Raytheon Acquires BBN Technologies

Government contractor Raytheon has acquired BBN Technologies. Most people (I think) won't even recognize the company name BBN Technologies. I've been in IT long enough (barely) that I remember BBN from the very early days of the Internet. BBN is a Massachusetts company known for the development of packet switching, including work for the ARPANET; predecessor to the Internet. They also developed the first TCP protocol for Unix. Wikipedia has the wonderful merger and acquistion history for BBN:

BBN was acquired by GTE in 1997 and BBN's ISP division BBN Planet was joined with GTE's national fiber network to became GTE Internetworking, "powered by BBN". When GTE and Bell Atlantic merged to become Verizon in 2000, the ISP portion of BBN was included in assets spun off as Genuity. In March 2004, Verizon sold BBN to a group of private investors. In September 2009 Raytheon entered into an agreement to acquire BBN

Following the acquisition, BBN Technologies will become part of Raytheon Network Centric Systems.
I had not been to the BBN web site in quite some time ; upon browsing, they have some pretty amazing research projects listed:

1. Flexible Intra-autonomous-system Routing Environment
2. Smart Environment for Network Control, Monitoring and Management
3. Density-and Asymmetry-aware wireless Networking
4. Proprietary waveforms for wireless networks
5. Terabit router traffic engineering

Network World has a very nice article (back in May) on DARPA military research projects. Check this one out (from the Network World article):

DARPA's Quantum Entanglement Science and Technology (QuEST) program is creating new quantum information science technologies, focusing on loss of information due to quantum decoherence, limited communication distance due to signal attenuation, protocols, and larger numbers of quantum bits (Qubits) and their entanglement. Key among the program's challenges is integrating improved single- and entangled-photon and electron sources and detectors into quantum computation and communication networks. Defense applications include highly secure communications, algorithms for optimization in logistics, highly precise measurements of time and position on the earth and in space, and new image and signal processing methods for target tracking.

Now -- I'm off to read patent 7,242,774 : Quantum Cryptography Based on Phase Entangled Photons

Green Storage, Smart Grids, and Wireless Spectrum for Utility Providers

Earth2tech has an excellent article on smarter storage -- how data storage can account for up to 40 percent of the energy consumed by a data center. GigaOm's Tom Trainer offered data de-duplication and thin provisioning as technologies that were helping the greening efforts. 3Par is a leader in thin provisioning, which is a "mechanism that applies to large-scale centralized computer disk storage systems, SAN's and storage virtualization systems". 3Par recently helped Mary Kay save 50% in storage capacity and 60% administration time with 3PAR Utility Storage and six InServ storage servers.

Last week Vint Cerf had a Google Public Policy blog post titled Where the smart grid meets the Internet. Vint has some awesome insight (as always) into building the smart grid and how it is essentially a nascent energy Internet. He stresses open protocols, open standards and free access to all of the energy information generated.

Finally -- Earth2tech also has an article today about American Electric Power (AEP) telling the FCC that a dedicated licensed spectrum is sorely needed by utilities. AEP is saying that as more smart grid services are rolled out, more and more network bandwidth is needed.

Data Center Stock Index Update

As I approach almost a full year of tracking my data center stocks, I thought I would post the chart for the wild ride it has been. I think for the most part these stocks have weathered the recession pretty well, and as you can see, they are doing quite well lately. Reference this blog post to see what stocks are included in my capitalization-weighted index.

Here is the October 2008 through August 21, 2009 graph:

Earlier this year I started a second index: Equinix, Savvis, Switch and Data and Terremark. Here is the graph for that index.

Smart Grids, City 2.0 and Project Netal

Ok, so those 3 things aren't related -- I just had a couple of things I ran across tonight that I found interesting....

1. Cisco looks to ride smart-grid data deluge. This one is pretty apparent if you follow the Cisco news and EnergyWise software announcements. I keep waiting for a Cisco acquisition -- particularly in this space.

2. HP's vision of building City 2.0. HP Labs sustainability visionary Chandrakant Patel describes his vision of building City 2.0, enabled by a sustainable IT Ecosystem. Pretty interesting interview/article.

3. Ok -- so this one is not data center related, but is just frigg'n cool. :) Cnet has an exclusive on Microsoft's project Natal. Netal is a next generation gaming platform (REALLY next generation) with no controller required.

one last one, as long as we're talking about the big companies in IT : BusinessWeek posted an interview with Eric Schmidt last week and asks several questions about where Google is headed next.

Now With 20% More Fiber!

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

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

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

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

DOE Smart Grid Report and $57 Million Funding

Renewable Energy World reports on the DOE $57 million to fund smart grid development yesterday. The original announcement was back on July 20th and included more than $47 million in funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and $10.5 million to increase the nation's energy security. Wednesday Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the delivery of more than $47 million in funding. The DOE also released a Smart Grid Report. Other items of interest on their web site include:

• The Smart Grid: An Introduction
• Smart Grid E-Forums
• Federal Smart Grid Task Force
• Grid 2030 Vision
• Modern Grid Strategy - a project of the National Energy Technology Laboratory

Science News also had an interesting article recently about Electromagnetic weaponry being used on the electric grid.

