Data Center Links: October 27, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• NVIDIA and Amazon Simplify Machine Learning.  Amazon and NVIDIA announced new Machine Learning software stacks in the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC), and a new 8 Volta GPU EC2 instance. 

• IBM's Blockchain solution for global payments.  IBM announced a new blockchain banking solution that will, with partners Stellar.org and KlickEx Group improve the speed in which banks both clear and settle payment transactions on a single network in near real time. IBM says the solution is run from the IBM Blockchain Platform on Hyperledger Fabric and that they will continue to advance the solution with the goal of expanding capabilities in order to support central bank-issued digital currencies, securities, bonds and structured financial assets.

• Arm launches security framework IoT at scale. At the annual Arm TechCon conference this year Arm introduced a common industry framework for building secure connected devices, called Platform Security Architecture (PSA). The company said PSA will deliver representative IoT threat models and security analyses, hardware and firmware architecture specs, and a reference open source implementation of the firmware specification called Trusted Firmware-M.

• Cisco acquires Perspica. Cisco announced that it is acquiring machine learning-driven operations analytics firm Perspica for an undisclosed amount. Cisco will fold the company staff into AppDynamics, which it purchased earlier in the year for $3.7 billion. 

• Intel doubles down with $60M on startups. At its annual conference Intel Capital revealed 19 new investments in startups, totaling more than $60 million. Intel Capital's Wendell Brooks focused on the data explosion, noting that "by 2020, every autonomous vehicle on the road will create 4TB of data per day. A million self-driving cars will create the same amount of data every day as 3 billion people.  Company investments in startups were from all over the world and included such companies as Trace, Bossa Nova Robotics, Horizon Robotics, Echo Pixel, TileDB, LeapMind and AdHawk Microsystems.

• U.S. warns about attacks on energy, industrial firms.  This seems almost like a template announcement... that has happened, and will probably keep happening.  The U.S. government issued a public warning last week that hackers are targeting energy and industrial firms. Homeland Security warned that nuclear, energy, aviation, water and critical manufacturing industries have been targeted along with government entities in attacks dating back to at least May.

Bonus item:  Here is a Really cool drone video - from Rotor Visual

Data Center Links: September 21, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• Toshiba sells Flash Memory Chip Unit for $18 Billion.  The bidding seems to be over, as Bloomberg reports that a group led by Bain Capital has acquired the chip unit from Toshiba for 2 trillion yen ($18 billion). The Bain consortium includes backing from Toshiba, as well as Japanese and other overseas companies. It was noted that financial support was added from Apple, Dell, SK Hynix and Japan's Hoya Corp.  

• Vexata launches with $54 million venture funding. After years in stealth Silicon Valley company Vexata launched, backed with $54 million from Mayfield, Intel Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and Redline Capital. The company also announced its Active Data Fabric, a software-defined all-solid-state data storage infrastructure that enables extreme performance at scale for Tier 1 applications in enterprise or cloud data centers. 

• How the Internet kept humming during 2 hurricanes.  A nice recap of stories from recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida and the facilities (and people) that maintained data centers throughout them. 

• Cray 'Theta' Supercomputer used to map brain function. What do you use to face such a daunting task as mapping connections of 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections? Call on the Intel-Cray 9.65 petaflops supercomputer housed at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. With tera and petabyte scale datasets the Theta supercomputer along with an advanced software platform utilizes data mining, graph analytics and machine learning to meet the challenge.  Very cool stuff.

• TigerGraph nets $31 million.  Graph database startup TigerGraph (formerly GraphSQL) announced its first product Tuesday, and a new $31 million Series A funding round. The company says it has "built the first native parallel graph databased platform using proprietary technology that yields performance up to 100 fold compared with other graph platforms."  

• Comcast acquires Stringify. Comcast has acquired IoT automation service company Stringify. Stringify has been named an IoT company to watch, and I'm not sure if this is a story for the data center, other than I can't help to think there is something making this deal significant...  at the intersection of content and things....      edge... ?

• IBM claims top spot for Blockchain technology. A Juniper Research study ranked IBM as the number one player in blockchain technology, leaving Microsoft and Accenture trailing in second and third places respectively. Customer project stories for blockchain with IBM include Maersk, London Stock Exchange, and AIG. 

Smarter Cities, Sustainable Buildings and Other Green Things

Last week I attended the 2011 Heartland GreenUp, and for the sake of reporting it, and for those unable to attend I thought I would share some of the insights I took away.

