Wednesday Bytes: 1547, Softlayer, Infomart, Cisco

Two data center build-outs, some recycled water cooling news and a new security scare:

Downtown Chicago will be getting a significant new data center option before long. fifteenfortyseven Citical Systems Realty has signed on to develop the Midway Technology Centre, a 230,000 square foot hardened warehouse that was once the home of the Schulze Baking Company. They’ll be building out 100K square feet and 26MW of data center space and power, with 52K and 10MW in the first phase. We had 1547’s CEO here for an Industry Spotlight over the summer, where he indicated the company has a series of new projects like this one in the pipeline.

IBM is expanding its Softlayer business down in Brazil. The tech giant is opening a second cloud data center in São Paulo, adding capacity for 9,000 additional servers powered by 2.8MW. That will give them 41 in all, doubling Softlayer’s footprint since its $1.2B acquisition of the cloud and hosting provider in 2014. We don’t hear much about IBM’s cloud relative to its public brethren at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, but IBM says the revenue from its IBM Cloud division has $8.7B in revenue for Q2, $4.5B of which came from as-a-service products.

Out in Silicon Valley, Infomart Data Centers says it is ready to help take on the drought.  They have completed the construction necessary to use non-potable, recycled water for its mechanical infrastructure and the irrigation surrounding the facility.  They expect to use 800K-1M fewer gallons of potable water than they used to.  Infomart is the result of a merger last year between Fortune Data Centers and the Dallas Infomart.

And Cisco routers have apparently come under direct hacker assault. Security researchers apparently have found malicious software, dubbed ‘SYNful Knock’, on Cisco routers in India, Mexico, Philippines, and Ukraine, enabling someone out there to harvest vast amounts of data without ever having to deal with little things like firewalls or other security measures. They didn’t break in to install that software, though. Rather, the breach appears to have been via stolen but valid network administration credentials. Still, such security threats have been more theoretical than actual until now.  Cisco has been trying to educate its customers about keeping such things from happening, which is about all it can do in such a case. Nobody’s saying exactly whose networks were being spied on, let alone who was actually doing the spying. Excuse me while I go encrypt, well, everything.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Datacenter · Security