virtualization stuff

Cloud Security - Is cloud the industry Monorail?

2012-01-11T07:03:00.000-08:00

For those of you not familiar with the Simpsons animated TV series, the title of the entry comes from Episode 413 - Marge vs. the Monorail. It became a widely used reference for ideas that could not stand up to logic, but became real when people's passions overtook their logic. In a nutshell - After Mr. Burns is caught storing his excess nuclear waste inside Springfield Park’s trees, he is ordered to pay the town $3 million. The town is originally set to agree to fix Main Street, but the charismatic Lyle Lanley interrupts and convinces the town to use the money to buy one of his monorails. Of course it doesn't work as advertised and there is a major safety issue that ends up threatening the town.

So what does this have to do with cloud?

Cloud is the latest IT buzzword that is having massive dollars thrown at it in an effort to provide all sorts of things, flexibility, elasticity, new paradigms of computing, the list goes on. What cloud didn't do early on was provide sufficient security, and so a new moniker was thrown out - the Private Cloud. That was the veneer on security for the cloud. Then cloud evolved again to hybrid cloud where you could mix and match Private Cloud and Public cloud based on the data that was involved. Ta da! We fixed it. Or so we thought.

Look, I get cloud. I love the idea of cloud. I think we will see the development and creation of even more paradigms that evolve over time but let's not forget the basic tenets of moving things outside the castle walls:

1. You are buying an SLA (Service Level Agreement). You are not buying a Cloud.
2. You are buying Risk. You are not buying a solution
3. Your Cloud will only do what it is designed to do. If your processes suck, the will suck in the Cloud too

When I read articles about outages - especially cloud outages - I look a lot deeper at what happened. Customers seem baffled (a.k.a. pissed off) that the cloud went down. I ask, well, did you design it to include the movement of data, workload, storage, and ultimately were you willing to pay for a level of redundancy you THOUGHT was included but wasn't? Remember you bought the SLA. You paid for the risk you were willing to accept. You made the call. The cloud did what it was supposed to. Failed when the site when down.

In all of the articles I have read, I have not seen any coverage of the type or tier of facility the Cloud is housed in? I'll bet I could offer Cloud served from the island of Jamaica for pennies and I would get laughed at. However if I offered cloud for pennies - my sales people's phone would ring off the hook. What's the difference? Disclosure. Assessing risk. And not assuming that the Cloud is what you THINK it is.

The Cloud is what you design and pay for. Whether it's in Jamaica in the back room of a Rum Bar or in a Tier IV facility in Silver Spring MD. The rules that are in the real world still apply in the Cloud world.

If it's highly valuable, treat it that way, and design it accordingly. Don't buy a monorail, no matter who is selling it.

PUE, DCiE, and other stuff that doesn't matter much...

2011-12-13T08:09:00.000-08:00

The Gartner conference was one of their best attended events in 2011 proving yet again that the space is hot, appears to have a bright future, and like the other hot sectors before it, is trying to mature through the development of standardized measurements that will be embraced by vendors, users, and analysts and give owner-operators bragging rights and a new area to compete in. PUE, DCiE and other yardsticks are competing for the 'best' yardstick for efficiency.

Sorry to pee in your Wheaties folks - we already have one. Cash.

I have done enough deals to know that PUE matters before financial analysts get involved. Once they do it comes down to costs. Total costs. Lowest cost wins. Not every time, but show me a CFO who authorizes paying more for something than its worth as a rule.

I will also put a caveat in to say that this is more true of multi tenant facilities than single tenant facilities. Single tenant/purpose built data centers can do what they want so long as it makes financial sense and delivers on the business objectives for the company and THAT company only. Multi tenant facilities must be far more INCLUSIVE of a wider array of requirements to service the greatest number of clients and their desires.

Both Single and multi tenant data centers will have a mix of manufacturers, densities, layouts, loads and preferences. The multi tenant facility needs to factor in broad compliance, placement of densities, weight, and other highly variable nuances. Like Rick on Pawn Stars says - 'You never know what is going to walk through that door.'

Gartner Data Center Conference brain dump...

2011-12-08T08:15:00.000-08:00

I just got back from 3 1/2 days in Las Vegas at the Gartner Data Center Conference, and will be writing about many of the things they presented, only in a lot more detail. In fact that was the #1 piece of feedback I heard was that the presentations are more sizzle than steak, and that they have to do a WHOLE lot more in providing the details about what they present.

Monday's keynote was pretty good and was given by Dave Cappuccio. It covered many stats and numbers that were fun to listen to, and I thought it was a decent way to ease into a conference. Some of the interesting nuggets I heard:

30,000,000,000 (billion) pieces of content were added to Facebook in the past month
Worldwide IP traffic will quadruple by 2015 - care to guess why?

Data Centers consume 100 times more electricity than the offices they support
The percentage of a college student's texting to phone call ratio is 98.4% to 1.6%
Within 4 years the bandwidth I/O per rack will increase 25x

Needless to say this is all pointing to growth - whether a company is prepared for it or not. There are some other topics I will be jumping into over the next few weeks as Gartner left a lot to be desired and discussed and in some cases were pretty off. So Stay tuned and lets see what I come up with once I shake the red eye jet lag...

Is innovation exclusively for single tenant datacenters?

2011-11-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

I am a data center geek. I love to read about them, see who is doing what, learn about new stuff and approaches that are being implemented - all of it. What I have begun to notice is that the innovation that is happening - while totally awesome - will never fly in 95 out of 100 facilities in the world. I have begun to ask the question 'why' to other geeks and data center users.

Without question the number one response is - because when you run a single tenant facility you can take risks and do things that mitigate a common set of risks - and since one company pays, they can do what makes sense for their business alone.

Others include - 'because they have an innovation budget'; 'it's about controlling their destiny'; 'the penalties for an outage are not as severe as outside the single tenant walls'.

In my opinion I think it has to do with a combination of factors - most of which have been mentioned above with one exception - evolution. As companies move from a cabinet in the ghetto colo company, they evolve to require more choices and options, different configurations, and vendors who deal with companies the size they hope to become. Once they scale up to ~10MW (100,000 square feet) they evolve into looking at finish to suits and finally building their own. Why do I think this?

I saw it happen with Facebook. They started by leasing cabinets in a few key markets, scaling that, then taking cages, then taking suites, then floors of buildings and now are building their own. Their headcount for their data center operation grew to that of a mid size provider, and there does come a point where it is more cost effective to build your own than to have to keep moving like a shark looking for open suites, floors, or whitespace.

I have seen it happen in reverse with many banks too. They built their own and leased where they wanted, acquired with abandon, and then had an impressive footprint. Then they figured out - as many did - that the network was more important than real estate and so the consolidation began where they wanted to consolidate into fewer huge footprint super centers because it was more effective to run a few huge facilities vs. dozens of all different sizes.

So when I think about why does all of the innovation appear to happen in the huge facilities, I look at the evolution of Apple, Facebook, Google, ING, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, etc. and they all find a different path to the same location - a risk averse facility that makes economical sense. Innovation is tied to reducing risk or cost and when you are the only one who has to live with the decisions and their outcome, single tenant facilities will continue to out-innovate the multi-tenant facilities since they have an exponentially larger set of risks and requirements to service.

What do you think?

Google's Data Centers use 26 Megawatts - What's the fuss?

2011-09-08T15:22:00.000-07:00

In the past 24 hours there has been a ton of press about Google's announcement that they use 26 million watts of electricity. Put another way, that is 26 Megawatts, and put another way, what is all the fuss about over 26 megwatts?

Is it that they ONLY use 26 Megwatts?
It it that Google is so efficient that they run this gigantic brand on such a small amount of electricity?

That has to be it, because folks, 26 megawatts in the data center business is a medium size operation.

Just for comparison's sake, Vantage data centers is building a campus twice that size in Santa Clara. Digital Realty Trust has a project in Dallas that is 4 TIMES that size to service clients. Bytegrid Holdings LLC has a 9.6 megawatt facility about one third the size of Google's entire operation. Just sayin'.

What I also have yet to review fully is the carbon footprint. It was mentioned in another, better, article that they get 25% of their electricity from renewable sources. Not LOW CARBON sources, but renewable sources. The thing I have paid attention to for years is what I call the carbon chain - what is the carbon footprint from start to finish on a project, and then the impact on an ongoing operational basis. And I'm sorry buying a carbon credit doesn't count. That's like buying recycled paper with Monopoly money.

It mentions that Google builds their own facilities. What about the carbon it takes to manufacture the steel, the concrete, the copper, and other raw materials used in a facility? Then there is the transportation. How many trucks filled with diesel are trucking in heavy loads of new equipment that was produced from scratch and had to source the raw materials, and you get the picture.

Why not re-use a facility as a rule vs build new? Why not cap the radius of transport of newly manufactured goods to 100 miles or less? Why not look at the whole impact and subsequent carbon footprint and measure and improve that? Just sayin'...

Still, great numbers by Google.

And a side note to Noah Horowitz at the Natural Resources Defense Council who '...cautioned that despite the advent of increasingly powerful and energy-efficient computing tools, electricity use at data centers was still rising, as every major corporation now relied on them. He said the figures did not include the electricity drawn by the personal computers, tablets and iPhones that use information from Google’s data centers.

“When we hit the Google search button,” Mr. Horowitz said, “it’s not for free.”

Trying to link energy usage of other corporations, personal computers, and iPhones to Google's numbers is like blaming a person's alcoholism on the fermentation process. It's a stretch at best. And what are you going to do to stop this reckless usage of the most efficient data center footprint on the planet, stop Googling? Didn't think so. Me neither.

Nothings free, but this is data that shows if we are going to search and want to be green about it, Go Green, Go Google.

Hybrid Cloud = Same Sh*t different Offering?

2011-08-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

I have had a number of conversations the past two weeks about Cloud computing and what companies are asking for and what they are actually buying. My observation is this:

Companies want providers to offer public and private cloud elasticity, but only buy hybrid.

This is following another form of pretzel logic (yes I like Steely Dan. A lot.) which are the folks who say they need to be outside of THE blast zone. (What zone? For which type of blast?)

First one first - duh. Was there ever ANY other choice than they hybrid cloud? Not all data is meant for public consumption in spite of compliance rules trying to impose transparency (visibility) and so the notion of a public cloud was right out of Woodstock, man. The public cloud was exciting because it took the pressure off of IT departments to have to plan way ahead of stuff. If they needed capacity, they went out and got it someplace that had it and didn't have to go to a CFO and ask for $500K of gear to support the new marketing initiative or cover their *ss when they underestimated the website traffic when Justin Bieber played a benefit concert for Hurricane Irene survivors. It solved a lot of unmaterialized logistics and scoping problems and was branded as being insecure and we couldn't have that in the age of WikiLeaks and Anonymous hacking could we...

Then the pendulum of cloud swung back to private cloud. Well by my assessment private cloud was just another way to get billed for computer stuff by the hour. Private Cloud computing was becoming the No-tell Motel option and charging by the hour. If you wanted something quick and dirty and the movie titles not printed on the receipt then you could get your resources by the hour. In this case all the data and network and everything about the environment was kept out of plain sight and secured.

Then it's as if the blinking light went steady on us - we can have both things - the ability to not have to know in advance what we will need for resources AND the ability to keep sensitive stuff more secure.

Is it just me or isnt this what managed colocation and managed services have been doing for the past 20+ years?

Why are containerized modular data centers the new Black now?

2011-08-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

What took you so long?

I was at Data Center Dynamics in Wasington DC on Tuesday and you may have thought it was Modular Dynamics instead. It seemed as if the data center world finally came around to what I have been seeing, studying, deploying, and writing about since 2008. That's not to infer that the modular solutions have gone mainstream yet, but the conceptualization has matured a lot as expected.

HP had a scale model of the EcoPod which was cool to see since up to that point I had only seen Powerpoint slides about it and have yet to see the real thing. PDI was showing off their modular solution as well which will be watched closely as they have some patent infringement allegations they are fending off. ActivePower had their PowerHouse scale model on display as well and given the coziness between HP and ActivePower in recently announced deployments I could easily see them sharing a booth at future trade events.

Bytegrid was the only data center owner operator who was able to speak to containers at the event - and did openly talk to several people about the good the bad and the stuff that trips you up on deployment and had specifics to back up the discussions. The three other owner operators there - GigaPark, QTS, and Powerloft weren't talking about supporting modular solutions.

Based on what I saw, acceptance has increased dramatically, demand is rising right along with it, and the Achilles heel that was there three years ago is there today still - being able to answer 'So where can I put one of these things?' with something other than 'Wherever you want'. ByteGrid is on to something and will be watched.

Rethinking the Value (and cost) of data

2011-07-26T06:56:00.000-07:00

I have had a number of conversations recently with some hospitals about storage requirements, and specifically where to put more gear as their data centers are bursting at the seams, or in some cases becoming structurally weakened because of floor loads. What I figured out pretty quickly is that there is an issue that is fairly ubiquitous to these organizations, but an issue that I believe spills over into any firm who stores data - all data is treated the same and is costing firms millions each year to treat all their data the same.

Here is one example:

A hospital is looking for data center space to grow their storage footprint into as they have tapped out every watt of space they have in the hospital. That's not even the real issue. The real issue is that because they have so many racks of gear, and heavy storage arrays on floors of the hospital with floor loads insufficient to support the weight, that the hospital is experiencing structural issues. Floors are sagging under the weight of all of the data being stored. Literally.

Many vendors they have talked to are simply telling them that's unfortunate but they need to buy more storage. However, the vendor won't get the sale unless his uncle is in the construction business and can structurally retrofit higher floor loads before the new arrays show up. So what does the hospital do?

Hospitals see patients, maintain facilities, manage compliance conformity, and administer services. Their IT guys set up storage arrays, networking equipment, and manage the applications that run the business. They are not in construction and they are not data center experts and yet are the go to guys to figure all of this out.
The solution that we began to discuss - and that I wanted to share - is that there is a fundamental change that MUST take place in how they think about data - storing it, managing it, accessing it, and realizing it's NOT all the same. The other thing that had to happen was to look at the way their business operates (no pun intended) and structure things in a way that are based on how their business runs, and not how their data flows today, but how it needs to flow based on their business.

Here is a specific example -

New patients create alot of new records. New paperwork, new insurance information, new MRI's, new test results, new billing codes, new invoices, etc.

Existing patients have this data on file and their data footprint changes with an office visit, an MRI, a perscription, and all of the associated charting that needs to happen to document the recent activity and results.

What are the commonalities of the two different kinds of patients? They create data around events - visits, procedures, tests. What are events tied to? A date. Can the date field be used to assess the freshness of data, and another date identifying the next event indicate the likelihood of accessing that data? Hmmmm. Interesting thought stream just started.

Where we got to was that whether or not the patient was new or existing, their events drove the need to access data. A new patient would likely need to be seen again shortly and would need to have their records accessible whenever. An existing patient who came in to have a sudden sports injury looked at would probably need to have their data file accessible since there would be consults, MRI's/X-rays, referrals, etc. taking place rather immediately.

A patient who was on a 'check in once a year' cycle, doesn't need their data accessed 363 days a year on average. They come in, get looked at, maybe a test is required (but we know what it is ahead of time) so why is the 'active' patient's data sitting with a 'maintenance' patient's data in the same facility, withe the same cost, and with the same SLA (service level agreement) or DAA - data access agreement? Why would you pay for 363 days of something you don't need? I equate it to paying for a rental car in Seattle for 365 days, while I am only in Seattle two days a year - why would I do that?

The point here is that yes, they do need more storage. They can't put it where they usually do - in their data center - and need to find someplace else to expand to. But before they just go out and buy new arrays, new cabinets, new servers, and lease new space, they MUST look at things in a new way so that not only are they solving the immediate issue -'we need more storage' they are solving the fundamental issue - all data is NOT the same and does not need to be managed the same, or cost the same.

Thoughts?

ByteGrid Launched

2011-06-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

I thought it was high time I got around to announcing the launch of my company - ByteGrid. As the name implies it is the fusion of data (Byte) and Electricity & Telecom infrastructure (Grid) and since we are a data center company, fitting as a short & sweet description.

I few friends have encouraged my to blog about the whole experience and now that we're a real company, I find I have a lot less time to tell the whole story but a few things are important for others to know and were extremely important to me personally to know:

1. Building a company is difficult.
2. Starting a company is more difficult
3. Standing on the other side of the Starting line, with the Finish line out ahead of you is incredibly rewarding and puts the difficulty in perspective
4. Many friends and family will be supportive the first 30 days after the decision to go out and do something on your own, and downright mean and skeptical from then on. They are more scared than you are.
5. Do not EVER let someone talk you out of what you know and believe to be the right way to do something, especially when you hear 'If you changed _________ you would get funded faster...' or anything that dilutes your vision. The vision is yours, not theirs and only you know the right way to execute the vision. A lot of people have money. few have a vision, and even fewer the intestinal fortitude to stay true to their vision.
6. Once you take on other people's money, they have a big say in how things get done. And they should.
7. If you are not used to constant change, competing demands, and like things nice and orderly, you won't like what you're doing. The best laid battle plans change the instant the first shot is fired.
8. Be intimidated by no one. You did something that few people ever do, and even fewer stick with for any length of time, and if they don't understand that, they won't, and keep moving.
9. You won't do it alone. After I brought on partners, it was amazing how quickly things came together and the right compliment of skillsets balanced one another. In our case my partners added deep financial expertise, deeper operational expertise, and legal expertise to my sales talents, and we were a well oiled machine and delegate better than any team I have worked with and for because we know who is best equipped to handle a situation in spite of our egos.
10. If you start a company with the sole reason to make a shit ton of money, then almost every decision you make will be short sighted to that end. If you go into business for yourself because you like it, you will do something better than anything you know of, and is a natural extension of who you are, then the shit ton of money will follow and your decisions will be sound, thought out, and you decide what the right price for your efforts are, not a spreadsheet.

Maybe this helps some of you get off the dime to do something, or keeps others from doing something they are not prepared to do. Either way, it's my experience, my opinions, and the next chapter has yet to be written.

Check out the ByteGrid website, and take a look at our first data center we acquired. It's a Tier IV gem, and I will blog next about why we bought it, and why it is a fantastic facility. I will of course be biased, however, I backed up how solid it is with a lot of money-so I put my money where my mouth is too.

If you want a copy of my data center site selection guide - it's still available. mmacauley at bytegrid. com

The Evolution of Computing - Have we stopped dragging our knuckles?

2011-04-13T07:47:00.000-07:00

The innovation of intangible things dependent upon tangible things has been the model for computing as a whole, practically since the Univac 1 hit the scene. Software - from word processing, to spreadsheets, to printer drivers, to web browsers, to java apps, and virtual machines - all intangible intellectual property innovation that was dependent on tangible things to be created, operate, and add value too. Key boards, green screens, motherboards, video cards, speakers, you get the idea.

On thing that I have been spending a great deal of time thinking about is which side of the equation - the intangible or tangible - will be cannibalized first?

We have seen the convergence most noticably in electronics. remember when you had to have a turntable, casette (reel to reel or 8-track), amplifier, and radio tuner to have a 'stereo' system? Then it was CD's and now the CD to mp3 (or other digital format) to just 'music' is happening. The battleground there is on the format which is a pissing contest that no one wins in my opinion. Why? Because there is someone who can think more creatively than the developer whose creativity was used up to create the format to make an interpreter/conversion intangible to make it all work.

The intangible side of the equation has seen it share of cannibalization (aka M&A) where entire companies who created a software program or operating system are now simply features in a larger 'suite'. Think widgets, apps, and all of the other components that get stitched together to make a new intangible thing in the 'cloud' as an example.

So if I think about all of the noise, innovation, branding, positioning, and other terms used to descibe the marketplace, two groups of tangibles are the veneer of all the intangibles - the source point and the end point.

In essence I am starting to believe that the endpoint (mobile device, tv, tablet, other) and the sourcepoint (data center) will be the only things that matter in the market. The UI will be embedded in the endpoint, the sourcepoint is all zeroes and ones to get from the sourcepoint to endpoint. People (consumers/viwers) could care less about the OS, the application used under the covers, or anything else intangible. I think Apple gets this (I am NOT an Apple fan at all BTW) better than most, however the sands are shifting and Apple is losing market share to Google daily. While Apple and Google have both built endpoints and massive scale data centers, Apple continues to offer a Blackbox of an OS, and other apps, and alienate Adobe and other platforms. Microsoft has tried this for years - and they don't own the endpoint and have some data centers for their Live apps but nothing as established as what Apple and Google have. And Microsoft loses market share every day as well - even on the desktop.

So as the next step in the evolutionary process I can't help but think that things will converge - and in the process the perception of what is vital will change right along with it and distill down to data centers (sourcepoints) and devices (endpoints).

Content will be the fuel for the convergence - and the innovations in the presentation of content will drive evolution at the endpoint. Because of this, the sourcepoints will be more reliant upon network density for cost effective distribution, with latency being the key variable. We are already seeing this with Facebook and Apple leasing and building sourcepoints, and with recent announcements by Dell to build 10 new sourcepoints, I will say that businesses who can own both the sourcepoint and the endpoit are making investments in owning both ends of the content consumption chain.

Your thoughts?

The Seismic Shift of Data Center Planning

2011-03-15T13:52:00.000-07:00

Friends of mine know that I have been beating on a drum for over 15 years about proper site selection for data centers. In fact I have recently blogged about it again and with all that is happening in Japan, it got me thinking even more about it. The other thing I have also spent more time thinking about is disaster recovery for obvious reasons.

I will say it again - site selection is the most important feature of a data center. The 9.0 earthquake merely reinforces that in a big way. I would not want to be a data center owner/operator in silicon valley - 10 years ago or now. The two biggest reasons are:

1. Seismic activity
2. Logistics post disaster

The first reason is more obvious today beacuse of the Japan earthquake. While well designed in and of themselves - they were not designed to withstand a 9.0. Logical oversight in my opinion. If the worst earthquake to date was 6, designing one for 2000 times worse seems logical. Until it happens.

The second reason is even more impactful when we we look at not only the immediate aftermath of the earthquake but of the tsunami that hit right afterwards. I have seen about 30 minutes of videos and my layman observation is it is worse than a flood because the earthquake loosens everything and gives it mobility and when you add a wall of water to move debris around - and by debris I mean cars, buildings, and dumpsters - it clogs streets with several feet of debris to have to move to make pathways passable again. This means that people cannot get to or leave the data center, and fuel deliveries for generators are hampered, service vehicles cannot get to them and in some cases entry ways and exits are blocked at the data center itself.

So what are some solutions?

Take site selection seriously. Look at your disaster recovery plans - not which data center your customer data will fail over to - but the logistic issues you will be faced with in the event of a real disaster happening. Is there food and water for employees? How far away is the fuel for the generators? Are there multiple ways to get it there? What happens if public transit cannot operate? Can you bike or canoe your way there if necessary? What about the conduits carrying electricity and telecom to the site? Can they withstand a ground shift of 20 feet (Japan is 13 feet closer to the US after the earthquake). How far away are the power plants? What is their capability to provide service? How will they do this? What is the wind direction? If you are near railroad tracks, what is carried on them that is toxic or can close pathways to and from the facility? Who are your neighbors? Is there anything that can float or blow into your facility? Into the infrastructure yard?

