Ever since we opened the first carbon-neutral data center in the Netherlands, we have seen data center sustainability in data center design and operation as the key to long-term competitiveness, not just for us but for our clients. And there has been excellent progress, but there is still a long way to go. To encourage improvements and stimulate new thinking we have just published two new white papers on the subject in the EvoSwitch knowledge center. If you are involved in data infrastructure design or management, or if you are interested in new directions for sustainability programs, I suggest you read them both.

Eric Lisica, Operations Director, EvoSwitch

Do more, do it better

The first paper, Data Center Sustainability: The Next Dimension, looks at the bigger picture. It reviews where we are succeeding, where we have yet to succeed, and areas where little effort has yet been made. In recent years, the data center industry has made progress in enhancing energy efficiency and in adopting renewable power sources, and there are many new solutions in development. But there are still major challenges; improvements are in new builds, because legacy data centers are hard to upgrade; PUE, while useful, has intrinsic flaws as used by the industry today; and renewables are great, but not all renewables are equal.

Tackle embodied impact

Research into embodied impact has driven the development of the second white paper, which opens up new territory for the sector.  Based on a Master’s Thesis by Caspar van Hoorn of Utrecht University, which was conducted with EvoSwitch support, Reuse & Recycling of Servers: Next Steps Towards Sustainability argues that improvements can be made in the current server reuse and recycling model which would deliver commercial and environmental benefits. The main areas for action are improved life cycle analysis and specification development at procurement, reduced shredding and increased dismantling/reuse at the end of first owner use, and a new trackable reuse business model which keeps valuable materials and components in the region. It is early days for this topic, but we hope that the Amsterdam Region will provide a fertile environment for discussion and systemic improvement.

There is also amore that data center operators should be doing. They should offer proactive advice on power consumption at the data floor level. They should push for more transparent universal standards which make it easier for customers to make informed choices. And they can need to take a more active role in tackling embodied impact.

Read the White Papers

If you’d like to receive complimentary copies of the two white papers: Data Center Sustainability: The Next Dimension, and Reuse & Recycling of Servers: Next Steps Towards Sustainability, you can download them individually clicking the buttons underneath the page.

Eric Lisica has 15 years’ experience of operations management in the hosting, data center and telecommunications fields, and has held positions with PSINet, Interoute and Verizon Terremark. View full bio

It is very easy for us to focus exclusively on the ‘back-end’ of the Internet; networks and infrastructure, platforms and exchanges. But it is extremely important – and often inspiring – to look beyond what we give our customers to what our customers are bringing to the world.  At the beginning of this month EvoSwitch hosted a very successful customer event, OpenCloud Live, where some of our most innovative customers explained to us what our infrastructure enables them to do, and this blog is dedicated to our customers who are bringing the next generation of the internet to life.  

Eric Boonstra, Managing Director, EvoSwitch

Bringing IoT to a street near you

IoT will deploy billions of devices over the next few years. Organisations in virtually every industry will use these devices to drive efficiency, reduce costs, generate new revenue, understand customers and improve the environment. Our customer smartsensors.me told us how they have been out on the streets of the Netherlands installing a new device with more than 10 different sensors, and integrating the ‘big data’ from thousands of these devices with cloud-based analytics. Their technology will revolutionize approaches to urban and infrastructure planning and high-end production, and help create everything from smart cities, roads and industries to smarter homes and health.

Mobile apps for mental health

Focusing on individual health, our customer Parnassia Groep explained how their data-driven healthcare applications are improving peoples’ lives. Nearly 100,000 people a month use their apps, which have proved effective in everything from stopping people hearing voices by playing word games to providing therapy and support for tackling alcohol and drug addiction and self-harm. As predicted by Moore’s Law, processor power is driving us headlong towards the creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and it is inspiring to see this processing power helping to overcome their problems.

There is a lot going on in the multicloud marketplace, but it is still opaque. There are many signs of growth and activity in the main cloud-related segments, choice and quality are growing, but there is also a lot of uncertainty. For practical advice and information on the latest developments and opportunities there is no substitute for meeting face to face with experts, potential partners and prospects, something we are happy to organise here at EvoSwitch.

