Data Center Directions Virtual Conference

I just happened to check my e-mail at the right time today. I received a reminder of the CIO/CSO/Computerworld virtual conference that would be going on throughout the day today. I was pretty skeptical, but it was lunch time so I figured I would give it a shot. The virtual tradeshow software they are using has come a LONG way -- this was very cool.

They had a networking hub with people from all over the world talking, an expo floor with give-aways, brochures and the ability to see what other people/avatars were at the particular booth. I ventured over to the auditorium and browsed through the presentations that were scheduled. I attended one called Dream Big: Your next data center. It was interesting and I jotted down a few notes of interest:

• Barbara Bartell - VP of Information Services, Maximus;
• She pointed out the 8 critical skills for the data center:
• Risk Management
• Environmental Engineering
• Capacity Planning
• Systems Administration
• System Engineering
• Networking
• Backup Strategies
• Awareness of business needs.
• A poll during her part:
• Is a new data center or major revamp planned for this year?
• 56.8% Yes
• 43.1% No
• Aaron Wangenheim - President, Base Partners
• Discussed the power plants that had coal contracts - when those expire and aren't renewed -- what are their plans for renewable energy?
• He mentioned that he had heard of a large black box project in Chicago.
• He discussed raised floor pros/cons. He suggests NOT using raised floor when designing the data center. Hey Goolsbee -- preaching to the choir, huh?!
• Robert Mcfarlane - Interport division president, Shen,Milson & Wilke, Inc.
• bad metric -- watts/sq.ft. ; this results in grossly over-designing
  
• use watts/cabinet footprint instead for a metric.
  

Terremark - Fox Business Interview

Fox Business has their CSuite Sitdown interview with Manny Median, Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) CEO. He discusses their service offerings, the carrier neutral advantage, the competition and Terremark's stock performance.

Check it out here

Possible Iowa Data Center for Microsoft!

Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ok, so much for being calm and collected. :)

According to a Des Moines Register article, Mircosoft is "considering Iowa for a data center"!! The usual sworn secrecy and mystery surrounds this one, just as we were used to when Google moved in.

“I’ve been given quite a bit of confidential information by Microsoft,” Rep. Phil Wise, a Keokuk Democrat, said today. “I can’t tell you the size of the investment, but it is indeed hundreds of millions of dollars. I can’t tell you the number of jobs, but it is in the hundreds of jobs. I can’t tell you the nature of the wages for the jobs, but it would be one of the best sets of jobs ever created in the history of Iowa.”

Also as usual, Iowa lawmakers are pushing a set a tax breaks through as fasts as possible. More may be known after Feb. 21, the next Iowa Department of Economic Development meeting. The article doesn't say where in Iowa the data center site selection is, but it is speculated to be in the immediate Des Moines area.

Check out the Des Moines Register article here

Data Center University

About a year ago I started studying to get certified at Data Center University. It is a good program, even though it was sponsored soley by APC. The online tutorial sessions I have done are not APC commercials and have actually been very informative. Teaming with training partner Global Knowledge , they have done a nice job of delivering presentations on a wide variety of data center related topics.

The streetinsider.com has a nice article about a company that used the DCU sessions and trained their staff to come up to speed on data center technologies.

A recent survey conducted by AFCOM's Data Center Institute indicates that by the year 2015, the number of qualified senior-level data center professionals will have diminished by 45 percent. As the talent pool decreases and the demand for these professionals grows, certification offers the assurance that individuals have the knowledge, skills, and ability to successfully implement data center solutions.

As of April 2007, 400 people have achieved the Data Center University Associate Certification.

Check out the article here

Citrix Workflow Studio

I don't get too much into the IT automation work flow software -- it's a crowded market and just something I haven't been able to play with much. Since reading about the Citrix Workflow Studio, it seems to be a pretty cool product. Gus Pinto covers the product on his MVP blog and thinks it is revolutionary.

This may be a stretch -- but I wonder if Citrix could/would buy Platespin?

Also.....Citrix is keeping it's promise on its Xen acquisition as well --- a new commercial version of the Xen Server is set to roll out and Citrix Presentation Server has been renamed to XenApp.

World Wide Packets Acquired by Ciena Corp.

Proving that the Ethernet services market is hot, equipment supplier World Wide Packets was acquired by Ciena Corp. for $305 million.

Ciena announced the intent to acquire WWP back on Jan. 22nd. Carrier Ethernet has been a side interest of mine (one of several....) for a while now -- I have just have not had time to read up on it. Ciena has a pretty cool poster that covers OTU (Optical Transmission Unit) Network technology.

Ciena delivers flexible network platforms, software and professional services to telecoms, cable operators and enterprises migrating to an IP platform. Ciena stock was up 16% today.

Check out the Dark Fiber Resource information on the acquisition here

Google/IBM Cloud Computing

Not to over-hype the term cloud computing -- but it really has me intrigued. I think the potential is absolutely huge and with companies like IBM and Google researching it, they are sure to make some significant progress to understanding it and making it better.

I came across an InfoWorld article this weekend that I felt was very good in covering the IBM/Google partnership/initiative for cloud computing. IBM and Google make money in very different ways and I think that cloud computing could (potentially) be the new platform that both IBM (the enterprise side of things) and Google (the Internet, massively scaled applications side of things) run on. In the article, IBM exec Steve Mills is interviewed about the goals of the partnership and research.

Check out the article here

Green Collar Jobs

I was at a meeting tonight where a lot of discussion focused on workforce development and attempting to bolster tech recruitment in the area. It seems like the changing workforce landscape is a problem that has plagued many generations. Training and re-training people to keep pace with technologies and changing industries is an industry in to itself. From the Agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution to the Internet Revolution (where I learned my history) companies and individuals are tasked to educate themselves, adapt to a changing world, and solve the economic development puzzle.

Ok -- perhaps this is a bit dramatic for the forthcoming link, but the MSNBC article does make you think. The title/subject is the future trend of "green collar jobs". I'm not sure why, but that just makes me think of Mr. Green Jeans from the Captain Kangaroo show. :) Anyway....the article presents some pretty interesting statistics; including that "wind energy industry currently employs about 45,000 people in the U.S. and had $9 billion worth of investment last year, a 45 percent increase from 2006". Randall Swisher is quoted as saying that by 2030 there will be nearly half a million new jobs created in green industries.

Check out the MSNBC article here

Hosting Industry Consolidation

I think 2008 will have a lot of consolidation and mergers in the hosting industry. The dedicated and shared hosting business is tough.......and crowded. As companies try to focus and compete for customers and the coveted SaaS (yes, I said it) market they will see the benefits of joining forces and/or acquiring smaller/similar companies.

Alentus Corp. recently acquired the Ohio data center from AO Technologies. AO will continue to focus on the streaming media and become a colo customer of Alentus. I imagine that this data center for California based Alentus will provide a midwest facility for them without the hassle of building their own. AO was founded in 1996, so I certainly hope they have upgraded the data center since then! :) I'll admit that I had not heard of Alentus -- but they certainly have an impressive customer list!