Things to avoid - don't base a decision on how quick you can get in and out for a site tour. Don't think about how easy it is to get to and from the office/data center, look around the facility at the roads, the access points, railroad tracks (especially active ones), flight paths (remember 9/11 when they grounded all planes and sent those in the air to the nearest airport?), and don't think something bad won't happen because it never has.

bytegrid@gmail.com is how to reach me.

Ask the right questions and invest

Green Dtata Center Retrofit Financing Available - Game changer?

2011-02-01T07:59:00.000-08:00

I have been spending some time, ok a lot of time, looking at why companies are not taking advantage of the various rebates and incentives for making data centers more energy efficient. There are so many programs offered by utilities, state and local Governments, and the green energy marketplace I wanted to figure out why more projects weren't getting off the ground. What I found can be summed up in a word - money.

Without exception, access to financing was the number one reason projects never got started. Companies would engage utilities, energy audit firms, constuction firms and other professionals to examine their current energy usage so that they can establish a baseline of what their energy usage profile is today. Many of these services are provided free of charge, and some firms charge for their services.

Once the basline was established through a thorough energy audit, a project plan was drafted detailing the equipment that could be installed to harvest energy savings. In most cases I found that the savings were substatial - 30-50% on average. In real numbers, if a data center operator spends $200,000 per month on their electricity, they would pay $100,000-140,000 per month with the new equipment, saving upwards of $1M per year. This is a no brainer, right?

Unfortunately it is not a no brainer and here is why: The new equipment to harvest the savings is expensive and goes on balance sheet. so if a company has an extra million dollars or two to spend, will it be spent on a data center upgrade or retrofit or on expanding the business? Most companies opt for not spending the capex to harvest the savings or only spend money on very short term ROI projects and only take a fraction of the savings back.

So once I figured out that the issue wasn't a desire to do these things (who wants to be known as the company that doesn't support green initiatives), or that they didn't know where to start or what to do - after all they had the audit and project plan in their hands - I focused my attention on solving the problem - where can I find or put together a financing solution that solves the problems?

I would love to tell you that I was smart enough to know exactly who to call to solve the problem - but as many of you know me, know that I am not that smart, but I am lucky in the sense that I am not afraid to pick up the phone and ask a lot of questions and learn what I don't know. So I learned a lot and then got lucky when a colleague in the financial industry called me and said 'I think I have something'.

Something indeed.

We have put together a financing program for companies who want to go green, harvest energy savings, and eliminate the capex up to 100% for the equipment., installation, and maintenance services. The beauty of the program is that the savings are dovetailed into the financing so the owner/operator is never out of pocket for the savings because if the savings are 30% per year and the cost of financing amounts to 15% per year, not only does the company get the benefit of the cost savings, they can structure it so that they add cushion to their monthly opex.

Of course if a company has money in their budget for capex purchases they can spend that allocation and finance the rest and do even better. So what's the catch?

At a high level here are the conditions that must be met:

1. Project sizes need to be in the $5M-100M range, based on an energy audit that has been done (or will be done)
2. The Owner operator must have investment grade credit (BBB or better)
3. The owner operator must be willing to sign a new maintenance agreeement on the equipment so the lender knows the new equipment will be taken care of

The whole process - from the energy audit to project start is about six weeks - or less.

The program right now is geared towards the large data center users for obvious reasons - they use a lot of electricity, a lot of it inefficiently, and the greatest improvement can be made with these users. Rest assured that I am working on options for smaller companies with smaller footprints so stay tuned. The other benefit to this program is it is specific to the savings - any tax breaks or additional rebates are kept by the owner operator and not factored into the program.

If you want more information on this program please email Pelagic Advisors and they will reach out.

More on Site Selection - Where is the Holistic View?

2011-01-10T10:18:00.000-08:00

I got a requirement sent to me on Friday afternoon for a site selection on a large requirement >50Mw. Based on what I know about users looking for sites in the marketplace I would bet an Egg Nog Latte that it was the requirement for the Social Security Administration's data center project that has gone sideways.

The Office of the Inspector General OIG issued a report back in April of 2010 about the criteria and process that put a smile on my face:

"While the reviewers concluded that the agency had developed a "highly sophisticated" list of site-selection criteria for the project expected to cost more than $800 million, they found the process for narrowing site properties down to a short list to have been problematic.

Mandatory selection criteria the agency developed could also have excluded too many locations.

"In particular, when developing the mandatory selection criteria, it does not appear that consideration was given to the serious fiscal impact that exclusions would have in the electrical power cost arena over the life cycle of the data center," summary of the inspector general's report read.
Information was also limited in evaluation of telecommunications criteria.

It was not clear from the report's summary whether one or several location had been identified. The agency did not release the document in its entirety.

Why is this humorous to me?

The things that were excluded - cost of power and telecom infrastructure were cited. Hello? The two most important criteria for a selection were overlooked? Wow. Who was doing the selecting? Was the 'highly sophisticated' criteria designed to mask breathtaking incompetence?

As a result the requirement (if it is the requirement) is back on the street for round 2. If you are involved with the site selection process for the SSA (or any other organization) I am happy to give you my site selection criteria checklist. It's simple, I have used it myself for years, and it works. Email me - bytegrid@gmail.com and I will send you a copy. Free. Yes free. I look at it as an investment of goodwill to keep my taxes down paying for a project that is big, expensive, and uses MY money to pay for it.

The other interesting thing to have noted in the requirement which I laughed out loud over was that Economic Incentives were weighted as high as power and telecom infrastructure in the selection criteria. Folks, Economic incentives go away after a few years. Data centers stay around for 15-30. Economic incentives help in the short term, but how many elected officials stay in office 15-30 years? That is a lot of election cycles and political agendas to factor in.

There is also the mandate from Vivek Kundra issued in February of 2010 that they will need to factor into their decision. This entails highly efficient, green powered facilities that will be flexible enough to handle the IT changes in virtualization, the inclusion of legacy applications and hardware, and CIO agendas. It's a tall order, however it's so damn simple when you focus on the lowest common denominators. The same ones they overlooked in the first requirement.

The Modular Data Center Choices - half baked?

2011-01-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows me or follows this blog at all knows that I have been a strong proponent of modular solutions for many years - two years in fact when I first blogged about container ROI on 1/8/09 using the IRS as the example. Since then many solutions have been designed, some deployed, and all of them rarely discussed. Still scratching my head on that one - I would want to do business with a company that is delivering the most cost effective and carbon footprint lowering solutions available.

Today, there was an announcement over at Reuters about another Data Center Anywhere offering from Telehouse which we can add to Lee Technologies, i/o Data Centers, BladeRoom and others. I have looked at all of them, talked with their Management teams, reviewed deployment documents, seen costs, proposals, the whole nine yards on these 'solutions'. You know what they are (data center anywhere solutions) half baked. If that.

The smart companies (Lee, BladeRoom, HP in my opinion) have figured out that while they may not be in the real estate development business they work with those who are.

Without exception each DCA 'solution' has a 'Batteries not Included' clause. In other words - they are as awesome as a Ferrari with no fuel system. It absolutely STUNS me that in this day and age of partners, specialization of product and service, and the fact that the modern data center buiness is approaching its 30th birthday that no one has put ALL of the pieces together into a TRUE solution. A true solution is a cup of coffee, not the possibility of opening your own Starbucks.

Since I hate people who bitch and don't provide solutions so here is my two cents on a TRUE solution:

Modular manufacturers need to find and work with owner operators of data centers to find and make ready sites that are 'modular ready'. It's not like a modular solution isn't a data center with the same lowest common denominators - power & fiber.

I know what you're thinking -

That data center companies are reluctant to embrace the modular solutions (they have inefficient buildings to fill)

I am a manufacturer not a real estate guy (you aren't selling many units without someplace with power & fiber to put them are you?)

The market is not mature (You haven't done your homework)

So what has happened is that customers are tasked with filling in these gaps themselves and the reason they are coming to you, the manufacturer, is to buy a data center SOLUTION, not a piece of one.

Most end customers are even less equipped to handle these filling of gaps than the people allegedly in the (modular) data center business and as a result the solutions havn't been flying off the assembly line. If you want a full solution - ping me - bytegrid@gmail.com - I have done my homework and will get you your cup of coffee...

Site Selection - A Case Study?

2010-12-20T13:35:00.000-08:00

I received a call from a friend of mine earlier today who called to ask if I had seen the data center requirement posted for the CIA. I had heard about it and got to thinking about what they would do to kick off the site selection process. Then I realized that if the requirements were posted, they must have done a lot of homework already. You would think anyway. So I thought I would brainstorm here on my blog and take you through my thought process. and then see how much of what I think about are in the posted requirements.

I will qualify this blog post with a disclaimer - the only specs I know are that they want a 200,000 square foot facility built out in 40,000 square foot chunks/phases. I have not read any document or article related to it.

So when I look at the requirement as I understand it - my high level criteria would be:

1. Available inexpensive power, ideally with a green power source that is off grid
2. Available network connections to Government TIC (Trusted Internet Connection) sites
3. Proximity to US military bases to insure that staff can get to a facility if needed
4. Risk profile for natural disasters, man made disasters (civil unrest/planes into buildings, etc), financial condition of location States, geologic topography, and political risk.

So for #1, availability of cheap power and preference to a green power source that is off grid is in the top slot for a reason. Data centers number one expense is power, and data centers are typically operated for 15+ years. Virtualization, while reducing floor space actually increases density and draw of power for more powerful servers, and the power needs to be 'green' per the mandate by Vivek Kundra, the CIO for the United States.

To my knowledge there are two sites that COULD satisfy this requirement today - but it would take a signed contract to mobilze the funds and people to construct the power systems, and one would get knocked out of the running because of proximity to DC proper. A box of anthrax, or a suitcase dirty bomb with nuclear waste within 40 miles would make it 'inoperable' at least on the surface. So this isn't a data center requirment, it's a power plant with one customer - a data center.

On to #2, which deals with network connectivity, and not just in the general sense but specific to a TIC site. There are 100 of them in the US, so that limits things too if that is a dealbreaker - and it should be. Data needs to flow to the facility and out of the facility to provide credible intelligence to our Government and to other Governments friendly with the United States. Since we arent talking DSL pipes, these need to be 100GB pipes or better. Redundant too. This will be expensive since there is not a lot of fiber in the boonies - I know, I live in 'the boonies' (kind of).

Number 3 is important because in the event of some really bad shit going down on a major scale, people need to get in and out of the facility no matter what. The ability to use runways and other infrastructure specific to logistics is crucial. People can fly to a base and get choppered in, HUM-V'ed in or some combination of planes and automobiles. Sorry trains. There is also the 'able to sleep at night' piece having jets and Blackhawks able to scramble and be airborne in seconds to sanitize any threat if needed.

Number 4 should be a given, and arguably #1. When I think about Ashburn VA and the amount of data that is captured, processed and stored at the end of a runway is breathtaking oversight in my opinion. Knowing I can get mobile network reception on the approach to Dulles means that people bent on harming the United States and its citizens can do major harm sitting in Verizon's parking lot and pressing send. Katrina got everyone's attention with natural disasters on a major scale, but what about wildfires that close roads, burn telephone poles, and melt insulation around copper lines? Ice storms that make roads impassable and cause tree branches to cut power and telecommunication lines or the earthquake that hits and while the seismically engineered building hardly feels anything, the 60 miles of conduit housing telecom fiber gets severed by a bridge collapsing or ground shaking separation of the conduit itself? Topography needs to be factored in as well for redundant microwave links, sensors for all sorts of data needing to be captured, analyzed and used in making educated decisions?

I added a vector that has not been too much of an issue to date but one I think about - the financial condition of a State. I will use California as the example - the State is teetering on bankruptcy if you believe the mainstreet media outlets. The issue won't be whether or not the State can afford to keep the power plants operating, but the civil unrest that occurs when people get incredibly pissed off. Mobs like to burn things, flip over cars, and do other things that make no sense to me. Looting happens. If there is no water or electricity all kinds of crazy things can happen. Guess what? Data centers plan to have water and electricity no matter what, making them a target.

The point in all of this, is that before you even start touring facilities, virtualizing, seeing who is out there, and putting together requirements based on square feet and phases, you better have done your homework, or you - CIA data center - will be the next disaster to recover from.

Pause for new thought stream

2010-12-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

I was just reading the tweets from the Gartner DC event in Las Vegas and had a random thought to solicit feedback on:

Is the term managed storage really just data management with a new coat of paint?

Discuss...

Site Selection - Part Two of a Multipart Series - Modular = What changes?

2010-12-06T20:10:00.000-08:00

First off thanks to all of you who reached out and sent comments on the first part of the series about how Site Selection is often overlooked. Some of the feedback inspired me to stretch this into a multipart series, and so now I will delve into another favorite topic I began writing about in April 2009 - modular and containerized options and for the purposes of this entry, how they factor into a site selection.

Modular data centers from companies like Lee Technologies, in the US and BladeRoom based in the UK, are coming into their own and being deployed at a pretty good clip. I think data center people and investors alike are starting to get it as to why these options are compelling:

1. Cost. I can deploy a facility in a quarter for half the cost. That means that I get what I want whether it's density, footprint, speed of capacity, or operational efficiency for a lot less than a traditional data center Suite. As an owner operator it means I don't overbuild, I don't pay for a 100,000 square foot facility to be built and then wait until ten 10,000 sqaure foot rooms are sold. Cha-Ching all around

2. Speed. I can get them deployed quickly - usually in less time than it takes my broker to fly in a team to look at several facilities in several markets and tell me 'Stop me when you see something you like'. Thousands of cores, petabytes of space in 3 months. Me likey.

3. Consistency of product. Can anyone point me to a data center company that has the exact same layout, generator brand, UPS equipment, switchgear, masonry, or even layout in their facilities? Me either. Imagine the money and time saved supporting the same make and model of data center and its components? Modular solutions are the Southwest Airlines of the data center business. Southwest only flies Boeing 737's. Why? Because any pilot and flight crew can work on any plane in the fleet. Makes sense for data centers as well.

4. Simplicity. If I can get the same data center solution in multiple places from a single vendor with a single contract, with terms and conditions the same why wouldn't I make that my first choice? I have experienced first hand getting a phone call from a customer whose main reason for calling me was because we had a contract with them and they needed space fast and didnt have 6 weeks to work with a competitor to hammer out a different contract.

5. Logistics - How do you find an insured and bonded mover? There are millions of dollars invested in the cargo so you want to choose wisely. You will also need to pay attention to overpass/underpass heights since your solution will likely arrive by truck. You will also want to have an address, since many deliveries will be handled by out of state/non-local firms so giving directions to old barns or favorite fishing holes won't likely cut it.

6.Medium voltage electricians: Container/modular solutions by in large require more medium voltage electricians than low voltage so having local contractors with those skill sets are a factor. (Chicago has thousands, some remote areas may have 2). Also you will want to factor in the Unions and whether or not you are in a right to work or union state.
So all of this is great, but how does site selection tie into all of this?

Well modular solutions change the model for data center companies and companies looking to go modular.

For the data center company, it trips them up. Why? If you just paid $100M for a big 100,000 square foot building with no land and 5 mw of power, you could take a container or modular solution and gobble up that power footprint inside your building in a heartbeat, and still have 90,000 square feet of expensive building you can't do anything with until you spend millions more to get more power and have to wait 18 months to get it. Or turn it into a raquetball court for employees I suppose. It impacts site selection for owner operators because they don't have to find big buildings to turn into data centers or build big buildings to chop up into computer rooms.

It also opens the door to a smarter model. One where they can buy land, do inexpensive improvements and pour concrete pads while they are working with the client to finish off the design of their facility. The data center is built, tested and shipped to the site where it is assembled in a couple of days and commisioned and ready for gear. The biggest issue is that there is no vendor that has emerged as a modular centric data center operator. X/O is the closest in supporting containers, but that's all I know of and the solution is far from complete. Today's owner operators will need to amortize their real estate and free up cash to make the switch and augment what they are doing, but that is a seismic shift in thinking, operations, and development, that I think a modular centric company would do better.

For end customers/tenants the site selection has been an issue for containers and modular solutions as well. Do we have land? Is it zoned? Is there power? Is it reliable? Is it in flight paths? Could a Waste Management dumpster truck get confused and pull our container away? How much is a generator? How many do we need? Can we even put diesel on site in a tank? Who will design the modular solution? What's a good UPS? Who understands power distribution and building codes? Where do we plug it in? Does it have a plug?

These are questions I have fielded or helped answer that past two years. many are funny today, but all legit.

Many companies who build and run their own facilities do have the people to figure it out, and Lee Technologies and BladeRoom both have designers to help get it right. The issue is still - what makes a good site? Send an email to me at bytegrid@gmail.com and I will send you my site selection guide which lays out all the questions you'll want to ask no matter which way you go.

Special thanks to Steve Manos at Lee Technologies for his contribution in this blog post. Steve can be reached at smanos@leetechnologies.com

Humor for a short week...

2010-11-22T11:15:00.001-08:00

http://www.projectcartoon.com/cartoon/2

This is funny because a lot of it is very true. It is the blind leading the naked through an acre of rosebushes...

Site Slection and How Overlooked it is...

2010-11-16T11:59:00.000-08:00

As many of you know - or at least those who follow my blog(s) know - I am building a data center company. The most important part of a data center is where you put followed closely by how you get to it and how others get to it - both physically and logically. The one thing I have experienced more of this year than in years past is how overlooked or non-sensical the site selction process is for people.

When I look at data center site selection I look at several variables - seismic, flood, environmental, natural disaster stuff, how close networks are, if they are not in the building, access to clean, reliable electricity sources, the talent pool, and overall market - is it a good place to do business. It is a little different for customers in that many times they choose a market, search available space and take what's ready to go in their time frame and trust that the facility has made a lot of the decisions for them in selecting where to put their facility. Commercial Real Estate Brokers are often engaged to help in this process. The brokers are also involved in selling data centers and buildings that could become data centers to people like me.

So you can imagine the head scratching (and some giggling) I do when I get calls and emails from people inside and outside the data center business pitching me on their 'prime data center' sites and they have NO IDEA what they are talking about. I will give you some of the more interesting sites I personally have been to and point out things that while obvious to me, were clearly overlooked.

I spent a day in Chicago in the early summer driving around and looking at sites with a good friend of mine in the design/build part of the business. We went by Microsoft's container site and that was pretty cool, and then he brings me to a site that had a banner on the front of it announcing it was going to be the next data center facility for Ascent Corporation, the guys who helped build the Microsoft site. Turning down the access road, I saw several cones and saw horses in the major road leading to the turn off and they were srrounded in a couple of inches of standing water and it looked there was a water main break the night before and I asked my tour guide if it was in fact a water main break and how it effected the Microsoft building. His response was 'no water main break, just 2 days of rain off an on'. Wow, three days after the last rain and water was still leeeching out of the ground and creating hazardous conditions on the only way to get to the facility. As we drive down the puddle filled secondary road, there is a large rail yard that had to have 10 tracks across it. There were few cars on the tracks, but it looked like it could support hundreds of them if needed. I popped the question 'What is the story with the railroad tracks?'. I was thinking it was an abandoned switching yard from the hey day of the Chicago railroads. The response was 'Oh that's an active switching yard that has been used for 50 years to switch up cars headed downtown', I replied 'Really? What is in the cars that go through here?'. My guide told me there is 'lots of stuff that goes through the year as it is a major switching point for the rail system'. Hmmm. Interesting.

We finally reach the building at the end of the street and it's tired, but workable. As I have learned, a lot of stuff is workable if you have a lot of money behind you. Then I look at the parking lot that abuts the track bed. The crushed stones were coming through the chain link fence and the closest track was maybe 20 feet from the edge of the parking lot. The parking lot had water in 60% of it and it looked like Lightning McQueen had dragged the statue of Stanley around it for a while. My guide says 'So this is the facility, what do you think? I heard they got a good deal on it.'. Well good deal or not they paid too much. I responded 'You really want to know what I think based on what I have seen so far?', he replies, 'yeah, I do'.

I launch into my assessment: This would be the last place I would put a data center in Chicago. Why?

- The roads get washed out after heavy rains making the site inaccesible unless by canoe.
- My employees couldn't get out to take care of their families
- There is a very active rail yard for a half mile before the property with no idea of what is in the cars - or what has been in the cars the past 50+ years.
- The site could be on a Superfund list from a spill that happened back before OSHA or the EPA was around to investigate such things
- The site could land on a Superfund site of one of the very rusty tanker cars decides to leak toluoene, or some other banned substance
- There could be an air quality emergency if one of the said tanks bursts emitting chlorine gas instead of milk
- The chain link fence, while adequate to keep deer out of the yard, would not keep taggers from spray painting the building or other folks who had no business being there

He interrupted me and said 'Yeah, I didn't think it was a great site either'. Nuff said. However I have heard that Ascent is moving forward with development plans and I would love to see how their anchor tenant will justify to their board why putting mission critical assets in a site like this is lowering risk.

Another one of my favorite areas to point out the lack of decision making intelligence gathering, is Ashburn Virginia. Yes it is one of the hottest data center markets in the US, great relaible power, MAE East is there so you have hundreds of network connections to tap, and the talent pool is deep. Very popular site for a lot of companies who operate data centers and who lease space from the data center operators there. It made sense to me too, until the first time I flew into Dulles instead of National airport.

I was on a Jet Blue flight from Boston, and I had a window seat on the right side of the plane. On final approach I look out the window to look at the beautiful countryside. As we get closer to touchdown, we fly RIGHT over the Dupont Fabros and Digital Realty Trust data center cluster. I was shocked. Why in the hell would anyone put a data center cluster in the flight path of a busy airport? That couldn't be right. So I got my rental car and drove out there. I parked on the road by Digital Realty Trust's campus and watched the sky. Every 90-120 seconds there was an airplane overhead. All different kinds - 737, cargo planes, regional jets all flying over the densest interconnection point in The Eastern United States. Big WTF moment.

Why tell you this? Because it shows in vivid in your face detail that site selection - even when validated by companies who run data centers for a living -is important and what would appear to be a good decision, isn't necessarily a good decision. It seems as if people are more concerned about how long it will take to get to a site than how far away from bad things it is. When you base a major decision like a data center site on how easy it is to get a sandwich for lunch vs. whether or not you will be physically able to get to or away from your facility, you (and your real estate people) are not doing yourself ANY favors and putting you at greater risk not less risk.

If you are looking for data center space, before you book your next tour do yourself a favor and pay attention to the overlooked stuff - roads to and from, the surrounding area around the facility, in the air, manhole covers, and think like your worst nightmare. If someone ships a box of Anthrax to downtown Dallas, how many people need to evacuate and can the roads handle it? If someone puts a device in a cargo plane bound for Dulles and is parked where I was with the cell phone trigger, is that an acceptable risk?

If you want help or want a site selection guide - email me - bytegrid@gmail.com and I will send you a free copy of my site selection document. I will save you time and money before you even leave your office.

Dell and its Data Center - WTF?

2010-11-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-does-dell-want-with-a-new-data-center-2010-11

I was reading this article and several others and the coverage from outside the industry is profound, and really doesn't tell a story, and speculates on things that don't make sense to me and other industry peers.

