Virtual-Hype

Virtualization is (my vote) the top buzzword used in 2007 so far. I am both sick of the headlines and jealous that I don't get to experiment with it as much as I would like. I have read good and bad about it and either way, it is here to stay. It looks to be a main topic at the Next Generation Data Center conference and VMWorld is coming up soon (BTW: Intel just recently invested $218.5 million in VMWare )

Besides satisfying my own curiosity on virtualization, I was asked a while back exactly what it is. With all that I have seen and as I have watched virtualization evolve, it is a pretty vague term anymore. Virtualization can apply to a number of things and technoloiges. I follow Grid technologies as well, and there is often some overlap and/or confusion with Virtualization. So... for myself, the person that asked what it was, and for anyone else interested, here is my run down of defining virtualization:


Datacenter
Since this is a data center blog, let's start there. One of the first articles that prompted this post was news of a patent. eGenera claims it is has received a patent for an all-in-one N+1 tiered disaster recovery solution. It provides a hardware-neutral Disaster Recovery solution that encapsulates your entire data center via grid and virtualization technologies. Joe Foran's article here goes on to explain why this is silly and not patent-worthy.

Intel launched its Data Center Virutalization project in order to enable transparent use of resources worldwide. They claim that since launching the program they have achieved 11% increase in server utilization and saved $77 million through cost avoidance. Check out the article here - click on contents--page 36

Server (or Operating System) Virtualization
When most people hear the term virtualization they most likely think of server virtualization. According to searchservervirtualization.com, server virtualization is "the masking of server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users." Players in this market are many, although dominated by VMWare , Microsoft ,and Xen. There are also a ton of blogs on the topic, but I read VMBlog and gridvm.org (because I LOVE Grid technology as well).

Storage Virtualization
Virtualization of storage can of course be twisted to mean what the vendor wants it to, but it's basically pooling physical storage and managing it from a central console. You can read more in the Wikipedia article here. One of my favorite companies to watch here isn't really in the 'virtualization' market, although they fit the description. Cleversafe is a really cool idea that takes storage from all over the world, splits it into slices and allows you to have your data (virutally) everywhere at once. They call it "Dispersed Storage Grids". I probably am not doing it justice, so I would highly recommend checking out the details on their site .

File Virtualization
It seems easy to think of this as the same thing as storage virtualization. The best way that "I" can describe file virtualization is to explain the vendors. EMC's Rainfinity operates at the CIFS and NFS file protocol level. Click here for more info on Rainfinity (not for the weak of budget). Netapp bought Spinnaker many years ago and now has their Virtual File Manager solution, that well....does everything. Check it out here for a better explanation than I can give it. I imagine there are many others in the market; check out this Internet News article for more information.

Application Virtualization
I had heard 'some' about application virtualization, but really started getting interested in it when I saw Softricity. They have since been bought by Microsoft and become "Softgrid Application Virtualization". http://www.softricity.com/ Again, I probably can't describe it perfectly, so check out their site. It basically delivers applications for users without ever installing them...where ever they are. It's an on-demand system that doesn't care what PC the user is on and from a system administration aspect makes a ton of management effecencies. My favorite player in this market however is Data Synapse. I ran across Data Synapse when looking at grid solutions. Gartner has listed them in the 'real-time infrastructure' market. Seriously cool stuff.

Desktop Virtualization
I won't go into this area too much - it's basically things like VMWare player, Parallels, and then other things like a Citrix environment. The Virtual Machine market has a lot of options

Virtual Nework?
Interesting......check out Peter Christy's blog

Virtual Worlds (I had to)
Business Week has a nice article on the Virtual Web. From my perspective, the only one in this market is Second Life (I've been a member for some time now).

Well, I hope my ramblings have helped someone other than myself. Virtualization is certainly an interesting and multi-faceted technology. Finally - here are some items I have read that I found interesting on the topic:

• Chuck Hollis from EMC
• Novell's Virtualization Tour
• E-week Virtualization in the Data Center
• Data Center Journal
• BaseLine Magazine on Virtualization tools
• SearhServerVirtualization on hidden costs
• The Lone Sysadmin
• VMBlog Post
• $11B Virtualization Services Market by 2011

Stargate Data Center

I 'think' I checked out this blog last April, but forgot to post about it. Stargate is blogging a photo album as their new Data Center is constructed. I happened upon it again today, and they are certainly making progress.

I take a lot of pictures as well as data centers are constructed --- it is just cool to see the progress and all that goes into the building of a good center.

Check out the Stargate blog (and latest pictures) here

Ontario Data Centre Project

A plan to modernize public infrastructure for Ontario's Government has reached RFP (request for proposal) phase. This will allow the 'short list' of selected vendors make a proposal to design, build, finance and maintain the new data centre.

Although they are happy the project is moving along quickly, this is a Government project - and I am still amazed at all of the steps, red tape and stages a company has to go through to even bid at the chance to win such a contract. However......

"This project is one of many in the McGuinty government's $30-billion plus infrastructure investment plan to modernize public infrastructure while ensuring value for taxpayer dollars."

For this fact alone, only the really large players have gotten through the first round (request for qualifications)

The overall project just (continues) to show the importance people are placing on infrastructure, data centers and modernizing their assets to compete.

Check out the news here and Government site here

IBM Data Center Modeling

I watched a video on IBM and it reminded me of some old software I used to use. Many many years ago the company I worked for used CA Unicenter for monitoring. It was pretty cool software and for the price, it ought to be. The semi-cheesy and not really useful feature it had was a 3-D fly-in view to computer hardware. Complete with really bad graphics you could fly in from your world view, all the way down to inside of a server on your network.

Anyway, the video explains that IBM is building data centers in Second Life (a virtual world) to assist planners and designers for real-world data centers. Pretty cool!

Check it out here

nVidea Data Center Tour

Here is a cool video of the nVidea data center in Santa Clara.

Joe Sura (VP Information Systems) certainly has a nice setup.


I still, however, love the Lucas Arts DC tour that Cnet did a while back. Check it out here

P.S.: I was listening to a podcast that interviewed Jonathan Schwartz and he was mentioning how putting images or video in a blog post increased traffic. :)

Google's Lenoir Data Center now $1.8 Billion!

"Documents released following a public records request by the News-Topic show that the scope of the project could expand, bringing the company's overall investment to as much as $1.8 billion."

