BGP Reform

Just a quick post (because the interesting information is in the article) on efforts underway by the Internet Research Task Force.

Check out this Network World article on research being done to radically change the Internet's core routers and way that BGP works.

WAN Optimization

Something I have always been simultaneously very interested in and confused by is the wide area network. WAN technologies, optimization and accelerators are creeping up in headlines all over the place. With data centers growing in number and consolidation projects pushing data from geographically disperse locations, the WAN is becoming increasingly important to build and operate. This post is really just to aggregate the information I have run across, help myself understand it better, and with any luck, help someone else interested in the topic as well.

Hardware

• Matisse Networks has some pretty cool products for what they are calling the "first optical burst switch, purpose-built for scaling metro and campus networks from 10 to 640 Gbps." Their equipment and technology allows you to scale the metro area network beyond 10Gbps while reducing the capital expenditures needed to accomplish it. Optical burst switching combines Ethernet and the enormous bandwidth of DWDM . Matisse is touting it as the next step in the evolution of optical network products ( Fixed wavelength --> Reconfigurable DWDM --> Optical Burst). A whitepaper explaining the technology and products can be found here
  

• Nyquist Capital has a nice post on Ciena products, optical transport and the future of carrier ethernet. They give an interesting analysis into the market scenarios for Metro Ethernet:

"There are four Metro Ethernet scenarios that we see developing.

1. Simple L2 aggregation combined with transport. Limited support for legacy interfaces and no support for TDM. Limited traffic management and service awareness.
2. The God box. Support for TDM grooming, L2 switching and perhaps even MPLS routing.
3. Sophisticated L2 switching and L3 routing. Deep packet classification and traffic management. No support for TDM.
4. The stupid network. Buy dirt cheap commodity transport equipment and manage everything at the wavelength level. Backhaul everything to enormous Cisco and Juniper routers and sort it out there."

• Paketeer keeps coming up in the WAN market for a number of products, acquisitions and alliances. Check out their PacketShaper System Architecture here

• Click here to check out the Gartner 2006 WAN Optimization Controller Magic Quadrant report.

• Here are some Cisco implementation stories of their Wide Area Application Services solution

WAN Optimization/Acceleration

• Mark Weiner over at the Cisco Data Center Networks blog talks briefly about WAN optimization. He mentions a company that saved 3.2TB (Terabits) of WAN traffic and related expenses within a one month period!

• An interesting lessons learned story comes from Byte and Switch article about Kansas City based 360 Architecture. Theirs is a story of WAN optimizers and consolidation of SAN resources. The article explains their problem, vendor evaluation and eventual 4X improvement in WAN speeds.

• Processor has a market overview of the technologies and vendors in the optimization/acceleration space. A Forrester Research research report shows Riverbed and Juniper Networks leading the market.

Fiber

Finally - the fiber networks themselves are getting attention as well. The attraction of owning your own private fiber network was underscored by Paetec Holding acquiring Mcleod USA for $492 million in stock. Check out the details and article here

Data Center Consolidation

As if we needed further proof that data center consolidations are top of the to-do list for IT departments....

CIO Today has a nice article where they surveyed 29 state CIO's and 80% had developed, proposed or had a consolidation plan in progress. As with the last post...it's interesting to gain some insight to how other organizations have their IT structured. Perhaps a little scary in the case of some of the stories in this article. :)

Check out the article here

World's Largest SANs

Byte and Switch has an initial article on what they are calling the World's largest SAN environments. They give some interesting, if not brief, descriptions of the SANs for JP Morgan Chase, U.S. DoD, NASA, San Diego Supercomputer Center and Lawrence Livermore National Labroatory.

These organizations have pushed over the petabyte level and the goal of the study by Byte and Swtich is to see how companies scale their storage infrastructure and what vendors they are working with. It was interesting to me to see how many are using SGI (I still really like SGI)

Assuming they will divulge more about this list in the future, I'll be anxious to read more of the details. Besides....forget about Petabytes -- let's talk Exabytes!

Check out the Byte and Switch article here

Green Data Centers

I have avoided posting too many things on green data centers or programs that are being announced for new 'green' initiatives. If you read my blog there is an exceptionally good chance that you run across a few dozen stories a day on the topic. My personal favorite is the IBM ad where they are taking green paint to the walls of the data center. I don't have anything against the initiatives or press on the subject -- it's just a little overwhelming at times.

Tonight I ran across a very nice article though, that summarized all of the recent news, initiatives and other tidbits quite nicely. It also has a number of links out to websites with all of the pertinent information.

