Inc. 500 and IBM's CEO Study

Just two quick links to things I ran across tonight. The first is that the 2008 Inc 500 list is out! I like this particular list because I can relate to the companies and their growth potential more than those listed on the Fortune 500. There are some interesting stories and new companies listed this year. They have a nice map of the Inc. 5000, but I'm not sure why they didn't provide it as a Google Maps mashup.

Congratulations to Midwest data center services company TEAM Technologies - entering the list this year at 212.

IBM released a study they did called "The 2008 Global CEO Study: Implications for the CIO". It was a Global study of CEO's and this particular section discusses the implications for CIOs, the statistics from the surveys and discussion about what the enterprise of the future will look like. I found it through a CIO magazine ad - so my link is ibm.com/doing/cio3

The Four Horseman of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse

I definitely need to get to the Black Hat conference next year. It was just a few weeks back in Vegas and it looked to have a ton of good sessions. One of my absolute favorite bloggers, Christofer Hoff, was nice enough to post the slides from his session on "The Four Horseman of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse". Although, as he points out, the slides are meant to go with his speaking, I went through all 176 slides and it was AWESOME!! I highly recommend anyone interested in virtualization, security....or otherwise take a minute to read through his presentation.

Check out his blog and the presentation PDF here.

Microsoft Data Center Coming To West Des Moines

I just finished watching the official announcement from Microsoft - saying that the new (~$500 million) data center will be in West Des Moines. The location cited, is just down the road from a new $300 million campus that Wells Fargo built. It is a large plot of land with plenty of room for expansion or other potential uses for renewable energy sources. I also noted that the location is near the railroad -- to, oh I don't know.....bring in containers! The red tape was rolled out as Senators, the Governor and Mayor were all at the announcement. Michael Manos from Microsoft was there as well.

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As DatacenterKnowledge points out, Iowa has had a lot of data center activity recently, and I certainly think there is more to come. A source of mine indicates that there is another big player bringing a data center to Iowa, more North and East from where Microsoft is at - but I couldn't squeeze any more details out of him (but I'm still trying).

Data Center Stocks

While the Dow, S&P and NASDAQ were all down today, I believe the tech stocks are going to continue to be a bright spot in an otherwise bleak market. I found a new web site tonight that I really enjoyed playing around in and researching data center stocks and the industry as a whole. So as to help justify the hour plus that I spent on the site I thought I would share some of the information I discovered.

The site ( MFFAIS) lets you en ter a stock symbol and it then tells you information about financial institutional/fund ownership of the stock. The numbers that interested me were the number of funds that owned the particular stock and the percentages bought or sold over the given time period. For a small group of data center stocks that interested me here are the results.

Format: Stock --- Shares owned by funds --- % buying --- % selling

Equinix --- 399 --- 48.45% --- 45.37%
Level3 --- 347 --- 40.95% --- 37.41%
Digital Realty Trust --- 310 --- 55.28% --- 39.02%
Savvis --- 214 --- 46.91% --- 43.82%
DuPont Fabros --- 160 --- 51.47% --- 41.91%
Internap --- 108 --- 41.17% --- 45.13%
Terremark --- 90 --- 58.97% --- 26.92%
Switch&Data --- 8 --- 0 --- 0

I assume that anything within +- 5% probably isn't of too much concern given how much regular trading activity happens. I still believe though that this is further evidence that the data center stocks are doing good and are seen favorably by fund managers. For the sake of comparison take a look at Cisco and Intel. Besides Microsoft they were the only two other tech stocks on the MFFAIS "top 10 Most U.S. most held stocks" list. Cisco stock is held by 2,077 funds and Intel by 2,009 funds!

Some other interesting web surfing that came up while searching for financial information on the tech industry included:

• The Wells Fargo Advantage Discovery fund certainly looks interesting. The largest stock in their portfolio is Equinix and a story on Yahoo reports that they are seeking big growth in the $406 million fund.

• Market Watch has an article about theJacob Internet fund manager seeing promise in tech companies.
  

• The Wall Street Journal had an interesting blog post about Wall Street analysts leaving for tech startup companies!
  

Forbes has an excellent interview with Diane Bryant, CIO of Intel. I had planned on summarizing more of my favorite points from this interview - but my favorite was her thoughts on a cultural change happening within Intel (and certainly other companies) about everything changing to an IT service versus a "server".

