Data Center Links: August 24, 2017

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

• Apple to build data center in Iowa.  The Des Moines Register reports that Apple will build a data center in Waukee, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines. Following large data center builds from Microsoft and Facebook in the Des Moines area, and Google in Council Bluffs, Apple will fulfill project 'Morgan' in a newly annexed portion of Waukee.  My thoughts? Smart move by Apple (Iowa=awesome location), data center hub in the making (enormous build-outs by Microsoft, Facebook and Google in Iowa), and good for Waukee (there is already another totally awesome data center in town). #iowa  #iowabrag

• Druva nets $80 Million Funding round.  Cloud data and protection management company Druva announced $80 million of growth equity funding Tuesday, bringing their total raised to around $200 million. Funding was led by Riverwood Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and most other existing venture investors. Druva said they will use the funds to "dramatically accelerate research and development, expand go-to-market efforts worldwide, and lead the industry in redefining how enterprises protect, manage, and use their data."

• Microsoft Acquires Cycle Computing. Microsoft announced it is acquiring Cycle Computing, a leader in HPC cloud computing orchestration. Microsoft says it will integrate the Big Computing capabilities from the CycleCloud product into Azure. 

• Microsoft launches Brainwave for real-time AI. At the 2017 Hot Chips Symposium in Cupertino Microsoft announced Project Brainwave, a new deep learning acceleration platform. Leveraging a large FPGA infrastructure inside of Microsoft, the new platform is built with three main layers: a high performance, distributed system architecture, a hardware DNN (deep neural network) engine synthesized onto FPGAs, and a compiler and runtime for low-friction deployment of trained models.

• Databricks secures $140 million. Unified Analytics Paltform company Databricks announced it has received $140 million in a Series D funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks has raised $247 million to date, and will use the new funds to accelerate the investment in making artificial intelligence achievable for enterprise organizations with its Unified Analytics Platform. 

• Red Hat, Microsoft simplify containers for hybrid clouds. Red Hat and Microsoft announced an alliance expansion, with a new initiative aimed at enabling enterprises to more easily adopt containers. The companies say this includes "native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure, and SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift." 

• ORNL readies facility for 200 Petaflop Supercomputer. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is getting a data center ready for its Summit supercomputer, which is expected to deliver 200 petaflops - which is about twice as powerful as the world's current leader in computer performance. The data center includes a new 20 megawatt power and cooling plant and an expanded central energy plant for the campus. 

Data Center Links: May 11, 2017

Between company conference season and a lot of M&A activity recently, it is hard to keep up with the news.  Here are a few things I found interesting:

• Facebook breaks ground on 1M sq ft Altoona data center.  Because Iowa is the best place for data centers.... Facebook broke ground on its fourth building in Altoona - a 1 million square foot data center. With this building the Facebook data center campus will total 2.5 million square feet.

• Cisco acquires AI company MindMeld.  Just like many years ago when you had to keep a running list of who Cisco was buying, they are keeping a fast pace in 2017. Making it their third acquisition in two weeks Cisco dives deeper into AI by buying MindMeld, a San Francisco company that has developed a conversational platform based on natural language understanding (NLU). The NLU functionality will be integrated with Cisco's Spark platform. MindMeld, besides being on my own 'cool tech' list, has been recognized as one of the top companies leading the AI revolution.
• Could Cisco possibly acquire Nutanix, vArmour or SnapRoute next?

• Cray launches Supercomputers built for AI.  Cray has launched new CS-Storm supercomputers that are purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads.  New CS-Storm 500GT and CS-Storm 500NX systems leverage NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, which foster "up to 187 TOPS (tera operations per second) per node, 2,618 TOPS per rack for machine learning application performance."   I'll take two.  :)

• NVIDIA GPU conference.  AI, self-driving cars, healthcare, Volta GPU platform, deep learning software tools.....   Too many to mention; check it out here.

• Microsoft debuts Cosmos DB. At the Microsoft Build 2017 developer conference Microsoft introduced Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database with five consistency choices. As a superset of DocumentDB Cosmos models include Strong, Bounded Staleness, Session, Consistent Prefix, and Eventual. 