Check out the article here

Cloud Computing

John M Willis has a very nice summary of cloud computing -- hype and all. John covers all aspects of it from myths to facts and the various levels of clouds. I will also admit that clouds are currently pretty high on the hype cycle, but like John -- I'm hooked!

Check out his post here

New Blog!

Ever since I have been following the Data Center industry I have had a side interest in Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery. I have decided to dig into the topics much deeper, and as a means for me to learn the industry and concepts I have started a separate blog for it.

If these topics interest you, please check out my new blog -- BCP Links (bcplinks.blogspot.com)

Due Diligence

Scott Whitney (on the TechNewsWorld site) has an excellent article on his trials and tribulations for selecting a data center. Having worked in a colo facility for some time I can appreciate his problems and desire to get a root canal instead of evaluating data centers.

While the points he brings up are kind of 'the usual' list for me; it is a very complete list and good for anyone else looking to run down the list of what they should be thinking of when shopping around for colo space.

Check out the article here

“Think containers. They’re for real.”

This headline was a quote from Debra Chrapaty, Corporate VP of Global Foundation Services at the Cisco Nexus 7000 announcement.

As I may have mentioned a few hundred times, I simply don't get the container model. I have seen it, studied it and read most everything about it....but where can it (practically) be used?!?!

Well....I'm starting to turn the corner. Forrester research has a nice article on the topic and potential uses for it; and like Douglas Gourlay over on the Cisco Data Center Networks blog, I think I'll utilize the white board and run some numbers. There may be some possibilities for this model after all..... :)

New Data Center in Guam

GTA Teleguaum is a communications company in Guam, a small Pacific Ocean island. They recently opened a $60 million, 60,000 sq.ft datacenter for businesses on the island to have a safe and secure to operate their equipment.

I may not have even posted about this data center, but one fact about the facility is pretty interesting:

Ninety percent of the undersea cable system for voice and Internet traffic between the U.S. mainland and Asia comes to Guam, said Singapore-based Eric Handa, vice president of sales with global telecom giant Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd., or VSNL.

Check out the rest of the details in the article here

Another Google Data Center?

It seems like all of the news surrounding where the next mega Google data center would be located had died down. They made a number of announcements and after they slowed down, the buzz slowed down. Until now....

Is Colorado the next spot? Chris Sherman at SearchEngineLand has an article about a "mystery buyer" of a 432 acre plot. Chris makes some good points for why it could be a good location...guess we'll have to wait and see.

Check out the article here

Tuesday Links

• Now I have to change my Google Alerts from Sun Blackbox to Sun Modular DatCenter S20
• Cisco has a cool 3D view of the new Nexus 7000 series switch
• Here is a nice introductory write up on the anatomy of a DNS DDoS amplification attack
• Peter Christy has a nice article explaining the Cisco TrustSec architecture
• Google's $10 million investment in eSolar
• Continuing yesterday's post on wind energy - check out Marquiss Wind Power - ducted wind turbine

Winds of Opportunity

One thing I meant to get to in my site selection white paper that I just didn't find time for was maps of renewable energy sources across the U.S. While surfing tonight I ran across some information on Wind energy - something that has interested me for a while now. Google and others have been big on Hydro energy and I would by no means discount that as a valuable and beneficial energy source.

The U.S. Department of Energy has a nice web site for their Wind and Hydropower program. I found a subsection of the site called "Wind Powering America" that contained a lot of valuable information on wind power. I clicked through to an update presentation they had available and wow - this report is amazingly thorough and has some really nice maps, research, correlative data and is a really nice place for anyone looking to learn about wind power and all of the environmental and economic benefits to start.

The 20% Wind-Electricity vision states:

Wind energy will provide 20% of U.S. electricity needs by 2030, securing America’s leadership in reliable, clean energy technology. As an inexhaustible and affordable domestic resource, wind strengthens our energy security, improves the quality of the air we breathe, slows climate change, and revitalizes rural communities.

Check out the Wind Powering America Update presentation here

Cisco - Data Center Infrastructure Transformation

If you work in a data center or follow the industry, you certainly can not avoid Cisco. Even if you somehow managed to avoid Cisco gear in your network there is a good chance you use something that they have since acquired. In 2007 they had 11 acquisitions, including the big one -- Webex . Cisco has engineered some amazing products, bought the rest and orchestrated a $146 Billion company. The San Jose Mercury News has a nice article on how the company has reinvented itself and other information on the collaboration strategies they are rolling out.

Fundamental to the data center space was the July 2007 announcement about "Data Center 3.0" (I then declared Data Center 3.5 ) Cisco's Data Center 3.0 strategy is a collection of products to manage network and other data center assets. There was the Vframe , the DC Assurance Program , and numerous acquisitions, including Securent . In this month alone they have demonstrated Visual Networking at CES , extended their Application Network Services portfolio , and made an investment in ipaccess.com (market leader in femtocell technologies) . On top of all this, CEO John Chambers was on the panel for the World Economic Forum a little while back titled Corporate Global Citizenship in the 21st Century (YouTube link ). Hey John -- I can't even fathom your schedule, but how about a blog like Jonathan Schwartz does from you?

DC 3.0 is about enhancing business resiliency and agility(remember--the keyword/buzword from the Garnter conference? ) Now there is the Infrastructure Transformation stage of their Data Center 3.0 strategy. The DC Networks blog (Douglas Gourlay) hinted at this several weeks back . Today Cisco releases the details on the infrastructure transformation stage, and exeution of the DC 3.0 strategy. The 4 cornerstones of this announcement are:

1. Unified Fabric - convergence to a single network (Storage,Ethernet,IP and HPC traffic)
2. A new switching platform, Cisco Nexus - Multi-terabit platform for the most stringent availability needs.
3. NX-OS - multi-protocol, Data Center-class operating system.
4. DC Network Manager - end-to-end systems visibility.

The new Data Center-class switch - the Cisco Nexus 7000 series is a powerhouse that delivers a number of things: first, it is a zero service disruption design; second, it is capable of handling 40GbE/100GbE; and third, it has a 15 Terabit switching capacity. Cisco usually touts 'investment protection' in their switch line and I have to imagine that the 6500 series switches will have 40GbE and 100GbE cards in the future. The Nexus 7000 delivers investment protection through fabric modules (46Gps per slot) that support GbE, 10GbE, 40GbE and 100GbE modules. Another impressive feature is "integrated lights-out management". This means there is a separate network in place for applying changes, so as you remotely connect and make changes to a switch you don't have to worry about applying changes and being in the dark because you have restarted the network you were connected on. In a nutshell - it's their latest revision in the switch line that delivers support for the future, transport flexibility and efficient physical and power design.