In the article, Bruce Myatt from EYP Mission Critical Facilities covers:

• The July EPA report and plans to congress ( I agree that this report is a must-read for anyone in the data center business)
  
• Initiatives summary for Sun, IBM, Dell, HP, Fujitsu, 365 Main, LBNL and others
• Finally and perhaps most intriguing is the following quote:

Finally, an anonymous Internet giant in the neighborhood is said to be developing a “fan free” air circulation system to cool its servers. Relying upon natural convection and server fans only, their data centers may require no computer room air-conditioner units or plug fans at all to drive the air circulation in their data centers. Now, that is progress!

Also -- as Rich Miller mentioned today, the DOE is joining the Green Grid.

Check out the article from Bruce in CSE Magazine here

TEAM Companies - Expansion

TEAM Companies has a second announcement, shortly after the story of the new Madison, WI Data Center. TEAM is also planning a $10 million expansion of their Cedar Falls, Iowa data center. The expansion, 15,000 sq.ft, would double the current footprint.

"Our facility in Cedar Falls is filled. That's the great news," Kittrell said. "But we have more Iowa companies that are looking for our services. So we never like to be in the position where we don't have anything to sell."

Check out the Waterloo Courier article here

Iowa Company Builds New Data Center

Just a quick follow-up post on the announcement yesterday from TEAM Companies.

Check out an article in Forbes on the announcement here.

TEAM Breaks Ground on New Data Center

TEAM Companies held a groundbreaking ceremony today for a new Data Center in the Fitchburg Technology Campus near Madison, Wisconsin. “This groundbreaking is another major step for the Madison area, adding capabilities to a region that is already an innovation hotbed for Information Technology", stated TEAM Companies’ VP of Development Mark Kittrell.

Stating the desire of companies to locate their data centers in secure and obscure places, TEAM focuses on the secondary markets like Madison, WI, Cedar Falls, IA and other upper midwest locations. “We have a proven method of designing, building and operating world-class data centers,” says Kittrell.

TEAM brings a 'lease' option to companies faced with the decision of whether to build their own facility or not. Leasing data center space allows a business to let someone else worry about the operational and overhead aspects of running a data center.

Madison and its suburb of Fitchburg are close and yet far enough to be a perfect location for this type of facility; it allows clients to store their data “off site” from their offices, but it’s also close enough for them to get to their servers within an hour or two. Fitchburg also has plentiful and relatively inexpensive power.

The Fitchburg location will house a 50,000 square foot office building and 20,000 square foot data center.

Everyone Wants a Data Center

Columbia, Missouri thinks it would be a "good fit" for the data center industry. They have hired Angelou Economics of Austin, Texas to evaluate the area and see what it needs to do to increase the potential of attracting a data center.

"A REDI (Regional Economic Development Inc.) economic development report to the City Council, prepared with the consultant’s input, said the combination of a skilled workforce and the presence of a large research university are important criteria for attracting a high-tech firm. Good quality of life — with low crime, strong public schools and affordable housing — is also important."

Check out the article here

NSF Data Center Grant

A 3 year, $200,000 grant was awarded to Dr. Xiaorui Wang at the University of Tennessee. The grant will be in support of a proposal he submitted titled “CSR--PDOS: A Holistic Framework for Power and Performance Control in Data Centers.”

"...research which applies a multi-input/multi-output control theory, organizing power consumption and the application of a high-density server on a large-scale data center. This proposal of Dr. Wang’s was chosen from a collection of 410 other proposals presented to the NSF Computer Systems Research."

Check out the article here

Google Dalles Pictures

I haven't taken any photos of the Council Bluffs Google Data Center yet, but thanks to Information Week there are photos of the Dalles, Ore. facility.

Check out the nice photo album of the facility and surroundings here.

Blog Day 2007

Since it is Blog Day 2007 I thought I would put my two cents in (or 5 links). More than 90% of my blogroll is tech related, so this is some what of a challenge to come up with non-tech blogs. I like the idea though and hope that you find these enjoyable.

1. thesimpledollar.com Financial Talk for the rest of us
2. 24-7 Family History Circle Blog from Ancestry.com
3. Dan Pink Author of A Whole New Mind (favorite book of mine I read recently)
4. Happy Neuron I just like the title :) (good site though)
5. Digitally Imported My favorite online radio station

Storage Service Provider (SSP)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Netapp Cogeneration

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

Very much worth a read.

Check out the article here

Google: Council Bluffs Update

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

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

Check out the article here.

DataSynapse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the article here

Virtualization: I'm OK, You're OK

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

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

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

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

What I did on my Summer Vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data Center 3.5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data Center vs. Data Centre

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


Hopefully Public Relations 4.0 is next.

DNS Re-binding Attacks

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


PDF here
Slides here