Electricity Decentralization Study

I have been thinking about an update to my now 2 year old white paper on data center site selection. Many blog posts and articles on the web this past year have prompted me to think of many new additions that could be integrated in to it.

For instance -- TreeHugger.com reported today on a very interesting story about the 100-Mile Diet for Electricity? It discusses a new/second version of a study done by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) titled Energy Self-Reliant States. It is a very interesting article that of course ties into the number one priority for data centers -- power. The study argues that "the cost of constructing new transmission lines to carry the power and electricity losses during transmission could result in an electricity cost to the consumer that is about the same, or higher, than local generation with minimal transmission upgrades."

I have a blog post brewing on the red-hot topic for 2009, smart grids, that will summarize the industry news for the year and everything that is happening with smart grid technologies. Stay tuned.

Microsoft Chicago Data Center Photo Tour

Although originally reported over a month ago at Data Center Knowledge --- CNet has a photo tour (follow-up or re-hash story) of the new Microsoft data center in Chicago today.

I am still hopeful that the data center Microsoft is planning for Des Moines will be their generation 4 data center model. I am extremely curious to see that in action. I've analyzed the video and pictures that they published last December a few thousand times trying to figure out each component and exactly how the containers are integrated and supported.

Hey Microsoft -- are you ready to build in Des Moines yet??!!?

Merger and Acquisition Targets

Mergers and acquisitions are always fun to speculate on. In this industry it seems like a week doesn't go by where some M&A activity is happening. With the recent Equinix acquisition of Switch and Data I have to wonder if more data center industry acquisitions will happen before the end of the year. Both Google and Cisco have said that shopping sprees will continue to gain speed in 2010.

thedeal.com had a Barron's article summary that intrigued me today about M&A speculation. The article points to 10 technology companies that are potential takeover candidates, including several that I have thought of:

1. Riverbed (RVBD | $1.53B market cap): major competitor to Cisco's WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. I've always thought Cisco would buy them, but perhaps HP is better suited.
   
2. NetApp (NTAP | $9.63B market cap): another possible target for Cisco. Otherwise maybe HP or Dell?
   
3. F5 Networks (FFIV | $3.73B market cap): No idea; maybe HP or EMC
   
4. Brocade (BRCD | $3.69B market cap): seems like HP is the lead candidate... if not, maybe EMC or IBM
   

and others.... Check out the complete article and list here.

Switch and Data Shareholder Investigation

There was an interesting development in the Equinix acquisition of Switch and Data late this last week. Kendall Law Group announced a shareholder investigation into Switch and Data Board of Directors in connection with the proposed acquisition by Equinix.

Their release states:

"Kendall Law Group’s investigation concerns whether the consideration to be paid to shareholders below the fair or inherent value of the Company and whether the directors and may have breached their fiduciary duties by not acting in the shareholders’ best interests in connection with the sale process."

Kendall is a national law firm and are either very large, or sue-happy, because there were 8 other investigation or class-action lawsuits announced last week according to their site.

The law offices of Howard G. Smith are apparently investigating as well.

Iowa Now Second Largest Wind Producer

The Wall Street Journal reports that Iowa has become the second largest producer of wind power in the U.S.. Tax breaks, cost recovery assurance and few zoning regulations for wind turbines are cited as reasons for the ranking.

At the end of the second quarter of 2009, Iowa had 3,043 megawatts of total wind capacity, compared with 8,361 megawatts in Texas and 2,787 megawatts in California, according to the wind-energy association. The article continues by saying that Iowa is flat landscape and lies in an enviable position on the grid - close to load centers like Chicago and Milwaukee.

Power transmission is now the road block to continued success in Iowa. Roya Stanley, Director of the Iowa Office of Energy Independence said "While we still have some room on the grid in the state, it will be critical to have agreement regionally for further transmission build-out."

The WSJ also has a very interesting article on Five Technologies that Could Change the Energy Picture. It discusses space-based solar power, advanced car batteries, utility storage, carbon capture and storage, and next-generation biofuels.

Waves, BIG Waves and Outage Explanation

Quite the news day this Tuesday, September 29, 2009

1. Google Wave will send out 100,000 invitations to Google Wave tomorrow. This is shaping up to be 'the' killer app of the year/decade. With the hype machine in full swing we'll see if it lives up to the promise. I have my request in for an invite!

2. BIG wave : after a magnitude 8.0 earth quake was recorded near American Samoa, a Tsunami warning for the South Pacific was issued. A Tsunami advisory was apparently issued for Northern California.

3. The Google Apps Sep.24 outage was a result of a high load on Google Contacts. Contacts is an integral part of Google Wave.

Cloud Computing Analysis From Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Just a quick link to an outstanding blog post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. I've linked to him before, because I thoroughly enjoy his thoughts and analysis. Among the amazing amount of cloud computing hype out there, Irving truly gets it and shows us how clouds and computing have evolved and will continue to.