The new Nexus 7000 series I/O modules are either a 32 port 10GbE card or a 48 port 10/100/1000 card. One of the cool new features of these cards is Cisco TrustSec. TrustSec was announced on December 5, 2007 and was promised to be available across the switching platform. It will be interesting to see the first labs run the 7000 series through testing to see what, if any overhead there is on the TrustSec product. The claim is that it is "wire-rate encryption" on a hop by hop basis.

Nexus (NX-OS) represents a new operating system to converge ethernet and SAN network protocols. This convergence and a zero service disruption design are its most impressive features. With NX-OS planned outages cause pre-emptive reconvergence around the device in a maintenance window. Think of it at as proactive, real-time ITIL Change Management. Pardon the marketing terms, but.... it provides a "virtualized control plane and scalable design", and it "sets a new standard for usability".

Other details being released today include:

• Data Center Network Manager - Complete infrastructure visibility and ease of configuration, troubleshooting and management.
• Catalyst 4900M Switch - high density uplinks, GbE and 10GbE Host and NAS
• Catalyst Blade Switch 3100 - coming in May 2008

Cisco will hold a Webcast today to discuss the changes and continued execution of the DC 3.0 strategy.

As a side note I started poking around in Second Life again recently....Cisco has a pretty cool plot inside of Second Life. They have a wealth of information about the company and products, as well as hold events regularly about various things . Their efforts here, the Telepresence offering and John Chambers saying "collaboration" every tenth word means that there are exciting times for this branch of Cisco coming. IDC thinks pretty highly of the collaboration group at Cisco as well:

"IDC predicts that Cisco (CSCO) will take the platform that they acquired with Webex, beyond just Web conferencing and other "collaboration" applications, to become an online platform for a wide range of business applications and services. "

Cisco holds their Q2 Financial results conference call in a little over a week.

Google's Iowa Data Center: Smart Move

Well Duh!! oh...sorry, was that out loud?

For anyone new to this blog, I was simply ecstatic that Google selected Iowa for one of their mega data centers. Bridget Botelho at Searchdatacenter.com has a nice article that explains why the experts agree that Iowa is a great place to build a data center. At the last Linux Users Group meeting we had two Google employees present and a member of the group inquired about the Google data center expected to be built just south of Ames.....pure speculation/guestimate by the way. The Google employees of course declined to answer. I would doubt that they would even know such a thing anyway.

Check out the Search Data Center article here

Charter Deletes 14,000 E-Mail Accounts

Charter Communications claims a "software glitch" was the cause of an accidental deletion of 14,000 active e-mail accounts. I post this, partially to poke a little fun at the 'accidental' part of it and partially just to further show that human error is the most likely cause in so many large goofs like this.

They claim it was a software error - that they regularly delete inactive accounts and this time 'some' active accounts slipped in. I bet if you were to ask the software company they would most likely say that their software was configured wrong -- by a human. Even routine procedures need to have a RFC (Request for Change) filled out, the process thought through, and a review board look over the change.

Check out the Cnet article here

Secret History of Silicon Valley

One of my favorite bloggers (and only the inventor of the frigg'n web browser) Marc Andreesen has a post about a video on the secret history of the Silicon Valley. It is a long video, but well worth it.

It was a Google Tech Talk video from Steve Blank late last year. I'm currently consulting on a project for a war museum and so the content of this video, how the CIA/NSA and Fred Terman 'really' built the silicon valley, is really fascinating.

Link: Marc Andreesen's post

Cisco CCDE

Just a quick post to say congrats to Michael Morris for passing the Cisco Certified Design Expert certification. I've often thought of going after this path of certifications -- starting with the CCDA. The tests look pretty hard, but I really like the design and architecture side of Cisco networks.

Link: Michael's blog

Link: Cisco news release on the CCDE

$1B Savings for Federal Data Centers by Going Green

Two new studies released today are getting some press. They cover how the U.S. Government could save $1B over five years, or $1.9B over 10 years in energy costs by applying the recommendations given in the reports. Many of the projections are based on the August report from the EPA outlining the energy-efficiency improvements possible for government and private sector data centers.

"Deploying green technologies in data centers can help the government save nearly 9.6 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in five years at a cost savings of $959 million, according to the HP and Intel study."

Check out articles on the studies here:

Tim Kauffman at the Federal Times

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee at Information Week magazine

1-Gig Cable Modem

Perhaps my prediction for 2007 wasn't too far off -- at the SCTE's Emerging Technologies conference Cisco talked up a cable modem cable of delivering upstream throughput of 974,723,228 bits per second.

But while the industry is using the DOCSIS 3.0 spec to target downloads of between 100 and 160 Mbps, Cisco envisions much higher speeds -- as much as 10 Gbps in the future, according to Bernstein -- using a passive optical network (or "PON") as the underlying transport mechanism.

Can someone get this to my house some time this year!?!!!

Check out the rest of the article here

Hacking the Power Grid

Here is one to keep any data center manager up at night. Speaking at a security conference, CIA analyst Tom Donahue gave information about attacks (regions outside the U.S.) where criminals hacked into systems and cut power to several cities. All attacks were intrusions via the Internet, and the goal was extortion.

On Thursday The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved approved new standards to protect the nation's bulk power systems against cyber attacks. The eight new standards are:

• Critical Cyber Asset Identification
• Security Management Controls
• Personnel and Training
• Electronic Security Perimeters
• Physical Security of Critical Cyber Assets
• Systems Security Management
• Incident Reporting and Response Planning
  
• Recovery Plans for Critical Cyber Assets

In November 2007 President Bush asked congress to move $152 million into cybersecurity programs for 2008. Given what the CIA has known (presumably for some time), it's no surprise that investigation, new technologies and protection methods are crucial.

The PC World article quotes a conference attendee as saying that this "came as news" to many professionals in attendance. I'm no security expert, but come on.... this is nothing new. The U.S. has had any number of reports on potential infrastructure attacks and we have been pouring money into cybersecurity for many years -- the Clinton administration announced a $1.46 Billion initiative for cybersecurity in 1999, there was project Eligible Reciver in 1997, and countless others since then. Just last September there was a demonstration at the Idaho National Laboratory of the effects of a software vulnerability attack on infrastructure systems.

The power grid hacking is still pretty scary to think about though....and good reason for all of these alternative power sources to gain popularity.

Check out the PC World article here

Data Center Tours

As I have mentioned before, it is always fun to see tours/videos of other data centers. TechTarget's IT Knowledge Exchange has a collection of DC tours here

I like the Huawei Network Operations Center!!!

Google Visit

I just wanted to say a quick thank you to Peter and Noah from Google for stopping by our Linux User Group last night. We had an awesome turn-out -- go figure, mention Google and free pizza!

They mentioned that the next 3 Google data centers will be located in...... just kidding - they did an excellent job of not disclosing anything they shouldn't. They did describe the systems administrator job and the tools they use to support the hardware techs that are deploying and fixing the thousands of servers in the data center. They confirmed that Google is indeed a seriously cool place to work and that most all of the software used is home-grown.

Google is getting serious about hiring for the Council Bluffs data center and I think a lot of applications will be filled out from the group attending last night.