The original data center size is growing larger, and they are pouring the pad for the second facility.
Each location had a sizable plot of land....maybe all of these announced locations will really be 2 to 3 times the size originally thought.

Check out the rest of the details here

DNS - "critical infrastructure"

I'm going to throw this one in the "Understatement of the year" category....

"IETF DNS Working Group defines DNS as "critical infrastructure"

Check out the IGP blog entry here.

Grand Central

I'm taking a break from Data Center news to tell everyone about a service I absolutely LOVE!!

GrandCentral is, well.....hard to describe, but it is awesome! As their site puts it, it's a new way to use your phones. One number, one voicemail and a TON of features.

And just when it couldn't get any better....they were recently acquired by Google! It will be interesting to see how this changes the service and what else will be added.

The button in the previous post will leave me a voice-mail. It's just an experiment, but anyone is welcome to try it out.

GrandCentral.com

1. click the button
2. enter your phone
3. GrandCentral will call YOU
4. Leave a message

DataCenter Build vs. Buy Whitepaper

Just a quick link to what looks to be a very good white paper.

It's by Fredd Mapp and is loaded with surveys and statistics from data center professionals.

Check it out here.

Overhead or Under-Floor Installation?

Network World has a free chapter of Douglas Alger's Cisco Press book Build the Best Data Center Facility for Your Business

The chapter is an interesting read on overhead or raised floor design. I was very glad to see that he at least made the caveat on the needs and space of your data center ultimately determining which solution is the best.

Check out the full chapter here

Data Center Photos

I'm a visual person. As such, I Love to see pictures of data centers around the world.

Every one is (obviously) different and it's nice to see what they actually look like instead of just reading about them. Of course, it can always be fun as well to see the lesser data centers that don't put very much effort into it, and those data centers that apparently have money to burn.

So -- thanks to Filipe Freitas for this photo gallery.

Savvis sells assets to Microsoft

Savvis sold assets in two adjacent data centers in Santa Clara, Calif., to Microsoft Corp. for $200 million. This includes forgiveness on $10 million of previously advanced revenue.

Check out the article here

Internet Governance

While perhaps a little bit 'deep' for my interests....I found an article at the IGP blog pretty interesting. It discusses a model for the typology of global economic governance.

Check it out here.

Google in Iowa

I simply couldn't resist a post to comment on the searchdatacenter.com follow-up article on Google selecting Iowa for a Data Center. Bridget's article created a response to some things about Iowa that people coming here to work should know.

"2) Don’t laugh at the names of our little towns (Greeley, Strawberry
Point, Cresco, etc.) or we will have to kick your butt."

Yes, we have some interesting town names (don't most states?). There are 947 cities (and towns) in Iowa!

"3) Don’t order a bottle or a can of soda here. Here it’s called “pop”. Accept it. Doing otherwise can lead to an butt-kicking."

Yes -- very true: I have called it 'pop' all of my life. Check out a link here -- to a map of what people call it all over the U.S. (thanks for the link Ben)

7)Don’t complain that Iowa is flat and that all you can see is corn and hogs. If you whine about it, we’ll kick your butt all the way back to Milwaukee."

Iowa has 52 persons per square mile vs. the national 79.6. Honestly though, I get so tired of this stereotype.....Iowa is 'not' ALL corn fields!! Flat? yes. Think -- wind generation :)

Let's not forget the famous people born in Iowa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa#Miscellaneous_topics). I used to live close to 2007 Masters Champion Zach Johnson.

Anyway -- it was a humorous response to the Google article -- thanks Matt. Check out the post here.

50% Reduction of Energy to Cool a Data Center

"A former defense scientist has figured out how to use satellite technology to cool data centers and he has reported unprecedented results."

Details are yet to come, but Microway CTO Stephen Fried claims his system reduces the amount of energy required to cool data centers up to 50%.

Interesting article....

Check it out here

21June2007 Links

• Google's Iowa Data Center -- well.... too many to mention; and they are pretty much all the same story anyway.
• I couldn't agree more with Eric, over at the Next Generation Data Center blog. I've attempted to preach that the midwest is the ideal place for DC site selection for some time. So much so that I'm working on a white paper on the topic......however with my current schedule it might be a few years before being complete. :)
• I have watched a few really good videos recently. Check them out
• Data Center Capacity Planning (hey TechTarget - how about something 'other' than RealMedia?!?) : BTW-I saw Richard at DataCenterWorld - very nice guy and very knowledgeable on DC technologies
  
• "Lowering Datacenter Costs Through Value Engineering" and "The Common Sense Guide to Planning & Building a Green Datacenter"- Digital Realty Trust
  

• Here is an interesting SearchServerVirtualization.com article on a patent for eGenera for an all-in-one N+1 tiered disaster recovery solution that combines grid technology and virtualization to provide a hardware-neutral Disaster Recovery product that takes your entire data center and encapsulates it.
• 3Tera continues to intrigue me - check out their new demo grid ( 1TB RAM, 400 CPUs, 40TB storage)

Google in Iowa - news roundup

I'll say it again -- I'm ecstatic that Google is coming to Iowa!! The buzz is all around at work and otherwise and everyone is incredibly excited that Google selected an Iowa site to build.

The press releases and news articles are starting to blur, so here is a round-up of the announcement:

Primary Des Moines Register article

Others

• Cedar Rapids Gazette
• Waterloo Courier
• Sioux City Journal
• Business Week
• Data Center Knowledge
• WOWT in Omaha
• Search Engine Land
• Information Week

Companion Data Services

After reading in the Aperture white paper how health care companies were 9% of the surveyed organizations, I ran across an article on Companion Data Services LLC. They have gone live with their Enterprise data center to host applications used to process Medicare claims

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is consolidating its data center operations at more than 20 facilities into four state-of-the-art Enterprise Data Centers. In 2006, CMS awarded a 10-year contract to three companies to operate the new data centers: CDS, EDS and IBM. The contract qualifies those companies to compete for task orders with a total value of $1.9 billion.

Check out the article here.

Holistic Data Center View

There are several good articles I've run across recently on the big picture for data centers. They cover software, automation tools, trends and why humans are the weakest link in data center risks. :) I really like the paper from Aperture that gives a state of the industry report on capacity demand and problems that the data center faces.

