Internet Network Security Blog

A new report from Tier 1 Research finds that the emerging North American multi-tenant datacenter (MTDC) markets – including Atlanta, Boston, Miami, Montreal, Phoenix, San Diego and Toronto – are underserved but starting to attract interest. The 100-page-plus report looks at current supply, demand and utilization metrics, sizing each of the next 14 of the top 20 North American markets – after New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Houston and Dallas – by existing supply levels, and identifying the top three datacenter providers in each market.

A part of the 451 Group, Tier 1 covers consumer, enterprise and carrier IT services, particularly hosting, colocation, content delivery, Internet services, software-as-a-service and enterprise services. Jeff Paschke, research manager for datacenters at Tier 1, says interest beyond the top six markets created demand for tracking what was happening in the top metropolitan areas in North America. Last September, the company did its first survey of 8 emerging markets and expanded to 14 cities for this report. More than 170 MTDC providers have been examined, and while the market is clearly fragmented, there are definite opportunities for consolidation, he says.

Each of these markets averages 19 MTDC providers, says Paschke, but the dominant provider accounts for 20 to 57 percent share of the market, in terms of built-out operational space. Utilization is nearing that of the top six markets. The second tier markets are approaching average utilization rates of 79 percent for 2011, compared to the major markets' utilization in excess of 80 percent, he says.

Tier 1 defines MTDCs as facilities that are normally owned by firms that provide Internet infrastructure services, including datacenter services, to multiple customers. Some firms lease datacenter space to other providers, as well as lease space to individual enterprises. Colocation datacenters can be considered the 'retail' version of MTDC, where space is sold on the basis of individual racks/cabinets or cages that typically range from 500 to up to 5,000 square feet in size. Moving up in size, the wholesale datacenter providers typically range in size from 10,000 up to 50,000 square feet and tend to have fewer customers and services, says Paschke.Service offerings vary widely, he says, from remote management, custom applications, help desk, messaging, databases, disaster recovery, managed storage, managed virtualization, managed security, managed networks and systems monitoring. A number of these emerging markets tended to be DR sites, says Paschke. For instance Sunguard, a large DR firm, is in almost every one of these 14 locations. Telecoms are also taking a growing interest, he adds, with Cincinnati Bell acquiring an MTDC, CyrusOne, in June 2010, and Verizon picking up another, Terremark, in April.

“These markets tend to have fewer competitors than in the bigger markets,” he says, and some don't have some of the larger wholesalers. SLAs (service-level agreements) are definitely a differentiator, as well as range of services, reliability and pricing, he adds.

As a former Fortune 500 datacenter manager, Paschke sees the migration to MTDCs as an unstoppable trend. “It's difficult to justify building a datacenter if it's not your core business.” It's also difficult for an enterprise to justify asking the board for $50 million to build a datacenter, especially once they've experienced depending upon a service provider and how easy it is to expand and make changes. “It's kind of tough to go back.”

It's also an easy choice for smaller enterprises that have their servers in a closet. “Once they get that first outage and their business is impacted, that's when they open their eyes and look for other options.”

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports The Data Center Balancing Act (subscription required).

Over the last year or so, some FCoE experts have been arguing nuances of FCoE and which protocols you need or don’t need. FCoE inter-swich interoperability? I will be old(er) and gray(er) before that happens in any meaningful way. While they are interesting discussions—if you go for that sort of thing—ultimately, they won’t impact you’re purchasing decisions. You are going to use whatever your SAN vendor tells you to use.

Lancope’s newest flow-based security, network and application-monitoring appliance features increased performance. The high-end StealthWatch FlowCollector 4000 features a monitoring capacity of 120,000 flows per second (FPS) per collector to scale for very large enterprise networks.

When HP completed the 3Com acquisition, it seemed obvious that the ProCurve product line was due for termination. In the last two years, HP has steadfastly continued with ProCurve and its custom ASIC development, and maintains that both the A-Series and the ProCurve occupy different spaces in the market. Maintaining two different product lines makes sense for HP and its customers.

HP unveiled three new consulting services to hasten the introduction of unified communications (UC) technology into the enterprise. The services focus on delivering multiple voice communication systems; accommodating the modern workplace, where employees work remotely and from multiple locations; and making sure the network has the capacity to deliver UC, particularly videoconferencing.

As IT professionals, we're all occasionally thrown curve balls by our suppliers. The most recent case is VMware changing its pricing model. When changes like these happen, the Twitterverse and blogosphere go wild with posts from folks who are affected, or are afraid they'll be affected, and those posts follow a pattern very similar to Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross' path for the grieving.

Back in April of this year, I was part of a group that went to Haiti to work with an educational institution to rebuild its IT operations after the January 2010 earthquake. What I discovered is that there isn’t a lot to rebuild, and the creation of an IT environment largely from scratch is what is really needed.

For many businesses, testing the capabilities of their networks, and the core systems that run on those networks, requires using some form of testing device to generate a load of simulated traffic to find out where and when problems will occur under heavy loads. But what if a company could use its own traffic to test its networks? The Endace Capture Replay System makes it possible to record up to 16 TBytes of a company’s network traffic and then use that recorded traffic as a basis for network testing.

Rumors about which networking company Dell was going to acquire have been silenced today with the announcement of its intent to acquire Force10. What Dell gets from Force10 is an equipment vendor that specializes in high-performance computing and has a clearly defined strategy to support cloud computing, orchestration and automation.

Dell's Kace business unit is looking to broaden its addressable market with a line of systems management appliances that have been designed to meet the needs of small and midsize businesses. The M300 Asset Management Appliance is targeted at SMBs with 50 to 200 employees looking for simple, reliable and affordable solutions for such routine IT tasks as hardware and software inventory, software license compliance, and asset tracking and management.