"If you deploy virtualization, you get a cultural change. It's not your server anymore. It's a service provided by IT to your department with a certain service level agreement. Then you can aggregate multiple apps onto that server and your utilization goes up. But you have to get over that cultural element, which is, "Where's my server?"

Finally -- does anyone know of an online tool (preferably free) that will let you build your own stock index? I would love to build my own index of favorite stocks and track it on a regular basis. Please leave a comment if you know of something. Thanks!

Data Centers in Iowa

The Des Moines Register ran an article yesterday about the growing trend of data centers coming to Iowa. There isn't (unfortunately) any new news in this article..... it is just a re-cap of why Iowa is so popular. Iowa being popular and a logical place for data centers is nothing new to me -- but it is nice to see the attention it is getting lately. The article discusses new facilities in the state from Google, Microsoft and TEAM Companies.

The usual factors are listed for why Iowa is ideal: Low costs, green energy, skilled labor, and rich tax incentives. There is a hint in the article that Microsoft will locate in West Des Moines, but I personally still think it is up for grabs exactly where in Des Moines they will land.

Check out the article here.

Security and Compliance In the Cloud

My latest column at Systems Management News is out. I dive (one more time) into cloud computing (it's in fashion you know). This time I talk a little more about security and compliance in the cloud and what is holding back the enterprise from further embracing it.

Check out the article here.

Alliant Energy - Business Continuity Lessons

Wisconsin Technology Network has a Business Continuity Plan article about Alliant Energy and their story of the June flooding in Cedar Rapids. The story basically runs through how they executed their BCP plan and the lessons learned during the event. The interesting part (to me) was the discussion about having contractual assurance of a hot-site for Disaster Recovery and how it is different in a city like Cedar Rapids vs. a large city.

Check out the article here.

Monday Links

In an attempt to clean up the growing number of Firefox tabs I have open, I thought I would share some of sites of interest I have run across lately:

• TechCrunch reports that LivePlace.com is set to launch a photo-realistic virtual world rendered in the cloud. It may be using the Otoy engine -- a very impressive 3D rendering company. I played around with Google's new virtual world Lively a little bit the other night.....pretty cool, but I think they should just buy Otoy and LivePlace and really give SecondLife a run for their money.

• It has been confirmed that AOL will sell X-drive. I worked for an online storage company in the dot-com days and X-Drive was always the one to chase. I think the evolution to storage cloud offerings may be almost complete.
  

• EMC to buy StorageTek? ChannelWeb explores the reasoning behind this rumor. It makes sense to me - StorageTek is better suited for a company like EMC than Sun.
  

• For some reason, I keep forgetting about a company on my "cool-companies" list. DataSynapse continues to make some nice products and has a lot going on. Recently they were awarded the best clustering or Grid solution at Next Generation Data Center conference (I really need to get to this one next year). They announced a partnership with Adaptivity and the results of a survey that showed High Performance Computing ranking higher than cloud computing as a driving IT initiative.

• I think everyone should click through to this Douglas Gourlay post. :) Douglas - the only thing missing is an acronym (GSOVCaaS) : everything in IT must be an acronym. BTW - MY all-time favorite post and definition discussion of what Cloud Computing is, is given by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. I think he sums up the topic very nicely.

• Michael Morris has an interesting post on Cisco LISP (Locator/ID Seperation Protocol) at NetworkWorld.

Yahoo Omaha Data Center Rumor Confirmed

A few weeks back the Tech Hermit blog wrote about rumors of Yahoo building a data center in Omaha. Today, the Omaha World-Herald newspaper confirms that state and local officials are at a "very serious stage" of negotiations to get Yahoo in to Omaha. The decision could potentially be made in the next five to six weeks.

Maybe Omaha will be one of the six locations for the HP-Yahoo-Intel cloud.

Check out the article here.

Don't Forget the Network

My latest column at Systems Management News is out! I am hoping to get into some more networking topics in future columns. WAN optimization and acceleration tools interest me and dark fiber, carriers and DWDM type stuff are things I would like to explore further. In this column I discuss networking in general and how Microsoft and Google connect their data centers.

Check out the column here.

Also -- Please check out the rest of the magazine - they have a lot of good articles and columnists.

