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Yahoo Apologizes for Cyber Monday Outage

Posted by Rich Miller on November 30, 2007

Yahoo (YHOO) has apologized to customers for serious problems with its Yahoo Small Business payment system on Cyber Monday, which left thousands of online merchants unable to take orders on one of the busiest online shopping days. Shopping carts for many of Yahoo's turnkey online stores were not working at all from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m., and remained sluggish until at least 6 p.m. The retail industry had been heavily promoting Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) as the kickoff of the online shoping season. Many online retailers offered sales and promotions to capitalize on news coverage of Cyber Monday. Rich Riley, senior vice president of Yahoo's online channel division, addressed the downtime on the company's Yodel Anecdotal blog:

Unfortunately, the system outage occurred at one of the worst possible times, and despite our concerted efforts to fix the problem as it emerged on Monday, we know that we let our merchant partners and their customers down. ... Our customers’ expectations were not met, nor were our own. And we are moving mountains inside Yahoo! to find out why and how this happened, and to take steps to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Customers are hopping mad, as evidenced by the comments on Riley's post, which gave a timeline but provided few details about what happened and why. The outage received widespread news coverage at CNBC, Wired and CNet.

Yet another reason to plan for failure and be ready to respond and adapt if Murphy shows up at the worst possible time.

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November 30, 2007

Customers: Uptime Trumps Green

Ted Samson at InfoWorld's Sustainable IT reports an interesting wrinkle in 365 Main's development of a LEED-certified data center in Newark, Calif. 365 Main put considerable effort into a plan to power the facility using generators running on natural gas. The company estimated the gensets would cost $25 million, pay for themselves over time, and save 20,500 tons of carbon per year. 365 Main planned to use the generators as the primary power source, with the local electric grid providing backup power.

There was only one problem: customers rejected the idea, even though it would have meant no additional cost. The reason? By the company's calculations, the natural-gas-powered generators alone could deliver only a 94 percent guaranteed uptime. Although grid backup would bring the uptime projection to 99.8 percent, customers were unwilling to support a greener solution if it had even a fractional slippage on uptime guarantees.

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

NBC Opts for P2P for Video Service

NBC has chosen peer-to-peer based Pando Networks for content delivery for its new NBC Direct service, according to Dan Rayburn at the Business of Online Video. Dan says this marks a key moment in P2P's emergence as a viable delivery option for commercial video:

When NBC Direct launches out of Beta, this will be the first major TV network in the U.S. to adopt P2P and make it such a crucial part of their distribution strategy. I know some will say Joost is already doing this and the BBC has been doing it for awhile but they don't count in my eyes, for obvious reasons. The NBC Direct service will bring a lot of exposure to P2P and will help to legitimize P2P as a solution for some, not all, kinds of video delivery.

Joost uses its own P2P client, while the BBC offering incorporates VeriSign's Kontiki. Dan's blog post includes a video interview with Pando co-founder Yaron Samid from the recent Streaming Media West show.

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

Facebook Effect? Rackable Server Sales Soar

Rackable Systems (RACK) says it posted the fastest one-year sales volume growth among leading sellers of x86 servers in North America, according to industry analyst firm Gartner. Rackable's sales increased 23 percent from the third quarter of 2006, according to Gartner's quarterly review of server sales. That outpaced the broader industry growth rate of 8.7 percent, as well as the sales performances by HP (+20.2%), Fujitsu (+17.4%), Dell (+5.4%), IBM (-3.9%) and Sun Microsystems (-4.5%).

What's behind the numbers? Rackable has always sold lots of equipment to Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO), who are both busy building data centers. But in the past year it saw significant sales from two newer customers: Facebook and Amazon (AMZN). Facebook has been buying servers and adding data center space to keep pace with its huge growth, while Amazon continues to build out the infrastructure for its utility computing services, S3 and EC2.

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

Cisco Preps New Dallas Data Center

Cisco has been talking the talk with its Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 initiative, which includes new products to manage virtual assets. But it's also walking the walk, overhauling its in-house data centers to take advantage of the same capabilities.

As we've seen with many large virtualization and consolidation projects, that means building a new data center. In the next two weeks Cisco (CSCO) will open a new facility in Richardson, Texas (a suburb of Dallas), which will serve as the model for the company’s future facility builds. Cisco executives Sidney Morgan and Doug Gourlay discussed the new facility Tuesday at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas.

"We were out of capacity," said Morgan, manager of IT engineering systems at Cisco. "We were physically out of floor space. After a while, the capacity issue was no longer even floor space, but power and cooling."

Cisco currently has 47 data centers with 195,000 square feet of raised floor space, which house 12,000 servers and more than 12,800 apps. Cisco has also acquired data centers through more than 120 acquisitions since 1997. That has given Cisco a larger footprint, but the company needed more advanced data centers. Morgan said many of Cisco’s data centers have the equivalent of Tier II infrastructure, and the company wanted more capacity and redundancy.

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

November 29, 2007

Google's Data Center Windmill Farm

Google (GOOG) is using on-site windmills to generate some of the power for its data center facility in the Netherlands. Erwin Boogert, who posted photos of the Google facility last year, has added additional shots showing the many windmills at the site (see the best shots here and here on Flickr). The photos were noted by InformationWeek columnist John Foley, who earlier this year traveled to The Dalles, Oregon to take photos of Google’s data center there.

