IDC: Accelerating IT Infrastructure Spending for Public Clouds

Total spending on IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switches) for deployment in cloud environments will increase 15.3% year over year in 2017 to $41.7 billion, according to a new forecast from IDC.

"After the slowdown seen in 2016, we expect to see spending on IT infrastructure for public cloud deployments return to double-digit growth in 2017," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director, Storage Systems. "Growing demand for access to agile IT resources and proliferation of next generation workloads will continue driving adoption of cloud-based services. In turn, this move leads to a shift in IT infrastructure spending from traditional enterprise on-premises deployments to datacenters delivering cloud services and corporate private clouds."

Some highlights from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker:

• Public cloud datacenters will account for the majority of spending, 60.5%, while off-premises private cloud environments will represent 14.9% of spending. On-premises private clouds will account for 62.3% of spending on private cloud IT infrastructure and will grow 13.1% year over year in 2017.
• Overall, worldwide spending on traditional, non-cloud, IT infrastructure will decline 5.3% in 2017. However, it will still account for the largest share, 57.9%, of end user spending.
• In cloud environments, Ethernet switches will be the fastest growing technology segment at 21.8% year over year growth in 2017, while spending on servers and enterprise storage will grow 17.9% and 10.7%, respectively. 
• Long term, IDC expects spending on off-premises cloud IT infrastructure will grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.7%, reaching $47.2 billion in 2021. Public cloud datacenters will account for 80.4% of this amount. 

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS42454117

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OVH Acquires Data Center in Oregon, Continuing U.S. Expansion

OVH announced its acquisition of a new data center facility in Hillsboro, Oregon. The name of the seller and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Hillsboro data center will house about 80,000 servers in 112,500 square feet. The facility joins Vint Hill, Virginia as OVH's second US data center, with a third North American data center located in Canada.

OVH said the expansion enables it to support its more than one million customers and respond to the growing demand for outsourced digital infrastructures throughout the world.

OVH now has 23 data centers around the world in 11 countries, spanning four continents.

“For years, leading tech companies have been trying to figure out how to cool their data centers for less money,” said Pascal Jaillon, Vice President of Research & Development for OVH US. “Legacy data centers have been using expensive forced air conditioning to cool servers. OVH’s innovation in data center cooling is just the first of many that will be introduced in this growing market.”

https://www.ovh.com/us/discover

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Open Container Initiative Gains Early Traction

The Open Container Initiative (previously known as the Open Container Project) published its draft charter for comment and announced that 11 new companies are joining this industry-wide initiative to develop common standards for software containers. The OCI, which was announced just last month at DockerCon and is being hosted at The Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project.

Companies signaling their formal commitment to this effort include AT&T, ClusterHQ, Datera, Kismatic, Kyup, Midokura, Nutanix, Oracle, Polyverse, Resin.io, Sysdig, SUSE, Twitter and Verizon. Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Cisco, CoreOS, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu Limited, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Pivotal, Rancher Labs, Red Hat and VMware are also committed to the Open Container Initiative.

As part of the formation, Docker Inc. donated its base container format at runtime to serve as cornerstone technologies under the governance of the OCI, while leadership from Application Container spec (“appc”) is also represented.

The OCI said work is underway on the draft specification, which is expected to be available for community comment within the month.

“The overwhelming interest in the Open Container Initiative is representative of both the opportunity containers offer for application development and the challenges we face with fragmentation,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “With such strong community support and collaboration, we’re confident this effort will rise to the opportunity.”

http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/
http://www.opencontainers.org

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Riverbed Boosts its WAN Optimization for Hybrid Enterprise Clouds

Riverbed rolled out significant enhancements to its flagship products – Riverbed SteelHead 9.0 and Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse 9.5 – with a focus on visibility, control, and optimization to accelerate performance of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications. The company sees enterprises moving rapidly to hybrid cloud architectures, where business traffic flows over both predictable WAN trunks and myriad Internet links between mobile users and their favorite cloud services. The new challenge is not only to handle congestion, but to ensure security, control and visibility of these new "Shadow IT" resources.

“Riverbed is now poised to do for cloud and SaaS applications what we’ve done for more than 1100 applications across the wide area network for the last decade,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, Riverbed Chairman and CEO, speaking at its Riverbed FORCE 2014 conference in San Jose, California.  

Riverbed customers have now deployed over 750,000 SteelHead appliances, giving the company a deeply embedded platform upon which to build further innovations in network management.

To accelerate the transition to global, hybrid enterprise networks, the company is also kicking off a Riverbed-Ready Technology Alliance program with 17 charter program members. Partners can leverage Riverbed open APIs and additional development tools to help with customization, integration, and automation.

Some highlights of the coming enhancements to the Riverbed platforms:

SteelHead 9.0 integrates with SteelCentral AppReponse 9.5 to provide visibility of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS apps.

• SteelCentral AppResponse 9.5 can measure end-user experience for both SteelHead-optimized and non-optimized enterprise web and SaaS applications for faster, more effective monitoring, and troubleshooting
  .
• SteelHead 9.0 can group applications according to their type and business priority to automate SLA activation for different types of apps.
   
• SteelHead 9.0 brings centralized, application-driven control of hybrid networks with “business intent”-based policies that make it easy to configure and manage path selection, quality of service (QoS), and secure transport.
   
• With Path Selection, SteelHead 9.0 intelligently derives all network paths and, based on business needs then prioritizes, secures and delivers business-critical applications over the fastest networks, while less critical applications are sent over the Internet. For example, Microsoft Lync voice traffic can be delivered over MPLS, while Lync video traffic is directed to the Internet.
  
• SteelHead 9.0 identifies over 1,100 applications – on-premises, cloud, and SaaS – which can be optimized for maximum productivity. Riverbed is rapidly expanding the number and type of applications that SteelHead recognizes, with a particular focus on SaaS apps.
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• Geo IQ for Microsoft Office 365 – The latest release of SteelHead 9.0 also offers Geo IQ for Microsoft Office 365, which ensures users are always connected to the native mailbox for optimal performance no matter where the Office 365 mailbox or the user is located.

http://www.riverbed.com/

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Hosted Private Cloud Options Are Now Listed in OpenStack Marketplace

A public listing of Hosted Private Cloud vendors and services is now available from the OpenStack Foundation on its OpenStack Marketplace comparison.

The new Hosted Private Cloud Marketplace category includes detailed information about offerings from Aptira, AURO, Blue Box, IBM, DataCentred, Metacloud, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Rackspace and UnitedStack. All products and services must meet specific technical requirements and be transparent with product information, such as OpenStack versions and capabilities supported.

The OpenStack Foundation said the Hosted Private Cloud offerings based on OpenStack are an attractive model for several reasons:

• Low barrier to entry with little to no upfront capital expenditure
• Deployment speeds that are comparable to public cloud provisioning
• Control over physical infrastructure location, isolated hardware, and policies to meet data sovereignty and security requirements
• Minimal responsibility for operating the physical infrastructure and operational aspects such as cloud software upgrades, driver updates, scale out management, etc.

http://www.openstack.org/marketplace/hosted-private-clouds/

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