Eric Boonstra, Managing Director, EvoSwitch

Everyone knows there’s a lot of money in the cloud.  According to Forrester, the public cloud market will reach $191 billion by 2020, up from 2013’s total of $58 billion. Cloud applications, at $133 billion in 2020, are leading this growth; cloud platforms will generate $44 billion in revenue by 2020, and cloud business services will come in at $14 billion. Cloud marketplaces have been described as “the ecosystem of the future,” and this is particularly true for vendor-neutral exchanges like our own OpenCloud exchange. These are key platforms for enabling growth because, like any effective marketplace, they give buyers the greatest possible choice and they also create a highly competitive environment, thereby improving both service levels and price.

For the big infrastructure players the race is well underway, and the attractiveness, maturity and accessibility of their branded marketplaces is their key differentiator. So it is no surprise that Google recently spent over $100 million buying Orbitera, developers of a platform to buy and sell cloud-based software. From the SaaS provider’s point of view, the race is on to prepare for indirect sales, restructuring products as open platforms and seeking out new cloud-rich channel partners.  And the service provider community is racing to sell the picks and shovels needed to enable this cloud gold rush.

But all of this growth and activity can sometimes seem a bit abstract, and it can be confusing for the end-use at the enterprise. Because it is still early days, there is not a lot of granular data available on sales and sales strategies, and everyone is scrabbling for competitive advantage, which means that they often either overstate their claims or keep their plans to themselves.

In such a fast-moving environment, isolation and ignorance can be major problems. That is why we will be hosting EvoSwitch OpenCloud Live on 1 December; a free event that will bring the multicloud marketplace to life.  We feel that we owe it to our customers to bring them together to help them discuss their strategies, exchange views on next steps and, if possible, buy, sell and partner for the future. Whether or not you are already a member of OpenCloud, I hope you can come along.

Eric Boonstra has been Managing Director of EvoSwitch since 2009.  His focus on attracting international customers to EvoSwitch has been helped by his multi-sectoral experience, which includes a degree in Law and senior management roles in Siemens, Staples and ABN Amro.  View full bio

More

• Sizing the Public Cloud Market 2014 – 2022 Forrester: https://www.forrester.com/report/The+Public+Cloud+Market+Is+Now+In+Hypergrowth/-/E-RES113365
• Event Registration: http://evoswitch.com/evoswitch-opencloud-live/

The news is full of security leaks, and everyone in in the industry is aware of the damage to customer relationships, the loss of revenue and the impact they have on corporate value (and acquisitions!)
While EvoSwitch is always going to be mainly concerned with the first layer of security – physical site and access security – as we increase our stake in the multi-cloud market through offerings such as EvoSwitch OpenCloud we see many customers facing a crossroads, uncertain how to achieve the right balance between traditional in-house security and the emerging and therefore extremely mixed bag of cloud-based security solutions. Here I try to answer some of the security questions that face enterprises contemplating a move to hybrid.

Eric Boonstra, Managing Director, EvoSwitch

Is the Cloud Less Secure?

The answer is yes, if it is used insecurely. With enterprises moving to hybrid cloud environments, data architectures are divided between dedicated infrastructure and public and private cloud platforms. These hybrid models have a lot of benefits, but they also introduce more complexity for securing data and applications.  This is a major skills challenge for many organisations. In a recent study, 46% of organizations said they have a ‘problematic shortage’ of cybersecurity skills – up from 28% just a year ago, and over 30%  of those respondents said their biggest gap was with cloud security specialists.

Who is responsible when things go wrong?

As I mentioned in a blog earlier this year on EU Data Security Regulations, from a legal perspective the new focus in the regulation on the data ‘processor’ rather than data ‘controller’ is good news here. It shifts some responsibility for data handling and documentation to Cloud Service Providers, and many CSPs are already well positioned to address the regulations through a mix of best practice and certifications. Choice is the key here to allow you to ensure your CSPs are compliant and that their SLAs match or exceed your security policies.

But the bad news is that the buck cannot stop with the service provider. Security has to be a shared concern. IT teams will still need in-house expertise on encryption and data loss prevention controls for content-rich cloud applications. They will need to know where the enterprise data sits in the cloud, what offerings cloud service providers have for data protection, and most importantly, how to integrate data protection policies in the cloud with existing company policies.