The factual news part of the Dell deal is that they bought land in a data center market where there are other data centers, and access to abundant cheap power, that part I get. It is also an active seismic area and long term that is not such a smart move to put a facility there unless you have it interconnected to other facilities on other grids, in other non seismic zones. To put one major facility in an active seismic zone indicates that their risk models either figured out that the power costs are cheaper than the expense of the facility, data loss and brand damage, or their site selection process overlooked the ground moving a lot and if you have one facility in one place with 100 different networks coming into the building then you will stand a better chance of losing all 100 networks AND the building in a major earthquake. Buh bye, on a big scale.

Does Dell have other data centers? Absolutely. Do those facilities have the capacity in them to take the entire load of the Washington facility in the event of an earthquake? I would hope so. If not, they may want to have another site in the works that could provide the deployed airbag like instant saturation of network connections (if they are even available), compute and storage load transfers that will occur.

If Dell wants to get into the hosting space, they need to get people who understand that business, from site selection to SLA's, otherwise this facility will be a bigger Dell box to put smaller Dell boxes in, and become one of the least cost effective sites to deliver those services from. Which might make sense if it was being built for a Government tenant... that I could understand.

Equinix Guidance...

2010-10-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

I thought this was an excellent quick & dirty assessment by Lydia Leong over at Gartner about Equinix Guidance being lowered and the ensuing stock tank, that also dragged the sector down with it. It shows me that investors don't understand the data center market other than 'it's a hot sector'. I wonder how many investors stopped to relaize that there are sub-sectors to the marketplace namely retail and wholesale players. This gives us a peek at the sub-sectors and outlines what investors need to pay attention to.

Equinix's reduced guidance

Lydia Leong | October 6, 2010 at 11:15 am | Tags: colocation, EQIX | Categories: Infrastructure | URL: http://wp.me/pj3To-ah

A lot of Gartner Invest clients are calling to ask about Equinix's trimming of guidance. I am enormously swamped at the moment, and cannot easily open up time slots to talk to everyone asking. So I'm posting a short blog entry (short and not very detailed because of Gartner's rules about
how much I can give away on my blog), and the Invest inquiry coordinators are going to try to set up a 30-minute group conference call for everyone with questions about this.

If you haven't read it, you should read my post on Getting Real on Colocation, from six months ago, when I warned that I did not see this year's retail colocation market being particularly hot. (Wholesale and leasing are hot. Retail colo is not.)

Equinix has differentiators on the retail colo side, but they are differentiators to only part of the market. If you don't care about dense interconnect, Equinix is just a high-quality colo facility. I have plenty of regular enterprise clients that like Equinix for their facility quality, and reliably solid operations and customer service, and who are willing to pay a premium for it -- but of course increasingly, nobody's paying a premium for much of anything (in the US) because the economy sucks and everyone is in serious belt-tightening mode. And the generally flat-to-down pricing environment for retail colo also depresses the absolute premium Equinix can command, since the
premium has to be relative to the rest of the market in a given city.

Those of you who have talked to me in the past about Switch and Data know that I have always felt that the SDXC sales force was vastly inferior to the Equinix sales force, both in terms of its management and, at least as manifested in actual working with prospects, possibly in terms of the
quality of the salespeople themselves. Time is needed for sales force integration and upgrade, and it seems like the earning calls indicated an issue there. Equinix has had a good track record of acquisition integration to date, so I wouldn't worry too much about this.

The underprediction of churn is more interesting, since Equinix has historically been pretty good about forecasting, and customers who are going to be churning tend to look different from customers who will be staying. Moving out of a data center is a big production, and it drives changes
in customer behavior that are observable. My guess is that they expected some mid-sized customers to stay who decided to leave instead -- possibly clients who are moving to a wholesale or lease model, and who are just leaving their interconnection in Equinix. (Things like that are good from a
revenue-per-square-foot standpoint, but they're obviously an immediate hit to actual revenues.)

This doesn't represent a view change for me; I've been pessimistic on prospects for retail colocation since last year, even though I still feel that Equinix is the best and most differentiated company in that sector.

The New Mod Squad

2010-09-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

Lee Technologies has released an interesting whitepaper this morning discussing modularization and introducing not only their approach but their solutions - at least high level. Steve Manos discussed his changing belief system in a blog post, which I thought was spot on.Change is in the air, as Steve points out, and I have always maintained change is fun to watch and even more fun to be a part of. That does not mean it is painless however - it seldom is. Change is a response to feedback - physical, mental, spiritual - that causes us to shift what we are doing and have 'always' done.
Having been in the data center space for 20 years, I have seen and been part of a lot of change. I was an early blogger on containers and that shift in the industry toward more efficient data center operation, and invested a fair amount of time in sitting with the vendors to understand how what they made were similar and how they were different. The change they were introducing made sense. What they were saying and doing was logical. Like a lot of other things that make sense and are logical and increase awareness - for that awareness to reach the point of changing behavior takes a while, not to mention a few skinned knees, and other painful lessons.
One major thing that was missing is their understanding of the entire ecosystem - not just their part of it - so they didn't understand that as great and efficient as they might be, unless you have a facility (or utility/systems) to hook them up to, you aren't done yet. You just sold a laptop without a battery or an iPhone without service, not the whole package that makes it all work.The data center industry, and the other parts of its ecosystem (power, network, water, facilities) are starting to change. Companies are deploying new solutions based on the logical assessments and operational experience of what they have done before (good and bad), and it is reinforced by carrot (cost savings) and stick (coal backed electricity) adding fuel to the building momentum.
The change is slow however, and I want offer an answer to the question 'Why?'
The dot com boom fueled a massive boom in data center development starting in 1993-1994. Money was pouring in, and as more and more data centers were built around the house of cards (logic went out the window - you don't stay in business without actual profits) more money kept being thrown at projects that wouldn't be done for years, and then you still had to fill them up with customers. The investors to a large degree didn't understand the data center business as a whole, they knew it took money which they had and knew how to work with. They didn't understand what it took to sell and operate them.
Those who jumped in without understanding the nature of the data center business aside from the real estate or money part, and followed the herd mentality got pinched. When they got pinched, they flinched hard, and abandoned projects and rather than owning their mistake (not understanding what they were investing in), they abandoned their projects and went on to express their opinions on why everyone else was foolish to be in that business. They had a chair when the music stopped.
The sentiment of data centers as a business from the financial community soured. They were not such a hot ticket in 1999-2002 when the bubble popped. Now I am watching the data center business become a hot ticket again. Amazon, Ebay, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and other internet companies, including 'cloud' companies started the pendulum swinging back the other way to make data centers the 'new black'. I will point out that these companies who started the changes, made the changes for themselves based on their requirments only, not the requirements of hundreds of customers with gear in the same data center. When you only have to satisfy one end user vs. hundreds, things are simpler.What has also changed is the influence from the data center ecosystem in data centers themselves.
The tree hugging dirt worshippers in the 'Green' movement have flexed their PR muscle (Google 'Facebook and Greenpeace'), the US Government has mandated energy conservation and lower carbon footprints for their data centers and builders, architects, and owner operators have flocked to LEED designs for projects. In short, logic backed decisions influenced by awareness of what we can do differently as an industry have begun to change behavior. First in single tenant facilities, and now the behavior change is spilling over to multi tenant facilities.
The behavior change is manifested in customers willingness to look at different solutions, so long as there is not a giant chasm to cross in being different is ok. It is up to us in the industry to continue some degree of missionary work in transferring knowledge about what we have learned to our customers and why it's important to them. We have to know the entire ecosystem, not just a piece of it.
We also need to explain why things like watts per square foot and rents based on square feet don't matter as much today, even though they have been standard selection criteria for decades. We need to explain that basing a decision on which data center to lease should be based on things like how accessible will it be if a dirty bomb goes off and the city is in lockdown, or what will the impact be to our production environments if a jet drops on top of the Ashburn cluster.
We are a part of a data center ecosystem - ultimately part of customers' ecosystems - and having a solid logical framework is the basis of what ultimately drives a right decision, not the greatest number of checkboxes checked on an RFP or how easy the facility is to reach from the airport for a tour.Modularization is a culmination of best practices, smarter execution, and practical application of components of that ecosystem.
Modular solutions are the physical representations that show us that each component which is part of the system can be inegrated better - or in a different way - to satisfy the most requirements for all customers, not just one and deliver more carrots from the experience with sticks.
Container solutions provide flexibility of deployment in the event of a disaster, modular builds let you eat the IT infrastructure elephant in bites, and provide the broadest set of options to satisfy the greatest number of requirements - and the only one that matters - the customer...
To be part of the Mod Squad - ping me - mmacauley AT bytegrid DOT net...

Are We Ready To Build a Data Center Around a Cabinet?

2010-09-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

I decided to blog about this because a friend of mine pinged me about Elliptical Mobile Solutions who has been receiving a lot of press because they are part of a few finalists' designs for EBay's new data center in Phoenix.

I met Richard Topping and SharylLin Bancroft of Green Data Solutions by literally bumping into them at a data center event in Santa Clara in December last year. I was at CoreSite helping to develop the Cloud Community AKA Cloud Center of Excellence with NASA as a charter member. I was talking to a couple of colleagues and they bumped into me trying to slide between me and another group enjoying cocktails and data center banter.

Needless to say I 'got' what they were trying to do and their solution (the RASER) is compelling. The downside is that it changes the economics for the data center owner operator because the RASERS are high density and self contained. You don't need a chiller plant to run them, just power and a sturdy building with telecom. The issue is that data centers are built with chiller plants, raised floor, air handlers, air conditioners with humidity systems and are designed around traditional cabinets. So back to the question - are we ready to build a data center around the cabinet?

I personally believe that the answer is yes, with some major caveats:

- the owner operator must have access to power and a sturdy building WITHOUT tens of millions invested in 'traditional' cooling infrastructure, raised floor, etc.

- The owner operator must be able to spend CAPEX on the cabinets to the tune of 70-100K each and collect it back over time

The challenges facing the adoption of the RASER (and others like it) are based in these two issues. An owner operator knows that there has been demand for traditional raised floor space, and because there is a mature market for it, it makes a safer bet for the financiers backing the data center build outs and retrofits. Owner operators get their buildings & projects financed building based on watts/SF, ability to cool the floor, and the mechanical & electrical systems to insure uptime. So for an owner operator to walk away from this model is risky - they run the risk of stranding a lot of floor space and equipment by implementing the new RASER cabinets. All this in spite of the efficiency owner operators all claim they are chasing reflected in PUE chest beating.

Now for an owner operator who has a building with ample power and was planning on building out raised floor environments/computer rooms in a traditional sense but has not purchased the infrastructure to operate it, their luck could not be better. Here are the rough numbers:

On a 1,000 cabinet facility they will plan for standard density of 4.8 Kw/cabinet - 4800 Kw or 4.8 MW. At ~3k per Kw all in it costs ~$14.5M for the project. The rent they plan for all in is ~$2,000 per cabinet per month. All in, fully rented it throws of $2M/month. Filled with 36 month term tenants that is $72M/36 mo. term. If the PUE is 1.8 that means for every dollar they spend on electricity 80 cents is added for inefficiencies (overhead). Electricity costs are .8 * 4800 * 730 (hours in a month) = ~$2.8M which is a pass through to larger customers.

Using a RASER deployment of 1,000 cabinets equivalent the numbers look like:

4800 Kw/12 KW/cabinet = 400 cabinets @ $70K = $28M. The PUE on a RASER is 1.2 so the facility saves 60 cents per Kwh of electricity. On 4800 Kw, the lower PUE gives you .6 * 4800* 730 (hours in a month)= $2.1M/month. Over 36 months the savings are ~$72M.

So 14.5M + 100.8M in electricity - ~116M 3 year cost on a traditional facility vs 20M + 25.2M = $45.2M.

Another way to look at it is per sq ft. 4.8MW supporting ~50K ft. At $2500/ft to build or $1800/ft to retrofit for traditional space is ~$125M build or $90M retrofit. With RASERS you need a facility of 15K ft, and retrofit only you're at ~$27M.

So are we ready to build the data center around the cabinet yet?

Data Center Modularization - The new New Thing?

2010-09-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

Recently I have followed a number of discussions, articles, and presentations about modularization of the data center. First was virtualization and next seems to be modularization. Is this cloud all over again? Repainting existing technology approaches as new?

I saw a video that was at Data Center Knowledge this morning introducing us to Dell's new approach to 'modularization'. I commented on the video and wanted to expand on my thoughts here.

Dell talks about their solution - as do others - as being able to deploy compute and storage resources quickly. Plug and play if you will. Dell says they can deploy within 30 days at a 'ready site'. The issue is that you still need to have a site/building to put them in that is ready to go. By ready to go I mean water infrastructure, electricity, fiber/telco, and security in place. And it all has to be redundant. The other distinction that needs to be publicized is that the Dell solution is NOT a mass production offering. It is a design and deploy offering, not an off the shelf offering.

This to me is not modularization, it is layout-ization. You are controlling the layout of the data center floor and in other cases the data center itself. What this 'new' approach does not address is the more difficult tasks of finding sites that have the infrastructure available - power substations that are accessible with capacity, necessary water for cooling, no less than 5 telecom/carriers accessible, and risk profile lowering physical security - not in flood plains, not in flight paths, 40 miles from population/city centers, 18 miles away and not downwind from nuclear power plants, and the list goes on. Once these requirements have been met, then you need to look at permiting in localities, which is not an easy process. Then construction schedules, budgets, and finally breaking ground around the weather.

Most of the 'new' approaches are for single tenant facilities. This is an important distinction because with a single tenant facility, there is one set of policies, rules, and group of decision makers to satisfy. In essence you only need to satisfy the requirements for one customer - the internal one. You can argue that there are multiple customers, however at the end of the day, it is one company's budgets and one cpany's policies and needs that drive decisions.

In a multi tenant facility, you have potentially hundreds of customer's requirements and decision processes and policies to contend with making the challenges numerous and all over the map. Densities vary, what phase of power, AC or DC, which telcos are important, circuit management, cabinet hardware, cage or no cage, private suite, and cooling these various deployments. What has happened is that the multi tenant facilities design facilities that work in their business model and for the potentially greatest number of tenants and the greatest number of requirements. Customers either find what they want in the facilities or keep shopping until they do.

Layout-ization can help with this because they can buy or build facilities with the requisite infrastructure, finish it off the way customers want it and create the win-win. However, this assumes that the other pieces are in place (permits, sites, etc.). The other issue is that when a data center operator buys a facility, it is a 20 year asset and technology changes many many times in 20 years. Raised floor vs slab, 50 watts/ft vs. 200 watts/ft, blades vs. pizza box, gig E vs. 30 gig, Tier calssifications that are the 'must have' Tier classification. You get the picture.

So what is the solution?

I think that the data center operators who 'get it' will adopt new deployment models for their facilities themselves and the layouts inside them. Watts per square foot don't matter as much after the short list is made by customers, only whether or not an operator can deliver to the customer requirements now and in the future. Tier classifications are being restructured, and existing space gets harder and harder to come by every week. This means that choices for customers will be made by what is available, vs. what is right for the customer.

There is a small window of opportunity here for investors to create the next model with data center operators who saw what has happened over the past 20 years and know it needs to be different for the next 20, and are willing to team up and build it.

Note to Cloud Service Providers - The Network is The Cloud

2010-08-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

I was catching up on some reading this weekend nursing a sunburn, and was absolutely blown away by the sheer number of 'Cloud' companies and what they are offering. I have covered Cloud in this blog repeatedly because I don't get it. I don't get what Cloud does that Managed Services Providers do with a reconstructed SLA. When I read in an eWeek piece that we need to 'stop defining what the cloud is and look at what it does' then I knew there are a lot of other people who don't get it, who want to get it, and since the industry can't come up with the single *right* answer, we call in Officer Barbrady to manage things 'Nothing to see here. Move along people...' and hope to move on without a definition in place.

Would you pay for something without knowing what it is AND does? In the words of Max from the movie The Losers 'it's like giving a loaded gun to a six year old Wade, you're not sure how t's going to end but you're pretty sure it's going to make the papers.' Is it a Zen thing? The cloud is, but will not be...? What is a simple truth? What are any of us sure of?

I am sure of one thing - that networks are the most overlooked component of the thing referred to as Cloud. Why? Simple? Imagine if there were no public roads between the airport and the car rental places, only taxi approved roads, or that you had to pay $10 to ride teh shuttle bus. You would incure a small fortune getting you and your stuff from one place to another to pay for the priviledge of renting something for as long as you needed it so you could move around.

I could play with that metaphor for a long time and won't, it's Monday. What I will say is that the Cloud providers need to understand networks so that they stay competitive, provide more value than the next guy, and if nothing else - they could offer the same pricing as Amazon's service and capture 38-48% more margin.

That should make the papers...

Everything is Bigger in Texas...

2010-08-23T05:23:00.000-07:00

Including outsourcing deals... IBM and the State of Texas are trying to re-negotiate their contract in the press instead of with each other. This is like divorcing in public folks - you think it's ugly now? Just wait.

There is $863M on the line and so some big rocks are being thrown between the two. The finger pointing is expected, the lack of leadership is not. Why someone on either side isn't saying (like a parent) 'I don't care who did what to who, figure it out and don't come out of your rooms until you figure it out!'.

here are my thoughts on the matter as an outsider who has been involved in pitching and delivering large deals:

1. Both sides need to get two people - preferably 'Juice Guys' (people who have authority to make and keep agreements) at the table and look forward as to where the State wants to go and what they need to do. I suspect a lot has changed given the fact that there have been so many issues and things the State thought it wanted may not be on the list anymore.

2. IBM needs to automate as much as humanly possible with the project. They are a HUGE company with a lot of PEOPLE. Folks, people, humans - that is the problem. The fewer people they use on the project, the higher the degree of success will be. Technology is used to execute business process. If the team focuses on the process that needs to be in place when all is said and done, they will be infinitely more successful. Software is then deployed to support the right process. It's a tool, not the solution.

3. If there are additional questions, call me. Not the people who got you into this mess in the first place Texas. I love this comment:

While citing its disagreement with DIR”s management and characterization of the contract, McLean said that ”should DIR decide to move forward with re-procurement of all or a portion of the services, IBM remains willing to assist DIR in that process.”

Why wouldn't the fox be ready to go back, invited, into the hen house?

IBM, you f'ed up. Own it, fix it (or not) and make the customer happy. You positioned yourself as the expert, and the State has said you fell short.

Texas - sit down with the stakeholders again and plot a new plan for someone new to execute. Remember to eat the elephant in bites, as migration and consolidation is a process, not a scheduled event.

Any questions? Call me or send me an email - mmacauley@bytegrid.net and I will do what I can to help. Even if it's only keeping the fox out of the hen house...

Do Watts per Square Foot Even Matter Anymore?

2010-08-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

I think about this question a lot, and it is one I am asking more as well to customers and peers in the industry. There are hundreds of facilities that were built 20-30 years ago and a few dozen that have been built in the past 10 (remember the .com bubble?) and I am being conservative. They were built with a solid approach for 20 years ago - build a building using a watts/ft metric to calculate costs, density, and ultimately capacity. Remember that Wang, Digital/DEC, and IBM mainframes were the systems of choice. Then the PC came on the scene, and drastically changed the dynamic of computing. Client/Server, new network protocols, ARPA, TCP/IP and http - the evolution was on.

So too were manufacturers evolving - building smaller footprint, higher capacity machines. These machines were 2-3x as powerful as their predecessors, taking up half the space. Companies could consolidate their huge footprint monlithic systems inside their data centers and make room for more. Or could they?

Today, to me it seems like deja vu all over again.

The computing world has shifted again by using virtualization, and those smaller more powerful servers, just got smaller (so small you can't touch or see them), went virtual, and companies are embracing the next evolution with gusto. They are also hitting the wall that IT managers who are retired or dead hit decades ago - power.

Why is this happening again? In a word - heat.

These smaller machines draw more power, and generate a lot more heat for their footprint. Ask a multi tenant data center operator who services the retail market on a cabinet by cabinet basis and they will tell you that cabinets full of gear that draw 4.8Kw are going in next to cabinets with 10-14 Kw. The higher density cabinets generate a lot more heat that needs to be removed from the floor so all the densities of the servers with their heat signatures can be maintained properly.

What is intrinsic of a 20 year old facility that makes it better to satify growing densities, evolving computing applications and hardware, and whatever comes down the pike? How does the colocation market evolve at the same time? When do we hit the wall, or do we hit the wall? Can you simply throw more air conditioners/handlers on the floor? Can we just continue to push utilities to increase generation and distribution? What happoens to the cost models?

I am starting to think that we are at a crossroads. Why do I believe this? Because data centers are starting to evolve. Containers, modular buildings, more flexible options. Until the hardware manufacturers get together with data center operators and do some R & D in a meaningful way, share roadmap, do testing together, we will continue to build the way we have, and not the way we must.

Want to play together - ping me. I want to figure this out...

To Live and Die in LA

2010-07-27T03:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-misses-deadline-in-high-profile-la-deal-2010-07-23?dist=countdown

Note to Google and CSC, both companies I enjoy a working relationship with:

The Cloud is an accounting puzzle, not a technology one. Add up the costs of of hardware, software, bandwidth, secure routers, switches, the whole nine. Divide by the number of employees and there is the cost per employee. Divide this by 730 hours per month and that is the cost per hour per employee.

Security is an issue in any network that needs to connect to another network that connects to another network because you lose control of policy and enforment. The way to deploy a cloud solution is to add up the costs, divde by employees, then by hours. There are implementation costs and 'day 2' costs which are the caring and feeding.

The cloud is a collection of IT stuff (hardware, software, network, people) that we have been deploying for 30 years. Cloud is a billing application. Get the beancounters in to help with the clean up and the software jockeys to write an open source billing app and be done with it.

New Use for Data Centers...

2010-07-26T09:22:00.000-07:00

I got the idea from watching the marijuana dispensaries start to pop up across the country and given my line of work in the data center business I had an 'A-Ha' moment.

Grow pot in old data centers

There is adequate power
Raised floors could support water lines for irrigation
The temp and humidity are already controlled so the infrsastructure is there
The facilities are secure
The biggest expense would probably be putting in the right kind of lights

Maybe someone already of this and I am half as smart as they are. Either that or I just figured out a way to make use of the Federal Consolidation of Data Centers without having big empty facilities mothballed.

Nebula comes into its own

2010-07-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

This was a project I worked on in the background and I am thrilled to see it come into its own and be part of OpenStack.

Congrats to Chris Kemp and behind the scenes -Bobby, Josh, and Kim - you got it done.

My Cloud Math - Flawed or Flawless?

2010-06-28T07:01:00.000-07:00

Dell PowerEdge R900 - $7500
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Support - $1200/year
Draw @ capacity – 1.5 KW per unit
4U = 9 plus a switch 1 Kw
Draw = 14.5 Kw per cabinet at load *.8 = 11.6Kw
$4500 for VM ware per cabinet

Costs:
2,175/mo rent per cabinet, 78,300 for 3 year term
67,500 hardware amortized over 3 years
10,800 for SW = 32,400 for 3 years:
3 year total – 177,900
Per mo: ~$5,000 per cabinet for a 3 year term

So on a per cabinet basis, you need to do ~$6,00 month in revenue to make it work at low margins.

