Microsoft Confirms Iowa Data Center

“We just announced we’re going to start to break ground in Iowa.” With that comment at the close of a video interview with Om Malik, Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty confirmed the company’s intention to build a major data center in Iowa, which is already home to a huge Google data center project in Council Bluffs.

Microsoft’s interest in Iowa became known back in February, after which state legislators quickly passed a tax incentive package offering Microsoft a set of tax breaks identical to those arranged for Google. No site has been publicly identified. Microsoft’s recent data center projects have involved more than $500 million in investment for each facility.

While Chrapaty mentioned an announcement, there’s been no mention of the project in recent days in Iowa’s major news outlets. One thing is certain: Chrapaty is in a position to know. She’s the Corporate Vice President of Global Foundation Services, the group responsible for all of Microsoft’s data centers.

Cogent Adds Sites at Switch and Data

Cogent Communications (CCOI) has deployed additional points of presence (POPs) in Switch and Data (SDXC) data centers in Cleveland, Phoenix and Sunnyvale, Calif. Cogent already leased space in 29 of Switch and Data’s 33 centers, meaning the company now has a presence in virtually every SDXC facility.

Cogent deploys its network in Switch and Data’s sites to market its Ethernet Internet transit services. The company operates a 30,000+ mile network in North America and Europe and also provides over 255 metro networks, totaling 11,000 miles in more than 110 global markets.

Cogent also peers with more than 2,300 other networks. Cogent recently established a direct connection to the America Online Transit Data Network (ATDN). According to Renesys, the connection between the two networks - which once faced off in a high-profile peering dispute - completes Cogent’s effort to become a “transit-free” network. Todd Underwood of Renesys has an analysis of this development and what it means for Cogent.

Declining Mindshare for Web Hosting

Pingdom has a post today noting the decline of the term “web hosting” in Google Trends data:

Compared to the high points in 2004, there only seems to be

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Major Data Center Expansion for Colo4Dallas

Colocation specialist Colo4Dallas has bought two buildings and leased space in a third site to continue the expansion of its data center footprint. The expansion is yet another sign of the strong demand for colocation and dedicated hosting in the Dallas data center market, where major providers have been steadily adding data center space for the past two years.

Colo4Dallas confirmed today that it has purchased its current facility at 3000 Irving Boulevard, along with an adjacent property at 3004 Irving Boulevard that will be used for expansion space. In May Colo4Dallas leased 40,000 square feet of data center space in a nearby Level 3 data center in Dallas.

With the expansions, Colo4Dallas has increased its total data center space from 28,000 square feet to 106,000 square feet. The company has filled about 90 percent of the space in its original site at 3000 Irving, which it has occupied since 2000.

Don’t Look to VCs for Data Center Supply

The big fear about the data center market has always been that a flood of new facilities would lead to a repeat of the oversupply that marked the data center glut of 2002-03. This burst of speculative construction has never materialized, as the data center industry is a capital-intensive business with a high barrier to entry, which has become even higher as the credit crunch has made it harder to fund new construction.

Here’s one more data point on the supply and demand situation that emerged from last week’s GigaOm Structure 08 conference: don’t expect the venture capital industry to directly fund new data centers anytime soon. An afternoon panel of venture capitalists focused on the lack on investment in Internet infrastructure. The VCs argued that they were funding infrastructure, just not servers and data centers - which Vivek Mehra, General Partner of August Capital, noted are “very, very expensive.”

Installing a 2.25 Megawatt Diesel Generator

How do you get a 38,000 pound generator into a sub-basement beneath the streets of a major city? Minnesota hosting provider VISI has posted video of the June 21 installation of a new Caterpillar 2.25MW diesel generator for its St. Paul data center. The process involved closing the streets, lifting out a chunk of the roadway to expose the basement, and using a 175-ton crane to lift the equipment into the opening. Watch the video below, and then check out Gary Elfert’s entry at the VISI blog for additional details.

Check out our Generator Channel for more articles about diesel generators. For additional video, see our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

215 Data Centers to Participate in EPA Study

At least 215 data centers have volunteered to provide data on their energy usage to the Environmental Protection Agency, which hopes to use the information to develop an Energy Star certification for data center facilities. That’s a huge improvement from mid-May, when just 54 facilities had agreed to participate, well below the agency’s goal of 100. The EPA extended its original deadline of June 1 by a month, and will get underway this week with more than twice as many facilities as initially hoped.

The EPA has been looking for data centers of at least 1,000 square feet to voluntarily provide energy use data that will help develop the Energy Star Data Center Infrastructure Rating, which will help data center operators and their customers evaluate the energy efficiency of specific facilities. Participants must collect 12 consecutive months of IT and building (whole building if stand-alone or data center portion only if within a larger building) energy use data, and submit the data by June 1, 2009. Additional details and instructions on how to participate are available at the Energy Star web site (PDF).

Microsoft-Powerset: All About the Data Centers?

Venture Beat is reporting that Microsoft may acquire the semantic search company Powerset for about $100 million. Both companies are mum about the reports, but a Microsoft-Powerset deal could solve the primary roadblock to real-world deployment of semantic search - the extraordinary amount of computing resources required to build a semantic index of the entire web.

One of Powerset’s challenges is data center resources, and whether it can afford to buy or rent the computing power needed to apply its indexing technology to the entire World Wide Web. From its inception, Powerset has acknowledged that its approach to “natural language” contextual search requires much more horsepower to compile than the keyword driven indexes built by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Here’s an explanation from our conversation last year with Powerset co-founder Steve Newcomb (who has since left the company):

We capture each sentence rather than just the key words in that sentence, so our index size is many times larger than a keyword index. That has a couple of large impacts on the data center. To parse a single sentence is much more computationally expensive for us than for Google. Because of that, we have to create a massively parallel infrastructure on the processing side. We need a lot more compute power than any keyword search engine, so we need more powerful machines, and the cost of our data center is potentially a very significant cost.

Powerset has its own data center infrastructure, but turned to Amazon and its EC2 utility computing service to build its web index.

Reflections On A Busy Week

I’ve had a busy week absorbing a ton of presentations, interviews and networking at the Velocity, Structure 08 and Data Center Energy Summit events. The jam-packed nature of the conference schedules left little time to write, so I focused less on live-blogging and more on gathering material for topical stories and features for coming weeks. The good news is that we’ve got lots of great stuff in the pipeline for next week.

These events reinforced the central role of the data center for both the Internet and the enterprise. There’s an amazing number of really smart people focused on infrastructure as the key to solving challenges and seizing opportunities. We’ll share some of their stories and insight next week.

Amazon S3 Issues: Load Balancers and MD5

Amazon’s S3 storage system had some issues last week with data corruption on files using MD5 to perform integrity checks. After some investigation, Amazon confirmed the problems and identified the cause:

We’ve isolated this issue to a single load balancer that was brought into service at 10:55pm PDT on Friday, 6/20. It was taken out of service at 11am PDT Sunday, 6/22. While it was in service it handled a small fraction of Amazon S3’s total requests in the US. Intermittently, under load, it was corrupting single bytes in the byte stream. … Based on our investigation with both internal and external customers, the small amount of traffic received by this particular load balancer, and the intermittent nature of the above issue on this one load balancer, this appears to have impacted a very small portion of PUTs during this time frame.

There are several follow-ups of note: Alistair Croll at GigaOm takes a look at the role of load balancers in cloud platforms, while Craig Balding of Cloud Security takes a look at the MD5 issues.