Study: Data Center Energy Woes Will Intensify

If current trends continue unchecked, data center greenhouse gas emissions will quadruple by 2020, according to a joint study by the Uptime Institute and McKinsey & Company. The study, released today at the Uptime Symposium in Orlando, calls for a doubling of the energy efficiency of large-scale corporate computing facilities by 2012. The authors warned that attaining that goal will require “an immediate overhaul of corporate management practices,” including the establishment of “energy czar” positions in major corporations.

The report, “Revolutionizing Data Center Energy Efficiency

Terremark to Host 150 Terabyte Database

Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) will host a 150 terabyte database for street-level imaging company Blue Dasher Technologies, the companies said today. The Blue Dasher database - said to be one of the world’s largest - includes high-density geo-coded images of public streets of major metropolitan areas in North America. The company’s spherical images and data are delivered as a GIS platform that is licensed to enhance commercial and government applications.

Blue Dasher plans to provide coverage of every public street in the Top 50 U.S. markets by year-end, and was seeking an infrastructure provider that could accommodate its scale and delivery requirements.
“Because we offer high-density photos and routing technology as a hosted solution, it’s critical we have a partner that we can rely on to deliver the performance our customer sites need and their users demand,” said Michael Reidbord, CEO of Blue Dasher Technologies. “Terremark’s track record of supporting leading global Web 2.0 companies and its global data center footprint weighed heavily in our selection of Terremark. Down the road, we anticipate that we’ll leverage their facilities in Europe and South America to support our efforts in those regions.”

Google’s Schmidt Sees ‘Lucrative’ Enterprise Play

In an interview with CNBC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about Google’s ambitions in the enterprise sector.

Savvis Shares Slide 24 Percent

It’s been a tough morning for Savvis (SVVS). The fallout on Wall Street from last night’s earnings and guidance disappointment has been swift. Savvis shares are down $4.52 to $14.16 a share, a decline of 24 percent from yesterday’s close. Analysts at Lehman Brothers, Jefferies & Co. and Kaufman Bros. all downgraded Savvis this morning after the company lowered its revenue guidance for the year, saying it was taking longer to close sales of managed hosting services.

This morning, the popular news site Slashdot was offline for nearly five hours, along with other sites operated by Sourceforge.net (LNUX). “Some planned downtime from our provider apparently didn’t come back up quite as planned,” wrote Slashdot co-founder Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda. Sourceforge.net’s sites are hosted by Savvis.

Gartner: iDataPlex is the Future of Servers

Gartner released a research note Tuesday on the shift in the server market towards Web 2.0 and high performance computing, exemplified in IBM’s launch of the iDataPlex server last week. Gartner analysts John Enck, Andrew Butler and Carl Claunch believe that “innovation in packaging will continue to drive data center density.” An excerpt:

Sales of servers in the Web 2.0 and high-performance computing (HPC) niches are outpacing those in the general server market. These two segments currently have unique requirements: Purchasers want the lowest-cost, lowest-overhead server, but with the most efficient power management and cooling. IBM’s iDataPlex is explicitly targeted at these market segments and provides IBM with an architectural framework for addressing the emerging interest in cloud computing. … Although iDataPlex is not appropriate for most enterprises today, it points to where server hardware is heading. Servers have evolved from tower servers to blade servers mounted in a chassis

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Uptime Honors HP, Sun, UPS, AOL, NetApp

The Uptime Institute today announced winners of its Green Enterprise IT Awards, which honor organizations “pioneering energy-efficiency improvements in their data center operations.” The awards were presented in Orlando at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2008: Green Enterprise Computing, and were co-sponsored by Deloitte Consulting. Here’s a list of the winners:

• Sun Microsystems (JAVA): Energy Efficient IT Hardware Deployment
• UPS (UPS): Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead
• AOL LLC (TWX): Facilities Site Physical Infrastructure (power and cooling) Overhead
• NetApp (NTAP): IT Hardware Asset Utilization
• Bank of Montreal (BMO): IT Hardware Asset Utilization
• Nationwide Mutual Insurance: IT Strategy
• Hewlett Packard (HPQ): IT Strategy
• Hewlett Packard: Green IT Beyond the Data Center

“Realizing that neither business nor the environment can sustain the costs of the increasing energy demands in data centers, the award-winning companies have displayed leadership and innovation in their data center energy efficiency efforts,” said Kenneth G. Brill, Institute founder and executive director. “It is our hope that they will serve as a clear example to the world’s largest operators of critical computing facilities of the realistic impact and feasibility of these types of initiatives.”

