San Diego, CA (PRWEB) May 20, 2013

ScaleMatrix, a front runner in the evolving Cloud Computing and Data Center market, announced today, in parallel to Dell’s Cloud Partner Program announcement, that ScaleMatrix will be one of the three initial North American partners Dell will leverage in the to deliver cloud services.

Of the three providers chosen, ScaleMatrix, will bolster Dell’s Cloud offering with their innovative VMware based TruCore™ Performance Cloud hosting platform, which provides users enhanced control over functionality and performance. Services are delivered from proprietary world-class data centers, and leverage enterprise hardware, storage and cutting-edge security and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation services.

“We are ecstatic to have been chosen as a partner to help deliver Cloud Services for Dell and their clients. We believe that the mix of ScaleMatrix enterprise class VMware and OpenStack hosting services, alongside Dell’s hardware, software and professional services offerings are highly complementary. We look forward to driving cloud adoption while creating increased value for our joint clients as a result of this partnership,” said Chris Orlando, co-founder and CSMO at ScaleMatrix.

As part of Dell’s broader cloud strategy, the Dell Cloud Partner Program will offer customers more choice of partners and platforms while the company continues to expand and integrate its cloud portfolio of services, software and hardware.

Dell will also maintain its commitment to its private cloud solutions. Specifically, Dell remains committed to the OpenStack platform and community, with offerings such as the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution and the Dell-led open source project, Crowbar.

Dell will provide its customers with multiple options to meet their business needs and help ensure a smooth transition to a Dell Cloud Partner or internal solution.

About DELL
Dell Inc. listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. Dell Services develops and delivers a comprehensive suite of services and solutions in applications, business process, consulting, infrastructure and support to help customers succeed. Learn more at http://www.dell.com.

About ScaleMatrix
ScaleMatrix takes an infrastructure-based approach to providing best-in-class hosting solutions to clients at every stage of their IT Lifecycle development. By investing heavily in both facilities and personnel, and developing strategic relationships with critical hardware, software, and support service vendors – we are able to offer our clients industry leading solutions which include design, deployment, and ongoing management as part of our standard offering. For more information on ScaleMatrix, visit ScaleMatrix.com.

Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. Acting as a single-source supplier, Dell will offer customers a choice of vendors and technology, freedom from lock-in to a single platform or pricing model and a central point of solution integration and control. Sales of Dell’s current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings.

“Many Dell customers plan to expand their use of public cloud, but in order to truly reap the benefits, they want a choice of providers, flexibility and interoperability across platforms and models, the ability to compare cloud economics and workload performance, and a cohesive way to manage all of it,” said Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president, Dell Cloud. “The partner approach offers increased value to Dell’s customers, channel partners and shareholders, as part of our comprehensive cloud strategy to deliver market-leading, end-to-end cloud solutions.”

The Dell Cloud Partner Program launches today with three initial partners in North America. These public cloud providers give customers a choice of platform and a range of geographical coverage. In EMEA, Dell will leverage the Dell Cloud Partner Program, where relevant, alongside the recently launched Global Services Provider Program to offer customers a greater choice of EMEA-located clouds. The three initial North American partners are:

• Joyent, a high-performance cloud infrastructure-as-a-service provider for real-time web and mobile applications offers a fully-featured Cloud IaaS with its worldwide, innovative and open technology platform. Joyent is positioned as a Challenger in the 2012 Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant and has out-of-the-box compatibility with Enstratius’ multi-cloud management.
• ScaleMatrix, offering their innovative TruCore™ Performance Cloud hosting platform, provides users enhanced control over functionality and performance. Services are offered from proprietary world-class data centers, and leverage enterprise hardware, storage and cutting-edge security and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation services.
• ZeroLag, which combines VMware-powered on-demand cloud infrastructure with professional services and custom-designed solutions. ZeroLag services are backed by highly-trained and experienced engineers committed to delivering the highest levels of performance, reliability, security and support.

Customers can immediately begin to purchase products from these partners through their Dell sales representative. The Dell Cloud Partner Program will expand to new partners and beyond IaaS, as determined by customer demand.

As part of Dell’s broader cloud strategy, the Dell Cloud Partner Program will offer customers more choice of partners and platforms while the company continues to expand and integrate its cloud portfolio of services, software and hardware. Dell’s newly acquired multi-cloud management platform, Enstratius, will help customers manage both single and multi-cloud environments, and can help integrate the partner offerings into Dell’s end-to-end cloud solutions. Enstratius currently supports more than 20 public and private cloud platforms, including OpenStack, VMware, Rackspace and Windows Azure, with the added flexibility to easily add new clouds.