• Information on Microsoft Midori - a legacy free operating system in the works.
• Emerson Network Power - new cooling system
• Networking: Switching to a new design for intelligent LAN
• Windows 2008 Clustering
• The Savvy Manager
• The Storage Rack

Mystery Data Center Coming to Indianola, Iowa?

The Des Moines Register reports that a "as-yet-undisclosed" company is looking at Indianola (roughly 15 miles south of Des Moines) as a potential site for a data center. The site request came from MidAmerican Energy - who has more than 1,200 megawatts of wind generating facilities in operation.

The Indianola development director stated that it was not Microsoft - the local utilities do not provide enough electricity to support such a data center. Indianola's fiber infrastructure is a major draw though for a data center.

It will be interesting to see who is selecting this Des Moines suburb for a data center - as soon as I hear more I will post it.

Check out the Des Moines Register article here.

Microsoft Data Center Monitoring System

CIO reports that Microsoft is using 2,000 temperature/humidity sensors - using ZigBee wireless in several of its facilities. Microsoft demonstrated their prototype system to the Uptime Institute. Check out the CIO article here.

This news (of course) made me think.... how cool would it be to combine this wireless mesh of sensors, with Autodesk's Revit (Building Information Modeling software), and OpenSimulator - like IBM is using to present a virtual data center. I am a visual learner and big fan of the virtual world stuff like OpenSimulator offers. I've played around in SecondLife - but have not been 'overly' impressed just yet. The vision that IBM has started with OpenSimulator/Virtual Worlds is pretty cool - and the potential to integrate other products (monitoring/management) into that is pretty exciting (for a geek like me).

IDS - Ship based Data Centers - Update

I'm not sure if the idea is growing on me or what, but the notion of a data center on a ship doesn't sound as silly as it did the very first time I heard it. Back in January of this year IDS (International Data Security) introduced us to the idea of putting containers on ships that were due to be scrapped.

There is an update now on how the company is coming with the idea, and they also do a nice job of explaining how it is accomplished and some of what the value proposition is. I asked questions about the business model, security and fiber, and they have addressed those in the comments section.

Check out the update and answers here.

TEAM Technologies and Iowa Health System Partnership

The previously announced information about the TEAM Technologies data center in Waukee, Iowa has an update. The Des Moines Business Record reports that TEAM and Iowa Health System have announced a partnership for the Waukee data center. Iowa Health will use half of the data center space developed in the initial phase.

Bill Leaver, president and chief operating officer of IHS, says that as data management needs continue to grow, TEAM appears to be a "natural partner" that will best meet those needs, while allowing IHS to save capital for other investments, such as the purchase of clinical equipment that will directly benefit patients. "When we're dealing with millions of records every year that contain confidential and critical information, it requires the utmost care and expertise," Leaver said. "Iowa Health System and TEAM Technologies thoroughly and completely understand the responsibility associated with maintaining and managing this data. We don't take that lightly and never will."

Check out the Business Record article here

Cloud Computing Outages

A fair amount of press has been covering the recent Amazon S3 outages. I personally would re-iterate the words of Reuven Cohen - in that Amazon is pioneering some of this technology and really should not be so heavily criticized. The cloud market is still in its infancy and problems will be worked out now that make the cloud even stronger in the future. I have also become somewhat of a fan of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. I think he has done some pretty amazing stuff at Amazon and the best is perhaps yet to come.

Jeff Feinman at Systems Management News has an excellent article on the recent Cloud outages, specifically at Amazon and Apple. Check it out here.

There was also a very good article on GigaOm about why the Enterprise is not ready to trust the cloud.

New 50MW Data Center for CRG West

CRG West announced today the development of an energy-efficient data center campus in Santa Clara , California. Expected to be complete in the second quarter of 2009 the 350,000 square-foot, 50 megawatt campus will be powered by Silicon Valley Power.

"At this campus CRG West will provide data-center and peering solutions to its customers along the continuum from single-cabinet colocation space through custom-built cages of any size up to blocks of wholesale data center space up to 20 MW. Additionally, CRG West can construct one of the planned buildings to meet the exact specifications of a single user for any corporation that wishes to design its data center but lease it rather than fund the up-front capital required to construct it."

The Bay area was ideal for CRG West because of the high demand, lower-cost power and densely populated peering opportunities. CRG West provides wholesale data center and retail colocation space, connectivity and and an Internet Peering Exchange.

