Terremark in the News

Terremark has been in the news again recently. On Friday, APCON (maker of matrix switches) announced that Terremark had purchased a 20 switch license of TITAN software for managing APCON switches.

Earlier this morning Cisco announced that Terremark's Infinistructure (TM) Utility Computing platform is using the Cisco Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture.

"Terremark's Infinistructure platform is a true utility-computing solution designed to solve both the economic and capacity-on-demand shortcomings of traditional infrastructure. Infinistructure's enterprise-class server and storage infrastructure combines Terremark's proprietary digitalOps® service-management platform with leading-edge virtualization technology from Cisco and other companies, providing a highly scalable and flexible high-performance computing platform."

Terremark's NAP of the Americas facilities use a wide range of Cisco products, from ASA's to Catalyst 6500's, and MDS switches.
Check out the CNN Money article here
and the Cisco press release here


I have started to watch Terrermark a little closer over the last few years. I almost forgot that they acquired Data Return this time last year. They placed in the 2008 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and the report had some very positive things to say about them. For instance, they are known for their well engineered solutions and support. I still get a kick out of their Capital Region NAP having DoD-trained anti-terrorism personnel on staff. I think that is the course I need to attend so I can have it on my resume. :)

Wednesday Links

• The Motley Fool lists Savvis stock as the "worst", in last Wednesday's "Worst Stocks in the World". Ouch

• Andy Kessler has the dream interview -- Woz! Andy has a series of videos on Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, and all-around genius. If anyone is interested in buying my Apple IIGS Woz Limited Edition, let me know.

New EMC Network Management Tool

Here is one I'm going to have to read up on in the near future. EMC continues to grow into new business lines, with the announcement of the release of Voyence Control 4.0. EMC acquired Voyence last October.

"Some other features in the release include an Extensible Hybrid Model-Based Approach, which EMC said aligns with the model-based management capabilities of Smarts and EMC Application Discovery Manager (ADM). You might say that's code for ensuring it works with with other vendor products, especially Cisco's network products"

Check out the article at InternetNews.com here
and the EMC press release here

We'll have to wait until Chuck Hollis from EMC is back from traveling, to hear his thoughts.

What $10.9 Billion Will Buy

A particular Digg caught my eye today -- "Exxon posts a $10.9 Billion Profit." For myself, and other mere mortals, $10.9B is just plain hard to even fathom. So, I thought I would do some of the fun math that I have seen others do that kind of puts it all in perspective.

Here is a break-down of what exactly $10.9 Billion means:

• It's slightly more than the 2007 Gross Domestic Product of Japan, Germany and China...... Combined!!
• It could buy 2.7 exabytes of enterprise-grade storage (roughly -- at somewhere around $4/GB). This is approximately .002% of the 1.7 zettabytes that IDC forecasts we'll be generating in 2011.
• Instead of building data centers for the company, you could just buy Equinix, Level 3, and Digital Realty Trust. (based on Market Cap)
  
• $10.9B is more than 4x the 2007 "net investments in real estate" made by Digital Realty Trust.
• It's more than 3x the total amount Cisco spent in acquisitions in 2007.
  
• It's more than 4x what Google spent on data centers in 2007.
• It's only 6% of the Google Market Cap.
• Google Gross Profit is catching up -- at $9.9B
• It would buy around 83,846 shares of Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock

Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid

I haven't commented much on the Microsoft/Yahoo saga....I figure there isn't much need for yet another story on it. :)
But.....since I am surfing right now and happened to read it -- it looks like the deal is off.

I think this perhaps proves that what ever John Dvorak says will happen....take bets on the opposite! :)

It will be interesting to see what happens with Yahoo over the next few months as the reorganize, and maybe re-think strategies and partnerships.

Check out the press release here
and Tech Crunch article here

FastServers Acquisition Article

MidwestBusiness has a follow-up article to the FastServers acquisition by Layered Tech. The article mentions a potential $15 million purchase price and that owners Ian and Travis are free to move on to other ventures after a 60 day consulting agreement expires. Hey Ian and Travis, I really think you need to buy a Lamborghini -- and more specifically, come let me drive it! :)

Check out the Midwest Business article here.

NOTE: Because of my Iowa-bias, I must note that the article incorrectly states "Cedar Rapids" data center --- it is really Cedar Falls data center.

This Week in Storage

Here are some recent items I found on the net about the storage market:

Because the storage market needed just 'one' more acronym.... Seanodes brings us SIS (Shared Internal Storage). It is an interesting concept - it converts unused internal disks and arrays inside of systems into a shared storage array. The idea is that data de-duplication is great, but it is a post-processing activity; where SIS is leveraging 100% of unused or underused disk capacity. "Shared Internal Storage takes advantage of what IDC calls an "inside-out SAN" by virtualizing internal storage assets and servers across a shared storage pool of clustered nodes." Seanodes was founded in France in 2002, but has since opened a Cambridge, Mass. office and was noted (last November) to be looking for partners for their solutions and software. Check out a VAR Business article here, and the Seanodes site here.

IBM revealed "Cloud Storage Services" this week, as a follow-up to its acquisition of Arsenal Digital Solutions in December 2007. It brings a storage service offering to the small and medium size business, something that Arsenal brought 3,400 of to IBM in the merger. Check out the eWeek article here.

StorageMojo has an article on the notebook flash SSD market.

Tony Pearson, over at the Inside System Storage blog at IBM, comments on the recent Forrester Research finding titled "Consolidate Storage Vendors To Reduce Complexity"

Network Congestion

I wish someone would hurry up and invent the Star Trek teleporter. :) I would like to be at work, in Vegas (Interop), and in Dallas (Broadband Properties Summit) all at once. Check out the Best of Interop Finalists here.

I was reading James Carlini today, at MidwestBusiness.com, and he had an interesting article that pointed me to the BroadBand Properties Summit '08. James is delivering a keynote at the event and previewed his speech with the article "AT&T: Will World Butt Up Against Internet’s Physical Capacity By 2010?". It is a good article and worth the read. It also reminded me of a good podcast I finished recently that I wanted to link to. Listen to Security Now, episode 139 - Network Congestion.

More on Interop as the week progresses -- the 'best of' finalists are some interesting companies worth researching.

IT Olympics

This weekend I participated in a really cool event. I volunteered to be a mentor for the IT-Olympics in Ames, Iowa. The IT Olympics is a competition among 25 high schools across Iowa, that compete in 3 venues: Game Design, Robotics and Cyber Defense. It is a really cool way to get young kids excited about IT and enforce the need to promote IT, IT as a career choice, and let kids demonstrate their talent. I attempted to help the Cyber Defense team for the high school I was helping and they did a GREAT job. There is a documented scenario and limited architecture that the kids put together and then on competition day, the "red" team, a group of event hackers, are let loose to try and penetrate the computers run by the high school. All of the kids setup systems yesterday and then had to fend off the hackers from 8-4 today (closed/controlled environment).

