Like most other companies with corporate sustainability goals, which usually include carbon-neutrality commitments, Microsoft buys Renewable Energy Credits to compensate for renewable energy it cannot source to reach those goals.

RECs can be decoupled from the renewable energy that was generated to produce them, so they do nothing to clean up the fuel mix on a utility grid supplying a particular data center if they were produced elsewhere.

Microsoft and other big cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google, are in rapid data center expansion mode to support growth of their cloud services. In the blog postannouncing the new green data center goals goals, Microsoft VP and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, acknowledged that “data centers will rank by the middle of the next decade among the large users of electrical power on the planet.”

The job of cleaning up energy supply of these cloud data centers is made more complicated by the fact that the cloud providers don’t own many of the facilities they use to host their infrastructure. Expanding quickly around the world means having to lease capacity from data center providers, whose sustainability ambitions are often not aligned with their clients’.

See also: What Cloud and AI Do and Don’t Mean for Google’s Data Center Strategy

While there are signs that some major data center providers have made renewable energy a bigger priority than in the past, the industry as a whole still has a long way to go.

Akamai, one of the world’s largest Content Delivery Network providers, is currently wrestling with this issue. The company announced earlier this month a goal to source renewable energy for at least half of its 200,000-server infrastructure, which is highly distributed, consisting primarily of small deployments in colocation data centers across 126 countries.

Akamai acknowledged that its goal will be hard to reach and said it would start by testing a financial instrument called Contract for Difference, where the energy user agrees to pay the difference between the cost of regular grid power and the cost of generating renewable energy to the producer whose solar plant or wind farm is on the same grid in exchange for RECs.

Microsoft recently hired Jim Hanna, former head of environmental affairs at Starbucks, to lead its green data center strategy.

This month, the company announced it had joined an alliance with environmental groups and Facebook, which will promote renewable energy development. The Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance’s goal is to push for development of 60 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2025, which is enough to replace all US coal-fired power plants that are slated for retirement in the next four years.

Original article appeared here: Microsoft Expands Green Data Center Ambitions

Source: TheWHIR

“We don’t enter into partnerships lightly,” said Rich Dolan, SVP of Marketing at Datapipe. “We make sure our partners are like-minded and innovative, and will assist us in providing clients with the strongest custom solutions, managed services, security, and reliability.”

Datapipe is also a highly valued, strategic partner of Equinix’s and was one of the first companies to join its global channel partner program in 2015. “By collaborating with them over the years, we have been able to work with enterprise companies worldwide to remove many of the common barriers to cloud adoption. Together Datapipe and Equinix help enterprises to deliver and maintain scalable and dynamic cloud solutions, including infrastructure as a service and platform as a service within highly secured and reliable data centers to fit every need. said Chris Rajiah, Vice President of Worldwide Channels and alliances at Equinix.

The two companies have come together, enabling domestic and global enterprise and government customers to scale both traditional and cloud solutions across the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe through their partnership. Together they have also adopted a number of strategic alliance best practices that are now built into both companies’ DNA:

Executive alignment: The alliance fosters a close relationship between the two company’s executive teams. This relationship enables quick buy-in from the top for new strategies, clients, implementations, and partnerships and helps ensure the alliance’s success.

Alignment on new market opportunities: Datapipe and Equinix recognized early on the shift from traditional to hybrid cloud happening within their client base. The established alliance with Equinix enabled Datapipe to offer clients a hybrid cloud; which continues today to be one of the most significant growth opportunities in the world for service providers to offer to enterprise IT.

Practical growth based on real customer opportunities and honing a vertical market approach: Datapipe builds out new offerings and new geographies based on demand. The alliance with Equinix gives Datapipe the ability to quickly respond to and scale customer requests. They can turn on new services and rapidly enable customers to expand into new geographies.

The company also has a vertical approach, recently making an acquisition to accelerate its success in the US federal market. This successful acquisition has enabled both Datapipe and Equinix to expand their presence into the military and civilian government markets.

Joint marketing, cobranding and demand generation: Datapipe and Equinix co-sponsor marketing and industry events, and mutually invest proactively in co-marketing and lead generation. They conduct joint thought leadership and marketing events in cities around the country, produce collateral and data sheets about the companies offers’, and publish joint success stories. Both believe the real client success stories in a wide range of verticals and applications/solutions are critical to help other customers understand the value. Also, Charlie Colletti, Datapipe Channel Marketing Manager, shared that he conducts a regular cadence of calls with the marketing team at Equinix to drive innovative initiatives and execute programs that are key to both companies’ success.