Each article is very much worth the read:

• Aperture: Data Center Professionals Turn to High-Density Computing as Major Boom Continues
• Processor.com: Harness A Holistic Data Center View
• Processor.com: Taking A Data Center Snapshot

It's Official!!

On Tuesday Google plans to announce that the Council Bluffs rumors are true: They are building a data center! They will receive $48 million over 20 years in property tax rebates as long as Google provides at least 100 of the 200 jobs promised. Construction, and more importantly, security crews are already on site.

What was surprising, yet extremely cool to me is that they expect one of the buildings to be up by the end of the year! I am already planning a trip down there to take some pictures if at all possible.

I am very excited about this and can't wait to follow the progress through to completion. Maybe I can talk someone in to giving me a tour once they are operational! :)

Check out the Omaha World Herald article here,, Des Moines Register article here, and post from DataCenterKnowledge.com here.

Nuclear Distance

There is a nice article in the New York times explaining how Pennsylvania is selling itself as a DR site for New York finance companies. They want to be close enough for synchronous data storage, but more than 50 miles to be out of a blast zone.

Mr. Abdel from Level 3 is quoted as saying

“There is a need for large data center space measured in tens of thousands of square feet, and cheap real estate helps,” he said.

Mr. Rendell admitted that developing Wall Street West “is a little bit of a chicken and egg.”

It's Wall Street West (Rich Miller article here) vs. Conneticut and others North of New York - all trying to say that they are the ideal place for all New York companies to have disaster recovery in.

Check out the article here.

06.05.07 Links

It's been a while since I have posted (again) -- this time I was on jury duty for a week! It was kind of nice to get away from my field and experience what lawyers and judges go through on a typical day. BTW: he was guilty ......... very, very guilty :)

Here are some links of interest I've come across in past days:

• IP in building automation systems is becoming a pretty hot topic. Check out these articles for some good discussion and news:

• The Changing Face of Infrastructure Monitoring
• GSA paves way for IT-based buildings

• Tivo for your data center (I like the analogy) - yet another excellent post from Chuck Hollis at EMC.
  

• Infrastructure databases - good article from SearchDataCenter.com
  

• Not everyone is jumping on the 'green data center' bandwagon.
  

• After reading this release -- I was curious : does Digital Realty Trust have any real competition (REIT's) in the Data Center industry?
• .
  
• IIJ Technology Chooses Opsware for End-to-End Data Center Automation

• "National Digital Medical Archive, Inc. (NDMA) announced the completion of an $11 million upgrade to its enterprise medical content communications infrastructure". I had to laugh when reading a bullet point they have -- it seemed straight out of a BS engine on the web I like...

"Enable enterprise aggregation and integration of medical information across heterogeneous and geographically dispersed environments"

• Verari Systems Secures over $20 Million
  

• El Paso targets the data center market. Jeeesh...I wonder where they got this idea? Hardly anyone in Texas targets data centers to come build there. :)

Links Catch-up

I've been pretty busy lately and not able to post many things on the blog. Well, as a result there was certainly a lot to catch up on. Here a number of links, notes and other items that I've been able to catch up on tonight:

• Plexus Systems, providers of the on-demand manufacturing performance system Plexus Online, announced a DR site; partnering with Netriplex in Asheville, N.C.

• Auto-Owners Insurance Group plans to build a $45 million, 96,000-square-foot data center in Michigan.

• Searchstorage.com has a nice article on data deduplication technologies and how it has replaced virtualization on TheInfoPro's hot technology index.

• It looks like data centers will continue to have problems because of Human error! :) I don't think it takes a study to prove that data center management can be stressful.

• An interesting post with some history of the making of data center management software company Racemi.

• Here is a nice slide show of the results of the Stanford University Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity May 2007 Survey.

• I have to learn to make my predictions when I think of them. I swear I pondered a post a month or so back that I thought Opsware would be acquired some time this year. Although this hasn't happened, it apparently is in the rumor mill for VMWare to make the acquisition. Maybe VMWare will acquire Racemi instead.

• ITIL adoption in the data center is still low, but interest high as discussed in this Eweek article. This is really too bad -- perhaps some of those human errors mentioned a few bullet points back could be eliminated through ITIL implemented procedures! As a side note, I recently came across a new IT Service Management software company that I am checking out: Lontra.

• Here is a good article on the colocation business model past, present and future.

• I have to mention (because it is an Iowa story) - Rich Miller's post on InfoBunker. Hi Jason!

Sun Microsystems

Just a quick link to a very nice article on the recent history of Sun Microsystems. The Fast Company article explains the ups and downs for Sun during the pre and post dot com era.

I think Scott McNealy left some pretty big shoes to fill, but from what I have seen, Jonathan Schwartz has been doing quite nicely.

They also discuss the BlackBox project quite a bit and the rumors about what customers they are potentially building them for.

Check out the article here

Invisible Traffic

I think I need to have a second job for Network World or Cnet or something -- I would LOVE to just play with all of these technologies I read about and see what they can do. How fun would it be to have an enormous lab and test network and then get products from software companies to play, I mean test out.

I've always been intrigued about the WildPackets software. A few days back they announced a new analysis tool to help optimize 'invisible traffic' among virtual servers. It's included in the latest OmniAnalysis platform and helps in troubleshooting, forensics, security and compliance.

“Data center personnel are frustrated by the problem of invisible traffic in virtual environments,” explained Mahboud Zabetian, President and CEO of WildPackets. “Virtualization offers tremendous benefits in the areas of cost savings and other efficiencies. But it creates new challenges for anyone who needs to analyze network traffic in order to fix a bug, troubleshoot a performance problem, and fine-tune a server configuration. Traffic among virtual servers doesn’t cross over a network segment where it can be easily captured.

Check out more information and the press release here

Yet Another Lessons Learned

Jeffersonville, IN city hall has a data center cooling problem.

Over heating in the data center has caused problems with servers 3 times this spring! They are looking into a HVAC unit, but have not made a decision yet.

I hate to laugh at the expense of others, but this story is certainly interesting to read. Hopefully sevreal people in this town have learned some lessons.
Check out the article here

Burton Group's Data Center Strategies

Sys-con Media has an article on the Burton Group adding a new service for IT professionals facing data center decisions.