Details of the event can be found on the IT-Adventures website here. If anyone would like further details please let me know.

It was a really fun event that I just wanted to give a quick mention to in hopes of promoting the idea and giving credit to all of those involved in the event. Congratulations to the team I helped, and all for all off their hard work, long hours, and dedication.

New VISI Data Center in Duluth

Minnesota managed hosting and connectivity company VISI has announced a tier 3 $18 - $19 Million data center to be built in Duluth, Minnesota. The 50,000 square foot facility will be built to Tier III standards and will also be SAS70 type 2 compliant. Showing the power of local partnerships, demand of the data center was researched by partnering with the Minnesota Power and Area Partnership for Economic Expansion.

Check out the press release here


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Amazon AWS and 1Q Results

Amazon continues to be in the news a lot and this past week was no exception. I have always liked the company and think that Jeff Bezos has managed the company and technologies well. I took the latest issue of Wired magazine on my business trips recently and read this article about Amazon and cloud computing. The article discusses the many startups that are successfully using Amazon Web Services to maintain their focus on the business and use Amazon as a HaaS (Hardware as a Service) provider. Eric Schonfeld, over at Seeking Alpha learned recently that of the 60,000 AWS customers, most are not the typical start-up profile, but corporations instead. They try AWS for a project, get hooked and never look back. While this was somewhat surprising to me also, I can see it happening. The same applies (I think) to OpenSource projects - someone at a company tries open source software, gets hooked, and then doesn't look back. Even though most of the AWS users are corporations, I by no means take that to mean that enterprise applications are moving to the cloud (jeeeesh, the term 'cloud' has sure reached a peak in the hype-cycle). I think it means just what Eric was saying -- that they are experimenting with it, and use it for one-off applications that are not enterprise-wide, critical applications.

On Thursday Amazon reported double-digit growth in earnings, but also noted worrying about the economy, and lowering sales expectations as a result. Business Week also has a nice interview with Jeff Bezos -- here.

Friday Links

I'm traveling some more -- in Ames,IA tonight - more on that tomorrow. Here are some miscellaneous links of interest I found today:

• An Earth Day link I forgot about -- the Microsoft Environment page was launched
• How Microsoft moves ITIL v3 from Concept to Practice
• Microsoft Virtual Machine tool
• The April 2008 issue of [IN]Secure magazine is out. The article on Wireshark is nice.
  
• Here's a video I'm trying to find time to watch -- to help learn more about FCoE.

Happy Belated Earth Day

I have been in Madison, Wisconsin the last few days and incredibly busy, so I haven't had much time to blog, let alone get my regular web surfing fix. I have come across a ton of Earth Day press releases and stories about Green Data Centers. Even though I'm sure you may have read some if not all of these, I thought I would just link to the items I ran across this week:

• "How Green is Green" research study by Digital Realty Trust
• The Green Data Center E-book from SearchDataCenter.com
• Hitachi's "Greenest Enterprise-class Data Center"
• Cassatt Data Center Energy survey
• Emerson Network Power and the EPA team up
• The Green Grid: Collaboration with EPA and SNIA

Wind Powered Data Centers

Last week we learned about Microsoft data center containers being "100% wind-powered" through offsets purchased from the Boulder-based Renewable Choice Energy. I had to laugh when I first read this --- at the airport on the trip home from Data Center World I was joking around with my boss that you could take a container, fill it with servers and then stick a wind mill on top to power it! All joking aside I think you will see wind power become a pretty popular green energy source for data center operations.

A developer, planning to build a data center south of Boston will install two large wind turbines to help generate electricity. The company, Granite Rock Global Data Center, will build a 120,000 square foot facility that is expected to have a utility bill in excess of $1 million a month. I don't quite follow the math for a facility that size costing over $1 million in utility bills, but then again the per kWh cost in Massachusetts is higher than a lot of places. The two wind turbines could reduce that monthly bill by 20%.

Check out the ComputerWorld article here.

The growing project list for wind powered energy is pretty exciting. Check out this page to view the American Wind Energy Association's data on U.S. wind energy projects.

Review of Industry Leader Equinix

Seeking Alpha has a very nice write-up on Equinix. They cover key findings about the company, the data center market, and a review of the Equinix stock price recently. It (once again) proves just how hot the data center market is, and provides some good insight into the company.


Check out the article here

Cisco Data Center Vision

Cisco has been in the news quite a bit this year. As I was attempting to get caught up on tech news recently I kept reading stories about Cisco. Here is what I found:

• They recently had their partner summit in Honolulu - now that's where I need to get a business trip planned for! I was able to watch the webcast though and it sounds like some pretty exciting times at Cisco.

• They announced that they are purchasing the remaining 20% of Nuova - a start-up founded by former Cisco executives in 2006. The deal is expected to close in Q4 of their fiscal year. Cisco noted that this acquisition compliments their "'Build, Buy, Partner' innovation strategy in support of Data Center 3.0 vision.

• It is no wonder why Cisco has an interest in Nuova - their partner ecosystem is pretty impressive: Intel, Qlogic, Emulex, Dell, 3Par, EMC, Netapp, VMWare, APC and others.

• In discussing a unified fabric, the phrase "wire once - provision multiple times" was mentioned a few times. This was also referenced when talking about APC and Panduit as parters, indicating that facilities and cabling play an increasingly important role in discussions that Cisco partners have in design.

• FCoE was also a common theme -- time to read up on this! An attendee at the summit noted that a FCoE HBA costs more than a switch - and Cisco responded that you will see LAN on motherboard - with 10gb Ethernet as an option this summer; thus driving prices down and eliminating the need for cards and adapters. This also plays into the unified fabric preaching, in that six or seven cables coming out of a server could be replaced by one, simplifying costs and cabling in the rack.

• Michael Morris has a nice summary of the product news on the Cisco Nexus 5000 series of switches and related technology.
  

• The total partner opportunity over the next 5 years is $14 Billion.

• Network World has an article on Cisco IOS vs. Juniper's JUNOS. Cisco addressed the issue of having so many new operating systems by saying that they are trying to maintain some agility while focusing on the right features at the right place and the right time.

• Soni Jiandani pointed out that as data center consolidation happens rampantly now days, customers may also be poised to consolidate networking and connectivity with a unified fabric.

• When asked about the next 12 months at Cisco, Doug Gourlay responded that they were in the top of the fourth inning, with the data center market driving -- gotta love a baseball analogy! :)

• John Chambers was in China last week, working out a number of arrangements to bolster Cisco's position there. Check out the article here.
  

• Chambers was recently mentioned by GOP nominee John McCain, as a possible cabinet member!
  