NASA's Nebula a Possible Federal Cloud Prototype

nextgov.com reports that a NASA cloud computing model, called Nebula is being looked at by NASA and the Obama administration for federal agencies to outsource IT services to a shared platform. "A significant journey ahead" may be an understatement -- an estimated 10 year migration would have several hurdles to manage.

NASA's Chris Kemp is working with the federal government's could computing working group. NASA CIO's Chris Kemp and Linda Cureton have blogs that I have been following for a while now. Chris managed the Google relationship and talks of the larger strategy with NASA and Google, Microsoft and Cisco. The NASA/Ames Research Center has the current #4 supercomputer (Pleiades), a SGI Altix ICE 8200 wiht a measly 51TB of memory.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra held a live chat several weeks back and has pretty ambitious plans for federal IT and data. You can see that even Vivek Kundra learned from Google -- the IT Dashboard site (very nice by the way) has a "beta" stamp on it.

Like many commercial data center consolidation projects, the federal government has about 70 data centers with "various levels of efficiency and availability that NASA is trying to contract to two outsourced data centers".

"Obama's fiscal 2010 budget proposal envisions optimizing cloud computing by "scaling pilots to full capabilities and providing financial support to accelerate migration," the budget stated. The fiscal plan acknowledges the effort will involve upfront costs, but the expense should be more than offset by savings from consolidating data centers."

Let's see -- one cloud with Google and one with Microsoft -- and then use all Cisco gear to network them together. :)

Check out the nextgov.com article here.

Emerson St. Louis Data Center

Today I attended the open house for the new Emerson Global data center in St. Louis. The data center and presenting staff were both very impressive. The data center, like many corporate initiatives we’ve heard about in recent years, was a consolidation project. Emerson consolidated over 100 data centers they had around the world in remote offices, acquired companies and such and made the St. Louis facility a showcase, done right from the start, high density facility to serve the enterprise. The consolidation project will continue overseas with Europe and Asia facilities.

Some quick specs from this impressive facility include:

35,000 square foot --- 12,000 sq. ft. raised floor and ultimately capacity for 5,000 servers

Anticipating a LEED Gold certification

7,800 square foot Solar array on the roof providing 100kW of power to the IT Load

Applied all 10 attributes of their own Energy Logic road map.

Designed to cope with a variety of natural and man-made disasters (earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, fires and telecom fiber cuts). The facility was built to withstand up to a F3 tornado or an earthquake up to 8.0 on the Richter scale.

Integrates numerous Emerson Network Power products – including Alber, Aperture, ASCO, Knurr and Liebert.

2 Caterpillar generators, with the capability to add 2 more.

72 hours of fuel on-site plus room to place an additional fuel tank.

Mostly new IT equipment populating the cabinets: Cisco, Dell, EMC and Sun.

Three layers of redundancy:

a. Dual utility feeds (separate physical paths into the building)

b. A and B side mechanical rooms / redundant UPS

c. N+1 Caterpillar generators

In Uptime Institute tier standards it comes about as close as you can to a tier IV data center. Dual-everything inside the building is used to the extent of having A & B telcom rooms where visiting technicians do not have to enter the data center or mechanical rooms to work on carrier equipment. There was great detail paid to the layout of the facility to ensure a separation of IT and facilities staff.

The LEED certification and renewable energy aspect to the facility was impressive. St. Louis based Fox Architects led a multi-disciplinary design and engineering team through years of

planning and 18 months of construction. Fox Architects also led the Monsanto data center project from a few years back. The solar array on the roof gives the ability to (manually) provide 100kW of DC power, directly to the IT load below. They use a Solectria Renewables Grid Tiered Photovoltaic inverter and boast that it is the largest solar array in the state of Missouri. The facility was originally planned to achieve silver LEED certification, but several items gave them additional points, such as approximately 80% of the waste generated during the construction has been diverted from landfills.

Site selection (to me) was a no-brainer, but primary reasons listed by Emerson were low power rates (typically 3-5 cents per kWh), low natural disaster risk, and low telecommunication rates. The sister site Emerson has in Marshalltown Iowa serves as a disaster recovery site and (now) vice versa.

As expected all of the latest and greatest Emerson products were used inside the facility.

Emerson even makes a component inside the Caterpillar generators used. There was amazing use and integration with their Site Scan and Aperture Vista products. A lobby television displays an interactive one-line diagram of their power infrastructure that can also be viewed on their internal corporate network. Site Scan is the dashboard for viewing a wide variety of data on the facility, load, IT equipment and other critical components. Emerson also incorporated the strategies and technologies advocated in their Energy Logic roadmap for improving efficiency. For instance they used a 240 volt power distribution architecture instead of the typical 208V. Aperture Vista is used for facility operations and future planning.

The “Liebert Adaptive Architecture” was seen in action throughout the facility:

1. Liebert DS precision cooling system

2. Liebert NXL on-line UPS

3. Liebert XD Cooling module (used when they had blades or higher density in a cabinet)

4. The web based monitoring of Site Scan

5. Liebert FDC power distribution cabinet

6. Liebert MPX adaptive rack PDU. This was just pretty darn cool. The word ‘adaptive’ is key here. It’s modular, re-configurable, supports NEMA and IEC, has SNMP and a host of other metrics and monitoring capabilities. The product is not yet released, but I was able to find this German Knurr brief on it – here.

