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: December 7, 2016

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

1. Equinix buys Verizon data centers.  I 'think' I saw this one coming... but the biggest player in the industry just got bigger.  Just 5 years after Verizon paid $1.4 billion to acquire Terremark, it has sold 24 data centers to Equinix for $3.6 billion. It seems hard to top this asset sale, but I guess we'll see what 2017 brings. I liked Equinix co-founder Jay Adelson's link to the 1998 story about Equinix as a Cisco-backed upstart.  
2. HPE and Schneider Electric partner on Micro Data Centers. HP Enterprise and Schneider are partnering to deliver a complete pre-fab solution for drop-in-place modular data center. I always liked the previous respective versions of a modular solution that were offered, but this partnership makes sense (targeting the edge and IoT, etc).  Bonus points for not referencing the solution as a 'virtual data center'. Last week Schneider launched the next generation of its EcoStruxure architecture and platform.
3. Cray and Microsoft partner for deep learning.  At the 2016 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference this week Cray announced the results of a deep learning collaboration between Cray, Microsoft, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) that expands the horizons of running deep learning algorithms at scale using the power of Cray supercomputers.  Research at CSCS utilizes the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on a Cray XC50 with more than 1,000 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators. 
4. Dell EMC and VMware launch new Hyper-converged systems. Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation Dell launched the VxRack SDDC as a turnkey hyper-converged solution for both traditional and cloud-native workloads. The total lifecycle offering is built on Dell PowerEdge servers and VMware infrastructure software (vSAN, vSphere, and NSX) and VMware SDDC Manger. 
5. Micron announces 8TB SATA SSD. Micron launched a 8TB Enterprise 5100 series solid state drive this week with random write performances up to 74k IOPS. 

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!

Microsoft Chicago Data Center Photo Tour

Although originally reported over a month ago at Data Center Knowledge --- CNet has a photo tour (follow-up or re-hash story) of the new Microsoft data center in Chicago today.

I am still hopeful that the data center Microsoft is planning for Des Moines will be their generation 4 data center model. I am extremely curious to see that in action. I've analyzed the video and pictures that they published last December a few thousand times trying to figure out each component and exactly how the containers are integrated and supported.

Hey Microsoft -- are you ready to build in Des Moines yet??!!?

Smart Grids, City 2.0 and Project Netal

Ok, so those 3 things aren't related -- I just had a couple of things I ran across tonight that I found interesting....

1. Cisco looks to ride smart-grid data deluge. This one is pretty apparent if you follow the Cisco news and EnergyWise software announcements. I keep waiting for a Cisco acquisition -- particularly in this space.

2. HP's vision of building City 2.0. HP Labs sustainability visionary Chandrakant Patel describes his vision of building City 2.0, enabled by a sustainable IT Ecosystem. Pretty interesting interview/article.

3. Ok -- so this one is not data center related, but is just frigg'n cool. :) Cnet has an exclusive on Microsoft's project Natal. Netal is a next generation gaming platform (REALLY next generation) with no controller required.

one last one, as long as we're talking about the big companies in IT : BusinessWeek posted an interview with Eric Schmidt last week and asks several questions about where Google is headed next.

NASA's Nebula a Possible Federal Cloud Prototype

nextgov.com reports that a NASA cloud computing model, called Nebula is being looked at by NASA and the Obama administration for federal agencies to outsource IT services to a shared platform. "A significant journey ahead" may be an understatement -- an estimated 10 year migration would have several hurdles to manage.

NASA's Chris Kemp is working with the federal government's could computing working group. NASA CIO's Chris Kemp and Linda Cureton have blogs that I have been following for a while now. Chris managed the Google relationship and talks of the larger strategy with NASA and Google, Microsoft and Cisco. The NASA/Ames Research Center has the current #4 supercomputer (Pleiades), a SGI Altix ICE 8200 wiht a measly 51TB of memory.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra held a live chat several weeks back and has pretty ambitious plans for federal IT and data. You can see that even Vivek Kundra learned from Google -- the IT Dashboard site (very nice by the way) has a "beta" stamp on it.

Like many commercial data center consolidation projects, the federal government has about 70 data centers with "various levels of efficiency and availability that NASA is trying to contract to two outsourced data centers".

"Obama's fiscal 2010 budget proposal envisions optimizing cloud computing by "scaling pilots to full capabilities and providing financial support to accelerate migration," the budget stated. The fiscal plan acknowledges the effort will involve upfront costs, but the expense should be more than offset by savings from consolidating data centers."