Uptime Institute - Data Center Greeness

As soon as I finish posting about the Emerson white paper and how there is so much press on the topic, the very next thing I read is about a new paper from the Uptime Charrette titled Four Metrics Define Data Center Greenness

It looks to be very good (as most all of their content is), but I'll have to find another time to dig into it.

Check it out here

Emerson Network Power - Energy Logic

Emerson published a press release regarding their Energy Logic road map - a new approach to data center energy optimization. Energy Logic centers on the "cascade effect" (throughout data center infrastructure) and is based on Emerson's research and modeling.


A lot has been written lately about energy savings, and the whole green movement, but this approach helps to quantify energy savings and sheds light on potential ROI.

“When we released our report earlier this year, we stressed that energy reductions could be achieved with the proper planning and implementation of efficient technologies that exist today,” said Andrew Fanara of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “We encourage companies like Emerson Network Power to share any and all expertise that helps the data center community reduce their energy usage.”

Their white paper titled Energy Logic: Reducing Data Center Energy Consumption by Creating Savings that Cascade Across Systems divulges the Energy Logic approach. Among the sea of energy efficiency / green literature, news and white papers, this one has some meat to it. It covers:

• Energy Consumption (where it goes)
• The approach - including the cascading/sequential approach of how certain best practices have the greatest impact
• Some nice tables and diagrams of Energy Logic applied (I'm a visual person) :)
• The ten Energy Logic Actions (more pretty graphs and pictures)
• Assumptions and timing benefits

Overall this is a very good white paper and one I'll keep in my reference pile

The white paper can be viewed here

US Signal Elk Grove Village Data Center

US Signal, a Midwest bandwidth provider, with a large DWDM backbone, announced the addition of a new data center in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. They have an impressive DWDM network in the Midwest (hey-what about Iowa!?). US Signal has been busy in the Chicago burbs lately, to complement their downtown loop.

I embeded the map below just to show how close it is to the new Microsoft Northlake data center. :) Check out the press release here



View Larger Map

Internap Acquisition Rumor

Back in the dot-com bubble I used to track stock message boards pretty religiously. It was entertaining at times, a little bit informative and it was fun to watch some people write under multiple handles. I had the pleasure for working for a company with a very eccentric CEO who loved to post on the message boards for our stock -- so much so he made posters out of a particular conversation with a share holder.

I've setup this post like that for a reason -- I read the message board for Internap tonight and found a discussion on Internap being acquired by AT&T. Just thought I would post a link to it and let you take it for what it is worth. There have been so many acquisitions in past years that it is hard to keep track of who owns who any more.

Anyway.... here you go

Computing in the Cloud

I ran across a blog post from Chris Tengi that reviewed a workshop titled "Computing in the Cloud", presented at Princeton. The post covers cloud computing and the historical computing models that brought us to it.

The review itself is interesting, but a particular blurb made about 'data' ownership made me automatically relate to what I've preached about the reason corporations build data centers near their headquarters.

It's all about location, but why does it matter where the data and software actually is? Possession of data implies control, and control implies power. Whomever owns the systems on which data resides has the ultimate control of how that data is retained and who has access.

Anyway....I wanted to post the quote, but also link to the blog post. I wish I could attend these workshops -- they sound very interesting.

INX to build $2.3 Million Data Center

INX, an infrastructure and professional services company, announced they have been selected to design and build a data center for a "major web-based company".

The press release reports that their client is moving their data center from a remote location, to a site closer to their headquarters. This kind of goes back to my tangent on disaster recover and site selection -- people want their infrastructure close to their primary offices; presumably so they can put their hands on it and see it in person.

INX is based in Houston, TX, but recently acquired Select, Inc., a similar company based in Canton, MA

Check out the press release here

Links Round-up

Well, it's been a busy week, so here are some miscellaneous things I feel are post-worthy:

• The floating data center container story is getting some pretty heavy traction. I guess it's just odd enough to make people take notice -- check it out (again) here at Network World and here at Storage. IT World.
• The Data Center container concept continues to get interesting....
  
• Network world has an article on how Microsoft is Going Green. The interesting part (to me) was this:

  "The company, which will say only that it has between 10 and 100 data centers, has used software to create a map of the world that aggregates 35 factors, such as power costs and climate, to determine the best places to build."

• Equinix stock was upgraded to 'outperform', based on industry demand and their sales pipeline.
• This was the last year for Bill Gates to keynote at CES. Here is the pretty funny video that they made for his last day at work -- and here is a full interview with him right after he finished the CES speech.
• If you haven't heard of the TV-B-Gone clickers, check out these CES pranks
• CNET has an interview with Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, a book I read this summer and really enjoyed.
• The appropriately titled "In Your Dreams" article at Geekologie, describes the Panasonic unveiling of their 150 inch plasma!!
  
• Finally -- I know it's not much, but there is a cool Weather Channel integration with Google Maps and Google Earth - check it out here
  

Intel -Transforming a Global Data Center Environment

Hats off to Intel! I am a big fan of lessons learned.....why not share the knowledge gained and let others benefit from it?!

Intel published a white paper titled Transforming a Global Data Center Environment and it is an excellent read. I of course could comment on placing three of their strategic data center hubs ALL on the west coast....but I won't. :)

It is interesting to read the story of their transformation, what it took to accomplish it and the data behind it. Well worth a read -- check it out here

Cabling Mess

I've seen some pretty bad cabling jobs before and many picture galleries.... but I think this one wins first place. :)

http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=234

Gram Tel Data Centers Acquired

Cincinnati Bell Inc. has paid $20 million for the privately-held assets of Gram Tel. Gramtel had been expanding its footprint of data centers throughout the Midwest and offers a variety of managed services additionally.

Check out the Houston Chronicle article here and the press release here

Floating Data Centers

I really don't know what to think about this whole container model data center thing. It is really intriguing and there have been some creative uses for them. After posting about nuclear-proof bunkers I now read, on the Silverback blog, that a company is planning to put data center containers on ships!

I'm much too confused to write the details here -- and you can check the story out for yourself. I just don't know if I can figure this one out. They list some of the reasons 'why' someone would want to use a container on the ship, but it simply doesn't counter the hundreds of reasons why you wouldn't want to.

The company is IDS (International Data Security), and Ken from the Silverback blog has a couple of posts on the company as well as a brochure for it. It sounds like it is pretty early stage development, yet they have pretty ambitious plans (22 ships in North America, 50 worldwide). No mention of whether it is a generic container or Sun BlackBox, Rackable IceCube, etc.

Check out the two posts here and here

Wikia Colo in an Iowa Bunker

In a January 7th press release, United States Secure Hosting Center (USSHC) is set to announce that Wikia has selected them for colo and DR services. Wikia is Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) latest venture - a new way of community search, that challenges the typical model (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft).

