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.

In-House Clouds

Just a quick link to a really good article I read at ZDNet about Cassatt.  Cassatt makes some really cool products and while I have a much longer blog post planned about them and their innovation, it is Thanksgiving......so......more later.  :)

Check out the article here.

TEAM Companies Des Moines Data Center

Cedar Falls, Iowa based TEAM Companies held a ground breaking ceremony Monday for their new facility in Waukee, a suburb of Des Moines.  Like their Madison facility, the 46,000 sq. ft. data center will be built in 3 phases.  The first phase is scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2009 and will cost $15 million to build.

TEAM will jointly own and operate the facility with Iowa Health System, the state's largest health care provider.  

Iowa Health System President and CEO William B. Leaver said Iowa Health System and TEAM Companies have had a multi-year relationship that has served its employees and patients well.  "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 Companies thoroughly and completely understand the responsibility associated with maintaining and managing this data.  We don't take that lightly and never will"

TEAM Companies recently ranked 212 in the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies.

Check out the press release here.

 

Data Center Stock Index:11-24-08

It was yet another interesting Monday for data centers and the stock market:

• My data center stock index closed last Friday at $16.54, an all-time low. Today it was up to $17.92 as most stocks in the index closed up.

• Even Yahoo has climbed up a little bit since Jerry Yang stepped down. Forbes has a slideshow of names that have been tossed out as the next potential CEO.
  

• The Dow Jones Internet Composite Index got as high as $53.80 before closing at $53.40
• Equinix was up 15.59% today! They also announced Jarett Appleby as their new CMO (Chief Marketing Officer)

• Google was actually down today and announced that the are "slowing the hiring rate" at the company.

• Twitter rejects a $500 Million offer from Facebook

SuperComputer 2008 Conference

SC08 (The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis) has been going on this week and there are a number of interesting links as a result:

• Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm points out that the conference is really (or has become) a Data Center conference.
• The Austin American-Statesman previews the conference and points out that Sun will bus people to their Ranger installation at UT, and Dell will bus people to UT's main campus to see Stallion, their advanced computer visualization system.
• Nortel 100G to carry critical network traffic for SC08 conference.
• MercuryNews.com reports that Intel, Cisco and Sun are helping develop a supercomputer for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
• NVIDIA announces Tesla "personal supercomputer"...... umm...... ok
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory selects DataDirect Network Storage to power one of the largest and fastest file systems in the world. "48 S2a9900 High Performance storage platforms deliver up to 240 Gigabytes per second of performance across 10 Petabytes". Wow!
• DataDirect Networks also won the HTCWire's Editors' Choice Award for best HPC Storage Product for 2008.

Finally -- I have a YouTube video to share. It's not SC08 related, but you would need a supercomputer to do some of the stuff this guy is talking about. It's the latest Google TechTalk, and even the title of the talk is over my head: The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted to Be
Enjoy

It's Just Another Manic Monday

Wow.....quite a Monday.....

• My Data Center Stock Index is $18.20 ; the lowest since I started tracking it.
• The Dow Jones Internet Composite Index continues to tank
• I continue to not open my IRA statements.
• Jerry Yang to step down as CEO of Yahoo!!
• Google Stock dips below $300 for the first time since 2005
• DuPont Fabros announces temporary suspension of development plans

Ok....enough of the bad news....let's balance that off a little bit...

• Level3 raised $400 Million in capital - sending its shares up more than 12%
• Dell should buy Sun Microsystems?? I really doubted this......until I read Drue Reeves post here.
  
• Quantum of Solace breaks Bond Box Office Record
• I just finished watching a special on Jack Benny on PBS. It was really funny (I'll try to tape it for you Dad). I never knew Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny and many others) was on the Jack Benny show.
• Albert Pujols names 2008 National League MVP!
• Complete with cartoon - Engadget notes that the Cray Jaguar failed to beat the IBM Roadrunner for top spot on the Top 500 Supercomputer rankings.
• The new Star Trek trailer is out

Cray Jaguar - 1 Petaflop!

Next Monday, the Top500 list comes out for the second half of 2008. I am not involved with super computers at all, but the geek in me loves to follow who has the fastest computer in the world. eWeek.com reports that the Cray Jaguar is set to top the IBM Roadrunner in the #1 position. The XT Jaguar now offers a performance of more than 1 quadrillion calculations (1 petaflop) per second.

"The Cray XT Jaguar system now boasts of 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors, along with 362 terabytes of system memory and a 10-petabyte file system. Jaguar also now offers 362 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and an I/O bandwidth of 284 gigabytes per second."

The supercomputer belongs to the DOE and resides at their Oak Ridge National Laboratory. See their press release here.

The Washington Post also has an article (with picture!) here.