• I can't really see this happening -- but the rumor is out there that Cisco (and IBM) is interested in acquiring Citrix.
  

• Hot off the press -- AT&T will partner with Cisco to manage their telepresence video conferencing system. Check out the CNN article here. I love the fact that this article references the TV show 24 as a showcase for the Cisco Telepresence system.

• Finally - I now see what keeps John Chambers going in what must be an amazing schedule: Diet Coke.
  

Book Reviews

One thing that I simply MUST make more time for in 2008 is reading. My schedule is pretty hectic and what little free time I have seems to go to my web surfing addiction. :) My wife was reading a book recently and could not stop laughing. She shared many quotes from the book and it is now top of my list to quickly get through. It is Dave Barry's History of the Millenium (so far). As an example of Dave's brilliance (something an anti-Yankee fan can appreciate) - here is a quote from the book:

"... the Boston Red Sox, ending an eighty-six year drought, defeat the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series, defying exit polls that had overwhelmingly picked the Green Bay Packers. The Red Sox get into the Series thanks to the fact that the New York Yankees - who were leading the American League championships three games to none, and have all-stars at every position, not to mention a payroll larger than the gross national product of Sweden - chose that particular time to execute the most spectacular choke in all of sports history, an unbelievable Gag-o-Rama, a noxious nosedive, a pathetic gut-check failure of such epic dimensions that every thinking human outside of the New York metropolitan area experienced a near orgasmic level of happiness. But there is no need to rub it in."

The entire book is full of quips like this and is an awesome book

The book I am currently reading -- and waaaaaay behind on, is Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch. I know, I am a few months behind the hoopla on this book. I was one of the fortunate ones that read his blog post in time to get one of the free copies! Once every one else had their reviews out within a few weeks later, I knew I would have to take the approach that I'll make my review.....ummm....unique, yeah that's it. It will be unique because it is months later and will give his book some press months after it has been released. :) Well -- I 'have' started it and it is certainly living up to the accolades it has received so far. I'll finish it up when possible and post a review here.

BTW - Nicholas has an e-book over at Internet.com titled "IT in 2018: From Turing's Machine to the Computing Cloud". Check it out!

As a means to help me reach my goal of reading the pile of books I have building up, I've added the Amazon widget to the blog and will put my recommendations/favorites as I am able.

Data Center Industry

I haven't been able to post much on the blog lately -- but this is merely a sign that the data center industry is going strong. It's been a busy couple of weeks for me, data center projects left and right, but I have a number of posts planned and plan to get to as many as I can this weekend.

Another sign that the industry is really moving is how well Data Center Knowledge blog is doing. DC Knowledge has passed 4,000 readers via FeedBurner! Congratulations Rich!

And my friends over at FastServers were acquired by Layered Technologies!

More tomorrow -- the soccer game my son was supposed to be in was canceled. They could probably play water polo though. It feels like Seattle here recently with all of the rain we have been getting.

Data Center Site Selection article

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

Layered Technologies Acquires FastServers

Dedicated server provider FastServers has been acquired by Layered Technologies for an undisclosed amount. On March 11, 2008 LayerdTech secured $11 million in private funding.

"The acquisition will combine the expertise of FastServers.net in managed dedicated hosting with Layered Technologies’ leading Grid and unmanaged offerings. The combination of Layered Technologies and FastServers will offer a new range of superior services significantly benefiting customers."

The integration of the two companies will begin immediately and combined, they will service over 6,000 clients. FastServers has data centers in California, Chicago and Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Check out the press release here.

I have known FastServers for some time now -- CONGRATS Ian, Travis, Terrance and AP!!

Verari Systems StorageServer

The one company I didn't get to spend much time with at Data Center World was Verari Systems. Since they had released their version of the data center container a while back I was naturally interested. The FOREST Container stands for Flexible, Open, Reliable, Energy Efficient, Scalable and Transportable. Maybe this is what Microsoft is using in their Northlake facility?

The FOREST container can house servers in standard form factor or the Verari Blade Systems form. Today, from Storage Networking World in Orlando, they announced their first high capacity blade-based NAS and iSCSI Storage appliance. "The SB5165XL StorageServer™ combines unified NAS and iSCSI SAN storage networking functionality and a comprehensive feature-set with appliance-like manageability."

A single "platform" can deliver up to 576 terabytes of storage in two floor tiles, while use of the StorageServer in a FOREST container can provide up to 12 petabytes of capacity. So.....if Microsoft has 220 containers on the first floor of their Northlake facility, and if half of those are dedicated to storage - they could potentially have 1.32 exabytes of storage!

Check out the press release here

Cassatt - Gartner's Cool Vendor 2008

A "cool" company on my list for some time is Cassatt. When I first came across the company and its product offering I was royally confused. Based on my experience and use / observed use of servers, their product was just plain silly. In the right environment though, I have now come to see how it is truly a unique approach to energy savings and cool software on top of that.

Gartner's Cool Vendor Report lists those companies that are Insightful, innovative and intriguing. They recently named Cassatt and Tata Consultancy Services to their "Cool Vendors in Sourcing and IT Services 2008" report.

"The Cassatt solution is based around the Cassatt Active Response product line, software to improve the operation of large data centers in manageable stages. Customers can start by increasing data center energy efficiency, using Cassatt’s software to safely and intelligently power off servers when they aren’t needed. This approach, based on the Cassatt Active Power Management™ technology, can reduce power usage in your data center by 30 to 50 percent while complementing your existing energy efficiency activity."

Check out the press release here

Business Technology Trends To Watch

There are a million and one 'lists' of various things on the Internet. Typically most of them do not have a ton of meaning to them, but I ran across one todayI really liked. The McKinsey Quarterly released their "Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch" list, and it has some good thoughts.

The list is also basically a summary of business books, as each trend has a "further reading" category that talks in more detail about the trend. Of particular interest and applicability to the data center (in my opinion) are #5 and #7. The trends are:

1. Distributing cocreation
2. Using consumers as innovators
3. Tapping into a world of talent
4. Extracting more value from interactions
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
6. Unbundling production from delivery
7. Putting more science into management
8. Making businesses from information

Check out the list here

Vegas Data Center World Wrap-up

Well.... Data Center World is wrapped up (for me anyway). My flight leaves early enough tomorrow that I am unable to attend sessions in the morning. I consider the conference to be wildly successful. I met and talked with a number of good people, there were some really good exhibitors and speakers, and the buzz throughout the attendees definitely matched that of the data center industry. It's an exciting time.