Harris M. Warsaw from IBM was the keynote and had several interesting statistics and notes about the Smarter Planet - The Green Message:

• $40 billion lost to inefficient supply chains
• The Port of Jersey has 100,000 empty ISO shipping containers. Maybe Google is ramping up for their floating data centers in the Atlantic. :)
• In the Smarter Cities initiative, IBM defines smarter as instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent.
• 80% of CEO's view sustainability as impacting brand value
• 82% of executives expect some form of climate change regulations in the next 5 years.
• Dubuque, Iowa is a pilot city for applying all of the IBM Smarter City initiatives. Last month IBM had a press release about how they combined analytics, cloud computing and community engagement for the City of Dubuque.
• Talking to the increase in monitoring and measurement devices around energy - Harris stated that people that have data are 8 times more likely to take action on problems that are uncovered.
• 24 Iowa companies are partnering with IBM to build software and integration around the Dubuque smarter cities project.

If it wasn't for my passion for technology, I think I would have been an architect. So - one of the sessions I highlighted before attending the conference was with Kevin Nordmeyer, who is the Director of the Iowa Energy Center - formerly with RDG Architects. Kevin had some very insightful comments about IEC projects and overall building design and sustainability. Here are some notes/links from his talk:

• Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) - Flowchart of Energy Use in the U.S.
• The Iowa Energy Resource Station - doing work for LLNL and researching energy performance in buildings with real-time, real-life systems.
• BECON - a focal point for developing value-add products from Iowa's biomass resources. BECON stands for Biomass Energy CONversion facility.
• Numerous software and tools at the Department of Energy web site.

Jurij Paraszczak - Leader of the Research Smarter Cities program at IBM. Jurij talked a lot about the case studies they have been a part of in the smarter cities projects. With the massive amounts of data collected during these projects, analytics plays a major role in making sense of the data being researched. Speaking to smarter analytics, he described them as either prescriptive, predictive, or descriptive.

Andrew Winston was the final talk and presented a nice summary of his research, case studies and echoed many of the themes of the day.

• GoodGuide.com - find green and socially responsible products - or see how the ones you use regularly rate.
• An interesting case on how 'culture matters' in sustainability -- BestBuy ranks 1000 stores for efficiency; this engages individual store managers to compete so their store isn't listed as #1000.
• Waste Management now produces more energy than solar.
• Reduced environmental impact meets cleaning - Minnesota company Tennant and their floor cleaner that uses just water (no chemicals)

2010 Reviews and 2011 Forecasts

This time of year I typically become inundated with "Top X Stories for 20xx" and reviews and predictions for the next year. Some times I have simply joined the crowd and made my own predictions, but this year I thought I would just 'link' to some of my favorites and review the news, innovations and prognostications for things to come.

Looking back at 2010:

• I made the prediction for 2010 that it would be a break-out year for desktop virtualization. I take that back…. 2011 will be that break-out year!
• Data Center Knowledge - 2010: Data Center Innovation Drives Change
• SearchDataCenter.com - Top 10 Data Center Stories of 2010
• Pingdom - The major incidents on the Internet in 2010
  
• Google's 2010 Zeitgeist
• World Energy Outlook 2010

Stocks and Mergers and Acquisitions

I think data center stocks have performed fairly well over the year and the M&A activity in the technology industry has certainly been brisk. In 2008 I started tracking my own data center stock index, using a weighted capitalization calculation. In October 2008 the initial value I tracked was $19.12, and on December 27, 2010 it was $35.55. I 'think' we will continue to see some M&A activity in the first half of 2011 as some additional target companies may get swallowed up. GigaOm has a nice summary story on acquisitions and how $10 billion was spent on data storage and warehousing companies between HP, EMC, IBM, and Dell. A Bloomberg article listed the following as 'takeover bait': F5, Brocade, Riverbed, Arista, VMware, bmc software, Citrix, Tibco, Teradata, and others that have already been acquired since they wrote the article. :)

Supercomputers

With supercomputers in 2010 it was all about GPU's and energy demands to pave the road for exascale supercomputers. A top highlight of my year was traveling to the NCSA National Petascale Compute Facility to check out the data center that will house Blue Waters. The specs for Blue Waters were recently published and at an estimated 10 Petaflops I am sure we'll see it in the top 5 of the top500.org list.

The Cloud

Cloud computing was obviously a run-away hit for 2010. Perhaps we are even coming to a point where it isn't pure hype with a sole purpose of aggravating Larry Ellison and other non-marketing people. The public/private cloud divide will help push overall cloud technologies along, as individuals and enterprises find their perfect fit. I still think security, legal issues and governance have a ways to go in the cloud - check out these videos: Gartner's Cloud Law and Order and Tom Roloff, Senior VP at EMC Consulting on private vs. public clouds.

