seeing the best possible growth path for the company.

Can a data center really drive

economic recovery?
By David Chernicoff
ViaWest, which recently opened its latest facility in North Las Vegas, has certainly created a data center that
stands out in a colo market filled with competitors searching for a competitive edge. Its new Lone Mountain
Data Center is an Uptime Institute Tier 4 certified design, a level that has not previously been achieved by a
colo facility and something that is certain to be a differentiator in the industry.
With 74,000 square feet of raised floor space, LEED, Energy Star, and Green Globe certifications, ViaWest has
pulled out all the design stops in building its flagship facility. From the perspective of the data center industry,
the new facility is a excellent example of data center state-of-the-art and an impressive accomplishment.
But is that a reason for the City of North Las Vegas to see it as a turning point for a community that has been
mired in the economic doldrums for a very long time?
North Las Vegas has seen a few other businesses over that last few years that opened to major fanfare
and flared out and died quickly, leaving the city in no better economic shape. The highest profile of these
businesses, the ill-fated Amonix solar panel manufacturer, brought a significant number of jobs and attention;
attention that proved to be detrimental when the operation collapsed in 2011, taking the jobs and area
investment with it.
The ViaWest data center is certainly a low-risk operation, in terms of concerns over the viability of the project.
ViaWest is a well-established data center provider and its decision to build a flagship facility means that the
data center isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
But the nature of the data center business is that it doesn’t bring long-term large-scale economic prosperity
to areas where one-off data centers are built. Even if other data center providers choose to build in the same
area, as we are seeing in Oregon and in North Carolina, the overall impact on the local economy in terms
of jobs and related business, once the data center facilities are completed and operational, is usually pretty
minimal.
North Las Vegas will be able to point to the ViaWest facility as a business that has chosen to be in its city. But
to expect ongoing economic benefit seems to be an unrealistic choice. While it is true that some number of
people will relocate to the area to work in the facility, there is no compelling reason for them to choose to live in
the same city. The nature of the valley is such that people are more likely to put quality of life choices ahead of
proximity to the office when choosing to relocate themselves and their families.
Hopefully, North Las Vegas will be realistic about what the ViaWest facility means to its city.

Choosing a DCIM provider

By David Chernicoff
Data center infrastructure management is an interesting topic. From the 20,000-foot view, it seems like a com-
pletely obvious idea for overall data center management. But even with decades of data center experience
behind us, DCIM is just now bubbling to the top as a key component in state-of-the-art data center design.
Intelligent systems management, embedded in devices, is a relatively recent design feature when you look at
commonly applied standards to data center hardware. It wasn’t that long ago that intelligent server manage-
ment required add-in cards and out-of-band solutions to implement. But over the last few years, instrument-
ing just about every component found in the data center has become commonplace, along with inexpensive
solutions for retrofitting devices such as server racks with monitoring and management equipment.
For years, the companies that built the data center infrastructure equipment (as opposed to the IT load
devices) have been developing and deploying management solutions for their hardware. In recent years, they
have been building entire suites of management software that is designed to go far beyond simple manage-
ment, adding everything from on-demand provisioning to goal-seeking analysis tools, tagging these software-
management tools for their hardware with the moniker data center infrastructure management.
While initially resistant, data center operators are beginning to embrace the overall concept of DCIM and are
looking for ways to integrate it with their general operations. The major hardware infrastructure vendors, led
primarily by the manufacturers of the big-ticket electrical equipment found in every data center, offer everything
from stand-alone applications to full suites of DCIM-focused product.
There’s no question that DCIM is on the minds of IT buyers these days, and that is clear in the relatively recent
appearance of DCIM features and DCIM-labeled management tools from traditional IT hardware and software
vendors. With vendors of all stripes pushing unified and converged infrastructures, the selection of manage-
ment tools across the board will have a far-reaching impact on the future of your datacenter.

