JLL Hosts Alibaba Cloud Event in New York City
Exciting Trends in the technology and commercial real estate world
The first interview of our IT Intelligence Podcast Series features Anthony Hidalgo, Founder and President of Hidalgo Communications. Hidalgo Communications was named one of CIOReview’s 20 Most Promising IT Infrastructure Solution Providers in 2016.
This Podcast focuses on current IT trends as well as a discussion on the importance of fostering long term client-relationships and positioning clients with evolving technologies.
By: Brandon Fried
techrealestatetrends.com
Blockchain: The buzzword has strong ties to the financial industry but has endless applications to essentially all industries. A term that Goldman Sachs says the technology “has the potential to redefine transactions” and can change “everything.”
But what is Blockchain?
The blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It provides a way to record and transfer data that is transparent, safe, auditable, and resistant to outages. The blockchain has the ability to make the organizations that use it transparent, democratic, decentralized, efficient, and secure. It’s a technology that holds a lot of promise for the future, and it is already disrupting many industries.
Every industry vertical has the opportunity to effectively store transaction, customer and supplier data in a more transparent, permanent ledger online. Some major industries, other than the financial industry, such as Healthcare, Energy and Education will all be impacted by Blockchain:
Healthcare – Electronic medical records stored in a blockchain, accessed ad updated via biometrics, allow for the democratization of patient data and alleviate the burden of transferring records among providers.
Energy – Decentralized energy transfer and distribution are possible via micro transactions of data sent to blockchain, validated and re-dispersed to the grid while securing payment to the submitter.
Education – Educational institutions could utilize blockchain to store credentialing data around assessments, degrees and transcripts, as well as verification of knowledge transfer between parties.
Blockchain Diagram – Bitcoin use case
And what implications does it have on the Data Center/Cloud Industry?
While it remains unclear how and when large scale adoption of Blockchain Technology will take place, past Bitcoin, we do know there are numerous industries that will benefit from this disruptive technology. In turn, as new technology is adopted, there is a large increase in data being stored and consumed. We also have seen an explosion of new Blockchain providers hit the market (Blockchain as a Service), these providers will also become massive consumers of data.
By: Jason Bell
techrealestatetrends.com
The world is becoming a more crowded place. About 7.5 billion people currently populate the earth and the United Nations estimates this figure will rise to 9.7 billion by 2050. With this population expansion comes continued and unprecedented erosion of our natural resources. While the idea of sustainability has moved further up the global agenda, the main consideration for many data center providers is how to incorporate renewable and sustainable energy into their facilities.
We are seeing this with the current growth in data center construction projects by internet and cloud giants with a surge in investment in renewable energy generation capacity to compensate for much of the energy the future data centers will consume. The following examples are recent renewable energy projects by Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon:
Facebook recently announced their plans to build a 22 acre, exclusively renewable energy powered data center in New Albany, OH.
Apple announced the completion of a 50MW solar farm in Arizona, which will offset energy consumption by the company’s new data center in Mesa, Arizona. Apple also has contracted for the output of 130MW of capacity from a solar project in Central California.
Amazon announced the completion of a 253MW wind farm in Texas, which is also meant to offset grid electricity that powers its massive cloud.
Google has taken a leadership position in procuring renewable energy to power its data centers, lining up power purchase agreements (PPAs) totaling more than 2.6 gigawatts of wind and solar energy capacity.
This is also leading to a new paradigm shift in the location of these large deployments. New secondary markets such as Ohio, New Mexico, Nebraska and others are being considered based on the capability to develop large scale, renewable energy.
We also expect the data center REITs, developers and operators to soon follow suit as their enterprise clients will be required to follow the same green sustainability prerequisites.
After Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, Target has began to scale back its use of AWS. Click here to read more about how Target is moving its operations away from one their competitors.
