Tag Archives: data center

Will Facebook Change the Face of Servers?

Posted on by gregl

No screws or “vanity plastic” on Facebook servers.

Facebook’s big data center in Prineville is pretty much an open book. The company is literally open-sourcing its data center and server designs, showing how the social-networking giant is stripping IT gear to bare essentials, with the goal of having a PUE – the industry-standard measure of energy efficiency in data centers – as low as possible.

At this point, the ratings for Facebook’s Prineville is well under the industry average of 1.5 PUE.

It’ll be interesting to see how the major vendors of IT gear react to the Facebook approach. Take servers, as an example. Facebook – in keeping with its barebones approach – strips its servers of any plastic casing and even unnecessary screws. The result is a server chassis with 22 percent fewer materials, no expansion slots, and weighing six pounds less than the comparable mass-market server.

Facebook also arranges racks as triplets for easier deployment and swapping, and has simplified its servers’ power supplies to achieve efficiency of greater than 94 percent.

Of course this approach to server architecture eliminates the manufacturer’s plastic skin along with any trace of product branding. “The upshot here is that many IT buyers will look at Facebook designs and incorporate them into what they do,” observes Larry Dignan at ZDNet. “It’s highly likely that technology vendors will have to respond.”

Data Center Outsourcing Globally to Reach $8 Billion

Posted on by gregl

Outsourcing data center services will hit $8 billion globally in 2012, according to new findings in the Data Center Industry Census of 2011. The United States is the largest market, with 210,000 racks outsourced either to third-party suppliers ~ such as EasyStreet ~ or to other offices.

The census, conducted by DatacenterDynamics, is the largest comparative study of data center operators and users, with 5,400 interviews conducted in 70 countries in June and July of this year. The census focused on 22 key markets worldwide, and found outsourcing to be prevalent across all markets.

Variation was wide, however, according to geographic region. India, for example, outsources 30 percent of its racks, and China 28 percent, while the Middle East is lowest at only 3 percent.

“It is evident that outsourcing fulfills different roles in the evolution of markets; as an entry point for organizations which have not yet evolved the capacity requirement to operate their own environments, or as an exit point in developed markets where the pace of increased IT requirements has exceeded in-house capacity,” explains Nick Parfitt, a DatacenterDynamics researcher.

Click here to read the entire report.

Data Center on the Street of Dreams?

Posted on by gregl

Architectural rendering of proposed data center in Minnetonka.

Are data centers going to be popping up in disguise in upscale residential neighborhoods? That’s a possibility raised by a proposed facility in Minnetonka, Minnesota, according to Data Center Knowledge.

FiberPop, a startup intent on building a chain of “community-based data centers,” is planning a $30 million, 36,000-square-foot facility in an area zoned for luxury homes in the Minnesota city. The facility is designed to have mansion-style sloped rooflines, dormers, stone-facade walls and high-end landscaping. The actual data hall is on the lower level, along with 60 underground parking spaces while FiberPop offices are on the mansion’s main level.

“We wanted it to fit into the neighborhood,” says FiberPop president Jim Louks of his plan to integrate the data center into the residential area. “I don’t know if it’s a mansion. It’s a commercial building with an upscale look to it.”

EasyStreet Business Success Story by AMAX

Posted on by Karen Karger

 

AMAX is the supplier of the Indirect Evaporative Cooling units used in EasyStreet’s Data Center 2. AMAX recently posted a Business Success Story about EasyStreet and how EasyStreet selected this solution as part of our long-standing commitment to sustainability and energy conservation. Thank you to AMAX. (We sure don’t need supplemental DX air conditioning on a chilly day like today!)

Click here to read the success story.

 

 

At least we don’t have to worry about tornadoes!

Posted on by Karen Karger

Every data center owner — those like EasyStreet who provide colocation and cloud space, or keepers of internal company data centers — takes steps to ensure services are reliably delivered. We all take care to protect our data centers against power outages, fire, earthquakes and any other form of digital pestilence that might befall us.  But at least we don’t have to worry about tornadoes here in the beautiful Northwest. Of course in the Midwest, that’s another story.