And regardless of whether they are deploying SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, or a combination of those services, they will need identity and access management (IAM) and multifactor authentication skills.  According to Gartner only a small percentage of security incidents impacting enterprises using the cloud have been due to vulnerabilities that were the cloud service provider’s fault. The characteristics of the cloud stack can make cloud computing a highly efficient way for inexperienced users to implement poor practices, which can result in widespread security or compliance failures.

Can a Broker Fix it?

The complexity and changing nature of the challenge have created an opportunity for cloud control tools and services. Again according to Gartner, by 2018, 50 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 users will use cloud access security broker products (CASBs) to monitor and manage their use of SaaS and other forms of public cloud.

Where to Focus your Efforts

The bottom line is that, although clouds are usually secure, the secure use of public clouds requires an expanded skillset and very real effort on the part of the customer. Service provider selection is key, and SLAs need to agree. But customers will also probably need to grow their skills to incorporate policy, audit and threat analysis, and to give their team (and the business as a whole) the confidence to move into the hybrid cloud.

Further Reading

• Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) – analysing ‘secure behaviour’:https://blog.cloudsecurityalliance.org/2016/09/07/dealing-dropbox-unmasking-hackers-user-behavior-analytics/
• CSA enterprise research: skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-university/
• Gartner on CASBs/ future trends: gartner.com/newsroom/id/3143718
• Brian Dye on security and orchestration skills: http://www.csoonline.com/article/3064673/security/securing-the-hybrid-cloud-what-skills-do-you-need.html

Many organizations are working on a digital transformations in which hybrid solutions take a central place. With hybrid solutions, the less critical data and applications take place in the public clouds. For business-critical applications and confidential data are arranged in private clouds. “If you don’t make a choice for a specific data center, your data will be stored in random data centers,” warns Eric Boonstra, Managing Director of EvoSwitch. “You won’t know where your data will be and that can have major consequences. For example, not every country has the same legislation concerning privacy as the Netherlands. And then I’m not even talking about the quality of the data center. So dig into the options and make a strategic choice. “

This interview was first published in the Dutch opinion magazine Elsevier.

Where should you look for when choosing a data center?

“Basically, a data center sells security. The infrastructure must be completely reliable. Power and cooling systems must be designed so that that customers are always being ‘’served’’. The technical level of redundancy, coupled with professional operational management, determines the availability of the data center and the herein housed systems and applications. A reliable data center should be able to provide an uptime percentage around one hundred percent. To continue to offer security, it’s important that a data center can grow alongside customer needs, both in physical space as well as in power and network capacity. Support is also important. A good data center provides 24/7 on-site technical support. ”

Connectivity is also getting more and more important. Why is connectivity so important?

“The customer should have a free choice of provider and hoster. This enables entrepreneurs to get good SLA’s, realize purchasing benefits from a location, to quickly scale capacity and open new markets. Our data center offers access to more than fifty networks and in addition connection to AMS-IX, NL-ix and LINX NoVa. Moreover, entrepreneurs can benefit from several private clouds and access to public clouds such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure Clouds. ”

Do data centers offer hybrid cloud solutions themselves?

“That is in my opinion a basic requirement. For example, we have developed EvoSwitch Open Cloud. In cooperation with AMS-IX, customers from our data center can be provided worldwide access to the large public clouds. This increases the applications of carrier-neutral data centers and provides an increased growth of enterprise and government customers. ”

And what about security?

“Both the data center and offices are protected against all risks such as fires, floods and burglary. This involves a complete system consisting of procedures, prevention and control. Leading organizations such as Wikipedia cannot afford to be offline for only a brief moment. ”

How important is it to also pay attention to sustainability?

“Sustainability is not only good for the environment. A company with low power consumption allows lower costs and can therefore offer more competitive prices. EvoSwitch is a leader from the start in 2007 when it comes to energy efficiency and at the forefront when it comes to data center technologies. Partly thanks to a self-developed free cooling concept, we can reduce energy consumption by about eighty percent, and we are even completely CO2-neutral. “

As I have mentioned before, Big Data is forcing CXOs to come up with new data processing approaches – both at the core and at the edge. But most businesses are still playing a conservative game, processing surprisingly limited amounts in the cloud, and waiting for improvements in cloud-based data processing solutions that can be added to their hybrid architectures. While the market matures in this area, keeping an open mind and agile infrastructure is the key to future success.