"According to Jamie Lewis, Burton Group CEO and research chair, technological advances in the data center, such as server and storage virtualization, storage networking using iSCSI and blade systems, multi-core processors, and low power platforms present opportunities to build efficient and productive data centers while reducing costs."

Check out the article here

Data Center Trends Study

Digital Realty Trust has commissioned a survey of senior decision makers in the data center industry. The report is really nice, was recorded in 2007 and included 150 participants of large companies in North America.

The report shows a number of key findings with wonderful statistics about data centers, expansion plans and proof that data centers have become a critical part of business operations.

The key finding was:

"Five out of every six respondents (more than 80 percent) have plans to expand their
 datacenters"

Check out the press release here

Netapp Data Center Expansion Follow-up

Back in April I posted a link to a story on Netapp selecting a site for data center expansion, with Research Triangle Park (RTP) being a top choice.

$16.3 million in county and state incentives later, they have selected RTP over Pittsburgh or Washington State. Netapp will build a 130,000 square foot expansion, where they have 530,000 square feet already.

Check out the article here

Berbee Expansion

Berbee, a CDW company, is planning a $1.9 million expansion in Fichtburg, WI. Berbee will receive $250,00 in Wisconsin Technology Zone tax credits.

Check out the Small Business Tims article here

DISA Utility Computing

Military Information Technology has a really nice article on how DISA(Defense Information Systems Agency) computing services has moved to a utility computing model. They have awarded $1.4 billion in contracts for storage and processing power, in a 'pay for what you use' model.

DISA maintains complete operational control over their data centers, while the six major 'service capacity' contracts provide the horsepower and SAN.

I could go into a lot of the details that are very impressive, but the article does a good job of covering everything. I have always liked the utility computing model (more so, 'grid'), even though it seems to be pretty high on the hype scale. I think this move by DISA just shows ( or will show) the validity of the model and how it can work.

Check out the article here.

Austin, TX Data Center Tax Breaks

Even with all of the data centers being planned or built in Texas, Austin is proposing another tax break to help attract data centers. Democrat Senator Kirk Watson sponsored legislation that allows data centers to avoid paying school property taxes for up to 10 years.

The state then pays the missed taxes to the school district. The goal of this, of course, is to attract more businesses with higher paying jobs and compete with other cities offering incentives to companies.

Check out the complete details here.

Total Site Solutions Books over $15 Million

As if we needed more evidence that the industry is doing well....

Total Site Solutions "today announced multiple new project awards totaling more than $15 million for the first quarter of 2007". TSS provides technology consulting, construction management and facilities management for mission critical facilities.

Check out the PR Newswire here

Data Center Outsourcing

There is a good article over at Infoworld on the colo market and companies outsourcing their data center needs. They also discuss making ice at night to cool in the day, fly wheel replacments for a UPS, and increasing efficiency through the usage of DC power. The first paragraph sums it up nicely:
"Data-center space is in high demand these days, and like energy prices, that demand appears to be headed nowhere but up. In fact, Digital Realty, a San Francisco-based REIT, estimates that demand for data-center space will continue to rise by as much as 15% annually over the next five years."

Check out the article here.

Utility Power Demand

Rich Miller beat me to the post on the Wall Street and Technology article titled "Don't Panic, The Grid's Going Down". I had been thinking that for all of the stories lately on how much power servers are using in the data center there wasn't much coverage on the available utility power from outside the data center.

The aforementioned article talks about the New York area, but surely this is bound to be on the minds of data centers most everywhere. It's amazing the number of data centers being planned/built in Texas. Here is a run-down of the announcements off the top of my head:

Stream Realty - 150,000 square feet
Microsoft - 470,000 square feet
Lowes - 100,000 square feet
NSA - new data center
Austin Data Centers - over 350,000 square feet
And then there's The Planet/EV1 in Dallas and Rackspace in San Antonio (already)

There are many others I imagine that I missed. Now -- with all of these new centers coming on line this year or next, all I can think about is the Texas power grid, ERCOT. Last year they shut off power to thousands when record spring temperatures were experienced. How well are the Texas power grids set to handle this massive increase in demand? There have been other brownouts around the country and many more to come I'm sure.

Then there was the 2003 NorthEast blackout that seems to be a reason for the DHS to build a backup data center and focus location selection in.......wait for it......TEXAS! On top of all of this let's not forget the potential cyber attack on power grids, as explained in this 2005 Washington Post article; or saboteur's with too much clearance.

Even when you have enough power coming in the data center, the staff may be the ultimate cause of an outage (humerous story here)

It will be an interesting summer to see what happens in the state of Texas (or elsewhere) with utilities and supply and demand.

Netapp Data Center Expansion

These articles are practically cookie-cutter. :) Company seeks major incentives to build a new data center and they are looking for cheap power and a talented work force.

Netapp is looking at Research Triangle Park, Pittsburgh or Washington state for a $25 million to $40 million Data Center expansion.

Check out the article here.

P.S.: Both Netapp and EMC have really good blogs that I check in on pretty frequently. Netapp's Dave Hitz blog is here, and Chuck Hollis at EMC here.

Google Data Center in Belguim

There was an announcement today regarding Google building a European data center in Belgium. Here is a run-down of the coverage:

Data Center Knowledge

http://lvb.net/item/4567

Market Watch

Web 2.0 in Belgium

Council Bluffs - Part 3

The Des Moines Register is running yet another article today on the 'mystery' company planning to setup shop in Council Bluffs. The funny part is that they no longer mention it as a 'mystery' company -- they say Google at every turn! (did I miss something?)

BTW - refund of sales taxes paid for electricity over five years has been in the works for Iowa for some time. Nice to see Google....I mean a large internet company move it along.

Check out the Register article here.

Going for Green

Iowa City-based ACT is building a $4 million "environmentally-friendly" data center. ACT is hoping for a Gold level certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system (LEED)

Going "green" adds about $300,000 to $400,000 to the final price tag but that money should be recovered in energy savings over the next five years or so. Gullette says, "Less water use, less electricity, more energy efficiency and we're also going to have a geothermal unit to cool the building so in the long run it'll pay for itself."

Check out the complete article here.

Fuel Cells in the Data Center

Techworld.com has an article about APC's first US customer that is using their new Infrastruxure enclosure, updated to use fuel cells.