A culture of partnering embedded into the DNA: Datapipe has a culture that rewards successful partnerships across sales, marketing, and executive management. The two companies have very different cultures, and work closely together to drive and maintain alignment at the executive, sales, and marketing level to keep the partnership on track. In addition, both Equinix and Datapipe channel partners can leverage the alliance and the solutions for their customers. There are clear goals and teams aligned from both companies to make those goals happen.

Continuing education on the alliance: Datapipe and Equinix conduct field boot camps, ongoing webinars and education for both companies’ sales teams and the channel partners. The teams believe in continuing to reinforce key partnership messages and success stories for sales teams and partners to replicate.

Business processes that serve as foundation for the alliance: Datapipe and Equinix measure the success from all leads for both companies through their lead flow process in Salesforce. Both companies mutually track and report on a comprehensive set of leads through the lead-to-close process, using provisions that tie those leads back to the respective partners they belong to. This serves three purposes: it gives an accurate metric for progress, ensures Datapipe and Equinix are aligned, and provides partners opportunities and drives their accountability in the process.

The Datapipe and Equinix partnership truly represents an example of a relationship that has progressed from first a customer relationship, then a channel partner, and now a true strategic channel alliance leveraged by both companies’ channel partners in the marketplace.

This article is brought to you by HostingCon, the Cloud and Service Provider Ecosystem event. Join us in New Orleans, Louisiana July 24-27, 2016 to hear Theresa and other thought leaders talk about issues and trends in the cloud, hosting and service provider ecosystem.Save $100 off your HostingCon All Access Pass with coupon code: H1279

Source: TheWHIR

The meeting offers new details about the scope of government plans to take “special management stakes” in Internet companies. Bloomberg News reported earlier this month that leaders were considering a pilot program for such an arrangement with web portals and mobile apps that focus on news content, but the idea of applying that to video-streaming companies was previously unknown.

It’s still not clear what would happen if companies refuse to give stakes to the government or if the regulators will proceed with the plan. The move would allow Communist Party leaders to exert even greater control over the web and the companies that distribute content online, such as Tencent Holdings Ltd. and NetEase Inc.

The government already exerts strict control over licensing for online video by only giving licenses to seven companies, and has made it difficult for international firms to have a share in the country’s $5.9 billion online video market.

Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp., whose representatives were said to be at the meeting, declined to comment in a text message. IQiyi.com, the streaming service of Baidu Inc., and Youku Tudou’s owner Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. declined to comment in e-mailed statements. PPTV didn’t respond to a request for comment and Canny Lo, a spokeswoman for Tencent, wasn’t immediately able to comment. The regulator didn’t respond to a faxed request for comment.

Under President Xi Jinping, China has enacted stricter limits on media and Internet freedoms over the past year. The proposal for “special management stakes,” first outlined in November 2013, would give authorities the ability to block content from reaching the web.

In the pilot program pitched to online news providers, officials offered to issue licenses in exchange for a board seat and stock, people familiar with the matter have said. The government wouldn’t receive dividends or any other form of bonus and won’t interfere in business decisions outside of control over content distribution, the people said.

In the May 18 meeting, the regulator recommended that online video companies choose among five state media companies to serve as shareholders but said they could work with others as well, according to the people familiar.

Source: TheWHIR

• Al Caplan of HTC USA won a Roku SE courtesy of Softlayer, an IBM Company
• Gerard Hiner of Webair won a Yoga tablet from Lenovo
• Rachel Field of PromoSuite won a Samsung VR headset from LiquidWeb
• Eric Goldman of Credit Suisse won Radware‘s prize of a $100 AMEX gift card

Also, thanks to iMiller Public Relations our guests arrived safely in Ubers!

If you missed us last night, we are stopping in Chicago next month so be sure to RSVP today if you will be in the area on June 23, 2016. And after that we will be hosting our third annual WHIR Event at HostingCon Global 2016. This one is a can’t-miss event that you will definitely want to reserve your spot at ASAP! You can do that by following this link.

I’ll be at the next couple of events so please say hi! One of my favorite parts of any event is meeting our readers face-to-face.

Source: TheWHIR

Other topics include metrics, e-commerce, and of course lots of security. HostingCon attendees can also learn from and share with the other industry players in the sessions they choose. In the Monday afternoon technology speed roundtables, and in all other sessions in the technology track, valuable insights will be shared about the latest hardware and software affecting the hosting and cloud computing.

Exhibit hall continues to fill, as do the two official hotels of HostingCon Global New Orleans. Early bird rates are available for a few more weeks, so register now to get your $100 off.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Contents of Megaupload’s Canadian Servers Still Unknown as Ontario Court Determines Next Steps

The filing by the RIAA and MPAA was in response to a request for a six-month pause in the ongoing lawsuit between the industry groups and the alleged piracy enabler. The RIAA and MPAA objected to the delay, complaining of the risk of data loss.