Reuters Renewal Looms Large for Savvis

In last night’s conference call with analysts, executives of Savvis (SVVS) said that a number of potentially large customers were taking longer to make decisions about lucrative managed hosting deals. One key deal that’s going down to the wire is a hosting and network services contract with Reuters, which expires next month. Reuters was recently purchased by Thomson, which has created some suspense about the service renewal. Here are comments from Savvis Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Von Deylen:

Reuters today roughly is about a $50 million account. … Essentially in the past two and a half years, they’ve had an opportunity on the legacy network business to migrate if they so choose and they have decided not to. So we’re working aggressively with them as they think about their Thompson/Reuters merger. … But they haven’t given us any clear signals one way or the other which way they’re going. We’ll continue to work with them and I think we’ll kind of get our niches on the network side, and then continue to try to meet their needs on the hosting side.

There was also discussion of power density in older data centers and its impact on demand for space.

Slashdot Down

The tech news hub Slashdot, one of our favorite daily reads, is offline this morning. Netcraft’s uptime monitoring shows that the site has been unavailablefor about three hours from its monitoring stations around the world. The site, which has millions of daily readers, is rarely down for that long.

UPDATE: Slashdot is back up again, just before 9 Eastern. As Emily Litella would say …. “Never mind!” We weren’t the only ones who missed our morning fix of Slashdot. While it lasted, the downtime was also noted by The Register and Pingdom.

UPDATE 2: “Some planned downtime from our provider apparently didn’t come back up quite as planned,” explains Slashdot co-founder Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda. Sourceforge.net’s sites are hosted by Savvis.

Savvis Cuts Guidance, Citing Slower Sales

Savvis Inc. (SVVS) lowered its revenue guidance for the year, saying it was taking longer to close sales of managed hosting services. The company reduced its 2008 revenue projection to a range of $840 million to $870 million, down from earlier projections of $910 million to $925 million. After closing today’s session down 6 percent at $18.68, Savvis shares fell sharply in after-hours action, trading down $2.73 at $15.95, a decline of 14.6 percent.

“We have begun to see a lengthening pipeline,” said Savvis Chief Executive Officer Phil Koen. “The deals we want are taking longer to close. We also were overambitious with our sales projections for the second half of 2007.” Koen said CEOs and CIOs “are being more cautious with spending in the second half of the year, particularly with the more complex commitment of a buy decision for managed hosting.”

The Savvis results will prompt close scrutiny of earnings reports for other managed hosting providers, as analysts assess whether the slowing sales cycle is specific to Savvis or reflects a broader trend in the uptake of managed hosting services. A key question is whether carrier-neutral providers will fare any better than Savvis, which operates its own backbone and bundles network services and managed hosting.

Switch and Data Projects Higher Revenue

Colocation and interconnection specialist Switch and Data (SDXC) said it continues to see strong demand for its services, and raised its revenue guidance for 2008. The company said it expects 2008 revenue of $168 million, rather than the previous estimate of $158 million, and also hiked its EBITDA guidance from $51 million to $53 million.

Switch and Data’s move comes a week after the other leading publicly-held colocation provider, Equinix (EQIX), also raised its revenue guidance and reported solid customer demand for data center space.

“Demand for our services is strong,” said Keith Olsen, Switch and Data CEO and President, in the company’s earnings call with analyst this afternoon. “Demand is outpacing supply (of colocation space) in our leading markets. IP traffic growth remains strong, driving greater need for our exchange points.

Switch and Data reported net income of $300,000 for the three months ended March 31, 2008, which included a loss of $700,000 related to the company’s recent debt financing to fund its New Jersey data center expansion.