Using Amazon EC2, @ $1.20 per hour you can bill $28.80 per day per instance. At 16 VM per core and a six core box is used, $2,764.80 per box per day at max utilization (16*6*28.8). At 9 per rack, that's $24,883 per day if the rack is 100% utilized. If the rack is utilized 8% then $24,883*.08= $1990.66 per day.

That's $730,000 per year per rack if you hit 8% utilization.

How does this check out with what you're seeing?

Fuel Cells and Green Tech in the Data Center

2010-06-16T16:49:00.000-07:00

An industry peer, Ken Jamaca from Silverback tech gave me a heads up on an article whose subject is one of great interest to me - Fuel Cells in the data center.

One reason it is of great interest is that the current electricity grid in the US is resilient, barely, and has been for some time. Adding load to it does not help the problem, and given the lack of a US Energy policy generation is hard to come by and getting new power plants approved are even more difficult. Not great news to folks looking to construct new data centers as data centers are about access to power. Period. The other reason is that I am embarking on a new data center venture that will bring a new data center platform to the market.

Wind has generated the most buzz and been deployed the most in the US as a solution to increasing generation capacity and giving us more electrons to consume in a 'green' way. Wind is great - so long as the wind is blowing and since it is inconsistent (unreliable) as a power source, and it's expensive to store the electricity, it is used as a mix of total power available to customers. Solar is also a solution that has generated a lot of buzz however the land area required to put PV panels up is so large to be meaningful to a data center that many solar installations on roofs of large data centers and commercial buildings only provide enough electricity for parking lot lights and ambient lighting in hallways and common areas.

Fuel cells are getting more attention and the technology seems to be advancing as fast as it ever has. Bloom Energy has garnered the majority of the buzz in the market, and UTC (United Technologies) to a lesser extent, and there are some new entrants that have reached out to me to discuss their approaches and solutions.

As I have gotten into the nitty gritty of designing a system that is reliable, off grid, and can support a multi megawatt installation, some interesting things have popped up that have nothing to do with the technology, but have to do with a 100 year old set of policies, tarriffs, and agreements that make it difficult for a company to adopt the technology, especially a data center that wants 5 nines. Let me explain a little...

One major factor is utility costs per kWh and kW. Many utilities have 'demand charges' and 'stand by' charges that will impact the economics of the approach and drive design of a fuel cell system. Some also use what is called a ratcheted rates or tariffs. Should the data center need to transfer from fuel cell to the power grid/utility for backup, the demand charge is the charge per month for the next 12 months.

So say you’re paying $5,000/mo demand charge every month for 500 kW for a computer room. Then the fuel cell system trips off for even a few seconds, the full kW demand of the facility is now the current demand for the next 12 months. So say that 500 kW goes to 2,500 kW at $10.00/kW the new monthly charge is now $25,000 for the next 12 months. Ouch.

Developers need to play close attention to the tariffs and the structure of where they build these systems. The utilities clearly do not want onsite power in many cases and write the tariffs deliberately to keep out self generation. In some smaller municipal utilities they may welcome exporting excess power to the grid as a peaker during the summer months to help carry load on the grid for when every home turns on air conditioning during a heat wave. In other cases they may not want these solutions in their service area due to the adverse impact on transmission capacity on the local circuits and upgrade costs to meet the need should the facility go down.

So a word to the States, counties, towns, and municipalities looking to attract data centers, jobs, and tax revenues: Electricity matters more than anything.

The ability for a facility to generate power for themselves, especially low to zero carbon footprint power, and still be served by a utility as back up vs. primary power flips the 100 year old electricity business model on it head. This creates a threat for the utilities, because there are now competitive technologies made by companies that aren't restricted by a 100 year old business model, and will serve customers faster.

While the cost is still high for these newer 'greener' systems, the price comes down as adoption prolifererates. The confluence of technology, its incresing reliability, and the ultimate development of an alternative electricity ecosystem will seismically shift the models and markets.

I don't know about you, but after 100 years, I am ready to try something new.

The jury is still out....

2010-06-14T06:29:00.000-07:00

I was catching up on some Monday morning reading and saw some covereage for a new low power server from SeaMicro and was left scratching my head.

I am not a server guy. I am a data center guy and I try to pay attention to systems and how they are designed and work together. I always find myself asking 'so what?' when I see a new product or service because at the end of the day I really don't give a sh*t how cool/new/groundbreaking something is, I want to to know why it's better than what I have, so I always ask - so what?

From a single tenant data center operator I can see that this is interesting. Lower cost to do more computing = good. For the multi tenant data center I don't see the good. Here's why:

Equinix sells a lot of cabinets. 4.8 Kw cabinets. So if you buy these SeaMicro servers that pack a full cabinet worth of compute into a 1/2 cabinet, you just made me double the density for 1/2 the space. Not Good. Why?

Because a data center operator needs to get power provisioned from a power company. To do this load letters are filed which is a formal request for more power to a site. Let's say that the load letter is for 13 megawatts in a 100,000 square foot building. The building consists of 10 computer rooms each with 1.2 megawatts. That 1.2 megawatts is designed for 4.8 Kw/rack, not 8Kw as the SeaMicro SM10000 are.

So now my electrical load can only support 5,000 feet of computer room space fully loaded leaving me (or the customer) paying for the other 5000 feet or stranding it, or waiting for more power assuming its available. It breaks the model and isn't as attractive as something that fits in my business model like a 4.8 Kw rack.

These are like containers. Containers break the model of a traditional data center in that for a ~600 sq. ft. footprint, they can consume 500Kw/half a megawatt. So instead of a 5,000 ft room, you have a very dense 600 sq ft box and a lot of extra space. That is good if you like paintball and want to set up a paintball field inside for when you are provisioning servers, but for a business, it's a tough sell.

And as a result,Seamicro may never get to the part of the pitch about lower operational costs.

The thaw seems to be on...

2010-05-27T08:57:00.000-07:00

In the past two days I have been fielding a ton of phone calls asking about my new venture and do I need money. I can only suspect that there is a thaw happening in the capital markets and investors sitting on cash earning single digit returns are starting to get impatient and looking for low risk investment sectors.

The sweet spot for investment in the data center markets seems to be the $200M-500M range and I can't figure out if that range is based on the numerous IPO filings by Telx, CoreSite, Interexion, etc., the M&A market with deals between Cyrus One and Cincinnati Bell, ViaWest and Oak Hill, etc. or if there are enough people to know what it takes to buy into the space and given where the bar is, not everyone can or wants to jump in (yet).

Expansions and new builds are being announced weekly which means there is more inventory coming to market. However, it won't be instantaneous inventory as the projects I have seen announced and others I know about from my Colo Mafia are all 9-24 months away from having space ready to move into.

So What?

This means that if you need megwatts now, the market is tight. It also means that there will be more sites to put into a site selection process and having people you can turn to with expertise about the operations, the systems, a company's innerworkings, will also be even more important. The real estate brokers are aware of this fact, and I see many establishing data center practices - with real estate folks, not data center folks. Real Estate guys for the most part don't understand the systems of a data center, why density is variable, why N+1 can mean different things to an ops person vs. a sales person.

Do they understand power distribution to the site and inside the site?
Do they understand telecom density? Peering and why that's an advantage?
Can they tell you why a facility is better than another or do they Google all the data centers in Ashburn VA and tour you through 6 of them when you really need to focus on one or two?
Do they understand what the data center needs to support?
Will they bring you to an NSA rated facility when you really need a fireproof locked filing cabinet?

With more inventory comes more choice. We love choice (usually). I use a simple formula to understand site selection:

number of decision makers/influencers * number of facilities = number of things you will need to sort through and spend time and money on

Lower numbers are better. I have encouraged companies to look at 1-2 facilities instead of 6 and spend the savings on bigger bonuses or an offsite meeting in St. Lucia in February vs. flying in 5-6 people multiple times for multiple site visits. It is a waste of time and money better spent on laying out the right facility than choosing it.

Pretty sweet little piece of technology...

2010-05-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

This morning in between calls to launch a new company I had the pleasure of checking out a new technology that is actually useful (at least to me) in the data center.

Viridity

Never heard of it? Me either, but a former colleague who knows I have been in the data center business a while says I should check it out. So I do.

After 10 minutes I wished I had a 50,000 cabinet data center to plug it into. Seriously. So what is so great about it?

First off it'll auto discover physical and virtual machines and where they are. Then it tells you utilization of the physical server. Then (drum roll please) it tells you the POWER DRAW of the machine and the VM's on it. So what?

For the data center operator:

- It lets you see where the power hogs are
- It lets you see where hot spots are or will come from
- It lets you insure that a customer (in an MTF - Multi-Tenant Facility) isn't in violation of a license agreement
- It will let you know when someone is close to their upper limit and put a call in before breakers trip
- If you want to consolidate a computer room it will let you know EXACTLY what you have running, what's tapped out, what isn't, and what the power needs to be in the new facility
- It lets you locate unused resources quickly and flag power hogs you may not know about

For STF (Single Tenant Facilities) or for customers in MTF's:

- It lets you see what is actually being used for power and whether or not charges are accurate
- It lets you plan deployments and consolidations so you know what is provisioned by facility, rack, or machine.

All in all very similar to Power Assure's product and probably worth a bake off...

Change of Heart Gartner? Confusion?

2010-05-14T07:56:00.000-07:00

I picked a bone with Lydia Leong at Gartner over a post she had in her blog essentially saying there wasn't a space issue in the data center markets. Today I see that Ramesh Kumar at Gartner says the EXACT OPPOSITE that power, space, and cooling are scarce.

I should also point out that yours truly made the very point that Ramesh did on Lydia's blog over a week ago. What changed?

So it got me wondering - is there just a ton of confusion over at Gartner about the data center market? How they cover it? It translates to me as a customer - you lost some credibility on this guys, please get it straight, you're supposed to the best...

Did Gartner do their homework after the first blog post on the state of inventory in data center markets and came to realize they really were tight?

Do they really understand what is out there, the differences, the nuances, the real deal in data centers from the systems perspective?

From density perspective? From the virtualization perspective?

I do. I will keep on sharing what I know to those who to understand what is and isn't out there for choices and arm you with knowledge to help make the best decisions.

If I hear any more Spin about The Cloud...

2010-05-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

I don't know if anyone remebers the Simpsons episode Marge vs. the Monorail, but it could likely be overdubbed with the cloud, and we would have a humorous look at the noise that cloud has created.

I go back to my post from January 29th 2010 about my acronym for the Cloud:

Completely
Ludicrous
Offerings of
Unsustainable
Diversion

Folks, I hate to pee in people's Wheaties, but we've been here before many times. Mainframes did the same thing. They were big honking machines that got divided up and rented out by the hour/job/unit to users. Supercomputers - same deal more power.

'Outsourcing' took anything not a core competency and allowed companies to lease back stuff, whether it was people, process, or other 'stuff'.

Managed services/leasing - pay for a computer and software (or several in a system) over time. Some were shared some were private.

Cloud - chop the system(s) up into components that can be paid for in a per unit fashion and users can lease the collective system or any component of it without a contract.

Tie it all together and it means companies no longer have to plan for capex, they can have an 'oh shit' go online, get a petabyte, couple hundred processors, and take the thought around problem solving out of the equation.

The downside is that IT is once again in a reactive vs. proactive mode of operation. They are willingly giving up any strategic value in the organization. The organizations are chasing the Cloud buzzwords like a junkie chasing a fix. Stop. Just stop.

With control comes responsibility, something that we seem so willing and driven to shirk to someone else vs. sitting down and calmly figuring out that:

A private cloud is nothing more than another way to pay for your systems.
A public cloud is nothing more than a pay as you go contract with a service provider
There are costs and benefits to each that should be explored thoroughly before deciding what to do.

And if you have an 'Oh Shit', what an opportunity for IT to step up and do something right. No buzzwords, no bullshit.

So as we see the vendor press releases about 'Cloud Strategy' lets remember that they are telling us what we already know - there are many ways to pay for your stuff, we need to figure out which solution is best for us as we have for the last 25 years thank you. Then we'll let you know how we want to pay for it. Kind of like our mobile phones...

Did EMC Management smoke breakfast this week?

2010-05-11T18:44:00.000-07:00

That is a reasonable conclusion after reading what Joe Tucci said at the EMC World event in Boston - 'Journey into the Private Cloud' as in cloud of smoke?

I understand that every Fortune 2000 IT company feels compelled to have a 'cloud strategy'. It's the new Black. However when a strategy is presented in a way that it communicates alienation of some big technology partners (HP/Cisco) whose gear EMC's relies on in some form or fashion to move the data on and off EMC arrays, then I sit back and wonder WTF were they thinking?

Here is the quote I am using from ZDNet:

Tucci also criticized the data center verticalization strategy that companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Cisco are taking, saying it will lead to a new kind of lock-in that will ultimately lend itself to inefficiency. He said EMC’s private cloud strategy swaps out verticalization with virtualization and allows all of your data center solution providers — even EMC competitors — to plug in.

So here are the things that make me glad I am not a shareholder and glad I am a customer:

1. Leading to a new kind of lock in is what you want Joe. That means people like your stuff, they buy your stuff and become dependent on your stuff to function. It's a nice virtually guaranteed revenue stream.
2. As a customer, its great that I can now try other storage offerings from my competitors in a cloud, so when you decide to change the strategy to something more realistic and come back to get me to 'lock in', I now have options. Options that you gave to me, and your competitors. Thanks.

Look, EMC has said time and time again it wants to be an arms dealer. They could care less who wins on the battlefield so long as bullets keep flying and they don't get bloody. The issue with this approach is it's non-committal. What are you for? What are you doing vs. what are you not doing? What do you believe vs. how many buzzwords need to be thrown around before people see that you have no clue about what you're doing.

So Joe, if you are listening or should have one of your colleagues stumble across my blog - you don't need a cloud strategy. Cloud is an exercise in accounting. It's mainframe all over again. Take a box, itemize its components and lease it back to the user on a per unit basis. If you want a solid private cloud strategy, call me, and I will pull together leasing partners who will chop up a VPlex faster than a Benihana hibachi cook and lease them out, protecting your market cap, serving your customers, and still being an arms dealer.

In other words EMC needs a cloud strategy that isn't about cloud. It's about EMC's products being the best damn storage products they can make and enabling different ways for customers to figure that out.

Part Three of The Issue of Scale - So What?

2010-05-03T07:56:00.000-07:00

The question 'So What' is probably my favorite question to ask when a great idea comes to mind, or I hear a pitch about something. If I haven't answered the 'so what' question in advance, then I have failed in specifying and conveying what matters. I have also failed my colleagues if I merely whine about an issue without coming up with at least one solution.

On the Issue of Scale, so what? Follow up question - what can be done?

The so what question comes down to supply and demand. The supply for large footprints is dwindling and will only get tighter. That drives price up in mature markets. Sure you can get a deal in Oklahoma City, but I would put money on paying more to be in Northern Virginia, even outside the Ashburn/Reston data center nucleus.

I had posted a response to a post by Lydia Leong at Gartner

She makes the argument:

If I’m going to believe in gigantic growth rates in colocation, I have to believe that one or more of the following things is true:

- IT stuff is growing very quickly, driving space and/or power needs
- Substantially more companies are choosing colo over building or leasing
- Prices are escalating rapidly
- Renewals will be at substantially higher prices than the original contracts

I don’t think, in the general case, that these things are true. (There are places where they can be true, such as with dot-com growth, specific markets where space is tight, and so on.) They’re sufficiently true to drive a colo growth rate that is substantially higher than the general “stuff that goes into data centers” growth rate, but not enough to drive the stratospheric growth rates that other analysts have been talking about.

My counterpoints were that Virtualization is driving power densities up, not down. Colocation pricing is based on power density, whether expressed in square feet or per Kw rent. Density goes up, so does cost whether the cost is new CRAH/CRAC units, a new building, or a 50MW transformer.

Second - more companies look to outsource anything that is not a core competency including data centers than look to build up in house capabilities and staff. The construction of data centers gets more buzz than leasing does, but leasing still outpaces building every quarter. The companies who build are single tenant facilities with cash to do it. However building one and running one are two different businesses.

Prices are increasing. 'Ready to go' supply (a.k.a finished space) is taken in most major metro markets. That said, there will always be a company that will buy some business, get a loss leader anchor tenant and those decisions have many variables like loan structures, financing vehicles, etc. that drive what a company will charge on a specific deal.

Renewals are being done at higher price points. The cost of capital to grow is very high, data centers are incredibly capital intensive up front and companies that are doing renewals are seeing bumps in rates going forward. The counter seems to be to shorten term as if to send a message to the company that 'if you're going to jack my rate then I am only doing a 12 month renewal'. You know what, the vendor likes that more because in 12 months there will be less space and higher rates.

So how does one deal with this?

Put ROFO's in your license agreements. It gives you the ability to preserve space if a facility is filling fast. It may cost you more if the new customer is willing to pay more, but it beats having to run two sets of infrastructure in two separate facilities.

Investors - open up your checkbooks. If you got burned in the last build up - here's your shot at redemption. The window will start to close in 18 months in that you want a project funded and rolling and cash flow positive in 18-24 months. If you're looking for a fast return - stay out of this arena.

Operators - there are many deals out there to roll up assets that are underperforming and make a reasonable play and expand with rent in place.

End users - take space now if its available - especially in hot markets. If you think that virtualization will save you, it wont - your power draws will go up, we have never created less data than the previous day/week/month/year. If you think I am wrong look at it this way - every increased megapixel of camera that comes out increases file size, things go viral, and what was one picture can become a dozen copies of a a 2 megabyte photo, in other words 2megs * 10 copies is 20 Mb, not 2.

Lastly, there is a reason that there are hot markets and data center clustering - it's network density. More carriers in a building means better performance, fewer hops and lower latency. Go to buildings with high carrier density.

The Issue of Scale - Part 2 - The Basketball through the Python

2010-04-12T13:32:00.000-07:00

What a difference a week makes...

QTS announced they will bring up to 1M square feet into the market after they purchased a former chip fab plant in Richmond VA.

Digital Realty Trust announced they they are full as is DuPont Fabros in Northern VA and they will both be expanding to the tune of ~100K feet each. In total that is roughly 120 MW, I am not sure on the time period over which the inventory will be rolled out.

So given that coming into the year, about 9Mw were taken per quarter in Northern VA, and the recent leasing of at least that much in March means that things are growing not abating. That does not include the ~1200 MW that the Government will need to start planning for consolidation starting in 2011.

So this example brings me to the next issue of scale which is reality of expectations.

Specifically expectations that the available space will be there when needed. If the Government or the Systems Integrators think that 1200MW will just appear, then lets look at reality.

Lets say 12 agencies need 100MW each. With 10 -20MW available in any given quarter as move in condition - i.e. we tour it, we like it, we want it, price is fair, where do I sign, space is finished condition - this means in ten years the space will be there. Ten years to do a consolidation that has been set to take two years. For each agency.

At a cost of $1200/ft, and 10k ft = 1.2 MW and 1200 MW are needed/100 per agency... For 100 MW the capital needed is $1B. Times 12 = $12B. For ~1M sq. ft.

Investors are you listening? That is $12,000,000,000 that is needed to fund building data centers that are green, efficient, and presumably modular in design and deployment. For one project from one customer. In a two year time frame. I mentioned that the power had to be green right? Oh and did I mention that gear needs to be ordered to replace the old stuff, moved if it's still good and in working condition, and all brought together within specific windows to minimize downtime? People can't NOT get their Social Security checks.

Using an industry estimate of 4 months to complete a 10k ft computer room - 1,000,000 square feet/10,000*4 months/12 = 33 years if we start now. No, that does not factor in economies of scale/parallel building projects, etc.

If we deploy 1M square feet at once then maybe to get a shell up takes 2 years, but figuring out how to chunk it up is a different story, and also where the time gets eaten up.

How much of the space needs to be in a SCIF and/or adhere to DCID 6-9? Where is the failover site going to be to make things redundant? Is all the data and equipment at the same level of security? Should it be? How do we connect it all?

I can hear the Cloud pundits say - put it in 'the cloud!'

How many of them have 12MW of cloud deployed let alone 1200? Does the data stay in the US? Can they prove it? Are all the facilities secure? How secure? Why do I have to pay to move data from site to site? How many vendors, license agreements, leases, and operations people, technologies, and methodologies do we need to be aware of?

Some of the apps can move to the cloud, along with the associated data and some of it already has been, however I am willing to bet that it is less than 1%. So this is a big opportunity and I sincerely hope that we as an industry can help keep it simple, eat this virtual elephant in bites, and save money for the taxpayers.

The Issue of Scale...

2010-04-05T05:40:00.000-07:00

I have been quietly spending the last few months contemplating scale. Specifically scale of data centers and the impacts of virtualization to the delivery of scale. This is the first installment of a multipart series discussing what is and what is not out there in the data center realm.

There have been few announcements about large data center projects worldwide over the past two years. Mostly from Single Tenant Facilities (STF) like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. I chalk this up to the capital markets being as dry as Melba Toast on a summer day in Vegas, so there hasn't been any capital to tap into to build new facilities so the big companies with credit are about the only ones who can do a build.

This leaves the rest of the market with Multi Tenant Facilities (MTF) strapped for space in the X megawatts up to the XXX Megawatts scale. The MTF markets are already experiencing stress in that the prime Tier III space is being gobbled up rapidly. I have had several discussions with folks outside the data center industry, or at best peripherally involved in it (like they shop for new space once every 8-10 years) and they say 'I don't see what everyone is talking about, there seems to be plenty of space out there'. For 10 cabinets or 20 cabinets I'm sure there is. For multiple megawatts from a single provider in a specific market? Ha ha ha ha... That's a good one.

In Northern Virginia, dozens of megawatts move every quarter, and have, for the past year. Companies are reluctant to publicize it. Why? They don't want the remaining inventory sucked up and for their ROFO/ROFR to get triggered because someone else needs a big chunk of space. There are two companies with buildings in Northern VA today that sat mostly vacant a year ago and one has sold out and the other will be full by fall. Another company on the West Coast that has pre-leased the entire first phase of their project before it was completed. Now that market has a few pockets for a few dozen cabinets when it seemed like there would be plenty of inventory for 2010-2011.

At the Data Center Dynamics conference in New York a month ago, Jim Kerrigan, one of the speakers said that "32% of the leased data center space is up for renewal by 2013" which means even MORE stress on the market is on the horizon with very little building going on and customers expanding out of necessity if nothing else.

Hopefully this helps establish a baseline for people trying wrap their heads around the two sides of the discussion about whether or not the Data Center market is tight on inventory. If you need a few cabinets in a few markets - you're fine. If you need 10 MW in 5 markets... Not so much...

I am Headed to FOSE

2010-03-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

Are you going to the FOSE Conference in Washington DC March 23rd-25th?

I will see you there. I will be attending a few sessions, meeting with friends and colleagues, and if you want to catch up, talk about the State of the Union, let me know - mark.macauley AT gmail. com

I will be at Data Center Dynamics in NYC 3/2-3/3

2010-03-01T08:26:00.000-08:00

It's at the Hilton in midtown. Is anyone else going?

Data Protection (Movement) in the Cloud

2010-02-24T04:56:00.000-08:00

This gives us a visual representation (Heat Map) of cloud data privacy policies. This is VITAL to understand if you do any work with the Government, here's why:

The data cannot leave the United States, and if you use Amazon or other cloud offerings from global players there is not a way to insure that data and workload stays in the US.