Wikia Search looks to give users an alternative to today's search engines by using individual feedback rather than secret algorithms. This approach is designed to lead to more effective results where the users determine how accurate a page or wiki is based on its relevancy. With the community providing the fine tuning of the searches, there will be fewer results with “parked pages” and ad content, and more relevant data.

Wikia is cited as selecting USSHC because their "level of service and security is as unprecedented as the disaster tolerance of their facility itself". USSHC is an underground bunker in Monticello, Iowa. Their facility is another U.S. Government project from the cold war that is 2N for power and 3N for cooling and fuel stores.

“We are very excited to host Wikia at our facility for their various projects,” stated Jerry Pasker, CEO of USSHC. “Our facility allows us to offer the best physical security available without breaking your budget. Companies that are looking for more than just commodity data center space expect a higher standard. We're able to offer that peace of mind through our attention to detail and dedication to having the best systems and practices in place.”

Maybe a 2008 project for me will be to research how many data centers would be able to survive a nuclear bomb. :) List any of the disasters in my site selection paper and these guys have you covered!

Congrats on landing Wikia as a customer!

2007 Review

I was reading a Star-Telegram article tonight that came across in my Google Alerts. It was about the problems with population growing so fast that communities and states can't keep up. No surprise, after reading about all of the Texas data center deals in 2007, this article was about the population boom in Texas. Check it out here

For whatever reason, this article made me think of something else.....

A while back I gave a lunch-and-learn at my company on Google searches and related applications. I am a bit of a Google fanatic and really dive into most every product and service they offer. I thought of an idea for reviewing the data center industry (via a specific Google search) -- and after reading about the most popular stories of 2007 on Data Center Knowledge.

Since a lot of my white paper on Data Center Site Selection was at the state level as far as what states were good or bad for building, I thought I would do a Google search for how many times a states name came up in 2007 articles at Data Center Knowledge. As many would agree, Rich is the source for all Data Center related articles, news and information. I didn't do a comprehensive search, but here is what I found:

Google Search results count within datacenterknowledge 2007 archives:

Washington: 78
California: 53
Virginia: 55
New York: 51
North Carolina: 42
Texas: 41
New Jersey: 40
Oklahoma: 37
Iowa: 36
South Carolina: 26
Washington D.C.: 23
Boston: 23
Kansas: 16
Illinois: 16
Oregon: 15
Michigan: 11
Colorado: 11
Indiana: 10
Wisconsin: 10
Minnesota: 7
Arizona: 6

While I was at it, I decided to run some other terms through the same search:
Google: 119
Microsoft: 118
Yahoo: 34
Equinix: 64
Digital Realty Trust: 80
Savvis:70
Terremark: 35
Akamai: 54
Sun: 48
Virtualization: 547
Utility computing: 35
Green: 88

No, John doesn't need a hobby or more to do with his time....I just thought it might be interesting as a snapshot of 2007 stories.

2008 Predictions

As promised, here are my 2008 Predictions. I don't think my predictions from last year (fiber to the home) came true at all -- as I visit my in-laws who can't even get a cable-modem or DSL in their new neighborhood (yet).

Ok...here goes:

1. As I have eluded to in the past, I am a big fan of utility computing. It does receive a fair amount of hype, but I can see the true potential in it and why people will start to see the light in coming years. Events that 365 Main and Rackspace encountered in 2007 helped paint the picture for web sites that only had a single hosting presence to wake up and take a more serious look at utility computing. Amazon EC2, S3, 3Tera and Joyent are pretty cool and worth a look for most anyone. I think the tools to measure, monitor and deploy utility computing will definitely grow in the enterprise realm, now that the internet sites/companies have pioneered so much. The growth of utility computing and enterprise interest should also help along the WAN accelerations and optimization industries as well. BTW--there was an interesting response to Intel's question about what emerging trends are in compute models - check it out here.

2. 2008 will see the hype phrase "Software as a Service" finally fizzle. There's no rocket science here people - get over the warm-fuzzy terminology.

3. Green/New Energy sources will continue to be big news in 2008 (big stretch here, huh?). Only two things I'll offer here.... the first, is to take a look at the Kleiner Perkins (Venture Capital firm) list of greentech companies they are funding --- here. I listend to Tom Perkins on the Venture Voice podcast recently -- what an interesting and amazing person! The second item is wind; Kansas took recent headlines , but it will continue to grow as a new energy source in 2008. There was an interesting story in Sunday's Des Moines Register about the wind industry in Iowa....some interesting stats and stories to see how the industry is growing here.

4. With the data center industry booming, I think 2008 will see more data center related services come out. I.E.- this article

5. Companies to watch / will be acquired? Akamai (an established company, but they will be doing exciting things), Riverbed , Savvis , Platespin , 3tera , and Joyent

6. Political ads will continue to be skipped on my Tivo . Living in Iowa means the privilege of having the first caucus, but the trade is enduring 24x7 ads on TV from the candidates. Maybe after the caucuses are over the ads will take a break until next fall.

7. Death to the RIAA in 2008 -- Alleluia!!

8. Here is my shot in the dark prediction -- at least 1 large acquisition will take place in 2008 in the Colocation or CDN industry. There has been a lot of activity here and some quality players; I think the market has hit a spot that something big will happen next year.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Dear Lord, I've been asked to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us, a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird, a social being capable of actual affection. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it.

-- Berke Breathed
(as seen in Forbes Magazine)

I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and prosperous 2008!!

I will be attempting some technology and data center predicitions, just as soon as I am done reading what everyone else has predicted, so I can pick the good ones and make them my prediction as well. :)

Sun BlackBox in Australia

It seems like the Sun BlackBox has arrived in Australia.

Check out Tom Worthington's post/review of it here

Chicago Data Center Market

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

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

MLB and Orbitz Case Studies

Network World is probably in the top 3 for my favorite magazines and web sites to visit. They really do a good job of capturing the news, but also delivering some good interviews that demonstrate real world use of the technologies they cover. Two particular stories caught my attention recently that I enjoyed:

The first was a story of Major League Baseball Advanced Media -- I visit mlb.com and stlcardinals.com frequently. The article interviews Ryan Nelson, director of operations for MLB Advanced Media. MLB uses Joyent services to 'dial-up' and 'dial-down' their use of servers and compute power based on the seasonal load and needs. I had heard of Joyent before, but never really looked into them. It's a pretty cool service, and seeing how MLB.com uses their service helps solidify the concept. Yes, it's another company jumping on the "cloud computing" bandwagon, but they offer some pretty innovative solutions, coupled with some cool Sun hardware and technologies. I had a brief introduction to Sun virtualization technology at the Blackbox event earlier this year, but if you haven't checked Solaris Zones it is worth a look. MLB has data centers in New York and Chicago, and thanks to the infrastructure they have setup they can move utilization between centers (for upgrades and such) on the fly. It sounds like Ryan Nelson has a pretty cool job playing around with this infrastructure and new technology. Check out this interview/article here

The second article (thanks for the link Ben) from Network World is about travel web site Orbitz. Like everyone else in the industry, Orbitz is trying to go green -- or as CIO Bahman Koohestani put it, "taking his IT operations carbon neutral". One thing that I liked about Orbitz (in this article) is that they know how much energy they use, monitor their use on a daily basis, and they know how much cooling they use for various parts of their operations. Going green is great, but keeping very close tabs on energy use and mining the data is even better (in my opinion). Orbitz has two large data centers in the Chicago area and Koohestani touts it as an excellent place to locate data centers. Chicago is RED hot now days for data centers. Like other stories we have seen about company strategies -- Orbitz is slashing the number of servers used, and consolidating data center operations world wide. The article has all of the details about how they are greening its IT operations.