• Apple announces $1B data center expansion in Reno. 9to5Mac reports that the Reno city council approved Apple's proposal for a $1 billion expansion to its existing data center. 

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)

Energy Links and The Heartland GreenUp

As I prepare to attend The Heartland GreenUp this Thursday I have read a number of articles around power lately that I thought were interesting.

Tech Companies becoming Power Companies?

Last week Fast Company had a nice article titled The Race for the Most Efficient Server is Turning Tech Companies Into Power Companies. The first item they bring up is that the big 'information factories' like Google, FaceBook, Amazon and Apple will be storing a few zettabytes here and there of our data, and as such have a rather voracious appetite for power. With the power consumption for the Apple data center in Maiden North Carolina guestimated to be 100 megawatts it is no doubt that their supplier, Duke Energy will be scrutinized for how that power is being generated. CO2K anyone?

Their second item, server efficiency is no small thing either: it is something that all of the manufacturers and chip producers have been doing their best to tout. SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman was interviewed by Robert Scoble recently and explains their amazing technology that can deliver 512 servers in 1/4 the space, for 1/4 the power utilization of a typical server.

New IEA Publication

Osha Gray Davidson on Forbes pointed out that the International Energy Agency published a 90-page book - Climate and Electricity Annual 2011. It seems like the data center industry is always cited for how much energy they are using - but look at electrical generation in general and how, for example it emitted 11 gigatonnes of CO2 in 2008. The report presents the challenge for decarbonisation, but also says that despite actions to reduce CO2 emissions and "despite very rapid growth in renewable energy generation, significant technology and policy challenges remain if this unprecedented essential transition is to be achieved."

Politics

On the political front there was some interesting commentary on H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act, around slowing the military's march to clean energy. SmartGrid News reported on the Electric Consumer Right to Know Act (e-Know) bill that would give customers the option of getting real-time electricity use information, as well as giving them the right to authorize access to their usage data to companies that provide home energy efficiency products. I just happened to run across a HP article around the same time that talked about their Home Energy Manager software that looks pretty impressive.

IBM - the keynote at Heartland GreenUp, has a ton of initiatives and projects surrounding the smartgrid and the Smarter Planet effort. A branch off of that I have been reading lately is the site: Generating Insights - Accelerating into a new era in energy.

Speaking of digital information about our energy - It looks like a South Carolina nuclear plant reactor will be the first in the U.S. to go digital. Managed by Duke Energy, they said they "made sure its engineers can manually take over all digital processes in case there are any problems."

Finally -- I am a sucker for infographics. The Infrarati blog had a nice one recently to create awareness about the energy consumption behind all of these digital services and clouds we use.

I would highly recommend attending the Heartland GreenUp. If you are not able to attend in person (June 2nd in Des Moines) they have a virtual world setup to attend the conference online!

Hey Verizon - Build Your Data Center In Iowa!

Recently a series of events prompted Verizon to pull out of plans to build a 900,000 square foot data center near Buffalo, New York. In the spirit of a few years back when people were cheerleading to have Google or Microsoft build a mega data center in their city or state, I would like to make the offer to Verizon -- Iowa would LOVE to have you build your data center here!!

There are a number of reasons why Iowa is the perfect place to build your data center. Here are a few highlights:

1. Tax incentives: Talk to Microsoft and Google first - they can explain the wonderfully accommodating business environment they encountered when building data centers here.
2. Inexpensive power - one of the best states for power costs. EAI - Average Price of Electricity.
3. Cost of doing business is a major consideration for a company when selecting a state -- I submit to you the #1 pick for 2010 -- Iowa.
4. The Iowa Department of Economic Development has a wonderful site to assist with any and all needs in locating here. There is even an online tool you can use to build a report comparing Iowa against any other state in a number of categories.
5. All nine of Iowa's largest communities ranked on the Forbes Best Places for Business list.
6. Iowa has a very low risk for natural disasters.
7. Iowa is a very progressive state for a variety of renewable energy types.
8. Iowa has a nationally recognized education program.
9. Did I mention incredibly inexpensive power?!
10. If you were considering New York or Wyoming, Iowa is the perfect compromise:

For my final plea - I would like to offer my complete consulting services (for free) on site selection within the state. I have a number of ideas on where the perfect location will be and can help you get in touch with city and state government officials to talk about incentives and power companies to discuss requirements.