Here is a (brief) run-down of some of my thoughts on the event:

• I met Jason from Infobunker, Kevin from Mission Critical Magazine, Rich Miller from Data Center Knowledge, Mark Fontecchio from TechTarget, and Rick Sawyer from EYP (now HP).
• I had some really good conversations from cool vendors about their products: Federal Communications Group, Aristos International, ConTech, Rackable, NER Data, RLE, Nodecom and t.a.c.
• Rick Sawyer had a particularly good presentation on the high cost of data centers. He gave three examples of data that was pulled from EYP jobs. According to Rick data center space costs between $700/ sq.ft and $2,500/ sq. ft. I liked his "Rick's Rule": Generally, the cost per square foot is directly related to the availability and power required by the load, and inversely related to the size of the data center.
• Another excellent session was given by John Tuccilo (APC) about the Green Grid's work in the development of standards for energy efficiency. The Green Grid is really growing lately and is doing some good work. I took a ton of notes on this one.
• Finally... some pics:

Air/Water Side Economizers

This morning I attended a session on Economizers. This technology is really interesting and I was anxious to learn more about it. Besides - the session was presented by someone with access to a lot of data (Dave Picket from Equinix). Here are a couple of interesting items I learned in this session.

A Psychometric chart is an excellent tool for analyzing data on air properties (enthalpy)

Research the temperature BINs for the particular region you are in. This facilitates the calculation of potential operating hours on economizer systems.

Water-side economizers: easy in climates with cool fall and spring seasons, and cold winter weather, such as Chicago, NY, and Washington D.C. It is with medium difficulty in climates with moderate weather year-round, such as San Francisco. It simply does not work where it is hot and humid most of the year.

There are many caveats associated with operation in freezing weather. Excessive ice build-up can damage tower components and operational errors can result in loss of cooling

Dave promoted two excellent sources of information - the EPA final report to Congress and the LNBL paper on air-side economizers and air quality.

Miichael Manos Keynote at Data Center World

The Michael Manos keynote this morning at Data Center World was inspiring. Michael doesn't read off of note cards and you can tell that he not only knows this material inside and out, but that he is passionate about it. I gained a number of things from this talk -- including him mentioning that their new Chicago facility will have upwards of 200 shipping containers pieced together like the RV campsites like I have talked about in previous posts.

Here are my notes from his talk:

• Microsoft challenges: 15x growth on servers, 9x growth on egress, 15x growth on power, 3x growth on number of data centers.
• 30% of the audience had active programs to monitor and measure power in their data center
• Next to nobody in the audience knew what their carbon emissions were for their data center
• Sustainability regulation 'is' coming ; not if, but when
• How many are working on green programs? 30% (audience)
• Industry challenges/minefields:

1. sustainability reporting & efficiency reporting
2. data center inventory globally becoming a challenge
3. increasing power densities at the rack level
4. power costs
5. green-washing
6. expertise shortage
7. organizational structures
8. increasing capital cost barriers
9. innovation hoarding
10. heterogeneity versus homogeneity mindsets.

• The 'old' power draw was 4kW / rack ; now is 8-12 kW / rack ; some implementations 36kW / rack
• $11-$18mil for a tier2 / tier2+ data center
• Cost of a data center:
• 82% construction costs : mechanical/electrical
• land: 2%, core&shell cost 9%, architectural: 7%
• 40,000 to 80,000 systems inside a typical 500,000 sq ft data center
• Staffing at a Microsoft data center: 35 people across 24x7x365 shifts.
• Boarding process: trucks pull up with pre-populated racks, drive into colo room, connect and go
• Driving automation is key ; have to have good operational practices.
• 35 factors for site selection. Including: Internet population, Internet peering/network, mobile users, power pricing, power capacity, environmental, construction costs, tax climate, IT labor availability, corporate citizenship -- this gives them their composite heat map. Quincy wasn't necessarily an ideal site until they went to the county level on a second pass and determined its benefits.
• Metrics: PUE vs DCIE : Microsoft uses both ; dcie shows the overhead ; goal, for either is ONE
• Microsoft sets aggressive pue targets internally.; they try to half the distance to a PUE goal by one every two years.
• Scribe (their software tool) ; shows/measures PUE, DCIE, total racks, total servers, kW power consumed, critical load power, etc.
• They have 1 million points to monitor/measure across data centers
• They have been measuring PUE for 4+ years ; an old data center of theirs started at 2.4 PUE and is at 1.9'ish in aug. 2007 ; very little if any capital improvements in this data center -- all driven by operational efficiencies.
• Chicago - their FIRST container data center!
• Entire first floor is full of containers ; each container houses 1,000 to 2,000 systems per container ; 150 - 220 containers on the first floor
• Containers are parked at 45 degree angle ; due to trucks parking them
• They build 'spines' of systems that connect power/cooling/bandwidth to their containers

Miachel Manos Interview

When I learned that the keynote I will be seeing (tomorrow) was Michael Manos, Director of data center services at Microsoft, I wanted to get a little background on him. He obviously has some large responsibilities with the aggressive growth plans Microsoft has for data centers in coming years. I ran across a podcast on Run as Radio where they interviewed Michael recently and he had some very good insights. I'm anxious to hear him tomorrow at Data Center World.

Here are some notes I took (on the airplane trip to Vegas!) on the interview:

• Microsoft site selection: they mapped out the world using 35 factors. Some of these include the power makeup, power capacity, IT personnel availablility, and the availability of fiber in the area.

• Why Quincy, WA?

• -- Quincy had invested money in infrastructure (fiber) and was a cross-continental fiber connectivity point.
• -- Nice community college with the right set of courses/curicculum; most Quincy Microsoft employees are local to that area (originally)
• -- 400 electricians onsite during construction
• -- Ongoing facility support : they provide 50 data center jobs in area
• -- Property tax bills reduced $200 per person as a result of them being in Quincy.

• Michael's job when coming to Microsoft: Apply Moore's law to their data centers and to focus on PUE and truely analyze /optimize off of that

• There is an ever increasing density per rack-- 8-12 kW range seen

• it can be a function of the space you have to work in.
• space between rack rows is getting further out (where cost of space is not high)

• Is there a trend toward cooler running gear? Definately

• In Ireland they use air side economization technologies.

• At the end of the day - it's all about efficiency.

• Small gains applied over the years results in large power bill savings.

• What is happening to 'old' Microsoft Data Centers?

• -- They have same problems other companies face with their old facilities
• -- They widen rows, redistribute cooling elements ; tweak efficiency design.
• -- Old data center managers - they are tasked with defining 'how' they are providing efficiency in their facility. These managers are measured on these efficiencies.

• Transactions per watt ; pretty deep metric for Microsoft to use.Everything is normalized against power (for measuring/reporting): everything is focused on 'power'

• A primary metric is cost/kW/month

• "Revolution through evolution" (Regarding data center facility strategies)

• Steve Balmer announced data center best practices recently at CeBit

Data Center World - Twitter

As I get ready for Data Center World this week, I thought I would try something new. The conference always gives me good thoughts to blog on and why not try an experiment to capture those thoughts.