The 21st century data center: Three

game-changers
By Scott Lowe
As we approach the midpoint of the decade, a number of forces are coming together that could fundamen-
tally reshape the data centers that have been carefully crafted over the previous decade. Let’s consider three
potential contributing factors and how they might affect data center plans in the next few years.
Cloud
Perhaps the biggest potential game-changer is the cloud. As cloud-based services continue their expansion,
the march to the enterprise is inevitable. At first, companies will find themselves testing the waters with a small
workload… just to see how everything works. And then, as the cloud providers prove themselves capable of
handling bigger workloads, and if the economics make sense, organizations will slowly move those tough-to-
support workloads to the cloud, too.
If this pattern sounds familiar, you’re not going crazy. It’s pretty much the same way that virtualization revolu-
tionized the data center in the previous decade. Organizations will ultimately begin to move to the cloud for the
same reasons that they turned to virtualization. However, the cloud offers even more possibilities:
• Pay for what you use. With virtualization, organizations were able to reduce their hardware
costs by consolidating inefficient servers. But even with virtualization, there is still “waste” in
the environment in the form of overhead and unused capacity. With a move to the cloud, there
exists the potential to simply pay as you go, which translates into paying for what you use and
no more.
• Capital vs. operating costs. Data center = big capex costs and cloud = operational costs.
• On-demand capacity expansion. Data centers aren’t always the most flexible objects in the
world. With the right cloud provider, as your needs fluctuate, you can add and reduce capacity
at will.
• Less time on IT, more time on business. As you spend less time on data center needs, there is
more time for business-facing activities—at least in theory!
Over the next few years, I do expect to see many companies move at least some workloads to the cloud.
Converged infrastructure
As you probably know, the cloud is not for everyone. So the data center will continue to be integral for a lot
of companies. Further, even for those companies that do embrace the cloud, it’s unlikely that they will move
everything. Some items will remain local.

However, for many, there is a need to simplify the data center, especially when it comes to supporting certain
new initiatives, such as VDI. Building data center environments is a lot of work and requires significant planning
to ensure that there is capacity to meet ongoing needs and testing that must be done to make sure everything
works together.
Stop the madness! This is where the emerging hyperconverged market can be of great assistance. Currently,
there are three major players in this space: Nutanix, Simplivity, and Pivot3. Each company takes a building
block approach to data center architecture. Each block includes storage, compute, memory, and a hypervisor.
As you begin to run out of resources in an existing block, you simply add another one.
As time goes on, these solutions are becoming even easier to manage. For example, with Nutanix, as you add
new blocks, they are automatically detected and added to the resource pool without an administrator needing
to go through a discovery process. You can’t get much easier than that.
Further, these solutions are often specifically targeted to handle certain kinds of workloads, such as VDI. They
generally include hard disk-based storage and enough solid state storage to support things like boot storms
and login storms, as well as enough capacity to handle storing hundreds or thousands of desktops.
Obviously, these kinds of solutions aren’t for everyone. But for IT shops that want to simplify the data center
and redirect scarce resources toward the business, they could be a perfect fit. I fully expect to see these kinds
of solutions enjoy great success in the coming years.
For those who don’t fit the hyperconverged space, there are always solutions such as Dell’s vStart and EMC’s
Vblock, which can meet data center integration needs. These solutions scale to meet the needs of even the
largest of organizations and also simplify the data center by providing a one-stop shop for the entire environ-
ment while providing a single phone number for support.
The economy
As times goes on, IT departments are continually being directed more toward the business and less toward
the technology—hence the need and desire to turn to solutions like cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure.
Even as the economy improves, I see IT as permanently changed and needing to continue efforts to refocus
attention to bottom line driven solutions.
This will necessarily affect the data center in the years to come. CIOs will be forced to make different kinds
of decisions than they may have made in the past, including simplifying the data center and redistributing the
workloads in new ways.
Summary
Of course, there are other factors at play when it comes to the next-decade data center. But I believe that the
continuing rise of the cloud and converged/hyperconverged architecture, coupled with ongoing economic
needs, will be significant drivers in the trends.

Determining the worth of an IaaS VM

By John Joyner
A virtual machine (VM) that is running in a public cloud, which aug-

ments or extends traditional on-premise VM computing roles, is A good place to start
known as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) class VM. Individual when calculating
business cases are the economic drivers that move IaaS class VMs ROI on cloud IaaS
into the public cloud. There are many motivations—such as seek- migrations is to know
ing high availability, global access, and elasticity—where large public what it would cost
cloud providers can uniquely deliver value. to refresh existing
infrastructure on
For example, a public cloud provider’s content delivery network (CDN)
new but similarly
might be able to synchronize IaaS document libraries across regions
configured hardware
more simply and cheaply than was previously possible. Other IaaS
and software
implementations may not have as clear a payback or return on invest-
platforms.
ment (ROI), so the question arises: How much is an IaaS VM worth?
Apples to apples, then some math