The IT equipment going in to phase 1 of this facility will include around 400 servers plus storage and network gear. They intend to use blade systems (Sun I assume) and have approximately a 15:1 virtualization ratio. All network distribution to the cabinets is fiber. Following the dual-everything approach, each cabinet is fed A and B side fiber runs and there is NO copper in the under-floor trays. The 3 foot raised floor serves all electrical connectivity, cable trays for communication and FM200 protection.

The FM200 distribution under-floor was interesting to me. With so much going on under the floor the thought was to put out the fire in this 3 foot raised area, but not above floor for the IT equipment. Above floor fire protection comes in the form of pre-action dry pipe. This is also then used in power equipment rooms that are on slab.

Designed to be a lights-out facility, the on-site staff may just achieve that if they sit still too long and the motion-detection lights shut off. J CNN was playing on the TV in the lobby, which means cable, which means the St. Louis Cardinals SURELY are on whenever the boss isn’t around.

New Paetec Data Center

Communications provider Paetec announced Thursday that they are opening an advanced data center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

"The 6,500 square feet of space available for customers includes the newest advancements in equipment with connectivity up to 10 Gbps, more energy efficient devices, higher cooling capacity to meet the increasingly powerful applications and a new Bi-Fuel power system providing redundant power generation fueled by conventional diesel, or a cleaner combination of diesel and natural gas. The center is also served by a diverse power grid, separate from New York City and Philadelphia, offering further resiliency in the event of a wide-scale brown-out or power outage in the area."

The press release mentiones Paetec's data center solutions -- at fast.net ; but I am unable to get a web page to resolve at that address. According to archive.org the fast.net site dropped off in late 2007. More information on hosting/colocation off of the Paetec web site can be found here.

UPDATE: Not sure if it was my connection or their site down last night --- fast.net is now resolving for me.

Renewable Energy Roundup

I've run across several items recently of interest in terms of smartgrids, new energy sources and reports on renewable energy.

Blue is the new Green

THE man, Mr. Bob Metcalfe (small invention known as Ethernet) -- is a partner in Polaris Venture Partners, a group of "experienced venture capital investors and technology executives." Polaris backs many IT and life science businesses and has an Enertech portfolio that is pretty impressive. Bob Metcalfe has a very interesting SlideShare presentation titled Internet History Applied to Solving Energy. This was from the March presentation at GigaOm's Green:Net -- I must have missed that, but this presentation is pretty cool.

Frost & Sollivan also have a nice SlideShare presentation on Utility-Scale (Grid) Energy Storage Development. Bulk Energy Storage + Power Generation = Grid Modernization

The DOE announced today up to $52.5 Million for concentrating solar power research and development.

The 20% Wind report card was released last week -- B overall, Transmission lags at C-. "National Policy Commitment Urgently Needed to Ensure Greater Use of Clean, Abundant Energy Source". Check out the report here.

Technology Review had an article yesterday about upgrading the electrical grid in the U.S. if it is to increase the use of renewable energy resources. "But plans to string new high-voltage lines to bring wind power from the midsection of the country to the coasts, where most of the demand is, could be expensive and unnecessary, and a distraction from more urgent needs, some experts say."

Also reported yesterday -- treehugger.com has an article on Baltimore's massive smart grid program where 2 million meters are being installed. Earth2tech also has an article on this.

Treehugger.com also reports that a new U.S. renewable energy record was set: 13% of total electric generation in April 2009.

I've seen a number of things online now about energy transmission problems and to lend to that, last week T. Boone Pickens announced that his plans to build the $10 Billion, 4,000 megawatt, Pampa Wind project are on hold. Energyworld.com article with the rest of the details here.

Superb Intnernet Hosting - New Virginia Data Center

Superb Internet announced the opening of a new data center today, located in Springfield, Virginia. DCA3 compliments its two existing data centers in McLean, VA and Seattle, WA. The new facility will facilitate a continued strong demand for data center space and they will offer dedicated servers as well as colocation services.

Check out the press release here.

SGI/Rackable ICECube Deployment Video

SGI/Rackable has some new media on their site for the ICE Cube Modular Data Center. I think this container has been one of my favorites ever since I saw it at a DataCenter World conference. It is really pretty unique in the container market -- if you get SGI servers inside. They take the fans out of the servers and are able to get amazing density: 1400U of available space and up to 22,400 processing cores. If you haven't seen inside of an ICE Cube - check out this video.

Check out this page on their site for a new product video, plus a nice white paper about their "Next Generation Data Center Infrastructure".

The Greenest Supercomputer

SGI performed quite well in the semi-annual ranking of the world's TOP500 Supercomputer sites this past June. They had the #4 supercomputer -- the Pleiades - Altix ICE 8200EX at the NASA/Ames Research Center. Although not an official award, they also were heralded as the industry's "greenest" supercomputer, as measured by performance efficiency.

Performance efficiency, or “LINPACK efficiency,” measures the ratio between maximum performance (RMax) and peak performance (RPeak). SGI dominated this new category with 12 of the 20 most performance-efficient supercomputers in the world."

Additionally the SGI Altix ICE cluster is the first time that an x86 scalar-based system outperformed vector-based systems.

Last week SGI/Rackable announced their x86 scale-out servers to support both on-board Quad Data Rate 40Gb InfiniBand and 10Gb Ethernet connections.