Dell will also maintain its commitment to its private cloud solutions. Specifically, Dell remains committed to the OpenStack platform and community, with offerings such as the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution and the Dell-led open source project, Crowbar.

Dell will provide its customers with multiple options to meet their business needs and help ensure a smooth transition to a Dell Cloud Partner or internal solution.

Partner Quotes
“Joyent is pleased to have been selected by Dell as a strategic cloud infrastructure partner. As long-standing partners with Dell, Joyent is fully aligned with the Dell DNA of providing customers quality, performance, flexibility and value,” said Henry Wasik, president and CEO, Joyent.

“We are ecstatic to have been chosen as a partner to help deliver Cloud Services for Dell and their clients. We believe that the mix of ScaleMatrix enterprise class VMware and OpenStack hosting services, alongside Dell’s hardware, software and professional services offerings are highly complementary. We look forward to driving cloud adoption while creating increased value for our joint clients as a result of this partnership,” said Chris Orlando, co-founder and CSMO of ScaleMatrix.

“ZeroLag is extremely proud to be selected by Dell as a premier cloud hosting partner. ZeroLag and Dell are perfectly aligned in our customer driven approach to technology solutions. ZeroLag leverages both public and private cloud infrastructure powered by Dell hardware to offer excellent ROI and scalable, high-performance solutions for our customers. I can’t be more pleased about teaming up with Dell to offer our services,” said Greg Strelzoff, founder and CEO, ZeroLag Communications.

About DELL
Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. Dell Services develops and delivers a comprehensive suite of services and solutions in applications, business process, consulting, infrastructure and support to help customers succeed. Learn more at www.dell.com.

Dell is a trademark of Dell Inc. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

Media Contacts
Corie Pierce
Dell | Services Communications
Plano, Texas
+1 972.577.3430
+1 214.458.7614
corie_pierce@dell.com

Link to original release: http://www.dell.com/Learn/us/en/uscorp1/secure/2013-05-20-dell-public-cloud-partner-ecosystem

Now commonplace, the SSAE16 controls report is the replacements for the retired SAS 70 predecessor. The newly updated SSAE 16 SOC 1 Type 2 extends the provisions of the SAS 70 report and adds a number of new IT focused attestation features. The AT 101 SOC 2 is a completely new concept, evaluating service organization controls in security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, and/or privacy. The report is definable by the subject to include as many of these trust areas as desired, from a single subject to all five areas.

ScaleMatrix’s recent AT101 reporting includes evaluations of controls for all five areas. ScaleMatrix can now share the successful results of these audited controls, including all five trust areas, with clients requiring support for Title 21 Part 11, 45 CFR parts 160-164, HIPAA, SOX, or like solutions.

In support of our international clients, the ScaleMatrix audit staff is fully able to engage international standards such as 95/46/EC and have significant experience with audits and reporting to the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) standards.

“Our ability to help our clients address, respond to, and manage controls structures has proven to be very valuable, helping them meet their reporting and audit response obligations as they pertain to specific verticals, such as financial services, legal services, and managed services to name a few”, said Daniel Zeiler, VP of Technology at ScaleMatrix.

With a burgeoning cloud and managed services business, ScaleMatrix understands the value of maintaining a well-managed controls practice. By operating our data centers in adherence with the strictest standards, by offering pre-packaged cloud and hosting solutions aimed at supporting our highly regulated clients, and by employing certified staff members (Staff members hold: CISSP, CISA, CISM, CRISC & CGEIT) to support each of these offers, ScaleMatrix drives considerable value for our clients trying to navigate complex compliance challenges.

About ScaleMatrix

ScaleMatrix takes an infrastructure-based approach to providing best-in-class hosting solutions to clients at every stage of their IT Lifecycle development. By investing heavily in both facilities and personnel, and developing strategic relationships with critical hardware, software, and support service vendors – we are able to offer our clients industry leading solutions which include design, deployment, and ongoing management as part of our standard offering. For more information on ScaleMatrix, visit ScaleMatrix.com.

ScaleMatrix, a San Diego based growth leader in the evolving Cloud and Colocation market, announced today that industry veteran John Teeling would join the organization as Vice President of Data Center Operations. Teeling is a seasoned data center expert with 20+ years of hands-on management and operational experience under his belt.

Teeling joins ScaleMatrix after more than a decade at Intuit, where he held several key management roles within the Enterprise Data Center Management and Operations Teams.  His tenure included responsibilities for the operation and support of multiple state-of-the-art production-level Data Centers, including large scale MTDC’s responsible for hosting Intuit’s revenue generating offerings.