Various public cloud and application providers offer business case calculators, but each is probably somewhat
slanted toward the technology of its vendor. A good place to start when calculating ROI on cloud IaaS migra-
tions is to know what it would cost to refresh existing infrastructure on new but similarly configured hardware
and software platforms.
Let’s say you have an application that features two load-balanced servers that, if deployed on two industry-
standard servers (ISS) with 2 GB RAM, a dual-core CPU, a local hard disk, and a three-year warranty, repre-
sents at least a $5,000 capital expenditure. Operating system and management licenses can increase this by
more than $3,000. A conservative $500 annual per-server power and facilities charge means it would cost
about $11,000 to host the two-server application for three years on conventional infrastructure (excluding
networking).
So when looking to migrate that workload, anything less than $11,000 total three-year expenditure—for
equivalent or superior service—will be attractive. This amounts to about $306 per month using conventional
infrastructure, or about $153 per month per server. You can go shopping for public cloud IaaS VM providers
knowing what the relative costs are to doing it yourself.

Compare rates, but consider the big picture

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), a Medium Utilization Reserved Small Instance VM on three-year term has
a total three-year cost of $1,261, or $36 per month per server. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines
(Preview) service Small Instance VM is $57 per month with no multi-year obligation. Rackspace Cloud Servers
lists a similar computer with a $117 per month cost. Obviously, all three public cloud options are cheaper ($36,
$57, and $117 per month) over the three-year period than doing it yourself with traditional on-premise servers
($153 per month).
At first glance, AWS has the cheapest option, but here, the comparisons across public cloud providers
become more nuanced. For example, the AWS price requires a three-year commitment, and there are higher
prices for shorter terms. The Azure offering uniquely includes geo-replicated hard disks in the base price. An-
other difference is that the Rackspace offering includes bandwidth, while the other providers charge extra for
networking. Each provider’s blend of services adds complexity in the decision making, but provider diversity
can be leveraged to use the highest-value features of each public cloud provider.
Rarely will the base monthly run rate of the IaaS VM be the decision maker. Do the math to calculate what it
would cost to do it in-house; then, verify that the public cloud solutions cost less out of the gate. If your idea
passes the first test, move to analyzing the details of the cloud provider offerings. Here are some valid consid-
erations for selecting a public cloud provider, after quantifying the ROI in your particular business case:
• Your near-term public cloud plans are part of an overarching cloud strategy, which should be
the primary decision maker when it comes to cloud providers.
• A particular provider may or may not permit virtual private network (VPN) connections between
the public cloud and either an on-premise network or another public or private cloud.
• Your operating system or vendor application stack has tools that permit easy moving of work-
loads into a particular cloud provider.
• Some other factor, such as the cloud provider’s CDN or networking charges, are particularly
suited to the business needs of the workloads.
• You are staging workloads across public cloud providers on purpose, effectively removing a
particular public cloud as a single point of failure for your enterprise application.
The example in this article was for two modest capacity application computers. Your situation might involve
complex workloads, such as database and transaction processing, that require more robust, more expensive
IaaS class VMs. Regardless of the VM category and selected public cloud service provider, small scale pilot
projects to gather precise cost/performance metrics are a must to validate cost and ROI models in public
cloud projects.

IaaS provider comparison reveals

market trends for the cloud
By Thoran Rodrigues
For me, there are two main uses for any kind of comparison data: The first one is to pit providers against
each other, checking to see who is going to offer cheaper servers, better support, and so on. This is useful for
newcomers to the cloud, people who are looking to change providers, and for other similar uses.
The second, less obvious application of any comparison data is market exploration, looking at how the com-
panies position themselves on the dimensions specified and trying to find market trends from this positioning.
My latest cloud IaaS vendor comparison includes 16 companies, broken down into Top-of-Mind companies
(the leaders, the ones we immediately think about when talking about the cloud) and the Upstarts (companies
that are less well-known but still provide good service). I created two subsets of dimensions, one of Cloud
Promises, covering the main promises of cloud computing (cost optimization, scalability and automation, and
flexibility) and one of User Concerns, dealing with the greatest concerns users have when moving to the cloud
(security, vendor lock-in, and reliability).
There are, in fact, several interesting studies we can extract from the data, but some care must be taken. Our
first step for analysis is going to be data normalization (not to be confused with database normalization), so
that we can compare the companies without a single dimension distorting our analysis. Normalization was
done using a simple standard score; discrete dimensions were placed on a 0-2 scale, where 0 is the lowest
(worst) grade and 2 is the highest (best) grade. From here, these two simple charts compare the average
scores of Top-of-Mind companies with the Upstarts. (If you’re wondering about the scale, it’s in z-scores.)