So while your Cloud Sales rep may be local, look under the sheets and see where the data is and could be at any given point.

Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) question

2010-02-11T06:31:00.000-08:00

Does anyone know what the failover capabilities are with OTV?

Spefically I want to know how long it takes for workload to be moved and connections restored. Example:

Data Center #1 has a power issue, site switches to battery and gives me 8 minutes. Can I have another site (DC #2) up/failed over within the 8 minutes with no data loss provided that the systems are configured correctly?

More details on Cisco OTV

2010-02-09T07:29:00.000-08:00

http://jasonnash.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/cisco-announces-otv-the-private-cloud-just-got-more-fun/

I was going to get into another layer and Jason did. I lifted this from his site (above):

What OTV does is that it allows you to connect two L2 domains that are separated by a L3 network. Basically, it’ll encapsulate Layer 2 traffic inside an IP packet and ship it across the network to be let loose on the other side. In this way you can make two logically separated data centers function as one large data center. The beauty of OTV is that it does away with a lot of the overly complicated methods we previously used for this sort of thing. It’s really, really simple. The only catch is that you need Nexus 7000s to do it today. How simple is it? Here is all the configuration you need on one switch in your OTV mesh:

otv advertise-vlan 100-150
otv external-interface Ethernet1/1
interface Overlay0
description otv-demo
otv site-vlan 100
otv group-address 239.1.1.1 data-group-range 232.192.1.2/32

That’s six lines, including a description line. Basically, you enable OTV and assign an external interface. The switch, like all good little switches, keeps a MAC table for switching frames but for those MACs on the other side of the L3 network it just keeps a pointer to the IP of the far end switch instead of an interface. It knows that when a frame destined for a MAC address on another switch arrives to encapsulate it in to an IP packet and forward it out. The switches all talk to each other and exchange MAC information so they know who is where. This communication of MAC information is handled via a multicast address. Very simple, very elegant. All done without the headaches of other tunneling or VPN technologies.

Cisco's OTV - Overlay Transport Virtualization

2010-02-08T06:54:00.000-08:00

I was taking a look at Cisco's OTV capability they are rolling out on the Nexus gear and my first impression was - wow!

The gist of it is: OTV is a new feature of the Nexus OS operating system that encapsulates Layer 2 Ethernet traffic within IP packets, allowing Ethernet traffic from a local area network (LAN) to be tunneled over an IP network to create a “logical data center” spanning several data centers in different locations. OTV technology will be supported in Cisco’s Nexus 7000 in April 2010, and existing Nexus customers can deploy OTV through a software upgrade.

Cisco says its overlay approach makes OTV easier to implement than using a dark fiber route or MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) over IP to move workloads between facilities.

“Moving workloads between data centers has typically involved complex and time-consuming network design and configurations,” said Ben Matheson, senior director, global partner marketing, VMware. “VMware VMotion can now leverage Cisco OTV to easily and cost-effectively move data center workloads across long distances, providing customers with resource flexibility and workload portability that span across geographically dispersed data centers.

“This represents a significant advancement for virtualized environments by simplifying and accelerating long-distance workload migrations,” Matheson added.

My opinion on why this is important centers around Layer 2. Layer 2 is where peering happens. Peering allows companies to move data around without paying for it. Bandwidth providers agree to pass traffic from one network to another via a cross connection between the two networks. Instead of buying a point to point OC-192 between data centers, a company would colocate IT gear in a data center on a peering point, buy a port on a peering Exchange like Any2, and cross connect to other networks who can move traffic around on other networks at Gig and 10 Gig (and up) speeds. The connections are in Layer 2.

A pertinent example would go like this:

An online gaming company colocates 50 cabinets in One Wilshire or 900 N. Alameda. They buy a port on the Any2 Exchange and set up 5 cross connections to different networks who peer at One Wilshire and 900 N. Alameda - Level 3, AboveNet, Tata, Vodaphone, and NTT as an example. As they expand into their global footprint, they can move VM's - workloads and game play - around from one data center to another using the cross connects, and not have to have large pipes, point to point, from one facility to another.

Another example would be a US based space agency I have done some work with, has containers that house a cloud offering (OS) in them. One of their satellites takes 100 pictures of the rigs of Saturn one morning and needs to distribute those massive images to thousands of constituents worldwide. In the past they may have purchased multiple 10 Gig pipes from their Center to a handful of hubs they interconnect with. Big money for big bandwidth which they need. Using this OTV technology, they buy a fat pipe from their Center to 55 S. Market in San Jose (3 miles or so), buy a port on an exchange that peers there, and now they can move those photos, videos, etc. to their other hubs who use the same peering exchange and not have to pay for the bandwidth between 55 S. Market in San Jose, CA and say Chicago - 2167 miles. This pays for the deployment of other containers where there is 100% green power that is cheap, can use peering to expand the footprint's network, and if a better spot becomes available, they move the container after offloading the workload to another container or two.

This is one of those game changing technologies in how people can deliver compute to customers. For large scale deployments, especially those that must be green and use wind generated power or nuclear generated power, this is a huge advantage. You know have the ability to drive physical and virtual movement of workload based on criteria other than - is there (do we have) a data center there.

I will be watching this solution closely.

The Green IT shell game

2010-02-03T07:20:00.000-08:00

I was doing research for an RFP yesterday about carbon footprints as they related to PUE, Data Center Operations, and IT resources in general. What I realized was that IT still looks at itself in silos, not systems. Let me explain...

This morning I got my copy of eWeek and on the cover was a pointer to Green IT Solutions - The Real Deal - on page 16. I'll admit I didnt spend a lot of time on the article because it was just like 100 others I have read the past few months that follow a simple formula:

Virtualization = Green

Um, not exactly...

Let me take you through a systems view of carbon in the data center operations:

The PUE of most data centers is 2.0 or higher. This means that for every dollar spent on powering servers, an additional dollar is spent on common facilities electricity to support systems. In the container model. The PUE is 1.2 which means 80 cents of every dollar captured for common facilities/infrastructure is saved. For a 500 KW deployment with a $0.10 per Kwh charge it means that in a data center with a PUE of 2.0, the cost is $73,000 for electricity. With a PUE of 1.2 the cost is $43,800. Savings per month of $29,200, and all of the electricity is green.

To produce a Kw of electricity from coal, 2.3lbs of carbon are produced (see http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html), so for a 500Kwh environment, multiplied by 2.3 lbs per Kwh is 839,500 pounds or 419 tons per month. Since wind eliminates 98% of carbon emissions, the net carbon footprint per month drops to 8.4 tons per month (see http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/postpn268.pdf)

When I look at a virtualization = Green example I see some major gotchas:

1. New equipment will likely need to be purchased. The manufacturing process is not carbon-light.

2. This means more mercury and other nasty stuff in the new equipment plus the old equipment. recycling gets you a couple of brownie points.

3. If a new data center is constructed, or leased, or expanded there is the cost of manufacturing, transporting, and assembling all of the components. If it's still powered by coal - you gained nothing

My point being Virtualization is NOT/KINDA Green and has a measureable but not significant reduction in carbon footprint. My personal stance is that you are far better off getting your utility to get wind energy into your data center and cut carbon by the boatload. Better yet, get wind produced power, use an existing data center someplace cool and open the windows when you can.

The other thing I found very amusing in my research was the data center with a LEED Platinum rating and was powered by multiple 50+ year old coal plants. It's like tinting mercury pink to make it 'safe' isn't it?

Is there a CLOUD Acronym beginning to emerge?

2010-01-29T06:10:00.000-08:00

I was wondering that this week as I started to see more expo/trade show emails starting to show up. The noise around cloud seems to be gaining, not subsiding, and it has me wondering why.

It also got me thinking that CLOUD was not a form of computing, but an Acronym.

Completely
Ludicrous
Offerings of
Unsustainable
Diversions

A year and a half ago, Grid changed to Cloud. Public cloud. Amazon and then Google started using (publicizing) 'The Cloud' and became legit. Then in an attempt to coin something new, 'The Industry' split into Public Cloud and Private Cloud, which gave us mortals something new to chew on. It was also something to divert us away from looking at the nature of cloud and what it really means. AKA Marketing figured out it was a way to create buzz and get their company looked at.

If you don't want to know what I think about the whole cloud thing, you should bail out now. Since this is my personal blog, I share personal opinions (right and wrong) with anyone who cares to read them.

The nature of cloud is that it has very little to do with computing and a LOT to do with accounting for IT spend.

The model has existed for years. Instead of building/buying a supercomputer I will rent cycles and schedule jobs on one. This way I get the benefit, and 'pay by the drink' based on consumption. I have also referred to it as a 'cash bar' or 'pay by the drink' model. You pay for what you use when you want to use it.

This was in stark contrast to the 'Open Bar' model where an organization bought (or in most cases overbought) their IT resources for any 'what if' scenario someone could think of. As a result, a lot of money is spent and a lot of IT resources go under utilized. Amazon filled a data center to process orders for the Christmas deluge, but then had to pay for the infrastructure for the other 10 months.

So Amazon came up with a way to utilize that infrstaructure the other 10 months a year - EC2 and AWS offerings. Now they could recoup some of that investmeant by leasing out their infrastructure in small bits to people who needed some resources. The public cloud became the next New Thing.

EMC did the same thing with Atmos - roll out a bunch of EMC gear and charge for it in small bits for people who needed storage. Carbonite is out there too.

So at the end of the day someone still needs to buy all of this gear, house it, carve it up, and dynamically provision and deprovision units of IT components - memory, disk, bandwidth and storage. Instead of leasing a 1U server, you can now lease pices of a 1U server, in multiple places and have your own cloud.

The shift then was to private clouds since customers wanted to own their data, and be able to secure it. The issue then arose, of how does a cloud provider secure data that is owned by users/customers? Isn't this just the same thing as a managed services provider leasing someone a server, and introducing per untit costs for data storage, network, and security?

At the end of the day, Cloud is about how you account for computing resources. It is moving IT resources from CapEx to OpEx down to the smallest untits possible. In many ways this is what data center colocation copmanies do today at a more macro level - they buy buildings, add electrical distribution systems, air handling/conditioning equipment, and then carve up buildings into cabinets, cages, rooms, pods, etc.

This is far easier to do as a single tenant facility vs a multi tenant facility because in a single tenant facility the customer has control of everything from the building to the systems, right down to the servers, apps, security - the whole nine. In a multi tenant facility you will see cages that go to the ceiling, some 8' high. Biometrics into the room and/or cage, and different locks on cabinets. The multi tenant facility must account for many more requirements that in a single tenant facility.

So what is happening is companies are rolling out their own clouds (islands) of computing, and if one provider can put marks in more checkboxes on an RFI, they get the business. The downside is that vendor lock can enter the picture, and without a way to federate the clouds, you need to hope your provider gets more islands to build an archipeligo for your requirements or you'll end up managing different island regions and you're no better off than had you taken space with a provider with multiple locations.

So I come back to the nature of cloud and ask - isn't Cloud computing just a different way of paying (accounting) for IT resources?

I will also offer that telcos are in the best position to offer a decent cloud becuase they have some of the most complex billing systems to layer on top of the equipment necessary to bill for cloud resources.

Thoughts?

A Hit and a Miss - with Verari I mean...

2010-01-18T13:17:00.000-08:00

Like few of my blogging colleagues I admit when I missed something. It's humbling, won't kill me and it's the truth - I missed on my prediction that Dell, HP and IBM would submit a bid for Verari. From what I understand they didn't. Whoops.

What I also understand however is that Dave Driggers did put in a bid for the company and will in fact be standing it back up.

So the container world has corrected itself. At least for this week. I am looking forward to learning more about HP's servers that will go in the containers later this week - I understand they have some cool stuff in the works. In fact HP almost always does - and I don't mean in a sparkly new 'het that's cool this week' way.

I will keep you posted, and let you know if I missed with HP's coolness too.

What we can learn about disasters from the earthquake in Haiti

2010-01-13T10:20:00.000-08:00

When I saw the news break last night, I was with a colleague and we were discussing the DR plans - or lack thereof - of Katrina, and wondering if there were any lessons learned that would apply to Haiti in the areas of IT and communications.

We tried to put ourselves on the ground and thought - what is most important immediately after a disaster happens and we determined that communication - Telephone and Internet were vital, but also very vulnerable in a natural disaster.

So after the earthquake happens, and it begins to be reported we envisioned that calls to emergency personnel couldn't go through, nor could calls from family members in the US and around the world for that matter. The cell towers would be laying in the ground, and the wireline systems severed to a large degree. Satellite phones would be the main form of communication - and in an impoverished nation in chaos - hard to come by.

So we began to discuss how communications could be deplyed quickly after a disater - be it hurricane, IED, earthquake, or act of terrorism and the conversation dovetailed into discussions we had been having with State and Federal Emergency Management organizations about this very thing. Let me share what has been discussed and shed some light on the communcations portion.

I will use Haiti as the example since it is releveant and unfolding now. The high level question was - how do we quickly set up a communications network to handle communcation with the outside world from inside a disater zone?

Our answer was that utilizing shipping containers to house satellite and wireless communication network gear made infinite sense. They can be stored and deployed from in any government locale - County, State, or Federal facility - so that you have a system that can be driven or flown to an area in a matter of minutes and operational in a few hours. It is a portable telco CO.

So in the case of Haiti, a fully operational communcations system - telephone and internet - would be housed in a container. Servers, switches, even satellite dishes to establish a connection via satellite to the world. There would be 4 of these systems/boxes deployed around the Island - in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. If a particular group/agency wanted their own unit they could choose to have their own as well, configured however they wanted it configured, but there needs to be a set that is for restoration of basic service for the disaster relief efforts. Even if one was at the Presidential Palace and was crushed or inaccesible, there are still 3 others that could be brought in quickly to establish a link with the rest of the world and stem the chaos and frustration following the event. The other thing we discussed was to have a backup of key systems on other tectonic plates and regions so that you can at least have access to a web site and a form of broadcast for status updates, etc. In this case hosting a site in Miami or Dallas or Rio would be ideal as well.

I will be attending several meetings of Emergency Management Personnel all over the US this year as it is important to bring pertinent solutions to a forum and raise awareness of what can be done proactively. We are so willing and able to throw money at a disaster after it happens when for 1/3 of the cost it could be addressed and more importantly give citizens and governments assurance that those responsible for response have actually done their jobs by thinking through what may happen before it happens, vs. after it happens.

I hope the politicians will read this entry because for 1/10 of what the spend to get re-elected they could virtually guarantee reelection by being proactive about deploying solutions that help their constituents when they need it most.

My thoughts and prayers are with the survivors, the familes, the emergency reponse personnel being deployed - there is much grief ahead and my heart is with you.

Why Cisco needs to buy Verari, and why Dell IBM, Rackable, and HP will fight for it

2010-01-07T06:07:00.000-08:00

I have been covering the Verari story for the past several weeks, talking with folks close to the situation every other day. I keep coming back to Why Cisco Needs to buy Verari:

1. Protect IP
2. Support the brand
3. Have a container play in the market
4. Maintain a level of credibility in a market they said they were entering - servers

The other reason they should make an offer is because they have a financial backer who will do the deal with them and pony up 50-60% of the cash.

So why would Cisco want to protect the IP? The technology is solid, Verari has customers, and if they don't Cisco must now go after another hardware manufacturer to secure solid (and deployed) server technology to make good on its announcement that it was going after HP's server business to get market share inside the data center.

There is also being in a position to address what a data center is since the move is clearly going towards modularity and container deployments in very key areas. If Cisco doesn't have a story, their competitors craft deals so Cisco can't play. Ouch.

Support the brand - Verari, when it comes out of the ashes, will be recapitalized with Carlyle, Citibank, Sierra Ventures and others out of the picture. In other words the company has a running head start in that it has customers, a pipeline, a brand, production, the whole nine yards supporting the brand. Cisco believed in it enough to do an OEM deal, now they get to put a Verari server in a pillow case for a data center technology beat down of the competition.

Have a container play in the market. For people who follow this blog and colleagues in the data center industry know I have been a strong proponent of containerized data centers for about two years - since before there was a lot of buzz about them anyway. Having a container play is absolutely crucial - why? Because companies who offer high performance computing, serve civilian and defense agencies, are in the oil and gas business, and cloud computing companies are all looking at and/or purchasing them. There was a question on Linked In a few weeks ago - 'why havent we heard about all these container deployments?' and there are a couple of answers both of which point back to 'we could tell you but then we'd have to kill you'. People don't want their strategic advantage broadcast to the world. Nor does the military. So containers are crucial - not for companies who need a couple of cabinets, but for companies who need hundreds of cabinets - containers are cheaper and more secure hands down.

Maintain a level of credibility - this one is crucial. I cannot and do not see companies today making large announcements that create seismic events in certain markets, pull back after a few months and say - Ha! Just kidding!. Cisco could buy Sun's server business and let Oracle ravage the software side, and that's about it. There are slim pickens for proven server technology out there where ther companies don't already have a relationship with IBM, Dell, and HP - Cisco's partners and in many circles now - the enemy.

Cisco solves a lot of problems for short money with this deal. On the flip side Cisco's competitors can create a lot of problems for Cisco for short money - real and in the press - by buying Verari. They keep Cisco out of the Server Hardware Club for a few more months, which is a lifetime in this business. and with the tech refreshes that need to happen in the next 12-24 months, a misstep or delay means a few hundred million are at stake.

This one will be fun to watch...

Buh Bye 2009

2009-12-31T05:58:00.000-08:00

If your year was like mine, then you are glad to see it in the rear view mirror. As for 2010, are we there yet? Well I guess I have a few hours...

I am not going to pick scabs and do a year in review. The past is just that. What I will throw out there are my wishes and hopes for 2010, as it relates to technology that I care about.

I hope that the noise about the cloud fades and that companies realize the cloud is a lot like the point of the Wizard of Oz - we had *it* all along, we just didn't know it.

I hope that companies start broadly consuming technology again as innovations come to market or proliferate themselves. Back ups, DR, the stuff that always seems not important until you need it.

I hope that more companies embrace containerized data centers in 2010. You can't beat them for so many reasons and anyone who says differently isn't drinking their own champagne - especially if that champagne is made with the grapes of efficiency, density, optimzed computing, or anything green.

I hope that the vision of transparency in Government data continues to proliferate so we get a sense, a real sense, of how messed up things are and more importantly, the fire in the belly to make deliberate changes in technology and process to regain a sense of what is right in the world.

Predictions:

There will be at least two high profile data breaches the first 6 months in the US, that will have global implications. Those that want to harm us in the US aren't taking 2010 off.

Cloud computing will get more secure, but will not be adopted en masse by private companies. They will continue to want a private cloud, which in its purest form is just a new billing and accounting system for underutilized IT stuff.

The data center inventory of space and power will continue to see increasing supply and demand laws put pressure on prices, lack of available inventory, and those with inventory will reap the rewards for the next 24-36 months.

There will be a major shift in where new data center inventory will be deployed. It will shift to inexpensive power markets, as deployments get denser and cost per Kw, and metered power in data centers becomes one of the top 2 decision points for where to put gear.

To my friends - I predict that 2010 will usher in stronger friendships, better opportunities, and reaffirm what I already know - that those I call 'friend' are clearly the best on the planet, and I am honored and humbled to know you.

Let's roll....

Verari Systems - The next Phoenix?

2009-12-15T02:33:00.000-08:00

I got a bunch of calls yesterday about Verari Systems announcement that they were out of business. Long story short - they are and they will be back.

The story is that the lead investor turned down the latest term sheet and in so doing sealed the fate of the company going into what amounts to chapter 11 (technically it is an ABC). So instead of protecting the investment, they blinked first and got a goose egg instead.

From the conversations I had it sounds like the company was not managed well and as a result, they tanked. What is also apparent is that there is still a backlog of business, still solid technology in place, as well as a plan to focus on higher margin business and refocus efforts with a slimmed down team ready to execute without the albatross of former bad decisions to get in the way.

This is one company who I believe will rise from the ashes.

R.I.P Verari Systems...

2009-12-12T15:57:00.000-08:00

The site is still up, but that's about it. Verari Systems is headed into liquidation early in 2010. If you need a container play, submit a bid. I think jumping into the server/storage game may not have been such a hot idea for them, but whoever picks them up for their container technology will get a screaming deal.

I thought a niche was a small market...

2009-12-07T17:20:00.000-08:00

Containerized data centers remain niche players according to IBM...

I got the heads up on this article from my Google Alerts and it was a head scratcher. IBM, who makes containers, was saying that containerized data centers are still a niche play. Steve Sams, VP of site and facilities for IBM, said containerized data centers are not for everyone and won't be for a long time.

"Most major companies conclude that data center containers are not for them, and I think they're right," he said. "I never think it's going to be a huge market."

Is IBM trying to sell these, or is this a ploy a la Sun Microsystems to sell more servers in a bigger box?

He goes on to say - "But Sams said that in general, he doesn't think containers are "the best way to build 320 square feet of data center."

"Ninety-nine percent of our customers are never going to install thousands of servers at a time," he said.

Someone in marketing at IBM may be to differ. I know I do.

Why would an organization NOT want to spend less money on delivering its IT resources? I can't name one company I have spoken to in the past 18 months that says 'We don't care what it costs, we'll do things the most expensive and inefficient way possible.'

The biggest issue I see with container adoption is that there are few places to plug and play. Microsoft and Google and Amazon are single tenant operations with custom built facilities to support their compute and storage infrastructure. Ninety nine percent of companies who buy IT gear don't have their budgets and their expertise to do this on their own.

Couple the budget issue with the fact that traditional data center operators do not have capital to build on spec, and when the container manufacturers are touting that customers can have 4000 square feet of data center deployable - including servers, OS, and racks - in 8 weeks, data center operators can't build out their infrstaructure fast enough to give container buyers a place to land them.

So a company must then navigate facilities issues, zoning and permitting, siting, redundancy, in short - it's a new data center project for their data center in a box.

I personally believe that when there is a vendor agnostic place to plug them in, it will increase data center container sales. Who in their right mind wouldn't want a PUE of les than 1.3, breathtaking capacity ordered, installed, tested, and delivered in 8 weeks, a quickly depreciable asset, and one that can be leased 100% with tech refreshes built in?

IBM must have quite a list if only 1% of their cutomers thinks that greener, more efficient, highly dense, and fiscally responsible solution is a way to go.

The HP-3Com deal and what it reinforces...

2009-11-12T06:32:00.000-08:00

The HP and 3Com deal reinforces something Scott McNealy said 10 years ago - 'The Network is the Computer' although with today's hype cycles I would replace 'computer' with 'cloud'.

I am working on a series that will be at least two parts, maybe three, on the single most overlooked piece of the cloud - and it's not Security.

Long story short the HP/3Com deal is about the network. Say what you will, HP is moving into the network hardware business and Cisco is moving into the computer hardware business.

My question is does Cisco buy Blade Network Technologies or Verari first?

Time will tell...

Move along, nothing to see here...

2009-10-14T05:23:00.000-07:00

It is being reported that Sidekick data has been recovered/restored, yet I have yet to see a forensic breakdown of what happened to get it back.

I was perusing a pice this morning at SYS-CON's site - http://wireless.sys-con.com/node/1143427 that discusses the 'lessons learned'.

