Storage Service Provider (SSP)

A post from the Burton Group made me nostalgic tonight. They brought up the idea of a potential revival in Storage Service Providers. InfoWorld also writes about the new storage cloud and how it will undercut the market dominance from EMC, HP and IBM. I think Nik Simpson states it pretty well: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I immediately went to check blogs from Chuck Hollis and Dave Hitz to see if they had anything to say on the topic. They didn't. Why? Because it is silly. First of all it's a term....nothing more. Journalists and marketing geeks like nothing more than to coin a term to spin the hype machine and see who will pay attention. Storage Service Provider (SSP), SAAS (Storage as a Service), storage cloud, Managed Storage Service....whatever. It is all just 1's and 0's on platters.

Reading the article took me back a bit, as a number of years ago I was a part of a dot-com company that offered online storage. We were like the rest of the dot-coms and offered 1gb, 5gb and 10gb plans, and then had a backup tool that would take your data directly to your online account. We ran the site for many years, and I always remember looking to one company as 'the' big dog of the industry. Storage Networks was the SSP of the time and (I think) had grown quite a large business. They took the enterprise side of the market, while sites like idrive, xdrive, swapdrive and others took the consumer side. Take a look to see what Storage Networks site looked like in 2000.

Today, we have Amazon's S3. I'm still amazed at this offering and almost equally amazed that it hasn't caught on more than it has. I was trying to think if S3 had any real competition and the only thing I could come up with is an equally intriguing offering from Cleversafe. It is fun to see how people are using S3 though. Check out this article about Stardust@home:

The Stardust@home project uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store and deliver the tens of million of images that represent the data collected from the dust particle aerogel experiment.

Anyway....back to the SSP model. The model is an enterprise one. I really believe that S3 and other online storage services that have survived can only truly cater to home/office users, small companies and some aspects of the hosting world. Enterprise customers want their data close to them and want to know it is managed, protected and monitored at all times. Regulations and data leakage incidents have ensured that enterprise storage is on a short leash at all times.

I do believe that managed storage services (see - even I can't stop from using IT lingo) have a place for some. Inside the data center, or between trusted parties and elaborate SLA and other agreements, it would potentially be beneficial to let someone else manage the scalability, reliability and a few other 'ilities of your storage. If nothing else, perhaps the consumer side of the market will help to push down some of the insane prices that the enterprise players push. Maybe a colo or integrator could offer a pay-for-what-you-use model to the SMB market and see if it flies.

Netapp Cogeneration

It's too late for me to think up any comments on this article, other than to say that this is pretty cool (literally) stuff.

Very much worth a read.

Check out the article here

Google: Council Bluffs Update

The building has already been expanded, the exterior walls are up and they are continuing to hire/recruit for jobs at the Google Council Bluffs facility. They mention "working around weather conditions" -- it has either been extremely hot, or raining constantly here lately, so I'm sure that has hindered things.

I really wish I could drive down there and snap some shots of construction -- assuming that I could even get anywhere near enough to get a glimpse.

Check out the article here.

DataSynapse

On the 'Grid'ComputingPlanet.com website there is an article on Data Synapse and the growing trend of jumping on the virtualization band-wagon. They now consider themselves the fastest growing application virtualization vendor.

I personally like the term grid (for them) better, but I can see a fit with virtualization as well.

"We're actually a lot like VMware in the problem we're solving," said Bernardin. But instead of creating virtual machines, DataSynapse creates "application instances" to maximize application performance, decoupling applications from underlying resources to improve scalability and resilience and set priorities.

"That requires an underlying platform, such as a grid," said Bernardin, who calls grid technology a "precursor" to such advanced functionality.

They expect 50% sales growth this year and a potential IPO next year! I ran across them last year and really like their product offerings. I spoke with a partner rep at the company because I have an idea for a product offering of my own that would incorporate their product. Their GridServer and FabricServer products are extremely cool and worth a look.