From this first chart, we can see that the Upstarts—the smaller companies that are fighting against the leaders
in this market—are on average charging lower prices and offering a higher degree of customization of virtual
instances (more Instance Types); the larger providers, as expected, have more robust offerings, bringing to the
table more data centers, better monitoring tools and APIs, and a greater variety of pricing plans.
On the User Concerns, we can also see some interesting polarization: The smaller providers seem to be
focusing more on offering premium service (through extended service hours and more contact channels), more
aggressive SLAs, and the possibility of uploading your own VMs to the services. However, the larger ones
have much better security ratings.
These charts look only at the averaged data, so let’s examine the details:
• In the Cost Reductions / Optimizations section, Lunacloud comes out in front. It has the cheap-
est servers I’ve found, at roughly US$ 46.00 per month, as well as the cheapest storage cost
and the second cheapest outbound data cost (no charge for inbound).
• In the Scalability and Automation section, Amazon and SoftLayer come out on top, offering rich
APIs, full scale out and scale up functionality, and good monitoring tools to round it out.

• In the Choice and Flexibility section, AT&T wins by sheer numbers: 26 global datacenters
to choose from, with fully configurable instances. And even if it supports only two operating
systems out of the box, you can upload your own VM images with whatever software you want.
• In the Security Features section, many companies are mostly tied, offering datacenters with all
the required certification and some security features—but these are far from complete.
• The same thing happens with Ease of Migration. Most companies, especially those employing
VMware technology, are allowing for easy VM upload and download, simplifying the life of IT
departments.
In the Reliability section, Rackspace, OpSource, SoftLayer, and Hosting.com take the top spot, with services
that have been running for more than five years, aggressive SLAs, and extensive support.
The rise of VMware is an especially interesting trend. While some of the large providers are spending time and
effort trying to create open source cloud standards, such as OpenStack and CloudStack, VMware is quietly
taking over the market. In the group of providers checked, there are more companies using VMware technol-
ogy than any other cloud standard. This trend could end with VMware becoming the true cloud standard, and
it does, in fact, make sense: Many midsize and large companies already use VMware internally, so the migra-
tion from internal data centers to the cloud becomes much easier if the cloud provider offers technology the
company is familiar with. All providers that work with VMware are also offering the possibility of clients upload-
ing their own VMs, making any transition even simpler.
Finally, we can look at who stands out from the pack. For this, a simple analysis is to simply sum the normal-
ized scores for each provider, assigning an equal weight for all dimensions. In this case, the top providers with
respect to the Cloud Promises are Softlayer, Opsource, Rackspace, Amazon, and Lunacloud. These providers
all have low prices, good APIs and monitoring tools, and many instance types and datacenters to choose
from.
Looking at the User Concerns, the top providers are Softlayer, Opsource, Hosting.com, and Tier3. Rackspace
and Amazon are solid but don’t stand out so much here. The top providers in this category all offer excellent
customer service and aggressive SLAs and have all the security certifications on their data centers. They are
also services that have been online for five years or more, so they have a longer track record.
Many other interesting trends can be extracted from the data. I’m providing the full Excel spreadsheet, already
with the numeric transformations and the normalization, so that anyone who wants can work with the data.
Rank the providers, add (or remove) dimensions, add other providers, place weights on the dimensions to
change the scores, or simply change the data around.

The role of UPS systems in energy

efficient data centers
By Rick Vanover
Too many times when we design data centers, we monitor power consumption at the device only. This could
be from a storage array or a server in many cases. Sometimes, we might also check in on the power distribu-
tion units (PDUs) that may be in use within a rack as well. But do we look closely enough at our uninterrupt-
able power supply (UPS) systems? Chances are, we may find efficiency there if we have to be constantly
mindful of data center power consumption. Recently I read a blog by Troy Miller that got me thinking about this
very topic.
The logic here is that if the UPS unit is very efficient, it is possible that the overhead associated with the power
protection can be reduced. And that might be the extra few percents of improvement needed in the power-
(and space-) constrained data centers of today.
Now, to set the record straight, all UPS devices are not created equal. There are three main types: VFD (line
interactive), VI (standby), and VFI (online double conversion). These types were enumerated recently by APC,
leaders in the UPS space. There is a certain amount of competitive tension going around about this topic, and
the fact that all devices are not created equal is important.
The VFI type is preferred by many. AC power is received, it charges the battery as DC, and then the battery
power is converted to AC for the devices to consume. In this way, there is no interruption if there is a power
loss because the second stage is untouched from the battery.
Some electronic devices in the data center may require a certain type, such as the VFI. In my experience
(albeit quite a while ago), I had a telecom system that required that type of power conversion. The system pro-
vided voicemail for my office and for some reason, it was sensitive enough to detect normal power fluctuations
if a regular UPS (VFD type) switched from AC to battery. Other sensitive systems may require power condition-
ing, which I have experience with as well. In fact, I’ve even put power conditioning in front of a UPS unit. That
gives very clean and reliable power, but it requires a high power overhead to do it.
The takeaway is to know the devices in your data center, big or small. It also may be worth implementing high
efficiency UPS devices that do VFD for one range of equipment and another group that does VFI for the most
critical areas. You can get additional power efficiency via the UPS if you need it.