#1 is The cloud is not redundant. Um, duh. As I pointed out in my last post, you cannot expect technology to do something it is not aware of (like backups, setting restore points, etc). Assuming that the cloud is anything but computing and storage resources made available to rent, is foolish. You still need to design how the cloud will work for you.

#2 Know your vendor - I don't know about you, but when I think mobile phone for $100, I am not thinking about the systems used to support the phone, the network, or anything else. I expect that I will be able to use the device and the network in a reliable fashion. I do not expect my vendors to cover my ass when it comes to backing up stuff that is important. If it's important, I back it up, If not, I am prepared to lose it, even if I lose it beacuse of laziness.

Anyway you get the picture. The cloud is not the Government that will magically develop processes and solutions to make up for our lack of discipline, awareness, or any other character fault.

Take responsibility and if It's important, make a copy. If it's really important, make two copies...

Danger - Sidekick data gone...

2009-10-12T08:35:00.000-07:00

Microsoft stresses that it wasn't its own technology to blame in the Sidekick data loss, but rather Danger's technology, which the Redmond company inherited when it acquired Danger in 2008 for $500 million.

However, the embarrassment for Microsoft comes as there is no apparent backup of Sidekick users' data, according to a report from HipTop3. It is also unclear whether Microsoft will be able to recover any of the lost customers' data.

Bu the unfortunate coincidence is Microsoft's launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 devices last week, which in association with this weekend's Sidekick data loss could translate into reduced customer trust from potential Windows Phone buyers.

*******
This event got me thinking - Is the Cloud only as strong as its weakest link?

In this day and age of Cloud computing, value of data, who owns it, what we give up as users, back ups, failover, etc. etc. It blows my mind that this stuff happens. It kind of reminds me of a time several years ago when data breaches were making headlines, and the rush was on for DR solutions. And security solutions. And privacy solutions. And the list goes on. And here we are. Again.

Whether or not the Sidekick user data was in a cloud or not, if it moves to the cloud 100% then does this issue go away? What do we gain? What do we lose?

Even with the promise of cloud computing and the movement of (and one could assume) copying of data in multiple places, what happens when something fails? Do We fail like we are falling down an escaltor or an elevator shaft? (Jim Heaton quote)

Is it data? Is it process? Where is the root cause? Sounds like in this case it was 'technology'. Not sure what that means, but I will bet that the corrective action is now a funded project that was once an afterthought and maybe an outright gamble.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a T-Mobile customer (and have been for 6 years) and I use a Blackberry. I keep some data backed up in multiple places, some data not at all. Makes me wonder if I have calibrated the value of my data correctly. Have we all? Hmmmm.

'We are using cloud' = WTF does that mean?

2009-09-22T05:42:00.000-07:00

I finally had an hour to catch up on some reading and it struck me that cloud computing - on the surface - hadn't changed much. People are still talking about cloud startegy, cloud rollouts, virtualization is the vapor of the cloud, etc. etc. etc.

I still ask the question - So What?

Cloud is a concept that is desperately trying to find a product category and an accounting method to charge for it. When I hear something to the effect of 'We are rolling out a cloud computing platform' or 'We are adopting Cloud computing' I cant help but think - So What? I have a huge crate of Lego blocks. Same difference.

Legos can be used to build really cool things. From incredibly complex to a simple collections of blocks to form a cube. Same with Cloud Computing. The Cloud is a bunch of stuff in a data center. You can roll out something incredibly complex and proprietary, or a simple massive storage application to put bytes into. Your call.

I recently had the priviledge of working with NASA to deploy a cloud stack. So what? Great question!

NASA wanted a simple, ubiquitous, adoptable, stack of applications for two things - raw compute and storage. That's it - two specific problems adressed in one stack of apps that would be made available to the organization. It is named NEBULA.

The interesting thing to me with NEBULA, is that by default in the way the stack was knitted together, they get three benefits out of one stack:

Infrastructure as a Service: Quite simply, IaaS is the delivery of computer infrastructure as a service. Instead of buying servers, software, data center space or network equipment, clients purchase necessary resources as a fully outsourced service. Nebula users can think of this as an evolution of web hosting and virtual private server offerings.

Platform as a Service: Nebula’s PaaS functionality facilitates the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing numerous hardware and software layers. Services are provisioned as an integrated solution over the web. No software downloads or installations are necessary to realize full computing capabilities.

Software as a Service: The SaaS functionality of the Nebula Cloud includes typical moderation workflows, terms of service, and several levels of basic policy compliance, security, and software assurance. Users desiring to utilize the underlying Nebula components directly will be required to pass the necessary security reviews, content reviews and legal certifications themselves.

In my next blog post, I will cover the issues that arise when it's successful...

Containers/PODS/Data Center in a box - the ultimate hedge?

2009-09-02T06:33:00.000-07:00

There has been a ton of stuff going on in the world of technology this summer and I thought it was about time I shared the sum of my discussions this summer and see what other folks are thinking about.

I just spoke to a good friend of mine who is headed to work at Stratus Technologies - the ultra high availability server company and we were chatting about the electricity issues companies are faced with as they virtualize their infrastructure.

Cabinet draws increase when you virtualize - especially with blades - which means electricity USE increases as well. If you use and need more of anything than what you have, you will have a shortage unless you get more. Duh. You can have a 100,000 square foot facility but if it has 5MW available and your new virtualized design requires 10MW, even though you can now put the entire data center into 100 cabinets - doesn't matter the size of the glass my friend - when you take the last sip you take the last sip.

Other topics that have been fun to watch...

Markey-Waxman bill HR2454 that got passed in the House and is up for debate in the Senate next session. Talking about taxing carbon footprints of companies. I am sure taxing carbon profiles of humans is around the corner - especially when they see the tab for Social Security, but I digress...

The Waxman-Markey bill is 1400 pages. I have read a fraction of it. It lays out a cap and trade program whereby companies get an allocation of carbon they can emit, and anything over that they pay a HUGE tax on, or go out to a soon to be created public market (Goldman Sachs is the lead developer) and buy other companies' carbon surplus.

So if I am a data center operator and I like coal and diesel generated electricity because it is reliable and cheap but dirtier than a mud wrestling prostitute, then I will get a hefty tax bill because I emit more carbon than the government thinks I should. OR if I can find an organic, wind, methane, gerbil wheel generating source of electricity data center that emits a tablespoon of carbon each year, I can cut a deal with them to buy their surplus of carbon allowance and keep right on chugging with my diesel and coal.

This, like many other government programs is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic - there is no real change to the outcome, but we can feel good about appearing to have addressed the outcome.

The other side of this is the cap program. Reduce your carbon footprint period. No trading credits/surplus/etc. reduce your emissions or we will tax you out of business. This has legs, in my opinion and speaks to what is good business, will drive innovation, and help the East Coast and Europeans have cleaner air. If we can get China and India to help out - sweet!

The other discussion I had more than a few times was around data center inventory and the lack of it. It has been leading to higher prices in a down economy, the fact that there is little inventory in the wholesale space - 20,000 square feet and up, and that there will be a tightness felt over the next few years until debt markets can open up, get financing flowing for new projects and space becomes available.

The last discussion area that has heated up even more in the past 60 days has been around containers. There is a LOT more activity out there as people come to realize how slick this solution is, and why it's a hedge against carbon tax (efficiency goes up with power consumption), you can get them quick, so when budgets open up, you can wait to buy as long as possible and get another few dozen petabytes of storage or a few thousand cores up and running in 2 months, and if you pl,ug them into green power and grey water - well, now you're talking extra credit.

The one thing that I am watching closely is based on a question I heard on a recent call - 'Whay are these container deployments fire drills every time?' to which I responded, 'Because they can be deployed faster than a traditional data center EVERY time. Customers know this, it's the data center companies that need to step it up and have inventory ready or the process in place to deploy it more quickly than they are used to.

There is also the issue of zoning too - cities and towns don't know what to make of the containers, especially the ones outside. They see them as 'occupied temporary structures'. To me that definition is a refrigerator box with a schizophrenic uncle and his three imaginary friends in it, not a standard container that there are several thousand of in Newark and Long Beach. Aside from the fact that they are 'occupied' maybe 2 days a year, if that.

Anyway, containers are getting much more street cred and are the ultimate hedge against taxes, portability, density, with the upside of efficiency gains and fast depreciation.

Wow. I just stopped my Blackberry while driving antics

2009-08-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

VERY graphic video of a texting while driving PSA from the UK.

It got my attention and I hope it gets yours too. As busy as I think I am, I am not this busy...

The Politics of Carbon

2009-07-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

I have read two articles this week that point to the same thing from different angles - The Politics of Carbon.

The first article I read - The Green Gotcha - was written by Michael Bullock for his blog at CIO.com. In this article he lays out something that I believe to be true -

The US Government will start taxing those organizations who do not contribute to reducing carbon emissions in their data centers. It is called Cap and Trade. What will likely happen is that data center operators will be taxed on their emissions. It is anyone's guess as to how this will happen but rest assured the US Government needs revenue and this is low hanging fruit. It is feel good legislation - we can encourage/force businesses to be green and if they choose not to - we'll make money off of them in the form of tax revenue.

It also targets a big business segment that is vital to worldwide communications, commerce, and national security. It is also a business that is capital intensive, meaning it is not easy to just change operational models and equipment and go green - the stuff that makes a data center run is expensive and in the capital markets of today - it won't be easy for a company to just go green, or for utilities to just stop producing electricity generated by coal to serve their customer bases.

So what I believe will happen is that data center operators and their customers will need to adapt and 'go green'. This can take the form of utilizing wind power and/or striving for the lowest PUE available to mitigate a tax liability that will no doubt be substantial.

Those that can't and don't will be hit with tax burdens that will no doubt be painful - at least in the short term - because at the end of the day it's customers that will foot the bill in one way or another.

Michael Manos has ecoed what has been said for months - that we as an industry need to have a say in how this cap and trade will go into effect. Legislators who know nothing about data centers, electric utilities, and the way the business of data centers works will wind up telling the entire utility and IT community and industry how we ought to be doing things.

The second article - in the Eithiopian Review says:

The federal government is very unlikely to issue strict green regulations related to data centers... The current administration is very technology-savvy — after all, the current Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was recently the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose work was heavily dependent on its data center. Chu did some great work related to Green IT when at the labs. He knows what can and can't be done — and will make sure that data centers aren't hamstrung with unnecessary regulation

If there is tax revenue potential in these regulations (and there is or the Government could care less) then you better believe they will hamstring anyone who can put money into coffers. Besides, the LBNL is funded by the Department of Energy - that takes money. Money that will no doubt come from data center operators (and others).

I for one am not for someone who knows nothing about how an industry works (Legislators) telling me how it ought to be run. Well unless the data center industry and the companies who build and maintain the internet want to be the next GM, Citi, or _______________. That worked out pretty well. NOT!

We do need to form a cohesive trade group and ultimately form a lobby that sets up a PAC or two to insure our interests are protected. If we do not do this as an industry, Our Senators and Congressmen will be running data centers.

I don't think that's such a good idea. Do you?

Virtualization = Data Center Efficiency? Not so fast...

2009-07-06T05:18:00.000-07:00

There is still a fair amount of buzz out there regarding Virtualization and its contribution to efficiency and greening of a data center. There seems to be so much buzz (aka noise) that one could think - Wow if I virtualize, I get better PUE's, and I am green too! Awesome!

Well, kinda...

When you get rolling on the Virtualization bandwagon, a few things start to happen:

1. Your footprint shrinks, freeing up space and cabinets
2. You now have something cool and useful to figure out
3. You can maximize densities of servers/cores like never before
4. You can actually deploy a DR environment without doubling size and physical deployment

There are a few other things that you'll realize too:

1. Your power draw almost doubles - cha ching!
2. Many data center companies don't like the high density cabinets
3. You still have to patch VM's - smaller footprint doesn't mean less work
4. Unless your power is green, then you haven't done much to put a dent in the coal fired electricity plant you get electricity from.
5. If you draw less power, you generate less heat, and the data center is LESS efficient in this state

Be aware, be knowledgable. Virtualize, but make sure you set correct expectations because while those of us in technology understand the benefits of Virtualizing, the CFO looking at an electric bill that doubled may take some extra time to get it...

New project I am involved with...

2009-07-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

This is about the Good Men Project. It's very different from the beers and boobs stuff that's out there. I can only hope it becomes as popular as Postsecret...

http://www.goodmenbook.org/about-the-book.html

The Good Men Project is an anthology of essays about what it means to be a man in America today. All proceeds from the book will benefit The Good Men Foundation, a charitable organization founded to support men and boys at risk.

Cloud Computing = Accounting Exercise?

2009-06-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

Dude. Seriously.

With all of the talk about Cloud Computing, and where it is headed and what it is evolving into, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

When companies wanted to get out of paying the capital expense of their computing hardware, software, and storage arrays, etc. they outsourced it to companies like Savvis, Terremark, and Navisite where they pay one monthly nut for new hardware, software, and 24x7x365 support by people who know what they're doing.

When I look at cloud, it's the same thing on a micro level...

'I need disk, memory, and CPU cycles and I need to rent them. I need them to be elastic, on demand, and automatically provisioned.' Isn't it managed services with an hour by hour/day by day/week by week contract? All the components are cash bar vs. open bar?

Is this just an accounting exercise?

Did you announce you're building a data center too?

2009-06-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

There have been several announcements recently about new data centers being built. The mean average per square foot I can figure out is $2,500 per square foot.

So that means that Apples announcement will peg the North Carolina site at 400,000 square feet for the $1B price tag. I am glad I am not an Apple investor or I would be flipping out on a company that is not a data center center builder, manager, or operator spending my money on something that is not a core competency. Especially a $B of my money. Who is running Apple, Obama?

The Yahoo announcement for Lockport, NY and their 60,000 sq ft planned build was interesting too. $150M project and it creates 75 jobs. That's $2M per job created. Again, is the Government making the decisions here? At $2M a job, I want to run the job

Cisco is going to build a 160K square foot building in Allen Texas. $40M is what that will come out to. I would be a little less angry at Cisco for spending my invested money on a non-core competency, but I could maybe justify it as a really sparkly new kick ass laboratory for new stuff.

IBM announced a 6,000 square foot facility for $12.4M. A steal at $2K/ft.

It's kind of funny in that I had 4 requests come in days apart about a month ago asking about build vs. buy whitepapers and current examples. Looks like the big boys went build and I still don't understand why.

The tough questions I would have asked early in the process:

1. What happens when we don't use all the space? How do we turn a data center from single tenant to multi tenant?
2. What is it that makes us think we can run a data center better than those people who do it for a living 100% of the time?
3. What SLA's will our employees sign when we hire them?
4. Where else could we spend this money? To grow revenue? Buyback stock? Create Jobs?
5. What other EXISTING sites were considered that would have led to less of a carbon footprint, less damage to the environment, and been greener?

If you want tough questions to ask for your project contact me.

The other thing that I noticed is that all of these data centers do NOTHING for the impending crisis of data center space that has been widely reported. Except maybe for those companies that are building them.

And what happens when they use 30% of the draw that they contracted for and the financial operating obligations are 70% more than budgeted because they are obligated to pay for their scale up whether it happens or not? How will they justify this to investors?

Believe me, I think data centers are a great investment, and safer than gold right now.

For data center companies.

Did the Cloud Rain on SiCortex?

2009-05-28T11:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/05/28/sicortex-out-of-cash-powers-down/

SiCortex, a six-year-old startup building energy-efficient supercomputers in Maynard, MA, has shut its doors. The company ran out of working capital and was unable to raise more from its venture investors, according to a report that surfaced yesterday in HPC Wire, a trade publication in the high-performance computing industry.

Xconomy obtained confirmation of the shutdown news from John Mucci, the founding CEO of SiCortex, who was replaced 10 months ago by current CEO Christopher Stone. Stone himself was not immediately available for comment.

“It is a sad day for all… less competition, unemployed seventy some workers…” Mucci said in an e-mail.

SiCortex had raised $42 million in venture capital, including a $21 million Series A round in 2004 contributed by lead investor Polaris Venture Partners and syndicate members Flagship Ventures, JK&B Capital, and Prism Venture Partners. All of those investors returned for the company’s $21 million Series B round in 2006, with the addition of new lead investor Chevron Technology Ventures. Bob Metcalfe, a Polaris partner frequently quoted about SiCortex in the past, said this morning he had no comment about the shutdown.

According to the HPC Wire report, which was based on information from an anonymous source close to the company, most of the company’s employees have been let go, and a sale of the company’s assets is underway.

It's about the power...

2009-05-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.cio-today.com/news/Blade-Servers-Are-Energy-Hogs/story.xhtml?story_id=1230080ZP1RO

This article today finally backed up what I have been blogging about which is that Blades (heavily used in Virtualization deployments) are power hogs. So while you just freed up 5,000 sq feet in your data center, you doubled your draw and D'oh! you ran out of power and can't cool the shiny new virtualized environment.

The closing quote in the article:

If new blade servers crash because the data center overheats, that's not very efficient, is it?

Is the least of my worries. How to Justfy a 7 or 8 figure purchase that you can't light up and run key apps on is a bigger problem, no matter how efficient it makes IT.

Glad to see someone else paying attention to this...

Dell's Fortuna - A web hosters dream?

2009-05-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

I met with Drew last week and he had alluded to this being available soon. This could be a great way for the managed services providers to maximize revenue per square foot.

The New Twitter

2009-05-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

Are you Green? Are you REC-less?

2009-05-20T06:20:00.000-07:00

I have been looking into renewable energy sources for data centers a lot lately. Why? Because it is responsible, necessary and a way to stimulate the changes that must occur in the nation's electricity grid that is up to 100 years old in places.

The whole Virtualization movement got me thinking about this a couple of years ago, because I noticed that when my customers deployed blades and other high density solutions to support virtualization a funny thing happened - electricity draw to the cabinets almost doubled.

So the footprint shrinks but the electricity (and cooling) goes up dramatically. So I asked the next question which was - if I double my energy draw and that energy is not green (wind, biomass, nuclear, etc.) how am I reducing carbon? Hmmmm. Maybe I'm not. Oh but wait, my utility lets be purchase RECs - Renewable Energy Certificates so I am all set.

Next question - aren't REC's like putting a 'save the earth' sticker on a Hummer? It's feel good green - not measureable green.

So What is the answer? How do you get truly green? How do you move beyond the 'we print on both sides of the paper' and 'we turn off the lights at the diesel refinery' feel good green into actual, 'I am doing something that is not only measurable but so green it's almost black' when looking at our IT infrastructure?

Stay tuned for more. There is a way, using 'off the shelf ' technology and sources of power to do this. And it will save you roughly $6,000/year per cabinet/rack on electricity alone, let alone what the carbon reduction is. Can you say FAT bonus?

Data Center Inventory - storm on the horizon?

2009-05-13T05:50:00.001-07:00

I have had several discussions the past 7 days about data center real estateand I am beginning to wonder if a storm is brewing just over the horizon.

A lot of new construction projects got mothballed or slowed this year because the money we gave to the banks apparently had to go to bonuses first instead of funding data center builds to house the infrastructure they will need when people start making and depositing money again, and they have to start processing checks to pay back the US Taxpayer. I digress...

In my daily Tier 1 email I have noticed a lot of small data center announcements - 1,500 sq.feet here, 2,000 there and I say 'OK, that's some but what about the 5 MW or 30MW sites?' I haven't seen one of those announcements in some time.

What gets me is that there are now 12 megapixel cameras on the market and my guess is by Christmas they'll be a 30 megapixel camera for those of us who want to see past the red eye down to the retinal pattern in the back of the subject's eye. There is also the legislation working its way through the US Government about being more green and ultimately more digitally centric. So what?

That means there is more data being produced. Bigger files that will be moved, copied, stored in multiple locations, shared, viewed, and even printed (great news for loggers). The production of data never rests so the need to store it, manage it, secure it, back it up, share it and consume it grows every second of every day. All of the capacity planning we did 18 months ago evaporates - sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.

Long story short - I believe there is an impending shortage of data center inventory out there.

Available data center inventory - the multi megawatt kind. Not the kind in Ashburn VA where Digital Realty Trust is digging up ground to expand and will need the utility company to run conduit to the facility before it is lit, not the kind in Boston where CRG West has 100K square feet and a dozen megawatts of space and power but it's I beams and concrete today an it'll be January before it is finished off. Not the kind of data center space like Dupont Fabros has but their financials are suspect if not downright shaky right down to their flywheels making it hard to attract the customers who worry about financial condition.

Shop smart and buy now - get a sublet clause in the lease as well. This has great opportunity for those of us who get it...

Interesting app for those of us looking to go green...

2009-05-11T09:32:00.000-07:00

I just spoke to a friend of mine and we were catching up on life. The conversation turned to what are you doing to be more green (I am a far cry from a tree hugger) and have I see a cool application at RoofRay.com. I don't think solar has the potential for data centers yet, but for all the computing horsepower at the house, maybe.

Having spent just 5 minutes on the site and looking at my house and what the solar potential was, he got my attention. Take a look or check out the widget on the bottom virtualizationstuff. It may get you through your next conference call...

http://www.roofray.com/

Data Center Containers - a black licorice product?

2009-04-29T05:09:00.000-07:00

I sincerely hope Tier 1 does a Data Center Transformation Summit twice a year. The one I was at yesterday was excellent and was topped off by dinner with the rock stars over at Horizon Data Center Solutions in Reston, VA. Then this morning our press release hit the wires which was great to wake up to.

One theme I saw again and again was people either 'get' containers or they dont. Chris Crosby over at Digital Realty Trust doesn't like them. Nor does the CTO at Equinix, Dave Pickut. Chris had a presentation that was full of inconsistencies that I will attribute to DLR being a REIT vs. a data center owner/operator. REITs view the container as competition - it's not real estate so they're not interested because they can't sell it. Given Mike Manos' move over there and his work in deploying containers for Microsoft makes me wonder if DLR will shed its REIT status and broaden its offerings. Nah. A REIT is a REIT and they have a lot of customers who rely on them for space.

Equinix (and others) don't like them, I believe, for two reasons -

1. They house high density equipment, up to 27 Kw per cabinet. The standard is 4.8 Kw, which means you need to allocate more floor space for air flow and that's floor space you cant sell to the 4.8 Kw cabinet customers.

2. The data centers they are in can't support them from a deployment perspective. Something new they can't support.

Here is why I believe they cannot ignore the data center container (DCC) market - the efficiency is unprecedented for the draw, the footprint, and the cost. You will save $6,000 per cabinet per year putting it in a container on the PUE gains alone (Power Utilization Efficiency). When all you need is a 600 AMP feed and a 4" water pipe connected to a water source of 65 degress, you're done.

So what's holding the proliferation back?

Basically 18 months ago before the economy really tanked, companies refreshed a lot of servers and other IT gear. They bought a lot of VMWare, and stood up a lot of new stuff. New stuff that was leased. On a 36 month lease. We are 18 or so months into a lease cycle for a lot of companies that have their hands tied and can't move to a DCC if they wanted to.

So what I see starting to happen is that companies are giving DCCs a look because bonuses are being tied to reducing carbon emissions, consuption, and doing more with renewable energy sources. DCC's will give them a healthy bonus. That tied with being able to lease extreme density gear self contained and from PO to plug in of 10 weeks tops - look out.