"Hydrogen is stored outside the data centre and carried through pipes to the cells, which replace batteries and generators for backup power."

It will be interesting to see how/if this power source works out and what the benefits, costs and maintenance will be. Check out the article here

Next Generation Data Center Conference & Expo

An impressive list of 11 distinguished individuals have been named to the advisory board of the IDG Next Generation Data Center Conference. The conference is August 7-9 of this year and mission critical applications and new technology that impacts the data center.

I have been looking at this conference recently and 'think' that I would like to attend. With an advisory board like they list, here, I think it certainly should be a good conference. Co-located with the NGDC is the SNIA Enterprise Information World.

Check out the conference here

Google In Council Bluffs - Part 2

Just a quick link to a Des Moines Register article about the "large internet company" potentially locating in Council Bluffs.
Apparently Governor Chet Culver is visited Council Bluffs today.

Check out the article here.

Military Research For Cooling Systems

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will receive funds to look for ways to "make fundamental advancements in thermal regulation of electronic systems, from pinky-nail size chips to an entire computer server farm."

The $3.4 million in funds is geared towards identifying cooling methods necessary to extend the life of computers and electronics.

Check out the complete article here
and here

Google Data Center in Iowa ??!!!

The Omaha World Herald has an article about speculation on a large project (i.e.: Google) in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I had to read the article a few times before I could stop grinning. :) Here are the indicators that it could be Google:

• Typical salaries of $60,000, quoted by the city councilman
• Inexpensive land and labor compared with the rest of the country.
• The potential Bluffs site is near several electrical grids
• The metro area has a large network of fiber-optic cables, which came with Offutt Air Force base.
• Talks with the local water works about dramatically increasing the amount of water available for the site
• Omaha was on one of the recent Boyd study lists
• Potential $48 million in rebates available
• There is a lot of secrecy and security surrounding the "large project"
  

The last one I'll offer is a reply received to my post on Guessing the Next Google Data Center Location: an anonymous reader asked if I had heard about Council Bluffs as a potential site. Dear anonymous -- I have now!

Now -- this is all speculation, and who knows what may or may not end up happening. Either way, I'm anxious to see where the next Google site will be.

Check out the Omaha World Herald article here

Qwest Strategy

The Denver Post has an article on the interest/opportunity that Qwest has on acquiring hosting companies. This allows them to focus on managed services and play catch up with rivals AT&T and others in data center space.

The article quotes several analysts that make their claim for why it makes sense for Qwest. I have my own opinions about Qwest as a company, but after loosing the MCI acquisition to Verizon, I think the strategy most likely has some merit.

Check out the article here.

Data Center Architect

I like the sound of that....... "Data Center Architect". Just like when Woody was promoted to "Senior Bartender" on Cheers. :)

Newsfactor.com has a nice article on the increasing popularity of the title of Data Center Architect within a company. Confirmation of this trend comes from both Nemertes Research and Afcom founder Len Eckhaus.

It is a nice article, and I have to agree with what is being said regarding the position, it's role in the organization and the holistic approach to data center architecture, design and operations. The one thing I felt was missing from each of the descriptions was to include the requirement of knowing ITIL processes. I think all of the things they mentioned are extremely good to have, but having a good base knowledge of ITIL guidelines is equally essential.

Check out the article here.

Guessing the next Google Data Center Location

It's kind of fun to speculate where the next mega-Google data center might pop up. Perhaps better yet is figuring exactly how many of these sites they will end up building!

Blaine Berger thinks that Wheatland Wyoming will be the next site selected. With a 3 unit power plant, each unit capable of 550 megawatts, and low electricity costs - it is easy to see why there is a possibility. Wheatland is an hour north of Cheyenne, who recently won a $60 million project for the new National Center for Atmospheric Research supercomputing data center.

Read Blaine's blog post about Wheatland here and if you are wondering where exactly Wheatland is, click here.

HB1500

I don't know if this is necessarily Data Center related --- but it is very interesting, and important to the network infrastructure (and business) that supports a data center. James Carlini has a Great article on the HB1500 bill that Illinois is looking at. It will give AT&T the ability to have one state-wide franchise without having to negotiate with each municipality.

More on HB1500 here

The idea was simply interesting until I came across James' chart at the end. It is a really cool chart that demonstrates what happens when cities embrace infrastructure changes vs. restricting them. I highly recommend reading the article.

Sun BlackBox Tour

I attended the Sun BlackBox tour presentation yesterday and came out a changed man. Not about the BlackBox, but about Sun. As I mentioned a while back, I really felt like Sun had slipped in recent years. In 1997 I attended Netscape DevCon and heard Scott McNealy speak. He was inspiring and I really liked what Sun was doing and where they were going (back then). Jonathan Schwartz has seemed to make a difference at Sun and is turning the company around.

To start things off there was a presentation on what Sun is doing with virtualization. I am an avid reader of virtualization technologies, but haven't really had a lot of opportunities to play around with it other than VMWare player on my laptop. I really liked their vision and implementation ideas for effectively utilizing it. I'm not sure if this was obtained with permission, but I found the slides presented on at this site: http://thenut.eti.pg.gda.pl/~zdzichu/a/485252.pdf

Ok...on to the BlackBox. It was pretty cool to finally see the container and I will say that it is well engineered (for a first shot at it). It crams a lot of compute power in a small footprint and the overall design makes sense. Here are some of my notes from what I was able to jot down:

• 20' shipping container: 20'x8'x8.5' (LxWxH)
• 20,000 lbs. fully configured
• Up to a 60 ton chiller for full 200kW load
• 7 racks of dual 60a 3phase power: 8th is a distribution cabinet
• Release date: expected in July 2007
• Without servers installed it is 'estimated' to cost $300k-$400k
• Site requirements for deployment: 208 3phase AC, Chilled water, Bandwidth and a flat, level pad >= 30' x 15'
• It was mentioned that someone like Caterpillar would potentially be interested in packaging a BlackBox with a generator and other items to complete the container.