“Having held various responsibilities for both private Intuit owned data centers, as well as a number of 3^rd party multi-tenant facilities around the US and Canada, I was immediately intrigued by the sophistication and efficiency of the new ScaleMatrix Dynamic Density Control™ platform.  I’ve watched the evolution of enterprise data centers with great interest, and I believe that this new platform is a game changer.  I am extremely excited to be part of a team who is redefining the value proposition for outsourced data center operations.” Teeling said.

John’s resume includes more than 10 years of data center operations and management experience, split between Intuit and Raytheon Technical Services, in addition to his distinguished career as a Navy Electronics and Computer Systems Specialist.  He holds enterprise level process experience in Incident, Change, Problem and Asset Management, as well as ITIL V3 certification.  John has overseen and led critical compliance and audit efforts at data centers throughout North America, helping implement and maintain operations in support of PCI, SSAE16, and AT101 type reporting.  At Intuit, a technology focused Fortune 500 organization, he held responsibilities for Enterprise Incident Management as well as coordinating critical system maintenance and support with multiple vendors and support staff across multiple data center locations.  John holds a M.S. degree in Telecom Systems Management and a B.S. degree in Electronics Management.

Teeling, whose new role and focus will complement the work ScaleMatrix is already doing as a leader in data center operations, will strengthen day-to-day operations of all ScaleMatrix data center facilities nationwide.

“As we continue to grow our high-density, high efficiency data center footprints across the nation, we are actively recruiting top talent to ensure that our clients receive the best support and services available anywhere.  With John’s unique mix of enterprise data center experience, global data center acumen, and focus on process driven operations – we could find no better candidate to help expand the vision and capabilities of ScaleMatrix” said Chris Orlando, CSMO at ScaleMatrix. “John has the background and know-how to ensure that our customers continue to enjoy one of the best uptime records in the industry, year after year without fail.”

Teeling’s first day at ScaleMatrix was April 8, 2013.

About ScaleMatrix

ScaleMatrix takes an infrastructure-based approach to providing best-in-class hosting solutions to clients at every stage of their IT Lifecycle development. By investing heavily in both facilities and personnel, and developing strategic relationships with critical hardware, software, and support service vendors – we are able to offer our clients industry leading solutions which include design, deployment, and ongoing management as part of our standard offering. For more information on ScaleMatrix, visit ScaleMatrix.com.

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What is March Mingle? Since 2004, March Mingle has brought together technologists from dozens of San Diego user groups for a night of networking, food, drinks, and relaxation. Thanks to the support of these user groups, the event has successfully drawn hundreds of attendees every year. In 2013, the 9th Annual March Mingle promises to be just as exciting!

Organized by the folks at San Diego Tech Scene, March Mingle is a technology-agnostic event that brings together developers of all flavors for San Diego’s annual “Technology Woodstock” or “Ultimate Geek Happy Hour.”  Hosted at a local venue and conducted without sales or technical presentations, you are invited to talk shop, trade war stories, and munch on finger food while enjoying the evening with San Diego’s finest technologists. Plus, we’ll raffle off several prizes – there’s no reason to miss out!

Who? Lots of San Diego area Technology Groups have been invited to participate this year! As many as we could reach out to. Here’s a list:

• SD PHP
• San Diego Robotics Club
• IAMCP (International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners)
• SMCSD
• SDTechCoffee
• iMarketers Association
• San Diego Social Media Club
• San Diego Tech Founders (Meetup)
• Augmented Reality Developers San Diego (AR Dev on Meetup)
• UX SIG (www.uxsig.org)
• HTML5 User Group (HTML5 on Meetup)
• Lotico Semantic Web (Semantic on Meetup)
• San Diego Google Technology Users (GTUG on Meetup)
• San Diego VIP’s (SD VIP’s)
• eBusiness Owners (eBiz on Meetup)
• San Diego WordPress (SD WordPress)
• SDADUG (ColdFusion, Flex, Actionscript – sdadug.org)
• SDdotNETDG (.NET – sddotnetdg.org)
• SD Perl Mongers (Perl – sandiego.pm.org)
• SDOUG (Oracle – sdoug.org)
• SDJUG (Java – sdjug.org)
• SDSQLUG (SQL Server – sdsqlug.org)
• SDLUG Kernel-Panic (Linux – kernel-panic.org)
• SDACM (Assn. Computing Machinery)
• SandCHI (Computer-Human Interaction | FB)
• SD WebDesign Meetup (Design – webdesign.meetup.com)
• WINSUG (Windows – winsug.org)
• SDNPA (Networking – sdnpa.org)
• SDBUG (BSD – sdbug.org)
• XPSD (eXtreme Programming – xpsd.org)
• San Diego .NET User Group (.NET SanDiegoDotNet.com)
• SD Ruby (Ruby SDRuby.org)
• RefreshSD (Web User Group RefreshSD.org)
• SMBSD (Social Media Breakfast SD)
• WebSanDiego (General – websandiego.org)
• SDGTUG (SD Google Tech)
• Django SD (Django User Group)
• SD DRUPAL (groups.drupal.org/san-diego)
• SD JOOMLA (joomlasandiego.org)
• IxDA San Diego (Interaction Design Association)
• Green User Experience (facebook groups)
• SDMCA Media Communications Assoc. (sdmca-i.org)
• SDSEO (SEO on Meetup)
• SDMODO 3D Modeling (sdmodo.org)
• SDMUG Mac User Group (sdmug.org)
• FCPUG Final Cut Pro User Group (sdmug/fcpug)
• SD2600 SD Hackers Group (san2600.org)
• SDBLOGGERS (SD Bloggers on meetup)
• SD Web Techs (SD Web Techs on meetup)