I would 'almost' venture to say that they are a good target for merger/acquisition. Perhaps the IPO is a backup plan. Adding/acquiring something like 3Tera's Applogic might be a nice complement....?

Check out the article here

Virtualization: I'm OK, You're OK

With all of the hype around virtualization, I couldn't resist another post. A few items I've found while surfing lately have really peaked my interest.

The first one is well over my head, but extremely cool. It's a year old, but I imagine some of the concepts still apply (or have been revised/improved/tweaked). It's called Hardware Virtualization Rootkits, from Dino A. Dai Zovi and can found here. If you are in to security at all, this guy does some insane research.

The second one I ran across was from a favorite blogger of mine - Christofer Hoff. It's a presentation on Virtualization and Network Security. It's an excellent mix of Virtualization concepts, vulnerabilities and solutions from his former company, Crossbeam. Check out the blog post here and presentation here.

The final is a presentation entitled The Virtualized Rootkit is Dead from Matasano, Symantec and RootLabs. It discusses HVM malware, virtualized malware detection and the Samsara framework. (Dino Dai Zovi is on the Matasono team)

What I did on my Summer Vacation

It seems like I wrote a multitude of these type of papers when I was in school. For the sake of catching up on links, here is what I did on my 2007 summer vacation.

• Outside 2.0: As a computer geek, information junkie and perpetual web surfer, this getting outside thing is pretty cool. My family takes an annual trip to visit relatives and a particular town we visit is a wonderful reminder of the real world, wonderful scenery and the perfect place to ditch the phone and laptop (besides, there is no wi-fi hotspot for MILES. On the second day we went to a St. Louis Cardinals game (the 2006 World Champion Cardinals). Although my sons' hero didn't win the game for us like last year, they did win and it was a good (but really really hot) game. The relatives house where we stayed did not have an internet connection, but their neighbors were nice enough to have open wireless access points for me...and a few that had the default router login/password still on it. :)
  

• I was able to catch up on a number of podcasts that I listen to and try a few new ones out. I was glad to see that Om Malik has a podcast on the red-hot media network Revision3. Since Om made a few (much more qualified) predictions, I thought I would give it a try also. He stated that he thought Ebay will buy Second Life; 'I' Think Google will buy it and integrate a version of a virtual world into Google Earth. Ok, maybe this is just my dream....but it could happen.
  

• I was also able to read a few books I had waiting in the queue. I listened to an audio version of Al Franken reading his book Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot. It was very funny and cool to hear Al reading it. I also read Blink, by Malcom Gladwell. This was a good book as well and now I need to back-track and read the predecessor The Tipping point. I'm thinking of a subscription to Audible as a Chrismas Present this year.
  

• As an information junkie, I couldn't stay away from blogs for too long. Rich Miller kept me up to speed on the industry and I went back to read several posts from fellow Iowa blogger Trent Hamm. Trent writes a very good (and popular) blog, The Simple Dollar, on 'financial talk for the rest of us'. His story and how he finds the time and ideasvvfor writing his blog was/is inspiring. Check his blog out here.
  

• For whatever reason I decided to peruse the quarterly 10-Q statements from Terremark, Equinix and Savvis. They were interesting in their lawyer and SOX-filled ramblings, but one thing caught my eye. From my last post, I had done a Google trends search for the term "data center". Interestingly, the second place region that is searching for that term from 2004-2007 is Singapore. In the Equinix 10-Q I read:
  

"In March 2007, the Company entered into long-term leases for new space in the same building in which the Company’s existing Singapore IBX center is located (the “Singapore IBX Expansion Project”). Minimum payments under these leases, which qualify as operating leases, total 3,674,000 Singapore dollars (approximately $2,394,000 as translated using effective exchange rates at June 30, 2007) in cumulative lease payments with monthly payments commencing in the third quarter of 2007. The Company is building out this new space in multiple phases. As of June 30, 2007, the Company incurred approximately $11,200,000 of capital expenditures to build out the first phase."

