Articles from Data Center Knowledge

Here’s our review of today’s noteworthy links for the data center industry: Oracle acquires Taleo. Oracle (ORCL) announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Taleo Corporation (TLEO), a leading provider of cloud-based talent management for $46.00 per share or approximately $1.9 billion. Freescale targets the data center with embedded multicore processors. Freescale Semiconductor (FSL) is taking aim at cloud computing and the data center market with the announcement of its T4240 and T4160 embedded multicore processors from its QorIQ Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) series. The T4240 processor has achieved the highest CoreMark benchmark performance-per-watt profile and overall performance score ever recorded for an embedded processor. Juniper introduces Universal Access Solution. Juniper Networks (JNPR) introduced its Universal Access solution that is designed to support more mobile calls and transactions with fewer dropped calls, while also improving network utilization and revenue opportunities for service providers. The ...

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The data center is a critical facility that houses computer systems and associated components, including backup power, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls and security devices. Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and fire protection systems become critical to system maintenance and recovery. What Are Your Core Value Activities? Any build versus outsource decision could be viewed through the prism of core competence – increasing performance and organizational delivery through a focus on its core value activities. Unfortunately, in the past, multiple extraneous factors often muddied the perspective. The key difference is that when an activity is core and business critical, it will receive top-level attention and focus. An IT team’s time should be dedicated to the activities that provide strategic advantage to the enterprise and allow resources to be focused only on those key areas.

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Cincinnati Bell is studying a spinoff or IPO for its thriving CyrusOne colocation business, the company said yesterday. The move could allow Cincinnati Bell to benefit from investor interest in the data center and cloud computing sector, while shifting significant capital expenses off the telecom company’s balance sheet. Cincinnati Bell said it would take six to 12 months to make a decision on the best path for CyrusOne, with options including “a partial separation through a sale, initial public offering, or a full separation.” Company officials said the analysis would examine which option created the most shareholder value.

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Has Iceland arrived as a data center destination? Today marked a coming-out party for the leading player in the nascent Iceland data center market, as Verne Global unveiled its new “modular colo” data center in Keflavik, along with three new tenants. Today’s event for analysts and media also served as a showcase for the use of modular designs to rapidly deploy data center space in remote locations with vast sources of renewable power. Working with modular specialist Colt, Verne Global was able to create a 500 square meter (5,400 square foot) data center in four months. The data center hall consists of 37 modules that were built in the UK and then shipped to Iceland, where they were assembled into a completed data center.

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The data center is at the center of an extraordinary shift in business activity to the Internet and the “cloud.” One of the companies working to articulate the nature of this shift and the central role of data center facilities is Cisco, which has put together a video combining market data, digital imagery and footage of data halls in a Cisco facility to illustrate “A Path to the World of Many Clouds.” It makes the case for Cisco’s Unified Data Center technology, but also serves as a rich visual explainer of the significance of data centers in the digital business transition. This video runs about 2 minutes.

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Companies selling wholesale data center space say corporate America’s appetite for IT infrastructure remains strong, with some regional variation in demand for data center space and customer timelines for expansion. Data Center Knowledge touched base with some providers of wholesale data center space in the wake of Tuesday’s earnings report from DuPont Fabros Technology, which said it was seeing slightly slower leasing in several markets, including New Jersey and northern Virginia.

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Leasing at new data centers built by developer DuPont Fabros Technology has been slower than expected in several key markets, the company said today,  DuPont Fabros said it remained confident in the long-term outlook for the data center market, but that given the current pace of leasing it is lowering its revenue guidance for 2012.

Shares of DuPont Fabros (DFT) were down by about 6 percent in midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange, declining $1.49 a share to $24.01. Shares had been as much as 9 percent lower in after-hours trading last night.

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10GBASE-T is the standard technology that enables 1- Gigabit Ethernet operations over balanced twisted-pair copper, including Category 6A unshielded and shielded cabling.  It provides flexibility in data center network design due to its 100-meter reach capability, and the requisite backward compatibility that allows most end users to upgrade from their 10/100/1000-Mbps networks.  The ecosystem currently in place has the adoption of 10GBASE-T poised to surge.

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Wholesale data center developer DuPont Fabros Technology has signed new customer leases at its data centers in New Jersey and Silicon Valley, the company said today.