Patrick van der Wilt, Commercial Director, EvoSwitch

Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Data?

Businesses are excited by the potential value of big data, but also wary of its potential to grow beyond their capacity to process. For businesses that still process data in-house, there is good reason to worry, simply because of typical data growth rates (around 40% pa). And there are plenty such businesses: In a survey last year, ESG found that 18% of respondents said they are planning to use dedicated (non-virtualized) servers for new big data analytics; 30% are looking to use traditional virtualized infrastructure, and 21% are considering dedicated analytics appliances from specialist suppliers like Oracle or Teradata. Only 31% are considering using public or private hybrid cloud.

Digging for Data

The accepted wisdom is to process data where it stands in order to save the anxiety and expense of moving it around.  “Wherever you create data, it tends to stay there, because it’s such a pain to move it,” says Charles Zedlewski, Products VP at Cloudera, a data management company with software based on Apache Hadoop. But things are changing. As more data is gathered through the cloud this will drive businesses to more cloud-based solutions. Also, moving data is less of a cost now than it used to be, with bandwidth prices running at a tiny fraction of what they were 5 or 6 years ago.

Evolving Analytics

This doesn’t mean necessarily buying in wholesale to cloud analytics, however. Management consoles for hybrid multi-cloud architectures are still improving, integrating the three key systems required for the enterprise: systems of engagement that are designed for user interaction; systems of execution that orchestrate work, and systems of record where the valuable transactional and trend data resides.

A Foot in Both Camps

In my view, the winners will have a piece of infrastructure in both camps – and a high-speed connection running between them. While for many it makes economic or security sense to hold a lot of data in-house, your business should be prepared to gather and store data closer to source moving forward, and that source will increasingly be the cloud. It therefore makes sense to have a multi-cloud capability (such as EvoSwitch OpenCloud) so that you can sample storage and analytics services until you find the one that is right for you.

Further Reading

• Interesting articles on the shift of Big Data from in-house to the cloud by Alex Barrett of TechTarget http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Why-big-data-servers-stay-on-premises-in-data-centers
• And http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/Vendors-race-to-provide-big-data-infrastructure

Since the United Kingdom declared its intention to leave the European Union, the news around ‘Brexit’ has consisted almost entirely of resignations and in-fighting or wild speculation about the future. But if you pick through some of the more responsible studies and articles focusing on the potential impact on business planning, it does look likely that, while it may not drive businesses away overnight, in time Brexit will open up more opportunities for continental Europe, and Amsterdam is likely to be one of the winners.

Eric Boonstra, Managing Director, EvoSwitch 

As the dust slowly settles following the UK’s recent vote to end its 43-year membership of the European Union, it is still difficult to see exactly what will happen next. Working on the assumption that Brexit proceeds as originally envisaged in the referendum, what are the key questions and answers, firstly for business investment in general and secondly for IT infrastructure?

Q: Will we see a shift of investment?

A: Yes, but it is unlikely to be dramatic – more of a ‘continental drift’ than a sudden shift.

I believe we will see redirection of planned investment in jobs and locations to EU locations, rather than businesses packing their bags and getting the next flight out. There are signs this may be starting already: a number of leading businesses (Easyjet, Vodafone, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, HSBC¹) have indicated their readiness to move to the continent, but more by way of reassuring investors than announcing concrete plans. Some external investors (Siemens and Visa have both made recent announcements) also seem likely to spend money earmarked for the UK elsewhere. Key factors here are likely to be:

• EU passported business activities: where the departure from the EU will inevitably lead to significant additional market complexity, for instance for airline operators and banks/financial service providers.

• Cost per employee: skilled international employees (e.g. programmers or designers from elsewhere in the EU) are likely to be more expensive in the UK in future.

• Electricity prices and security: this is of particular significance not only to the power-intensive data center industry but also to the emerging electric-powered era of smart cities and electric cars.  As a major importer of energy whose power prices are already high (in 2014, for example, a UK kW hour cost 76% more than a Dutch one²) the UK will need to tread very carefully and establish new secure energy planning that does not rely on current EU frameworks.