Singapore seems to be a hot spot, and I have to wonder if we'll see announcements out in the near future about data centers being built there.

• In my Gmail I found a link to a Syska-Hennessy white paper that (due to it being vacation) I had some time to read. It was on outside air economizers and a very interesting read. My new term for the month is enthalpy ( In thermodynamics and molecular chemistry, the enthalpy or heat content (denoted as H or ΔH, or rarely as χ) is a quotient or description of thermodynamic potential of a system, which can be used to calculate the "useful" work obtainable from a closed thermodynamic system under constant pressure. ). As usual, I most likely wouldn't do it justice in trying to explain it, so check it out here.
  

• Last, I worked some more on a Data Center Site Selection post I have been developing for some time. Through surfing various sites I ran across an article that mentioned the "Pandemic severity index". From a DR and BCP perspective, I thought this was pretty interesting. Check out the Wikipedia article on it here.
  

I still have a few days left of vacation -- perhaps I should get back to the outdoors and enjoy it while I can. It may take several weeks to get caught up on work, but the time spent with family, 100+ degree temperature and "are we there yet" car rides was definately worth it.

Data Center 3.5

Since I am unable to attend the NGDC conference (I really, really wanted to go), I thought I would have a little fun and coin my own term. I would like to declare DataCenter 3.5. Why? Just because :)

Cisco declared Data Center 3.0, Eric Schmidt declared Web 3.0 and I'm going to declare Data Center 3.5.

This Infoworld article made the dare, so I thought I would oblige. :)

Ok...so I suppose I could attempt to put a little bit behind the statement. Let's take a look:

• Data Center 1.0: Everything pre-2002 : from small server rooms all the way up to Exodus and other dot-com boom companies. BTW: When searching for Exodus, I found it funny that this is what I came up with. The Equinix IPO was August 11, 2000

• Data Center 2.0: 2002-2006 : Post dot-com bubble rebuilding. The industry re-groups and numerous other colocation companies come on the scene. Many of the big players start to out-pace the S&P 500.

• Data Center 3.0: 2006-July 2007 : Virtualization technologies; Mega data centers being planned and built by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others; Eco-friendly data centers; Blade Servers ; and data center in a box.
  

• Data Center 3.5: Starting August 8, 2007 : Virtual private data center ; Utility computing, EC2, insane grids and 4+ Billion Megawatt-Hours of electricity per year (just in the U.S.!). I know these are all current technologies, but I think they will really gain momentum from here on out.

There you go.... data center 3.5 begins. :) It really is quite silly ; all we really measure in the what-ever x.x is a hype cycle. On that note, I wandered over to a fun little distraction...Google Trends. Here are my finds:

Data Center vs. Data Centre

Data Center companies in 2007 (I thought the 365 main spike was kind of funny)


Hopefully Public Relations 4.0 is next.

DNS Re-binding Attacks

This is a little off-topic, but incredibly interesting(originally found at the O'Reilly blog). It is a paper/presentation by Dan Kaminsky at the recent Black Hat Black Ops 2007 conference on turning your browser into a tcp/ip relay. Anyway....I have only read the first half dozen pages or so, but it is really fascinating. As Artur Bergman puts it in the O'Reilly blog post, "I'm really glad Danny is on our side"


PDF here
Slides here

Google in Korea

I'm not sure if this means they are exactly 'building' a data center, but the Data Center Journal reports that Google is "transferring servers" to Korea in order to better comply with local regulations.

Other things I have read here and there, certainly show Google's interest in the global market, underwater fiber to Europe/Asia and peering arrangements.

