Brocade SAN Solution at U of Iowa

Brocade had a press release out yesterday explaining how their SAN directors had been implemented recently. I've always liked Brocade products, thought this was an interesting case study and thought I would see if my brother was paying attention to the blog. :)

Two 48000 Directors are the foundation of the SAN (Storage Area Network) and will scale to as many as 384 concurrently active 4 Gbit/sec ports in a single domain.

Check out the new/press release at CNN here

First LEED Gold Certification

The first Gold Certification for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) has been earned by Digital Realty Trust. The project was for a Fortune Global 500 company (i.e.: someone that could afford it) in Chicago.

The data center is 20,000 sq.ft of raised floor with 4000 kW of available IT load. They started this certification process more than a year ago and have several other projects expecting certifications soon.

Check out the press release here

The HD Web

A short while back I explained what a cool company Akamai was. Back in February of this year I made my prediction for 2007. Well, Akamai continues to blow me away, and I think the prediction was perhaps a little ahead of the market (hey Verizon, how long until I get FiOS?!!)

I forget where I ran across it, but Akamai has a new web site to showcase High Definition video capabilities through their network. It really is pretty amazing, and gets me excited for watching HD over the internet (as soon as the fiber comes to my house).

Check out their site here and cool explanation of it all here.

Green Data Center

Of the hundreds of articles we've all seen this year on the environment, saving energy, new energy sources and "the green data center", I wanted to point out two recent items I have read that I thought were particularly good.

The print version of the October 15th issue of EWeek ("The Green Issue"), has a lot of good information, statistics and news. I couldn't find a direct link to the issue, but here is their 5 Steps to Green IT.

Secondly, Matt Stansberry at Tech Target is releasing a chapter at a time of his E-book, The Green Data Center: Energy Efficient Computing in the 21st Century. The chapters I have read so far are excellent. Matt has a lot of good information, stats and industry trends. I am anxious for the chapters to come.

HP's Dynamic Smart Cooling

Just a quick link to an article about HP debuting their new 'smart' India data center. They claim it has achieved a 40% energy savings due to using their technologies and methodologies.

Check out the San Jose Mercury News article here

Data Center Outsourcing

I ran across a link in my email recently that was interesting, so I continued reading it. EDS has received a "Strong-Positive" rating from Gartner. This comes from the 2007 release of their "MarketScope for Data Center Outsourcing, North America".

EDS was one of 17 companies evaluated and manages over 100 data centers worldwide. Check out their press release here

I of course didn't have a spare $1,995 laying around for the full report, so I searched around - and found a good summary of the report. Unisys was listed on the report ("Positive" rating) and had the summary on their web site. There were a few companies I didn't recognize. I suppose I think too much of the colo companies and not those providing a data center as an outsourced service.

I wish I was able to purchase the report - it looks very thorough and does a nice job of spelling out the evaluation criteria and market segment. Here are some of the companies (with links) that were evaluated in the report:

Acxiom
ACS
Atos Origin
CapGemeni
CGI
CSC
EDS
HP
IBM
Infocrossing
Maintech
Northrup Grumman
Perot Systems
Savvis
Siemens
Sungard
Unisys
Vericenter (recently acquired by Sungard)

DC Site Selection

A long while back I mentioned that I was working on a site selection post for the blog. As I was working on it, I decided it was worthy of more than just a post.

I am happy to announce that I have finished a white paper on the topic of Data Center Site Selection. I welcome any and all comments and hope it is informative and helpful.

If you decide to link to the paper, I would ask that you link to this post instead of directly to the PDF.

Link: http://datacenterlinks.blogspot.com/2007/10/dc-site-selection.html

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Acrobat PDF File: Data Center Site Selection

Rath Consulting
October 2007

Good Code and Computing Overhead

Alistair Croll over at Earth2Tech has an excellent article on coding practices, coding complexity and the effect it has on the data center. It shows how complex our applications have come and all of the different components that go in to making it run.

I'm not sure I could do it justice in discussing or quoting, so check it out here.

Netapp DoD Data Migration

Enterprise Storage Forum has a pretty interesting story on the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) going from 18 data centers to 2. They virtualized the middleware and consolidated data with Network Appliance's Virtual File Manager (VFM).

In addition to consolidating the servers, DCMA also needed to set up a common file system that would work across the enterprise. For this it created a File Area Network (FAN) using software and storage appliances from Network Appliance. DCMA has more than 300TB of storage.

I think we will continue to see stories like this as large projects are under way to consolidate, virtualize and setup common file systems and platforms across the enterprise.

Check out the article here

Server Farm Goes Solar

Server farm company AISO (Affordable Internet Services Online) has built a 2,000 sq. ft. facility, banked with solar panels that generate 12 kilowatts of electricity. Located south of Las Angeles they claim to be 100% solar powered.

To slash energy consumption, AISO.net switched from 120 individual servers to four IBM blades running virtualization software that lets one computer do the work of multiple machines. The cooling system cranks up for only about 10 minutes an hour, and when the outside temperature drops to 60 degrees, air is sucked into the building to cool the servers. Solar tubes built into the roof illuminate the facility's interior.

Check out the CNN article here and AISO site with further details on the implementation here.

Akamai Enters the Data Center

Akamai is a pretty amazing company. They have been around since 1999, survived the dot com bust, losing their co-founder Danny Lewin in the 9/11 attacks and continue to be an innovative company among growing competition.

Today they announced a new application acceleration service. As product marketing manager Neil Cohen explains it, it takes traffic off the WAN and substitutes the Internet. The service utilizes their 27,000 + web points of presence world wide.

Akamai's software achieves faster response times by optimizing Internet routing, the vendor claims. Its server-based software opts, not for the default shortest path first as data traverses the network, but for a route that may look longer on a map but turn out to offer better response time. "We find good latency and an available path," Cohen states. Akamai also adds transport flow optimization and protocol optimization, he adds.

Pricing will be similar to their web application acceleration service. Akamai has had several trial customers for the service that claim to have recorded significant cost savings. Akamai shares jumped 8.7% on the news.

Check out the information in the following places:

Byte and Switch
Red Herring
Internet News
Reuters

Terremark Building in Virginia

Totaling 450,000 sq. ft., Terremark is starting on the first 50,000 sq.ft of their data center in Culpeper County Virginia. The $250 million project is expected to put Culpeper County on the map.

With existing facilities in Florida and California, Terremark is looking to provide a little more safety, security and government compliance with the Virginia site. Culpeper is apprixmately 66 miles south west of Washington D.C.

Check out the WHIR news article here (complete with misspelling Culpeper county as a country) :)


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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.