NICE: London’s position as the data centre hub of the UK is putting businesses at risk by opening up their data to a host of threats.

Speaking to V3, MigSolv chief executive Alex Rabbetts, whose firm owns a data centre facility in Norwich, said that a more distributed, regional model for data centre deployment is needed in the UK.

“London is rubbish. It’s on a 20-year flood plain, based on the Environment Agency’s own data. It has power problems, it’s a terrorist threat, so there are numerous issues. People say they have to be there for connectivity but that’s not the case anymore,” he said.

“Capital cities around Europe used to be considered the best sites for data centres and perhaps 10 years ago or so they were. But now connectivity around the UK is suitable, and areas like Manchester and Leeds, or Lyon and Marseille in France are growing for data centre sites.”

Rabbetts also cited the risk of having hubs of data centres in areas like Slough that have grown up in recent years as posing a risk to the UK. “If you put all your data in one place, that’s a risk. After 9/11, all the data centres [at Ground Zero] were wiped out, and the same problem could happen in London or Slough.”

MigSolv claims its base in Norwich, as an example, proves regional areas are more than suited for date centre hosting, due to strong connectivity options, good power access and a lower security risk from terrorists threats. The firm partners with other firms for backup, but Rabbetts told V3 the firm intends to build out more data centres in the future.

MigSolv also revealed it has now achieved PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) accreditation for any customers storing, transmitting or transacting credit card data through its facility.

Customers with MigSolv include various public sector and private sector organisations in areas such as oil and gas, managed services and larger enterprises.

Despite the argument put forward by Rabbetts, Daniel Domio, vice president of IT at energy management firm Schneider Electric, said that cities of the future must incorporate data centres at their heart, akin to churches in the Middle Ages.

“We’re going to have to add more infrastructure to cities in the next 30 years than we have in the last 4,000 years. We must build cities around data centres to maximise their data transfer and energy use,” he said.

AMD has expanded its Opteron server lineup with new chips designed for cloud-based services like Facebook and Amazon, which call for large volumes of high-density energy-efficient systems to serve the ever-growing data needs of mobile devices.

Available immediately, the Opteron X-Series is styled as the highest performance small-core x86 processor on the market, competing directly against Intel’s Atom S1200 chips. Like the Atom, the Opteron X-Series is set to be delivered in HP’s Moonshot servers as well as AMD’s own SeaMicro Fabric Compute systems.

However, the Opteron X-Series is all quad-core, delivering twice the performance of the Atom at the same clock speed for single-threaded workloads, according to AMD. It also supports up to 32GB of memory, four times that of Intel’s microserver chip.

Those cores are also AMD’s next-generation Jaguar architecture, as seen on the AMD 2013 mobility platforms that the chipmaker introduced last week.

The first versions available are the X1150 CPU and the  X2150 APU. The latter also integrates an AMD Radeon 8000 GPU with 128 cores, enabling it to handle highly parallel workloads such as offloading video decoding from client systems.

AMD’s new chips are similar to Intel’s Atom chips in power consumption and price. The 9W X1150 is clocked at up to 2GHz and will cost $64 in volume, while the 11W X2150 is clocked at up to 1.9GHz and costs up to $99 in volume. However, AMD points out that its chips have twice the number of cores.

The new Opteron parts will enable AMD to target “a vast array of the fastest growing workloads,” according to Andrew Feldman, head of AMD’s Data Center Server Solutions team and former chief executive of SeaMicro before AMD acquired it last year.

“A fundamental shift is taking place away from some types of workloads and towards other workloads. Workloads in the data centre used to be heavily computational. It used to be big hard problems, but right now the big driver is for highly parallelised modest-sized problems that suit low-power 2P servers,” Feldman said.

“Portable devices like tablets and smartphones essentially present information that is computed elsewhere, and that is the underlying driver for server growth,” he added.

The Opteron X-Series is “not good for heavy compute workloads like CAD/CAM,” Feldman explained, but it is ideally suited for hosting, driving virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Hadoop deployments and handling object storage.

Feldman showed sample Opteron X-Series motherboards that meet the Open Compute specifications, with the implication that the chips will soon be finding their way into data centres that have adopted servers based on this platform.

AMD also hinted that the Opteron X-Series could be found in some workstations or other client systems. Both the initial models are system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs that integrate I/O including PCI Express, Serial ATA and USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports.

Nigel Beighton is the international vice president of technology for hosting company Rackspace, responsible for delivering the firm’s products.