If it's not too late -- Please consider Iowa as the perfect place to build your new data center.

Thanks!

Microsoft Data Centers

I was all set to write a wonderful blog post enticing Microsoft to decide on Des Moines for their next data center .... extolling about how wonderful Iowa is, how Des Moines was recently listed as one of the best cities to live in and numerous other reasons. The very next day they confirmed that they had indeed (re)selected West Des Moines for the site. I like to tell myself that they just didn't want to see me grovel.

So now -- I'll write to THANK Microsoft for the uber-wise decision to locate in West Des Moines....and then THANK them again for placing the uber-cool fourth generation data center design in West Des Moines!

I was fortunate enough to talk with the Principal Power Systems Architect, eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft - Shaun Harris this past week (check out my Blue Waters post btw) and he elaborated on the latest revision of the 4th generation design. This means the concept I saw was only a few revisions behind the actual 4th generation design. Shaun also told me numerous company secrets that I just can't blog on. :)

Continuing on the Microsoft path -- I ran across this Burlington, NC story on a large company possibly building a "data storage center" in North Carolina. The story mentions an investment in the billions and speculation has automatically gone to Microsoft. Data Center Knowledge reported back in May that Microsoft was deciding between southern Virginia and Western North Carolina. Apple and Google already have North Carolina sites, so the only other 'large' company with that kind of clout and the need to build data centers (in my mind) would be Amazon.

The only reason I think it would not be Microsoft is because of their fourth generation design -- it seems like that design would not require an investment that large. However, the investment they made in Dublin was fairly large -- maybe North Carolina will also be a hybrid indoor/outdoor data center.

Ok - so one last plea to Microsoft: forget North Carolina, Virginia or wherever ... just double or triple the size of the West Des Moines facility and call it good!

TEAM Companies Data Center Video

Data center services provider TEAM Companies has released a new video that does a fly-through of a typical data center. The modular design used in a TEAM facility is broken out in this video into infrastructure layers that depict power, cooling, telecom, data rooms and network operations center.

TEAM Companies operates multi-tenant data centers in Cedar Falls and Des Moines, Iowa, as well as Madison, Wisconsin.

The video runs 8 minutes, 34 seconds.

Green News Week

Being in between the GreenNet conference last week and the upcoming Heartland Green Up (which I am going to) -- I have a lot of green news in my browser cache. There were several interesting things at the GreenNet conference that caught my attention -- most notably the Google Budget Containment system. I've looked at air curtains before and have been intrigued...I think they give an attractive solution to most any data center and Google highlights the flexibility it allows them. The Greenpeace IT rankings were also announced at the conference, with Cisco taking the #1 spot. Jonathan Koomey also spoke on a panel at GreenNet about the Dematerialization opportunity.

I also caught a Seattle Xconomy story last week about Cisco and a Verdiem, an energy management software company teaming up. Through the Cisco "EnergyWise Orchestrator" brand they will market Verdiem software for PCs and networked devices. I still think that 'one' of the Cisco acquisitions in 2010 will be related to their building management / EnergyWise division.

Another green story last week was from the U.S. Green Building Council -- saying that they were selected to help empower a new generation of green building student leaders. At the Clinton Global Initiative University annual meeting the USGBC and others were called to help students jumpstart their careers in green building and sustainability through the USGBC Student program. At the conference all attendees were asked to make a commitment to action, a comprehensive, formal plan to address a specific problem around the world, in their community or on their campus.

An interesting item I ran across in my neck of the woods was the Eco4 Partners project for Moss Green Urban Village. The project is developing 170 acres of land in Iowa City, Iowa as a 'green' office and research park, allowing developers to apply for tax increment financing. The most cost effective energy saving and green technologies will be used -- shooting for near Net Zero in energy usage. Buildings will use 60% less BTU's per square foot than a conventional office building.