• EU-funded activities: these will definitely move, including ICT research projects in which the UK has shared. Some of these, like the €80 billion Horizon 2020 program, have huge budgets and also contribute to talent retention and generation.³

• EMEA HQ selection: this is potentially the biggest investment shift, as London has traditionally been the HQ city of choice for US tech businesses. These moves have to made with conviction, and while uncertainty over its commercial relationship with the EU lasts, it simply would not make sense to select the UK as a gateway to Europe.

Q: Which places are most likely to benefit?

A: Dublin, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. 

Dublin should do well where 100% English fluency is a critical factor or there is already significant investment in the country, which includes a large number of tech firms. Paris has size, standard of living and exceptional cultural attractions on its side, but there are (English) language, tax, transport and labour law issues. Frankfurt will have particular appeal to some financial players, with excellent transport and internet infrastructure, plus the fast-growing DEC-IX and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. For financial firms it runs a very close second to Amsterdam – at least that is what a recent New York Times piece⁴ suggests, awarding Frankfurt 54 points to Amsterdam’s 55. The author assessed a number of relocation-related factors – employment, transport and communications infrastructure, office and housing availability, schooling and culture/night life. It is ultimately subjective, but it makes interesting reading.

To these one might add a few infrastructure-specific factors:

• The Netherlands offers low energy costs (much lower than in Germany) and stable supply with high availability of renewables and exceptional levels of energy efficiency among newer data centers

• Amsterdam is home to one of the world’s leading Internet exchanges – AMS-IX – and is a landing point for 11 of the 15 transatlantic subsea cables.

• Amsterdam has a total of around 1.4 million square feet of datacenter space, with around 20% of this space currently available and rapid capacity growth.²

• The Netherlands is home to a third of Europe’s current multi-tenant data centers (by operational square feet)

• Amsterdam is perfectly located for transport as well as low-latency data reach, adjoining Germany and Belgium and just a short hop away from Europe’s biggest market – London.

In conclusion, I wish the UK well as they chart their course outside the EU. We all know it is impossible to predict investment trends with any degree of accuracy, and in a fast-changing world they have every chance of success. That said, it is reassuring for the Dutch workforce and its infrastructure and colocation providers to know that we can make a strong case as a European base for successful firms looking to expand, and also that this is appreciated and echoed on the other side of the Atlantic.

Further Reading

• Vodafone is threatening to move UK jobs to the EU, and Goldman says banking jobs could go’ – Oscar Williams-Grut, UK Business Insider¹
• ‘These Companies Are Already Threatening to Move Jobs Out of the UK’ – Clare Zillman, Fortune Magazine¹
• ‘After ‘Brexit,’ Finding a New London for the Financial World to Call Home’ – James Stewart, The New York Times ⁴

Eric Boonstra has been Managing Director of EvoSwitch since 2009.  His focus on attracting international customers to EvoSwitch has been helped by his multi-sectoral experience, which includes a degree in Law and senior management roles in Siemens, Staples and ABN Amro.  View full bio

As I mentioned before, the Internet of Things (IoT) is making new demands on data center infrastructure, and will create a functional division between ‘slow’ data at core facilities and faster analytics (and response) at datacenters on the edge, where the bulk of data is generated, aka ‘edge analytics’ . In this post I’d like to look briefly at analytics ‘beyond the edge’ – the ubiquitous super-fast processing and response IoT will demand in some industries. This looks likely to be delivered by a new breed of tiny off-the-shelf data centers or ‘microsites’.  Is your data disparate and ultra-latency-sensitive?  Will this mean you need microsites? If so, how might they feature in your infrastructure planning?

Patrick van der Wilt, Commercial Director, EvoSwitch

The logical next step

Edge Analytics – the location of automated, intelligent analytics near where the data is generated — is gaining widespread acceptance as a practical response to the data tsunami forecast from IoT.  Data that falls within normal parameters would be ignored or routed to lower cost storage for archival and regulatory reasons, while that which falls outside the norm could trigger an alert and be sent to a primary data platform like EvoSwitch for further analysis.  However, logically, service providers and enterprises in many industries will need to go further still, as pointed out in a recent piece by, Rhonda Ascierto and Andy Lawrence of 451 Research.

