Tag Archives: data center

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.

Apple’s Data Center is Cool, Too

Posted on by Karen Karger

Data Center Knowledge’s Rich Miller noted some of the data-center-design principles that Apple has employed in its new iCloud data center, including, “a slab floor and a cooling system in which cold air enters the equipment area from overhead. Apple is using containment systems to separate the cold supply air for the servers from the exhaust heat, a strategy which dramatically improves the efficiency of data center cooling systems.”

That sounds remarkably similar to the cooling system strategy EasyStreet incorporated in its new Data Center 2. EasyStreet’s containment systems are chimney cabinets and connective ducts. The cold supply air floods the area via huge overhead fabric diffusers – a design that is, indeed, much more efficient than outmoded raised floors.

Here is one of many articles about Apple’s intriguing new facilities.

Older Data Centers Facing New Growth Challenges

Posted on by gregl

As the old adage says, something’s got to give. A recent IDC survey found that the average age of data centers in the United States is 12 years, with many built before the dot-com era.

Meanwhile, businesses are facing increasing demand for IT capacity in their data centers to support business growth. IBM predicts that the installed base of servers has continued to multiply by a factor of six between 2000 and 2010, and storage is expected to grow by a factor of 69 in the coming years.

“In our experience, servers account for 50 to 75 percent of a typical data center’s total floor space, but we’ve seen the average utilization rate for those assets at only between 10 and 15 percent,” according to IBM sources. “Their requirements for physical space, power and cooling preempt the deployment of new capacity. And the inefficiencies of older data centers make it difficult to respond quickly to the opportunities and demands created by new information technologies.”

One evident solution is ongoing virtualization of the server base, yet businesses are also under increasing cost pressures, which can preclude many equipment purchases. In a recent survey of nearly 500 North American and Western European senior IT professionals, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found: “Cost reduction — and cost avoidance — rule the day for business and IT decision makers.”

Private Clouds and Data Centers

Posted on by gregl

“Everyone’s going to the cloud. The cloud’s all the rage. Almost no IT discussion is complete without mentioning ‘the cloud,’” according to Erik Eckel, IT entrepreneur and commentator, in a recent TechRepublic.com column. “But when it comes down to it, the cloud is nothing more than systems hosting information in a data center somewhere ‘out there.’”

“Organizations have discovered the benefits of offloading infrastructure development, automatic failover engineering, and multiple coordinated power feeds – not to mention backups, OS maintenance, and physical security – to third-party data centers,” he adds. “That’s why ‘going to the cloud’ ultimately makes sense.”

But, as Eckel says, “Not every data center is ready for prime time.” He says companies seeking data center for hosting private clouds need to look at basics such as data capacity, power redundancy, 24x7x365 support, written SLAs, and financial security. Here’s his full list.

 We invite you to measure EasyStreet with Eckel’s list. You’ll see we stack up very well.

EasyStreet buys water offsets for data center

Posted on by Karen Karger

You may know that EasyStreet buys 100 percent renewable energy offsets, but did you know we buy offsets to balance 100 percent of our water usage as well? Actually, we’re the first data center in the world — or certainly the U.S. — to do so.

EasyStreet’s new data center design uses Indirect Evaporative Cooling rather than traditional AC units, and the cooling units require a lot of water. A rainwater capture system supplies about 70 percent of the water needed, but we purchased Water Restoration Certificates™ (WRCs) from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) to offset the city water we’ll consume. The WRC Program allows those who consume water to return an amount of water equal to what they’ve used back to the environment.

This Sustainable Business Oregon article provides more details about EasyStreet’s support of this BEF program. More information about the Certificate Program can be found here.

SELP Helps EasyStreet Green up and Prepare to Boost Growth

Posted on by Karen Karger

The Oregon Department of Energy (ODOE) has a number of programs designed to encourage Oregonians to use energy more efficiently and to use renewable energy sources. Its Small-scale Energy Loan Program (SELP) offers low-interest loans for energy saving projects.

You may or may not know that EasyStreet is the first company to receive funding assistance through SELP. The ODOE’s Office of Public Affairs and Outreach just posted an article about how the program made the building of our new energy-efficient data center possible. You can read the article here.

The Incredible Shrinking Data Center

Posted on by gregl

Three trends affecting the IT industry in recent years are gaining momentum and leading to steady shrinking of corporate data centers, according to industry pundit Jason Hines, editor in chief of TechRepublic.com.

Cloud computing, virtualization and outsourcing are terms now so common they are approaching cliché status. But combined, they are a potent force affecting how companies will operate structure their IT infrastructure in the next few years.

“One of the most direct consequences of the cloud is that IT departments are shrinking their private data centers as they move to purchasing some of their apps through third-party companies that deliver them over the Internet,” Hiner states. And regarding virtualization: “The distributed server movement of the 1990s is clearly over as companies are buying bigger (but far fewer) server boxes and then using virtualization to divide them into as many logical servers as they need.”

The other key trend in this triumvirate — and one dear to us at EasyStreet — is the continued growth of outsourcing data center functions. “The next stage of this trend will come in 2-3 years when some businesses move toward renting server capacity on demand rather than running their own servers at all,” Hiner predicts.

Click here to see the other hottest business technology trends to watch in 2011.

The Data Center as Core Competency … Or Not

Posted on by gregl

Maintaining focus on core competencies is a key part of business “back to basics,” including in IT. “It is imperative to outsource activities that are not core components of one’s business,” writes Global Net Access president and owner Jeff Hinkle on DataCenterKnowledge.com. “A prime example is when a company chooses to build its own data center.”

“Building a data center or worrying about the 24×7 staffing and operations of hardware, which requires upgrades year to year, are distractions from the core mission,” Hinkle says. “Many organizations are not equipped to conduct operations at an enterprise level.”

“Expansion is difficult, costly and time consuming. Often the facility is ‘maxed out’ from Day One, and obtaining new capital is difficult. This endangers new projects that require more space for gear. Operating costs are almost always higher for smaller companies, who will not have access to bulk electrical rates that a large commercial facility might have, nor the sheer purchasing volume.”

There’s more: “Areas that must be covered within an enterprise data center include electrical, mechanical, hardware maintenance, cabling and network operations. These areas are also the lowest on the value chain and require scaling before they become affordable.”

And then Hinkle asks: “How many data centers make their own soft drinks and do their own surgery on their employees? Probably none! If they wanted to, they could, but the costs and the lack of quality of the product would probably not make sense. The same example can be applied to the soft drink company or the medical company: would they run their own data center at the same level as an established commercial facility?”