Renewable Energy Capital of America

Continuing the push for Iowa as an ideal place to locate business, Governor Chet Culver announced that Iowa was the "renewable energy capital of America". Playing off the attention Iowa gets for political caucusing Culver encouraged campaign staff and media to rethink what they knew about Iowa.

Culver went on to list some of the statistics to back up the renewable energy claim:

• Iowa ranks #1 in ethanol production, #2 in biodiesel production and #3 in wind energy production
• In 2006, Iowa alone accounted for over 30 percent of U.S. ethanol production and 25 percent of U.S. biodiesel production.
• Iowa is over 1,000 wind turbines which create almost 1,000 megawatts of energy, generating enough power to service 250,000 homes.
• The $500 million Iowa Values Fund and the new $100 million renewable energy research and development initiative called the Iowa Power Fund offer businesses the tools and financial resources they need to be successful. Administered through our state Department of Economic Development, these funds provide tax credits, incentives, loans and regulatory assistance to foster business development and job creation.

Check out the complete press release here

Mission Critical Magazine

As an information junkie I tend to visit a lot of web sites and read a lot of blogs. I also frequent a lot of tech industry magazines. A new magazine has come out that I will be adding to my list - Mission Critical Magazine. I have only had a short time to check out the site, but what I have seen so far is really good.

On their home page is a link to Chris Crosby's presentation on 5 Data Center myths. I attended this session at Gartner's Data Center Conference and really enjoyed it. At the conference there was a nice follow-up presentation of a case study that Digital Realty Trust implemented. Chris described their POD Architecture and Gating Process and how it was applied to the customer requirements.

Check out Mission Critical Magazine!

International Site Selection

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

Check it out here

Security in Ten Years

Just a quick link to an interesting post where security guru Bruce Schneier has a conversation with Marcus Ranum.

The conversation with appear in Information Security Magazine this month. While there is nothing earth-shattering in the conversation, it is a good read.

Check it out here
---------------------

Also check out the SANS Top 20 2007 Security Risks

Gartner Data Center Conference -- Polls

Here are some more Garnter Data Center Conference Polls that I found interesting:

Question: When are you starting a CMDB?
Responses:

• Now: 41%
  
• 6 months: 7%
  
• 6-12 months: 18%
  
• end of 2009: 21%
  
• not planning: 13%

Question: Who is your CMDB Vendor?
Response:

• BMC: 22%
• CA: 9%
• IBM: 7%
• HP: 21%
• Managed Objects: 1%
• Home grown: 14%
• Service desk: 15%
• Other (NI2, Caimit, Service-now.com): 1%

Question: What are your top Network Operations Pressures?

• VoIP: 8%
• MPLS: 8%
• Wireless: 12%
• Compliance: 3%
• Security: 3%
• Network Faults: 15%
• Proactive Prevention and Performance: 27%
• Meeting SLA's: 12%

Question: What is your #1 priority for 2008?

• Network Device configuration: 8%
• Network Operations Management: 32%
• Performance Reporting: 20%
• Traffice Analysis: 11%
• Capacity Planning/emulation: 16%
• Other: 3%
• No Plans: 10%

TheRegister Article on Google's Iowa Data Center

I just had to do a quick post so you could enjoy the title of The Register's article about Google in Iowa. "Virgin Mary Appears in Google's Iowa Data Center"

The Register always has a......um.... unique (yeah, that's it) take on stories and humorous twist

Check it out here

Gartner - BCP Session

Yesterday I attended an informative session on Business Continuity Planning. I loved their definition of Business Continuity Management -- because it encompasses SO much that people tend to forget about. Their organization groups under BCP were:

1. Business Recovery
2. Contingency Planning
3. Business Operations
   
4. Information Security Management
5. Pandemic Planning
6. Crisis Management (very important one with lots of sub components)
7. Damage Assesment
8. IT Disaster Recovery

Here are a couple of polls that were taken of the attendees in the session.

Question: Do you have a business continuity Management Office?
1. Yes: 55% 2. No: 44$ 3. Don't Know: 1%

If you have a BCM office, where does it fit within the organization?

1. CFO (11%)
2. CIO (26%)
3. CISO (10%)
4. COO (17%)
5. CRO (Chief Risk Officer): 17%
6. Don't Know (6%)
7. Other (13%)

BTW: Having it in the COO office is the ideal according to Gartner.

Finally....you have heard me tout ITIL before and it looks like I need to catch up on ITIL v3. Version 3 includes continuity management guidelines.

Paradigm Shift

Without sounding too much like an analyst and over-generalizing the tech industry as a whole, I really believe we are in the middle of a paradigm shift for technology. I’m old enough to remember mainframes, but never operated or administered them (unless doing COBOL programming in college counts). So there was the mainframe era, the client/server era and whatever-we’re-in-now era. I’ve loved the concept of utility computing ever since the hype (and over-hyping) began. I think it has a ton of potential and some really important concepts and intelligent people behind it. As many others have pointed out, the internet companies have contributed a significant amount to changing architectures used in IT. Perhaps they can be credited for driving much of the needed change that allowed for such enormous scalability (there, the words paradigm shift AND scalability should sit well for the search engine spiders :) A comment from a Gartner session yesterday summed it up nicely…. “cloud computing has ‘some’ degree of truth to it, but also a lot of fog”.

I’ll keep this post as short as possible so I don’t blab on too long and lose readers (assuming you have made it this long). I wanted to link to some utility computing and virtualization articles I liked and then make a few links out to some thoughts on data center containers/black box (DataCenter in a box part IIIa).

Bert Armijo and Peter Nickolov from 3Tera wrote an article recently on Fishtrain about services that virtualization needs adapt to the utility computing model. It is a very good article about future concepts and why virtualization is “not a complete utility computing solution”

The additional service that I would add is security. I’ve been a big fan of Christopher Hoff’s blog that frequently discusses virtualization security and potential vulnerability attack angles. And speaking of innovative technologies and industry shifts, check an excellent post on Security and Disruptive Innovation part III. Security needs to be improved in virtualization, but even more so as it spans across a utility computing implementation.

Network World also ran an interesting article on virtualization security and the realization that many are coming to for their implementations and how some have not even started their implementation because of security issues.