Going in to the presentation the biggest question was simply what in the world would this thing be used for (or who would buy this)? Sun provided the following potential customer scenarios:

1. Data Center expansion
2. Data Center Consolidation
3. Data Center Migration
4. Disaster Recover
5. Remote Infrastructure
6. Temporary Data Center
7. Hybrid Data Center

I won't counter each of those points because....well, just because it would take a while and in the end is probably not worth it. There was one customer scenario given that was intriguing and worth mentioning. They said an airline in Chicago needed additional servers and instead of paying a high price for the airport data center space, they dropped a blackbox in their own hanger and used it (rent-free) instead. It is an interesting use of the container and I imagine it was set up and running in a short time.

That seems to be one of the big selling points....quick turn around (versus building an actual facility). This and the ability to pre-configure and ship it where you want seem to be the real purpose in the product. Now, I still question having the power and pipe readily available in some of these places they suggest, but..... Not to mention if you are going to have a chiller, transformers, 208 3phase power and UPS -- just so you can drop a black box in, haven't you really already built a Data Center?

Finally, the one that simply blows me away: security. I don't think you will find too many scenarios where people will say that the data residing on servers inside the data center is not that critical or important. This is one of the top reasons that servers are kept in facilities that have multiple levels of security and measures to prevent tampering with any part of the data, server or data center infrastructure. The picture where a BlackBox is in a parking garage still makes me chuckle. Why would anyone park one there and then just leave the bandwidth and power dangling off the side for anyone to come sever.

Competition: recently, of course, there is Rackable. Check out this InternetNews article that mentioned investor site report rumors that Sun was in talks to BUY Rackable! And all of this is old hat to the APC Data Center on wheels that has been around a long while. Just for fun, take a look at the Google trend chart between Blackbox and Rackable's Concerto.

So to summarize.....I had a good time and was glad I got to see it. I don't doubt they will sell many of these in the future and think that they have engineered something pretty cool. I think there is a purpose for these that I just can not see yet (as evidenced by Rackable saying that they sold one to a leading Internet company (Yahoo perhaps?)). My only question is that by the time you provision everything needed to support a BlackBox, have you really saved anything over building an expandable data center to do the same thing?

I also wanted to provide some links to others that have blogged on the BlackBox tour and provided their reviews:

• http://www.connectfive.com/?p=7
• http://lonesysadmin.net/2007/03/26/my-questions-about-project-blackbox/
• http://ideasint.blogs.com/ideasinsights/2007/02/suns_blackbox_b.html
• http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/03/post.html
• http://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2006/10/20/sun-blackbox-not-a-virtualised-data-center-how-much-it-is-at-sea-level/
• http://hostingfu.com/article/sun-blackbox-rapid-deployable-data-center

And finally, my pictures:

Nicholas Carr - Showdown in the trailer park II

Just a quick link over to an Excellent article from Nicholas Carr's blog. He writes about two different views on commodity models and data center containers. Besides being a very nice article, it has links to Microsoft's James Hamilton's paper and slides vs. Sun's Greg Papadopoulos counter point.
Check out the blog post here.

Frankfurt Airport's Data Center

Eweek's Infrastructure column does a nice case study on the Frankfurt Airport Data Center. It has incredibly impressive features and is redundant from start to finish.

Nine meters below ground, 3 different power grids, redundant chillers offering 1.4 megawatts of cooling and even the building is built within another hardened structure.

Check out the rest of the story and case study here.

Dell Data Center Solutions

Dell announced today that they have created a new division that will focus on designing customized data centers for companies. They will extend their build-to-order business to accommodate the large-scale server farms. Their target market is large web-based companies and hyperscale data centers of the business world.

I must be getting old, because this is yet another one I just don't get. It sounds like they are basically offering customization tools and guidance for those companies buying $2 gazillion in Dell product or more. If you are a large company making a mega-purchase of Dell servers, I would certainly hope you have an inkling of what/why you are buying and some sort of architecture to support it! The only other take on it is that Dell is just inching its way into consulting and business services, and what better place to start than where all of the money is.

Check out the ComputerWorld article here.

Data Center In a Box

Rackable Systems has joined the in-a-box party by announcing they will also have a Data Center in a box product. The new product, called Concentro, will be a 40 foot shipping container that can be deployed on short notice. Although Sun grabbed the press early on this, Rackable will end up beating them to the punch as they announce on Monday the first sale of a unit to "one of the world's leading Internet companies".

Check out the ComputerWorld article here.

Blogroll

Here is the blogroll I promised a while back. I tend to have 3 times as many blogs that I subscribe to than what I actually have time to read. Here is the short list of my favorites.

Data Center Knowledge (of course) http://datacenterknowledge.com/
SearchDataCenter.com http://serverspecs.blogs.techtarget.com/
Data Center Design http://datacenterdesign.blogspot.com/index.html
DataCentres http://www.datacentres.com/rss/
Isabel Wang http://www.isabelwang.com/
Jeff Pulver http://pulverblog.pulver.com/
Nicholas Carr http://www.roughtype.com/
Robert Cringely http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/
Chuck Hollis http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/
GigaOm http://gigaom.com/
Renesys Blog http://www.renesys.com/blog/
Seeking Alpha http://seekingalpha.com/

Cool Technology!!

This is not data center related....but I am absolutely blown away by this. Check out this amazing demo of Jeff Han's human-machine interface.

http://www.loiclemeur.com/france/2007/03/377_jeff_han_an.html
and another one at
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_han

I have played it 3 times now and can't get enough. I'm not sure I have an 8 foot wall in my cubicle at work, but I'll make room. Very inspiring technology!

(thanks to my friend Ben for the link)

Q9 Networks Reports Growth

I thought I would counter the server consolidation post with a quick note about Managed Infrastructure provider Q9 reporting that they are under budget and have greater capacity than originally estimated in their new data center . They are finishing up a 1200 cabinet, $20million facility in Calgary Canada.

"Q9 Networks reports that revenue for the first quarter 2007 was CAD $12.8 million, a 17 percent increase over first quarter 2006 revenue of $11.0 million and an increase of 3 percent from fourth quarter 2006 revenue of $12.5 million."

Check out the WHIR News article here.

Server Consolidation Blunder

A $35 million dollar Madison Wisconsin IT Project, delays, no time table for completion, and another $36 million over the next two years....it kind of sounds like a lessons learned for what 'not' to do. The details are too many to describe here, but my favorite was this one:

The 57,000-square-foot data center, which the DOA leased and took over in April 2006 and which will cost $5.3 million a year to run at full capacity, was supposed to eventually hold 2,000 servers under the consolidation and is large enough to handle up to 4,900. So far the state has moved 120 servers there, Henderson said.