Cogent says its inability to read the data could be caused by “drive heads” which are “frozen,” but is unwilling to perform free diagnostics and maintenance or repairs on machines it is essentially holding for the DOJ.

In the criminal case against Megaupload, Carpathia parent QTS recently moved to be relieved of its obligations relating to the storage of over 1,100 servers once leased by Megaupload. A decision by the court on that matter is pending.

“Having seized control of the Carpathia servers in order to obtain ‘selected’ portions of the data, the government has triggered its duty to preserve the remaining data because the entire data-set ‘might be significant’ to the defense of the Criminal Action,” Megaupload argues, and that entire data-set includes the Cogent servers.

The RIAA and MPAA filed a motion (PDF) on the same day as Megaupload to have the Cogent data subpoenaed, or copied and preserved by a court-appointed third party.

A judge told the parties to the criminal action to figure out the Carpathia server maintenance issue in April of 2012, and has been attempting to arbitrate some kind of arrangement ever since.

Source: TheWHIR

One of the investors participating in the funding round is Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn, one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers. Ingrasys co-developed DriveScale’s hardware and will act as its manufacturer. The Foxconn subsidiary is also one of the startup’s first customers, a group that also includes AppNexus, ClearSense, and DST Systems.

The other investors in DriveScale are Nautilus Venture Partners and Pelion Venture Partners. Pelion led the Series A round.

DriveScale is calling its architecture “composable,” a term HPE also used to describe its recently launched product line with many similar aims, including the flexibility to adjust compute or storage capacity independently from each other.

Read more: HPE Rethinks Enterprise Computing

The approach is often referred to as “rack-scale architecture,” which is something internet giants like Google and Facebook use in their data centers. Now, the startup is promising enterprises the kind of rack-scale infrastructure the web giants have been enjoying for years.

DriveScale’s three-person founding team has deep roots in the IT infrastructure industry. Two of the founders, CTO Satya Nishtala and chief scientist Tom Lyon, held key engineering roles at Nuova Systems, a startup acquired by Cisco in 2008 whose technology became the basis of Cisco’s UCS servers and Nexus switches, according to founder bios on DriveScale’s website.

All three founders have deep ties to Sun Microsystems, the legendary Silicon Valley hardware company whose engineering legacy continues to command respect in the industry, despite its business troubles in the years between the dot-com crash and its acquisition by Oracle in 2009.

The third founder is VP Duane Northcutt. He ended up at Sun after it acquired Kealia in 2004, where he was VP of technology. Kealia was a startup launched by one of Sun’s founders, Andy Bechtolsheim, who had left Sun but rejoined it following the acquisition. The Kealia deal was the basis for Sun’s entry into the x86 server market, according to DriveScale.

Original article appeared here: Scale-Out Infrastructure Startup DriveScale Raises $15M

Source: TheWHIR

Block told analysts that all of Amazon now uses Salesforce, and a source told Barb Darrow of Fortune that Amazon had reached a deal with Salesforce to extend all Salesforce software to all of its employees. Darrow speculates that that deal could be the “nine-figure deal” closed this quarter.

Features of Salesforce’s marketing tools announced last week also run on AWS, Block said, as does, perhaps tellingly, “a lot” of company research and development. A Salesforce spokesperson also told Fortune that SMB sales software SalesforceIQ runs on AWS.

Benioff also hinted at more announcements from Salesforce involving AWS at its upcoming developer conference TrailheaDX and customer conference Dreamforce.

Shifting away from the cloud, or AWS in particular, can reduce costs for companies like Dropbox, but Salesforce appears to be betting heavily on AWS to grow its margins.

Source: TheWHIR

The WordPress version is touted as a solution for SMBs needing advanced site functionality, while the simple plan provides a basic, single-page web presence for contact information.

“We’ve talked with many Canadian small business owners and we have heard that they’re challenged to build professional-looking websites within their budgets,” said Jill Schoolenberg, Vice President of GoDaddy Canada. “Our Professional Web Services make it simple and cost effective for Canadian SMBs to benefit from a professional-looking website and SEO services, while enabling small business owners to focus on what they do best – running their businesses.”

GoDaddy’s Logo Design Service was launched in January to allow customers to receive a logo within a week.

Three new tools were launched by GoDaddy for Canadian SMBs in October, including SEO beginner tool Search Engine Visibility.

GoDaddy also launched in 11 new Asian markets earlier in the year, and it seems likely that GoDaddy will extend Professional Web Services to those and other international markets in the future.

Source: TheWHIR