"The features of the expanded Rackable x86 server lines include dual QSFP InfiniBand/Ethernet ports at up to 40 Gb/s (gigabits-per-second), Intel Xeon 5500 series "Nehalem" processors, including the top-bin W5580 running at 3.2 GHz, and large memory capability with up to 96 GB (gigabytes) of ECC registered DDR3 DIMMs. It is also power optimized with over 90 percent voltage regulator module efficiency on the server board, which perfectly complements SGI’s up-to-96.5 percent-efficient power supplies."

96GB of memory! One of the things that made me such a fan of SGI was a computer I saw in 1994; a SGI with 4GB of memory (which was a TON back then). It ran a flight simulator that looked Amazing.....

Tech Industry M&A Activity

It's always fun to speculate about IPO's, mergers and acquisitions. In the tech industry it happens so often it's hard to keep track of who bought who and how long ago it was.

My current train of thought on the topic surrounded the recent news of CoreSite. CoreSite is a Carlyle Group company, which as I mentioned before is a HUGE global private equity company. I wondered if CoreSite would do an IPO in the near future. Carlyle invested in Equinix in 1999 -- their site says "acquired" in 1999. Equinix then raised $240 Million in their IPO a year later.

Some other interesting ones I have seen a few times:

• Savvis and Global Crossing

• Level 3 and Spint Nextel?

With all of the news Cisco has made lately, there could be some acquisitions by the other big players to get deeper into the networking market:

• Either IBM or HP to buy Juniper or Brocade ?

I refuse to believe that Cisco would buy EMC, but do think they could/should buy NetApp. Or maybe Isilon Systems?

Either HP or Cisco could by F5

All speculation -- but the tech industry M&A activity does seem to be picking up.

CoreSite Prepares 20,000 sq. ft In Their Chicago Data Center

I've always been pretty impressed with CoreSite (formerly CRG West). They've been a solid company, in the data center business for quite some time, and they stay innovative. A few months back they announced a partnership with Verari and the FOREST containers. Recently they re-branded to CoreSite, a Carlyle Company. I remember many years ago asking my boss who the Carlyle Group was, and he answered something like " a H U G E global private equity firm." Today Carlyle announced $1.04 Billion to support high growth in Asian businesses.

Once again proving Chicago to be a hot data center market, CoreSite announced today the completion of 20k square feet of new space at the downtown Chicago data center. The space provides 2MWs of power and immediate occupancy. The Lasalle site offers low latency and direct connectivity to major financial exchanges as well as multiple domestic and international carriers.

Equinix Wins Engergy Innovator Award

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group Energy Summit, held yesterday, gave Equinix the Power Energy Innovator Award. The ceremony held at Stanford recognized their nearly $1 million in rebates received from the city of Santa Clara for energy efficiency measures implemented. Equinix optimized efficiencies at its Silicon Valley 2 (SV2) data center.

"As a part of Equinix’s expansion at its SV2 center, the company implemented a variety of efficient procedures, such as installing air-side economizers that use the outside air to provide “free cooling” and drastically reduce the amount of mechanically produced cold air needed for the center. This system has resulted in energy savings of more than 4,000,000 kWh and $300,000 per year. Equinix also installed variable frequency drive (VFD) fans that allow for greater efficiency by operating at reduced fan speeds when there is a lower demand for air distribution."

Check out the press release here.

Equinix stock has done quite well the last 3 months, starting at $55.67 March 30th and then closing up 3.66 at $72.74 today. Analysts at Morgan Joseph initiated coverage of Equinix with a 'buy' rating, and set a target price of $100.

Wikinvest has some nice new features on their site -- worth a look!

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Broadband Conduit Deployment Act of 2009

The Broadband Conduit Deployment Act of 2009, or H.R. 2428, would "require many of the so-called 'shovel-ready' projects funded by the stimulus bill earlier this year to also lay conduits capable of carrying fiber optic cables." Two Democratic Senators announced a measure today that would require states to build 'tubes' for internet fiber optic cables under every bit of highway they build or modify with with federal funds.

Check out the Wired.com article here

Data Centers In The Desert

Forbes has a very nice article on i/o Data Centers - the cool company in the hot Phoenix desert. They interview President Anthony Wanger and ask why the Phoenix area has been such a hot bed of activity for corporate data centers and i/o Data Centers growth.

Check out the article here

Phoenix NAP

A 160k square foot retrofit will be the home of the first data center for Global Datacenter Trust. The company announced ground breaking for the facility, dubbed Phoenix NAP on Thursday. The facility will have more than 20 megawatts of power, 2N redundancy all the way back to the substation, a 3000 sq. ft meet-me room, and modular chilled water plants.

Although this is the first data center for GDCT -- they are a private equity firm made up of operational, networking and management professionals that have worked in the industry since the 1990's. "the difference" as they claim, is ping, power, pipe and people.

Check out their web site here and a Phoenix Business Journal article here

The facility is located just south of the airport in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Testing Cisco's Media-Centric Data Center

Lightreading.com has an excellent article about the tests they ran against Cisco IP video infrastructure, applications, and data. The report is broken out into the various areas and equipment, and disects the claims that Cisco makes on their hardware and software.

