Infomart: Expanding & Improving Carrier-Neutral Colocation

Infomart Data Centers is a rapidly growing builder, operator and owner of carrier-neutral, wholesale data centers, with locations in Dallas, Portland (Oregon), Silicon Valley and Ashburn (Virginia).

In this video, Scott Mitchell, Senior VP of Sales at Infomart, gives us an update on the company's progress, including its cutting- edge work with LinkedIn.

Filmed at PTC'17 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

https://youtu.be/16L_mgHOOyU

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AWS Sales Rocketed 47% YoY in Q4 2016

In its financial report for Q4 2016, Amazon noted that sales for AWS rose 47% YoY to reach #3.546 billion.  Operating income rose 60% YoY to reach $923 million.

Some AWS highlights for the quarter:

• AWS accelerated its infrastructure expansion in 2016, opening eleven Availability Zones across five geographic regions in the U.S., Korea, India, and most recently, Canada and the U.K. AWS now operates 42 Availability Zones across 16 infrastructure regions globally and plans to open an additional five Availability Zones in two regions (France and a second region in China) in the coming months.
• AWS announced that customers migrated more than 18,000 databases using the AWS Database Migration Service in 2016.
• AWS continues to accelerate its pace of innovation with the release of 308 significant new services and features in the fourth quarter, bringing the total number of launches in 2016 to 1,017.
• AWS announced three Artificial Intelligence (AI) services that make it easy for any developer to build apps that can understand natural language, turn text into lifelike speech, have conversations using voice or text, analyze images and recognize faces, objects, and scenes. Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition are based on the same proven, highly scalable AI technology built by the thousands of deep learning and machine learning experts across Amazon. AWS also announced a significant investment in MXNet, an open source distributed deep learning framework. AWS will contribute code and improve the MXNet developer experience to enable machine learning scientists to build scalable deep learning models that can significantly reduce the training time for their applications.
• AWS announced Amazon Athena, a pay-as-you-go, interactive query service that makes it easy for customers to analyze data directly in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Amazon Athena at their data stored in Amazon S3 and begin using standard SQL to run queries and get results in seconds. With Amazon Athena there are no clusters to manage and tune, no infrastructure to setup or manage, and customers pay only for the queries they run.
• AWS announced AWS Greengrass and AWS Snowball Edge, hybrid services that help customers extend the power of the AWS Cloud to connected devices and other environments that exist beyond the network edge.
• AWS announced AWS Snowmobile, an Exabyte-scale data transfer service that customers can use to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. Each Snowmobile is a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container pulled by a semi-trailer truck that is capable of moving up to 100 PB of data — from video libraries and image repositories to entire data centers — to the AWS Cloud in as little as a few weeks.
• AWS announced seven new compute services and capabilities to support an even wider range of applications, introducing the next generations of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Memory Optimized, Compute Optimized, and High input/output (I/O) instances, adding a way for customers to get started quickly with virtual private servers (VPS) through Amazon Lightsail, and delivering hardware acceleration with Elastic GPUs and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-enabled F1 instances.
• AWS announced the expansion of Amazon Aurora to include full PostgreSQL compatibility. With Amazon Aurora’s new PostgreSQL support, customers can get up to several times better performance than the typical PostgreSQL database and take advantage of the scalability, durability, and security capabilities of Amazon Aurora — all for one-tenth the cost of commercial grade databases.
• AWS announced the general availability of Amazon QuickSight, a very fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy for all employees, regardless of their technical skill, to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data at one-tenth the cost of traditional solutions.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2241835

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Facebook Passes 1.2 Billion Daily Active Users, up 18% YoY

Facebook is now serving over 1.227 billion daily active users, up from 1.038 billion DAUs a year earlier.

Some other metrics:

• Mobile DAUs – Mobile DAUs were 1.15 billion on average for December 2016, an increase of 23% yearover
  
  -year.
• Monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 1.86 billion as of December 31, 2016, an increase of 17% year-over-year.
• Mobile MAUs – Mobile MAUs were 1.74 billion as of December 31, 2016, an increase of 21% year-overyear.
• Capital expenditures for the full year 2016 were $4.49 billion, up from $2.25 billion for 2015.

http://www.facebook.com

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Mellanox Says Infiniband Continues to Grow

Mellanox Technologies reported Q4 sales of $221.7 million and $857.5 million in fiscal year 2016. GAAP gross margins were 66.8 percent in the fourth quarter, and 64.8 percent in fiscal year 2016.

“During the fourth quarter we saw continued sequential growth in our InfiniBand business, driven by robust customer adoption of our 100 Gigabit EDR solutions into artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-performance computing, storage, database and more. Our quarterly, and full-year 2016 results, highlight InfiniBand’s continued leadership in high-performance interconnects,” said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “Customer adoption of our 25, 50, and 100 gigabit Ethernet solutions continued to grow in the fourth quarter. Adoption of Spectrum Ethernet switches by customers worldwide generated positive momentum exiting 2016. Our fourth quarter and full-year 2016 results demonstrate Mellanox’s diversification, and leadership in both Ethernet and InfiniBand. We anticipate growth in 2017 from all Mellanox product lines.”

http://www.mellanox.com

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HPE Acquires Niara for User and Entity Behavioral Analytics

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has acquired Niara, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California that specializes in the emerging User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) security market segment. The technology seeks to identify next-generation security threats that have penetrated traditional firewalls and other perimeter systems.Financial terms were not disclosed.

After an incident is discovered by Niara, a ClearPass network access policy can be automatically triggered to isolate or disconnect the user or device from the network to prevent access to sensitive information such as credit cards or other customer and corporate information.

Niara will operate within HPE Aruba to enhance the company’s ClearPass network security portfolio for wired and wireless network infrastructure. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“With this transaction, we are continuing to innovate at the Intelligent Edge with software-defined solutions to better protect our customers’ business and IoT data,” said Keerti Melkote, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HPE Aruba. “With over 20 billion IoT devices expected to be connected to networks by 2020, security is the number one concern for our customers. Combining Niara’s next-generation behavior analytics software with Aruba’s ClearPass network security portfolio will deliver the industry’s most complete visibility and attack detection system.”

http://www.hpe.com

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OIF Approves Polarized Multiplexed Quadrature Modulator for 400G

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) approved an Implementation Agreement (IA) for an optical integrated Polarization Multiplexed (PM) quadrature modulator for coherent applications with nominal symbol rates up to 64GBaud. The agreement supports the 16QAM modulation format for 400G applications.

“As we go to higher data rates, we need higher performing optical components that maintain a reasonable level of complexity,” said Karl Gass of Qorvo and the OIF’s PLL Working Group – Optical Vice Chair. “These components are targeted for 400G applications. RF bandwidth is the highest priority for this project.”

The forum members also started the CEI-112G in MCM project to support interconnect within Multi-Chip-Modules (MCMs). In addition to the CEI-112G-VSR specification that is being developed, there is a need to support high rate interconnect amongst large logic devices as well as to small driver devices within an MCM.

Members have also started a maintenance project to produce amendments to the User Network Interface (UNI) 2.0 and External Network to Network Interface (E-NNI) 2.0 specification documenting the extensions for support of OTN rates higher than 100G. Adding these extensions to UNI 2.0 and E-NNI 2.0 will facilitate vendor interoperability. The project seeks to assist the IETF as it develops the required routing and signaling extension by providing a description of the Byond100G data-plane and the operations to be controlled by GMPLS.

http://www.oiforum.com

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