Mobile Data Centers Introduced in Vietnam

A story on Vietnam Business News caught my eye this weekend -- no, not a publication I 'usually' read, but thanks to a Google alert....

The story covers mobile data centers being offered in the Vietnamese market by Dot VN, Vietnam Internet Center and Elliptical Mobile Solutions (EMS). Once again, the marketing hype calls it "meeting Tier 4+ standard" -- not sure which Tier system they are talking about. :)

The mobile data center is being proposed to meet the demands of "a wide range of clients" and reduce "the size by 50% and save up to 50% of the initial investment." Dot VN will be the sole distributor of EMS solutions in Vietnam and non-exclusive distributor in Asia.

I've been interested in container data centers for a while -- so EMS interested me. Upon further research I found they are an Arizona based business that provides "high-tech enclosures for the mobilization, operation, environmental protection, and security of electronic equipment." They must have an IT background, because every one of their products is an acronym for something. I would not call what they make a 'data center' either, as it is just a single rack, or small enclosure with a pretty narrow focus/market.

They do list some interesting government/military applications for their product, and maybe this is where they shine. I remember when the Sun Blackbox container first came out -- they showed several applications where the Blackbox is deployed into remote areas where the technology needed served a very unique purpose.

Maybe you take an ISO shipping container, fill half of it with Bloom boxes and half of it with EMS R.A.S.E.R.'s and you have something!



P.S.: Does anyone know what's going to happen to the Sun Blackbox, post-Oracle acquisition??

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??!!?

SGI/Rackable ICECube Deployment Video

SGI/Rackable has some new media on their site for the ICE Cube Modular Data Center. I think this container has been one of my favorites ever since I saw it at a DataCenter World conference. It is really pretty unique in the container market -- if you get SGI servers inside. They take the fans out of the servers and are able to get amazing density: 1400U of available space and up to 22,400 processing cores. If you haven't seen inside of an ICE Cube - check out this video.

Check out this page on their site for a new product video, plus a nice white paper about their "Next Generation Data Center Infrastructure".

i/o Data Centers To Offer ICE Cube Modular Data Center

I have followed i/o Data Centers for a while now. Today I ran across a press release that furthers my theory about containers and the colocation market, as well as supporting the overall container momentum.

SGI / Rackable announced that it recently shipped its ICE Cube modular data center to i/o Data Centers to address clients' evolving data center needs. The press release is about 95% marketing and specs on the ICE Cube, so I have to wonder what exactly i/o is going to do with the containers other than 'offer' them to customers. Still -- I applaud them for embracing it and making it a product offering.

Last month CRG West announced it was offering Verari Systems FOREST containers to its customers.

HP POD, Servers and Factory Express

I found a couple of YouTube videos (link from Mauricio Freitas) that were pretty interesting.

First -- Mauricio has a few pictures from a HP Storage POD - filled with 22 racks, each containing 160TB of storage. Just park that in my back yard and I'll be good to go!

Also on his blog he has videos of the HP Factory Express:




and information about the re-architected HP Servers (pretty cool stuff here):

Data Center Design

As I read the Pingdom article about "8 ways to make data centers less boring"....I recalled a TED talk I watched recently. The talk was from Don Norman, and I later learned that it was a speech from 2003! Anyway, it was a Really good talk and made me think about the overall design of a data center and how it makes you feel when seeing it.

I work in the colo industry, so we have to sell the data center as a product and after listening to Don Norman I can see how design, architecture and a number of other details effect how the data center is experienced by customers and employees alike.

Even the companies making data center containers today pay attention to the outside colors, layout of racks and shiny metal curves inside. Functionality, efficiency and cost will always trump .... because utlimately the data center has a sole purpose.....but why not put the little bit of effort into the principles that Don talks about and make it even better.

Check out Don's TED Talk here

P.S.: The 2008 talk from Mike Rowe (host of Dirty Jobs) is still by FAR the best one I have seen.

Monday Links - March 30, 2009

LOTS of news today, and not much time, so here you go.....


NYT: Rackable vows to outlast price war with Dell. Interesting story about Rackable and their history and strategy against Dell. I like Rackable....I don't think they are the right solution for 'everyone', but there is a lot of potential.

