Data center strategies with no data center power redundancy?

First came data centers with no chillers. But is the industry ready for a data center with no UPS and no generators?

That seems like a radical concept. But Yahoo is considering going without UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and generators for some future data center projects. It’s not alone in advocating design choices that represent a huge departure from current practice. A number of data center designers are urging clients to consider limiting UPS support to loads that are genuinely critical.

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Everything looks like a nail, a truism that ASHRAE (The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) has just demonstrated in its advice to data center operators on how to achieve greater cooling efficiency in the data center (see ASHRAE Standard 90.1). In ASHRAE’s opinion, the way to achieve data center cooling efficiency is through the use of various economizer techniques (air-side, water-side …) to reduce the amount of energy used by the cooling plant. Unfortunately, this is a rather narrow view of the problem, focused on the stuff that ASHRAE members do best, i.e. air-conditioning and chilled water plants. The ASHRAE standard has now drawn a universal thumbs down from some of the largest data center operators (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Digital Realty Trust, DuPont Fabros Technology and Nokia) who issued a joint statement urging ASHRAE to re-think it’s position.

more of the Burton Group blog post

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “Clouded by Chrome: Googles Strategy in Cloud Computing – Chrome as Your Next OS” report to their offering.

Google is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy with the aim of redefining how consumers access online services and applications including mobile applications.

This report analyzes the dynamics of Googles disruptive moves in the world of communication services with a focus on cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to virtualized set of information services offered on-demand and dynamically in a scalable fashion over the Internet. Cloud computing offers an organization the ability to run applications, increase capacity, and add capabilities to its existing IT infrastructure without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, and incurring fees for licensing new software. The revenue generation model in cloud computing is primarily based on subscription and pay-per-use. Changes to IT and provisioning of resources are conducted real time in a dynamic and scalable way as a service over the Internet.

Google raises barriers to entry for potential competitors. For example, processing search queries at very high speeds has been possible with the companys billion-dollar investments in data processing centers. It is clear that Googles ambitions are big and disruptive. The company announced its biggest yet investment in data center in mid-2008, with $842 million representing its biggest capital expenditure for a single quarter. The proceeding sections of this report explore and analyze Googles move in cloud computing, online search and advertisement, and news media in more detail.

more of the Cloud Computing Journal article

There are many in the data center industry that have repeatedly called for change in this community of ours. Change in technology, change in priorities, Change for the future. Over the years we have seen those changes come very slowly and while they are starting to move a little faster now, (primarily due to the economic conditions and scrutiny over budgets more-so than a desire to evolve our space) our industry still faces challenges and resistance to forward progress. There are lots of great ideas, lots of forward thinking, but moving this work to execution and educating business leaders as well as data center professionals to break away from those old stand by accepted norms has not gone well.

That is why I am extremely happy to announce my involvement with the University of Missouri in the launch of a Not-For-Profit Data Center specific organization. You might have read the formal announcement by Dave Ohara who launched the news via his industry website, GreenM3. Dave is another of of those industry insiders who has long been perplexed by the lack of movement and initiative we have had on some great ideas and stand outs doing great work. More importantly, it doesn’t stop there. We have been able to put together quite a team of industry heavy-weights to get involved in this effort. Those announcements are forthcoming, and when they do, I think you will get a sense of the type of sea-change this effort could potentially have.

more of the Loose Bolts Blog post from Mike Manos

Containerized data centers solve many problems associated with changes in the data center. Affordable colocation (outsource data center space ) solves these problems and more:

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Today’s containerized data centers, also known as modular data centers, are niche products often quietly chosen by customers in emergency situations. But they’re winning over more IT managers who face too much demand and too little data center expansion room.

When Australian firm WesTrac needed to expand its data center capacity quickly, the company bought the equivalent of a Band-Aid for its server needs: A containerized data center.

The company, which supplies Caterpillar (CAT) brand heavy-machinery to Australian customers and others, found itself with too little data center to meet the needs of its latest IT project. Because of space issues, WesTrac could not expand its current facility. Instead, the company decided to use a pre-packaged data center, housed and shipped in standard-sized cargo containers: one for the servers and one for the chillers and power infrastructure.

more of the CIO article from Robert Lemos

Mapping technologies that bring together multiple layers of data have led to the development of sophisticated “heat maps” for use in data center site selection. These applications combine data about power pricing, natural disasters, connectivity, water supply and dozens of other factors to identify the best areas to operate a data center.

Microsoft has often discussed the importance of heat maps in scouting locations as it worked with Jones Lang LaSalle on identifying sites for its data center projects. But software can only go so far, as Michael Manos notes today in a post at Loose Bolts, in which he discusses the process of making decisions on data center site location.

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

One of our new data center customers is a cloud service provider. Correction: most of Lifeline Data Centers’ new customers are cloud services providers. But this particular customer took advantage of a specific approach to cost savings, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars per year. I’ll refer to this approach, this space between, as Lifeline.

This customer is a cloud services company. Back at start up a few years ago, the company leveraged another cloud provider for the IT infrastructure: server, network and security equipment. This let the company start up fast and provide for future scalability.

