networking fellas

Chapter One
Microsoft is planning to invest about $350 million in expanding its data center site in Boydton, Virginia – a tiny town with about 400 residents at the state’s southern edge.

This is the company’s third expansion project at the site and the biggest data center investment it has announced publicly this year. Its first construction project in Boydton was started in 2010 and involved about $500 million in investment, according to a statement issued by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe’s office.

Microsoft has been expanding its data center capacity around the world quickly and aggressively to support its growing cloud services business. “The expansion will help support Microsoft’s more than 200 cloud and online services, which are consumed by over 1 billion customers across 89 markets globally,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email.

Advanced energy efficient design

Microsoft has substantial in-house data center design expertise and its facilities evolve with every new build. The Boydton site is not an exception.

“Each phase of the facility represents a different rapidly evolving design that enables the integration of new efficiencies, best practices and capabilities,” the spokesperson wrote.

The first phase of the facility was built using Microsoft’s ITPAC concept. ITPACs are container-like modules with large louvers along the walls which pull in outside air for cooing.

In the company’s first build in Boydton, the ITPACs were placed outside, without roofs or walls, with an open-air “electrical breezeway” powering them. The phase also included colocation rooms with enclosed server PODs.

The latest expansion, whose first phase is expected to be completed in the summer of 2015, will be a recent iteration of that design. “Learning from these designs, we have been able to remove even more inefficiencies, carbon, water use and costs out of our data center environment for this expansion,” the spokesperson wrote.

The facility uses adiabatic cooling – a form of free cooling that relies on evaporation of water which causes temperature to drop.

Building to support cloud growth

As it transforms itself into a cloud-services-centric company, Microsoft has been on data center expansion kick. In addition to its Azure Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, it is also now providing products in its popular Office suite on a Software-as-a-Service basis under the Office 365 brand.

The company’s infrastructure provides services to its massive network of Xbox gaming console users and supports its video conferencing platform Skype.

Chapter Two
I don’t think I’m alone in saying that organizations need a flexible, that can expand and contract more readily to their needs, especially in terms of security. A security-centric, programmable infrastructure that detects and responds to emerging threat vectors is essential for organizations to thrive in our hyper-connected era.

However, many business and IT leaders are unsure of what that looks like. How can a programmable infrastructure examine security holistically and gain visibility across the entire cybercrime continuum—before, during, and after an attack?

One way malicious actors try to deliver malware to organizations is through the use of “watering hole” attacks. Like big game watching their prey, cybercriminals looking to target a particular group (for example, people who work in the aviation industry or shop at a particular store) will monitor which websites or payment methods that group uses, infect one or more of these sites with malware or data collection software, and then sit back and wait for a user to be compromised.
A programmable infrastructure can help protecting users against these attacks by keeping machines and web browsers fully patched to minimize the number of vulnerabilities that an attacker can exploit. This type of network can ensure web traffic is filtered and checked for malware prior to its delivery to the user’s browser. It can also automatically detect and respond to security breaches by taking appropriate actions to block the threat before any harm is done.
With a programmable infrastructure in place, security professionals will be better positioned to block threats and help to defend the environment.
After an Attack
If they are attacked, organizations need to have a formal plan in place that will allow them to quickly scope the damage, contain the event, remediate, and bring operations back to normal as quickly as possible. It is clear that the connections among organizations, data, and the advanced attacks are simply too complex for a single appliance to address.
Leaders can’t change the fact that cybercrime exists, but they can arm their business with the proper infrastructure. Manned by up-to-date security professionals, a programmable infrastructure that is secure, as well as agile and intelligent, is the best bet to identify key risks, thwart cybercrime and protect valuable data – both now and in the future.

Before an Attack

Most organizations do not have the resources to have constant real-time monitoring for their networks and determine if they are being infiltrated.

To protect their key assets, organizations must be aware of what’s traversing their networks: a programmable infrastructure can help implement access controls, enforce security policies, and block applications and overall access to critical assets. The flexible nature of this type of infrastructure can help fill in the gaps left by disparate solutions or dated models. The result is much more sophisticated interaction between applications and infrastructure.

While a programmable infrastructure can address many top security concerns, organizations must also invest in IT professionals with up-to-date skills. It’s estimated that the industry is short more than a million security professionals across the globe.

During an Attack

Organizations must address a broad range of attack vectors with an infrastructure that operates everywhere that a threat can manifest itself—on the network, on endpoints, from mobile devices, and in virtual environments.

Often times when it comes to security, organizations don’t know what to look for or aren’t paying attention. A recent revealed that while most organizations say that they could identify a security incident within a matter of hours, it takes an entire month, on average, to work through the process of incident investigation, service restoration, and verification. It’s also important to note that no company is too big or too small to be a target.

Chapter Three
Google owns a lot of computers—perhaps a million servers stitched together into the fastest, most powerful artificial intelligence on the planet. But last August, Google teamed up with NASA to acquire what may be the search giant’s most powerful piece of hardware yet. It’s certainly the strangest.
Located at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, a couple of miles from the Googleplex, the machine is literally a black box, 10 feet high. It’s mostly a freezer, and it contains a single, remarkable computer chip—based not on the usual silicon but on tiny loops of niobium wire, cooled to a temperature 150 times colder than deep space. The name of the box, and also the company that built it, is written in big, science-fiction-y letters on one side: D-WAVE. Executives from the company that built it say that the black box is the world’s first practical quantum computer, a device that uses radical new physics to crunch numbers faster than any comparable machine on earth. If they’re right, it’s a profound breakthrough. The question is: Are they?
Hartmut Neven, a computer scientist at Google, persuaded his bosses to go in with NASA on the D-Wave. His lab is now partly dedicated to pounding on the machine, throwing problems at it to see what it can do. An animated, academic-tongued German, Neven founded one of the first successful image-recognition firms; Google bought it in 2006 to do computer-vision work for projects ranging from Picasa to Google Glass. He works on a category of computational problems called optimization—finding the solution to mathematical conundrums with lots of constraints, like the best path among many possible routes to a destination, the right place to drill for oil, and efficient moves for a manufacturing robot. Optimization is a key part of Google’s seemingly magical facility with data, and Neven says the techniques the company uses are starting to peak. “They’re about as fast as they’ll ever be,” he says.
That leaves Google—and all of computer science, really—just two choices: Build ever bigger, more power-hungry silicon-based computers. Or find a new way out, a radical new approach to computation that can do in an instant what all those other million traditional machines, working together, could never pull off, even if they worked for years.

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