Rackable, along with Intel, Netapp and Akamai have probably bought a few steak dinners for Facebook executives lately. Data Center Knowledge reported today about them seeking up to $100 million to expand data centers. To compliment that post and the Businessweek article, I found these interesting:

• Niall Kennedy has a very nice write-up with an amazing amount of detail about Facebook operations, user stats and data centers.
• Fool.com also has a nice commentary about the TriplePoint Capital conversations and overall troubled state of banks with tech companies.

At the Intel Xeon 5500 launch today, Intel also announced a Data Center Efficiency challenge. It should be interesting to see what people submit for videos. Check out the Facebook page with contest rules and details here.

I can just feel the momentum going for container data centers.... and apparently CRG West gets it also. Data Center Knowledge reports on a partnership with CRG West and HP to deploy the HP POD container. Very cool stuff. Check out the press release here.

"Data Center Fabric" is fast becoming a big term for 2009. Juniper Networks outlined their vision and strategy today for the next generation data center fabric. David Yen's blog at Juniper also has some details on project 'Stratus' .... here.

"PFB Seeks 40 million pounds in Data Center Financing" . If my currency conversion is correct, that's about $57 million. Pinder Fry and Benjamin is a London-based real estate firm with an interesting data center investment portfolio. The Data Center Dynamics article states that "The company said this third round of funding would be used to invest in the sites to which it has already committed and new data center investments." The March 9 Offer Summary can be found here.

A magnitude 4.3 earthquake hit the bay area this morning -- about 16 miles east of San Jose. The interesting thing was that a new fault was discovered. No major damage was reported. Lots of tweets surrounded the event this morning as well. No news or impact on data centers that I have read about yet.

Check out the Phase 2 notes from Michael J. Morris on his data center project - with networking based on the Cisco Nexus-series line. It sounds like a very fun project

Finally -- this is an Iowa blog, so I have to say GO Gov. Culver Go! :) Governer Culver announced he had a positive, productive meeting with Microsoft today. The status of the West Des Moines data center hasn't changed, but at least it isn't cancelled. I am still SUPER curious to see if the Iowa facility will be the test bed for their 4th generation design.

5 days, 19 hours and 12 minutes until opening night of Baseball!!

Verari Article: "Greening the Internet"

Just a quick link to an article I liked about Verari Systems, maker of the FOREST data center container. It was on the Xconomy | San Diego site and is an interview with two execs from Verari. The article discusses gree technologis, efficiencies, financial aspects of containers and overall energy-saving approaches.

Check it out here.

AST-Global Data Center Container

Data Center Knowledge had an interesting article today on the AST-Global data center container, displayed at CeBIT. Does anyone know what the tie is between AST and IBM (i.e.: the IBM PMDC container is made by AST, or the AST container is made by IBM)?

I did a search for AST-Global, not being very familiar with them and found an interesting Power Point presentation by Pablo Fernandez of AST. Slide 53 is interesting... "The future is MOBILE" and then he lists how containers are better than traditional data centers: "Short term projects, disaster recovery, remote locations, hostile environments, space limitations and expensive real-estate".

Slide 55 goes on to talk about the "PMDC Data Center Park". This is an entire data center park, built with multi-PMDCs -- no building, just concrete slab. This of course made me think of the Microsoft 4th Generation data center concept from Michael Manos back in December last year.

Scalability and mobility, along with protection and potential efficiency gains are really making the case for data center containers. I never thought I would list 'mobility' as an attractive feature of a data center, but it is growing on me. After a phone call I had today discussing containers, I think I will sit down and really pour through the container offerings from IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Rackable, Verari and others. It may not be the solution for every need or company, but I think (at this stage) there is definately more to it than what I am seeing.

HP POD Container Video

I ran across this HP video for a second time, and so I thought that surely meant I should put it on the blog. It is Wade Vinson, HP's Power and Cooling Strategist and HP POD Architect.

It's a nice look at the POD (Performance-Optimized Data center) from an engineering stand point.



Also -- Don't forget the video Data Center Knowledge took late last year at the Gartner conference.

Sun Donates a Blackbox to China's Disaster Reduction Center

Sun Microsystems has donated a Modular Data Center to the China National Disaster Reduction Center to help the Chinese Government.  The WHIR News site has the complete details of the story.