Storage Area Networks

Unified Fabric

Virtual Machine Relocation

Data Center Convergence

In-Service Software Upgrade

Control Plane Failover

Check out the report here

Tech Innovations Cool Data Centers

The Environmental Leader site has a nice story on data center cooling methods. The main part of the article talks about the GlaxoSmithKline data center in Brentford, UK that installed a water chiller cooled by the Grand Union Canal that runs along side the building.

The article also discusses Sentialla's Energy Manager For Data Centers. Very interesting read -- check it out here.

Cisco and Duke Energy Partner for Smart Grid Development

Cisco and Duke Energy announced a partnership today to fast-track the development of Duke Energy's smart grid. Duke serves 11 million people over 5 states and later this year will launch a five year mass deployment of smart grid technology.

"Cisco, working closely with Duke Energy, will develop a highly refined, end-to-end, smart grid communications architecture – one that both companies believe will be among the most comprehensive and interoperable in the electric utility industry."

Check out the press release here.

New Cisco Data Center For Allen, Texas

Cisco announced today that they will build a 140,000 - 160,000 square foot data center in Allen, Texas. The facility is reported to cost $500 Million, employ 100 people and (wait for it....) Cisco will receive tax incentives. Cisco stock closed up 1.06% today at $20.08

The Allen Economic Development Corporation has a nice report on the the Data Center proposal for the Stacy Road location that Cisco is most likely building on. Good power, fiber connectivity and financial incentives = data center site selection. The local utility for this area, Oncor announced last week that the "World's largest concentration of smart grid voltage compensation equipment placed in service by Oncor".

Allen Texas is about 25 miles north of downtown Dallas. There is also a sizable Cingular data center just a little bit south of the Cisco site in Allen.

Check out the press release here

Here is a map of the Allen, Texas data center site

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Qwest Nixes Plans To Sell Long-Haul Network

At an estimated value of around $4 Billion Qwest announced today confirming that they will not be selling their long-haul network. I have to agree with the Telecom Ramblings blog in that this was just a trial and if they didn't like the bids today, it won't stop them from reconsidering an offer later in the year.

Check out the Qwest Press Release here

There is a nice history lesson of the 1984 AT&T break-up and the resulting baby bells on the Wikinvest site.

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Northern Indiana - Latest High-Tech Hub

Like I was saying in my last post -- the data center news is getting predictable:

____insert city name here____ is poised to become a high-tech hub, thanks to a change in state law that allows __________.

This time around: Northern Inidana, where they have passed a law that allows for personal property tax exemptions on data center equipment. The announcement is complete with benefits for Metronet, a quote from EYP Critical Facilities Servcies, and a the Senator who authored the bill.

Colocation and managed service provider Gramtel is located in South Bend, Indiana. Gramtel was acquired by Cincinnati Bell in January 2008.

It just shows how the data center industry continues to be a hot business and states are foaming at the mouth to get that business to locate in their state.

Check out the press release here.

I meant to mention this a few weeks back, but if you haven't checked out datacentermap.com lately ......CHECK it out! Sune has been busy on this site and the additions (since the last time I had seen it) are really cool. There are data center profiles, maps, tenants, connectivity and more!

North Carolina Passes Tax Code for Apple

Get ready for the shocking news... :) NC House passes tax code that could bring Apple data center. It seems like these mega data center announcements are pretty cookie-cutter as far as 'how' the deal goes down. Months and months of stealth mode, a "leak" of information, tax breaks written for data center "companies" and so on. The funny thing in this arstechnica article is that "the bill isn't tied to any particular company" and then a little later... "those conditions include investing $1 Billion dollars". :)

The Cliff Notes:

1. $1 Billion data center
2. 100 full time staff members initially
3. up to $46 Million in tax credits over the next 10 years
4. could save Apple $300 Million if the company operated the data center for 30 years

Check out the article here.

i/o Data Centers To Offer ICE Cube Modular Data Center

I have followed i/o Data Centers for a while now. Today I ran across a press release that furthers my theory about containers and the colocation market, as well as supporting the overall container momentum.

SGI / Rackable announced that it recently shipped its ICE Cube modular data center to i/o Data Centers to address clients' evolving data center needs. The press release is about 95% marketing and specs on the ICE Cube, so I have to wonder what exactly i/o is going to do with the containers other than 'offer' them to customers. Still -- I applaud them for embracing it and making it a product offering.

Last month CRG West announced it was offering Verari Systems FOREST containers to its customers.

Data Center Stock Market News

Just a couple of items I noticed today in regards to the data center stocks I monitor. First, is an update to the data center stock index I started last year. It has been a roller coaster -- here is the latest graph:

More details on what the index is comprised of can be found here.

The Dow Jones Internet Composite Index has also been graphing quite nicely the last 3 months.

The second story was one I some how missed last week -- Wachovia resumed coverage of the data center space. They immediately rated Equinix and Switch & Data with OUTPERFORM.

"Both companies have high visibility into its revenue base and low churn driven by 1 – 3+ year contracts with escalators. EQIX, SDXC, and other network neutral data centers benefit from a supply demand imbalance due to growth in IP and internet traffic and limited available space close to fiber hubs for telecom equipment and networking gear"

Also late last week submarine transport cable provider Hibernia announced they have expanded into Equinix's LD4 London Slough IBX data center.