ScaleMatrix has opened its San Diego Business Continuity Center located next to the company’s Kearny Mesa campus in the eastern suburbs of San Diego. Supported by power generators for emergency power, the 46,000-square-foot, climate-controlled business continuity center provides diverse and redundant Internet connectivity and armed security, as well as phone services. The facility features high-speed, multi-homed Internet connectivity and direct interconnection to colocated cabinets and cloud infrastructure. Amenities also include a shared kitchen space, which will have coffee service and vending machines.

Most of the larger multi-tenant datacenter (MTDC) facilities today provide temporary office space, conference rooms and kitchen areas for colocation customers. These amenities are typically offered on a first-come, first-serve basis. ScaleMatrix’s new facility, in contrast, offers secure, dedicated cubicles for $499 per month, and suites starting at $1,499 per month. The company will also provide custom suites to customers with specific space and configuration requirements. The company reported that several San Diego institutions have already secured space and that half of those clients have asked for custom suites. With an on-site construction crew, ScaleMatrix can build a custom suite within 30 days.

The value of dedicated business continuity space

The temporary office space, conference rooms and kitchen areas provided in MTDC facilities suffices if a colocation customer suffers an outage and requires time to restore systems and data. However, significant issues arise around office space utilization when a widespread disastrous event occurs that affects multiple customers in the MTDC facility or if multiple customers schedule recovery testing at the same time.

IT resources from multiple companies converge on the datacenter and vie with one another for resources to restore systems and data. It should be noted that some disasters could result in IT resources working for days to ensure all critical systems are operational and business operations have been restored. It will be during such events that an organization will most appreciate the investment in dedicated cubicles and suites for its recovery team’s uses while restoring business continuity.

Competition

San Diego has the 17th largest GDP out of the metros in North America and the city has seen steady demand for MTDC services. The economy in the city has a number of drivers, including the city’s deepwater port; hosting the world’s largest naval fleet; a shared border with Mexico, leading to important trade; tourism and the city’s growing number of technology firms providing demand for MTDC facilities, including wireless, life sciences, pharmaceutical research and health services. San Diego is located about 120 miles south of Los Angeles and 87 miles south of Orange County, so MTDC providers in the city do see some limited competition from datacenter providers in Orange County and even further north in Los Angeles. We estimate that roughly 75% of the demand for San Diego datacenter space tends to come from within a 75-100 mile radius.

We identified nine MTDC providers in San Diego during our research of the market this year with a total of 14 active datacenters. While local competition for colocation services exists from regional providers American Internet Services (AIS) and RedIT, ScaleMatrix aims to target clients on a national basis with a combination of traditional colocation services, cloud-based hosting and a growing managed service portfolio. The company sees Rackspace and Layered Technologies as its biggest cloud competitors for private cloud services.

San Diego area data center operators are offering more than just space for computers. They are making space for people too.

Born out of experience with actual disasters, local competitors ScaleMatrix, American Internet Services and RedIT are all stepping up in various ways to assure their customers have a place to work near their servers during emergencies, when electrical power may be interrupted at offices and residences.

ScaleMatrix is building what it calls the San Diego Business Continuity Center next to its data center in Kearny Mesa. The first customer will move in next month, said Chris Orlando, a ScaleMatrix co-founder and its chief sales and marketing officer.

The three vendors offer San Diego businesses a menu of computer services, including redundant data centers in San Diego and other markets.

AIS and RedIT each have second data centers in Phoenix. ScaleMatrix works with a center near Houston. If any of their San Diego data centers go down, the Arizona or Texas centers are there to keep data safe.

Steve Wallace, chief technology officer for American Internet Services, recalled standing on the roof at an AIS facility in Kearny Mesa in October 2007, watching wildfires approach.

“Most disaster recovery strategies get data into at least another geographic risk zone,” said Wallace.