I found another decent definition of cloud computing, that I believe is attributable to McKinsey: clouds are hardware-based services, offering compute, network and storage capacity where: 1) hardware management is highly abstracted from the buyer; 2) buyers incur infrastructure costs as variable open; and 3) infrastructure capacity is highly elastic (up or down).

Looking forward to 2011

• IBM's five predictions for the next five years: for instance - "heat from data centers may help power cities"
• 11 predictions for 2011 from Chris O'Brien at Mercury News
• 7 Ramblings for 2011 in Telecom and Internet Infrastructure - Telecom Ramblings
• Five smartphone hardware trends in 2011. Big impact here on the back-end data centers supporting all of these smartphones.
• CleanTech Media - 11 predictions for 2011

The "A" companies

I think the "A" companies have it for 2011. Apple and Amazon. Apple's 505,000 square foot North Carolina data center had a big spotlight in 2010 and I think 2011 we will finally see the streaming iTunes service come to life that everyone has been talking about. Continued success of the iPhone and iPad will drive data center requirements as well -- just today it was reported that Apple put an order in for 20-21 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2011. The really interesting company behind the scenes for producing the iPhone, among many other devices, is Foxconn. Bloomberg had a nice article a few months back on this company.

I can never seem to find too much information on Amazon data centers, but they certainly have the intellectual capital behind them between Werner Vogels and James Hamilton. Amazon acquired Quidsi this year, the company behind the wildly successful site diapers.com. With that acquisition they gained a 1,250,000 square foot warehouse in Gouldsboro, PA. Now there is a place to put data center containers and build-out a warehouse-scale data center. :) In 2010 AWS introduced Cluster Compute Services for EC2, where for $1.60 an hour anyone could 'rent a supercomputer' -- VERY cool stuff. Amazon Web Services had a number of innovations in 2010 and I think we'll see them continue to dominate in 2011.

Finally - as LEED is a big part of data center design, did anyone else make their holiday ginger bread houses LEED-compliant?

Merger and Acquisition Targets

Mergers and acquisitions are always fun to speculate on. In this industry it seems like a week doesn't go by where some M&A activity is happening. With the recent Equinix acquisition of Switch and Data I have to wonder if more data center industry acquisitions will happen before the end of the year. Both Google and Cisco have said that shopping sprees will continue to gain speed in 2010.

thedeal.com had a Barron's article summary that intrigued me today about M&A speculation. The article points to 10 technology companies that are potential takeover candidates, including several that I have thought of:

1. Riverbed (RVBD | $1.53B market cap): major competitor to Cisco's WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. I've always thought Cisco would buy them, but perhaps HP is better suited.
   
2. NetApp (NTAP | $9.63B market cap): another possible target for Cisco. Otherwise maybe HP or Dell?
   
3. F5 Networks (FFIV | $3.73B market cap): No idea; maybe HP or EMC
   
4. Brocade (BRCD | $3.69B market cap): seems like HP is the lead candidate... if not, maybe EMC or IBM
   

and others.... Check out the complete article and list here.

Cloud Computing Analysis From Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Just a quick link to an outstanding blog post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. I've linked to him before, because I thoroughly enjoy his thoughts and analysis. Among the amazing amount of cloud computing hype out there, Irving truly gets it and shows us how clouds and computing have evolved and will continue to.

Check out his August 31 post on The Data Center in the Cambrian Age. He compares cloud computing to the Cambrian Age, a geological period where evolution accelerated rapidly into more complex life forms. He also references an excellent paper done by Google engineers Luis Andre Barroso and Urs Hoelzle on Wharehouse-Scale computers.

Tech Industry M&A Activity

It's always fun to speculate about IPO's, mergers and acquisitions. In the tech industry it happens so often it's hard to keep track of who bought who and how long ago it was.

My current train of thought on the topic surrounded the recent news of CoreSite. CoreSite is a Carlyle Group company, which as I mentioned before is a HUGE global private equity company. I wondered if CoreSite would do an IPO in the near future. Carlyle invested in Equinix in 1999 -- their site says "acquired" in 1999. Equinix then raised $240 Million in their IPO a year later.

Some other interesting ones I have seen a few times:

• Savvis and Global Crossing

• Level 3 and Spint Nextel?

With all of the news Cisco has made lately, there could be some acquisitions by the other big players to get deeper into the networking market:

• Either IBM or HP to buy Juniper or Brocade ?

I refuse to believe that Cisco would buy EMC, but do think they could/should buy NetApp. Or maybe Isilon Systems?

Either HP or Cisco could by F5

All speculation -- but the tech industry M&A activity does seem to be picking up.

