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Most Popular Stories of 2007

Posted by Rich Miller on December 31, 2007

In nearly 20 years of working at daily newspapers, I spent countless hours in daily news meetings in which editors picked the day's top stories. Publishing on the Internet has reinforced the fact that readers and editors have different ideas about the most interesting stories. So in addition to our editor-selected review of the Top 10 data center stories and trends for 2007, I thought I'd also list the stories on Data Center Knowledge that were the most popular with our readers.

So here are the 10 most popular stories of 2007, ranked by total page views:

More than 2,380 different sites linked to stories at Data Center Knowledge this year. The largest number of readers came from Google searches, followed in order by Slashdot, Yahoo search, StumbleUpon, Tech Dispenser, Yahoo Finance message boards, MSN Search, Bloglines, Techmeme, Valleywag and Digg.

A huge thank you to all of you who read our site in 2007. Have a great New Year, and best wishes for a successful and prosperous 2008!

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December 31, 2007

2007: The Year of the Data Center

2007 was the year in which the data center moved from the back-end to the front page. The data center has become the focal point for fundamental changes in computing, involving massive shifts toward cloud computing platforms and a more energy-efficient, virtualized infrastructure. These trends will continue to drive infrastructure investment in coming years, both in the form of huge data centers and massive spending on hardware and software to save money and energy as IT operations expand their scale.

Here are our picks for the top data center trends and stories of 2007:

  • 1. The Data Center Arms Race: Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) provided a very public face for the push toward mega-data centers, as the two Internet giants announced more than $4 billion in data center projects. Google unveiled plans for $600 million data centers in four sites: Lenoir, North Carolina, Goose Creek, South Carolina, Pryor, Oklahoma and Council Bluffs, Iowa. Not to be outdone, Microsoft announced $500 million data center construction projects in San Antonio, Texas, Northlake, Illinois and Dublin, Ireland. These projects were the tip of much larger iceberg, as data center specialists continued their building boom. Companies with prominent construction projects included Equinix (EQIX), Digital Realty Trust (DLR), DuPont Fabros (DFT) Terremark (TMRK) and 365 Main, while Savvis (SVVS), Switch and Data (SDXC) and CRG West either retrofitted or expanded existing space.

  • 2. More Power, Scotty! Rising power loads are remaking the geography of the industry, the design of facilities and the landscape of neighborhoods in data center hubs like northern Virginia. The availability of cheap power - and lots of it - has become a major data center site selection criteria, boosting the fortunes of Quincy, Washington and San Antonio. Power capacity is a key criteria for new facilities, with some provisioning as much as 225 megawatts for growing projects. Those power loads also continue to drive demand for diesel generators, as DuPont Fabros opened a site using 32 generators, and Google is planning for 38 backup generators for its Iowa project.

  • 3. Data Center Virtualization: It's been a huge year for data center virtualization, as a growing number of enterprises are pursuing virtualization projects as they consolidate servers and data centers. Market leader VMware (VMW) had one of the most successful IPOs of the year, and other providers are targeting the data center in hopes of their own virtualization windfall.

  • 4. Greening the Data Center: It was often hard to separate the substance from the hype, but it's clear that energy efficiency in data centers is a trend with legs. IBM's Big Green announcement in May opened the floodgates on green data center marketing, but the push towards energy efficiency began much earlier, and is focused on the bottom line - green as in dollars, not eco-friendliness. The two intersect neatly in LEED data centers, which have become a growth market for vendors and operators.

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  Posted by Rich Miller December 31, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

2007: The Year in Downtime

Pingdom has compiled a list of 13 major outages of 2007, which includes the July downtime at 365 Main's San Francisco data center, November outages at NaviSite/Alabanza (migration problems) and Rackspace (truck vs. transformer) as well as the flameout at RegisterFly. I can think of several incidents where downtime was more mission-critical - the Cyber Monday problems for Yahoo stores and migration woes at ValueWeb/Hostway probably had bigger business impact than outages at Twitter and Blogger - but these incidents collectively reinforced the value of uptime and reliability.