Earlier today Datacenterknowledge reported on VMWare taking a 5% stake in Terremark. In terms of institutional ownership, that puts them in 2nd place, behind Ashford Capital Management, who has a 7.98% stake. I thought the comment on the BusinessWeek investing site was interesting:

"There is significant interest in TMRK by institutional investors. The 29.13% of the shares outstanding that they control represents a greater percentage of ownership than at almost any other company in the Specialty Telecommunications industry."

Data Center Degrees

Nope -- not a blog post about temperatures and cooling in the data center -- this time I'm talking about educational degrees. ITJungle.com reports on Metropolitan Community College (MCC), in Omaha reinventing its General IT curriculum. They are adding specialized course work realting to the IBM Power Systems i Platform - and launching a two-year educational track called Data Center Management. With Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all in their back yard - combined with online courses, MCC should have a lot of demand for these courses.

"MCC received a three-year $1.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor with the goal of increasing the number of students in IT education. Building and developing the data center and the management is part of the grant."

Check out the IT Jungle article here

Last week the Wall Street Journal had an article about "Google Searches for Staffing Answers". It discussed Google HR and their approach to solving the brain drain problem. What better or more appropriate way for them to solve it, than with an algorithm. Check out the interesting article here.

Fremont, NE Data Center Study

Apparently Freemont, Nebraska lost out on a bid for a Yahoo data center.  A study was then done to determine whether Fremont was a suitable location for a data center.  The study findings show a spot on the north edge of town that would be idea.  The main selling point for the city is power -- 30 megawatts.  While it may not have been enough for Yahoo, they point out it is perfect for the smaller, Enterprise data centers.

Fremont is about 35 miles north-west of Omaha.

Check out the Fremont Tribune article here

Yahoo Data Center Planned for New York

It looks like Yahoo is planning another mega data center, this time in Western New York.  The Wall Street Journal reports that state officials are working with Yahoo to establish the new data center and that the Governor asked the Power Authority to come up with low-cost power (which is why I was suprised to hear the news in the first place).

Late last month Yahoo reported a strong balance sheet with $3.7 Billion in cash and marketable debt.  

Check out the article here

Insert Catchy Cloud Computing Title Here

For the most part I stay away from articles or links about cloud computing -- it's just too crowded right now and I have too much to read, let alone write about.  I have, however run across several good links lately that I wanted to share:

Many sites and blogs have coverered the move from Microsoft to Digital Realty Trust for Michael Manos.  I thought the May 5th post on his blog - Forecast Cloudy with Continued Enterprise - was particularly good.  The beginning reminded me of reading Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: an excellent book.  I think Digital Realty Trust will be an excellent fit for Michael and thank him for generously sharing his wisdom in his blog.

Also on Cinco de Mayo was a post from Sam Johnston on "Is OCCI the HTTP of Cloud Computing?"  OCCI is the OGF's Open Cloud Computing Interface - who provides the interface to Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.  Has anyone asked Tim Berners-Lee about this yet?

Apparently Akamai, formerly a Content Delivery Network company, is now a Cloud Provider.  Ummm... ok

Google had a couple of notes on cloud computing recently.  Co-founder Sergey Brin posted the 2008 Founders' Letter on the Google blog, and discussed cloud computing.  CEO Eric Schmidt, at a press event, dismissed Android questions in favor of talking about the cloud, models and strategies.

Forrester Research recognized 3Tera's Applogic as the leading "cloud infrastructure software offering available today".

Wind Energy

For anyone that has read my blog for a while, you will know that I have a side interest in Wind Energy. Power and renewable energy sources are obviously huge issues for the data center industry and since I live in one of the top wind energy producing states, it has always been of interest to me. Tonight I read two lines from an article about a Berkshire Hathaway meeting that piqued my interest.

"Berkshire is investing heavily on wind energy, especially in Iowa. "We'll continue to be a leader" in wind power, Buffett said. They'll also invest in additional utility businesses."

Berkshire lists MidAmerican Energy Holdings, based in Des Moines, IA as a subsidiary company. MidAmerican has some large wind projects in Iowa. As much as wind power is picking up in popularity around the world, I have to wonder what projects (specifically) Bershire is investing in.

After reading the above quote I turned on the TV (Science Channel of course) and watched one of those "future world" type programs. One of the segments was on a huge wind farm in Denmark that was producing double-digit megawatts of electricity. I 'think' they were referring to the Middelgrunden Wind Turbine Co-operative, off the coast of Amager, Denmark. I of course proceeded straight to online maps and Google Earth to check it out.

• You can see the line of wind turbines from Google Earth / Maps
• Google Earth also noted a few Panoramio photos (here and here, and here)
  
• Microsoft Live Maps has a nice bird's eye view of the turbines

An October 2008 article at Treehugger has an aritcle on the wind farm - stating that it will have 207 Megawatts by 2010.

Exiting times for Wind power as a renewable energy!

UPDATE: Thanks Sune Christesen for a link to Offshore Wind Farms - complete with a Google Earth Placemark collection!

Intel's Green Power

I have run across several news items about Intel Inc. lately and thought I would share.  

The first was a ComputerWorld article last week about the EPA Study on energy saving opportunities in servers and data centers.  Intel has been working closely with the EPA to develop the new data center energy performance rating.  About a month ago Intel launched their 5500 series processors and their Data Center Efficiency Challenge.  