TEAM Technologies to Build Data Center in Waukee

Cedar Falls, IA based TEAM Technologies is looking to build a $14 million data center in Waukee. This was published tonight on both WHO-TV and MSNBC. Waukee is a suburb of Des Moines on the far eastern edge of the city.

It looks like the data center will be built next to a MidAmerican power substation and the Waukee Mayor is excited to bring the server farm to his town.

Check out the WHO-TV article and video here

and the MSNBC article here.

Microsoft's Iowa Data Center

The suspense is killing me! I ran across this post from Des Moines' WHO TV station - Dave Price claims that Microsoft has been eyeing West Des Moines or Urbandale for the site selection.

I was in Des Moines / Urbandale this weekend. I really can't think that West Des Moines is going to be the site they select -- my guess is either Urbandale or Waukee.

If I don't go crazy first - I'll post here the second I hear anything!

Cloud Computing Aritcles and Blogroll

Besides containers, my other recent fascination has been with cloud computing. Put another way (thanks to Gianpaolo Carrero) I am really in to nephology (the study of clouds). I'll have another Systems Management News article on the topic in the near future, but for now I thought I would list some of the articles that I have run across recently and my blogroll on the topic of clouds.

Articles/Sites:

• Cloud Computing Portal

• Information Week - The Rise of Enterprise-class Cloud Computing

• Zimory - This one REALLY intrigues me.....will have to read up on it more, but definitely check it out.

• Amazon White Paper on Cloud Architectures and best practices of Amazon S3, EC2, SimpleDB and SQS

Blog Roll:

• The Wisdom of Clouds - James Urquhart

• Cloud Computing Journal

• Cloudy Times: Markus Klems - I found this one via his post on the "Classification of Cloud Computing Stakeholders"

• Dell - In the Clouds - Condensing ideas on the future of cloud computing

• Cloud Security

• HP Communities - Ben Reid: Head in the Cloud

• Elastic Vapor - Life in the Cloud - from Enomaly's Reuven Choen

• Cloud Blog - by Roland Judas

• an EXCELLENT post on the future of Enterprise applications and clouds - Gianpaolo's MSDN blog

Containers, Clouds and Rumors

There has certainly been a lot of news in the industry this week and although I haven't completely caught up yet (I'm attempting to take vacation this week), here is a quick run-down of what I have seen so far.....

• First and foremost, my apologies for getting some figures wrong in my Systems Management News article. I said that Microsoft has 220 containers and 30,000 servers ; well, let's just say I need to stop writing articles so late at night. :) Going back to my own post of the AFCOM keynote that Michael Manos gave, at 1000 to 2000 systems per container it is more like 300,000 servers total.
  

• Containers were a hot story today, as HP announced the POD (Performance Optimized Datacenter).
  

• There were a couple of good articles on Cloud Computing I ran across. The first one, from Douglas Gourlay at Cisco is a nice wrap-up of the hype-filled term and how it is really just a technology shift that is happening across many layers and industries. I agree that the term cloud doesn't really mean much today -- I think we'll look back in a few years and realize that things were really just getting moving in terms of true Cloud Computing. He mentions workload portability, which I have been intrigued with for a while and was why I followed Platespin, who was acquired by Novell back in February. Doug's mention of the fictional Skynet made me realize that Cisco is so good that aiming for clouds isn't enough - they are into outter space newtorking!

• Another Cisco story this week is the press release about enhancements to IP over DWDM. I am still (somewhere in my spare time) trying to pursue my CCDA certification and DWDM technology is well..... pretty cool stuff. You should read the press release for yourself, but the main news is that they have doubled the reach of the CRS-1 40Gbps IPoDWDM to an industry leading 2,000 kilometers without regeneration.

• The second cloud computing article was very interesting -- for some rumors! Reuven Cohen from Enomoly gossips about project "Red Dog" from Microsoft. I remember reading about this before (because of the Clifford the Big Red Dog reference). It's basically saying that this project is meant to be an "EC2 for Windows" cloud offering. The second rumor is that of a Chinese cloud project "under a hydro dam", which when complete may exceed a million servers. For whatever reason, my hunch is that Sun is involved in this.

That's all for now -- I've upgrade my Ipod Touch to version 2.0, so I am having fun with the AppStore. I'm still bummed that the National League lost the all-star game, but excited that next year it will be in St. Louis!!