I would not want to see the project manager that managed this consolidation. :)
Check out the article here.

Improvements in 2007 for AT&T

"AT&T Inc. will invest more than $750 million in 2007 to advance the delivery of IP services to businesses worldwide, the company said Tuesday"

Part of this initiative will be expanding current data centers, as well as opening new ones in New York and Canada. By the end of the year they will have 38 Internet Data Centers. As if it wasn't already evident enough, they are making themselves the dominant player in DSL, Wi-FI, ethernet and satellite technologies. Other services like VPN, VoIP and security are also set to benefit from the $750m.

Check out the article here.

Commodity Data Center Design

I love going to conferences. I know many people get tired of them and can find them boring, but I am both an information junkie and a geek, so I like them. The Web 2.0 Expo, coming this April has a particular session that caught my eye. Commodity Data Center Design, with James Hamilton has an interesting summary.

"This talk describes a commoditized data center design using standard shipping containers as the core building block."

I still haven't changed my mind on the Sun Black Box product, but it was certainly interesting that this Microsoft Architect was pushing a shipping container design. For the sake of seeing it for myself I have signed up to see the Sun Black Box on their nationwide tour. I'll (of course) write about it here afterwards. Check out the full Web 2.0 session summary and conference information here. Although I can not go to this conference I would sure love to hear from anyone that is going to it!

Data Center Vision

Laurianne McLaughlin at CIO Magazine has a blog entry recently titled "Will the Phone Company Run Your Data Center?". Laurianne interviewed Bill Coleman from BEA Software, whose vision is that companies will trust the phone companies to run their data centers in 10-15 years.

I don't necessarily agree with the idea, but I would venture to guess their are some similar visions out there. I do like his reference to utility computing though. I know there are those who think we won't go to a lights out data center any time soon, but I believe it will happen sooner than you think.



Colocation companies, phone companies, power companies, Google, or perhaps the KOA campgrounds (for the Sun Black Box farms) -- some entity is going to house massive amounts of computing power and will offer it up on a utility basis to enterprises. Also playing into my belief of a utility computing realization is a fascination with grid technologies. I think instead of building your own data center or outsourcing it to one or two other companies/locations, your computing infrastructure will be spread out over dozens of different data centers that are a part of a grid that you buy processing power on. All of your applications have been virtualized to the grid and there is no need to worry about individual servers or infrastructure going down or needing maintenance. It also buys automatic Disaster Recovery and BCP.



Ok....enough for one night. The above are just my random ramblings, so please don't take them for anything more. :)

Here is the CIO blog post Will the Phone Company Run Your Data Center?

What's After Yottabyte?

What comes after a Yottabyte? According to a recent IDC study we'll have 601 exabytes (available) in the year 2010. Closing in on 1 zetabyte generated in 2010, the yottabye is all that is left! The study, sponsored by EMC, claims that the world stores 161 exabytes as of last year, with each file replicated 3 times. The Business week article quotes EMC Vice President of Technology Alliances Chuck Hollis, who happens to be on my favorites list for blogs I read.

Check out the details of the IDC study discussed here at Business Week.

Scale Out or Scale Up

ServerWatch has an interesting article that discusses several organizations and their stories of facing the scale out or scale up decision. The article discusses scalability headaches experienced by companies facing rapidly increasing capacity and processing power. All of this while becoming more and more dense.

I would submit that these stories and problems experienced are the ultimate sell for going with a colo provider instead of facing the changes alone. A company can attempt to run their infrastructure AND a facility, or leave the facility to someone whose sole purpose is to deal with cooling and power headaches.

Check out the Server Watch article here.

New Look, Saving Energy and Blogrolls

After reading a post over at EcoIron I decided to do my (very small) part and make my blog a darker color. For those of you reading this in your favorite RSS reader - click over to see what I mean. Also read the ecoIron post for some interesting energy saving results on using a white Google home page vs. a black Google page.

I am also working on posting my blogroll on the side bar. Since I am an information junkie I have a TON of blogs I read in my Bloglines reader. I'll sift through them and post them as soon as possible.

Cooling Options

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I am a fan of overhead cooling and do not care for raised floors. An article at searchdatacenter.com discusses a study done by two IBM researchers. While the title of the article is "Raised Floor Bests Overhead Cooling, IBM finds", I like it because it is a balanced discussion. It talks about where raised floors work best and where they don't -- it all depends on the load and the configuration of the data center. Check out the article here.

Hosting.com Adds New Data Center Facility

Hosting.com has announced a second 16,500 sq.ft. data center to be built in Louisville,KY. Besides BCP and DR reasons, hosting.com said they evaluated facilities all over the U.S. before selecting Louisville. The new facility will be an impressive Tier III facility with N+1 cooling, N+2 power redundancy and DC power capabilities.

Disaster Planning: Pandemic

Chris DeVoney has a very interesting article at Enterprise Systems Journal where he interviews Dan Lohrmann, CISO for the state of Michigan. They discuss the issue of pandemics and other disasters that aren't typically on the radar when you think of DR or BCP.

I always enjoy hearing about scenarios that government or private sector come up with to test their systems and procedures. Dan was the 2006 Information Security Executive of the year (congratulations Dan!). Data Centers tend to focus on how resilient the facility is, but what if the facility and network are still there, but there are no people to operate it?! Read the complete interview here.

The Planet Exapnds Texas Data Centers

Dedicated hosting company The Planet plans on expansions to their Dallas and Houston data centers throughout 2007. After both sites are complete, their total data center footprint will be 175,000.
Check out thehostingnews.com article here.

Raised Floor

I just wanted to post a quick follow-up on the raised floor discussion. An article over at SearchDatacenter.com prompted me to do so. APC's CTO Neil Rasmussen states the following at the close of their interview:

The floor is the problem. I can make an air conditioner any size I want, but the problem is getting the air through the tiles. If I try to moving 25kW of air through tile, it's going to be 120 mph coming through floor tile. It's also very inefficient to push all that air over a distance. It takes a tremendous amount of horsepower to move it around. It's not uncommon to find just the fan taking more power than the servers in data centers.