This coming Wednesday at The Heartland Green Up conference in Des Moines I'll learn about green lessons learned at HP and Oracle, as well as efficient data centers at Wells Fargo and MidAmerican's wind energy program. I'm also going to try and attend the track with Kevin Monson and Tom Struve, talking about the ACT data center in Iowa City that achieved LEED platinum status. It should be an awesome event!

The Heartland Green Up Conference

Just a few weeks left until The Heartland GreenUp! If you haven't heard about this event -- please check it out. It is shaping up to be an outstanding symposium and expo. The goal of the conference is to "promote awareness of and best practices in reducing overall energy consumption and carbon footprints in information technology. This premiere event provides a forum to discover and share new, innovative green products and services".






I am personally looking forward to a few of the keynote speakers - including Randy Mott from HP. Randy is executive vice president and chief information officer at HP. Also delivering keynotes are Andrew Fanara works from ENERGY STAR and Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar at Google.

Please don't think of this as some little, local event -- this is global conference for all those interested in learning about GreenIT and networking with others in the industry. In ONE event, it will bring together:

"a group of global enterprise and government thought-leaders for one, intense day of networking: to share latest research, brass-tacks case studies and fast-paced total-immersion backgrounders on enterprise-wide sustainable IT best-practice; next-gen datacenter architectures, power management strategies and facilities engineering; cloud computing and virtualization; and on the nuts and bolts (and business case) for plugging into wind and solar, biomass and other emerging energy technologies"

If not able to attend in person, the Technology Association of Iowa will host a Virtual GreenUp to let you attend keynotes, track sessions and network with speakers, sponsors and peers.

I am going! Will you?

Register Now!

Iowa Now Second Largest Wind Producer

The Wall Street Journal reports that Iowa has become the second largest producer of wind power in the U.S.. Tax breaks, cost recovery assurance and few zoning regulations for wind turbines are cited as reasons for the ranking.

At the end of the second quarter of 2009, Iowa had 3,043 megawatts of total wind capacity, compared with 8,361 megawatts in Texas and 2,787 megawatts in California, according to the wind-energy association. The article continues by saying that Iowa is flat landscape and lies in an enviable position on the grid - close to load centers like Chicago and Milwaukee.

Power transmission is now the road block to continued success in Iowa. Roya Stanley, Director of the Iowa Office of Energy Independence said "While we still have some room on the grid in the state, it will be critical to have agreement regionally for further transmission build-out."

The WSJ also has a very interesting article on Five Technologies that Could Change the Energy Picture. It discusses space-based solar power, advanced car batteries, utility storage, carbon capture and storage, and next-generation biofuels.

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!!

GreenTech 2009

I didn't make any predictions for 2009, but a some what obvious one is that renewable energy sources and Green technology for the data center should certainly have a good year. I have a number of items I have been saving up for GreenTech and the data center that I found to be pretty interesting:

• This quick announcement should impact data centers in 2009: ASHRAE and an alphabet soup of other groups are forming a consortium to advise the DOE on high-performance building issues.

• Treehugger.com always has good articles -- just too much for me to keep up with. They reported last week on a Yale Environment 360 opinion piece about the US as a renewable energy world leader.

• Treehugger.com : 76% of Federal renewable energy support went to Ethanol in 2007.

• 500 MW Wind Farm in Iowa Announced

• There was an interesting article about pressure in gas pipe lines to power London. A UK startup works with National Grid to generate 20 MW using 'geo-pressure' by 2010.

• Last Wednesday it was announced that the DOE invested $6 Million to address the technical challenges of wind development and market acceptance barriers.

• This weekend Intel unveiled its first solar electric installation in New Mexico. They hope the "array will demonstrate the potential to power such things as data centers." There was also a mention of containerized data centers:

  "He also said experiments will be done under the solar array with containerized data centers, in which computers are racked inside a tractor-trailer rig-size container. For example, a filmmaker might want to have a computer graphics system on site during a shoot, Miner said."

2008 Review

I feel somewhat obligated to do an end of the year post. It's in fashion, it's that reflective time of year, and well....why not. I've been saving up a bunch of items, so here we go.....