Check out his August 31 post on The Data Center in the Cambrian Age. He compares cloud computing to the Cambrian Age, a geological period where evolution accelerated rapidly into more complex life forms. He also references an excellent paper done by Google engineers Luis Andre Barroso and Urs Hoelzle on Wharehouse-Scale computers.

Data Centre Stock Index Launched

The Broad Group has announced the "World's first global data centre market performance index". The index is a partnership with Data Centre News and AHV Associated LLP, a corporate finance advisor based in London. The index is a capitalisation-weighted index of large companies in the data center sector from all over the world. The index has shown so far that the U.S. dominates companies in the sector and that the sector is yielding good returns for the leading public companies engaged in data centres.

I of course, MUST protest about the "first data center index" claim of course. :) Just about a year ago I started my own capitalization-weighted index of companies I felt were at the heart of the data center industry. I recently posted an update with the graphs for how it has been doing. I maintain it in Google Spreadsheets, and would be happy to share it if anyone is interested.

The Internet turns 40

As a follow-up to my post yesterday on BBN -- I found this article at ComputerWorld about the Internet turning 40. September 2, 1969 (very good year) computer scientists at UCLA created the first network connection between two computers. Companies present during this exciting time were GTE Corp., DARPA, Honeywell and Scientific Data Systems.

The article interviews UCLA distinguished Professor of Computer Science Leonard Kleinrock, who was one of the men who enabled the two computers to exchange data. The UCLA web site also has a personal history/biography of Kleinrock: "The Birth of the Internet"

Raytheon Acquires BBN Technologies

Government contractor Raytheon has acquired BBN Technologies. Most people (I think) won't even recognize the company name BBN Technologies. I've been in IT long enough (barely) that I remember BBN from the very early days of the Internet. BBN is a Massachusetts company known for the development of packet switching, including work for the ARPANET; predecessor to the Internet. They also developed the first TCP protocol for Unix. Wikipedia has the wonderful merger and acquistion history for BBN:

BBN was acquired by GTE in 1997 and BBN's ISP division BBN Planet was joined with GTE's national fiber network to became GTE Internetworking, "powered by BBN". When GTE and Bell Atlantic merged to become Verizon in 2000, the ISP portion of BBN was included in assets spun off as Genuity. In March 2004, Verizon sold BBN to a group of private investors. In September 2009 Raytheon entered into an agreement to acquire BBN

Following the acquisition, BBN Technologies will become part of Raytheon Network Centric Systems.
I had not been to the BBN web site in quite some time ; upon browsing, they have some pretty amazing research projects listed:

1. Flexible Intra-autonomous-system Routing Environment
2. Smart Environment for Network Control, Monitoring and Management
3. Density-and Asymmetry-aware wireless Networking
4. Proprietary waveforms for wireless networks
5. Terabit router traffic engineering

Network World has a very nice article (back in May) on DARPA military research projects. Check this one out (from the Network World article):

DARPA's Quantum Entanglement Science and Technology (QuEST) program is creating new quantum information science technologies, focusing on loss of information due to quantum decoherence, limited communication distance due to signal attenuation, protocols, and larger numbers of quantum bits (Qubits) and their entanglement. Key among the program's challenges is integrating improved single- and entangled-photon and electron sources and detectors into quantum computation and communication networks. Defense applications include highly secure communications, algorithms for optimization in logistics, highly precise measurements of time and position on the earth and in space, and new image and signal processing methods for target tracking.

Now -- I'm off to read patent 7,242,774 : Quantum Cryptography Based on Phase Entangled Photons

Green Storage, Smart Grids, and Wireless Spectrum for Utility Providers

Earth2tech has an excellent article on smarter storage -- how data storage can account for up to 40 percent of the energy consumed by a data center. GigaOm's Tom Trainer offered data de-duplication and thin provisioning as technologies that were helping the greening efforts. 3Par is a leader in thin provisioning, which is a "mechanism that applies to large-scale centralized computer disk storage systems, SAN's and storage virtualization systems". 3Par recently helped Mary Kay save 50% in storage capacity and 60% administration time with 3PAR Utility Storage and six InServ storage servers.

Last week Vint Cerf had a Google Public Policy blog post titled Where the smart grid meets the Internet. Vint has some awesome insight (as always) into building the smart grid and how it is essentially a nascent energy Internet. He stresses open protocols, open standards and free access to all of the energy information generated.

Finally -- Earth2tech also has an article today about American Electric Power (AEP) telling the FCC that a dedicated licensed spectrum is sorely needed by utilities. AEP is saying that as more smart grid services are rolled out, more and more network bandwidth is needed.