“We have huge pipes that go directly to Phoenix,” he added. “We can synchronize the data in San Diego and Phoenix if something bad happens.”

Business Continuity

ScaleMatrix got to thinking about its Business Continuity Center during the blackout of September 2011.

Like other local data centers, ScaleMatrix’s Kearny Mesa facility had emergency generators. It was an island of power and light during the event. The outage started around 3:30 p.m. and continued all night, stretching more than 12 hours.

ScaleMatrix representatives recalled that executives from the health care and telecom sectors set up war rooms at their facility.

“We looked at that and said, ‘Wow,’” Orlando said.

Sept. 8, 2011 convinced the owners of ScaleMatrix that they could lease dedicated office space with guaranteed electrical power, telephone services, access to the Internet and close proximity to servers.

“We have the capacity to build 70 offices in this space,” Orlando said, as he showed a visitor around the second floor of a warehouse on Kearny Villa Road. A small part of the space was already partitioned by wallboard, but most of the expanse had yet to be finished. There was the smell of fresh paint.

ScaleMatrix is marketing cubicles at $499 per month, and suites starting at $1499 per month. High-profile San Diego institutions have already leased offices, Orlando said, and half of those clients have asked for custom spaces. With an on-site construction crew, ScaleMatrix can build a space to suit within 30 days, Orlando said.

Amenities will include a shared kitchen space, which will have coffee service and vending machines. Like the data center next door, the business continuity center will have armed security and emergency power generators. It’s also located near the confluence of several freeways.

Wallace, the executive at AIS, said most data centers let customers set up shop under their roofs, free of charge, during disasters. During the 2011 blackout, he said people congregated at AIS’ facility, which had generator power, and watched Thursday night football on television.

Orlando noted that the ScaleMatrix cubicles will be reserved for the exclusive use of customers who lease them.

Wallace also noted that AIS’ Phoenix location is within a comfortable driving distance from San Diego, if technicians needed to work on computer equipment in person.

Technical Sophistication Required

Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions require a great deal of technical sophistication. It’s something all three of the San Diego vendors offer. The systems must include tools for failing over to the second site, Wallace said.

Keeping a website up and running may be less important than making sure people get paid, servicing clients or shipping product, he added.

ScaleMatrix, for its part, now has slightly less than 100,000 square feet of space in Kearny Mesa. Its data center clients have grown to include San Diego’s Superior Court and the San Diego Unified School District.

AIS counts Callaway Golf, Mitchell International and Hold-Free Networks among its customers.

Multi-tenant datacenter (MTDC) providers continue to report steady customer contract wins. We see these new customer wins and renewals as a validation that our expectations for continued growth in the colocation sector are finishing the year on the rise. This week’s roundup highlights two wins for Equinix, which was selected by LMAX Exchange in London and by ChinaNetCenter in Los Angeles, DuPont Fabros Technology disclosing expanded leases with two existing tenants, The San Diego Unified School District expanding its services with ScaleMatrix and Opera Software selecting Latisys for colocation services.

LMAX Exchange selects Equinix in London

LMAX Exchange, the London-based foreign exchange, has selected Equinix’s London LD4/5 datacenter for its primary operational site. LMAX Exchange is extremely sensitive to latency issues and chose Platform Equinix because of the low latency, as well as for the large number of other foreign exchange activity that is transacted through Equinix. Such foreign exchange transactions also need access to global support and connections because this is a 24-hour activity, with links between major financial markets such as London and New York. Equinix cites a 65.7ms roundtrip for data between its London and New York facilities.

Platform Equinix is an ecosystem of customers that the company brings together to foster high levels of interaction between customers within the Equinix facilities, an integration that significantly benefits applications with low-latency requirements.

Equinix operates facilities and connects customers across 30 markets globally, including 16 of the largest financial centers. The company datacenters are located in the top datacenter markets worldwide; we have estimated datacenter utilization in the top markets continues to increase due to an imbalance in supply and demand. During Q3, Equinix opened expansions in several markets including Boca Raton, Florida; Dallas; Secaucus and Bergen, New Jersey; Amsterdam; Hong Kong; London; Paris; Shanghai and Sydney. The company has additional expansions underway in Ashburn, Virginia; Chicago; Seattle; Rio de Janeiro; São Paulo; Singapore and Zurich through the early part of 2013.

We see services to the financial vertical as a natural fit for colocation services; at the most basic level, these companies achieve their goals only when they interact with each other over electronic trading networks, and the interconnection possible within colocation facilities would be difficult for individual firms to achieve with internal datacenters. While costs are always important, more strategic for this business sector is the capability for low-latency transaction completion.