Inside the Backblaze data center and

its Pod 3.0 architecture
By Scott Lowe
Have you ever wondered how some online backup companies can afford to provide the services they provide
at what seem to be insanely low prices? One company—Backblaze—has, for quite some time, made its
hardware specifications freely available. This has allowed those requiring mass storage to rely on a proven
architecture that’s used every day to support a profitable business.
Backblaze recently released version 3.0 of its Pod architecture, For many, a SATA
which sports a whopping 180 TB of capacity in just a few rack cable is a SATA cable,
units of space and at a cost of less than 6 cents per gigabyte. That but for a company like
6 cents per gigabyte includes all costs for the storage chassis, 45 Backblaze, a faulty
x 4 TB hard drives, and all of the components and electronics that SATA cable can be a
make the solution work its magic. really bad day for a
How do they do it? First of all, Backblaze has spent an incredible customer.
amount of time testing and validating every part that goes into its
Pod architecture. It does so in both lab and real-world, mission-
critical, customer-facing environments. As a result, the company is an authority on specific parts and whether
they work or don’t work. For example, in Pod 3.0, Backblaze recommends the use of a specific brand of SATA
cable. For many, a SATA cable is a SATA cable, but for a company like Backblaze, a faulty SATA cable can be
a really bad day for a customer, so everything is tested.
Perhaps the most important part of the Pod, the chassis has undergone some refinements in Pod 3.0. It’s a
known fact that physical vibration can be a performance killer. Any unexpected movement of a hard drive read
or write head requires that drive to spin back around to correct the issue. With Pod 3.0, Backblaze has made
improvements to the chassis with an eye toward reducing vibration. Each row of 15 drives now includes its
own anti-vibration assembly intended to address this issue. In addition to helping to keep performance steady,
reducing drive vibration can improve disk failure rates.
All told, this 180 TB behemoth costs just under $11,000 to build with 4 TB hard drives. A 3 TB hard drive ver-
sion yielding 135 TB of raw capacity can be built for $7,567. Backblaze explains that hard drive prices have re-
mained relatively high over the past couple of years, so storage costs are not dropping as they once were. But
with the introduction of 4 TB drives, the company is able to squeeze more capacity into a single unit, which
provides more storage for less power. In that way, the company can somewhat reduce costs with Pod 3.0. In
fact, Backblaze even provides these figures: With 3 TB drives, the company’s cost for the storage is 63 cents
per terabyte per month on a full-rack basis. With 4 TB drives, this cost plummets to 47 cents per terabyte per

month. If those numbers appear too low, they aren’t. That’s the amortized cost of storage for Backblaze on a
monthly basis. The company estimates that the lower ongoing cost for the 4 TB drives means that the more
expensive upfront costs are recovered in around five months.
For me, one of the most impressive aspects of the company is its willingness to openly share its hardware
specifications and cost figures. If you jump to Appendix A in this Backblaze blog post, you will find a com-
prehensive list of parts that make up the Backblaze Pod solution. Bear in mind that Backblaze enjoys some
significant economies of scale with regard to procurement, so your own cost may be a bit higher if you decide
to try to build one on your own.
From a performance perspective, Backblaze’s services are certainly designed to maximize capacity. Data
trickles into Backblaze’s data centers and traverses the storage infrastructure. As you may imagine, there is
significant write traffic and read traffic increases when a customer needs to recover a system. Backblaze is
focused on providing inexpensive but reliable backup space for its customers and it does it well with Pod 3.0.