Beighton also drives the OpenStack community internationally, a community co-founded and hosted by Rackspace, which offers those in the IT industry an open-source cloud computing platform alternative to the proprietary technology available from firms like VMware. Recently the firm announced it would build and manage cloud computing infrastructure for service providers, in a bid to promote the OpenStack platform.

Before Rackspace, Beighton has most recently worked as the group chief technology office for Associated Northcliffe Digital, covering the group’s digital businesses including FindaProperty, Prime Location, and Teletext. Over the past ten years Nigel has served as the CTO for lastminute.com and was also the director of enterprise strategy for Symantec.

Murray’s Hot Seat follows on from a host of leading industry figures ranging from government operating officer Stephen Kelly to Hotels.com chief technology officer Stuart Silberg.

V3: What would be your dream job (apart from your current role, of course)

Nigel Beighton: I’d really love to work as a research engineer on a Hadoop open source big data project. We’re only just starting to understand now how we can process huge volumes of data and so this is a really cutting edge area that I would love to be involved in – there is so much we can do to benefit the world with all that big data out there.

Which mobile phone and tablet do you currently use

I use an iPad and I’m a huge user of so many great apps. When it comes to phones I actually have three; I have an Android unit and a Windows phone and an iPhone. But if I have to come back to one unit again and again it is the iPhone, because I’m really into my photography and I tend to use it a lot, as it’s generally always the thing that I have in my hand. They do say that the best camera is the one that’s with you at any moment, after all.

Which person do you most admire in the IT industry

Obviously there are many people in IT who have made massive changes to the way we work with technology, but I keep a special place in my heart two people. Alan Turing – because of what he did in terms of helping to start this industry and also help win the second world war – and secondly the American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie for his work in the early days of computing.

Sony has faced a tough time in the smartphone and tablet markets in recent years in the face of competition from Apple and Android devices, but it is slowly fighting back and interest in its products is growing.

Our review of the Xperia Tablet Z was the most popular item of the last week, with readers keen to know our impressions. We were impressed by its ultra-lightweight, slim build and reasonable performance, awarding it four stars, although its software let it down slightly.

Elsewhere a customer story in the ongoing Google verses Microsoft battle gave both sides cause for optimism, and concern. At first, it seemed Google had landed yet another blow when education firm Pearson said the majority of its 40,000-strong workforce were using Google services over Microsoft platforms. However, since the story went live, scores of unhappy staff at the firm came forward to decry the switch to Google.

Elsewhere, Sky’s boost of its backhaul network on Virgin Media Business services was of interest, possibly from Sky customers hoping to see a speed boost from their services.

Another notable headline from the past seven days saw the chief technology officer at the BBC suspended for overseeing a failed digital project that cost the corporation £98m without any clear benefit.

A final piece of interesting news came from Transport for London (TfL), which revealed that it is planning a major overhaul of its website, based on HTML5, in order to meet the demands from Londoners accessing its site on numerous mobile devices.

Sony Xperia Tablet Z review
A lightweight rugged tablet that’s ideal for working on the move

Google trumps Microsoft in Pearson’s cloud app offering to 40,000 staff
Firm sees most business units opting for Google

Sky pays Virgin £49m for broadband backhaul boost
Deal sees Rupert Murdoch forced to hand over cash to rival John Malone

Microsoft calls for Office attack victims to be more vigilant with security patches
Firm urges businesses to apply automatic updates to systems

Apache Darkleech PDF and JavaScript attacks infect hundreds more websites
Security firm Zscaler links harmful attack to Blackhole exploit kit version 2

Google pushes Android and Chrome SAP Fiori apps to attract enterprise
Company partners with German software house to push secure HTML5 apps onto browser and mobile platforms

BBC suspends CTO after £98m loss on failed digital project
John Linwood pays the price for unnecessary Digital Media Initiative project

Apple OS X Oslo malware linked to sophisticated India ‘Operation Hangover’ gang in India
Indian group tied to multiple crimeware outbreaks

DWP has no immediate plans to support systems newer than Windows XP and IE6 for benefits claims
Claimants restricted to phone and face-to-face meetings for certain benefits

TfL plans HTML5 website overhaul and ditches Bing Maps for Google
New site to be live before the end of the year, beta planned within two months

HP has updated its mobile client lineup to support the Citrix XenDesktop 7 release.

The company said that its mobile client line would include the new mt40 notebook client system. Designed to run with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platforms, the client system connnects to a hosted instance rather than rely on local hardware for its computing and storage tasks.