ChinaNetCenter enters US with Equinix in Los Angeles

In a second customer win, ChinaNetCenter selected Platform Equinix as it expands its service into the United States. ChinaNetCenter chose the Equinix Los Angeles LA1 datacenter for deployment of its content delivery network (CDN) node.

ChinaNetCenter is a leading service provider in China for both CDN and Internet datacenter (IDC) products, with more than 2,000 customers depending on their content. This has included support for global companies such as Huawei, ZTE and Audi, along with international event coverage including the World Cup (2010) and Olympics (2008). In the announcement ChinaNetCenter cited the carrier neutrality and carrier concentration at the Equinix IBX, along with the reliability and ability to handle further expansions as critical factors in making its selection.

CDN and related media and entertainment verticals continue to be driving forces within the MTDC top markets. The bandwidth-intensive nature of their services call for a geographically dispersed presence in order to manage reliable data distribution within the performance expectations of subscribers.

DuPont Fabros fills Chicago facility

While not releasing the names of tenants per its policy, DuPont Fabros disclosed the expansion of relationships with two existing tenants, which has brought its Chicago facility (CH1) up to 100% leased. The company announced that one existing tenant in its Piscataway, New Jersey (NJ1) facility has leased space within the CH1 facility, taking 0.43MW of capacity in Phase 1 of that facility. The second new tenant has been an existing tenant in Ashburn, Virginia (ACC1), and has expanded its relationship with DuPont by executing a lease for CH1-Phase II; this lease totals 2.6MW, and will be utilized in three phases throughout 2013. Combined, these two tenants have now raised the CH1 facility to 100% leased. CH1 was developed in two phases, with a combined 485,000-square-foot gross space and 231,000 square feet of raised floor; the facility has 36.4MW critical load capacity.

In addition to the space in CH1, the second tenant above has also executed a lease for DuPont’s Santa Clara (SC1) facility, comprising 5.69MW of capacity. With this additional lease, SC1 (Phase 1) is now 75% leased; the first phase of this facility has been designed with a critical load capacity of 18.2MW.

Filling CH1 is certainly good news for DuPont. We have previously reported the increasing percentage of colocation customers using more than one facility, and the company’s announcement highlights that this is also the case for MTDC wholesale providers. Both tenants referenced in the DuPont announcement are extending the relationship with DuPont to a second or third facility. While for colocation customers such diversity is often driven by resilience architecture, the larger footprints taken by wholesale customers are more likely driven by pure capacity demands. For wholesale vendors, expanding relationships with existing customers also point to high customer satisfaction, as we see the MTDC markets as remaining highly competitive. Customers have choices, and positive customer satisfaction is indicated by these tenants opting to expand their leases with DuPont.

San Diego Schools choose ScaleMatrix

California’s second largest school district, the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), has chosen ScaleMatrix for its datacenter needs. The school district is heavily dependent on system availability for its educational and classroom services. The offering hosted at ScaleMatrix includes:

• Active-active hosting configuration
• Redundancy and uptime support
• Access to enterprise-class power and cooling
• Facility security
• Support services

We see the educational market as an ideal segment for colocation services. Colocation offers economies of scale to school districts in meeting their IT needs, and allows the districts to focus their staff on technology within the classrooms without having to manage datacenters or servers potentially installed in each school building.

Opera Software chooses Latisys

Opera Software selected Latisys for the deployment of its colocation service in Ashburn, Virginia. Opera offers Web browser services that have garnered significant customer utilization on mobile devices due to its compression technology that minimizes bandwidth utilization. Opera is expanding its service to provide coverage for Latin American customers, and needed to be close to its social network partners whose data is critical to the browser responses. Latisys met its needs in Ashburn due to:

• Low latency between Latisys and major social media providers’ East Coast installations
• Stable and cost-effective power infrastructure
• Access to international interconnects

We have seen the eastward flow of social media and entertainment companies from the West Coast to the Ashburn area as a key driver to their content performance model, and Opera is taking advantage of that transcontinental shift with its expanded north-to-south growth, which intersects in northern Virginia.

This article appears in the October 2012 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.

Cloud computing is taking hold in healthcare as a form of data sharing and for archival storage, an infrastructure cost-cutter and a time-to-market accelerator, and even as a method of recovering from disaster. But as author William Gibson famously said, if the future is already here, it isn’t evenly distributed yet, and cloud computing is a textbook example. Concerns about security, privacy, regulatory compliance, and service-level agreements are just a few of those cited in and around healthcare as go-slow signals for adoption of the cloud.

Just don’t show those signals to a growing contingent of CIOs and other healthcare technologists who are making real use of cloud computing today to help solve pressing needs.