First - there have been any number of '2008 review' articles and blog posts, but here are some of my favorite year-end stories:

• MIT Technology Review: The year in Computing
• CIO Magazine: The Top 10 Cisco Stories of 2008
• Seeking Alpha: What's Next for the Colocation Sector?
• Data Center Knowledge - Top 10 Stories of 2008

The big story of the year (for me anyway) was the Iowa floods in June. I witnessed a lot during those few weeks/months and was very fortunate to not be directly affected. I saw both good and bad business continuity plans being executed and came out with a number of very valuable lessons learned.

I am a big picture person. I like to see the 10,000 foot view and then analyze the heck out of it to the associated impacts, outcomes and possibilities. A short while back I ran across a report from the National Intelligence Council titled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. Although I didn't read the entire 120 pages, here are some things that stood out to me:

• Page 33: ".... nine factors can contribute to a modern National Innovation System: fluidity of capital, flexibility of the labor pool, government receptivity to business, information communication technologies, private sector development infrastructure, legal systems to protect intellectual property rights, available scientific and human captial, marketing skills, and cultural propensity to encourage creativity."

• Page 40 has a an interesting map showing world population by age range, in 2005 and 2025.

• Page 63 has a chart breaking down likely energy sources (coal, gas, hydro, oil, nuclear, biomass, others) from 1980 to 2025.

In October I started tracking data center stocks a little closer. I created a Google spreadsheet and used the capitalization-weighted method to make an index of the stocks I chose to track. The stocks are all data center industry companies and I post regular updates for what the price is as often as I can. It started in October at $23.13 and closed today at $19.63

I have a few million feeds in my Bloglines account. I removed a couple dozen the other day and need to work on prioritizing what I read in there. My favorite new blogs that I am reading are:

• Stevey Clayton : Geek in Disguise
  
• John Gannon - Yet Another VC Blog
  
• Errata Security
  
• Microsoft Data Centers
  
• Gianpaolo's blog
  

This blog had a pretty good year overall....the biggest problem is just finding the time to sit down and write. Coverage of the Michael Manos speech at the Spring Data Center World conference was by far the most read post of the year. Much of this was due to a link from the popular blog by James Hamilton. I was happy to see that my Data Center Site Selection white paper from 2007 had the second highest number of visits. The top states that visited my blog (in order) were California, Iowa, New York, Texas, Washington, Illinois, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

As many of you know, I live in Iowa and am a big advocate of the upper Midwest. Iowa had a lot of activity in 2008 with the Google data center in Council Bluffs, the Microsoft West Des Moines announcement and TEAM Companies making several announcements (opening Madison data center and breaking ground in Des Moines).

On to 2009!!

Data Center Containers were a huge story in 2008 and I think that will continue in 2009. I saw the Sun Blackbox again this year, and the Rackable Icecube at Data Center World. I have a number of posts in mind to review and analyze containers, but more on that later...

A few blog posts back I mentioned that video was going to be the killer app. While this is not any big revelation I realize, I think it has been a gradual thing that has many side affects and will continue to grow rapidly in 2009. I've read things about Cisco really attacking the home entertainment market, YouTube , Hulu , Joost , Vimeo and others had great years, and the infrastructure market to support video distribution is growing. The CDN market (I believe) is set to have a great 2009 and we may see some M&A action here. Video podcasts (or what ever you want to call them) are growing in number as well. Some of my regulars include:

• Cisco TechwiseTV
  
• TED Talks
  
• Google Tech Talks
  
• Hak5
  

Kevin Rose from digg.com cut the cord and ditched cable in favor of the Internet, TiVO and Netflix. TiVO recently announced that they will offer the ability to watch YouTube videos on TiVO. I got an iPhone about a month ago and have to say....it is the best cell phone I have ever had. I mention this because I discovered I could use qik.com on it and find the application and streaming video ability pretty amazing. The end result though....bandwidth is going to HAVE to get better in 2009!! More on this at the New York Times article about Internet usage growth.

Happy New Year!!!

Inspiration is for amateurs ; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
-Chuck Close

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.

 

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.

View Larger Map
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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.