I came across a Data Center Knowledge article that describes a 4.5 million pound roof — the equivalent weight of 1,258 average midsize cars — built to protect a data center in Columbus, Indiana.  The roof incorporates nearly an acre of rebar.  You can read the article here.

Colocation and Cloud Seen As Popular Expansion Options

Posted on by gregl

Company-owned data centers are having a tough time keeping up with digital demand, and a growing number of IT managers now consider colocation a solution. Nearly half of all data centers are facing necessary expansion of some sort within two years to meet growth pressures, according to recent surveys.

In a recent Uptime Institute survey, for example, 40 percent of respondents are considering building new data centers, 30 percent will lease colocation space, and 20 percent intend to move their workload to Cloud providers.

(For those interested in a bit of both, EasyStreet can help integrate your choice of services (Private Clouds, dedicated servers, colocation and connectivity) to form the flexible computing infrastructure you need.)

Digital Realty Trust, a data center provider, surveyed 300 large-company IT decision-makers and found 85 percent planning to expand their data centers in 2011. “Expansion includes everything from a physical expansion and leasing of collocation space to cloud computing services,” according to Computerworld. “It represents a four percent increase over the previous year’s survey results.

Afcom, an association of data center managers, found 29 percent of the 360 IT managers it surveyed now involved in data center expansion, while another 21 percent are planning to expand within two years.

Data Centers Evolving into Heart of Business

Posted on by gregl

After decades on the periphery of companies’ business concerns, the data center has been moving steadily toward center stage. In a recent commentary piece in ZDNet, IBM’s vice president of strategy for its Tivoli brand, Hing Wing To, described new ways business and IT leaders must think about data centers.

“The days of the data center operating as an isolated business automation function are long gone,” he writes. “For most organizations, today’s data center is at the heart of the business. It supports a wide variety of business functions, including tracking the status and use of assets, ensuring the availability and performance of business processes, collecting vital market and customer data, and, for many enterprises, the data center is the face of the business on the Web.”

Data volumes are doubling every 18 months, he adds. “Stakeholder and regulatory pressures are having a major impact on the data center in areas such as identity and access management, data retention, audit control and compliance as well as in the area of environmental sustainability.”

Enterprises today are better at adapting to business changes, while IT is pursuing ways of leveraging Cloud computing “to create more agile, flexible and cost-effective data center operations.”

“Data centers are becoming ever more transparent, giving both owners and users better visibility into their operations, performance and cost,” To writes. “Process-based service management is becoming the norm, ensuring data center configurations are under strict and audited control. Also broader use of automated processes is helping data center managers to improve service while controlling costs.”

EasyStreet hosts visitors from International Sustainability Leadership Project

Posted on by Karen Karger

This afternoon EasyStreet provided an educational tour of our new data center for participants in the International Sustainability Leadership (ISL) Project. Gathering young adults from around the world to explore important sustainability issues, the ISL project event will be held in Beaverton from July 18 to August 5, 2011.

We split the young people touring EasyStreet from the ISL Project into three groups. Above, EasyStreet’s Operations Manager, Jeff Burlingame, talks about the energy-saving innovations in Data Center 2.

Are Corporate Initiatives Driving Emission Controls?

Posted on by gregl

Corporate social responsibility initiatives might be the biggest influence on the amount of attention paid to carbon emissions in today’s data centers. (We know it’s true for EasyStreet.)

In a recent survey of data center owners and operators conducted by Uptime Institute, 45 percent of respondents said carbon footprint data was important to them. The same percentage said their companies have adopted social-responsibility initiatives related to energy efficiency.

The survey stopped short, however, of drawing a direct correlation between the levels of concern and the presence of corporate initiatives related to data center energy efficiency.

Water usage in data centers was important to only 33 percent of respondents, while 38 percent said the amount of water their data centers consumed was unimportant to them.

At EasyStreet, we buy Water Restoration Certificates™ through the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to cover 100 percent of our city water usage — the first and only data center services provider in the nation to do so. An estimated 70 percent of the water used for our Indirect Evaporative Coolers is captured and filtered rainwater.  

The survey encompassed 525 data center owners and operators, 71 percent in North America and the rest from Europe and Asia.