Level3 CDN Ecosystem

Level3 is an interesting company to watch. Their stock closed under $1 today, but I think there is some real potential for this company to take off. Level3 started out in 2008 with a focus on the CDN Market. You can follow events on the archives at Data Center Knowledge, but since then they have had a change in CEO, acquired IBM's CDN patents, and dramatically increased the capacity of their CDN.

I ran across two things today that put Level3 on my radar. The first was an article at the BusinessofVideo.com blog about the Level3 Broadcast Encoding Centers. These encoding centers are a part of their ecosystem offerings that the article discusses.

"The new broadcast centers allows level 3 to provide support for encoding up to 24 simultaneous live events in Windows Media, Flash or Move Networks formats. And with both broadcast centers tied into Level 3's Vyvx offering, the company can also ingest video directly from customer's locations and downlink and uplink video from nearly 95% of the world's satellites"

The second item I found on the Level3 website -- an investor presentation that goes over the usual stock and company performance data.... but the first half of slides in the show really drive home the market they are in, how they plan to attack the opportunity, and really not a bad summary of where things are going in the market.

Kevin Rose, of digg.com and Revision3 fame .... I believe..... recently said he stopped all cable and satellite services in favor of watching everything on his computer. Maybe the IPTV movement will be the thing to watch in 2009. I know I am certainly watching a lot more shows/episodes/podcasts/whatever online anyway.

Data Center Stock Index: Week Ending 11-7-08

My data center stock index tumbled, but only a little bit on a week where Obama won, the jobless rate climbed to 6.5% and the Dow dropped big yet again.

The index closed the week at $19.94. I (hopefully) will expand the index like I have talked about this week and see what kind of impact it has.

Iceland - A Green Data Center Hub -- Maybe!

Maybe I spoke too soon in my last post about Iceland. I ran across a few things that might counter some of the arguments made against the country. First, there is news that the economic / banking crisis in Iceland is being resolved. This may take a while, but it at least looks like they will come out of the crisis favorably.

Second -- there are some new stories I've found that may dispell any negatives about connectivity to Iceland. Capacity magazine reports that "subsea cable operator E-Farice has said that the final leg of its Danice cable system is underway." When complete some early next year, it will provide the country with a huge volume of additional capacity and full redundancy.

"The Danice system will comprise a four-fiber pair link between Iceland and Denmark, with initial capacity of 100Gb and full potential capacity of 5.1Tb. Using DWDM, the system will support the transmission of 128 10Gb wavelengths on each pair.

This press release from Tyco Telecommunications explains the venture as well. Some other Iceland-related things I ran across include this article from Mary Jander at Internet Evolution and the Data Centers in Iceland page at Invest in Iceland Agency.

ABC News also has a nice article on Iceland -- Iceland's Path to a Green Future

IBM On Notice For State of Texas Project

Nothing ups the priority and urgency of finishing a contract like getting press about missed deadlines and deliverables. According to the Austin American-Statesman, IBM's $863 Million contract is on the line if they don't resolve a data backup issue.

"The governor expects the issue will be resolved to the full satisfaction of the state," said Allison Castle, the governor's spokeswoman, so that termination of the contract will not be necessary"

With 9 pages of comments on the article, it apparently is a sore spot to many. One commenter wrote "The Office TV series has nothing on the State of Texas agencies". :)

Check out the article here.

Data Center Stock Index For Last Week

The data center stock index I have been tracking closed last week at $20.42. It started the week at $17.66 and just kept on climbing. It will be interesting to see if election day/week has any affect on it.

I have several stocks that I would like to add to the list -- I just want to take one more crack at using the Google spreadsheet to get historical data before starting over with the new stock list.

DataCenterKnowledge.com has an October review of data center stocks today also. Call it a hunch, but I think Terremark will be one to watch -- they have some pretty cool things going on and I think there is a ton of potential there.

DuPont Fabros will release 3rd quarter results the day after elections -- they were down 59.1% in October.

Iceland - A Green Data Center Hub?

We've heard the stories in recent months about activities in Iceland and the potential for locating data centers there. The geothermal resources and cold climate make it attractive for a power-hungry data center. The 2008 Icelandic Financial crisis may have some of those big companies that were "looking", thinking twice.

An article at Greentech Media is what had me thinking about Iceland again. The CEO of EYP made some comments about Iceland at a recent round table with reporters. According to the CIA World Factbook, Iceland is slightly smaller than Kentucky, has a population similar to Pitsburgh, and lists natural hazards of earthquakes and volcanic activity. The most interesting part of the article was these two lines:

"So in the future, large companies could roll them from center to center around the world and take advantage of low nightime electricity rates. Some HP customers and HP itself is already examining ways of shifting computing loads with the clock"

Not rocket science in terms of the concept, but it does reinforce the #1 site selection factor of cheap power, and #2, renewable energy possibilites in the area. I think in the end Iceland will loose out to Ireland as far as a European hub for data centers. Who knows though...... maybe Microsoft, Cisco, Google or others will build a cheap skeleton of a facility in Iceland where they could deploy containers quickly/easily -- and then pull them out just as easy to another location if economic problems in the country persisted.