I am a big fan of the TWiT Newtork of podcasts and Leo Laporte. They frequently mention Twitter and how they follow people via the tool. My usual reaction is - jeeesh, people, get a life! Other than teens trying to keep up with their friends, rather than, oh I don't know -- GOING OUTSIDE and talk to them in person..... this site/tool seems like a big waste of time. However, I 'suppose' their is some value in it and it really is just like a personal chat room or sending an instant message to anyone that wants to listen. To that extent - I'm going to try and post updates about the conference via my Twitter account.

I may just be talking to myself - but that is nothing new. :)
To follow me (this week anyway) at the conference -- click here

U of Illinois Petascale Project

Buried at the bottom of a story about the University of Illinois is an update on their $72.5 Million Petscale Computing Facility. When it comes online in 2011 it will become the world's most powerful supercomputer for open scientific research. The 95,000 square foot facility was designed by EYP Mission Critical Facilities (now HP).

Check out the article here

DataCenter World 2008 Vegas

I learned recently that I am able to go to the Vegas Data Center World Conference! It is coming up next week and I am pumped. Michael Manos is a particular keynote I am anxious to see.

The conference is Tuesday through Thursday of next week. If anyone is planning on being there and is interested in meeting up just let me know.

3Com Merger Approved

Just last Thursday we learned of the 3Com acquisition attempt being halted by the Government. Well, apparently that bluff was called and the 3Com shareholders approved the acquisition.

The vote appeared to be designed to ensure 3Com could get a US$66 million breakup fee as compensation for pursuing a merger with Bain Capital Partners and Huawei Technologies that was proposed last year.

Check out the Network World article here

Rackspace Green Initiatives

There is carrier neutral colocation - why not have carbon neutral server farms? TMC Green Technology World interviews Rackspace as a follow-up to their customer survey about making their data centers green.

Rackspace is focusing on company conservation, customer offerings and employee education. They are also co-marketing efforts from their partner NativeEnergy. NativeEnergy is a pretty interesting company and has a good list of big name companies as members. They have a number of renewable energy sources that aren't always the ones making the news. My favorite is "remooable energy". :)

Check out the TMC article here

USSHC Announces EColo Program

USSHC announced "EColo" today - their new program to allow customers to offset the energy needed to run their systems with renewable energy. For every customer that enrolls in the Ecolo program, USSHC will in turn buy the equivalent amount of renewable energy from Alliant Energy. This exchange is a part of Alliant's Second Nature Program.

"Alliant Energy's Second Nature program allows us to be a catalyst for change in the data center colocation industry," said Isaac Helgens, Project Director for USSHC. "No other program allows us to make an impact so quickly without making major changes to processes in place. We are able to able to reduce our ecological footprint and in doing so give our customers a more efficient alternative.

Check out the EColo (pronounced ECHO-low) program here
and the press release here.

Data Center Cooling

Business Week has a nice article on the business of powering and cooling the data center. Be sure to check out the slide show for additional information. For instance - they talk about Google using wind and solar technologies ; and specifically mention that they may tap into Wind energy in the Council Bluffs data center.

Check out the article here

New Data Center for Sisters of Mercy Hospital

Thanks to HIPPA and other regulations, and incredible amount of data health care organizations have to manage and process, I think you will continue to see a lot of data center news about this industry. Hospitals tend to build data centers close to the cities they serve. As Rich Miller pointed out the other day, there is a lot of activity in the second tier cities for data center expansion and new facilities.

The St. Louis Business Journal reports that the Sisters of Mercy Health System is building a $60 Million data center in Washington, Missouri. The 40,000 sq. foot center is slated to go live in 2010.

Check out the article here

World's Most Powerful Particle Accelerator

Wow.
What else can I say.....

Check out a picture tour of the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

Cloud Storage: Nirvanix and 3Tera Partner

I'm still not sold on the term "cloud" anything....maybe I just need to warm up to it, but that's for another post.

Today Cloud Storage provider Nirvanix announced a partnership with Utility Computing company 3Tera. The partnership includes offering global distributed storage, content distribution and remote backup capabilities to web developers. 3Tera's Applogic catalog will have the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network(SDN) added.

“This solution blends together the best of both worlds, Utility Computing and Cloud Storage,” said Jonathan Buckley, Chief Marketing Officer for Nirvanix. “The two companies are coming together to address a very real problem for their customer: How to complement the simplicity and automation of a robust Utility Computing platform, with a cost-disruptive, yet most-reliable layer of data protection based on Cloud Storage.”

This sounds like a pretty good step for both companies. Check out the press release here

3Com Acquisition

3Com is an interesting company. Back in the day they were everywhere....lots of products, lots of market penetration. Then, there are times where I forget they even exist and just don't hear much about them or their products. With a founder like Robert Metcalfe : the founder and co-inventor of a little thing called.... Ethernet, how could the company go wrong?

3Com has been in the limelight recently in the M&A saga section. Boston's Bain Capital Partners and China's Huawei Technologies were bidding to acquire 3Com and ComputerWorld reported today that this bid was abandoned. The reason is the interesting part. In January 2005 3Com acquired security company TippingPoint The ComputerWorld article explains that the U.S. Department of Defense uses 3Com IDS products. The acquisition has been halted apparently due to security concerns and the fact that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. intended to take action to prohibit the sale. This TippingPoint software must be really good -- I had always figured the DoD wrote their own software for IDS/IPS.

Check out the ComputerWorld article here

Interview with Qwest CEO

Om Malik has a short, but nice interview with Edward Mueller, CEO & Chairman of Qwest. Due to some poor customer experience stories I have not been a big fan of Qwest. However, I imagine you can come up with similar stories for most any carrier.

Qwest is certainly going in different directions over the past few years. It's interesting that they would be such a heavy contender for the broadband market. Qwest is the dominant local loop provider in my area. They mention their fiber to the home initiatives -- hey Qwest - I'll pilot it for you!! :)

Check out Om's interview here

Asynchronous Data Replication Patent

I had not heard of virtualization and provisioning software company Exludus prior to their March 18th press release, but their software sounds very cool. They announced that they have received a patent for "Asynchronous and Autonomous Data Replication" technology.

Exludus' tag line sums up what they do nicely: "the leading developer of multi-core system capacity management, virtualization and provisioning solutions". Check out the GRID Today article here

Back in February they announced a reseller relationship with one of my favorite companies - SGI. The agreement will embed eXludus Grid Optimizer in the SGI BioCluster solution.

“Through testing conducted on a 64 processor configuration, it was observed that Grid Optimizer™ provided up to 90 percent performance gains on key life sciences applications."