Two new tenants have signed leases totalling 1.71 megawatts of critical power – about 8,120 square feet of raised-floor technical space – at the NJ1 facility in Piscataway, New Jersey. In California, a single tenant has leased 2.28 megawatts of power (11,000 square feet of space) at the SC1 facility in Santa Clara.

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High-speed trading customers are packing more equipment into their cabinets, and thhe operator of the NASDAQ stock exchange is responding with a new high-density enclosure for companies that colocate their servers in the NASDAQ data center.

The NASDAQ OMX Group today introduced the Super Cab, a cabinet that vents the hot exhaust air from servers into a custom cabinet chimney, allowing it to cool customer workloads requiring up to 17 kilowatts of power within the NASDAQ OMX Data Centert. The solution also reduces cabinet-to-cabinet connectivity latency and maintains reliability with fully redundant power capacity.

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Although most enterprises today have multiple IT providers, it is worthwhile for large organizations to consider consolidating data center support processes under just one multinational provider. This can provide more consistent security, scalability, administrative simplicity, performance, and resilience across multiple locations.

This white paper from CyrusOne examines the benefits of consolidating a system of multiple specialized data center providers into a single, global provider. It lists the main factors impacting the choice of one global provider vs. specialized providers, listing standardized reporting as a heavily weighed aspect. It then provides three options for collocation, explaining the benefits of one global provider, One U.S. provider and multiple international service providers, and multiple providers.

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As the demand for data center efficiency rises along with the demands for higher bandwidth, speed and performance, facility managers worldwide are challenged to conserve available space and energy, and “do more with less.” As a result, data center professionals, IT managers and networking staff are likely to share the burden of conserving energy, as everyone responsible for the IT facility will play a role in reducing operations costs of the ever-evolving data center.

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Griffin Capital has purchased AT&T Wireless’ National Network Operations Center in Redmond, Washington, the company said recently. The facility was bought as part of Griffin’s acquisition of a three-building, 155,830 square foot office and data center campus fully leased AT&T Wireless. The property also houses AT&T Wireless’ next-generation research and development labs.

AT&T Wireless, the country’s second-largest cell phone service provider, has continuously occupied the property since it was built in 1995 and over the past three years invested more then $50 million of its own capital to upgrade the facility. with plans for additional investment.

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Networking startup Nicira today unveiled its Network Virtualization Platform (NVP), along with an impressive lineup of companies using its product. Nicira was founded by key players in the development of the OpenFlow protocol for software-defined networking.

But the company’s approach to networking goes beyond OpenFlow. Its software platform manages a network abstraction layer, which lets users create virtual networks that operate independently of the underlying physical network hardware. Nicira says its software will work with any network hardware from any vendor and is hypervisor agnostic, working with VMware ESX, Linux/KVM, Xen Server and Microsoft’s HyperV.

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It’s been more than five years since the unveiling of the Sun Blackbox, the first commercial data center container. Modular designs are now common in huge cloud data centers and high-performance computing (HPC), and vendors say they are poised to push further into the mainstream.What’s the state of the modular market? Five years in, the questions abound: Are any customers really buying them? Who are they? How large is the potential market? What does the analyst community think about modular data centers?

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Officials in Nebraska are seeking to pass a package of economic incentives to land a huge data center known only as “Project Edge,” which could result in a $1.2 billion data center campus. It’s the latest example of “code name” projects in which large companies seek to remain secret as they scout locations for data centers.

“It’s quite an extraordinary investment,” Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman, who has been involved in the recruitment effort, told the Omaha World-Herald. “We’re one of the finalists, and I think we have an outstanding opportunity to have this occur.”

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Facebook’s $1 Billion Data Center Network – Facebook has invested more than $1 billion in the infrastructure that powers its social network, which now serves more than 845 million users a month around the globe. SeaMicro Servers Get Brawny With Xeon Chips – SeaMicro has adapted its many-core server design to work with Intel Xeon processors, significantly expanding the type of workloads that can run on the company’s low-energy servers. Amazon: 762 Billion Objects Stored on S3 Cloud – How fast is Amazon Web Services growing? The number of objects stored on the company’s S3 cloud storage service tripled in the 12-month period between the final quarters of 2010 and 2011. S3 now stores an amazing 762 billion objects. By any measure, that’s extraordinary growth. SuperNAP Featured on CBS Evening News – The massive SuperNAP data center was in the spotlight last Thursday evening when it was featured in a ...