Extending the edge

In essence, the paper, entitled ‘Datacenters for the Internet of Things: diverse, cloudy and connected’, takes the infrastructure argument and adds a new layer beyond the edge; a distributed network of ‘micro-modular data centers’.  These tiny sub-100kW self-contained prefabricated units – aka ‘microsites’ or ‘data centers in a box’ – would be located one step closer to the IoT action, gathering and processing particular latency-sensitive sets of data from sensors and IoT gateways. For manageability, the data would be triggered only if it stands out from the norm, and if every millisecond counts.  Not every IoT-enabled business would need this type of coverage, but for some applications – things like latency-sensitive mobile apps, distributed fire detection or vehicle and traffic management – it would be vital.

The graphic below (with thanks to 451) captures the impact on infrastructure neatly:

Early movers

It’s an interesting proposition, and while take-up is not currently widespread, some power operators (Schneider, Emerson) and public cloud providers (think Google ‘fiber huts’) are already moving in this direction.  As it begins its journey towards becoming a fully-distributed utility, the most important initial questions will be who is best placed to provide the microsites, how close together will they need to be, and how will they be integrated with existing infrastructure and services? The onus will be on power providers, major public cloud providers, and network service providers to partner up and invest, followed swiftly by the largest and most innovative enterprises and public sector organizations. Does that list include you?

Further Reading

• ‘IoT data analytics spurred on by big data’s expansion interesting short piece on the practicalities of upgrading vehicle data analytics applications. Read article here.

Internet of Things (IoT) is too big for traditional data processing solutions.  Edge analytics may be the key to exploiting the oceans of data it generates. Identifying critical data sets and processing them close to source will be critical to the success of new services, and for speed and compliance it is likely that a lot of this analysis will take place in edge data centers.

This blogpost was written by Patrick van der Wilt, Commercial Director, EvoSwitch

Here Comes the Flood

According to Gartner, IoT will include 26 billion devices by 2020. Organisations in virtually every industry are using these devices to drive higher levels of efficiency, reduce costs, generate new revenue, and understand customers at more granular levels. However, not all of these organisations are prepared to deal with the deluge of data they will bring. The huge amount of data streaming from IoT could easily saturate datacenter networks, storage and processing capacity.

Enter Edge Analytics. An increasingly popular way of addressing these challenges is to put automated, intelligent analytics at the edge — near where the data is generated — to reduce the amount of data and networking communications overhead. Data that falls within normal parameters would be ignored or routed to lower cost storage for archival and regulatory reasons, while that which falls outside the norm could trigger an alert and be sent to a primary data platform for further analysis.

Islands of Data

A section of this compute, storage and analysis could take place in the Cloud – for instance via specialist machine data analytics firms like Splunk or Sumo Logic.  But for a lot of organisations the data will need to be processed closer to source (and faster) in specialist edge data centers such as EvoSwitch facilities. This applies in particular where companies don’t want any of the compliance headaches of manipulating private customer data in the cloud.

The Prize on the Horizon

Enterprises who do not have a clear Big Data strategy by now need to get a move on. Recent research indicates that the majority of Fortune 1000 firms now have at least one instance of big data in production – twice as many as in 2013 – and over half are creating new senior data-specific roles, in particular that of Chief Data Officer.

At the service provider end the prize is even bigger. Cisco claim that in what they call the ‘Internet of Everything’ there is $4.6 trillion of ‘value at stake’. Whether or not you would go that far, the prize for the winning data processing solution will be huge, and all the leading players are forging ahead with their offerings. SAP are evolving their HANA database solution; Cisco has bought Cologne-based edge analytics specialist Parstream; Dell continue to work with Intel on their IoT Labs and IoT Gateway servers, and IBM and HP are both investing heavily.

The greatest prize will undoubtedly be in the interoperation of IoT networks; where one dataset meets another and they generate something new and valuable.  Today there are plenty of networks of data, but they don’t talk to each other.  Edge analytics -whether they take place in edge data centers or in the cloud – will be the key to realizing this value.

Further Reading

• Information Week: Edge Analytics An Antidote To IoT Data Deluge. Read article here.
• Information Week: Big Data Goes Mainstream: What Now? Read article here.