BearingPoint Opens Utility Computing Center

BearingPoint Inc. (BE) and Cassatt Corporation have opened a facility in New York City where financial services companies can test-drive utility computing technologies, the companies said today. The Utility Computing Customer Experience Center at 3 World Financial Center in New York, replicates a large corporate data center. The two companies are also teaming on joint marketing activities to highlight the benefits that large data centers can see from running IT as a utility.

“Utility computing is a game-changing proposition for our customers,” said BearingPoint Chairman Rod McGeary. “Properly deployed, utility computing can reduce infrastructure costs, leverage underutilized IT assets, help integrate disparate environments from mergers and acquisitions, improve IT service delivery, and even reduce electricity costs in data centers.”

Data Center Demand Outpacing Supply

Worldwide demand for multi-tenant Internet data center space has grown 12.5 percent in the past year, while the inventory of available space has increased by 4.2 percent, according to new data from Tier1 Research. This strengthening demand growth trend contributes to “an already lopsided supply/demand curve,” which is working to the benefit of data center operators, according to Tier1.

“The shared tenant datacenter market is red hot,” said Daniel Golding, Vice President and Senior Analyst at T1R. “North America, for example, is seeing continued and strong datacenter demand, particularly in hot markets such as Silicon Valley, Northern Virginia (near Washington, DC), New York, Northern New Jersey, Dallas and Chicago. North American datacenter demand is up an incredible 14.67% in the last twelve months.”

Data center demand drivers cited include growth in Internet content sites (including content delivery networks), the need for enterprises to maintain business continuity (largely driven by Hurricane Katrina and Sarbanes-Oxley) and power and cooling issues for many existing single-user data centers.

Gates and Jobs, Together

There’s a lot of anticipation of next week’s event at the D Conference in which Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will appear together. But there’s a lot of hype, too, including the assertion that Jobs and Gates haven’t appeared together since 1983. That’s interesting, because here’s what certainly looks like a picture of the two of them having lunch with Walt Mossberg at a previous D conference in 2005. I suppose this could be a Photoshop creation, but the Journal release notes that “both have made multiple individual appearances” at the conference in the past. So I’m guessing it’s more likely that MarketWatch got the facts wrong.

UPDATE: There’s more photos of this event here. It seems C/Net picked up and repeated MarketWatch’s report. Meanwhile, a post at Digg almost immediately surfaced the 2005 photos.

UPDATE #2: John Shinal of Marketwatch e-mailed to say that he was aware of the 2005 meeting between Jobs and Gates. “That was a private conversation,” John writes. “A public conversation means the public is privy to it.” John’s article stated that “the two industry icons have never had a public conversation.” So John is technically correct, but I’m not the only one who immediately found the statement curious.

If you haven’t already, check out All Things D, the new site Walt and Kara Swisher are running.

Power Loft Plans Large Virginia Data Center

Total Site Solutions (TSS) said today that it has been hired to maintain a new 200,000 square foot data center being built by Power Loft @ Innovation LLC in Northern Virginia. The facility is under construction and expected to come online next year, and TSS expects to have 35 full time engineers, technicians and on-site security officers maintaining and protecting the site.

The TSS press release provided little information about the project. A little searching found that the Power Loft data center is located at the NT Innovation Park in Manassas, Virginia. Power Loft LLC is affiliated with several business units of Greyfields, a real estate private equity firm. The NT Innovation Park was purchased by Next Tier Equities (a Greyfields affiliate) in December 2005 to capitalize on the strong demand for mission-critical facilities in Northern Virginia. Next Tier was founded by Kevin Reardon, who previously worked as a principal and Chief Financial Officer at T-Rex Capital overseeing a portfolio of $400 million of mission critical, data center and commercial office assets. Reardon is also a principal in Greyfields, along with Robert Freeman, whow as previously a senior principal of Lazard Fr

Infocrossing Targets Medicare Processing

New Jersey managed hosting provider Infocrossing, Inc. (IFOX) has introduced a new service positioned at the intersection of two major trends driving demand for data center space - regulatory compliance and health care record-keeping. Infocrossing’s new offering promises speedy implementations for Medicare plans, while also helping to meet the compliance requirements of the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

“Health plans need a good payment reconciliation system since there is so much data involved in calculating expected payments and comparing those expected payments to the CMS’ reports,” said Art Miller, president of Infocrossing Healthcare Services, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infocrossing, Inc. “The new Rapid Implementation Process is a fully automated system that helps put a plan’s reconciliation process in place quicker, taking the burden off of the plans’ shoulders.”

More details are available on the Infocrossing web site. More than 150 managed care companies and pharmacy benefit organizations use Infocrossing Healthcare Services, which has five data centers in Leonia, N.J.; Norcross, Ga.; Omaha, Neb.; Tempe, Ariz.; and Brea, Calif.