In the interest of equal time for catching folks doing things right, Netcraft has released its list of the most reliable hosting providers during November. The top performer is Fremont, Calif. colocation specialist Hurricane Electric, which had a perfect month - no downtime and no failed DNS requests - during November.

  Posted by Rich Miller December 31, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

December 28, 2007

Report: Google Eyes Kansas for Data Center

UPDATE: The reports by NPR and local media of a possible Google data center in Greensburg, Kansas are not accurate, according to Google. "Currently we are not planning on building a facility in this area," said Google spokesperson Sunny Gettinger. "As a company, we are committed to continuing to look for ways to improve our energy efficiency and to be greener as a company, including exploring wind powered options, but have nothing to announce at this time."

There are reports tonight that Google is exploring a wind-powered data center project in a Kansas town that was destroyed by a tornado earlier this year. Officials in Greensburg, Kansas are seeking to rebuild their community as the "greenest town in America." An architect working to help rebuild the town says Google is studying a site in Greensburg as a potential location for a 20-megawatt windmill-powered data center.


Greensburg, KansasOn May 4, an F5 tornado destroyed 95 percent of the structures in Greensburg, killing 10 people and displacing more than 1,400 residents. In the wake of the disaster, local non-profit group Greensburg GreenTown is leading an effort to rebuild using eco-friendly construction. On Dec. 17, Greensburg adopted a resolution for city owned buildings to be built to the LEED Platinum standard, the highest rating of the U.S. Green Buildings Council.

BNIM Architects told local media that Google is considering building a 20 megawatt wind-powered data center in Greensburg. Bob Berkebile, a partner with Kansas city-based BNIM, said Google is "currently doing feasibility studies on the possibility" of a Greensburg location. Reports of Google's interest have also been mentioned in an NPR report (link via ServerSpecs).

Google's interest in wind power is well-documented. The company is currently using a windmill farm to provide some of the energy to power its data center facility in the Netherlands. A portion of the electricity for Google's Council Bluffs, Iowa data center comes from windmills operated by MidAmerican Energy.

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

Friday Links: Rooftop Data Center, VMware

Here are a few interesting data center links I've come across this week:

  • When Harrod's department store in London ran out of space in its basement data center, it decided to move the facility to the roof. DataCentres.com has an interview with Harrods Ltd. Network Infrastructure & Security Manager John Dilkes about the challenges of a building a rooftop data center.

  • Network World updates efforts to rebuild the IT infrastructure for the New Orleans school system, 28 months after Hurricane Katrina.

  • Om Malik at GigaOm has an interview with Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, VMware’s chief scientist as well as a co-founder of the virtualization specialist. Rosenblum shares how the industry "went down a rat hole on how we built the data centers," and the role of virtualization in addressing architecture challenges.

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

December 27, 2007

Equinix Opens New London Data Center

Equinix Inc. (EQIX) has completed the phase 1 build out of its London Slough (LD4) data center. The first customers moving into the new site include "a leading global financial services firm and one of the world's top five providers of IT services," according to Equinix. The Slough site is the largest of Equinix's four data centers in London, with a first phase featuring 5,000 square meters (53,800 square feet) of technical space. Phase 2 of LD4 is scheduled to come online in summer 2008, adding an additional 53,800 square feet of data center space.

"The opening of the site represents a significant increase in our capacity and allows us to maintain our momentum in this important market," said Russell Poole, General Manager - United Kingdom for Equinix. "We are able to meet increasing demand from organizations seeking to leverage Equinix's secure and robust colocation facilities, as well as the multitude of carriers offering network services at Equinix."

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

December 26, 2007

Yahoo: 330,000 Man-Hours to Open Quincy

How long does it take to build and prepare a ground-up (greenfield) data center project? In announcing its new data center in Quincy, Washington, Yahoo (YHOO) noted that the project involved 330,000 man-hours. That works out to about 8,250 40-hour work weeks. If you had 100 people working full-time on the project, that would equate to a completion time of 82.5 weeks - about 20 months, give or take a few days.