Data Center Degrees

Nope -- not a blog post about temperatures and cooling in the data center -- this time I'm talking about educational degrees. ITJungle.com reports on Metropolitan Community College (MCC), in Omaha reinventing its General IT curriculum. They are adding specialized course work realting to the IBM Power Systems i Platform - and launching a two-year educational track called Data Center Management. With Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all in their back yard - combined with online courses, MCC should have a lot of demand for these courses.

"MCC received a three-year $1.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor with the goal of increasing the number of students in IT education. Building and developing the data center and the management is part of the grant."

Check out the IT Jungle article here

Last week the Wall Street Journal had an article about "Google Searches for Staffing Answers". It discussed Google HR and their approach to solving the brain drain problem. What better or more appropriate way for them to solve it, than with an algorithm. Check out the interesting article here.

Monday Links

Just some quick links to things I found on the net today -- no time to comment; just things I found to be interesting.....

Check out the drawing in this IEEE Spectrum article. It looks like another approach to the Microsoft 4th Generation data center (outdoor container park)! The article is good also --- although it is kind of a summary of what has gone on the last 6-12 months....nothing new.

Power Grid Found Susceptible. I'm a big fan of SmartGrids, but like anything else they need to be EXTREMELY careful with this. Security firm IOActive is offering the security lesson....maybe a few rants from Christopher Hoff would help as well.

Just to show I'm not a complete Cisco fan-boy.... Force10 announced some big iron today. They unveiled a new line of switches and routers "designed to improve the performance, management and cost effectiveness of virtualized data center and cloud computing environments." Pretty cool stuff from an initial quick glance.

As many of you know, I blog from Iowa and simply can NOT escape the stupid stereotype about farmers. I've worked on a few IT projects in the past that were for, or benefited farmers, and so I thought this was interesting..... it's a map showing broadband in america -- percentage of farmers with high speed internet.

March 19 announcement from Rackable: "The CloudRack C2 servers can run at 104 degrees inside the data center, and they offload power supply to the rack to reduce energy wasted in converting AC electricity from the wall to DC electricity used by the box to 1 percent"

I'm usually on the same page as Om Malik.... but have to disagree with him on this one. He thinks Cisco should buy Sun, not IBM.

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.

GreenTech and DataCenters - Part 2

Continuing where I left off yesterday with GreenTech..... today I'll cover what the big companies are up to with environmental sustainability, greentech, etc....

Cisco:

• Just a few short weeks back Cisco announced EnergyWise. I haven't had a chance to get 'really' familiar with the technology yet, but it seems pretty cool on the surface. A TMCnet blogger has his thoughts on the Cisco "energy tax" here. It's a Nortel favored argument, but I'll refer back to the video I blogged about here to tell you what I think about the energy tax criticism. I'm not saying EnergyWise is perfect or that you 'should' put your eggs in one basket, but come on..... SmartGrids have HUGE potential in 2009 and I think EnergyWise is in on the beginning of something great.
  

• Last Friday CNet had an article about "Cisco unveils Global blueprint for cities". Pretty cool stuff -- and it builds on Cisco's mission to become a more Global company.

IBM

• InformationWeek reports "IBM to Help Orange Data Center go Green". Partnership with IBM and Syracuse University.

• IBM Launches "Ready for IBM Energy & Environment" Validation for Business Partners.

• IBM Expands Efficiency Offerings. Announcement of a Strategic Carbon Management consulting service.

• IBM Brings Smart Meters to Malta. 5 year project to "design and deliver a nationwide smart utility implementation" to the nation of Malta.

Google

• Google: A Utility Company. Interesting blog post about Google purchasing an abandoned paper mill in rural Finland.

• On Feb. 9th the Official google.org blog wrote about home electricity use and combining smart meters with easy access to energy information. This (to me) was Extremely interesting. More information on the Google PowerMeter and other items can be found here.
  

Microsoft

• The Microsoft "Innovating to Improve the Planet" site is a pretty good source to find out what they are up to in the green department.

• The Microsoft Dynamics team has been up some interesting things. Check out this video about the Dynamics Sustainability Dashboard on Channel 9.

More still to come.... I am almost through my list of links. Success stories, green technologies and more on smart grids the rest of this week.

IBM Smart Grid

Just a quick link to a really nice article over at Cleantech. It's about the $819 Billion Stimulus plan that was passed and how there is a lot of money included for smart grid technology. Cleantech interviewed Drew Clark, Director of Strategy for IBM's Venture Capital Group.

