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DHS Data Center Planned in Western U.S.

Posted by Rich Miller on April 30, 2007

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is planning a second major disaster recovery data center, and is focusing its search on Texas and the Western United States to guard against a potential blackout affecting the East Coast, according to a report in Government Computer News.

DHS has asked contractors to propose locations for the "cross-agency" data center, which would serve as a central backup site to coordinate disaster recovery efforts across the many agencies that report to Homeland Security. The primary existing DHS data center is at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

The second data center will be designed to continuously synchronize with the Stennis center, so it mirrors the data in both sites, allowing the second site to seamlessly take over from the Mississippi facility in the event of a power outage or other disaster.

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April 30, 2007

Cogent and the Peering Ecosystem

Cogent Communications (CCOI) is best known for cheap bandwidth and peering controversies, including several with Level 3. In these peering spats, Cogent has traditionally been the one being "de-peered." But last week Cogent apparently ended its peering relationships with several UK providers, which prompted an interesting analysis by Todd Underwood on the Renesys blog about Cogent's evolution as a company:

If Cogent is pruning small peers as part of such a longer term strategy, that means that they've reached the early adulthood of their network. ... If Cogent is settling down into its corporate middle age, interesting things are afoot. Cogent has long held the role of wacky, freewheeling, young whippersnapper—the new kid on the block willing to undercut everyone's prices, maybe while cutting a few corners on coverage and network reliability, but not so much so that its customers aren't happy for the deal. That role has been one of the big drivers pushing IP transit prices down. Someone has to be the "low price leader" and for the past several years, that has been Cogent. If these depeerings are not isolated events, but rather part of a new strategic direction for Cogent, that could spell changes in pricing and competitive dynamics.

Cogent's pricing has made it a significant factor in many Internet business plans, so it bears watching.

Posted by Rich Miller April 30, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

Amazon: 'Strong Demand' for S3 and EC2

Shares of Amazon.com (AMZN) surged 40% last week after the company announced blockbuster first-quarter earnings, driven by strong performance in its core Internet retail business. With Amazon's re-emergence as a hot Internet stock, the company's Web services strategy continues to gain attention.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos discussed the prospects for the company's utility infrastructure services during its quarterly earnings call on April 24. Bezos said Amazon does not break out revenue numbers for its Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), but said the company is "seeing very strong demand for those services. ... We have been adding new capacity for those services and I continue to expect that to continue indefinitely."

Posted by Rich Miller April 30, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

Carrier Hotel Alliance Adds 1102 Grand

The Carrier Hotel Alliance (CHA) has expanded its membership to include 1102 GRAND, Kansas City's largest carrier-neutral interconnection facility, which will participate in CHA's joint marketing effort at the 2007 Global Telecommunications Meeting (GTM) May 21-24 in Washington, DC.

The CHA is a cooperative effort of North America's largest operators of carrier hotels (multi-tenant telecom buildings), including CRG West (One Wilshire and San Jose's Marketplace Tower), the Westin Building of Seattle and the telx Group network of meet-me rooms in a dozen major Internet gateways across the US, including 60 Hudson and 111 Eighth Avenue in New York.

The CHA offers prospective customers the opportunity to "build their entire North American network in one room" at major telecom industry conferences. "It's a win-win situation for GTM attendees," commented Michael Boyle, Director of Business Development for the Westin Building. "The combination of international network operators, equipment manufacturers, and facility owners in the CHA allows attendees to buy and build the necessary infrastructure for the next phase of telecommunications growth."

Posted by Rich Miller April 30, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

April 29, 2007

Stream Realty Announces San Antonio Project

Stream Realty Partners has become the latest data center developer to announce plans for a facility in the booming San Antonio market. The Dallas-based developer has acquired 33 acres in the Westover Hills area for a 150,000-square-foot data center. "The demand for data-center space is extremely strong," Stream Realty managing director Paul Moser told the Express-News.

Westover Hills is already home to Microsoft's 470,000-square-foot data center and a $60 million Lowe's data center. San Antonio will apparently also get an NSA data center in a former Sony plant. The San Antonio Economic Development Foundation said it is working with five other companies looking at San Antonio for new data-center sites, including some speculators.

Posted by Rich Miller April 29, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

NetApp Plans Research Triangle Data Center

Network Appliance (NTAP) is considering building a $25 million to $40 million data center facility in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, and seeking tax incentives to clinch the project. The exact square footage hasn't been determined, but the new facility would employ at least 50 workers, the company told local media (link via John Rath).

NetApp said it is also looking at sites in Pittsburgh and Washington state. Ken Hibbard, vice president of East Coast operations for NetApp, said incentives packages will be an important factor in the company's decision. "It's not the sole consideration, but it is a factor," Hibbard said. In 2004 the North Carolina Department of Commerce offered NetApp offered $8.9 million for creating 361 jobs over five years. The company has since added about 520 jobs. In January, NetApp negotiated a contract to buy a 100-acre parcel across the street from its RTP site with the Research Triangle Foundation, and has 120 days to make a commitment.

Posted by Rich Miller April 29, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

April 28, 2007

Data Center CapEx and SaaS

eWeek Editor in Chief Eric Lindquist notes the huge capital spending on data centers by Google and Microsoft, and wonders what it will mean for SaaS (Software as a Service). Eric advises companies shopping for SaaS hosting to consider their provider's ability to manage its ongoing data center investments.