The second and third items were Forbes.com articles.  The first one I actually read about in an archaic media form called a....... "magazine".  :)    Luckly, there was an online version of the same thing.  This article discusses how Intel is spending $7 Billion (with a B) to downsize its chips.  I guess there are buildings more expensive than data centers to build!  The second article was discussing how well situated Intel is in the current recession.  $3.5 Billion in cash, $4.2 Billion in short-term securities, and a gross margin of 46%!

The fourth item is actually how I started this blog post -- The EPA announced their list of the largest green power purchasers in the U.S. and Intel ranked #1!  You can find the National Top 50 list here.  I also then checked out a 'provider' company that seemed to be used a lot by the top 50 companies - 3Degrees.  

Since I am a maps fanatic and like to look at Fortune 500 corporate campuses (from Google Maps) I had an urge to map the top 10 in the EPA's Green Power Purchasers list.  

View EPA National Top 50 in a larger map

Visualizing the Power Grid

When I did my site selection white paper I loved looking at various maps of the U.S. to depict a number of different things.  Tonight I ran across a new set of maps and very interesting information (link courtesy of my  brother-in-law).

NPR is running a series titled "Electricity in America".    This map, Visualizing the Grid, shows power lines, power plants, sources of power and other data overlays.  

Now....if only the overlays could have been Google Earth layers...  :)

Equinix Q1 Profit Triples at $15.5 Million

Equinix announced their first quarter 2009 results today. Proving that the demand for colocation and data center services is still high, they had some good numbers:

• Increased quarterly revenues to $199.2 million, a 4% increase over the previous quarter and 26% increase over the same quarter last year.
• "Capital expenditures in the first quarter were $75 million, of which $10.3 million was attributed to ongoing capital expenditures and $64.7 million was attributed to expansion capital expenditures"
• For the second quarter of 2009, Equinix expects revenues to be in the range of $206 to $210 million

On their Investors web page there is a spreadsheet full of "non-financial" metrics that I found pretty interesting. For example:

• "head count" is up 226 people from Q1 2008
• It's funny how colo customers are 'somewhat' seasonal. They had 160 new customers in Q1 2008 and 161 in Q1 2009
• 10 Gig Exchange ports has more than doubled in the past year
• "Managed infrastructure Services % of recurring revenue" has not budged a single percentage since Q1 2008.
  

There is also a fairly detailed '2007-2010 Announced Expansions' PDF here.

The Seeking Alpha blog had a nice post on Monday on Equinix and the colocations sector.

When searching around for Equinix today I ran across a pretty interesting article at Forbes.com. It was from December 2, 1999. It gives the historical perspective on just how far Equinix has come..... I still put Jay Adelson as one of my top "Tech People to Know" list. Here is a quote from that 1999 article:

"Equinix announced an impressive $280 million in financing today, including a $200 million debt offering by Salomon Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Goldman Sachs. The remaining $80 million came from its initial backers--Cisco Systems csco (nasdaq: csco - news - people), Microsoft msft (nasdaq: msft - news - people), and Benchmark Capital--as well as a slew of new and less likely investors like Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and E*Trade Group egrp (nasdaq: egrp - news - people). So far the company has raised just more than $315 million."

Equinix closed down today -0.19 at $62.26 -- but shares rose 2% in Wednesday's extended trading.

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HP POD, Servers and Factory Express

I found a couple of YouTube videos (link from Mauricio Freitas) that were pretty interesting.

First -- Mauricio has a few pictures from a HP Storage POD - filled with 22 racks, each containing 160TB of storage. Just park that in my back yard and I'll be good to go!

Also on his blog he has videos of the HP Factory Express:




and information about the re-architected HP Servers (pretty cool stuff here):

Iceland Data Center Market

Just a quick post about an interesting documentary video on the Iceland Data Center Market (link from the Green Data Center blog). I know there have been many skeptics about this area being good for data centers, but they certainly have a lot of things coming together recently that make a case for them.

Level3 Financing $220M Loan

"Level 3 Financing, Inc., has received commitments from lenders to increase the borrowings under its existing $1.4 billion senior secured credit facility through the creation of a $220 million Tranche B loan"

That quote was from the StreetInsider.com article on the Level3 announcement. The loan is reported to be used for "general corporate purposes". I'm a techie - so I had to Google what "general corporate purposes" meant. :) Apparently it means we're going to get a ton of money to do what we want with it and not tell anyone.

Rob Powell at the Telecom Ramblings blog had a pretty funny April fools post about CEO James Crowe moving his office to an undisclosed monastery deep in the Himalayas. Rob also suggests that the cash could be used for purchasing Qwest longhaul -- which makes sense to me.

Last Thursday Level3 announced some new wavelength service offerings for network protection, additional bandwidth options and performance guarantees.

Level3 has posted their Red Couch interviews, taken at SXSW last month - including one from Matt Tanase from Rackspace.

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Xerox $100 million outsource deal to HCL Technologies

Xerox will pay $100 Million over six years for HCL Technologies to manage disaster recovery preparation and consolidate data centers across North America and Europe.

This article over on MarketWatch has the details and quite the discussion thread to follow.

Data Center Design

As I read the Pingdom article about "8 ways to make data centers less boring"....I recalled a TED talk I watched recently. The talk was from Don Norman, and I later learned that it was a speech from 2003! Anyway, it was a Really good talk and made me think about the overall design of a data center and how it makes you feel when seeing it.