Sweet!!
Check out the February press release here

EMC Raises Offer to Acquire Iomega

It looks like EMC has raised the offer to $205.5M to acquire Iomega. Iomega's board has authorized them to enter into discussions with EMC.

Check out the press release here

Renewable Energy

I ran across two articles this evening, that....well, let's just say they are post-worthy.

The first one is not necessarily data center related - except in the renewable energy realm.....and the "I got a kick out of it" realm. A frequent topic in the books I select to read is economics. I throughly enjoyed The World Is Flat, and Freakonomics. A recent post on the Business Facilities blog talks about how the ethanol industry is wreaking havoc on the chicken industry. Apparently the fact that so much corn is going towards ethanol production has driven the price of chicken-feed up. The World's largest poultry processor, Pilgrim's Pride has announced facility closings and 1,100 jobs cut as a result. This one will surely end up in economic studies in some book in the future. Check out the post here.

The second one is also from the Business Facilities blog and is about wind turbines bound to the ocean floor. It has something to do with tapping the ocean currents, but it sounds like there is a lot left to research and test for this potential use. The reason I thought this one was interesting, was combining recent news we have heard in the industry. We've heard about Google investing in undersea cable; and we have heard about data center containers being used aboard ships, so why not use undersea turbines to supplement power to the ship and the undersea fiber to get connectivity and setup your own floating data center fleet! Better yet -- how long until we read the headline "Google to build data center (Googlantis) on the Atlantic Ocean floor". Maybe there is a use for those cars that convert from cars to mini submarines yet! :)
Check out the turbines post here

The picture below is my attempt at a joke -- based on how much I like James Bond movies. If I had bonus points, I would give them out to anyone able to name the bad guy in the movie that this picture comes from.

Cisco's Network on Wheels Container

The Philippine Daily Inquirer has a story about the Cisco Express Network on Wheels (NoW) truck visiting the National Computer Center in Quezon City. The article title had the word 'container' in it and naturally caught my eye.

The Cisco NoW truck had typically been used for Marketing and doing a road-show to showcase Cisco technologies. The use case for the Philippines was for a mobile command center and data center housed in a 40 foot container.

"NoW, currently stationed at the National Computer Center in Diliman Quezon City, is custom-made with Cisco’s latest technologies and solutions, including a generator—making the container into an instant mobile command center that can be deployed immediately to the affected area to do fast wireless coordination among the various the government disaster-response agencies."

Learning lessons from hurricane Katrina, the disaster management abilities of this truck would be greatly beneficial to the Philippines. However, they rank 69th in the world in network readiness, according to Cisco's data.

Check out the article here

Busy day for EMC

EMC had a busy day in press releases today. They announced the acquisition of Australia based ITSM software company Infra. Infra compliments EMC's data center operations family of software and gives them an ITIL solution that automates IT Service Management.

EMC also announced that 2007 was the 8th consecutive year that they were named the market share leader in storage software. This was according to the latest IDC worldwide quarterly storage software tracker.

Now -- if we only knew what to do with all of this data on EMC storage! :) Last week the press release was about the new AIIM survey revealing that organizations continue to struggle with unstructured information.

Finally -- Today Iomega "received an unsolicited and non-binding proposed offer" from EMC. EMC's $178.1 Million bid represents a 22% premium over the stock's closing price on Friday. Check out the Iomega press release here.

Iomega stock closed up 20.3% and EMC closed down 2.2%

Netex Drives Data Center Acceleration Market

High-end data replication over long distances at rates above OC-12, ensuring data reliability and integrity -- cool. DR over IP WAN Optimization company Netex has reaffirmed their commitment to the data center acceleration market. Netex and the need for optimizing connections between data centers was called out in Gartner's most recent Magic Quadrant report for low-end branch office WAN optimization technologies.

With special attention towards large enterprise customers, there are many easy justifications for products like HyperIP from Netex:

"Replicating enterprise data sets between data centers with NetEx ensures that compliance standards for records maintenance are achieved, eliminating exposure to regulatory sanctions and lawsuits. Additionally, by simplifying and accelerating data replication as part of a corporate business continuity and disaster recovery plan, HyperIP helps companies slash expenses for data management chores that account for 21 percent of overall IT costs, according to one study."

Transfer speed in HyperIP has been qualified by a regular who's who list in the enterprise data management applications market: EMC, Hitachi, IBM, Netapp, Oracle and Symantec.

Privately held Netex is a spin-off of StorageTek and is based in Maple Grove Minnesota. Last December they unveiled a version of HyperIP for VMWare ESX server. "With HyperIP for VMware, customers can scale performance up to 600x with no hardware upgrades, the company says."

Last September I looked at the WAN Optimization market and some highlighted products -- this will continue to be a hot market in 2008.

Data Center Links: The Green Issue

Data Center Links: The Green Issue

There - now I have it out of my system! :) The data center industry is absolutely inundated with stories on renewable energy and ways that companies are saving energy or building energy efficient facilities. If it weren't so important I would say enough already on the hype cycle -- but power is obvious paramount to a data center and saving money and being environmentally friendly at the same time is equally important.

Let's start with the Google search results -- perhaps meaningless, but interesting:

Wind Energy: 6,490,000 results
Solar Energy: 12,400,000 results
Hydroelectric: 3,060,000 results

Below is a collection of items that have come across my virtual desk in the past few weeks; but first I thought I would link to several 'green' blogs that I have added to my regular surfing schedule.

• Enterprise IT Planet / Green
• Green Data Center Blog: Monitoring, Metering, Managing the Green Data Center
• Green Techies.com
• TreeHugger (this one is a little bit information overload, but good to scan through)
• Energy Matters

Other miscellaneous links to interesting stories:

• Solar
• An email from my dad led me to the company WorldWater & Solar Technologies Corp. Just this last week they announced a ground breaking of a 2 Megawatt solar system at the Denver International Airport. "The solar installation will supply 3.5 million kilowatt-hours of clean energy annually for the airport and is valued at over $13 million." Check out complete details here.
  
• Courtesy of the TreeHugger blog, there is a story on the Solar Market Outlook - unveiled in New York City.
• Here is a story in Business Week about Florida power companies buying back solar energy from their customers. I imagine you will see this story in a lot of other cities throughout 2008.
• This one was just too funny -- The Seattle Times reports that a man filed charges against his neighbor because their redwoods blocked sunlight to his backyard solar panels. A judge recently ordered the neighbor to cut down 2 of its 8 redwood trees, citing an obscure state law that protects a homeowner's right to sunlight. This is so silly that I'm speechless...
  

• Managed hosting provider EasyStreet is building a new 10,000 square foot data center. They put a lot of green design into it, partnering with Intel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and others. Check out the Portland Business Journal article here.
  