The mt40 system will sport an Intel Celeron processor and support for both 802.11n WiFi connections and gigabit ethernet. The system is equipped with 16GB of local storage via an internal SSD and will rely on Intel HD graphics hardware.

HP is also unveiling updates to its HP Velocity virtualisation management platform. The company said that the platform will sport better integration with Citrix platforms both for VDI deployments and other cases such as unified communications and mobile data services.

With the update, HP said that it hopes to better integrate with Citrix’s new platforms and allow customers to better manage network traffic and improve throughput speeds for hosted platforms and systems.

“As office workers become more mobile and more smartphones, laptops and tablets enter the workplace, the challenge to secure data grows more daunting,” said Jeff Groudan, HP marketing director for thin clients.

“With innovations such as HP Velocity and our support for unified communications, companies can enable their mobile workforce while knowing they have the security, realibility and managebility of thin clients without sacrificing productivity, user experience or performance.”

Cloud services firm Colt Technology Services is opening up enterprise access to what the company claims is the largest datacentre footprint in Europe.

The company said that its cloud services, which include platform management, IT as a service and managed storage offerings, will offer datacentres in some 20 European cities. Additionally, the company will offer support to customers in 15 different languages.

“Our enterprise cloud services are designed to deliver scalable cloud solutions as well as flexible service and commercial levels delivered via our service catalogue,” said Colt vice president of portfolio and strategy Jon Bennett.

“After consulting closely with our customers, it is clear that being able to offer infrastructure, platforms and workloads will give the CIO confidence that they can focus on delivering business objectives, rather than managing technology.”

The company hopes that its wide range of datacentre locations and extensive portfolio of services will appeal to customers looking to perform large-scale IT automation projects and cloud migration initiatives and desire multiple datacentre locations for performance and stability.

In addition to the performance benefits, cloud platform providers have pointed to the presence of local datacentres as an important privacy and compliance initiative. With many government agencies and regulated industries weary of moving data to a physical location in a foreign state, having a datacentre within the coun try’s borders has been a growing concern.

In the UK, cloud providers such as Salesforce have announced plans to bring their new datacentre facilities to London in order to provided localised services.

Citrix has taken another step towards enabling enterprises to deliver applications and services to their workers on any device anywhere, with new releases of XenDesktop, XenMobile and ShareFile.

Announced at the firm’s Citrix Synergy event in Los Angeles, XenDesktop 7 is the first release of Project Avalon, an initiative to deliver Windows as a cloud service. Meanwhile, a new XenMobile Enterprise edition combines device, app and data management, while ShareFile can now deliver mobile access to data inside the corporate firewall.

XenDesktop 7 now integrates Citrix’s XenApp application delivery platform with XenDesktop’s existing virtual desktop capabilities. This provides app and desktop delivery from a unified framework with a single management console, according to Citrix.

Project Avalon, first discussed at Synergy in San Francisco last year, is an ambitious project to take Windows and enable it to be delivered as a scalable cloud service that can be accessed on any endpoint device.

With XenDesktop 7, Citrix is delivering the first portions of this, in a release codenamed Excalibur. The second release, codenamed Merlin, will be available as a technical preview next year and will focus on automating deployment and management in private and public cloud infrastructure while providing self-service provisioning, Citrix said.

Citrix chief marketing officer Steve Daheb said that the firm is following this strategy to help customers adapt to the changing technology landscape and the way that IT services will be delivered in the future.

“IT decision-making is being shaped by the forces of BYOD and personal cloud services,” he said. “By providing powerful cloud solutions, we are helping our customers embrace mobile workstyles to succeed in a dynamic and mobile world.”

In a similar vein, XenMobile Enterprise edition now combines device, app and data management into one platform, according to Citrix. It updates the XenMobile MDM platform Citrix released earlier this year, which is based on technology gained through its acquisition of Zenprise.

In addition to a corporate app store, XenMobile Enterprise edition includes an updated mobile device client that provides help desk support as well as app and data access, along with new Worx Mobile productivity apps, comprising WorxMail for secure e-mail, WorxWeb for secure web browsing, and ShareFile for data sharing.

ShareFile itself has now been updated with the ability to link to network shares and SharePoint sites behind the corporate firewall. ShareFile StorageZone Connectors creates a direct and secure connection to the data from mobile endpoints rather than synchronising it elsewhere, Citrix said.