HP POD Container Video

The idea of data center containers continues to really grow on me. At first I had a hard time seeing the true benefit for a non-Fortune 100 company, but I think I'm coming around. GigaOm has a nice video of an exclusive first look inside the HP POD (Performance Optimized Data center) container. It shows the layout inside their container and since the person being interviewed is a thermal engineer, the cooling solution is discussed.

I think my biggest road block for containers is still security -- but that's a post for another day. Check out the GigaOm video here.

Systems Management News - Containers

My latest column at Systems Management News is out. I couldn't hold back any longer....I had to talk about containers. I could probably go 3 more columns worth on the topic, but I attempt to cover the major manufacturers who have come out with container products: Sun, Rackable, Verari, and IBM.

Check out the column here

Intel Premiere - Containers Everywhere

Just a quick link to a nice article from Intel that appears in their Summer 2008 Premier magazine. It primarily covers the Rackable Systems IceCube container.

I continue to be really intrigued with the container model and will (in a future Systems Management News column) go into the container market a little deeper.

Containerized Data Center Marketing Growing

Byte & Switch has an article about containerized data centers boosting cloud computing. The article talks about a growing market, with offerings from Sun, Rackable, and Verari. They report that Rackable is gearing up orders in the second half of this year for containers "intended for Yahoo or perhaps Amazon".

"There are power claims, too: Verari's Forest Container requires 400,000 watts, which the vendor says is 110 percent more efficient than regular data centers."

I know in past posts I have started to really come around to the container model -- but I still struggle with it. Unless it is in a situation like Microsoft is using them, I really don't get how it is secure or is safe against natural disasters or other threats. If I can ever get some free time I want to build a matrix comparison of the containers and 'try' to do an apples to apples comparison.

Check out the Byte & Switch article here.

Sun Blackbox Tour 2008

Earlier today I attended a meeting / event for Sun Microsystems. The Blackbox (S20) was back in Des Moines and although I saw it last year, I was curious to see it again. I'll get to the blackbox in a minute. The guest speaker for this year's event was Brian Wilson, Sun's Director and CTO - Market Development. He was an awesome speaker and I came out of his presentation inspired, with 3 pages of notes.

Brian started by briefly explaining how Sun has transformed over the past few years. Scott McNealy was a good CEO, but Jonathan Schwartz defintely shook things up when he took the healm. Jonathan promotes a new "transparency" for Sun and their interactions with customers and the industry. Sun has also become very 'agnostic' in its hardware and software platforms. Brian noted that Sun is actually more of a software company now than hardware. The challenge that Jonathan and Brian are presented with is... "how can Sun stay in business when customers can do more with less". Rather than give a typical marketing answer to this question, he went into the Sun answer with an overhead projector drawing. For those younger folks reading this -- here is the Wiki article on what an overhead projector is. :) I won't try to replicate Brian's drawing, but the thrust of it is that the focus is moving away from the enterprise where "IT=cost", and over to the service providers where "IT=weapon". The three drivers for this change in focus are the Internet, High Performance Computing, and the SaaS providers.

Some other notes or quotes I had from his talk:

• AT&T (who has a large Sun footprint), spends over $1 Billion per year for power.

• Book recommendation -- Empires of Light ( a favorite of Jonathan Schwartz also)
  

• Sun opened their Santa Clara data center and Brian took a tour. He was very impressed, talked with his tour guide and ended up finding out that those involved with the design and build of the data center ended up reporting to the Sun CFO. This was particularly interesting to Brian -- let the person in charge of paying the bills for the data center drive the build (and efficiency) of it!

• Blackbox: 25kW per rack, in 1/8 the space

• "Some" business do actually want to move their data centers -- examples being the U.S. Military and media companies covering Olympic events for periods in other countries.

• Sun entered the data center switch business. Internal code name Magnum. This is the big dog. It is an Infiniband core switch, with capacity for 3,456 server nodes and does a lot for switch consolidation and thus reduction/elimination of space and cabling.

• Best kept secret : TCP offload engine .....interesting stuff.
  

