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...
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Monday, December 20, 2010
Site Selection - A Case Study?
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Pause for new thought stream
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...
Is the term managed storage really just data management with a new coat of paint?
Discuss...
Monday, December 6, 2010
Site Selection - Part Two of a Multipart Series - Modular = What changes?
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
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
Monday, November 22, 2010
Humor for a short week...
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...
This is funny because a lot of it is very true. It is the blind leading the naked through an acre of rosebushes...
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Site Slection and How Overlooked it is...
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.
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.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Dell and its Data Center - WTF?
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.
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.
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