• An article on the IT@Intel blog mentions a twist on energy conservation - energy reuse. Anyone that has worked or been in a data center has felt how hot the hot aisle is. This article discusses using that heat waste for good in areas outside of the data center. Intel is putting this to use in Israel - one of its 8 global hub data centers. An estimated $235,000 will be saved annually with heat recycling and this facility will hopefully become Intel's first LEED certified green building. After the 2007/2008 winter I have endured, I could benefit from this technology! Their white paper on the technology can be found here.

• Both Intel and Google have nice R&D web sites about their renewable energy initiatives.
  

The End (for now)

WorldWide Telescope

(off-topic)
Being a multi-billion dollar Global Tech giant has its advantages. One good thing Microsoft has done is pour a ton of money and resources into Research. A recently announced research project will be released this spring and looks VERY cool!

Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope uses their "visual experience engine" to seamlessly pan and zoom across the night sky. My explanation probably won't do it justice, and it isn't out yet -- but there is a nice video demonstration on a TED Talks video.

Here is a MSNBC article on it and here is the Microsoft site for WorldWide Telescope.

Now...I'm still a Google fanatic, and love Google Earth and the 'sky' function inside of Google Earth--but this new Microsoft app looks to be a strong contender. With the Google/NASA partnership I'm sure we haven't seen the last of the cool apps/features from Google Earth.

Terremark: $135 Million Multi-year Contract

A few weeks back we saw a video update of the $270 Million NAP of the Americas from Terremark. Even though it is a little under half of the price of a Google data center, it is a very impressive facility for a colo.

Yesterday Terremark subsidiary, Terremark Federal Group, announced it was awarded a multi-year, competitively bid $135 Million contract (unnamed customer). Now that is what I call an anchor tenant!

"Our ability to provide the federal sector with top-quality services and excellent customer care was a major factor in the awarding of this contract," said Jamie Dos Santos, President and Chief Executive Officer of Terremark Federal Group, Inc.

I would have loved to see who else was bidding on this contract. Check out the press release here.

Techie Drought

A Miami Herald article explores the issue with recruiting and retaining IT employees in Florida. The article might as well be in most any newspaper across the country -- this is a huge problem that many tech companies are facing.

The article mentions Terremark and the fact that having internship programs has helped them out -- to train, mentor and then hire interns into the company.

Check out the article here.

Links for 05 March 2008

Not much time for comments tonight and there were quite a few stories that piled up this week, so here we go:

• Verari Systems introduced their container data center yesterday. The "Forest" container solution will have a forest scene painted on the outside -- hmmm, maybe they could paint a blue ocean on it and put it on a ship!
  
• InformationWeek has a photo slide show of the Google data center being constructed in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It's been a loooong winter here -- the last picture is of some locals ice fishing.
  
• Xcel Energy has selected Stratavia's data center automation platform to streamline its IT operations. Standardization, centralizing critical processes, and scalability were listed as primary factors in the evaluation and selection of Stratavia. Stratavia was recently named a 2008 rising star from the Enterprise Management Associates.
  
• Xcel Eneregy also announced a groundbreaking wind-to-battery project. The project will take place in Minnesota and received a $1 Million grant from Minnesota's Renewable Development fund.
• A short while back when Rich Miller wrote about the BayCare Health System data center redesign, it made me think of the 'other' hospital case study I had recently seen. As I've mentioned in the past, I am intrigued by Second Life and applaud all that Cisco, IBM and other companies have done in the virtual world. Check out this blog post and this video of the Palomar Pomerado Health Cisco case study of the "Hospital of the future".
• Speaking of Second life -- when is Google going to come out with their own virtual world? Well, until then, they have Google Earth and the new Google Cities in 3D program. Pretty cool stuff.....
• BT Quraterly has a nice Cisco case study of their SONA (Service-Oriented Network Architecture) titled "A Network Architecture for Business Value Acceleration"
• Issue 7 of the EDS magazine Synnovation is "the green issue". The article I liked the most was "Making a List - Environmental Sustainability 101". We are obviously flooded with Green articles lately, and this one does a nice job of covering a high level view, what we 'should' do, what is 'right' to do, and what is 'smart' to do.
• I really enjoyed the SearchDataCenter.com article (and linked presentation)on the cost of different data center architectures.
• Finally -- since the Platespin acquisition actually happened, I thought I would take another shot in the dark prediction and say that Cassatt will be purchased by either IBM or Cisco in the near future.
  
  

CyteWorks takes data center underground

The Kansas City Star has an article on CyteWorks moving their equipment to an underground data center, provided by Cavern Technologies. I mention it for two reasons -- it's nice to see the quote from the business owners that setting up their own data center was "a distraction" and that it made more sense to outsource it to a data center provider (amen). Secondly, I keep running across these bunkers or underground facilities that are up and coming data centers! The underground concept is definitely unique and worth a look.

Check out the article here.

Iowa Technology and Ken Patchett

I attended an awards show tonight that honored technology companies in Iowa and the progress we have made as a state. Produced by the Technology Association of Iowa, the event was very nice and it was inspirational to see all of the things going on in the state and the innovation that continues to make us a technology power-house.

A highlight of the evening was the keynote from Google's Ken Patchett. Ken has been quoted and photographed for countless news articles about Google data centers. Ken was incredibly supportive of the Iowa companies taking part in the event. He delivered a wonderful keynote, complete with a modified Google logo for Iowa (apologies--the picture was taken with my phone)
It contains the Iowa state flower and bird and (of course) a corn stalk. OK -- the real highlight was actually getting to meet and talk with Ken. As you can imagine he was incredibly popular, so I didn't get time to ask him the question I had ready. I was going to ask him his thoughts on the viability of wind energy generation for use in powering/augmenting a data center. An InformationWeek article last November posed the thought as well.

Congratulations to all of the award winners at the show tonight!

P.S.: I also wanted to congratulate Principal, HNI and Meredith for getting listed on Fortune's 'most admired' list!

Data Center Best Practices

Just a quick link to a good article that InformationWeek has on tips shared by operators and consultants in the industry.

These "badass" data centers--energy efficient, automated, hypersecure--are held up as models of innovation today, but their technologies and methodologies could become standard fare tomorrow.

Check out the article here

Also, check out a side story on Ebay data centers here

Iowa Governor Signs Microsoft Incentives

Ok Microsoft -- Come on in!! After easily passing the Iowa legislature, Iowa Governor Chet Culver has signed the business incentives package designed to persuade Microsoft to locate their data center in Iowa.

Many local newspapers and TV stations have speculated which Iowa city Microsoft is looking at. I have heard Marshalltown, Cedar Falls and Sioux City as top candidates. For a number of reasons I would recommend Cedar Falls as the top choice!

Here is the link to the Associated Press article.

Old School Optics

Lightwave magazine has an interesting article that covers an Ovum analyst's thoughts on a generational shift in views on fiber optics and networking technologies.