Rackspace: An overview of a major

cloud player
By Nick Hardiman
Let’s say I am part of an organization that wants to test drive a cloud computing service now, with a view
toward entering into a managed service partnership later. Should I try Rackspace? Many companies seem to
be. Is Rackspace the best place for my organization’s people to play around with off-premise computing?
Rackspace is a large and successful hosting provider. It has had its

Rackspace pushes
share of data center problems in the past and has plenty of happy
the Fanatical
customers now. Rackspace is one of the hyperscale providers, along
Support angle.
with Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. But Rackspace isn’t the big-
You can’t move
gest—AWS is.
your mouse on its
Many data centers, managed by an army of engineers, sysadmins, website without
and operators, host a zillion servers for customers around the globe. a chat window
They’ve got a great SLA, but so has HP. Rackspace had the cojones popping up
to kick off the OpenStack project, but I don’t know what difference prompting you to
that makes to me. There is no doubt they are trying hard to be the talk to its support
best in the business - the most reliable, the most supportive and even staff.
the most open. Have they got what I want?
The Rackspace edge

In the world of cloud computing, all the big players provide instant access, customer self-service, and utility-
style bills. Those are qualifiers for membership of the cloud club, not differentiators. What benefits does
Rackspace offer that are different from the other big players?
The Rackspace people are clear about what benefits they offer and they have a strong marketing department
that makes sure the message comes across loud and clear. Who hasn’t looked at a trade magazine (paper or
Internet version) and read about Rackspace’s Fanatical Support, OpenStack, Interoperability, and so on?
But what does that mean? Why are these words important? And what’s that capitalization telling me?
Fanatical Support
Rackspace pushes the Fanatical Support angle. You can’t move your mouse on its website without a chat
window popping up prompting you to talk to its support staff. Computer systems are the most complicated

machines ever built by humans. Nothing spooks an organization like the fear of being left by themselves in the
dark when systems fall over.
Rackspace has gone as far as registering Fanatical Support and a few variants as trademarks and making it a
central pillar of its entire business.
OpenStack
Rackspace kicked off the OpenStack cloud management platform project. Big players, including Rackspace,
HP, and NASA, use OpenStack apps within their data centers. The development of OpenStack as an open
source project is leading to a new business ecosystem forming around it. In the world cloud ecosystem cham-
pionships, OpenStack is not a finalist (AWS wins and VMware is runner-up). But it’s early days. OpenStack is a
young project and it has a lot of potential to develop. The open source applications are timesavers for coders.
Interoperability
Interoperability reassures early adopters that they are not entering a relationship they can’t escape later.
Interoperability is the ability to chop and change between cloud providers.
The FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) of vendor lock-in has always been useful in marketing. In the 1990s,
IBM was advertising the exclusive power of the AIX OS, while Sun marketed Java as “write once, run any-
where” freedom of choice.
In truth, cloud interoperability is patchy at best. Cloud computing is just too young a computing segment to
provide stable interfaces to build on—there is too much change happening. OpenStack is more about making
interoperability possible than making it. At least the information needed to get the job done lies in the public
domain, rather than hidden as company secrets. Interoperability will, eventually, allow an organization to do
things like this:
• Automatically and seamlessly transfer data between cloud storage providers
• Spread a workload across cloud computing providers
• Take custom code from one platform and run it on another without the need for an expensive
migration project or support contract
Infrastructure test drive

It’s usually impossible to say up front if a certain cloud provider has what my organization needs. There just
isn’t enough knowledge to make an informed decision. There is one way to find out for sure. Sign up to Rack-
space, run up a couple of test services, and find out how it feels.

Test-driving infrastructure is not possible in the on-premise IT old world. It’s not possible to convince IBM to
drive a truck full of computers and software to the office, unload it, and install it just so a prospective customer
can play with it. How does an enterprise customer convince IBM to dump a lab’s worth of computing power
one month, HP’s truckload to arrive the next, and Dell’s the month after that?
In the new cloud world, an enterprise can play with the large computing installations of half a dozen vendors
and see which one fits best with its business.

Is data sovereignty a real concern?