• Brian noted a database shift (in parallel with earlier statements about IT=cost vs. IT=weapon. 90% of enterprise databases are Oracle, while 90% of web 2.0 databases are mySQL

• Sun does NOT use raised floor in their data centers.

• They feel it is their corporate responsibility to share data center design knowledge and lessons learned with the industry.

• 3 take-aways: 1) Sun hardware runs on other vendors chips (Intel/AMD). 2) They push extreme efficiency. 3) Build a digital service delivery platform (i.e.: LAMP , SAMP , or MARS (mySQL, Apache, Ruby, Solaris) )
  

Ok -- now on to the Blackbox: Unfortunately, Sun did not send the latest version of the S20 to Des Moines. The container was essentially what I saw last year. The two notable differences in the product were that they have added a fire suppression system to it, and this time they had a Sun branded Chiller unit sitting on the truck in front of the Blackbox. Other changes include better cable management and the ability to move an entire cabinet (easily) in and out of the container. They state that you can place anyone's hardware inside the container and there are configuration alternatives you can take; for instance, adding fewer, but deeper cabinets to accommodate special equipment that needs the depth. It was overheard that there are 8 Blackboxes in production today, but the pipeline of interested parties is pretty large. The United Airline story about putting containers in their hangers in Chicago was mentioned a few times.

Overall I am glad I attended the event and I think the whole container story is starting to really sink in with me. I by no means think it is "the" answer, but there are some very plausible scenarios where it can be used and I think Sun entered the game pretty early and as such has a good chance at succeeding. Here are some pictures I took of the Blackbox.

Verari Systems StorageServer

The one company I didn't get to spend much time with at Data Center World was Verari Systems. Since they had released their version of the data center container a while back I was naturally interested. The FOREST Container stands for Flexible, Open, Reliable, Energy Efficient, Scalable and Transportable. Maybe this is what Microsoft is using in their Northlake facility?

The FOREST container can house servers in standard form factor or the Verari Blade Systems form. Today, from Storage Networking World in Orlando, they announced their first high capacity blade-based NAS and iSCSI Storage appliance. "The SB5165XL StorageServer™ combines unified NAS and iSCSI SAN storage networking functionality and a comprehensive feature-set with appliance-like manageability."

A single "platform" can deliver up to 576 terabytes of storage in two floor tiles, while use of the StorageServer in a FOREST container can provide up to 12 petabytes of capacity. So.....if Microsoft has 220 containers on the first floor of their Northlake facility, and if half of those are dedicated to storage - they could potentially have 1.32 exabytes of storage!

Check out the press release here

Miichael Manos Keynote at Data Center World

The Michael Manos keynote this morning at Data Center World was inspiring. Michael doesn't read off of note cards and you can tell that he not only knows this material inside and out, but that he is passionate about it. I gained a number of things from this talk -- including him mentioning that their new Chicago facility will have upwards of 200 shipping containers pieced together like the RV campsites like I have talked about in previous posts.

Here are my notes from his talk:

• Microsoft challenges: 15x growth on servers, 9x growth on egress, 15x growth on power, 3x growth on number of data centers.
• 30% of the audience had active programs to monitor and measure power in their data center
• Next to nobody in the audience knew what their carbon emissions were for their data center
• Sustainability regulation 'is' coming ; not if, but when
• How many are working on green programs? 30% (audience)
• Industry challenges/minefields:

1. sustainability reporting & efficiency reporting
2. data center inventory globally becoming a challenge
3. increasing power densities at the rack level
4. power costs
5. green-washing
6. expertise shortage
7. organizational structures
8. increasing capital cost barriers
9. innovation hoarding
10. heterogeneity versus homogeneity mindsets.