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Fusion-io selected by inFrame Designs. Fusion-io (FIO) announced that InFrame Designs, provider of custom-built media servers to accelerate playback of video at live media events, has deployed Fusion’s ioMemory technology in its appliances to reduce latency by up to 100 times when compared to InFrame’s previous architecture. Raritan launches dcTrack 2.6 DCIM.  Raritan introduceddcTrack 2.6 DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) software with new intelligent connectivity management capabilities to help data center professionals manage both network and power connections more efficiently.CommVault unveils new Simpana software innovations.  CommVaultannounced new, next-generation Singular Information Management innovations that further empower Simpana software customers to lower data management costs, reduce business and compliance risks and easily extract data for better decision making with anywhere, anytime information access. 

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Kent Christensen is virtualization practice manager for Datalink, where consults with both Fortune 500 and mid-tier customers on storage consolidation, virtualization, cloud strategies and technologies. He blogs about theses issues.

Cloud computing is gaining popularity. Yet, we know that only about 25% of IT teams are actively involved in cloud computing within their organization. Why the disconnect? Many IT people tell me they are interested, but just don’t have time to explore what cloud computing could mean to their IT organization.

The best advice I can give them comes from American Revolutionary Thomas Paine, himself:

“Lead, follow or get out of the way.”

Now’s the time to move forward with plans for your own internal, private cloud. If you don’t, you may find yourself — and your IT organization — left behind.

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Facebook has invested more than $1 billion in the infrastructure that powers its social network, which now serves more than 845 million users a month around the globe. The company spent $606 million on servers, storage, network gear and data centers in 2011, and expects to spend another $500 million this year, Facebook revealed Wednesday in its filing for an initial public stock offering.

The company’s massive armada of servers and storage must work together seamlessly to deliver each Facebook page, the company said. “Loading a user’s home page typically requires accessing hundreds of servers, processing tens of thousands of individual pieces of data, and delivering the information selected in less than one second,” the company said.

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Cisco (CSCO) announced it has updated its switching portfolio with 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) and 40 GE capabilities, the next speed limits for networking. These new capabilities provide a holistic architectural approach across campus, data center and service provider environments. (Read Full Article)

Several leading data center providers reported this week that they have competed audits of their facilities: DuPont Fabros Technology – Wholesale data center developer DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) today announced that the control procedures for its data centers that required the certification have been found to be suitable in design and operating effectively according to Service Organization Control Reports (“SOC1″). IO – Modular data center specialist IO said the company has completed a SSAE 16 Type 2 audit covering three operational data centers – IO New Jersey, IO Phoenix and IO Scottsdale.

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While much data center news broke in January, one story on a unique data center design – camouflaging a data center as a residence – clearly led the pack of the best-read items on Data Center Knowledge. There was also interest in stories on the federal government’s plans to close data centers, Facebook’s spending on its facility in Oregon, and a guest column on audit standards confusion in the industry. Here’s a look at the 10 most popular stories on Data Center Knowledge during January 2012, ranked by total page views:

• A Data Center That Mimics A Mansion – January 20
• Feds Now Plan to Close 1,200 Data Centers – January 4
• Facebook Has Spent $210 Million on Oregon Data Center – January 30
• AICPA Fumbles Audit Standards at the 5-Yard Line – January 19
• Google Spent $951 Million on Data Centers in Q4 – January 23
• The Coming Colo Crunch – January 18 ...

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The concept of introducing virtualization into corporate data centers has moved well past the trial phase over the past few years into one of wide acceptance today. The latest virtualization technologies deliver on the promise of increased efficiency, reduced expenses and a smaller overall footprint.

But when it comes to a truly virtualized data center, server virtualization, which enables several applications to run independently on a single physical server, is only half of the solution.

Storage Demands Continue

CIOs today continue to struggle keeping up with the demands for more storage capacity as data continues to grow exponentially. That, in turn, has led them to add storage systems ad-hoc, responding to the needs of a specific deployment, a particular business function, or a geographic area. As such, many organizations have created a complex, inflexible storage infrastructure that has become both difficult and costly to manage.

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