Google’s Speedy Site Location Process

Nick Carr points to an interesting item in the Tulsa Free Press regarding Google’s data center site location process:

When a major Internet server wanted to find a site for a server farm how did they do it? Google googled its way to a major Pryor engagement. As Lloyd Taylor, director of global operations for Google, tells it, the company knew it needed a lot of land, a lot of electricity and a lot of water. They wanted the facility to be more or less in the middle of the country. How did they find Pryor? They went on the Internet.

The story also includes an account from Sanders Mitchell, who runs the MidAmerica Industrial Park in Pryor, the site of a $600 million Google data center project, who said he wasn’t certain who he was dealing with until the papers were signed. Google’s cloak-and-dagger approach to data center secrecy is pretty well established. But one of Mitchell’s other comments was very revealing, and may have implications for any further buildout of Google’s data center network:

“They haven’t really discussed this, but I think one of the things that made us attractive to Google was that we were ready to move on the spur of the moment. We had an 86,000 square foot building already in place, which we had built on speculation. … In other locations so many agencies have to sign off on a project that it can be a year or more before any real movement can be made. I don’t think the team at Google was willing to wait that long.”

Google’s sequence of data center announcements over the past year reinforces the impression of a company in a hurry. What’s driving this need to scale so large, so fast? The combination of secrecy and speed is making some folks nervous about Google’s ambitions. But not in Oklahoma, where Google’s Taylor received a medal from the governor.

Insurer Plans $45M Michigan Data Center

Auto-Owners Insurance Group says it will put off plans to build a new headquarters building, and will instead focus its development efforts on a $45 million, 96,000-square-foot data center in Delta Township, Michigan (near Lansing), according to local media reports. Company officials said the data center is more of a priority than new corporate offices planned for 300 acres the insurer owns in nearby DeWitt Township. The new facility is expected to employ 80 workers. The Auto-Owners Insurance Group has more than 4.2 million personal, commercial and life policies issued by more than 5,900 independent agencies in 25 states.

Digital Realty is Best Performing REIT

Digital Realty Trust (DLR) is the best-performing real estate investment trust (REIT) over the last year, according to an analysis by MarketWatch. With a share price near $40, Digital Realty is up 60 percent on the year, outdistancing competitors focused on hotels and commercial properties. The next best performers were Highland Hospitality (HIH) with a gain of 56% and Eagle Hospitality (EHP) at 49%.

It’s no surprise that data centers are the hottest sector in real estate investing. What’s somewhat surprising, given Digital Realty’s performance, is that it remains the only REIT focused on data center facilities. It’s not that the thought hasn’t occurred to other companies in the field. Equinix executives say the company has considered a REIT structure, and in February appointed a veteran REIT specialist to its board. But with Equinix making no immediate move to convert to REIT status, Digital Realty has the playing field to itself.

Plenty of Fish: Big Traffic, Small Infrastructure

It’s common for operators of high traffic websites to tout their industrial-strength infrastructure. But at least one owner of a hugely popular site prefers to boast about his frugality and ability to keep his site running with minimal infrastructure. Markus Frind is something of a legend among entrepreneurs who use Google’s AdSense program to monetize their web sites. Frind operates the free dating site Plenty of Fish, which just moved into the top 100 web sites, as ranked by HitWise. As a result, Frind is featured in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Frind, who runs Plenty of Fish with help from his girlfriend, says the site generates as much as $10,000 per day in AdSense revenue. According to Frind, this is accomplished with minimal server infrastructure:

I’m now using a server with 2 Quad Core Intel chips(Zeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of ram (only using about 800 megs) and 2 hard drives using Windows x64 Server 2003. Total cost was a couple of grand. The system works a lot better when going over 2 million page views an hour. All outbound data is being Gzipped and even then only 30% CPU usage. To clarify I have only 1 webserver that serves all those pageviews. Most of the 100 million plus image requests a day are running through Akamai. This server does serve 10’s of millions of image requests directly, but most of those images are in ram so its not much of a load.

While that’s likely the most modest setup of the top 100 sites, serving hundreds of millions of images through Akamai is not entirely cheap. Frind says that using a CDN is essential because of the global reach of his site (which has a large user base in Australia) but says his largest expense is his storage area network. Some on the Web have been skeptical of Frind’s claims about his traffic and infrastructure, but the HitWise data is the latest in a series of metrics to have validated the traffic growth of Plenty of Fish.

Data Centers Foil Bank’s Energy Goals

Will data center operations become scapegoats when corporate energy conservation programs fall behind schedule? It’s a fair question after Barclays Bank said that it was “highly unlikely” to meet its energy reduction goals between now and 2010, and cited its UK data center operations as the issue. “Their projected growth was much higher than had originally been forecast,” according to the bank’s Corporate Responsibility Report for 2006. “This is disappointing, but we are taking what action we can to ensure that the shortfall is as small as possible.” What action is that? Here’s Barclays’ solution:

Compared with the rest of our buildings and branches, the energy needs of our data centers are very different. Because their requirements are so much higher, we intend to split the data centers out from the main energy reduction target, and during 2007 we will be identifying a separate performance target for them

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