Check out the Data Center Journal article here.
Google's Fiber (older story) here
Google jobs: Strategic Negotiator-Global Infrastructure

Third Pipe

It seems there is an entire industry following what Google does now days. I have to admit that I am a Google-junkie. I use a vast majority of Google tools and applications and simply can't get enough (Google Earth being my favorite)

I had an idea recently and had it 'somewhat' confirmed by my favorite podcast, This Week in Tech. It's potentially far-fetched, but is, for the purpose of this blog, data center related. Before I get to what I am thinking, some background information:

• Google searching for growth in cell phones.
• Google is talking with carriers, pushing the mobile versions of its applications and prototyping it's own phone. If I remember right an iinovate podcast with Eric Schmidt had him mention 'mobile technologies' as the market to watch / grow in the future. Google has relationships with Vodafone, T-Mobile, Sprint and others. Eric Schmidt sits on the board at Apple (i.e. iPhone). Check out these articles for further information:
• Wall street Journal
• ComputerWorld

• Google's $4.6 billion bid for the 700mhz spectrum
• AT&T told Google to put their money where their mouth is, and well....they did! The news and commentary is worth a read:
• Public Knowledge
  
• Google's Public Policy blog (here and here)

The FCC also wants to spur commercial wireless innovation, especially when it comes to creating a "third pipe" for broadband that can provide an alternative to cable/DSL duopoly that prevails in most of the country.

• Google acquires GrandCentral - a follow-me phone service with a ton of functionality.

Ok -- so where I am I going with this? Google obviously has plenty of mega-data centers going up around the world to house the amazing server infrastructure needed to satiate search and applications. But what about customer-access to the net via a 'third pipe' or other
wireless ventures? Well, we all know the story about shipping containers in Google parking garages in Mountain View. What if they had the containers put all over the U.S. and
used them as a small data center to connect communities, serve the immediate area and dominate the third pipe?

Ok, I can't seem to explain my idea the best, but basically -- the have the containers, they'll have the spectrum, customer applications and of course, the cash to lay out the infrastructure. I would think there is a minimal amount of infrastructure (networking and servers) needed to serve a particular market and if they put all of that in a container, dropped it on some of their
dark fiber and then had the mobile devices to connect....well, viola! Now -- let's hope they provide a little better physical security for these containers than the default Sun Black Box.

It's been a long day today (garage sale and tired kids), so I apologize if I am rambling and don't make sense. Thanks again to Leo Laporte of TWiT for confirming and discussing the thought.

New Uptime Institute White Paper

The Uptime Institute has a new white paper out (draft). It is quite interesting and has a number of good statistics and observations about the industry. It reviews the facilities' CapEx and OpEx costs and examines what needs to happen to alleviate skewed trends. The title is The Invisible Crisis in the Data Center: The Economic Meltdown of Moore's Law

Besides being an excellent paper to read, I wanted to quote what I found to be a funny story inside the paper. It is nice to hear that large corporations can have large blunders. Here is an excerpt from the paper:

"...a company that invested $22M in blade servers without including the site facility representatives in the decision. Just to install the blades, a site infrastructure upgrade investment (site CapEx) of an additional $54M was required For three years of operation, another $21M was required for site OpEx."

Check out the white paper here

Titan Private Security Vault

I found the following article to be pretty interesting. An Oklahoma off-site storage and safety deposit box company blossoms into a colocation and DR facility. Titan Private Security Vault is building a 20k sq.ft. facility in Sapulpa, Oklahoma so they can offer a wide variety of services. With extremely hardened and redundant facilities, help from technology advisor I2e and a ton of neighboring Texas data centers going up (and needing off-site DR), I have to think Titan will be successful. The most interesting thing in the article was the last line:

"Titan also is working to expand to the Kansas City area in a mine converted to a "mega” data center with more than 1.5 million square feet."

Check out the article here

EYP MCF C4ISR

Working in the computer industry I use, and am surrounded by acronyms. Some times it seems they are used just for the sake of sounding important.

The uber global consulting engineering firm EYP has recently added a dedicated C4ISR group to its Washington D.C. group. This addition creates a "unique bridge" and will assure "continuity of operations (COOP)".