Because I am in the data center business I always digress to the physical part of the infrastructure when the ‘virtual’ data center is mentioned. To me there is no such thing as a virtual data center because it is the one true ‘real’, tangible asset in the infrastructure equation. So when I read about Amazon EC2 and 3Tera, I love the utility computing concepts and having infrastructure virtualized across physical data centers. Of course, with my recent white paper on site selection I also automatically assume geographically disperse data center locations to account for BCP plans and risk avoidance.

A final paradigm shift item I’ll mention is workload lifecycle and management. I don’t know if I completely understand it yet, but I have spent a fair amount of time on the Platespin web site and feel they have a very complete set of products. As it relates to a new and better way to deploy, manage and control your infrastructure I would recommend anyone gives their products a consideration. There is also a decent joint presentation from Dell, Microsoft and Platespin on their respective technologies here

Ok, so there is the paradigm shift in infrastructure architecture and deployment options. Let’s go up a level and look at the data center as a whole. If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time you know I am intrigued, interested, and perplexed by the container model that Rackable, Sun, APC and others have come out with and Google patented, but was dropped as a research project.

There are some interesting comments on the Slashdot post about Intel Data Centers. Some of the interesting points I noticed from these comments are:

1. Chuck Thacker from Microsoft has a very interesting PowerPoint presentation on data centers as a container model. It is a 26 slide presentation full of their research and insight to the topic.

2. There are references to the recent news about Sun’s BlackBox being used underground in Japan and using Geo-exchange for cooling and heat exchange.

3. A user comment: “The reason a "data center in a box" sounds so attractive is that the amortization schedules are different for IT equipment and buildings. If building infrastructure can last its advertised 25-30 year life then a tilt-up or factory assembled type of building structure is more cost-effective than containerized data centers architecturally.”

The thing I have always been thinking about, and that was brought up many times in the Slashdot comments, was just what in the world was the practical application of the data center container? With Google, Sun, Microsoft and others seriously looking at it and doing such deep research on the possibilities, you simply have to think that there is something that they have found that makes business sense and that they have justified.

More later --- back to the Gartner conference for now…..

Google - Renewable Energy Push

While I don't think this is necessarily anything new.... Google announced a new program yesterday called Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal. The goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. The hope is to do it in years instead of decades.

Check out the Reuters article here

Gartner Conference - Polls

Just a quick post to give some background on the Gartner Data Center Conference that I am currently attending. During the opening comments and first keynote they took a few polls of the audience.

I think these are important --- to profile the average attendee and show real data about the industry. Here is what was covered so far:

Poll Question: What is the make up of your Data Center?
Responses:
40% Mainframe, Linux, Unix, Windows
25% Unix, Linux, Windows
10% Mainfram, Unix, Windows
10% Unix, Windows
(I couldn't write fast enough to get the rest :) )

Poll Question: Do you have server consolidation projects?
Responses:
1. No Plans -- 3%
2. Looking into it -- 17%
3. Project Under way -- 50%
4. Already completed a project, may do another -- 30%

Poll Question: How long have you worked in IT?
Responses:
< 2 yrs: 1%
2-5yrs: 2%
5-10yrs: 8%
11-20yrs: 35%
21-30yrs: 40%
31-40yrs: 13%
40+yrs: 1%

Poll Question: Do you have a long term strategy for Infrastructure and Operations?
Responses:
Yes: 42%
No: 37%
Unsure: 21%

HSBC Questioning $1 billion Niagra County Data Center

The Niagra Gazette reports that global banking giant HSBC is reconsidering the $1 billion data center it had planned for Cambria, NY. The data center would add 56 jobs, averaging $76k and would add $14.5 million in property tax collections.

HSBC is not terminating the project, but just looking at alternate sites in the county (otherwise they will give up the $89.5 million in tax breaks. The bank indicated that current business climate was the reason for them to step back and stay in planning phase for a while.

In January of this year Data Center Knowledge reported the plans for the 275,000 sq. ft. facility.

Check out the Niagra Gazette article here

BroadGroup - 1mil sq ft of Fresh Capacity

BroadGroup Consultancy (London) announced build plans that include more than 1 million square feet of data center capacity. Most of the planned capacity, it was stated, will serve one or more large companies. Other projects for the space included managed services by ISP's, colocation and disaster recovery planning.

A little over a month ago BroadGroup predicted the constant demand for European data centers.

BroadGroup is an independent consultancy based in London and focuses on analyzing and interpreting business strategy. BroadGroup also runs the data centre portal datacentres.com

Check out the WHIR article here

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just wanted to wish everyone well this Thanksgiving. I'm heading to the Gartner Data Center Conference on Monday and will of course report all that I can in what time allows

Also--check out Network World's Top IT Turkeys of 2007. :)

Parallel Computing and Cognitive Fitness

I just finished reading the article "Cognitive Fitness" in the November 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review. The article covers new research in neuroscience about staying sharp and exercising your brain. One of the items you often find in these articles and research is to learn something completely new and/or something you don't normally deal with.

After reading this article I went back to surfing the web.....and came across some information on parallel computing. Perfect! This is something that I've always considered out of my realm of comprehension, yet I have always been very interested in it. As an added bonus there are some insights to draw in the data center industry and links to information about Google!

First -- Microsoft. Microsoft has made a couple of moves this year to indicate a trend in parallel computing and perhaps a tie-in to container-style data centers....stay with me, I'll get to that. In July of this year EETimes.com interviewed Burton Smith about programming languages and parallel computing. Smith oversees research in programming languages for parallel hardware architectures.

Multicore processors are driving a historic shift to a new parallel architecture for mainstream computers. But a parallel programming model to serve those machines will not emerge for five to 10 years, according to experts from Microsoft Corp.

Then, last Friday, Microsoft Research hired veteran supercomputer researcher Dan Reed. Reed's mission is to take a "green field approach" to the spiraling power and reliability requirements of large data centers.

"There is a sea change in computing coming at the intersection of multicore and large data centers, and working on this is one of the most exciting things I can imagine doing," said Reed. There's no single path to the parallel programming models needed to support tomorrow's multi core processors, said Reed. "It will take a variety of efforts in areas such as functional languages, transactional memory, extensions of existing languages and new higher level tool kits," he said.

And as we all know now, Microsoft is building 'mega data centers' to support the massive computing infrastructure required for internet-scale initiatives and Microsoft Research.

EETimes.com also had an interesting article about a month ago on the Cloud Computing initiative for Google and IBM. Google's Christophe Bisciglia explained:

"It's no longer enough to program one machine well; to tackle tomorrow's challenges, students need to be able to program thousands of machines to manage massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye."