Let's see -- one cloud with Google and one with Microsoft -- and then use all Cisco gear to network them together. :)

Check out the nextgov.com article here.

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!!

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.

Misc. Tech News - March 1, 2009

34 days and 20 hours left until the opening night of Major League Baseball!

Outside of the fun little newspaper generator mentioned above, I ran across a number of interesting stories this weekend....

• The Data Center Pulse Summit presentations and videos have been graciously posted on their site. There are a number of interesting things mentioned here. NetworkWorld also has a nice write-up of the Top 10 Industry Requests generated at the summit.

• Intel and Microsoft are flexing their muscle when it comes to innovation in the current recession. Microsoft recently had their annual TechFest event to showcase what Microsoft Research had been up to. Slide 13 shows the low powered processors we all heard about recently. Intel Research Laboratories have also been up to quite a bit lately. Wireless Power technology, numerous uses for RFID and robotics were displayed -- check out the full story here.

Intel and Samsung are going at it in the Solid-state Disk market. Check out this ComputerWorld article : Samsung's 256GB SSD Offers Capacity, Speed

Several weeks back the TED 2009 Conference was held -- if you haven't checked out the videos from that yet, I Highly recommend it. Also interesting at this conference was the launch of Singularity University - "Preparing Humanity for Accelerating Technological Change". With backers like Google, NASA and Ray Kurzweil, how can this NOT be cool!!

At the VMWorld Europe conference VMWare showed off its MVP (Mobile Virtualization Platform). Basically -- it would give you the ability to run multiple operating systems on your portable device. Sounds like some pretty cool stuff here.

Finally -- it is always fun to see creative help wanted ads : check this one out.

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.

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
  

Containers, The Economy and Telecom

OK-- bad title maybe, but I wanted to avoid the "Tuesday Links" vagueness.

Containers -- for anyone that has followed this blog for a while knows, I am fascinated by containers. Initially I just couldn't figure it out, but through Sun, Rackable and Michael Manos I am fully on board now. Although..... now I am racking my brain for the non Microsoft / Fortune 200 idea that makes the container solution applicable to the rest of us. More on that later.

The video that Data Center Knowledge posted last week was really excellent. I watched the full hour and appreciated the knowledge and insight provided. My highlights/comments:

• It was interesting to see some new things come into the site selection and data center equation: jurisdiction for placing containers and the classification of the space. Daniel Costello from Microsoft noted that they were able to classify theirs as "unoccupied spaces".
• Focus can shift quickly to container solutions for the rest of the infrastructure as well -- what about the emergency need to ship a container somewhere and have an equally quickly deployed power solution available? (i.e.: Active Power)
• The one thing that would have been hilarious (to me) for an audience member to ask is what the panel thought about putting containers on cargo ships. :)
  

The Economy -- All eyes are on the economy now days and President-elect Obama's plans in the making. I personally think the data center industry is going to pull through the recession just fine and GreenTech within data centers should really blossom in 2009. I ran across a video from Financial Times that I thought was interesting; it compares the worst bear markets in history and how they were punctuated by rallies that made a lot of money for those lucky enough to time them correctly. Global Crossing also had an interesting blog post recently about Stimulating Ideas - commentary about telecom investment ideas from Paul Kouroupas. There was also a nice story early last week in the New York Times about Venture Capitalists and how innovation will continue to drive the technology industry out of the recession. The last paragraph is especially interesting:

“Cisco was founded two weeks before a stock market crash. Oracle was founded during the Reagan recession,” Mr. Holland said. “In bad times, that’s when the best opportunities come up."

Telecom -- Level3 is off to a good start in 2009. Rob Powell at the Telecom Ramblings blog speculates why they have been doing so well. Fourth quarter and full year 2008 results are set to be released on February 11th. If my math is correct 4 VPs and the CEO of Level3 sold 23,265 shares January 5th.

View the full LVLT chart at Wikinvest

2008 Data Center Statistics

A lot of people reference statistics this time of year. Many will cite Tier1, Forrester, or Gartner...... me; I'll cite the only thing I have access to: Google. Google Zeitgeist is always interesting to look at and is usually a pretty good indication of what happened throughout the year. Here are some other random statistics that pretty much speak for themselves. Meaningful? Maybe. Maybe not.
Enjoy.