Data Center Stock Index Update

As I approach almost a full year of tracking my data center stocks, I thought I would post the chart for the wild ride it has been. I think for the most part these stocks have weathered the recession pretty well, and as you can see, they are doing quite well lately. Reference this blog post to see what stocks are included in my capitalization-weighted index.

Here is the October 2008 through August 21, 2009 graph:

Earlier this year I started a second index: Equinix, Savvis, Switch and Data and Terremark. Here is the graph for that index.

Smart Grids, City 2.0 and Project Netal

Ok, so those 3 things aren't related -- I just had a couple of things I ran across tonight that I found interesting....

1. Cisco looks to ride smart-grid data deluge. This one is pretty apparent if you follow the Cisco news and EnergyWise software announcements. I keep waiting for a Cisco acquisition -- particularly in this space.

2. HP's vision of building City 2.0. HP Labs sustainability visionary Chandrakant Patel describes his vision of building City 2.0, enabled by a sustainable IT Ecosystem. Pretty interesting interview/article.

3. Ok -- so this one is not data center related, but is just frigg'n cool. :) Cnet has an exclusive on Microsoft's project Natal. Netal is a next generation gaming platform (REALLY next generation) with no controller required.

one last one, as long as we're talking about the big companies in IT : BusinessWeek posted an interview with Eric Schmidt last week and asks several questions about where Google is headed next.

Now With 20% More Fiber!

The DataCenterDynamics site has an article I really liked, titled The American Clould's Weakest Link. It covers the sobering speech given by Allied Fiber CEO Hunter Newby at the Seattle DataCenterDynamics conference Thursday. Newby said "Moving apps into the cloud is very dangerous if you don't know your physical fiber route". How very true -- I almost think people take the physical connectivity between data centers for granted some times.

$7.2 Billion of the recent U.S. stimulus money was dedicated to developing the country's broadband infrastructure. Allied Fiber has been applying for stimulus funding and dreams of building one large fiber ring around the country.

I've worked with several places and brokers that know where all of the fiber routes are in America -- what a fun resource that would be to have as public domain. I think much more fiber investment is needed in this country and NOT just in the big / tier 1 cities and markets. I think if the U.S. is to stay competitive, on both the business and home side of things, we must have a more robust fiber infrastructure that reaches everyone. Next to cheap land and cheap power, data center site selection places a strong emphasis on the amount of lit and dark fiber available in the area.

Allied Fiber and TMCnet have built a Dark Fiber Community to bring together optical network providers and the suppliers who help them build. I've also worked with NEF and the vast database of buried and lit services they have. They also have a natural extension of that business in findadatacenter.com Another favorite site and set of research reports I would Love to use if I had money burning a hole in my pocket is TeleGeography.....some pretty cool data here.

DOE Smart Grid Report and $57 Million Funding

Renewable Energy World reports on the DOE $57 million to fund smart grid development yesterday. The original announcement was back on July 20th and included more than $47 million in funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and $10.5 million to increase the nation's energy security. Wednesday Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the delivery of more than $47 million in funding. The DOE also released a Smart Grid Report. Other items of interest on their web site include:

• The Smart Grid: An Introduction
• Smart Grid E-Forums
• Federal Smart Grid Task Force
• Grid 2030 Vision
• Modern Grid Strategy - a project of the National Energy Technology Laboratory

Science News also had an interesting article recently about Electromagnetic weaponry being used on the electric grid.

NASA's Nebula a Possible Federal Cloud Prototype

nextgov.com reports that a NASA cloud computing model, called Nebula is being looked at by NASA and the Obama administration for federal agencies to outsource IT services to a shared platform. "A significant journey ahead" may be an understatement -- an estimated 10 year migration would have several hurdles to manage.

NASA's Chris Kemp is working with the federal government's could computing working group. NASA CIO's Chris Kemp and Linda Cureton have blogs that I have been following for a while now. Chris managed the Google relationship and talks of the larger strategy with NASA and Google, Microsoft and Cisco. The NASA/Ames Research Center has the current #4 supercomputer (Pleiades), a SGI Altix ICE 8200 wiht a measly 51TB of memory.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra held a live chat several weeks back and has pretty ambitious plans for federal IT and data. You can see that even Vivek Kundra learned from Google -- the IT Dashboard site (very nice by the way) has a "beta" stamp on it.

Like many commercial data center consolidation projects, the federal government has about 70 data centers with "various levels of efficiency and availability that NASA is trying to contract to two outsourced data centers".

"Obama's fiscal 2010 budget proposal envisions optimizing cloud computing by "scaling pilots to full capabilities and providing financial support to accelerate migration," the budget stated. The fiscal plan acknowledges the effort will involve upfront costs, but the expense should be more than offset by savings from consolidating data centers."

Let's see -- one cloud with Google and one with Microsoft -- and then use all Cisco gear to network them together. :)

Check out the nextgov.com article here.