The Google/IBM initiative is to advance large-scale distributed computing by providing hardware, software and services to Universities. Google is providing several hundred of their custom-built computers, while IBM will provide its BladeCenter and Sytem X Servers. The initiative (and article) are pretty interesting; check it out here

The other Google link I found returned me to the 'brain workout' I was receiving by reading about parallel computing. Check out the slides and presentations on Distributed Systems and Cluster Computing at Google -- here

Ok, so now the container angle. Caveat---remember I'm a newbie for the parallel computing topic, so tell me if I'm way off here. Google's infrastructure is more or less, clusters of networked CPU's orchestrated for various tasks and applications. Microsoft hints at similar items when talking about writing programming languages for parallel computing. Why not call a fully-loaded container of computers a cluster, write 'internet-scale' applications that will be able to reference multiple clusters (i.e.: thousands of CPUs across different containers) and still utilize the multi-core processors within each computer. Ok -- I know, this is essentially what Google does now across their data centers -- but why not change up the data center model. Place compute units (in this case, a full container) at geographically disperse locations and then reference them with an parallel-optimized OS or language. The benefit to shipping containers in this case is not having the high up-front costs involved with building the mega data centers that they are today, and they can move the containers to where the cheap power and land are without too much trouble. With such dense computing and more raw power than form factor, the container is a good fit, and the portability and quick build time are added benefits. I still advocate that security is an absolute must add-on for shipping container parks, but retro-fit a warehouse and BYOUG (bring your own UPS and Generator).

Ok -- that's enough brain exercising for one night (maybe a couple).

Intel IT (and shipping containers, Part III)

About a year ago I listened to HP discuss their consolidation plans of reducing their data centers to a few key hubs. Recently, Intel has published some of the details surrounding their consolidation plans. Brently Davis has a nice YouTube video explaining the details.

Intel also launched their new power-efficient Penryn processors today.

A little while back I received my Winter 2008 issue of Premier IT -- Intel's magazine for sharing best practices. It is a pretty nice magazine -- usually vendor magazines are 80%+ a pure marketing vehicle, but Intel's is actually quite infomative. The "Transforming Intel IT" article in this issue was particularly interesting. I continue to be hung up on the exact use of the shipping container model for data centers. I still picture trailer parks full of black boxes and fiber hooked up as if they are getting HBO. :)

I have a number of items (and links) queued up for a longer post on shipping containers, the Google patent of the modular data center, and potential (practical) uses of the container model, but for now, I wanted to point out the interesting quotes from this Intel magazine article.

The article explains that Intel is evaluating all types of innovation......

We’ve determined that our compute servers operate quite well at a higher ambient temperature than do other systems such as storage; by comparison, the storage environment requires much cooler temperatures (10 percent to 20 percent lower) and more floor space per unit. By segmenting storage systems into smaller rooms that are tuned to the specific needs of storage,
we could run the compute servers at higher temperatures, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

The second item is about containers:

The cost of building a new data center is extremely high—between USD 40 million and USD 60 million. As an alternative, we are considering placing high-density servers on racks in a container similar to those you see on container ships and trucks. We estimate that the same server capacity in this container solution will reduce facility costs by 30 percent to 50 percent versus a brick-and-mortar installation. Because it’s a small, contained environment, cooling costs are far less than for traditional data centers. Even if we build a warehouse-like structure to house the containers (thus addressing security and environmental concerns), the cost is dramatically less per square foot. In fact, the difference is so great that with this solution, brick-and-mortar data centers may become a thing of the past.

The site requires (free) registration, but once logged in, the article can be found here

Finally -- a presentation on their site for the energy efficiency opportunity had a cool slide on delivering data center optimization:

2002
3.7 TFlops
25 racks
512 servers
1000 sq. ft
128 kW

2007
3.7 TFlops
1 rack
53 blades
40 sq.ft
21 kW

Gartner Data Center Conference

Just a quick post to say that I will be attending the 26th annual Gartner Data Center Conference. This is being held in Las Vegas, Nov.27-30. I have my schedule ready to go and am really excited about attending this conference.

If anyone else will be attending and would like to meet up -- drop me an email.

IBM

For whatever reason, I've been surfing a lot lately on IBM. IBM is an absolutely enormous company and have their hands in just about everything. Here are some of the things I have been looking at lately:

• IT facilities assessment, design, and construction services
• IBM Grid
• Deep Computing - Capacity On Demand
• Ideas International - a nice summary of the IBM 2007 Analyst Conference
• IBM System X

Today, System x is the second largest server group in IBM (based on revenue) next to the System z, and by 2011 IBM expects it to be the largest server group

Symantec State of the Data Center Report 2007

Last Tuesday Symantec (SYMC) announced the release of their 2007 State of the Data Center Report. The international study surveyed managers of Global 2000 and other large companies. The magazines, web sites and company white papers are constantly full of industry statistics and trend monitoring, but I think this report did a nice job of doing the legwork necessary to get real data from those facing the issues in the data center today and presenting it in a clear and concise manner. I think one sentence in the paper summarizes the main point nicely:

Essentially, data center managers are being asked to deliver more high-quality services in an increasingly complicated environment, yet their budgets are relatively flat. As a result, data center managers find they adopt cost containment strategies that make use of new technologies, including virtualization, and new management approaches, such as those that automate routine processes.

Here are some of the highlights that I gleamed from reading the report:

• Of the five issues (of factors impacting today's Data Centers) I think #2 and #5 are the big ones (in my mind). #2 is staffing and #5 is Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning. Staffing has been noted several times in the press and is obviously becoming a large issue that managers must deal with.
  

• Better preparedness for a disaster now versus two years ago was listed by 53% of the repsondents. When thinking of locations for your DR and BCP plans, don't forget my Site Selection white paper.
  

• Not surprising, the always fun statistic proved true once again for a cause of downtime. Twenty-eight percent of respondents listed "change or human error"as a chief reason for downtime. Although some stories have down played ITIL, I think for this reason alone you will see an increased usage of the ITIL guidelines in data centers. This obviously plays into the staffing issues raised as well.
  

• The report has good information on virtualization plans. I think it will be interesting to see how Microsoft fits into this market in the near future. I don't believe they will pose a serious threat to VMWare, but will most likely balance out the market a little more and have a decent percentage. VMWare was the top product listed in the U.S. but almost half of Asia-Pacific respondents are using Microsoft virtualization, with only 35% going to VMWare. I haven't finished watching it yet, but here is a video of Eric Traut from Microsoft, presenting on Microsoft's virtualization technologies (it also mentions Windows 7).
  

• The outsourcing statistics were interesting. Fourty-two percent of U.S. managers said they utilize outsourcing, while 61% of non-U.S. organizations are. "Among the most common tasks outsourced by both U.S. and non-U.S. organizations are server maintenance, backups, storage management, archiving, and business continuity."
  

This is, overall, a very good report and worth the read. Check out the press release here

Chicago Colo Armed Robery

Many years ago I remember CI Host as being a reputable, large hosting company in the industry. It seems as though they have gone down hill in recent years, and this recent event makes the bad even worse.

They have had at least four intrusions to their data centers in the last two years!! In the most recent event intruders apparently cut through the walls with a power saw. At least 20 servers were stolen and a night manager was tazered. To make matters worse, CI Host staff was not quick to alert customers or even admit the breach.

I predict a mass exodus from this facility (old DC pun intended)

Check out the article at The Register here