Intel's Green Power

I have run across several news items about Intel Inc. lately and thought I would share.  

The first was a ComputerWorld article last week about the EPA Study on energy saving opportunities in servers and data centers.  Intel has been working closely with the EPA to develop the new data center energy performance rating.  About a month ago Intel launched their 5500 series processors and their Data Center Efficiency Challenge.  

The second and third items were Forbes.com articles.  The first one I actually read about in an archaic media form called a....... "magazine".  :)    Luckly, there was an online version of the same thing.  This article discusses how Intel is spending $7 Billion (with a B) to downsize its chips.  I guess there are buildings more expensive than data centers to build!  The second article was discussing how well situated Intel is in the current recession.  $3.5 Billion in cash, $4.2 Billion in short-term securities, and a gross margin of 46%!

The fourth item is actually how I started this blog post -- The EPA announced their list of the largest green power purchasers in the U.S. and Intel ranked #1!  You can find the National Top 50 list here.  I also then checked out a 'provider' company that seemed to be used a lot by the top 50 companies - 3Degrees.  

Since I am a maps fanatic and like to look at Fortune 500 corporate campuses (from Google Maps) I had an urge to map the top 10 in the EPA's Green Power Purchasers list.  

View EPA National Top 50 in a larger map

Visualizing the Power Grid

When I did my site selection white paper I loved looking at various maps of the U.S. to depict a number of different things.  Tonight I ran across a new set of maps and very interesting information (link courtesy of my  brother-in-law).

NPR is running a series titled "Electricity in America".    This map, Visualizing the Grid, shows power lines, power plants, sources of power and other data overlays.  

Now....if only the overlays could have been Google Earth layers...  :)

Equinix Q1 Profit Triples at $15.5 Million

Equinix announced their first quarter 2009 results today. Proving that the demand for colocation and data center services is still high, they had some good numbers:

• Increased quarterly revenues to $199.2 million, a 4% increase over the previous quarter and 26% increase over the same quarter last year.
• "Capital expenditures in the first quarter were $75 million, of which $10.3 million was attributed to ongoing capital expenditures and $64.7 million was attributed to expansion capital expenditures"
• For the second quarter of 2009, Equinix expects revenues to be in the range of $206 to $210 million

On their Investors web page there is a spreadsheet full of "non-financial" metrics that I found pretty interesting. For example:

• "head count" is up 226 people from Q1 2008
• It's funny how colo customers are 'somewhat' seasonal. They had 160 new customers in Q1 2008 and 161 in Q1 2009
• 10 Gig Exchange ports has more than doubled in the past year
• "Managed infrastructure Services % of recurring revenue" has not budged a single percentage since Q1 2008.
  

There is also a fairly detailed '2007-2010 Announced Expansions' PDF here.

The Seeking Alpha blog had a nice post on Monday on Equinix and the colocations sector.

When searching around for Equinix today I ran across a pretty interesting article at Forbes.com. It was from December 2, 1999. It gives the historical perspective on just how far Equinix has come..... I still put Jay Adelson as one of my top "Tech People to Know" list. Here is a quote from that 1999 article:

"Equinix announced an impressive $280 million in financing today, including a $200 million debt offering by Salomon Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Goldman Sachs. The remaining $80 million came from its initial backers--Cisco Systems csco (nasdaq: csco - news - people), Microsoft msft (nasdaq: msft - news - people), and Benchmark Capital--as well as a slew of new and less likely investors like Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and E*Trade Group egrp (nasdaq: egrp - news - people). So far the company has raised just more than $315 million."

Equinix closed down today -0.19 at $62.26 -- but shares rose 2% in Wednesday's extended trading.

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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):

Iceland Data Center Market

Just a quick post about an interesting documentary video on the Iceland Data Center Market (link from the Green Data Center blog). I know there have been many skeptics about this area being good for data centers, but they certainly have a lot of things coming together recently that make a case for them.

Level3 Financing $220M Loan

"Level 3 Financing, Inc., has received commitments from lenders to increase the borrowings under its existing $1.4 billion senior secured credit facility through the creation of a $220 million Tranche B loan"

That quote was from the StreetInsider.com article on the Level3 announcement. The loan is reported to be used for "general corporate purposes". I'm a techie - so I had to Google what "general corporate purposes" meant. :) Apparently it means we're going to get a ton of money to do what we want with it and not tell anyone.

Rob Powell at the Telecom Ramblings blog had a pretty funny April fools post about CEO James Crowe moving his office to an undisclosed monastery deep in the Himalayas. Rob also suggests that the cash could be used for purchasing Qwest longhaul -- which makes sense to me.

Last Thursday Level3 announced some new wavelength service offerings for network protection, additional bandwidth options and performance guarantees.

Level3 has posted their Red Couch interviews, taken at SXSW last month - including one from Matt Tanase from Rackspace.

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Xerox $100 million outsource deal to HCL Technologies

Xerox will pay $100 Million over six years for HCL Technologies to manage disaster recovery preparation and consolidate data centers across North America and Europe.

This article over on MarketWatch has the details and quite the discussion thread to follow.