Des Moines Register has a review of the 18 month process the City of Altoona went through.   What seems interesting is a tax issue based on a three limit needed to get changed to six. Also in March, a roadblock suddenly emerges: VanderZanden emails Durham that state rules prohibit the company from fully benefiting from Altoona’s proposed 20-year tax abatement. The rules specify that all phases must be built within a three-year project completion window. 

DCK has a post on 601 Polk opening its doors for co-location business. AlteredScale Opens Doors at 601 Polk in Chicago By: Jason VergeMay 17th, 2013 601 West Polk in Chicago is the home of a new data center for AlteredScale. The facility will be managed by Norland Managed Services. 601 West Polk is alive and kicking. The 100 year old structure just west of the Loop in Chicago has been through a lot over the years, including a previous owner passing through bankruptcy. After several millions of dollars worth of renovations. AlteredScale, a provider of mission critical data center solutions, announced this week that it has chosen Norland Managed Services to operate and maintain its data center at 601 West Polk. But, this opening is not so much news as a milestone in a long process. First the President of AlteredScale, Kevin Francis is a good friend and we ...

Google I/O is one of the few times you know Urs Hoelzle is going to speak.  Urs is the MAN behind Google's Infrastructure.  Urs is Google employee #8.  He is wicked smart, got plenty of money to do what ever he wants, and has the backing of the Google executive staff to build for the future.  When most hear the words of "Cloud Services" they think of Amazon Web Services.  Amazon.com being a great retailer has a phenomenal presence and selection of Cloud Services.  But, I'll tell you something that is not widely known, just because something is well marketing and looks like a good price doesn't mean it is built to last and to handle stress.  An example of this I've noticed is ski jackets that get used by ski mountain staff.  They wear the jackets multiple times a week, wash every week ...

In the old days, data centers were all about space, # of sq ft.  The power was actually hard to figure out.  The data center salesman would almost always talk in sq ft. 1,000 sq ft. 10,000 sq ft.  How much power?  Ohhh,  10,000 sq ft x 50 watts/sq ft = 500kW.  I would joke that part of why sq ft is used so much in commercial real estate is it is nice easy math.  How much does it cost to build per sq ft.  What is operating expense per sq ft.  What is rent per sq ft.  This set up a bad practice of thinking people would save money by using less space in a data center.  I am charged by space so if I go higher density, then I’ll save money.  Uh NO.  The expensive stuff in a data center is the electrical and mechanical ...

Management and other marketing recognize using the words thought leadership are good. January 09, 2009    Monday night we had a data center social with thought leaders, but thought leadership is not how we market what the event is. Thought leaders are the type of people we are looking to invite.  So, why do the thought leaders we invited make time in their  busy schedule and some flying in from Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, NY, and Seattle?  The event works because it is about friends being able to chat in a comfortable environment.  Spending 10 minutes, 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes just chatting about whatever they want.  There is no hurry, there is hovering salesman looking to interject.  In fact some of the vendors who we let come in because they wanted to meet with some others who were in town recognized that they need to tread softly as the slightest hint ...

There was all kinds of news about CO2 level reaching 400 ppm. National Geographic Climate Change and CO2 400 ppm Energy Collective-by Lou Grinzo-May 11, 2013 Climate Change and CO2 400 ppm ... on 400ppm, which is to say, an amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that's 400 parts per million, by volume. 

In Frank Frankovsky's keynote at Interop he showed the progression from red to green of the open compute project from data center, rack, server, storage and now network. Frank started with the open source software used. Then Facebook shared its data center practices. Next came racks in the co-lo Eventually building to the complete taxonomy below. What's next?  The Open Compute Project comment is the one who asks for new things as well as Facebook deciding to contribute in an open source manner.

The folks at Open Compute Project are on a roll, driving open source ideas into servers, data centers, racks, etc. And now their latest move is networking. With that in mind, we are today announcing a new project within OCP that will focus on developing a specification and a reference box for an open, OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch. 

We're all used to getting a data center tour.  When someone is trying to sell you space or IT Services, they will bring you through the server space.  Here is an example of a Softlayer tour. Local media was let into parts of Google's Douglas Data Center and this below video is posted.  Most of you haven't seen this as there a whopping 18 views. :-)   One of the rules Joe Kava explains is only those who must go into server room have access, and many who work in the data center aren't allowed in the server room. At least the folks at WPXI11News have better color matching then the Sentinel folks.  Joe Kava looks much better in the video than the sentinel camera shot. I think what the folks at the sentinel did is they needed to adjust the exposure/contrast and that really messed up ...

Wired has a post on why Google will embrace cell phone chips (aka ARM). I've blogged on the concept of little green servers built on Atom and ARM, but what if ARM isn't more efficient than an x86 server?  Here are some thoughts that are running through my mind. 