By Spandas Lui
Data sovereignty has been a persistent concern for Australian companies that think their data has less protec-
tion when it’s hosted overseas. But data center provider Digital Realty, among other global companies, doesn’t
believe that concern is legitimate.
The US Patriot Act has become the bogeyman when it comes to why Australian companies should be keep-
ing their data onshore. There is a perception—which some claim is a misconception—that the Act gives the
US government unfettered access to data hosted in the US or by a US company, a view that Australian cloud
providers have used to market their own services.
US-based provider Microsoft is more dismissive of this perception, even claiming that Australia’s data-protec-
tion laws are just as bad, if not worse, compared with the US. The Commonwealth Bank, which is a client of
Amazon Web Services (AWS), has come out to rubbish the data sovereignty issue as well.
In terms of the Patriot Act fears, if a company isn’t doing anything nefarious, it shouldn’t worry about the US
government gaining access to its information, said Digital Realty’s senior vice-president and regional head for
Asia Pacific, Kris Kumar.
“Unless you’re doing something wrong or against the law, you have nothing to worry about,” he said. “Any
act that exists need warrants to access that data—the government can’t clamp down and access the data
willy-nilly.”
According to Kumar, data sovereignty shouldn’t be much of a concern for Australian businesses.
Digital Realty has a network of data centers across the globe, and in the last 14 months, it has made a big
push into Australia, building and acquiring several data centers in the country.
“I think data sovereignty is a partially made up issue,” Kumar said. “There is no regulatory impact to hosting
data offshore other than taxation issues, and tax offices globally are working to pin down the tax provisions
under some of the business offerings from the global cloud providers—but that’s a whole separate issue.”
Cloud providers that host data in data centers overseas are aware of the importance of keeping customer data
safe and are smart enough to know they can’t compromise on this matter, Kumar said.
He fears that the data sovereignty concerns in Australia will stifle the growth of the country’s cloud industry.
“There is a lot of hype around this issue, and some protectionism going on in terms of the current domestic
environment in Australia,” he said. “Cloud is pretty much an organism that multiplies, grows, connects, and
does various things. If you start to create a situation where you believe everything has to be hosted onshore,
you will create a data desert rather than a data oasis.

“Having your data disconnected from the rest of the world will do no good for anybody from a business
perspective.”
It pays to be part of a globally connected cloud, according to Kumar, though he acknowledged that it made
sense to host business critical data and applications that are latency and time-sensitive locally.
“But the productivity applications such as Microsoft 365 and AWS services for computing are not customer
data sensitive and can be done from anywhere,” he said. “There is a place in the world for both onshore and
offshore hosting.”

Google’s new Asia data centers will

boost speed of services
By Jamie Yap
With Google’s new data centers in Asia scheduled to go operational this year, users in the region such as India
can enjoy the Internet giant’s services, including Web search and YouTube videos, at faster speeds.
In a recent report by The Economic Times, Lalitesh Katragadda, country head, India products at Google, said
Internet connectivity speed in India is not very high, and the new data centers will be “crucial to this market
due to its proximity.”
Google started construction of the new data centers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan beginning in late
2011. The Singapore facility is expected to be complete early this year, while the one in Taiwan will be com-
plete by the second half of this year. Google has not yet given a clear timeframe for completion of its Hong
Kong data center, the report said.
Outside Asia, Google has seven data centers in the US, and one each in Finland, Belgium, and Ireland.
Katragadda said India was not chosen as a location due to its hot weather. He also said that some Google
services, such as YouTube and Google Hangout, can’t be accessed in India at optimal speeds currently.
With the new centers, time taken to access such services will reduce dramatically, which will help boost user
adoption.
In the report, Raj Gopal AS, managing director at Bangalore-based NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Services,
said that the proximity of the Asian data centers could result in Google services becoming 30 percent faster.
Typically, countries located close to data centers enjoy faster access to data on the Internet. The report said
that India is ranked 112th globally in Internet speed, according Akamai Technologies.
Citing figures from StatCounter, the report also said that India is one of the largest markets for Google, with
more than 100 million users and a 95 percent share of India’s search market. Over the next three years,
Google expects 500 million online users from emerging markets, as compared to 15 million from the United
States.
“More people from India are coming online everyday and this is an important market as Google looks to bring
the next one billion online,” Katragadda said. “We plan to invest disproportionately in India in the coming
months and years.”