In reality, work hours are not spread uniformly across a project or time window. Some stages of a project would involve far fewer than 100 workers, other parts could require far more. Your mileage may vary. But Yahoo's number provides an interesting metric for one large project for a major Internet company with long experience with data center infrastructure.

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

Weave Means More Infrastructure for Mozilla

The Mozilla Corporation has announced its entry into web-based services with Weave, which allows Firefox users to store their settings and bookmarks on Mozilla's servers. While the project's initial ambitions are modest, Mozilla Labs cites online storage as among the future services being explored for Weave:

Dan's hard drive has died. Like many folks, Dan had never gotten around to getting that backup solution he knew he needed. Dan feels miserable when he thinks of all the software he needs to install, the stuff he's lost, and all the account names and passwords he'll never remember. Then he realizes that his family photos, email and calendar are all hosted online, as well as all of the services he uses to manage his life: his banking, shopping, purchased music and more. With his replacement computer in hand, he installs Firefox, logs in to his Mozilla account and resumes his online life without skipping a beat.
Storing browser settings and bookmarks doesn't require massive infrastructure. But an online storage service like the one described in Mozilla's use cases is a different matter entirely.

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

Level 3 Sues Limelight Over CDN Patent

Level 3 Communications (LVLT) has filed suit against Limelight Networks (LLNW), asserting that Limelight is infringing patents that Level 3 acquired when it purchased a content delivery network from Savvis Communications (SVVS) earlier this year. The lawsuit makes more work for lawyers at Limelight, who are already litigating patent infringement claims with CDN market leader Akamai Technologies (AKAM) in a case that may go to trial this year.

The suit was first reported by Dan Rayburn, who noted that Level 3 mentioned patents when it acquired the Savvis CDN network. The news doesn't seem to have had much impact on shares of Limelight, which have recently been trading between $7 and $8 a share. Limelight went public at $15 a share in a June IPO that saw its shares trade as high as $24. But the stock took a major hit in August when it lowered its revenue guidance, and has traded in single digits ever since.

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

United Layer Expands at 200 Paul

Managed infrastructure provider UnitedLayer has leased additional space at 200 Paul Avenue, the San Francisco carrier hotel operated by Digital Realty Trust (DLR). UnitedLayer is leasing a Turn-Key Datacenter from Digital Realty Trust that supports up to 3,000 additional servers, and has extended its lease commitment at 200 Paul through 2018. The 10-year lease for the new space is valued at more than $6 million, the company said.

UnitedLayer was already a tenant at 200 Paul Avenue, and earlier this year upgraded the power and cooling capacity for its existing space. The continued growth inside 200 Paul is part of a broader expansion to position UnitedLayer for the "incredible demand" in the San Francisco market for managed colocation services.

"The demand for internet infrastructure services seems nearly insatiable," said Richard Donaldson, UnitedLayer's VP of Sales, Marketing and Development. "Our continued expansion inside one of the internet's key strategic physical addresses allows us to optimally serve the ongoing demand for our services."

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

December 23, 2007

Facebook: We Maxed Out Our Data Centers

Facebook has officially announced that it has opened a data center in Virginia to expand its infrastructure, and adds some details on the company's growth and how it will synch profile data between its facilities. Facebook has leased 10,000 square feet of space in a new Ashburn, Va. facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT).

Facebook engineer Jason Sobel said the service has been adding nearly two million users per week, and "the load on our thousands of servers continues to increase at a pretty astounding rate." Here's an excerpt from Jason's blog item:

A few weeks ago we reached full capacity in our California datacenters. In the past we handled this problem by purchasing a few dozen servers, hooking them up, and getting on with our lives, but this time we didn't have it so easy. We'd actually run out of space in our datacenters for new machines. Fortunately we saw this problem coming a long time ago and started work on a new datacenter in Virginia.
Sobel also calls the Ashburn facility a "great first step" and hints that there's additional data center expansion ahead: "Going forward we have lots of exciting plans to expand our infrastructure and improve performance so no user ever has to sit around waiting for a page to load."

  Posted by Rich Miller December 23, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter

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