April 19, 2023

Good evening, this is Cold Isle Insights.
This is your morning briefing that meets where IT, telecommunications and infrastructure converge.

Here’s what’s inside:

• Hyperscalers and CSPs: a reluctant, inevitable union 💒

• Macnificient: A look at MacStadium 🏟

• Toyota CEO totally overpromises on hydrogen cars 🚗

• Daily Dall-e 🎨

Est. read time: 5mins, 1secs

Hyperscalers and CSPs: a reluctant, inevitable union

Their ball, their rules

Over the last decade or more communication services providers (CSPs) have been weary of trusting hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, Google, etc. Why? Well, these reasons:
1. Competition: These are the big boys, the legacy CSPs see them as direct competitors.
2. Privacy: This is the big one. Hyperscalers hold vast amounts of data and a new breach is announced all the time…
3. Regulatory concerns: In many regions regulatory restrictions can affect where data can be stored and processed. The legacy CSPs haven’t necessarily trusted the hyperscalers to comply, and more, thought it more prudent to go with small local data centers to mitigate this risk.

And there’s more, but essentially these old-school CSPs wanted to play their own game by their own rules and stay separate from the hyperscalers.

No Choice

The digitization of everything over the last 5 years, and even more so since Covid, has made this impossible. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars have been funneled into digital infrastructure, making these huge tech giants unavoidable in the space. (AT&T will fold before Amazon does)

Further challenging existing service providers is the squeeze they’ve felt due to an explosion in network demand coupled with the cost increase in capital and infrastructure.
Right now most CSPs operate in a private cloud environment, and their strategy of how they handle the cloud operations of their network over the coming couple of years will determine their ability to survive. (In the short run, in the long run they’re all dead)

Ways to win, ways to lose

There are a couple ways to win here for the CSPs, and more than a couple ways to win.
Primarily, the legacy service providers need to embrace the changing infrastructure ecosystem and adopt a more public, expansive cloud model. By partnering with the hyperscalers, the smart CSP will quickly increase its revenues beyond traditional connectivity. 

The reality is that for many, if not most, traditional CSP providers, the demand for data is outstripping their ability to provide connectivity. And their only chance to compete and thrive is to leverage the capital, access and network of the hyperscalers that they have be wearry of so long.

Those that don’t will be unable to maintain their networks and be bought up. 😢

Quick Bites 👄

• StratCap is scooping up data centers in California, Missouri, beyond. Formerly Strategic Capital, the large investment firm bought two fully-leased, midsize data centers for around $13-15 million each.
  Their wireless arm also picked up a couple of cell towers with tenants that include top three carriers. Last year StratCap acquired fully-leased data centers in Jacksonville and Milwaukee.
  It looks like their strategy is paying top-dollar for mature, developed assets in order to establish themselves in the data infrastructure space.
  
  Also, if you like seizures, you absolutely must visit their data center homepage: here.

• AHREFs saves $100s of millions NOT going to the cloud. The massive SEO software developer just posted a fascinating breakdown of the cost of migrating their servers and IT infrastructure to the cloud.

  

  ahrefs.com

  
  This is obviously a biased review, but a really interesting look at the costs involved in cloud migration (they used AWS as their hypothetical provider.)

  What’s more, it’s a completely different perspective than what you normally see in the industry.

• Holy Data Center! 19th-century church becomes university data center. Widely considered the most beautiful data center on the planet, the Barcelona Computing Center at Polytechnic University of Catalonia is a site to behold.
  
  Housed inside the deconsecrated chapel is MareNostrum (the Romans’ name for the Mediterranean Sea, literally ‘our sea’), the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, and due to the heterogeneity of its network architecture, likely the most interesting in the world.

  

  MareNostrum4

• Macnificient: MacStadium is the largest provider of Apple Mac infrastructure. Established in 2009, MacStadium is the largest provider of cloud solutions on Apple Mac infrastructure. 

  MacStadium is headquartered at its data center outside Atlanta, but over the past few years, they’ve expanded its operations to Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, Dublin and Frankfurt.
  The company exists to service companies that need to use Apple hardware at the bottom of their private cloud. A small niche, but one that their clients pay very heavily for (I’m guessing but not really).

• Youtube: The CEO of Toyota totally overpromises on Hydrogen. (Interesting look at Hydrogen combustion though) If you’re at all interested in alternative fuel, check out the video below.

Hot Links 🌭

Daily Dall-E 🎨

Here’s a painting I did in the 60s of my dad working on his iMac.

That’s enough out of me. Let me know what you think, hate it, love it or otherwise. Reply to this email and give me your feedback.