Hong Kong is planning underground

data centers
By Ellyne Phneah
Hong Kong’s government is looking to create new space by building data centers in the special administrative
region in underground caves.
Speaking at the recent Datacenter Space Asia Conference, Hilary Cordells, partner at a local real estate law
firm Cordells, revealed that plans for subterranean data centers were in progress, The Register news site
reported.
“Rock cavern development can be done, and data centers use is a particularly good one. It’s on the govern-
ment’s radar screen and it’s taking active steps,” Cordells said, adding that some sites will be more suitable
than others.
It is also possible for ownership to be divided according to different strata since legally, the person who owns
the ground “owns everything underneath the center of the earth and everything above to the heavens.”
While the theory is sound, the environmental impact of construction could be high, as water tables would need
to be lowered and toxic material removed.
Engineering consultancy firm Arup released an initial feasibility report last year, which said that underground
facilities in Hong Kong will benefit data center owners by increasing security, as they reduce the risk of ac-
cidental impact, blast, and acts of terrorism.
The report also found that two-thirds of Hong Kong has land of “high to medium suitability” for digging rock
caverns. Within the territory, five areas comprising more than 20 hectares apiece have been selected in the re-
port as “strategic cavern areas,” which can technically accommodate multiple cavern sites. The areas include
Hong Kong island’s Mount Davis, Kowloon’s Lion Rock, New Territories’ Tuen Mun and Sha Tin, and Lantau
Island’s Siu Ho Wan.

India’s IaaS market to grow 40 percent

until 2015
Swati Prasad
India is still in the very early stages of cloud adoption, driven primarily by infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
deployments.
A study by Knowledgefaber, a consultancy and research firm, on cloud computing adoption among India’s
enterprises indicates IaaS as the cloud delivery model that will witness higher adoption rates among these
companies. The IaaS market in the country is set to grow at 40 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate)
between 2011 and 2015.
Currently, about 40 percent of total IT spending in India comes from

large enterprises, and substantial investment is expected from this While India forms
segment in cloud computing as well. With legacy infrastructure in place 17 percent of the
and existing investments in enterprise software licenses, the migra- total cloud market
tion path in terms of cloud delivery and deployment models for large in Asia-Pacific,
enterprises will be different from small and midsize businesses (SMBs). domestic firms are
still in the phase of
“Enterprises belonging to manufacturing, BFSI (banking, financial
understanding cloud
services, and insurance), healthcare, information and communication
benefits as they look
technology (ICT), government, and education sectors are expected to
to cut IT costs and
be major cloud adopters driven by higher IT spending and increasing
achieve higher IT
need for cloud-based services,” the study said.
services availability.
SMBs, however, are leveraging cloud-based applications such as
CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource
planning), SCM (supply chain management), and other collaboration and communication applications to boost
organizational efficiency and productivity and effectively compete with larger enterprises.
But while India forms 17 percent of the total cloud market in Asia-Pacific, domestic firms are still in the phase
of understanding cloud benefits as they look to cut IT costs and achieve higher IT services availability.
“Current IT architecture has led organizations worldwide to allocate nearly 70 percent of their IT budgets to
keep existing applications running, leaving scope for only 30 percent to create new value. With increased
business complexity and declining profit margins, companies are now looking at cloud computing as a new IT
business model to create more value, achieve cost benefits and business agility,” Knowledgefaber said.
The total cloud computing market in India was estimated to be worth US$458 million in 2011. By comparison,
the global cloud computing market was worth US$34.7 billion in the same period of time.

Asia leads cloud growth

Cloud computing is now witnessing robust adoption across the world, especially among developing markets in
Asia-Pacific and Latin America. India, China, Australia, and Singapore are leading the way for the Asia-Pacific
region.
Robust uptake of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, need for online storage, and improving
Internet and broadband availability will provide the impetus for cloud adoption in the region, according to the
report.
Conversely, security concerns, government regulations, and lack of clarity on business benefits from cloud
remain major hurdles for adoption in the region.

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Executive’s guide

to the 21st century

Copyright ©2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

Executive’s guide to the

Published by TechRepublic Head Technology Editor

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Make your new data center a star

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Don’t let old data center concepts

Consider this: The planning for data center construction has

Conversely, the components that actually performed the IT

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Can a data center really drive

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Choosing a DCIM provider

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The 21st century data center: Three

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Determining the worth of an IaaS VM

A virtual machine (VM) that is running in a public cloud, which aug-

Apples to apples, then some math

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Compare rates, but consider the big picture

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IaaS provider comparison reveals

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The role of UPS systems in energy

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Inside the Backblaze data center and

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Rackspace: An overview of a major

Rackspace is a large and successful hosting provider. It has had its

The Rackspace edge

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• Automatically and seamlessly transfer data between cloud storage providers

• Spread a workload across cloud computing providers

Infrastructure test drive

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Is data sovereignty a real concern?

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Google’s new Asia data centers will

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Hong Kong is planning underground

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India’s IaaS market to grow 40 percent

Currently, about 40 percent of total IT spending in India comes from

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Asia leads cloud growth

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