"The analyst says active optical cables, more holistic approaches to 10/40/100G data rates, and a new focus on size and power exemplify the new outlook. Even consumer markets appear within grasp."

Check out the article here

LinkedIn: Bill Gates Asks A Question

I don't remember where I read it - but I heard about an event on LinkedIn where Bill Gates was going to ask a question for the LinkedIn community to respond to. Out of curiosity I checked it out tonight. A mere 16 hours after he wrote the question there were 1,509 answers!

His question is: "How can we do more to encourage young people pursue careers in science and technology?" I thought it could be a pretty interesting question to pen an answer to, and I figured this would probably be as close of a conversation with Bill Gates as I'll ever get. :)

Check out the question and answers (including mine -- #1,510 on page 51) here

Arizona Solar Power Plant

A while back we learned of web hosting company Aiso being the first 100% solar powered hosting company. They have pretty low power needs - but imagine what you could do with 280 megawatts for your data center!

A huge solar plant, named Solana is a joint venture/contract between Abengoa Solar and Arizona Public Service Company and has a build cost of $1 Billion. The 1900 acre will be 70 miles south west of Phoenix and has an projected capacity of 280 megawatts. What's a story like this without mention of tax breaks...? :) The project will be completed by 2011 - but only if Congress renews the clean energy tax credit set to expire at the end of 2008. This bill allows ~$18 Billion in tax breaks for renewable energies.

The article doesn't mention data centers - but I just wanted to post about it ; I have a larger post brewing about renewable energy technologies available to data centers and thought I would mention this enormous solar plant. Plus -- Iowa Governor Chet Culver recently set out plans for renewable energy goals in Iowa. More on that later...

Here is the link about the Solana solar plant.

Novell Acquires PlateSpin

I knew it! Ok, well, I knew part of it. I had always figured that Platespin was ripe for acquisition. Very cool products in a hot market....it was bound to happen sooner or later.

Today Novell announced that is was acquiring Platespin for $205 million in cash. Platespin specializes in software that allows workloads to be spread across physcial and virtual servers. The acquisition strengthens Novell's virtualization stack and gives it an affordable disaster recovery solution.

"Over the next three years, heterogeneous virtualization architectures will be the norm for most IT organizations; as such they must purchase data center management solutions that offer an ongoing opportunity for lowering operational costs as well as integrating and managing VMs across both server and storage infrastructures for greater control and visibility between hardware and the virtual software tiers."

Check out the eWeek article here
and
Novell Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon's blog post here

Terremark NAP of the Capital Region

The Terremark $270 Million NAP of the Capital Region is one impressive facility! Virginia site StarExponent.com has a write-up of the new Terremark facility being built in Culpeper, Virginia.

Set to open in June 2008, this data center has some impressive features:

• Two power systems. The first: an array of 55 diesel generators. The second, 440 large flywheels.
• 160 watts per square foot (funny--I keep hearing that this is a bad metric to use).
• It is expected to consume 100 megawatts of electricity.
• 2500 tons of a/c
• Bus-sized chillers fed by 18 inch wide pipes.
  
• They have poured enough concrete to build a 21.5 mile road.
• Campus will consist of up to five 50,000 sq.ft. independent data centers.
• My favorite: DoD-trained anti-terrorism personnel on staff.

The video of construction progress:

The Terremark information page, complete with webcam and video (including an overly dramatic soundtrack) can be found here.

The StarExponent.com article can be found here

A related story about how most of Terremark's workforce could be local ; can be found here

Berkely RAD Lab

The Wall Street Journal has a pretty interesting artcile on Google data center software and architecture. The Berkely RAD (Reliable, Adaptable, Distributed Systems) lab is charged with taking the mystery out of the Google datacenter and really understand the software and infrastructure needed to run a scalable, reliable data center.

Check out the WSJ article here

XSF Selects USSHC for Colocation

Another high availability site/organization has selected USSHC (US Secure Hosting Center) for colocation services. A month ago we learned of Wikia locating their infrastructure at USSHC and now the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) has selected USSHC. Core Jabber/XMPP services as well as the Jabber.org IM service will run from their infrastructure there.

"Given the secure, always-on nature of Jabber/XMPP technologies, the choice of USSHC is only natural," said Peter Saint-Andre, Executive Director of the XSF. "USSHC's commitment to secure hosting, highly reliable systems, and fast, friendly service is unsurpassed in the industry."

USSHC is a military built, hardened, underground facility located in Monticello, Iowa.

Check out the press release here

Cooler Planet - Solar Map

Cooler Planet has a really cool interactive map of California Solar Power. It interactively narrates total installs, total Megawatts, average system size and total Kiloton pounds of carbon emissions saved. It covers 1999 through 2007. The stats demonstrate a 17x increase in solar installations over the last 6 years. It is a very nicely done map and (for me anyway) speaks volumes over a spreadsheet or other presentation methods.

Check it out here.

BizJournals - America's Most Stressful Places

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

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

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


View Larger Map


Check out the BizJournals study information here.

Google Data Center Blueprint

I think Harper's Magazine could have picked a different title for the article -- "Keyword: Evil" ; but maybe that's just me. The March 2008 issue has a short story on the Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon. The interesting part is they have a blueprint of the Google complex with information on utility connections and every detail for fiber, sewer, water, power and others. The most interesting annotation I saw was the one that read "confidential / proprietary". :)

Check out the Harpers article and blueprint here

Sun Preps for Infiniband

I (admittedly) don't know much about Infiniband. I know what it is, but I just don't hear that much about it and have not used it in my experience. Well, it looks like Sun is taking a gamble on it.

Sun touts many advantages of Infiniband vs. Ethernet in the race for the unified network. Infiniband is poised to beat Ethernet to the 40Gbit/sec mark and products are expected to have latency as low as 60-70 nanoseconds.

I'm going to have to agree with quotes made in the EETimes article and say that Ethernet advances may be slow going due to IEEE red tape, but Infiniband just doesn't have the market share that Ethernet does and data center managers are looking to reduce the types of fabrics, not increase.

Check out the EETimes.com article here

Iowa Tax Break Offering To Lure Microsoft Data Center

As we did with the Google deal, Iowa has sweetened the deal for Microsoft to build a data center here. The Iowa House voted 99-1 (HF 2233) in favor of giving tax breaks to Microsoft in order to lure them to the state. You can read the rest of the details in the Des Moines Register article, but I wanted to say a big thank you to Republican Christopher Rants for the for this:

House Minority Leader Christopher Rants, a Sioux City Republican, voted for the bill but also requested that lawmakers look at what can be done to help smaller companies, many that already exist in Iowa.

It's nice to see someone looking out for ALL business in the state and not just the mega million deals and companies like Google and Microsoft.

Check out the Des Moines Register article here
and a Forbes article here