“We have several examples of what we’re doing in the cloud,” says Joe Bengfort, executive director and CIO of University of California San Francisco Medical Center, which posted net patient service revenue of more than $1.8 billion in 2011. “Some are quite closely related to the medical record system and patient care. Some of them are more back in the weeds of the infrastructure and the back-end technology.”

At the same time as UCSF is making these preliminary steps into the cloud, it’s also just bet big on a traditional client/server-based electronic medical record from Epic, which went live in June 2012. “We use an approach we call development on the edges of the medical record,” Bengfort says. “Our strategy is to develop capabilities outside of the medical record, and then feed that information back into that system, or to link from the medical record environment into some outside system.”

One of those outside cloud systems, Salesforce.com, has deep ties to UCSF. In 2010, its founder, Marc Benioff, pledged $100 million of his fortune to the UCSF Children’s Hospital now under construction. Salesforce.com’s development engine is powering a breast cancer research project spanning UCSF and the rest of the University of California system, Bengfort says.

“We’re using the Salesforce platform to develop applications really around surveys—surveys associated with screening or survivorship, things of that nature—that our patients utilize,” Bengfort says.

“They can either utilize it by going into what looks a lot like a website, but it’s really the Salesforce cloud,” he says. “Or they can access it through an iPad application that we’ve developed that they use on an iPad while they’re at the doctor’s office.”

UCSF has different programs written in the Salesforce.com environment that do basic things like organize the data from the survey. These programs also do computations on the risk scores for developing breast cancer based on the input that they’ve gotten from the patient. These results can be linked to or moved into the medical record, so that if this patient presents at the hospital or at a clinic, that information is accessible by his or her care team, he says.

“We still have all the issues of patient information, PHI that has to be protected, that can’t be shared unless it’s agreed to by the patient, so you still have all those restrictions,” Bengfort says. “We’ve done a lot of work with Salesforce in certifying their environments for our PHI, so we think we’re in good shape around all those issues.”

UCSF’s boldest cloud move has been to develop a way to back up its new Epic medical records to the cloud. “All the infrastructure is in place,” Bengfort says. “We’re replicating our data right now. We’re through two rounds of disaster testing, and we’re at a point now where we want to test the ability to not just fail over to switch to a redundant system but to fail back to restore the system to its original state.”

The capability is so new that the providing cloud vendor, Dell Healthcare, has only implemented it with UCSF, Bengfort says. This implementation was key to UCSF as it prepared to achieve compliance with Meaningful Use 2011; the 600-bed main hospital was on track to attest last month.

Those medical records predating the Epic system also found a home in the cloud. Legacy Data Access takes records from old medical systems and converts them to a format that can be stored and retrieved in the cloud. “They will custom-develop a webpage so you can see it in the format you want to see it back, and then you just pay a subscription service for the access to that data,” Bengfort says.

Some healthcare organizations laid solid groundwork for the move to the cloud by investing substantially in application virtualization some years back. “We’ve always been a proponent of looking at how we use computing resources on the fly without having to add a lot more hardware infrastructure and software licensing to go along with that,” says Dee Cantrell, CIO of Emory Healthcare.

With more than 1,830 licensed beds, more than 20 health centers, and 9,000 employees, Atlanta-based Emory has partnered with GNAX for the past five years to provide niche clinical systems.

“I’ve actually taken work off of my technical team, who was previously having to work on setting up servers and getting the hardware connected appropriately with the network and making sure all the security safeguards were in place, as well as loading the applications, and of course with that comes a lot of licensing expenses,” Cantrell says. “Now, instead of doing that, we actually have our technical resources really focused more on going out and working with our customers, looking at strategy for new solutions, and working on implementing new things.

“So they don’t really do the setting up of the hardware, the application, or supporting that anymore. We actually get that service through the cloud offering that GNAX provides.”

One such niche system being served up in the cloud is Emory’s cardiology images, Cantrell says. “We actually acquired two new hospitals that have their own systems that we’re in the process of consolidating and moving to the Emory Healthcare systems,” she says. “We need to be able to store these images in a secured location and not have to do a lot of up-front investment for hardware. The cloud offering allows us to do a subscription-based approach, so we’re using operating dollars instead of the capital dollars that are so hard to come by these days.”

Some software controlling Baxter infusion pumps is now being provided via software as a service. Cantrell says migrating these types of applications over to the cloud has realized Emory a 30% savings by avoiding unneeded hardware, hardware maintenance, and related infrastructure components.

Sheer speed of deployment is driving many hospitals to implement their ambulatory medical records via software as a service. Three years ago, Continuum Health Partners—a New York City–based system with seven major facilities, 2,180 certified beds, and an annual operating budget of $2.8 billion—selected eClinicalWorks as its ambulatory EMR.