Data Center Index 10/27/08

The data center index I created/started a few weeks back continues to plumit. My index is down over $5, but the DJINET index is down $15 for roughly the same time period.

John's Data Center Index as of 10/27/08: $17.66

Cisco's TechWiseTV

I recently upgraded my iPod to an iPod Touch, and ever since have been watching more video podcasts.  I can list off a number of good shows that I have on my downloads list, but thought I would mention the Cisco TechWise TV show for those of you that hadn't heard of it.

Episode 38 is out -- Accelerating Virtual Machines and it has some good information about WAAS (Wide Area Acceleration Services) and VN-Link, which delivers virtual machine-aware network and storage services.  The video is below, but they also have a YouTube channel for previous episodes/videos.

Cisco WAAS technologies are pretty cool and I think you'll see that product line grow pretty fast for them.  A video on this WAAS page at Cisco gives an implementation case for Monsanto.  It's a nice video, but I have two problems:  they mention Iowa twice as if it is connected via 56k modem at best (so VERY not true btw); and the solution pairs WAAS with Microsoft Share Point.  I have never been much of a Share Point fan, but (Ben - don't read this) -- it is growing on me.  It has it's purpose and the product line has certainly evolved since I used it last.

Finally, itWorld Canada has a story on Cisco WAN Optimization and "dramatically shrinking" replication times between company data centers.

Microsoft Data Center Experience 2009

The LiveSide.net blog reports that Microsoft will hold their second Data Center Experience in Chicago in Spring/Summer 2009!!!  Assuming that this will tour the NorthLake facility, it stands to be a very cool event!

Transformational Technologies On the Horizon

Just a couple of quick links to interesting 100Gig articles I ran across recently and an article about the Father of the Internet....

From PC World --  researchers have created an optical network component that they say can encrypt data travelling at 100 Gbps.  The advantage comes from companies utilizing Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM)  in corporate networks.

"But encryption still is typically done electronically, at a top speed of about 10G bps, Telcordia's Etemad said. Without the high-speed optical encryption, enterprises that wanted to carry 100G bps of traffic couldn't take advantage of the efficiency of putting it all on one wavelength."

TMCnet reports that Huawei Technologies has reportedly deployed a 100 Gigabit Ehternet WDM prototype.  Back in June of this year Cisco and Comcast did a demo of a 100GbE router interface.  

Finally -- in the list of "Tech gods", Vint Cerf is certainly in my top 5.   Network World has a summary of his keynote speech from the Internet Days conference.  IPv6, DNSSEC, and international characters (in DNS) are what he thinks will be a part of the "big changes"  in the coming years.  Check out the article here.  

Data Center and Green Design

I ran across a couple of interesting posts on CleanTechnica recently, and then a newspaper article tonight that prompted this blog post.  The CleanTechnica posts I liked were:

• UK becomes world's biggest producer of offshore wind power
• Off grid, tidal-powered data center in UK
• Alternative fuels could deplete water supplies

Then - today the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had an article on designing buildings for increased productivity.  The thing that caught my attention was the mention of the new $21 million Monsanto data center.  I imagine/hope I am reading too much into this, but.....

"...Fox aimed to limit human errors by introducing daylight into much of the space.  The firm said studies showed natural light improved the efficiency and mood of employees."

I'm all for this in the office space -- but they seemed to be talking particularly about the data center itself.  Any reader of my blog would know there are any number of security, natural disaster and other concerns with putting windows in the data center!  Anyway...the construction video is below...

John's Data Center Index: Week Ending 10/17/08

My data center index that I started a few weeks ago ended down 2.01  at 19.4.

It was yet another turbulent week for the markets. The other Index I have kept an eye on, the Dow Jones Internet Average, ended up down 6.37, at 64.46

New Nationwide Data Center in New Albany, OH

I know a couple of people that work at Nationwide in Des Moines, IA.  Des Moines is (I believe) Nationwide's second largest presence of employees next to their headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.  Nationwide will build a new data center approximately 14 miles to the north east of their headquarters -- once again showing that site selection seems to be thrown out the window in favor of building close to where your existing offices / people are.

The 120,000 square feet facility will be constructed on 45 acres in New Albany's Research and Information district.  Apparently there is no rush, as construction is not set to begin until January of 2010.

Check out the article on the announcement here.