Technology executives will have to learn what steel mill executives discovered long ago: Capital investment is not a one-time event. That server farm you built last year will soon require another big round of investment to stay current and efficient. For the customer looking at a SAAS provider, all this will mean a new question in the request for proposal. In addition to understanding a vendor's strategic product direction, you will want to know the vendor's capital spending plans and how those plans will provide you with the service you expect at a cost the vendor can provide—without starving future products to keep the server farm up-to-date.

The data center business is extremely capital intensive, and that's a trend that will continue for some time. Part of the issue, as Eric notes, is how securities analysts view those capital expenses. Justifying data center capital expenditures is one thing if you're Google and your infrastructure provides your competitive advantage. Same deal for SAVVIS, which is building data centers like mad to support a utility computing model, but just saw its stock hit a 52-week high. It's a harder sell if your primary revenue source is selling books or desktop software, which is why Amazon and Microsoft have to work harder to sell analysts on the benefit of short-term CapEx spending to pursue long-term gains.

Posted by Rich Miller April 28, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

April 27, 2007

Database Sharding Helps High-Traffic Sites

Several presentations this week have focused attenton on database sharding - breaking a large database into smaller pieces to provide faster access to the data. ZDNet reports how Google used database partitioning to manage a 12 gigabyte database for its financial planning unit. Google's Chris Schulze discussed the technology during a presentation at Hyperion's Solutions 2007 conference in Orlando.

In addition to using sharding to streamline its huge in-house databases, Google last month contributed its data partitioning solution to the open source Hibernate project. A description:

Hibernate Shards offers critical data clustering and support for horizontal partitioning (also called sharding) to Hibernate. Now, customers can keep their data in more than one relational database for whatever reason-too much data or to isolate certain datasets, for instance-without added complexity when building and managing applications. Hibernate Shards is designed to encapsulate and reduce the complexity of building applications that work with sharded datasets.

Database sharding is also used by Digg, which outlined the details of its database management techniques in a presentation at the MySQL conference in Santa Clara this week.

Posted by Rich Miller April 27, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

Google Data Center Project in Belgium

Google is expanding its data center network in Europe as well as the U.S. The Internet search giant will build a data center near Mons, Belgium, investing 250 million Euros (about $341 million) in a project that will create 120 local permanent jobs, as well as 300 temporary construction jobs,according to reports in the Belgian press (if you read French, check out coverage in L'Echo). Construction starts today, and the facility is scheduled to open in early 2008. The data center will be in the Ghlin-Baudour industrial park in Hainaut, an area some reports describe as a former coal mining region. The new facility will be located near a canal to provide abundant water for cooling.

In February reports emerged that Google may be a tenant in a massive new data center near Amsterdam, which is one of the most wired cities in Europe. Google already has at least one facility already in the Groningen area. Internet growth in Europe is driving strong demand for data center space, as seen in strong leasing rates for data center space. Belgium is an interesting choice for Google, as the company was involved in litigation with the Belgian newspaper association about Google news.

Posted by Rich Miller April 27, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

Data Center Jobs: Google, RampRate, eBay

At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have new job listings from Google, eBay and RampRate:

Google is seeking a Data Center Project Manager and Data Center Construction Project Manager, with both positions in Mountain View, CA.

RampRate Sourcing Advisors is looking for a Sales Director, CDN & Media Services, Colocation in Santa Monica, CA.

eBay has an opportunity for a Data Center Manager in Brisbane, CA.

We'll be posting more jobs shortly. You can list your company's job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our RSS feed.

Posted by Rich Miller April 27, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

April 26, 2007

Energy Exchange Consolidates In Chicago

IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), a leading electronic energy marketplace, will consolidate its primary data center operations in Chicago, the company said this week. The relocation will consolidate a backup data center and its primary facility in a single Chicago site, with a staged transition of those services from existing data centers in London and Atlanta. ICE's data centers support electronic markets for ICE Futures, the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) and ICE's global over-the-counter markets.

"As our business expands both globally and domestically, the location of our key technology infrastructure in Chicago ensures we are positioned at the center of the commodities trading community and near many of our largest customers," said Mark Wassersug, ICE Vice President of Operations.

The ICE recently launched a $9.6 billion bid to merge with the Chicago Board of Trade, topping an $8.5 billion bid by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The data center consolidation commences June 1, when ICE's disaster recovery will relocate from London to Chicago. The disaster recovery system mirrors the ICE primary exchange system to enable a seamless transition of trading operations to a redundant platform in the event of a disaster or unexpected shutdown. In January 2008, ICE's primary data center will permanently migrate the hosting of its trading operations to Chicago from its current site in Atlanta. The current primary data center in Atlanta will then be utilized as the permanent disaster recovery site.

Posted by Rich Miller April 26, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

DHS Data Center Planned in Western U.S.

April 30, 2007

Cogent and the Peering Ecosystem

Amazon: 'Strong Demand' for S3 and EC2

Carrier Hotel Alliance Adds 1102 Grand

April 29, 2007

Stream Realty Announces San Antonio Project

NetApp Plans Research Triangle Data Center

April 28, 2007

Data Center CapEx and SaaS

April 27, 2007

Database Sharding Helps High-Traffic Sites

Google Data Center Project in Belgium

Data Center Jobs: Google, RampRate, eBay

April 26, 2007

Energy Exchange Consolidates In Chicago

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