So right now the DCC's are a black licorice product - you either love em or you hate 'em. I believe more people will be loving them in the next 18-24 months because it's green ($) for them to do it.

Digital Realty Trust Presents

2009-04-28T07:16:00.000-07:00

From Chris Crosby:

Power is the commodity of the information age - I agree

If you buy square feet in a data center you will get screwed - buy Kw/load - Agreed

If you are thinking about functional obsalescence you are thinking about it wrong -???

'I bet you've never had the FBI raid the cloud' - Duh, only one company has had it happen.

Pitching the modular pod approach - wash rinse repeat, build to be the same -that's great if requirements don't change

Containers are not they way to go - 100% wrong on all data points - this will get a separate blog entry - He completely missed the boat.

Covering the Data Center Transformation Summit 2009

2009-04-28T06:38:00.000-07:00

I will follow this on twitter as well: http://www.twitter.com/mmacauley

Hot topics:

Selective outsourcing is available yet under utilized
-Wholesale & resale

Financial stability of providers is key
- There is a lot of legacy debt from 2001 for a lot of players

Best of times for the data center industry
- Banks hate data centers
- Hard to get construction loans
- Data centers are the safe bet vs. mortgages to high credit risks
- Have the banks done that well in picking good loan programs? $100M is safer in a data center project than in high risk mortgages yet in the banks eyes there is no difference

vSphere 4 - VMWare Turbo?

2009-04-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

I love this quote taken from information week

In its initial iteration, vSphere 4 can manage up to 1,280 virtual machines on 32 servers, or an average 40 VMs per server. Each server may have up to 64 cores, such as eight-way server with eight cores per CPU, for a total of 2,048 cores; each server may host 32 TB of RAM. VSphere 4 can also manage 8,000 network ports and 16 PB of storage.

and this one:

Network throughput is now 30 Gbps compared with the previous 9 Gbps. A virtual machine can have up to 300,000 operations per second versus 100,000, and the new maximum number of transactions per second is 8,900. The latter figure is five times the total transactions per second of the Visa network worldwide, said Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware. VSphere 4 includes Distributed Power Management, which monitors running virtual machines and moves them off underutilized servers, which is shut down, to a server running closer to capacity. By adopting Distributed Power Management, a VMware customer can save 20% of his power consumption, said Herrod. If all VMware customers implemented it, the saved power would be enough to supply the nation of Denmark for 10 days, he claimed. He then quipped it would be enough to serve Las Vegas for nine minutes. VSphere 4 includes VMware Host Profiles, which are golden images of desired server configurations. By referring to a host profile, a vSphere user can generate a new virtual machine and know its properties, according to Herrod.

My Crystal Ball says...

2009-04-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

I finally had a chance to catch up on a few things early this morning and one of them was the pile of press clippings and RSS feeds.

Two predictions based on 100% personal speculation based on press mentions & reading:

Cisco buys EMC
Dell buys Egenera
Oracle sells Sun hardware business to IBM

That's all for now.
Feel free to tell me how out of my mind I am...

Is a Green Data Center even possible?

2009-04-13T06:51:00.000-07:00

This was the question running through my mind this weekend, and assuming it was, who would build it, what makes it green, and is it a standard? Yes, my mind was quite active this weekend…

The question came up after a chat I had with Austin Energy and the State of Michigan last week about wind power projects – both current and future. Why wind you might ask? Because right now it is fashionable, generates more electricity than solar on the same footprint, and it works. In the data center world however, you plan for the crazy what if’s, in this case no wind for a month, so you do need to have back up at the ready, preferably Natural Gas. T. Boone Pickens has studied this extensively.

So let’s consider that we have access to wind generation, the issue that I have seen is that the grid, at least the ERCOT one, is not designed to have more generation that it has today. So you can generate thousands of megawatts from May-October during the windy ‘tornado’ season but because the transmission grid can’t do anything with the capacity being generated you turn off the generation capability so you don’t bring down the entire US power grid. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Given how much electricity data centers consume and need to sustain growth, it seems there should be a louder voice out there telling utilities to upgrade their power systems. There isn’t though. Why? Money. If I own a utility that gets a lot of electricity generated by wind (inexpensive), then any upgrades I make to my power system are going to help my competition more than me (potentially). So they don’t get done.

So while there is all this effort out there being spent on building generation, until we give the Grid an upgrade it will be the equivalent of watching high definition TV over dial up. There will be a lot more content (electricity) than availability to deliver (bandwidth).

I believe this is what ultimately will hold back expansion the most, of both data centers AND the proliferation of getting green energy to some of the largest consumers of power out there. Your friendly, stark, neighborhood data center.

The Big Switch

2009-04-08T04:41:00.000-07:00

For anyone looking for a GREAT read about where I believe computing is heading pick up a copy of Nicolas Carr's The Big Switch. It discusses virtualization and the rise of Cloud Computing. It's a couple hundred pages of great stuff to think about. I just finished it on my trip down to Reston, VA and will likely re-read it. It was that interesting.

Cloud Computing is the New Black

2009-04-01T05:52:00.000-07:00

I am at the Virtualization (and Cloud Computing) conference in Manhattan and was here to meet with the cloud computing Czar from HP and 3tera, Right Scale, vKernel and others and had a chance to walk the intimate expo floor and see what vendors were doing. The thought that hit me was that Cloud Computing is the New Black.

The level of confusion that is out there is staggering - both on the marketplace side as well as the consumer side. I saw a fair number of the reveloving slide decks up on LCDs and they all felt compelled to define, yet again, what cloud is. To them.

For Rackspace the cloud offering is a service, for others an IT initiative to reduce costs, for others a chance to offer consulting services and for others it was all about the software solution they were pitching.

There were a lot of people trying to figure out what it was and my observation was that they were as confused when they left as when they got there.

One area that was not even discussed let alone on display was the cloud enablement, and I think it is more important than any one solution. What I mean by cloud enablement is a set of components that are already stitched together to facilitate the use of the benefits of compute on demand.

My metaphor that I have been using at CRG West is that we want to be Madison Square Garden not the performance that is using it as a venue. In other words vendors are focused on whether or not they want to be U2 or Stars on Ice, vs. the place where people (buyers) come to experience what it is they want to experience.

So we have started to build the new Madison Square Garden so when companies want the New Black, in whatever shade or size they need, we will be the place they come to experience it.

Podapalooza - Good time in Boston

2009-03-26T06:06:00.000-07:00

The other night in Boston, I hosted a cocktail reception and dinner for local folks to come to the Westin in Boston and check out the HP POD, enjoy me buying them drinks and pulling together a lobster dinner/clambake. All of it amounted to a GREAT time.

I also wanted to do a little shameless self promotion on my blog, because I am starting to see the shift from pod computing being a WTF? solution to an interesting solution and people are starting to truly grasp how and why they make sense. A couple of examples from discussions over lobsters:

I could see using this to expand into a data center while my new data center is being built. I can use the PODs for two years and then drive them over to the data center when they have served their short term purpose and now I have a backup solution that I can put anywhere my risk managers want.

For genome sequencing this is ideal. We are no longer constrained by scheduling jobs. I know what I have for CPU cycles, memory, everything - and I can just run job after job after job. It will be the workhorse our facilities guys always gave us flack about building becuase we couldn't cool it.

I think when companies start spending again that the pent up demand will be such that if anyone has to get something up and running in a quarter - these PODS will be the best game in town. Imagine - a data center racked, stacked, and tested - delivered in 8 weeks. Wow. Just wow.

We will try to do more of these events in the near future. They are valuable, small, no spin, and FUN!

CRG WEST ANNOUNCES HP POD COMPATIBLE DATA CENTERS

CRG West Makes Deploying, Powering, and Securing HP Performance-Optimized Data Centers Easy

DENVER, CO– March 25, 2009 – CRG West is pleased to announce compatibility at multiple data centers across the United States with HP POD (Performance-Optimized Datacenter), a container-based data center offering. CRG West data centers in Boston, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area can monitor, power, and secure HP PODs with unmatched efficiency.

HP PODs are a flexible, expedited solution for companies looking to augment existing data center infrastructure or deploy a ready-to-use data center IT solution. They support a wide variety of HP and third-party technology, increased power density supporting 3,500+ compute nodes or 12,000 large-form-factor hard drives and flexible configurations to meet specific customer requirements. In addition, HP offers supporting infrastructure services, such as assessment, preparation and deployment services, as well as data center design and planning. Each HP POD comes ready to use in a 40-foot container and requires approximately one megawatt to power.

Customers facing infrastructure, space, or power supply constraints can take advantage of this innovative technology by deploying their HP POD in a CRG West HP POD compatible data center. CRG West provides more than 2,000,000 square feet of robust, carrier-neutral data center space and 150+ megawatts of power across the United States. HP POD compatible data centers offer tailor-made deployment capabilities, with increased ceiling height, ample power and water supply, and crane-lift capable space, allowing for a deployment process that is as easy as “deliver, position, and power on.”

In doing so, customers can also take advantage of everyday CRG West amenities such as usage-based power pricing; 24-hour remote hands and security; redundant emergency generator power; access to 200+ carriers and ISPs; and a convenient on-line customer portal that allows for real-time power use tracking from any computer with an internet connection. In addition, utilizing CRG West data centers can eliminate the possibility of an outside deployment, where exposure to weather and other elements can require additional planning.

“CRG West HP POD compatible data centers make it easy for any prospective buyer to take advantage of the many perks, without jumping through power supply or space constraint hurdles,” said Mark Mac Auley, CRG West Vice President of Strategic Accounts. “These locations make an HP POD deployment as easy as ready-position-power, in a highly secure, protected CRG West data center environment.”

“Customers can maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace without having to invest in another building in order to build out their infrastructure,” said Steve Cumings, director of infrastructure, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure organization at HP. “The HP POD combined with CRG West’s nationwide, turn-key data center capabilities gives customers an easier way to deploy IT resources while minimizing expenses and improving data center efficiency.”

More information about the HP POD products, software and services is available at www.hp.com/products/pod.

An HP POD virtual video tour is available at www.hp.com/go/pod.

About CRG West:

CRG West is a leading developer, manager and operator of world-class data centers. Established in 2001, CRG West provides wholesale data center space and colocation, connectivity services, remote hands support and a public Internet peering exchange, the Any2 Exchange. A wholly-owned portfolio company and operating partner of The Carlyle Group, a global private equity firm with over $91 billion of equity under management, CRG West manages carrier-neutral data centers in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Northern Virginia, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington D.C. CRG West provides data center and peering opportunities to more than 500 of the world’s leading networks, enterprises, government institutions and universities. Visit www.crgwest.com for additional information.

It's all about Cosmos Computing

2009-03-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

Clouds are too small for what is possible in the new computing paradigm.

Clouds are more than a Visio object or a piece of Powerpoint Clip Art.

Cloud up until now has been about defining what we know based on old models that are known. Grid, Utility, etc. Where we are going and what we are doing is larger than that - it is at the Cosmos level.

We can define the components but not the end state. We don't know what we
don't know but we understand that this is bigger than the sum of its known parts.

Clouds work because the Cosmos works

The Cosmos players are bringing the open structures, protocols, and relationships together that allow the components of Cloud computing to work.

Cloud computing has many interpretations, the Cosmos doesn't. It is. It works. It has worked for years and is now evolving. Again.

The Cosmos is elastic, resilient, interconnected, open, limitless, expanding, and alive.

The Cosmos binds the defined and undefined together into a system that is bigger than all of us, comprehensible in its existence, but not in its nature.

We Nephologists have much to learn about its nature...

The Scale of Cloud Computing

2009-03-17T14:40:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting chat with someone at one of the juggernauts in the space today and we were trading stories about Cloud Computing presentations. His comment to me was 'I saw one this morning and it showed 3 servers on it. Do these Cloud guys understand that what they are showing isn't even a test environment in the cloud'.

Exactly why I coined the term Cosmos Computing. The cloud is too small.

We are talking billions of computing components stitched together in some definable but not fully understandable way so that we can use them when we need to. Clouds are but part of and a subset of Cosmos computing.

Stay tuned while I ruminate on this some more.

Quote of the day - Senator Grassley discussing AIG Execs

2009-03-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

A prominent U.S. senator has intimated that executives of the troubled insurer American International Group Inc might consider suicide, adopting what he called a Japanese approach to taking responsibility for their actions.

Senator Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, made his comments on the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, radio station WMT on Monday.

"The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them (is) if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide," Grassley said.

"And in the case of the Japanese," he added, "they usually commit suicide before they make any apology."

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE52G3BQ20090317

Cloud Computing is Dead - Long Live Cloud Computing!

2009-03-13T08:06:00.000-07:00

I have been on my share of webcasts and seen over 100 presentations about clouds.

You know what they all start with – a definition of what cloud is.

Why?

Is it that confusing? Is it that unclear?

Why is it so confusing and so unclear?

By rehashing and refining a definition, do we hope to somehow impart some clarity to the emerging space?

Cloud computing is unclear. Cloud computing is emerging.

Cloud computing is a paradigm shift and the approach thus far has been to address it like it was not a paradigm or business model shift. The ‘let’s put the Ferrari Red paint on the Apple Cart and call it a Ferrari’ approach.

Why is it a paradigm shift?

Cloud computing is a paradigm shift because there are cosmic forces at work ripping apart, re-forming, and creating new things out of what is and what was every day.

Cloud computing – in my opinion and in its nature - does three major things:

1. Centralizes availability computing resources and components into ‘galaxies’
2. Distributes the galaxies into a collective pool of computing (universe)
3. That universe expands and morphs creating and destroying galaxies

There is the confusion because the definition does not fit the description.

If I am a hardware vendor – I have been in the business of selling hardware. Is hardware the end all be all of computing – no! I need software, networking, and other pieces to make it part of the universe.

If I am a software vendor – I sell the software that provides the ability for me to do something on the hardware, and in conjunction with the network, other software and other pieces in the universe.

If I am a network company – I may build and make hardware AND software, but unless it is connected to other pieces then I am not part of the universe.

So what is cloud computing?

I believe it is not Cloud Computing but ‘Cosmos’ computing.

I really can’t define it in and of itself, but can metaphorically in that it is the equivalent of our Cosmos - universe(s) – much is known, exploration is happening every moment of everyday, and the forces that govern the universe(s) – known and unknown – are at work keeping things in some sort of balance allowing it to work.

I will keep on ruminating on the definition as it goes way above cloud in my opinion...

Clouds are still...Well...Cloudy

2009-03-12T04:54:00.000-07:00

I am catching up on my industry reading this morning and the recurring theme that is (still) enmeshed in the notion of cloud computing is one of cloudiness.

I was on a webcast with Surgient yesterday and bailed after 5 or 6 slides. Why? No useful information was presented. What I mean by that specifically is that the first several slides were all about Surgient and their product positioning. Stuff I could care less about and quite frankly stuff I could get from the 'Products' tab or 'About Us' tab on their website.

Note to webcasters - I need to understand how your product works by you showing me how others have made it work. I do not need to know who the founders are. The obligitory logo slide needs to tell me why these guys use your stuff and how they use your stuff. Answer the question 'So What' in your first 5 minutes or I'm gone.

One of their applications is for setting up 'internal clouds'. What??? Is that the new buzzword to get CFO's to buy new computers?

The 451 Group did a survey in October 2008 and 84% of respondents said they had no plans for internal clouds. If I has to guess why my top guesses are:

1. There is no cloud strategy in place, so no funding for stuff you can't define and understand. See Toxic Assets.

2. CFO's have figured out that a cloud is tech speak for for shiny new computers that will sit underutilized until their leases are up. Again.

3.Why would you build out a cloud for yourself vs. use the ones out there?

One thing that has seemed to gel when Cloud Computing is discussed is that there are generally 3 flavors - SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Software, Platform, and Infrastrcuture as a Service respectively. Using these definitions as jumping off points, an internal cloud becomes centralized infrastructure as a service which already exists in some form in the largest companies.

There is much to be done in making the notion of Cloud Computing understandable by CIO's, CFO's and CEO's since they must decide how good it is for their business.

I like this stimulus plan better

2009-03-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/Blogs/the_next_big_thing/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=6bab7b08%2D81ca%2D4602%2Dbd97%2D4b7b2c893e88&ID=654

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times today (2/29/2009) wrote “Startup the Risk Takers” where he suggests the US government should stimulate the economy by funding startups, not by bailing out GM and Chrysler.

“You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The US Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors’ upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.”

“GM has become a giant wealth- destruction machine — possibly the biggest in history — and it is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so they can truly start over under new management with new labor agreements and new visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money should focus on start-ups, not bailouts.”

Friedman’s main point is this; invest in the future (startups), not the past (bailouts). Startups are the best opportunity to create new jobs in high growth industries, and do it fast. According to the SBA small businesses created 70% of all new jobs in 2007, and account for about 50% of all employment in the US economy. Small business is defined as 1-500 employees.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures says “No Thanks”. Fred writes “The venture capital business, thankfully, does not need any more capital. It's got too much money in it, not too little. Just ask the limited partners who have been overfunding the venture capital business for the past 15-20 years what they think. You don't even need to ask them. They are taking money out of the sector because the returns have been weak.”

Government wants to create jobs, VCs want to create wealth – Do VC backed companies create jobs? Yes, but their primary objective is to create wealth. VCs invest about $25 billion a year in over 3,500 companies. These companies grow fast and create jobs. But, VCs primarily fund technology companies with fewer employees and explosive growth potential. Most VCs only fund 2% – 5% of the companies they see, leaving 95% unfunded. These might be the companies that create lots more jobs.

Service based companies create lots of jobs, but don’t get VC funding.- What about all the viable companies that don’t meet the 10X return potential that most VCs demand? Would a VC have funded Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Subway, or ServePro when they were small startups? No way. Service based companies don’t fit the VC model. But, a successful service company might have 5,000 employees, compared to a successful technology company with 500 employees. The government should focus its stimulus money on programs that create jobs. New approaches are needed, but some existing programs are listed below.

Create 50,000 startups for $1B - How about funding for startup incubators similar to Ycombinator and TechStars. These startup mentorship programs are very successful in creating startups and driving innovation but they only cover 30 to 50 companies a year, investing about $20K in each one. Why not start 50,000 companies a year? It would only cost $1B, and could incubate the next Facebook, Google, or Microsoft…and millions of jobs. How many jobs will $1B invested in General Motors create? Government funding for VCs is probably not a good idea, but maybe a small amount of funding for startup incubators would create the jobs that VC backed companies won’t. $1B invested in 50,000 startups would conservatively create 250,000 jobs immediately. If just 2% of those startups became wildly successful they would create 3 million to 5 million jobs.

What can government do? Government should create incentives for investment. It is probably best not to make the investments directly. There are already some good programs and incentives in place that have been forgotten or underfunded for too long. Pouring money into these programs is certain to stimulate investment, inspire innovation, and create jobs. Here are a few examples of programs that stimulate investment from the private sector.

SBIC – Small Business Investment Company A program managed by the SBA, SBICs are privately owned and managed investment funds, that use their own capital plus funds borrowed with an SBA guarantee to make equity and debt investments in qualifying small businesses. The U.S. Small Business Administration does not invest directly into small business through the SBIC Program. This program encourages private investment in startups and small businesses.

SBIR – Small Business Innovation Research Another SBA managed program, the SBIR encourages small business to explore their technological potential and provides the incentive to profit from its commercialization. SBIR targets the entrepreneurial sector because that is where most innovation and innovators thrive. By reserving a specific percentage of federal R&D funds for small business, SBIR protects the small business and enables it to compete on the same level as larger businesses. SBIR funds the critical startup and development stages and it encourages the commercialization of the technology, product, or service, which, in turn, stimulates the U.S. economy.

R&D Tax Credits – There a 20% R&D tax credit for “incremental” R&D spending, over and above what you spent the previous year. There are lots of restrictions on expenses that qualify. Unfortunately startups are limited to a 3% credit because they don’t have lots of prior years spending base. This program could be significantly enhanced by loosening the restrictions, which would in turn stimulate research investment.

Seed Capital Tax Credit – Maine has a 40% Seed Capital Tax Credit for startups, that can go as high as 60% for startups based in high unemployment areas. This is a good example of targeted support for private investment to create startups, jobs, and innovation. More states should adopt Seed Capital investment tax credits.

There are probably lots of other little known programs that support investment in startups. We need to publicize them and invest more in them. Please leave a comment and a link to your favorite program.

The Story (and Myth) of Metered Power

2009-03-05T11:34:00.000-08:00

I was in Dallas, TX this week meeting with a number of companies from Real Estate Brokers to Data Center partners to enterprises. One thing I heard three times was that metered power isn't always metered power - it all has to do with where you put the meter.

At my company we put the meter on the panel that feeds the servers, switches and the gear you house with us. I thought that was the norm and industry standard. Boy was I wrong!

I found out in the course of discussions that some colocation providers put meters on the outside of the building or pod. What's the difference you ask? Big difference!

If you take the base colocation rent that is let's say 100Kw of critical load (draw) and multiply it times .5 and add the 50Kw to the rent to cover cooling and infrastructure, You pay for 150Kw of potential draw and that's what a provider will give you. That's great if the critical draw is 100Kw going to your equipment. Makes sense.

If the meter is placed on the corner of the building or outside the pod, not only are you paying for the critical draw, you are paying for lights, copiers, office space A/C, and everything else NOT related to your gear. Plus 50%. Ouch.

Buyer beware and be sure legal catches this. At $200Kw you could be paying 100-150% of the price per Kw to run signage that's not yours, coffee machines you'll never drink a drop from, and offices that are kept at 64 degrees after hours. Not a good deal, in this or any economic climate.

Virtualizationstuff is now cross posted

2009-03-03T07:00:00.001-08:00

Just a heads up to my readers - I have cross posted this blog at CRG West and you can take a visit here:

Virtualizationstuff at CRG West

I will remain opinionated, and call it as I see it, so fear not loyal readers...

Interesting Article on the Electricity and Efficiency of a Data Center

2009-02-03T07:37:00.000-08:00

Having just met with the utility mentioned in this article last week, I thought it was an interesting read because it points out a major disconnect between greenness/efficiency and SLA's which drive the data center business.

I think there is a market for this kind of approach, however it is the segment of the market that does not require an SLA of any kind or has live-live replicated environments.

Published: Tuesday, Feb. 03, 2009 | Page 1B
A data center under construction at McClellan Park has won the nation's highest green-building rating for its groundbreaking, energy-saving, low-carbon-emitting "air-side economizers."

Engineers call it "free cooling" technology.

Anyone else would call it opening the windows.

"Outside air is an absolute must now," said Bob Sesse, chief architect at Advanced Data Centers of San Francisco, developer of the McClellan project. "It never made any sense not to open the window."

The windows in this case are 15-foot-high metal louvers that run the 300-foot length of the building, a former military radar repair shop. Inside, a parallel bank of fans will pull outside air through the filter-backed louvers, directing it down aisles of toasty computer servers.

The company figures it can get by without electric chilling as much as 75 percent of the year, thanks in part to Delta breezes that bring nighttime relief to the otherwise sizzling Sacramento region.

Data centers are among the biggest energy hogs on the grid. These well-secured facilities are the "disaster recovery" backups for banks, insurers, credit card companies, government agencies, the health care industry and other businesses that risk severe disruption when computer systems fail.