First - the "data center" vs. "data centre" in Google Trends (shows a trend of how often the term is searched in Google).
Next - Google and Microsoft data center projects were both big 2008 stories; here is how they compared in Google Trends:
Proof that Google has ALL of our personal search data, they have at least let us look into the aggregated data with Google Insight for Search. For instance, here is the chart and data for the category of "networking equipment" -- showing that 'cisco', 'router', and 'wireless' were the top 3 search terms in that category.

An Insight search for the term "data center" shows that Pakistan, India and Singapore are searching for that term the most. Equally interesting is the data for just the U.S. that shows top regional interest for "data center" coming from South Dakota!

Finally - here is a look at Equinix, Savvis and Terremark in 2008 U.S. Web search Volume.

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

The Lego Cloud

Christian Belady and David Gauthier from Microsoft have started a blog on Microsoft data centers. They start off with a bang by building on the Michael Manos blog post about Generation 4 data centers. Christian and David sit down with Adam Bomb from the Edge Technet site and answer a fair amount of questions that came as a result of people reading the Gen4 ideas.

They talk about the fact that it is truely a modular solution for the entire data center, and not just the server containers. David mentioned legos as building blocks, so I couldn't resist the title to my blog post. :)

The only question un-answered that I can think of is about natural disasters. I would have to think that the containers are some how anchored down in order to protect against tornadoes.

The only other comment I'll make on this follow-up information is that David mentioned how much shorter the build time is for Gen4. Instead of 12-18 months for construction, they expect the Gen4 sites to be ready in 3-6 months! Christian then mentioned that they are 'piloting' the modular concepts, and pulling together specs, etc. Then...... earlier today I read a brief article from the Des Moines Register stating that the plans for Des Moines data center were still on track. The article says that construction is due to begin this Spring or Summer. I think that is enough time to really nail down the supply chain process and get those containers rolling into Des Moines! At the August press conference Michael Manos said “We are implementing a very new design that’s just coming out of our research and development department, so we need to get that finalized”. The other clue is that the Register article describes it as a "150,000 sq. ft. facility". I imagine this goes back to changing the entire model for a data center.... if they would have told the press they were building a 42-acre "yard" for containers they probably would have had some puzzled looks.

But.....if San Antonio is 470,000 sq.ft. and Chicago is 441,000 sq.ft - why is the Des Moines site only 150,000?

I'll be in Des Moines in a couple of weeks and see what other clues I can find on-site.

The Week Ahead

It should be another interesting week for stocks and the market in general as the financial roller coaster continues. My data center stock index was up and closed the week at $18.18. The Dow Jones Internet Composite Index was up $5.22 for the week and closed at $57.59

I think traders should sell any telecom company stock associated with research firm Precursor. They released a report calling Google a bandwidth hog. It was just plain silly and I was glad to see that Google responded appropriately.

There are a few events happening this week, virtually, that I am planning on attending. The first is Cisco's C-Scape 2008. This looks to be pretty interesting and has a lot of the Cisco Senior and Executive VP's speaking. John Chambers will also participate! I saw the funny Nortel commercial today that talks about the Cisco "energy tax". I had not seen this commercial before, except in the parody done (moderately funny) below. Note there are 4 episodes all together on YouTube.




The other event I am looking at if I have time is "bMighty bOptimized: A deep dive on IT Infrastructure for SMBs." More information on it here.

It's also rumored that Microsoft will make some big announcement this week -- perhaps a Zune Phone. This Tuesday is also the last Patch Tuesday of the year and is supposed to be a pretty big one.


With any luck I will also get to the book review of Nicholas Carr's Big Switch. During the Thanksgiving break I was finally able to finish it. I really liked it and will do a quick review for anyone that has not read it.

Microsoft Generation 4 Modular Data Centers

Many people have commented and blogged on the recent post from Michael Manos about the Microsoft Generation 4 Modular Data Center strategy. I have watched the video about 5 times now and really like it. I especially like the fact that Microsoft is sharing this and giving so much information to the public about their strategies and countless hours of research.

If you haven't checked it out (are you living under a rock!), then it is VERY much worth the read. The post references a very nice video they produced to demonstrate some of the research and Gen 4 model for their data centers. It is complete with a piano soundtrack titled "Daybreak" (can't have a dramatic video like this without an appropriately named theme song. :) )

I do have just a few observations and questions that I thought I would log about the strategy, video and otherwise.....

