Emerson to Consolidate Data Centers

Emerson Network Power will consolidate 100 data centers around the world into four facilities, including a new data center in St. Louis that will showcase the company’s cooling technologies, the company said this week. Emerson will also build new facilities in Marshalltown, Iowa; Singapore and a location in “Western Europe,” according to local media.

The new 35,000 square foot facility in the St. Louis area will be a testbed and demo center for Emerson’s latest technologies, according to company spokesman Steve Hassell. ”We want this St. Louis center to be not only a facility that runs the IT part of it but also to really be a showcase for Emerson products, and really the thought leadership that we’ve put into this area,” Hassell said.

Based on its plans for the data center architecture and technology infrastructure, Emerson said it anticipates the new St. Louis facility will receive LEED Silver Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The facility will have one of the largest roof-top solar arrays used by a data center, the company said, which will provide 100 kW power to the IT load. The data center, which is scheduled to open in summer 2009, will include three layers of redundancy, dual utility feeds, redundant UPS protection and onsite generators.

CloudBursting: A Hybrid Approach to the Cloud

How can businesses leverage the cloud without losing the comfort and control of in-house data center operations? Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr says many companies are following a middle path that combines the best of both worlds. Jeff has coined a term for this hybrid approach: cloudbursting.  

Jeff defines cloudbursting as “an application hosting model which combines existing corporate infrastructure with new, cloud-based infrastructure to create a powerful, highly scalable application hosting environment.” Here’s his description of how it works: 

A pattern is starting to emerge. The conservative side advocates keeping core business processes inside of the firewall. The enthusiasts want to run on the cloud. They argue back and forth for a while, and eventually settle on a really nice hybrid solution. In a nutshell, they plan to run the steady state business processing on existing systems, and then use the cloud for periodic or overflow processing.

This hybrid approach may not slow the interest in private clouds that employ cloud computing concepts to run apps more efficiently in corporate data centers, but it will raise awareness of different ways to manage the risks and rewards presented by third-party clouds.

Serious Cloud Storage Stumble for FlexiScale

Cloud storage service FlexiScale has been offline for several days while it attempts to fully restore customer data from backup, the company told customers yesterday. The problems for FlexiScale began when one of the main storage volumes was accidentally deleted by an employee during a system upgrade earlier this week. FlexiScale then encountered problems while trying to restore the data from backup, as explained by CEO Tony Lucas:

Although we have now successfully gained read-only access to everyones data, a bug in the storage platforms operating system has prevented us from providing read-write access to it. … After consulting with our storage vendor it was agreed the most sensible option would be to copy the entire volume to a new disk structure (still maintaining it’s integrity and structure), from where we could re-mount it correctly. Unfortunately due to it’s size we didn’t have spare capacity on the platform to create a complete duplicate of it. … The decision was then taken to get additional capacity in from the storage vendor as soon as possible so that we could then increase the capacity to a sufficient level to allow us to copy the volume and successfully restore it.

FlexiScale’s problems come just two weeks after another cloud storage provider, The LinkUp, shut down suddenly following a customer data loss. Lucas says he remains “confident about restoring all the data.” In an update today he said the company has “seen very little data corruption of the data we have examined although we can’t rule it out completely.”

FlexiScale is a unit of UK hosting company Excalibre Communciations.

iWeb Gets $22M Funding from Goldman Sachs

Canadian hosting provider iWeb Group Inc.  has received $22 million (about $20.9 million USD) in financing from Goldman Sachs Credit Partners L.P., the company said today. iWeb (IWB) will use the funding to support the long-term growth of its data center operations and to lease dedicated servers. The company has three data centers in Quebec provice (in Montreal, Verdun and St-Leonard) and a point of presence in Washington, D.C.

“A deal of this magnitude will allow us to continue investing in the infrastructures which are vital to maintaining our growth, which has been outstanding thus far,” said Marc Guindon, Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer.

The deal marks the second investment of 2008 in the data center industry for Goldman Sachs, which previously provided $75 million in credit and equity financing to support data center expansion for DataPipe, a New Jersey managed hosting provider.

The Dell-Facebook Cloud Dissipates

Last week we picked up on a report of what appeared to be a significant pending announcement that Facebook and Dell are “working together on a project that will represent ‘the next generation of cloud computing,’” noting that although there’s “lots of hype around cloud projects, this is one to watch.”

Or not. Execs from Facebook and Salesforce made an appearance at a Dell media event in San Francisco Tuesday, but there were no new partnerships or services announced. Facebook VP of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger spoke about the company’s operations, and commended Dell for being a “thought leader in large-scale infrastructure” and the most aggressive of the major server vendors in offering stripped-down cloud servers. We had assumed that the chumminess between Dell and Facebook was bad news for Rackable (RACK), which counts Facebook as its fourth-largest customer. But Heiliger made it clear that his appearance didn’t signify that Facebook necessarily favored Dell, and made a point of acknowledging other server makers, including Rackable. 