Publishing and education company Pearson has taken a unique approach to the ongoing enterprise cloud apps battle between Microsoft and Google: it is offering its 40,000-strong workforce the choice of either.

Pearson owns several well-known brands, including the Financial Times Group, the Penguin Group and Pearson Education, and its IT team serves staff in over 1,000 locations worldwide. 

The firm has overhauled its IT estate from Microsoft Office 2003 in the past two years, in order to ensure it maintained relevance with the new ways of working that its staff were embracing.

After evaluation it decided to offer its businesses units a choice of either Google or Microsoft Office applications, integrated together so they could be used between business units on a single platform, managed by the IT team.

To date 33,000 staff from just over 40,000 have been migrated to this new platform and Google’s services have been the overwhelming favourite, securing around 80 percent use over Microsoft’s offerings.

Graham Calder, chief technology officer for global platforms and services at Pearson, said numerous aspects of the Google technology have proved enticing to business units.

“We didn’t recommend what people chose, but it’s been interesting to see most have moved to Google after assessing the offering” he said. “There were a couple of swing factors that we’ve seen. One was cost, but another factor was the ability to transform the way people could work.”

One feature in this area of Google’s offerings – its video collaboration tool Hangouts – has been particularly popular. “Hangouts have gone viral. You rarely see people doing voice calls you just see Hangouts. They love the collaboration,” explained Calder.

Calder also said the firm is fully committed to a bring your own device (BYOD) strategy supporting all major platforms, although only two are used to any real extent. “Our primary base for BYOD is iOS, but the Android base has risen incredibly fast over the last year or so.”

The news comes on the same day that Orion Media has moved to Google Apps for Business, using cloud firm Ancoris to bring 200 staff over to its services.

“The key drivers were the need for more storage and more collaboration,” explained Jonathan Dean, IT manager at Orion Media. “There was no question Google was the best, most cost-effective solution. Google offered us much more storage than we could economically provide in-house.”

While this is good news for Google, last week Microsoft rolled out a number of customers that had ditched Google for its own service, as the two firms continue to battle for customers in the enterprise space.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has cleared a major compliance hurdle which could allow the company to strike new deals with US government agencies.

The company on Tuesday revealed it has achieved compliance with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP.) The standard will allow the company to host “moderate” level cloud initiatives for some 300 agencies in the US Federal government.

“Today most government computing systems require built-to-order platforms and applications to meet government security and compliance requirements, which involve time-consuming and costly evaluations,” said AWS worldwide public sector vice president Teresa Carlson.

“With this FedRAMP compliance, agencies can now utilize a streamlined process from AWS when moving applications to the cloud to meet their unique business and mission requirements.”

With the certification, the AWS platform can now be cleared for higher-level security and secrecy projects, opening the door for new cloud initiatives. Groups impacted by the ruling include the US Navy, Treasury Department and NASA.

AWS said that in meeting the FedRAMP requirements it had to comply with standards for security, monitoring and safe storage policies. The certification and compliance are being co-managed by HHS.

With governments both at the local and federal level looking to develop sweeping cloud initiatives in order to save money and reduce capital expenditures, achieving compliance with government regulations has been an important step for hosting firms looking to land the lucrative government contracts.

Last week, Box made a point of announcing that it had cleared a federal government hurdle by complying with the ISO 27001 standard for secure storage.

The Home Office has completed the largest order to date for the government’s G-Cloud framework, and signed a contract with hosting provider Skyscape worth £1.5m for the next year.

Skyscape will host the Home Office recruitment Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checking services, more officially known as the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS). The service will go live early next year.

Members of the government’s G-Cloud team, including Denise McDonagh, who leads the G-Cloud programme and is also the IT director at the Home Office, refused to comment on the contract, despite its notable size.

Phil Dawson, Skyscape’s chief executive, said: “Our platform as a service offering will help the Home Office to dramatically reduce capital expenditure, and also facilitate savings in operational costs and time.”

So far, sales to the government using the G-Cloud have topped £18m and this has included 911 different contracts being signed with 700 suppliers, offering more than 5,000 services. G-Cloud sales have particularly skyrocketed this year, increasing by £14m since January, partly due to the government’s Cloud First policy.

The G-Cloud programme was launched in February 2012 with the aim of driving the uptake of cloud computing in the public sector. The online system allows the public sector to rent the use of services as needed and do away with lengthy contracts.

The system also allows SMBs to sell to government departments in equal capacity to larger enterprises.