Foley also offers an intriguing theory: that the additional 1,000 acres of land Google purchased in Council Bluffs, Iowa could provide room to build a massive windmill farm to provide additional renewable energy for Google’s $600 million data center project in Council Bluffs.

Energy was a factor in Google's decision to locate in Council Bluffs, which has a large quantity of renewable energy, fitting Google's ongoing push for environmentally responsible computing. The local utility, MidAmerican Energy, generates more wind energy than any other utility in the country. MidAmerican officials said they expect that at least 18 percent of the energy consumed by the new Google data center will be generated by wind and other renewable energy sources. MidAmerican operates 323 wind turbines at three sites in Iowa, providing the capacity to generate 459.5 megawatts of electricity. The utility recently sought approval to by another 540 megawatts.

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

CRG West Expands Miami Exchange

CRG West will expand its data center space at the Miami Exchange, adding 16,000 square feet of space to accommodate new customers, the company said today. The Miami Exchange is a 48,000-square-foot carrier-neutral data center located at 2115 NW 22nd Street, which was oringially developed by WilTel and bought by CRG in 2002.

"CRG West’s expansion in Miami reflects the growing domestic and international demand for highly secure, conditioned data center space in major metropolitan markets," said David Dunn, Senior Vice President of CRG West. "Our ability to offer quality colocation space now and in the future provides our customers with the comfort that they can expand their footprints within the same facility as their business grows."

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

Wind-Powered Data Center in Wyoming

A group of Wyoming tech entrepreneurs have teamed to build a data center powered entirely by wind and solar power. Green House Data is building a 10,000 square foot facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming which will run primarily on wind power. The company said that if the project succeeds, it hopes to build similar green data centers around the country.

It is not the only provider to use wind power in its data centers, as Google has recently installed a windmill farm at its new data center in the Netherlands. The facility will run primarily off the utility grid, with the wind power helping reduce its usage of grid electricity. Green House Data says it can be 100 percent renewable in its energy usage.

"We are really excited to launch Green House Data," said company president Shawn Mills. "The business climate, broadband infrastructure, renewable (wind) energy availability and rural nature make this the perfect proving ground."

Mills, 33, has been an executive with several VoIP service providers, and founded the Wyoming Technology Organization, an advocacy group for the state’s tech sector. Green House Data co-founder and VP of operations, Cortney Thompson, runs an IT services firm in Cheyenne, Wyoming Professional Services. A third founder, Thomas Burns, is a veteran IT sales executive. The data center is expected to be complete in January.

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

RagingWire to Build New Site in Sacramento

Managed IT provider RagingWire Enterprise Solutions, Inc. (RES) is planning to build a second 200,000 square foot data center in Sacramento, Calif., the company said this week. RagingWire said it is currently negotiating incentives from the county and hopes to break ground for the new site in early 2008. The company said the expansion was needed to meet growing demand for data center infrastructure in the Sacramento market.

"We have seen explosive growth in the demand for premier, enterprise-class data center space over the last couple of years," said George Macricostas, CEO and Vice Chairman of RagingWire. "Weathering the dot.com downturn reinforced our lean and efficient business model. As a result we continue to expand while remaining profitable."

The expansion will increase RagingWire’s data center floor space by more than 120,000 square feet, which would give it a total of 230,000 square feet of raised floor in Sacramento. The company has developed its existing 200,000 square foot facility in phases, including a 46,000 square foot buildout announced in August. RES also has a dedicated 69kv power substation located on-site.

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

November 28, 2007

Terremark Secures GSA Approval

Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) said this week that one of its subsidiaries, Terremark Federal Group, has been awarded a United States General Services Administration (GSA) schedule contract for secure colocation services. The approval from the GSA should position Terremark to expand its government business.

"Being awarded GSA schedule status means we are, in a sense, pre-approved to offer secure colocation services to federal agencies," said Terremark spokesman Xavier Gonzalez. "The significance from our perspective is that Terremark Federal Group is the only provider of colocation services that meets the government's stringent SCIF standards for secure facilities."

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

Did Google Shelve Its Portable Data Center?

Google (GOOG) made some headlines last month when it was awarded a U.S. patent for a portable data center in a shipping container, prompting discussion of how it might use a "data center in a box," as well as what the patent might mean for similar products from Sun Microsystems (JAVAD) and Rackable (RACK). Google's interest in containerized data centers have been the focus of much speculation since PBS columnist Robert X. Cringley wrote about the effort in 2005.

It turns out that one of the inventors listed on the Google patent, William Whitted, has said publicly that the portable data center project has been discontinued. Whitted, who retired from Google in 2005, spoke about the project in a San Francisco Chronicle story in January of this year. Whitted's comments were part of a much longer profile about Google retirees, and weren't widely noticed at the time. Here's what the Chron reported:

"One of the ideas (Whitted) championed was to build portable data centers in cargo containers, a project Google tested in its headquarters parking lot. But managers were too timid to pack in enough servers, so the experiment was not cost-effective and was ultimately canceled, he said."

We doubt this will end speculation about Google's portable data centers, but it's a data point worth noting.

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

November 30, 2007

Customers: Uptime Trumps Green

November 29, 2007

Google's Data Center Windmill Farm

November 28, 2007

Terremark Secures GSA Approval

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