Cloud, Cloud, Cloud.  It is the way of the future.   Yeh. Yeh, Yeh. It looks the Cloud may be a bit over hyped. GigaOm's Barb Darrow covered the Rackspace news. Laggard Rackspace growth sparks concern: is there enough cloud biz to go around? by Barb Darrow 1 HOUR AGO No Comments A A photo: Flickr / mnsc SUMMARY: There are lots of potential cloud workloads out there but there are also about a zillion clouds. Is there really enough paid work to support them all? tweet this Here’s the narrative that cloud vendors would like us to believe: there are infinite workloads flowing to clouds of infinite capacity. There’s enough business for all, keep moving. Rackspace did add 4% more servers quarter to quarter.  So even though there may be some pricing issues, bottom line the server growth was only 4%.  Total server count increased to 94,122 ...

One person recently asked me what is going on in the data center industry.  I said the big are getting bigger, the small are disappearing and the middle is trying to make it seem like things are great.  Those who make the most amount of noise aren't necessarily doing the best.  When a company is quiet with few press releases and presence at trade shows doesn't mean they are not growing. I found it interesting when you would give a small presentation at a conference like Uptime Symposium and half the room is full of your competitors. If you have something really good that sells, you don't want to tell your competitors how you market your product and how it addresses customer needs. What got me to write this post is reading Chris Crosby's post on Pardon My Hyperbole. Pardon My Hyperbole   Share on facebookShare on ...

Atlanta Business Journal has a post with a slide of the Google's data center that had a media tour. Jacques CouretSenior Online Editor-Atlanta Business ChronicleEmail You’ve heard how cool it is to work for Google. Now, you can see for yourself. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) on Tuesday opened up its new super-energy efficient Douglasville, Ga., data center for a media tour. But, after looking at the slide show, I found the stuff that Google publishes on itself way better. First on Google Maps, here is the site. And there is a whole gallery of pictures on the data center here. The Douglas County Sentinel also covered the data center with Joe Kava VP of data centers at Google as a tour guide.   This is what the mechanical area looks like with good color matching. Unfortunately, the photographer had real bad color matching.   Search engine giant Google hosts rare ...

Part of hanging out with GigaOm is seeing how the rest of the data center industry interacts with their audience.  I've consistently seen Dupont Fabros, Softlayer, and Verizon Terramark sales teams at events, and they are quite happy with the audience they talk to. What got my attention today is Internap sponsored a post on their webcast on GigaOm. Sponsored post: Cloud and co-location hybridization (live webcast) A A   SUMMARY: Learn how hybridization of the cloud and co-location can result in improved visibility and flexibility in our June 5 webcast, “Hybridization: shattering silos between cloud and co-location.” We’ll discuss the benefits of a hybrid environment and use cases in which co-location and cloud efficiently work together. ... Attend this webcast to learn:• Advantages of both co-location and cloud solutions• How hybridization of the cloud and co-location can result in improved visibility and flexibility for your IT infrastructure• Real-world use ...

Centurylink Internet Network is down. Where are your five nines now? CenturyLink’s nationwide outage affects millions by Stacey Higginbotham   2 HOURS AGO 3 Comments A A SUMMARY: If you’re one of CenturyLink’s 5.8 million broadband subscribers, you’re probably fuming because your service is out. Such nationwide outages are rare, but that doesn’t make it any less painful for customers. tweet this Most cloud outages are caused by human errors, and there is a good chance that CenturyLink's outage is also caused by human errors in the ability to detect the problem, identify the source of the problem, and possibly taking the wrong action to fix the problem.  we'll see what the postmortem reveals as the events that caused the outage.

Most of my readers are data center folks who would go to AFCOM Data Center World, Uptime Symposium, DatacenterDynamics, Gartner Data Center Conference and/or 7x24 Exchange.  I’ve gone to all of them as well as Intel Developer Forum, GigaOm Structure, and IBM Pulse.  In prior jobs I used to go to all kinds of Microsoft, Apple conferences, and Seybold Publishing. Last week I was in Las Vegas when a bunch of other data center people were in town.  I’ve gone to AFCOM data center world and unfortunately, I really don’t learn much as I know plenty of people i could ask about power, mechanical systems, and the presentations really don’t interest me.

IBM PureSystems hit the one year anniversary of their launch, and at IBM Impact i heard about PureSystems a lot.  After a few days, I filtered the marketing material to figure out what is the IBM PureSystems. Then I saw this IBM video on PureSystems by Jason McGee.   This reminded me of what AOL’s Mike Manos has blogged on AOL’s microdatacenters. Here is just a few of the things required to look at/change/and automate to even make this kind of achievement possible: Developing an entirely new Technology Suite and the ability to deliver that capacity anywhere in the world with minimal to no staffing. Delivering extremely dense compute capacity (think the latest technology) to give us the longest possible use of these assets once deployed into the field. The ability to deliver a “Microdata Center” anywhere on the planet regardless of temperature and humidity settings The ...