He goes on to comment that the APC strategy is to get the cooling closer to the cabinet. When you are in a small "computer room" I suppose I can see this. When you have hundreds and hundreds of cabinets, this just seems like their way to make even more money on the deal. I am by no means an expert, but I believe their are plenty of cooling solutions that work (even for a 25 kW cabinet) that don't require cooling at the cabinet level.

Network Computing: Data Center Design

Network Computing has a nice article on data center design. It's an outsourcers' notebook, lessons learned, on a 15 month project to design and build a 10k sq. ft. data center. Although it is only the basics of design and construction, it is a good overall article.

Side rant -- once again, a raised floor is listed as a requirement!! WHY???!!!???

Net Neutrality and the Carrier Hotel

Just a quick link over to an EzineArticles.com article by John Savageau on Net Nuetrality and the Carrier Hotel. I found it to be a very interesting read.

NASA & Google - Part 2

I have always been a Google fan, but this latest announcement with NASA is very cool. NASA is teaming up with Google (again) to use it's massive amounts of computing power and storage.

With the amount of data that NASA is generating it is no wonder they turn to Google, who has more than 10,000 servers (i.e.: 450k) over 13 data centers and expenditures of $1.5 billion on property and equipment in 9 months of 2006. NASA's Columbia super computer recently had an upgrade of 600 Terabytes, 20 StorageTek libraries and more. Columbia is connected to 1.1 Petabytes of storage with a SGI SAN (I love SGI equipment by the way).

I think Google will be alone for a while in the claim to have Exabytes of data in their possession. I wanted to link to what an exabyte was for those that didn't know how much storage this was, and came across an interesting 2003 CIO magazine article that states:

"It estimated that in 1999, the total of all human knowledge, music, images and words amounted to about 12 exabytes. About 1.5 of those exabytes were generated during 1999 alone. "

Since I probably won't get anyone at Google to bite on locating a data center where I live, I'll put the request out to them to divulge what they use for a storage infrastructure, management software and technologies used to connect storage equipment (their Bigtable publication is an interesting read by the way). It would be an amazing lessons learned story/white paper to learn what they use, how they implemented it and what they learned in the process.

Ok...enough suspense, here is the article at Byteandswitch.com.

Study: U.S. Data Centers Consume As Much Electricity as State of Utah

"A new report from the Alliance to Save Energy says computer data centers offer an important area for increasing the nation’s energy efficiency and notes policies and measures that could help mitigate the energy used by this emerging sector"

This article at EnvironmentalLeader.com covers the AMD and Alliance to Save Energy funded report. It also discusses H.R. 5646, the study to promote the use of energy efficient computer servers. The big quote of course is that the total consumption of U.S. data centers equals that as the entire state of Utah. I say, just throw a Google and Microsoft data center in Utah and then that statistic will become irelavent. :)

Hey Google -- Build Here!

With Google building mega complexes all over and everyone on the edge of their seat for where the next one will be, it's no wonder we find articles like this one at the Technology Evangelist blog. I have to give them credit -- it is a very good case they build and very creative.

I would also like to make the plea to Google to build a Data Center in my neck of the woods. I would personally do just about anything for the opportunity. We all think our own city is the best and while I won't go back into my location selection rant, I will say that at least the Technology Evangelist site location is closer to my area and a decent choice.

Googlegate

I had been seeing this story all over the net recently and wasn't going to post on it. That was until I ran across the Nicolas Carr blog post titled Googlegate in North Carolina. I just like the title. :)

It is interesting though that discusses the disclosures that "Google was granted as much as a quarter billion dollars in secret tax breaks for a plant expected to employ approximately 200 workers."

Of the articles I have read I think this one is very good, thorough and covers all of the details.

Digital Realty Buys Dublin Data Center

Digital Realty Trust continues to grow world wide! They have now purchased a Data Center in Dublin, Ireland. Yahoo news story here.

Cincinnati Riverfront Park

I like the stories about technology parks that seem to be going up just about everywhere. Here is a link to a story on a 10k sq. ft., tier III data center being built with the possibility of growing to a 90k sq. ft. facility. It looks like Sara Lee Corp. is an early anchor tenant.

Disaster: Network Outage Graphs

Todd Underwood has a really neat article recently on the Renesys blog. The article shows network graphs surrounding events such as the 2003 NorthEast power outage, hurricane Katrina and 2006 Taiwan quakes. It's pretty cool to see the graphs and his analysis of network patterns when the events were happening. Check it out here.

Amazon's EC2 Stories

Just a quick link to some success stories on Amazon's EC2 Service that are pretty interesting. I am really intrigued by the EC2 service and can't wait to hear more stories and perhaps someone else having a similar / identical service offering?

WYSIWYB and John's 2007 Prediction

In 1999 a terabyte was a lot of storage. Today I can have a terabyte in a single disk on my system. In 1999 I upgraded my 56k modem to a screaming fast cable modem. Today.....well, I still have my cable modem. I know it is February, but I would like to make my prediction for 2007. I think 2007 will be the year of the home bandwidth upgrade. I think FiOS and other FTTP technologies will gain a lot of momentum as people demand better pipes (or tubes) to their homes.

A Robert Cringely column got me thinking about all of this. His recent column on WYSIWB was another excellent read on an exiting new technology from NuMetra. It may be dreaming (at this point), but NuMetra's technology would move the typically ISP over provisioning 20:1 ratio down to a What You Buy Is What You Get (WYSIWYG). Hey Robert -- watch the cracks about Vinton Cerf! :)

I almost wrote a post a while back on yet another Cringely column. He had an excellent piece on the Google monopoly and his thoughts. I thought I had an opinion on the article until I started reading all of the comments (270 in all). Afterwards I'm not sure what I think. :)

Water-Cooled Systems

I have always been a little leery of water-based cooling. Water being so close to mass amounts of computer equipment just didn't make sense. With all of the water cooled systems that have come out in past years I have become more curious, but still wonder if it has a place in the data center. With the extreme density that some racks can have, I suppose their is some practical purpose for it.

Jonathan Heiliger, CEO of Aperture Development explains that the cost also plays a large factor, depending on what the density being cooled is. In this Processor article he states... “Generally, it’s cheaper to spread systems across the data center floor or build additional data center space than deploy water cooling today.”

No matter what your opinion on water is, it is worth the extra effort to prepare for it if building a data center today. Check out the rest of what I found to be a very good article here at Processor