One of the companies mentioned, SynapSense makes some pretty cool products for the data center. They were honored by the DOE last fall for their innovative approach to saving energy in the data center. They have a LiveImaging product that provides thermal, pressure and humidity mapping using 3D, real-time data at multiple levels of your data center. SyanpSense will be at the Green Grid Technical Forum in San Jose Feb. 3 - 4.

Check out the Cleantech article here.

Wednesday Links

Lots of little things that I thought I would quickly blog about..... data center news has been pretty heavy lately and I'm just catching up.

• My data center stock index was up today almost a whole dollar from the previous day. I started it back in October, so I thought I would finally make a graph just to show the ride it has taken since then. It closed today at $19.48.

• This is a month old now, but I still found it pretty interesting -- "Why IT Colocation Centers will see a boom in 2009 despite the Macroeconomy".

• Anyone looking for a project plan for building a data center -- here is a good read, plus a benchmark against one of the best: Digital Realty Trust.

• I was pretty bummed about the news that Microsoft is postponing the West Des Moines data center. However.... it is just 'postponing' it, not scrapping it. I guess we'll just have to be patient.

• I've been reading and watching the news about Cisco EnergyWise .... more on that in a separate post. Meanwhile, check out this good article from IBM's Forward View: "ROI: Extending the Benefits of Energy Efficiency"

• Finally -- I thought I would share a bit of humor -- as a fan of The Matrix trilogy, I thought this video was pretty funny: The Matrix Runs on Windows
  

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.

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.

Wednesday Links

Too many stories -- too little time to comment.

Some of these are on the current Wall Street situation (hard to avoid that topic recently).  On a side note to that -- I am building my own stock index for data center companies.  Google Spreadsheet makes this amazingly easy.  I want to get a full week of data before blogging about it though, so more on Monday....

Wednesday Links:

• GigaOm: Sequoia Capital Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley is in Trouble.   I especially liked the comment near the bottom -- "Start-ups will have to start developing legitimate business plans and actually execute upon their strategy to monetize.  How Horrible.  This is good for tech, not bad".

• Forbes.com -- Tech Earnings Loom

• New York Times - Venture Capitalists are Hearing Footsteps.

• Stratus Technologies Survey: 20% of businesses with Business Continuity Plans have no idea if they will actually work.

• Veritas Cluster Server One -- Symantec Delivers new High Availability Disaster Recovery platform

• Terremark to provide core infrastructure solutions to WiMAX

• Eleven things you didn't know about EMC

• IBM Creates new data center certification

• Sun Microsystems recognized by EPA for surpassing agressive greenhouse gas emissions goal.

whew!

Welsh Data Center, IBM and Carbon Offsets

I don't have a lot of time to comment on these stories, but found each of them to be interesting:

• Massive data center planned for Wales.  In April of this year we learned about Next Generation Data's plans for a $400 facility in Newport, Wales.  Today, PC World had an article on the now $346 million renovation of an old microchip fabrication plant.  The building and infrastructure that NGD is putting into this facility is pretty impressive -- and reminds me of some of Terremark's NAP of the Capitol Region.

• Any good tech blog wouldn't be hip without at least one mention of Cloud Computing.  So....  The ICT Review has an article about the IBM initiative that "extends its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and clients"

• Harvard Business Publishing has a nice article by Andrew Winston that covers "Do Quality Carbon Offsets Exist?

Friday Links - IBM and Wireless at Fiber Speeds

IBM is in the news recently regarding two foreign centers. PC World reports that IBM plans to open a new data center early next year in Scotland. This facility, at $3.52 million, is suited for medium-sized businesses. Check out the PC World article here.

IBM also recently (today) announced that they awarded Schneider Electric the contract to design and provide electrical distribution, building management/security system, high density cooling and critical power solutions for their India data center. Schneider Electric is a pretty huge company, and thanks to acquisitions has all of the necessary parts to fulfill such a large contract. The facility should be complete by March 2009. Check out the article here.

MIT Technology Review has a story about new millimeter-wave technology that sends data at 10 gigabits per second. The article is fascinating and I recommend reading it -- here.

ReadWriteWeb has an article on 5 Big Data Center Trends for 2008. Blades, Green, Virtualization, Clouds, Enterprise Linux. Maybe it's just me -- but I would throw the container model in that trend list. I think we are just starting to see containers in the data center and that there is a lot more to come. Check out the article here.

Virtual Intrusion Prevention Appliance

A short while back I linked to a presentation by Christopher Hoff about virtualization and security.  Those that attended VMWorld a few weeks back reported that security was a big theme at the show.  Well, the trend continues.... with IBM offering a peek at the future of its Proventia Network Virtual Intrusion Prevention System appliance.  It looks like this product (and maybe others) will be out early next year.

Check out the Network World article here  and more from IBM here