• One of the most intriguing parts of the video, to me, was not mentioned in very much detail in the blog post. I liked the depiction of their distribution system for data centers: Mega data center, Anchor and Edge. I assume that the Mega data center feeds the anchors, and the Anchors then feed the Edge, which was comprised of the 4 basic containers. The Anchors could simply be a communication hub, since a lot of international fiber lines were drawn off of them.
  

• I am VERY excited that the Des Moines data center could potentially be the first Gen 4 data center. San Antonio was Gen 2, Chicago was Gen3 , so......

• I imagine this is just the details, but.... asset management could be simplified and streamlined for them as well. It looked to me like (in the video) that as the trucks were leaving the warehouse, they were scanned. It would be logical then also that they are scanned upon entering the edge or mega data center and the contents are automatically updated to note that the particular compute unit is now at that location.

• The biggest concern or question may just be a thing that I have to get past as the model for data centers evolves and advances. It may also just be applicable to this particular Microsoft strategy and not for others. Security! Natural Disasters! We see data centers built miles underground, have DoD-trained anti-terrorism staff, and have 3 foot thick re-inforced concrete. Yet, the video showed their mega data center with containers Outside!! I suppose security is established at the perimeter, and since the equipment is all inside the container there is no worry about privacy. As far as natural disaster prevention.....I'm stumped. Maybe they anchor the containers once in place. Maybe there are other measures in place that just weren't discussed.
  

• I also noticed that they discussed reducing the dependency on water cooling and overall use of water in the data center. I think this is a trend you will see more of in the coming years. Maybe they could put 3 or 4 windmills on top of each branch spine in the mega data centers.

• A question I had, and have had ever since containers have really taken off, is about the rest of world (not Google or Microsoft). How can radical design and engineering changes like the Gen 4 strategy apply to other business or the colo industry? The idea I have in my head for applying this to the colo industry, is something like what BastionHost is doing with their DataVille system. It's called HotParking, and is a BYOC (Bring Your Own Container) model. They provide the security and facility hook-ups, you park your container.

A year or two ago I was pretty skeptical about the whole container model and what, if anything, it could offer. Today, I'm fully on board....with questions....but on board.

THANK YOU Michael for publishing the information and to all the Microsoft Research staff for the excellent work.

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

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!

Cloud Services and Data Center Design

James Hamilton had a blog post yesterday about "Embarrasingly Distributed Cloud Services".  It points to a paper that he and some others at Microsoft wrote to present at the ACM Hotnets 2008 Workshop in Calgary. The paper is pretty amazing and besides some pretty deep formulas and theory for networks a number of good points are made on mega data centers versus newer, geo-diverse, distributed or containerized designs.  It's a paper about trends in the data center industry and what models will work best for particular types of processing and applications.  To me, it was incredibly insightful and you can tell that the authors have not only done their research, but have been seen what works and what doesn't, as well as have the vision for what the future holds.   I (obviously) recommend reading the paper (here), but also have a few comments/observations of my own:

1.  Products -- maybe I've had too much caffiene today, but I can see a mix of software products that are ideal for a predictive and scalable deployment across the new, geo-diverse containerized data center designs.  3Tera continues to be a hot company with their Applogic software and recent global cloud computing expansion.  I thought of them several times when reading the paper.  I also thought about another cool company (that 2 of my friends work at) called Cariden.  I don't know if my description of what they do would do it justice -- let's just call it network simulation and traffic planning/engineering software.

2. I haven't done a plug for my almost year-old white paper in while, so what better opportunity.  If these geo-diverse, smaller data centers are built in closer proximity to the end user, then site selection becomes an issue that many have not thought of before (because they never ventured outside of their region of the country).  So -- check out my Data Center Site Selection white paper.

3. It might be a stretch to relate this one  to the paper -- but it was something I ran across recently that could come into play with containers and an increased need for sensors and environment data.  I was browsing around the Dust Networks website a few days back, via a link from the IP for Smart Objects website.  Dust Networks makes embedded wireless sensor networking for monitoring and control.  Co-founder Kris Pister helped coin the concept of "smart dust" to describe a network of miniture wireless sensors called "motes".  The 12 millimeters square devices can run on micro-batteries for up to 10 years.  Check out the product lines and technology at http://www.dustnetworks.com/

4.  The day before at the Interop 2008 New York conference NeworkWorld reports that today's networks won't cut it as foundations for real-time applications.