I remember when IBM announced its smarter planet initiative 5 years and I had lots of questions on how sensor networks will work.  Today IBM announced the MessageSight appliance built on MQTT. LAS VEGAS - 29 Apr 2013: IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Smarter Planet strategy took a major technological step forward today with the introduction of IBM MessageSight, a new appliance designed to help organizations manage and communicate with the billions of mobile devices and sensors found in systems such as automobiles, traffic management systems, smart buildings and household appliances. Over the next 15 years, the number of machines and sensors connected to the Internet will explode. According to IMS Research, there will be more than 22 billion web-connected devices by 2020[i].These new devices will generate more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data every day[ii], while every hour enough information is consumed by Internet traffic to ...

I was in NC last week, and missed the Google event in Lenoir, NC.  When I am doing technical data center work I take almost no pictures and don’t write any blog entries which is why I was so quiet last week and it was understandable I missed the Google event. GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher did cover the Google announcement and put things in perspective of her visit to NC. Google calls on utilities to sell it clean energy for data centers, starting in North Carolina by Katie Fehrenbacher   APR. 19, 2013 - 8:30 AM PDT SUMMARY: Google is asking utilities to create programs that will sell companies clean power if they’re willing to pay for it, starting with Duke Energy in North Carolina. It seems with Google’s announcements and Facebook’s announcements, they are both deflecting Greenpeace to go after others.  Will Greenpeace start protesting Duke ...

GigaOm's Katie Fehrenbacher has a post on how some of the best bloggers got to the top.   A lesson from the blogging elite: there are many ways to the top by Katie Fehrenbacher   21 HOURS AGO 1 Comment A A photo: Albert Chau SUMMARY: There’s more than one way to the top of the elite blogging ladder. Here’s lessons from four bloggerati that made it there. tweet this The really surprising thing about a conversation with some of the blogging world’s most celebrated names is how little they actually have in common — in terms of their motivations, strategies and business models. At paidContent Live on Wednesday, Brain Picking’s Maria Popova, New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, The Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, and web marketing guru Tim Ferriss, discussed the various reasons why they blog, and how (if at all) they monetize their web work.

I found the announcement for Facebook's PUE and WUE dashboard on The Register. Bit barn efficiency metrics on a minute-by-minute basis By Jack Clark in San Francisco • Get more from this author Posted in Data Center, 18th April 2013 17:00 GMT 

I was chatting with Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppetlabs a few months ago and he said his company had a DevOps survey it was working on and it is now available for download here. DevOps Adoption is Accelerating, Don't Get Left Behind We surveyed over 4000 IT Operations and Development professionals and found that DevOps adoption is accelerating across organizations of all sizes. Organizations that have implemented DevOps practices are up to five times more likely to be high-performing than those that have not, and the more mature the DevOps implementation, the better their performance. Download the 2013 State of DevOps Report to learn more about: How DevOps enables high performance How to achieve high performance How to remove barriers to DevOps adoption How to stay ahead of the curve as demand for DevOps skills grows Spread the Word Know anyone who needs a dose of DevOps? Please share ...

Where to get cloud computing is a problem many have.  There are so many choices, from IBM, Dell, HP, to Rackspace and Softlayer.  One view on what cloud to buy is to buy from someone who uses their own SW and develops the cloud.  Would you buy a Ford car from a company where most of the people drive other cars?  Kind of hard to swallow.  Which is why many think of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft's Cloud offerings. GigaOm's Barb Darrow has a post on the AWS vs. Google battle with a bit on Microsoft.  Barb starts by acknowledging AWS is #1 and asks who will be #2. Amazon is the cloud to beat, but Google has the cloud to watch. Here’s why. by Barb Darrow   1 HOUR AGO 1 Comment A A SUMMARY: So who will be number two in public cloud after Amazon Web Services ...

GigaOm has a guest post on the problem of IT being in the back seat at so many companies. Technology is king, so why are so many IT departments playing backseat roles? by Bart Copeland, Guest Contributor   23 HOURS AGO 7 Comments A A photo: aceshot1/Shutterstock SUMMARY: As employees feel increasingly entitled to take tech into their own hands via BYOD, the cloud and SaaS, IT is finding itself sidelined. The answer is for IT to redefine itself. Welcome to IT as a Service. Today’s IT departments face an identity crisis. Technology is an integral part of every single business process, and has come to dominate the lives of consumers who are routinely shopping online, downloading information, and browsing the Internet. Yet ironically, in an era when technology rules, IT departments are losing ground fast:  The forces of cloud computing, social media, and information management are evolving rapidly ...