I simply have to quote a sentence from this link, for two reasons: one because it will define C4ISR for those (like me) that didn't know what it means; and two, because it accomplishes a perfect marketing spin, while (like a politician) not really saying anything meaningful.

"The term C4ISR is an acronym for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance and refers to the facility, technology, operations and people who manage the protection umbrella of U.S. national security, through a netcentric approach to today’s asymmetric warfare threat."

Anyway... here is the Energy and Power Mangement site link

Failure Happens

Just a quick link to the O'Reilly Radar blog -- where Jesse Robins does a nice summary of the 365 Main outage. I am a visual learner, so I Really appreciate the nice diagrams he has.

check it out here

New 40k sq.ft Peak 10 DC in Nashville

Peak 10 is building a second data center in Nashville, Tenn. Not too many other details released, other than it being 40,000 sq.ft and that they will be investing heavily in to the infrastructure (can you 'not' do that in the market today? :)

Peak 10 is investing heavily in space, power, and bandwidth to enable current Nashville customers to grow their infrastructure in both the existing and new facility. The new data center will be in close proximity to the original facility, convenient to customers with presence in both, and will be built to next generation data center standards.

Check out the press release here

Virtualization Follow-up

Just a couple of things I wanted to write about as a follow-up on my post a while ago on Virtualization (man, this is one, hot topic)

• Unless you have been under a rock, you have heard about "Data Center 3.0" from Cisco. BTW: I thought Tim O'Reilly was the only one that could coin a term like that. :) Anyway, this is one seriously cool product that I plan on reading up on soon. To top things off, they then turn around and invest $150 million in VMWare!

• One seriously cool company I forgot to mention in my Virtualization post was Platespin. It's best just to check out their site and product offering, but they summarize their offering as "Anywhere to anywhere workload portability and protection". Since I made a wild guess about Opsware being bought, I would like to say that Platespin sure seems ripe for the picking ....... by......umm....BMC (yeah, that's it)

• Microsoft Cloud OS: This isn't really virtualization - but I'm going to throw it in because it is kind of cool. Cnet has a good article on the next Microsoft developer platform where they plan to open it all up to the public. "Microsoft plans to open up much of the technology that powers Windows Live as well as the underlying infrastructure." Check out the Cnet article here.

• OK -- I saved the best for last. I'll start with a quote that I really like: "future of IT is being defined on the Internet". Granted, it is a little basic for a cool quote, but read this Web Hosting Talk article and you'll see why it is inspiring. The quote is from Barry Lynn of 3Tera. 3Tera and Layered Technologies teamed to build a virtual private data center (grid), composed of 443 CPUs, 920GB RAM, and 47 terabytes of storage. They allow you to easily scale your product/site/application because they have infrastructure over many data centers and 'they' worry about the infrastructure, not you. It is a step closer to a true utility computing model and think what you want...."I" think it is the way of the future.

Do you want fries with that?

Pour a data center floor and make some french fries too! :)

While pouring the floor in Microsoft's new Quincy data center, the construction company found that it presented a health and safety issue because of the diesel exhaust.

Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos confirmed that the construction company is using biodiesel at the Quincy, Wash., site. "It smells like you're in a fast-food restaurant in there," he said. Biodiesel, which in this case is made from the same type of oil that is often used in restaurant fryers, can let off a scent similar to fried food when it's burned in engines. The first building there is now finished, he said.

This is the largest Microsoft data center yet, and it plans on running on hydro-electric power. I think I will setup a Google alert for the phrase "carbon footprint"....that seems to be favored by many journalists and press release writers.

Check out the InfoWorld article here.

365 Main Power Outage!

365 Main apparently lost power today. Tens of thousands of PG&E customers in San Francisco were down Tuesday afternoon, starting around 2pm and service restored around 4pm.