But there was a problem. The company became successful. They were acquiring new clients, generating new revenue and scaling their application. But the costs of scaling were too high. The cloud infrastructure pricing model meant that more sales growth would result in lower and lower margins.

So they took a step back and re-evaluated the infrastructure. It wasn’t that complex; it boiled down to VMware, a few servers, a SAN, switches, security appliances and a recovery model. With a few hours of design time, they came up with a modular approach, designed to scale one rack of equipment at a time. The design was a low-cost, over-engineered solution that was resilient enough to take multiple failures and not miss a beat. What they really needed was a flexible, affordable colocation facility to house these racks.

Here is the list of outsource data center requirements they developed:

High uptime: 99.995%: equal to tier IV data center uptime standards of 27 minutes of downtime per year or less

Hardened data center facilities operated by experts who build to the highest data center certifications and resiliency standards

Access to multiple carriers without monthly cross connect fees: Multiple carriers allowed them to negotiate more flexible contracts with multiple carriers. Multiple carriers allows them to control their uptime and service levels. No monthly cross connect fees means lower monthly costs and no upper limit on carrier diversity.

Data center pricing model that is incremental, or pay as you grow

Midwest data center for low, predictable costs of power

The company chose Lifeline Data Centers because Lifeline was flexible and had all of these features. The cloud services company found better profitability by replacing a cloud infrastructure with their own infrastructure at Lifeline. This “space between” cloud computing and the data center may hold lower costs, better service levels or higher profitability for your organization, too.

If your data center is in-house, you may want to consider outsource data center as well. Infrastructure and cloud computing PDF whitepapers don’t talk enough about flexibility when it comes to a company’s physical data center facilities. Check out our whitepaper on outsourcing a data center.

If you’re a cloud service provider, or an IT professional looking to improve uptime ad reduce data center costs, call 317.423.2591 to find out how you benefit from this “space between.”

We are entering a new phase of IT where organizations must orient delivery of service across the entire IT supply chain to behave and operate in a real time manner. Those organizations that don’t embark on this transformational journey will not deliver the desired business growth and maximized shareholder value that is the fiduciary responsibilities of IT executives in support of their businesses.

Let’s call this the Service Orientation of IT, where leading innovative firms are using as a strategy to improve the long term competitive position of business – by delivering anytime, anywhere information and processing as the business needs/when they need it. Service Orientation of IT require firms to implement well targeted capabilities of service agility, optimized transaction IT unit cost and dynamic execution control into a “service-oriented” IT (SOIT) platform.

A SOIT Platform can be conceptually described with the following attributes:

more of the Cloud Computing Journal article from Tony Bishop

One of the most common questions financial services companies ask us is whether we have a SAS 70 data center certification. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, here’s the definition straight from the SAS 70 about page:

Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 70, Service Organizations, is a widely recognized auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). A service auditor’s examination performed in accordance with SAS No. 70 (“SAS 70 Audit”) is widely recognized, because it represents that a service organization has been through an in-depth audit of their control objectives and control activities, which often include controls over information technology and related processes. In today’s global economy, service organizations or service providers must demonstrate that they have adequate controls and safeguards when they host or process data belonging to their customers. In addition, the requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 make SAS 70 audit reports even more important to the process of reporting on the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting.
In short, SAS 70 certification means that you have control objectives, and that you adhere to them, as attested in an audit. And Sarbanes-Oxley puts a great deal of weight on the certification.

Before we had our SAS 70 certification, we had prospective clients choose an outsource data center with SAS 70 certification over our data center, even though we offered higher levels of uptime at lower prices.

The strange thing, in my opinion, is that the company seeking SAS 70 certification writes their own control objectives. Isn’t this asking the fox guarding the henhouse? If I’m clever enough to write vague, simplistic control objectives, I can obtain a SAS 70 certification without really having a well-run facility.

What do you think? Is a SAS 70 data center certification like a fox guarding the henhouse?

As a cloud computing data center provider, Lifeline closely watches the cloud industry. As Linda Leung’s article states, revenues and margins are all over the map. One thing is certain: cloud computing service providers are buying more outsource data center facilities like Lifeline.

How much are the major players in cloud computing making from their cloud operations? The answers are all over the map.

Many cloud computing providers are private, and don’t disclose their revenue. Most of the leading publicly-held companies see cloud computing as a promising source of future growth, though perhaps not a large percentage of current revenue. And there’s some significant differences between companies providing software as a service (SaaS) and those offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Here’s a look at some of the public companies and their cloud computing revenues:

SERVICE PROVIDERS

Salesforce.com
In February 2009, chairman and CEO Marc Benioff boasted that Salesforce.com (CRM) was the “first billion-dollar cloud computing company,” when the company announced 2009 year-end revenue of $1.077 billion, a 44 percent increase from 2008. All eyes will be on Salesforce.com on Feb. 24 to see if the SaaS provider will maintain its $1 billion revenue status when it reports its fiscal year end results.

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Linda Leung