The Industrialization of Data Centers

When it comes to data center design, the form factor has been getting smaller. The wide-open “barn” layouts of the dot-com boom have yielded to smaller pod architectures, while some vendors and end-users are now optimizing designs around shipping containers.

The focus on smaller spaces provides greater flexibility, but also allows data center builders to standardize many elements of the process, enabling an “industrialization” of data center design. That term has been adopted recently by the world’s two largest data center operators - Digital Realty Trust and IBM.

“We’re really seeing the standardization really resonating with a lot of customers,” said Jody Cefola, Site and Facilities Services marketing Manager for IBM. “We liken it to what’s happened in IT, where companies have gone to standardized operating environments in their software.

“You want the data centers to be designed and operated so that you know you’ll have a similar environment in your data centers in different places,” said Cefola. “It becomes less complex because you’re using the same standard operating environment. It’s much easier than if everything is one-off. We’re seeing the desire to adapt to change and to the global environment.”

The trend has been driven in part by the need to conserve capital by building large footprints in phases, while compartmentalizing space to support different power and cooling loads, and in some cases offer dedicated power infrastructure to customers in multi-tenant facilities.

But standardization also offers enormous advantages to data center builders, allowing designers to develop repeatable approaches to many elements of the construction process.

i/o Data Centers Completes SAS 70 Audit

i/o Data Centers has completed the American Institute of Certified Public Accounts (AICPA) Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70 (SAS 70) Type II examination for its data center in Scottsdale, Arizona. The audit results were announced yesterday by CrystalTech Web Hosting, a large hosting provider that houses its servers with i/o in Scottsdale.

The SAS 70 Type II audit is a rigorous third-party evaluation of internal procedures, policies, and controls in accordance to the standards set by the AICPA. The completion of this audit, which was performed by independent service auditor Deloitte & Touche LLP, provides assurances that Newtek Technology Services’ data center space has the necessary controls in place to effectively manage and protect customer data.

Green Power Solutions Gain Visibility

This week we’ve seen some interesting announcements about alternative approaches to data center power products, and one vendor saying interest in green data centers appear to be boosting their wares. Here’s a roundup:

• Capstone Turbine Corp. (CPST) said it has received a $1.3 million order for its UPSource product, an Uninterruptible Power Supply to be used at data centers in Houston, Texas and Arlington, Virginia. Capstone makes microturbines that can run on natural gas. “Instead of an air-conditioned room with rows of batteries on raised floors periodically used to provide emergency back-up, Capstone’s UPSource Secure Power product uses multiple highly reliable, natural-gas fueled microturbines that provide continuous power independent of the electric utility,” said Jim Crouse, Capstone’s Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing. 
• APC introduced Fuel Cell Extended Run (FCXR), a hydrogen-based fuel cell backup solution that integrates with the company’s InfraStruXure racks and enclosures. FCXR, which produces power using air and stored hydrogen, is available in 10 kW increments up to 30 kW contained in a single 19-inch rack.” APC’s next generation fuel cell backup product represents one of the first commercial uses of fuel cell technology for data center environments,” said John DiPippo, senior vice president, APC Data Center Solutions, Software and Services.

Managed Data Buys Stargate Chicago Center

Managed Data Holdings (MDH) continues to buy up data center and managed hosting properties. Today the company said it has acquired Stargate, which operates a large data center in Oak Brook, Illinois. The deal is the third acquisition for MDH, which previously bought Intelenet of Irvine, Calif. and Denver area colo provider Data393. Terms were not disclosed.

The Stargate acquisition continues the strong deal activity in the data center and managed hosting sector. Earlier this week the private equity firm ABRY Partners bought Q9 Networks, marking its third deal in the industry in the past year.

Managed Data Holdings said it expects to continue investing in infrastructure upgrades for the 86,000 square foot facility near Chicago, which was originally developed by Exodus and will continue to operate under the Stargate brand. MDH has funded expansions of the data center infrastructure for Intelenet and Data393 as well. 

“As the demand for high density data center space grows, we are committed to meeting those demands by increasing cooling and power capacity within the facility,” said Evans Mullan, COO of Managed Data Holdings. “These capacity increases, along with the full suite of managed services, including virtualization already available in our other data centers, will benefit current and future customers by providing both increased efficiency today and a clear growth path for future requirements. We will continue to deliver top shelf customer service to our existing customers at the center, and we’ll use our hands-on service approach to convince Chicago area business customers that our data center is the place to be.”

Yahoo Nebraska Data Center Set for La Vista

Yahoo has selected La Vista, a suburb of Omaha, as the location for its Nebraska data center project, according to papers filed with the state. Nebraska Tax Commissioner Doug Ewald told Omaha.com that Yahoo has applied for tax incentives under the Nebraska Super Advantage program, which requires a minimum investment of $100 million and the creation of at least 50 high-salary jobs paying a minimum average salary of $68,700.

La Vista is one of the fastest-growing cities in Nebraska, and has 800 acres of industrial business parks. Current corporate residents from the tech sector include HP and eBay’s Paypal unit, which employs about 2,000 workers at a call center in La Vista.