"The problem began when breakers in the utility's transmission service opened for an unknown reason, Chiu said. Every time workers attempted to close those breakers to restore service, it caused voltage fluctuations -- high and low flows of electricity through the system -- that impacted PG&E's Martin Substation in Daly City, she said"

365 Main, host to Craig's List, Yelp, Technorati, Six Apart properties and others were affected. The shocker was that the facility 'lost' power, and generators were not reported working until 45 minutes later!

I think this will easily be a case study for the industry with whatever went wrong at the facility that the generators did not come on. I only hope 365 Main explains what happened. Maybe the aforementioned sites may also learn to load balance across multiple data center sites as well. :)

Here are the links:

• SFGate.com
• Oreilly Radar
• Six Apart Twitter stream
• Digg Post and comments

HP to Acquire OpsWare

Earlier this year I had a hunch. I'm a big fan of anything Marc Andreesen does and so I have followed OpsWare for some time. I figured with everything going on in the market and the position that OpsWare was in, they would be acquired, or go on a spending spree themselves.

Although it was the wrong buyer, I did make a guess at this back in May; here

Today, HP announced that they are acquiring OpsWare for $1.6 Billion. The deal is subject to regulatory approval, but once complete OpsWare will merge with a "HP Subsidiary".

Here is the coverage:

Network World
Data Center Knowledge
InfoWorld
Marc's Blog

Wind Power

As many people look for alternative power sources, I found an article at the Houston Chronicle interesting. City officials in Houston are negotiating a contract to power 1/3 of the city with wind power.

Looking to stabilize a $150 million annual electricity bill, the wind will be part of the annual 1.3 kilowatt hours needed to power city infrastructure.

The article has 6 pages of user comments ranging from loving the idea to absolute hate. I figure with all of the data centers that are there and being built, the city probably needs an alternate source. :)

Somewhat accidentally, I ran across this article in CSE Magazine, describing how wind power is being used to generate hydrogen. The project is a collaboration of Xcel Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

"The facility links two wind turbines to electrolyzers, which pass the wind-generated electricity through water to split the liquid into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can be stored and used later to generate electricity from either an internal combustion engine turning a generator or from a fuel cell. In either case, there are no harmful emissions and the only by-product from using the hydrogen fuel is water."

Check out the Houston Chronicle article here

GDCM Signs Storm Technologies as a Reseller

Storm Technologies, a specialist computer reseller has signed up to sell Global Data Center Management's flagship product, nlyte.

Nylte is a comprehensive data center management, automation and intelligence application.

"John Brooker, Managing Director, Storm Technologies commented: “By partnering with GDCM, we’re able to provide real efficiency gains to our customers. We chose nlyte, above any other tool on the market, because of it's proven ability to reduce costs within the data center as well as reducing power and cooling, enabling our customers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

I'll have to admit that I had heard of UK based GDCM, but did not really know too much about the company or software. There is a lot of good marketing swag on their site, but I think the one that wrapped it up nicely for me was:

"GDCM underpins the next generation of datacenter management, enabling complete audit, mapping, optimisation and control of global datacenter assets"

They claim that nlyte is designed to optimize utilization across power, cooling, space and connectivity restraints. The press release states that clients have a 16% reduction in power requirements, which, if repeated across the world would "equate to a reduction of up to 96,000,000 metric tons of Carbon Dioxide production per year."


Check out the press release here

InfoBunker Article

I'm not sure what the purpose of the article is, but Jason McGinnis from Infobunker is in the news again explaining all of the security and under-ground madness associated with the facility.

This time at the New York Post

Check out the article here

Frankfurt Data Center

A while back I wrote about the underground Frankfurt Data Center at the airport. Recently I ran across another Frankfurt Data Center calling itself a "Tier IV Shell Data Center".

This looks to be an offering from global real estate adviser DTZ.

The stats, pictures, location and brochure can be found here. The interesting thing (that I liked) is on the facility page you can download a PDF of the typical floor plan (a Worldcom document?). I like looking at these just to see how others arrange their rooms, rack layout, etc.

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.