They house rows of high-powered computer servers, storage devices and network equipment – all humming and spewing heat around the clock, every day of the year.

Large "server farms" rival a jumbo-jet hangar in size and an oil refinery in power use. California has hundreds of them, including RagingWire Enterprise Solutions and Herakles Data in the Sacramento region.

Almost all are designed so that only a small amount of outside air enters, lest dust invade the high-tech equipment's inner circuitry and short out the works. Indoor air chillers run with abandon to make absolutely sure the vital processors don't overheat and crash.

Now, with energy prices rising, bottom lines dropping and computer equipment becoming more powerful – with hotter exhaust to prove it – data center developers realize the perfect computing environment is the enemy of the good.

"It's a return-on-investment question," said Clifton Lemon, vice president of marketing for Rumsey Engineers, an Oakland firm that specializes in green-building design.

"People are beginning to realize they can build data centers with the same performance, reliability and safety and save lots of money on electricity."

Manufacturers of data-center equipment are fast meeting the energy challenge, said KC Mares, a Bay Area energy-efficiency consultant.

"Just in the last several months, we are seeing a new generation of servers giving us dramatically increased performance while consuming no more power than the previous generation," Mares said.

The green factor also looms larger in the marketing of data centers.

"We have recently replaced our air-cooled chiller system with a more efficient water-cooled system and doubled our cooling capacity," Herakles touts on its Web site.

Not to be outdone, RagingWire boasts on its own site of a recent savings of 250,000 kilowatt-hours a month – enough to power about 1,700 homes in the Sacramento area – by improving its chilled water plant and cooling efficiency.

But data centers continue to run computer-room air conditioners during many hours in which the outside air is cool enough to do the job, according to engineers who research high-tech buildings for the federal Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

"We wondered, 'Why are people doing this?' and what we found out is that the data industry had grown up this way back from the days of mainframes," said William Tschudi, principal researcher in the lab's high-tech energy unit.

The tape drives and paper punch cards in the giant mainframe computers of the 1960s and 70s were more sensitive to dirt than today's equipment. But while computing hardware grew more resilient to the elements, manufacturers held firm to their recommended ranges of operations on temperature, humidity and air quality.

"They had this myth built up that you had to have a closed system," Tschudi said.

Yet modern servers actually could handle a much broader range of environmental conditions, with protective coatings on circuit boards and hermetically sealed hard drives.

Microsoft Corp. broke a mental barrier last year when it tested a rack of servers for seven months in a tent outside one of its data centers in the rainy Seattle area. The equipment ran without fail, even when water dripped on the rack.

Similarly, recent experiments by the Berkeley lab engineers found that suspended particles in data centers drawing outside air for cooling were well within manufacturers' recommended ranges.

The "free cooling" system accounts for most of the 30 percent energy savings that Advanced Data Centers expects to gain over conventional data centers. The balance would come from efficiencies in electric fan systems, air chillers, lighting and battery backups. The project's first phase – a 70,000-square-foot center – is scheduled for completion this fall.

Last year, the company built a 45-megawatt substation to support long-term growth of up to 500,000 square feet across four buildings. As an incentive to follow through on its energy-saving plans, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District gave it a break on electricity rates, a discount worth $80,000 a year, said Mike Moreno, a key account manager with the utility.

Another bonus: SMUD, together with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and California's other major utilities, recently gave Advanced Data a $150,000 "savings by design" award.

On top of that, the U.S. Green Building Council awarded the company its highest rating – platinum – under its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

If the center operates up to expectations, it will be the most energy-efficient data center known, Tschudi said.

"I think it's achievable."

Why High Density isn't Dense Enough

2009-02-03T07:32:00.000-08:00

I have been involved in four discussions in as many days about High Density Hosting. When I ask - what does that mean to you? I usually get a number that is north of 125 watts a square foot up to 200 watts a square foot.

That is one way to look at it, but even at 200 watts a square foot, if your loading up a multi core box with dozens of VM's you will be headed north of that. Typically what happens is that hosting companies balk at the space required to cool 200 watts plus. Looking at power density is about power NOT space.

So in one conversation the company said that they wanted to deploy 10 - 30Kw cabinets. Total draw of 300Kw.If I throw in a PUE of 1.5 I am at 450 Kw for draw. If I have a 10,000 square foot pod that doesn't have a half a megawatt available in either current or generator power, it can be the best space on earth but you can't power it. No power = no CPU cycles, and no company.

Buy power, not space. Think about when the lights go out - you aren't thinking about what a nice neighborhood you live in or what a good investment it was, or how sweet the location is. You just want to nuke some popcorn and watch the Red Sox beat the Yankees.

Stirring the Pod (Container) a Little...

2009-02-02T05:18:00.001-08:00

I just read a piece put out by the folks over at Tier 1 Research, part of the 451 Group. They point to a gap in understanding of a growing space - containers and their application and importance in the business of data centers.

Their biggest issues are with Scalability and Maintainability (See below). I don't get it. A snippet says:

What happens when a server reaches catastrophic failure? Do the containers themselves get treated as a computing pool? If so, at what point does the container itself get replaced due to hardware failures? There are just so many unknowns right now with containers that T1R is a bit skeptical

Interesting questions, however what happens when a server reaches catastrophic failure in a data center? Why is it different?

Do containers themselves get treated as a computing pool? - Duh. If you have a container in ~500 sq feet that is the equivalent of 4,000 square feet based on CPU density alone, I would think a pool of CPU cycles is a safe assumption.

Replacing containers are easier than replacing data centers. You can't ship an entire self contained data center and just plug it in. Determining the point of failure in a relatively new segment of the business seems a bit presumptive that these will fail more often than a data center would. Why would they fail more? They are servers in a very dense, very efficient controlled environment. My money is on they fail LESS not more.

Scalability is a non issue. They scale to over a dozen petabytes of storage per container. You can even stack them and save horizontal floor space, or in Dell's case to separate environmentals from compute.

For maintenance - there are some issues, yet do not point out a single one Having vetted most of the containers in the market - those from Sun, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Rackable, and Verari - by speaking with the heads of all the product groups, their sales people who talk to customers, and the facilities/install folks I will tell you that the analysis that was done was PURELY SPECULATIVE and not based on fact or experiential knowledge. If there is an Achilles heel on containers - the ones that run water through them will have maintenance issues. Stuff grows in water. Verari uses a refrigerant based solution that is a step in a thought out direction. But as for maintenance, if you can open a door, have serviced equipment in a traditional data center, and have worked on a server before you can handle a container.

'There are too many unknowns right now'? What?

Tier 1, you are a research firm - do the research. There are few unknowns in my book right now, other than, when do the containers and the equipment they contain get End of Life'ed. If I (a VP of a Data Center Company) can call up Dell, Microsoft, Verari, Rackable, and Sun, get an audience, delve into the technology with them, talk to end customers, and actually figure out the good the bad and the ugly with containers then surely you can too. And I can assure you that you also stand to benefit more than I do from containers. It is a new research area for which people pay you money. I do this for fun, and my research is done on my own time. The benefit to me is credibility and pure exploration into an area that is so compelling from an efficiency, economical, and common sense perspective that there are FEW unknowns at this point. Assuming you know the data center business. I know enough to be dangerous and know enough to know what is good for my business and my customers.

Further on in the piece Economics and credit markets are discussed. Containers are almost entirely OpEx - when leased, depreciated over 3-5 years or whenever the useful life of the servers is over for the application they serve. In other words, you don't need access to CapEx nor do you need to spend CapEx right now on these. Lease vs. own - it's a smart decision right now since containers are boxes of storage and CPU cycles and little else.

My 2009 Data Center trends will be covered in depth in an upcoming post, and I will tell you that Containers are one of the trends. They won't replace data centers any time soon, but they will present a very green and very compelling option for us all to look into.

mark.macauley@gmail.com

T1R INSIGHT: 2009 DATACENTER GROWTH TRENDS AND MODULARIZATION VS CONTAINERIZATION by Jason Schafer, Aleetalyn Schenesky

T1R has an overall positive outlook for the datacenter space, although due to the current tight debt market and the subsequent slowing of datacenter builds, there are persisting questions regarding datacenter trends for 2009 as well as thoughts on creative ways datacenters can increase their supply and/or footprint without expending huge amounts of capex (new datacenter builds can cost upwards of $32.5m for 25,000 square feet). As far as major datacenter trends for '09 go, T1R believes the three major trends will continue to be modularization (not to be confused with containerization), IT outsourcing and that datacenter providers with significant cash flow from operations, such as Equinix, will expand their market share as cash-light competitors are forced to slow expansion. As far as creative means for datacenters to increase their supply and footprint, T1R believes that there will be continuing M&A activity in '09 as smaller datacenters will continue to suffer from the lack of available capital and larger and regional datacenters (many of which are now owned by equity firms) look to increase their supply as utilization creeps up.

Modularization

Although modular datacenters are really in their infancy, T1R believes that the trend toward using modular datacenters will continue to gain momentum over the course of 2009. Currently, there are a few approaches to this concept including Turbine Air Systems' modular cooling system, where the system itself is pre-built and requires little to no on-site 'design and build' work (and time); and APC's pod-based rack systems, where the cooling and power is at the row level and can be installed as datacenter computing needs grow.

The idea of a modular datacenter is that it takes the current infrastructure pieces (cooling, switchgear, etc.) that have been traditionally custom built for each facility and makes it more assembly-line and mass-produced. The obvious benefits to this are standardization and ease/speed of installation (and presumably fewer issues after a design is proven and tested). A current disadvantage to this approach is maintenance. For example, maintaining many row-based cooling systems would be more complex to perform and track than the current traditional method (since currently cooling is more or less room-based and not row-based). The size of the equipment being serviced is decreased but the number of pieces of equipment is increased. In most cases, this means that total maintenance time is increased, as the size of the equipment isn't proportional to maintenance time. T1R believes that as the modular datacenter design matures, however, the maintenance issue will become less of a factor, especially when compared with its installation advantages.

Containerization

While T1R believes that modularization has potential significant advantages, we are currently not bullish on containerization. Containerization, literally, is building an entire datacenter inside a commercial shipping container. This includes the servers, the cooling, the power, etc. in one container. (Dell has changed this slightly with its double-decker solution where it uses a second container to house the cooling and power infrastructure separately from the server container. Some containers contain no power or cooling at all, but rather are designed to be a bit more efficient due to enhanced airflow and are dependent on an external source for power. T1R believes that these economics make even less sense.)

With a containerized approach, the datacenter gets shipped and plugged in and it's up and running, more or less. In T1R's opinion, the main issues with containers are scalability and maintainability. A container is a very enclosed space and, in a lot of cases, not very 'engineer-friendly.' What happens when a server reaches catastrophic failure? Do the containers themselves get treated as a computing pool? If so, at what point does the container itself get replaced due to hardware failures? There are just so many unknowns right now with containers that T1R is a bit skeptical. In addition, containers contain approximately 2,000-3,000 servers in one package and are sold in a huge chunk, so they tend to favor those that would benefit the most from such a product – namely, server manufacturers. Given the aforementioned unknowns and scaling and maintenance issues, T1R does not believe container datacenters to be solutions for the majority of datacenter customers.

Expansion via distressed assets?

With the credit crunch going strong, how will datacenters continue to increase supply and footprints? If history is to be our guide, the logical conclusion here is 'Hey, let’s go buy up all those distressed assets at fire sale prices from failing industries à la 2001.' Sounds like a great plan; however, the current situation is significantly different from the high-tech meltdown that allowed companies like Switch and Data, 365 Main, Equinix, Digital Realty Trust and CRG West, among others, to acquire large datacenter assets from telcos relatively cheap.

In 2001, datacenter builds by telcos were based largely on speculative revenues and business models, therefore parting with those assets in order to recoup some of the capex spend in view of what the telcos perceived to be a failing industry, was a no brainer. However, those were newly built, and for the most part, high-quality assets.

So what's on the market today? Well, potentially there are datacenter assets from financial and insurance institutions. The difference now, as opposed to then, is that these current enterprise assets are much lower quality. Certainly upgrades can be made in terms of things like power density, but the real problem is size – they're simply not large enough to be worthwhile for most major datacenter providers to be interested. And, let's remember, even for the few higher-quality assets that may be out there, turnaround time to remove old equipment and upgrade is approximately 12 months, resulting in no meaningful supply add until at least 2010. T1R does believe, however, that these limited, higher quality assets will be acquired in 2009.

Expansion via M&A

How are the datacenter providers increasing their supply and footprints, then? Aside from small expansions such as the one by DataChambers mentioned on January 29, T1R believes that for 2009 this will largely be accomplished through M&A activity, a trend that has already begun to emerge over the course of the last year.

In the second half of 2008, several M&A deals of this nature closed, including Digital Realty Trust acquiring datacenter property in NJ and Manchester, UK; Seaport Capital acquiring American Internet Services (a San Diego colocation provider), which in turn acquired Complex Drive (another San Diego colocation provider) a month later and Managed Data Holdings' acquisition of Stargate (a datacenter outside of Chicago) to continue its datacenter rollup strategy for expansion. In January of 2009, the first M&A deal of the year was announced when Center 7 (a portfolio company of Canopy Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm targeting information technology companies in the western US) acquired Tier 4, a datacenter provider in Utah.

Going forward, T1R expects similar deals with smaller datacenter providers, like Tier 4, to investigate being acquired to enable access to capital for expansion. We also think private equity as well as a few of the top datacenter providers are potential acquirers in 2009. For more details on M&A activity in the datacenter space, please refer to T1R's Internet Infrastructure: Mergers and Acquisitions Second Half Update report.

Microsoft and Google - Are they really ceasing data center expansion?

2009-01-28T19:40:00.000-08:00

With the numerous reports of Google, Microsoft, and others halting data center builds you would think the data center business was caving in on itself like a dying star.

Town governments as well as the state Governments where the builds are halted are groaning. Sure they gave up tax breaks (their revenue) and the payroll tax that was supposed to come won’t, but I have to wonder why they are they that concerned. Data centers have a lot of servers in them, not a lot of payroll taxes in them, so at the end of the day they are out what they would have been out anyway which is the revenue on the construction and sales tax.

So the governments are feeling what the companies are – a contraction in the economy, driven by lack of access to capital in the credit markets. So things contract.

I can’t help but wonder though, with green technology evolving quickly AND the emergence of containers to house servers and their inherent improvement in efficiency, are they really thinking and retooling for the long term?

Both are smart companies, and I learned a long time ago that smart companies will take a strategic look inside their four walls when things slow down to retool and improve for when things do expand again.

I was in a meeting today discussing PUE of containers with an organization considering a build of a new data center. If you can make a data center TWICE as efficient, for 1/5 the cost, and shift the capex to almost 100% opex - wouldn’t you do it?

I think Microsoft and Google are simply rethinking how they want to deploy computing horsepower. Containers are a very modular, very fast and very economical way to deploy horsepower. I realize fully that those of us in the traditional data center realm are looking at containers and scratching our heads, however I for one believe that they are the future of data centers – which at the end of the day house servers with CPU and memory and give us resource pools or clouds.

If that computing resource pool can be deployed at massive density, double efficiency, and at a fraction of the cost – who in their right mind wants to defend the position of paying twice as much for something half as good?

Me neither…

I am working on publishing a white paper that explores the cost and efficiency of containers vs traditional data centers and will post the link when it's done in a few weeks. If you care to share data - please do. I will change the names of the innocent if needed - I just want to make sure I put out real data.

Sun's new data center

2009-01-27T05:22:00.000-08:00

I just read a story about Sun Microsystems' new data center in Broomfield, CO. There were some interesting highlights in the blurb.

Reduced Electrical Consumption: By 1 million kWh per month, enough to power 1,000 homes in Colorado

While this is a great stat, where did the savings come from? What is the PUE? Sun rolled out the Blackbox product last year - Containers/Pods are the next wave of computing as far as I am concerned - and I'll bet the container is still more efficient and the power saved in a Blackbox would power 1,000 homes on the cooling alone. You double the cost and draw of electricity in cooling a data center so unless the environment is optimized to support heat dissapation and optimize cold air flow, you don't gain much.

Reduced Raised Floor Datacenter Space: From 165,000 square feet to less than 700 square feet of raised floor datacenter space, representing a $4M cost avoidance.

I used to walk through a raised floor data center every week in a previous job and I always wondered why they were all the rage. The amount of cold air under the floor that didn't do anything was astounding. I know the electricians had a better environment to work in, but at the end of the day, no one ever asked me 'What am I paying for my share of idle cold air?'. Cooling is a necessary evil, and an expensive one. Looking not at cooling but how heat is removed is the key.

Enhanced Scalability: Incorporated 7 MW of capacity that scales up to 40% higher without major construction

What the **** does that mean? Are they using high octane diesel in their Caterpillars? Funny car fuel? A four barrel carbuerator?

Superior Cooling: The world’s first and largest installation of Liebert advanced XD™ cooling system with dynamic cooling controls capable of supporting rack loads up to 30kW and a chiller system 24% more efficient than ASHRAE standards.

I love Lieberts - they work, they're reliable, and they mask poor design. In this series of Lieberts it appears that their offering is more modular, and more deployable into trouble/hot spots than its other offerings. That is great, however they do not put the draw into the technical documentation. Efficiency is great, but if it takes 30% more power to generate 10% cooler air in the same footprint, I don't see the value.

Greener Architecture: Including flywheel uninterruptible power supply (UPS) that eliminates all lead and chemicals waste by removing the need for batteries, and non-chemical water treatment system, saving water and reducing chemical pollution.

I wonder when someone will actually have the stones to say, Green is great until it doesn't work or it costs 1.5x what traditional (proven) technology can deliver. Case in point: I wonder what the carbon output of manufacturing a wind turbine is compared to the .3 megawatt it generates. The steel manufacturing (they don't use woodstoves or solar to melt metal), the wiring manufaturing (people dressed in hemp clothing, using bamboo shovels don't find wiring deposits), the lubricants, the shipping fuel... Blindly going green because it's trendy may not be the answer. Yet. Did you cut down to one square of toilet paper to save a tree? Me neither.

Overall Excellence: Recognized with two Ace awards for Project of the Year from the Associated Contractors of Colorado, presented for excellence in design, execution, complexity and environmental application.

But not efficency? How can give an award for data center design without efficiency being the most weighted category for judging it? It is like giving out an award for best dessert without tasting it.

I love that companies like Sun are pushing the envelope and I hope it continues. I just hope that common sense enters the equation and that an actual yardstick is used to measure what matters.

A Penny Per GB of Storage

2009-01-16T11:58:00.000-08:00

One of the comments I got back from Verari was that their solution is capable of 13 Petabytes of storage, going well beyond the 600 TB I used as a benchmark.

So since a single Petabyte is 1024 TB, you basically double the storage for the sake of math and keeping it in line with my earlier benchmark of 600TB:

Petabyte = 1024 Terabytes

The new computations then look like this:

At ~$200 KW, you’re looking at $120,000 month in base rent for a 600kw solution ($200*600)

So for 13.3M gigabytes you’ll pay about 130,000 per month (keeping numbers round) which means you’re at one cent per gig on cost. And more efficient and that is with the drives fired up 100% of the time.

Microsoft needs to implement these to archive email at these prices... Or Live Apps data.

Mark

Low cost 600TB backup...

2009-01-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

I forgot to include this little tidbit too in my previous post...

If the bandwidth charges were whirring through your head like the electric meter on Clark Griswold's house after putting up the Christmas lights - try this:

When the container is ordered ship it to your office loading dock. Plug it in, and throw a strand of fiber out the window and plug that in. Voila, 600TB at the speed of light, no bandwidth charges. It's a bit of a hack, but, cha ching!

600 Trillion Bytes per box - ROI of Pod Container Storage

2009-01-08T06:58:00.000-08:00

I read recently that the IRS stores 15 to 20 Terabytes of data for each year of tax returns.

If the number is 20 Terabytes, 600/20 = 30 years of tax records storage is possible with a single container/POD. Since they go back 10 years for most practical applications of retrieval this means, at least conceptually, that the IRS and any other entity that stores records electronically (lawyers) will pay for 66% of records they seldom or never need to access for legal, operational, or other reasons.

For other organizations (banks, brokerages) it is 4-7 years where records need to be accessed on a 'regular' basis and after four years the trend falls off a cliff and after 7 it's hello abyss. So let's look at what a company might pay to store all this data and then let's look at what they would save if they thought differently about how they actually implemented their storage both in dollars and in energy efficiency.

1024 Gigabytes (GB) = 1 Terabyte (TB). I will round it to 1000 to keep it simple.
I will also assume that the cost per GB is $.50 - 50 cents US, so cost per TB is $500 USD. So that means in raw Capex you're at $300,000 ($500*600) for a container of raw storage.

Let's look at Opex now. We have power, cooling (subset of power), and space.

Power for a container is 350-600kw. If I use 600 or the max draw/densities I have seen, then 1TB = 1 KW of power for keeping the equipment fired up. At $200/kw or $200/Tb you're at $120,000 per month in base rent. Here is where the containers leave the data centers in the dust - PUE.

A data center PUE (Power Utilization Efficiency) looks at how much additional power is needed to power the cooling and facility in which the computing equipment is stored. Most data centers are at 1.7 for a PUE, meaning for every Kw of power needed to power the computers, an additional .7 Kw is needed for cooling it and ultimately powering the chillers, the A/C, etc.

POD Containers are 1.08 to 1.3. What does this really mean?

That you will save .4 to .6 per Kw in a container per month in power alone.

In real dollars that means per TB of storage, saving .5 Kw (mean average) equates to cutting my Opex by about a 1/3 over a traditional data center FOR THE SAME FUNCTION - storage of data.

So we lop off $40K/ month, which means that over a year we save $480K ($500k to round it). This covers the cost of the storage ($300k) and then some. You can look at it as free storage plus $200K, or a substantial reduction in Opex, or $200K to do other things with.

Bottom line is a POD/container pays for itself in under a year, is FAR more efficient than a data center day to day and that's not only good for our bottom lines, but it's good for our environment, and is responsible computing.

I will take a look at an even smarter solution for older records using MAID - Massive Arrays of Idle Disks.

Want help crunching your numbers? Email me -

mark.macauley@gmail.com

How much is One Trillion

2009-01-08T06:53:00.001-08:00

With all of the talk about a Trillion dollar budget/bailout/deficit/cost of Iraq I had to try to wrap my brain around it and here is what I found for explanations:

A trillion dollars is so large a number that only politicians
can use the term in conversation...

Here is some perspective on TRILLION:

1 TeraByte (TB)

Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000.
The USA has not existed for a trillion seconds.
Western civilization has not been around a trillion seconds.
One trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years – Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.

or this:

Let's start with one billion. If you spent $1,000 per day, every day without fail, you would spend $365,000 in a normal year.

You would spend $36,525,000 in a century (assuming 25 leap years per century).

So, if you started spending $1,000 per day starting January 1, 0000, you would be spending $1,000 per day through the end of the Roman Empire, the collapse of the Mayan civilization, the Middle Ages, the Crusades, the Black Plague, the Renaissance, the European conquest of the New World, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, the end of the 20th Century and would finally reach one billion dollars a little more than one-third of the way through the 28th century.

Now do that 999 more times and that gets you to one trillion dollars