• The 'old' power draw was 4kW / rack ; now is 8-12 kW / rack ; some implementations 36kW / rack
• $11-$18mil for a tier2 / tier2+ data center
• Cost of a data center:
• 82% construction costs : mechanical/electrical
• land: 2%, core&shell cost 9%, architectural: 7%
• 40,000 to 80,000 systems inside a typical 500,000 sq ft data center
• Staffing at a Microsoft data center: 35 people across 24x7x365 shifts.
• Boarding process: trucks pull up with pre-populated racks, drive into colo room, connect and go
• Driving automation is key ; have to have good operational practices.
• 35 factors for site selection. Including: Internet population, Internet peering/network, mobile users, power pricing, power capacity, environmental, construction costs, tax climate, IT labor availability, corporate citizenship -- this gives them their composite heat map. Quincy wasn't necessarily an ideal site until they went to the county level on a second pass and determined its benefits.
• Metrics: PUE vs DCIE : Microsoft uses both ; dcie shows the overhead ; goal, for either is ONE
• Microsoft sets aggressive pue targets internally.; they try to half the distance to a PUE goal by one every two years.
• Scribe (their software tool) ; shows/measures PUE, DCIE, total racks, total servers, kW power consumed, critical load power, etc.
• They have 1 million points to monitor/measure across data centers
• They have been measuring PUE for 4+ years ; an old data center of theirs started at 2.4 PUE and is at 1.9'ish in aug. 2007 ; very little if any capital improvements in this data center -- all driven by operational efficiencies.
• Chicago - their FIRST container data center!
• Entire first floor is full of containers ; each container houses 1,000 to 2,000 systems per container ; 150 - 220 containers on the first floor
• Containers are parked at 45 degree angle ; due to trucks parking them
• They build 'spines' of systems that connect power/cooling/bandwidth to their containers

Cisco's Network on Wheels Container

The Philippine Daily Inquirer has a story about the Cisco Express Network on Wheels (NoW) truck visiting the National Computer Center in Quezon City. The article title had the word 'container' in it and naturally caught my eye.

The Cisco NoW truck had typically been used for Marketing and doing a road-show to showcase Cisco technologies. The use case for the Philippines was for a mobile command center and data center housed in a 40 foot container.

"NoW, currently stationed at the National Computer Center in Diliman Quezon City, is custom-made with Cisco’s latest technologies and solutions, including a generator—making the container into an instant mobile command center that can be deployed immediately to the affected area to do fast wireless coordination among the various the government disaster-response agencies."

Learning lessons from hurricane Katrina, the disaster management abilities of this truck would be greatly beneficial to the Philippines. However, they rank 69th in the world in network readiness, according to Cisco's data.

Check out the article here

Links for 05 March 2008

Not much time for comments tonight and there were quite a few stories that piled up this week, so here we go:

• Verari Systems introduced their container data center yesterday. The "Forest" container solution will have a forest scene painted on the outside -- hmmm, maybe they could paint a blue ocean on it and put it on a ship!
  
• InformationWeek has a photo slide show of the Google data center being constructed in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It's been a loooong winter here -- the last picture is of some locals ice fishing.
  
• Xcel Energy has selected Stratavia's data center automation platform to streamline its IT operations. Standardization, centralizing critical processes, and scalability were listed as primary factors in the evaluation and selection of Stratavia. Stratavia was recently named a 2008 rising star from the Enterprise Management Associates.
  
• Xcel Eneregy also announced a groundbreaking wind-to-battery project. The project will take place in Minnesota and received a $1 Million grant from Minnesota's Renewable Development fund.
• A short while back when Rich Miller wrote about the BayCare Health System data center redesign, it made me think of the 'other' hospital case study I had recently seen. As I've mentioned in the past, I am intrigued by Second Life and applaud all that Cisco, IBM and other companies have done in the virtual world. Check out this blog post and this video of the Palomar Pomerado Health Cisco case study of the "Hospital of the future".
• Speaking of Second life -- when is Google going to come out with their own virtual world? Well, until then, they have Google Earth and the new Google Cities in 3D program. Pretty cool stuff.....
• BT Quraterly has a nice Cisco case study of their SONA (Service-Oriented Network Architecture) titled "A Network Architecture for Business Value Acceleration"
• Issue 7 of the EDS magazine Synnovation is "the green issue". The article I liked the most was "Making a List - Environmental Sustainability 101". We are obviously flooded with Green articles lately, and this one does a nice job of covering a high level view, what we 'should' do, what is 'right' to do, and what is 'smart' to do.
• I really enjoyed the SearchDataCenter.com article (and linked presentation)on the cost of different data center architectures.
• Finally -- since the Platespin acquisition actually happened, I thought I would take another shot in the dark prediction and say that Cassatt will be purchased by either IBM or Cisco in the near future.