I work in the colo industry, so we have to sell the data center as a product and after listening to Don Norman I can see how design, architecture and a number of other details effect how the data center is experienced by customers and employees alike.

Even the companies making data center containers today pay attention to the outside colors, layout of racks and shiny metal curves inside. Functionality, efficiency and cost will always trump .... because utlimately the data center has a sole purpose.....but why not put the little bit of effort into the principles that Don talks about and make it even better.

Check out Don's TED Talk here

P.S.: The 2008 talk from Mike Rowe (host of Dirty Jobs) is still by FAR the best one I have seen.

Monday Links - March 30, 2009

LOTS of news today, and not much time, so here you go.....


NYT: Rackable vows to outlast price war with Dell. Interesting story about Rackable and their history and strategy against Dell. I like Rackable....I don't think they are the right solution for 'everyone', but there is a lot of potential.

Rackable, along with Intel, Netapp and Akamai have probably bought a few steak dinners for Facebook executives lately. Data Center Knowledge reported today about them seeking up to $100 million to expand data centers. To compliment that post and the Businessweek article, I found these interesting:

• Niall Kennedy has a very nice write-up with an amazing amount of detail about Facebook operations, user stats and data centers.
• Fool.com also has a nice commentary about the TriplePoint Capital conversations and overall troubled state of banks with tech companies.

At the Intel Xeon 5500 launch today, Intel also announced a Data Center Efficiency challenge. It should be interesting to see what people submit for videos. Check out the Facebook page with contest rules and details here.

I can just feel the momentum going for container data centers.... and apparently CRG West gets it also. Data Center Knowledge reports on a partnership with CRG West and HP to deploy the HP POD container. Very cool stuff. Check out the press release here.

"Data Center Fabric" is fast becoming a big term for 2009. Juniper Networks outlined their vision and strategy today for the next generation data center fabric. David Yen's blog at Juniper also has some details on project 'Stratus' .... here.

"PFB Seeks 40 million pounds in Data Center Financing" . If my currency conversion is correct, that's about $57 million. Pinder Fry and Benjamin is a London-based real estate firm with an interesting data center investment portfolio. The Data Center Dynamics article states that "The company said this third round of funding would be used to invest in the sites to which it has already committed and new data center investments." The March 9 Offer Summary can be found here.

A magnitude 4.3 earthquake hit the bay area this morning -- about 16 miles east of San Jose. The interesting thing was that a new fault was discovered. No major damage was reported. Lots of tweets surrounded the event this morning as well. No news or impact on data centers that I have read about yet.

Check out the Phase 2 notes from Michael J. Morris on his data center project - with networking based on the Cisco Nexus-series line. It sounds like a very fun project

Finally -- this is an Iowa blog, so I have to say GO Gov. Culver Go! :) Governer Culver announced he had a positive, productive meeting with Microsoft today. The status of the West Des Moines data center hasn't changed, but at least it isn't cancelled. I am still SUPER curious to see if the Iowa facility will be the test bed for their 4th generation design.

5 days, 19 hours and 12 minutes until opening night of Baseball!!

GE 750kVA SG Series Digital Energy UPS

Yesterday GE Digital Energy (a division of General Electric) announced that its 750kVA SG Series Digital Energy UPS has been certified as an Ecoimagination product.

“As the IT industry’s demand for data storage grows significantly each year, so does the amount of energy needed to run servers and data centers,” said Larry Sollecito, President and CEO, GE Digital Energy. “GE’s investment in more energy efficient UPS technology helps data centers achieve a high level of energy efficiency without sacrificing high power capacity or reliability. A number of large data centers have already placed orders for the highly efficient 750kVA UPS.”

I'm going to have to look at this UPS a little closer. The press release touts some impressive cost savings figures.

Check out the press release here

and the product page here.

Monday Links

Just some quick links to things I found on the net today -- no time to comment; just things I found to be interesting.....

Check out the drawing in this IEEE Spectrum article. It looks like another approach to the Microsoft 4th Generation data center (outdoor container park)! The article is good also --- although it is kind of a summary of what has gone on the last 6-12 months....nothing new.

Power Grid Found Susceptible. I'm a big fan of SmartGrids, but like anything else they need to be EXTREMELY careful with this. Security firm IOActive is offering the security lesson....maybe a few rants from Christopher Hoff would help as well.

Just to show I'm not a complete Cisco fan-boy.... Force10 announced some big iron today. They unveiled a new line of switches and routers "designed to improve the performance, management and cost effectiveness of virtualized data center and cloud computing environments." Pretty cool stuff from an initial quick glance.

As many of you know, I blog from Iowa and simply can NOT escape the stupid stereotype about farmers. I've worked on a few IT projects in the past that were for, or benefited farmers, and so I thought this was interesting..... it's a map showing broadband in america -- percentage of farmers with high speed internet.

March 19 announcement from Rackable: "The CloudRack C2 servers can run at 104 degrees inside the data center, and they offload power supply to the rack to reduce energy wasted in converting AC electricity from the wall to DC electricity used by the box to 1 percent"

I'm usually on the same page as Om Malik.... but have to disagree with him on this one. He thinks Cisco should buy Sun, not IBM.