“We really didn’t want to expand our internal staff organization to the degree necessary to really support the implementation and the rollout at the same time,” says Mark Moroses, senior vice president for information technology and CIO at Continuum. “We could move quicker by not having to support the application infrastructure as well as the complexity of going from practice to practice and dealing with the application integration issues, the data migration issues, the workflow issues, and the adoption issues.”

By the end of 2012, Continuum will have more than 500 physicians utilizing eClinicalWorks, Moroses says. “So that’s been pretty successful for us.”

Moroses makes the point that the software-as-a-service industry has attracted vendors who now have their own clinical resources on staff, supporting the rollout of cloud services in healthcare in a far more knowledgeable way than just a few years ago.

“These are companies that are specifically focused on healthcare, so they understand the HIPAA regulations,” Moroses says. “They understand all of the privacy concerns. So when we express those, they have a better answer, and they also are able to provide and are more willing to provide different things that we would insist upon, like a biannual audit of their data center that they have to provide us with their own internal audit documentation.” Moroses says the software can review the audit trails on a consistent basis.

“In another industry, that maybe seems onerous or they may not be able to provide those as regularly, but because these guys are savvy in healthcare, our lawyers and the data people, anything that we ask, they weren’t surprised at the request, and they had an approach to answer it,” Moroses says.

One place where the cloud and healthcare seem to have a natural fit is the build-out of health information exchanges. Cantrell says cloud computing makes image sharing in such an exchange much easier.

Likewise, Moroses says Continuum went live in January with a cloud-based HIE from Caradigm, the joint venture between GE and Microsoft.

“We didn’t want to have to deal with the massive amounts of data and the complexities of integrating with every practice we brought on board,” says Moroses. “We wanted to focus on the use of the HIE and the use of the data, so it was really a strategic decision to say, ‘Okay, the things that are really most important to us are not the infrastructure nuts and bolts kind of stuff. That, we can just go to the cloud for. We can just rely on somebody else and pay a flat fee.’ ”

Archiving in the cloud is also on Continuum’s radar. “We’re having conversations with people around the idea of putting images and long-term archive in the cloud, and that has some appeal to us, too, because as part of a medical record, it’s a pretty dense element of data,” Moroses says. “Images are pretty large size, and for people to be able to access them anywhere and not have it really pulled across your network is appealing.”

Static storage media, such as DVDs or optical disks, have a lifespan. Pediatricians may have to keep images for 21 years, and even tape won’t last that long, Moroses says. “Probably the safest thing is some kind of form of spinning disk that I can either mirror or have multiple copies. [of].”

Still, all three health systems are typical in that they continue to run their own data centers for storing their primary inpatient EMRs. A big reason: These systems were purchased so recently in the rush to attest for meaningful use, the institutions are still amortizing the cost of building and equipping these data centers with software licenses. “It is going to be a matter of finances as we look to do more migration,” Cantrell says. “One of the first things that we look at now, any time a new solution is approved for implementation, is [to] offer it through the cloud service offering through GNAX.”

Bengfort sees rapid growth for cloud computing in healthcare. “From a medical center standpoint, I tend to be a little bit more conservative about it,” he says. “It may not sound that way, because we’re using a lot of cloud today, but we’re using things that either we’ve been personally involved in developing the criteria for, much like the Dell example, or they are quite mature, proven rock solid.

“When you are providing care to patients, the closer it is to the patient, the more rock solid it has to be,” says Bengfort. “I love innovation. I hope you can tell I’m certainly pushing the edges where I can, but when it comes to patient care, it’s got to be a well-proven and very secure environment. From a medical center standpoint, I might be a little more cautious than we’re going to be on the university or the research side, where we can be a little bit more assertive about what we push into the cloud. So that’s kind of just the high level of it, but I certainly think leveraging capabilities like this are going to be more and more prevalent as we move forward.”

Another concern is to address service expectations with the vendor.

“The contractual arrangements that you have in your agreement are really key,” Cantrell says. “I don’t think you can shortchange that process, because you do want to define pretty clearly what your service-level expectations are, not only from a performance perspective, but also from a turnaround time perspective, if you happen to have an issue.”

The cloud also represents a starting point for many future innovative healthcare technologies. “In the home healthcare space, where you’re sending patients home with monitors and telemetry data is being sent back out, I would see using a cloud-based service to gather that data, process that data, maybe analyze it, have certain thresholds, certain trends that they’re analyzing for,” Bengfort says. “I would see that as a great innovative service for the cloud that doesn’t exist today, specifically for the healthcare space.

“We could probably come up with lots of examples as we start to push accountable care organizations and we’re trying to manage proactively the health of a community before they ever even present at the hospital or at the clinic,” Bengfort says. “There’s got to be creative cloud-based solutions to help provide services to those accountable care groups.”