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!

Site Selection - What Not To Do

A while back the Black Swan Real Estate Zine had a post I enjoyed. Typically you will see data center site selection articles about where TO build a facility, but Black Swan approached it from the other point of view -- 10 Places You Don't Want to Build.

My two favorite on their list are #5 - In a building that used to be something else and #6 - in a large metropolitan area. I see a number of stories about converted malls or warehouses that are now data centers, and while I'm sure in 'some' cases the retrofit study / cost analysis made sense, I view data centers as a very purpose-built facility that should not, if at all possible be "fit" into a building that was built for something else. Not building in a large metropolitan area is another one I believe in -- and not just for the reasons mentioned in the article or stories I've personally heard. If anyone is reading this from Dallas -- are your lights dimming? :)

A few days after that blog post I read another excellent point brought up by Dave Ohara on the Green (low carbon) Data Center blog. Dave brings up the error of a single number view vs. the range of performance. With a number of criteria to pour over when selecting a site, Dave points out that most criteria have relationships to other things and that a holistic approach is rarely executed, marrying site, building, IT hardware and software.

Now With 20% More Fiber!

The DataCenterDynamics site has an article I really liked, titled The American Clould's Weakest Link. It covers the sobering speech given by Allied Fiber CEO Hunter Newby at the Seattle DataCenterDynamics conference Thursday. Newby said "Moving apps into the cloud is very dangerous if you don't know your physical fiber route". How very true -- I almost think people take the physical connectivity between data centers for granted some times.

$7.2 Billion of the recent U.S. stimulus money was dedicated to developing the country's broadband infrastructure. Allied Fiber has been applying for stimulus funding and dreams of building one large fiber ring around the country.

I've worked with several places and brokers that know where all of the fiber routes are in America -- what a fun resource that would be to have as public domain. I think much more fiber investment is needed in this country and NOT just in the big / tier 1 cities and markets. I think if the U.S. is to stay competitive, on both the business and home side of things, we must have a more robust fiber infrastructure that reaches everyone. Next to cheap land and cheap power, data center site selection places a strong emphasis on the amount of lit and dark fiber available in the area.

Allied Fiber and TMCnet have built a Dark Fiber Community to bring together optical network providers and the suppliers who help them build. I've also worked with NEF and the vast database of buried and lit services they have. They also have a natural extension of that business in findadatacenter.com Another favorite site and set of research reports I would Love to use if I had money burning a hole in my pocket is TeleGeography.....some pretty cool data here.

Monday Links

My data center stock index was fairly steady last week, but closed down today, at $19.20. The Dow Jones Internet Composite Index tracked similarly and closed today at $58.83.

Here are some other items of interest I have run across recently:

• Wachovia initiates coverage on Data Center Space. "We believe the network neutral data center space represents a relatively safe derivative way to play on the continued growth of IP and internet traffic."

• Reuven Cohen has a very interesting blog post: "Cloud Interoperability and The Neutrality Paradox.

• Matt Stansberry has the Biggest Stories of 2008 article.

• The Seeking Alpha blog has a very nice write-up on the Equinix presentation, given with Dan Golding from Tier 1 Research: Operating Today's Data Centers & Key Industry Trends That Will Affect Your Business. This is a very nice presentation with some really good insights to supply and demand for the industry.
  

• As some of you know.... I have a pretty strong side interest in data center site selection. So much so I published a white paper on the topic last year. I am a visual learner, so I love having all of the maps of the U.S. for natural disasters and other things. I have started to work on a second version of the paper and recently found another map that is interesting. The International Journal of Health Geographics recently published some new research: Spatial patterns of natural hazards mortality in the United States. The paper "examines the spatial patterns of natural hazard mortality at the county-level for the U.S. from 1970-2004 using a combination of geographical and epidemiological methods". Click through to the PDF to see the various maps.

• DataCenterKnowledge has a nice video of the uber-awesome SuperNAP in Vegas.

• Even Bigger Nightmare on Tech Street

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.  

Data Center Site Selection article

I am kind of partial to this particular author (ha ha), but check out the recent article at Systems Management News titled The Data Center: Where Should You Locate Your Facility?

BizJournals - America's Most Stressful Places

BizJournals.com created a 10 part formula to rank the stress levels in 50 metro areas. I thought it was an interesting study and perhaps equivalent to other "quality of life" studies done, that I mentioned in my data center site selection white paper.

The IT industry has enough stress as is, without living in a city with all of these stressful factors that BizJournals looked at. It would be interesting to study the major industries in the most and least stressful cities to see what the are comprised of.

I am a visual person, and a Google fanatic, so I started a Google map of these cities. I have the most stressful cities mapped, and will go back to enter the least stressful.


View Larger Map


Check out the BizJournals study information here.

Chicago Data Center Market

As a follow-up to a comment I made in my last post -- Chicago is a RED hot market for data centers. ZDNet has an article "Bragging Rights: Chicago as green data center powerhouse".

It mostly talks about the new Microsoft data center, but lists the reasons why they chose Chicago. It seems like the hot area has shifted -- it was Texas, is now Chicago, and who knows where is next! Hopefully Chicago will not become as over-crowded as Texas is now.

International Site Selection

When I did my site selection white paper back in October, I limited it to the United States. Adam Trujilo over at searchdatacenter.com has a nice write-up on some of the international studies done on site selection as well as references to recent data center activities abroad.

Check it out here

DC Site Selection

A long while back I mentioned that I was working on a site selection post for the blog. As I was working on it, I decided it was worthy of more than just a post.

I am happy to announce that I have finished a white paper on the topic of Data Center Site Selection. I welcome any and all comments and hope it is informative and helpful.

If you decide to link to the paper, I would ask that you link to this post instead of directly to the PDF.

Link: http://datacenterlinks.blogspot.com/2007/10/dc-site-selection.html

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Acrobat PDF File: Data Center Site Selection

Rath Consulting
October 2007

Everyone Wants a Data Center

Columbia, Missouri thinks it would be a "good fit" for the data center industry. They have hired Angelou Economics of Austin, Texas to evaluate the area and see what it needs to do to increase the potential of attracting a data center.

"A REDI (Regional Economic Development Inc.) economic development report to the City Council, prepared with the consultant’s input, said the combination of a skilled workforce and the presence of a large research university are important criteria for attracting a high-tech firm. Good quality of life — with low crime, strong public schools and affordable housing — is also important."

Check out the article here