Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Searchdatacenter.techtarge.com artilce on using DC power

SearchDataCenter.com has an interesting article on a study done at The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It's a study that compares using AC power vs DC power in a data center. Check it out here

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Network World Article: IT Architecture

While this article is not directly about Data Centers I found it very interesting. It is basically a case study for Burlington Coat Factory and a good article on their new grid-based, virtualized architecture. I like architecting solutions like this and the technology they are using is pretty cool stuff. I'll let the article speak for itself....check it out at http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2004/ndc4/0621bcf.html?page=1

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Google Data Center!!

My co-workers know me as a Google fanatic. So you can only imagine my excitement when I ran across the digg.com post on the no-longer-secret Googleplex being built. Just 130 miles south of the Microsoft and Yahoo planned Quincy data centers, Google is building a massive facility (as only Google can). There are too many details to write about here; check it out at:

International Herald Tribune
or
New York Times (with a picture!)

I think I will setup a new Google alert to track progress on this data center! :)

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Microsoft/Yahoo data centers

Just a quick follow-up on the Microsoft/Yahoo data centers planned for Quincy. This Business Week article also does a good summary on the data center industry as a whole.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

$600 million Data Center ; Site Selection Thoughts

I had read about massive data center projects going on in Quincy, Washington before by Microsoft and Yahoo. These projects seemed pretty big and selection was based on cheap land, a good work force and in still close proximity to Microsoft headquarters. A few posts back I also wrote about a $400 million data center going up in Birmigham, Alabama. Well, now the stakes are raised again...and who better than Microsoft. It seems they are considering San Antonio for a $600 million data center build. The article at mysa.com states "People close to San Antonio's talks with Microsoft said its site-selection staff likes the area's inexpensive electrical power, work force and lack of exposure to natural disasters."

I also ran across a new blog I had not seen before this weekend called Planning for Business IT Continuity. While I found it to be an interesting blog with some good articles, I started to wonder why it seemed so biased. Upon further investigation I discovered it was written and hosted by Sterling Network Services, LLC. I certainly don't blame them for using the blog as a marketing tool, and as I said, they were good articles.

The thing that really puzzles me between this blog and the last article on Microsoft Data Center site selection, is what really drives location selection? I know the obvious ones like cheap power and superior connectivity options, but with data centers placed all over the country what are the other factors? Does the Data Center really need to be in close proximity to the business placing infrastructure there? Is it merely price? Is it access to a good work force and major transportation hubs?

I'll be digging into this and post my thoughts back to this blog. Just in case anyone is actually reading this, feel free to post a comment!