Roundup: H5 Colo, Emerson, Center 7

It’s been a busy week for data center news, so here’s a roundup of news and links from the data center industry:

• McKnight Development has launched a new company to develop data centers in the Dallas market, according to BizJournals.  The real estate firm formed H5 Colo, which is developing 51,000 square feet of data center space in the 220,000-square-foot Park Central IV building.
• Emerson Network Power is integrating Future Facilities’ 6SigmaDC computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools with its Aperture VISTA infrastructure management system. “These developments support our strategy to aggressively develop more sophisticated tools and services to help global businesses manage the increasing complexity of their data center infrastructure,” said Fred Stack, vice president of marketing at Emerson’s Liebert Precision Cooling unit.
• Center 7, Inc. announced that Access Technology Solutions, a provider of eCommerce logistics and technology, has signed a multi-year agreement to utilize Center 7’s data protection and hosting facilities.

Roundup: Hosting.com, Peak 10, Sisters of Mercy

Here’s a roundup of data center industry news released yesterday:

• Hosting.com said it has completed its expansion in San Francisco, where it has added 7,000 square feet of high-density colocation space.
• Peak 10 is opening a 22,000-square-foot data center in West Chester, Ohio, which will be Peak 10’s 12th facility in nine mid-Southern cities
• The Sisters of Mercy religious order has hired S. M. Wilson & Co. to build a $35 million medical data center in Washington, Mo.

Roundup: Equinix, Rackspace, Active Power

Here’s a roundup of data center industry news from released Monday:

• Equinix (EQIX) and Japan Internet Exchange Co. Ltd. (JPIX), the largest Internet exchange in Japan, have  announced that JPIX has extended its peering fabricto the Equinix Tokyo-2  data center located in Shinagawa. As a part of the agreement, Equinix customers will be able to directly exchange traffic with JPIX’s diverse aggregation of Internet service providers, cable TV service providers and content providers.
• Rackspace (RAX) released a survey in which nearly 50 percent of customer respondents said that they expect the percentage of IT budgets spent on hosted services to increase over the next five years. “Two thirds of the survey respondents use a services provider to host one or more of their SaaS applications today and the data indicates that demand is likely to increase,” said John Engates, chief technology officer, Rackspace Hosting.
• Active Power (ACPW) announced the shipment of its 2,000th flywheel UPS (uninterruptible power supply) system, which was purchased by Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) to support an application in the solar power sector. Active Power has now deployed more than 500 megawatts of flywheel UPS power protection to customers around the world.

Digg Will Expand Its Data Centers

Digg will use some the $28 million in funding it announced last week to expand its data center infrastructure, according to company officials. The fast-growing social media site is optimizing its current infrastructure, but will soon need additional data center space.

“We currently have some room to grow but we’ll be expanding to a larger space in the coming months to fit the new growing infrastructure,” said Scott Baker, Digg’s VP of Operations. “We are always expanding our infrastructure to meet the demands of higher traffic and new features that we’re always developing.”

The company’s short-term goal is to refine its data center architecture to serve content from two locations, rather than just one. “We are currently in two data centers set up in an active/passive configuration for disaster recovery purposes,” said Baker. “Part of this expansion is to make better use of our (backup) data center installation. We are working towards some site rearchitecture to allow us to have an active/active setup with traffic being served from both locations simultaneously.”

Roundup: Amazon, Oracle, Emerson, IBM

Catching up on several industry news items from this morning:

• Amazon (AMZN) continues to adapt its Amazon Web Services utility computing platform for enterprise use, and said today that it will now support products from Oracle (ORCL). The Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager can now be licensed to run in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Customers can even use their existing software licenses with no additional license
• Emerson Network Power (EMR) announced new leadership roles for Anand Ekbote and Charles O’Donnell. Ekbote now has a leadership role in the Emerson Network Power monitoring and infrastructure management center of expertise for the Liebert business as vice president of monitoring, and O’Donnell is playing a lead role in product development as vice president of engineering for the Liebert AC Power business
• IBM today announced its Systems Director 6.1 ”intelligent dashboard” software that will allow clients to view, maintain and adjust the energy consumption, performance, and hardware utilization of their multi-system, virtualized environment - all in a single view.

Roundup: Terremark, APC, Databank, Involta

Here’s a roundup of data center industry news announcements from earlier today:

• Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) announced that IBM de Colombia will use the infrastructure at Terremark’s NAP of the Americas - Colombia in Bogota, Colombia to offer customers its range of IT solutions. The Bogota facility opened in June.
• APC unveiled a new version of its APC InfraStruXure Central, Capacity Manager and Change Manager software, which provides monitoring and management capabilities to help customers managepower, cooling, physical space and security in dynamic datacenter environments.
• DataBank Holdings said it has deployed Caterpillar’s CAT flywheel UPS (uninterruptible power supply) 4800 kVA system at the company’s new 40,000 square foot data center located in the former Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas at 400 S. Akard St.
• Involta LLC said it has opened a new data center in Marion, Iowa. The 20,000 square foot facility was announced last year and is now accepting customers. 

Data Center Shares Hit Hard in Selloff

Shares of public companies in the data center sector were hit hard in Monday’s steep selloff on Wall Street, which saw the Dow drop 504 points (4.5 percent) while the NASDAQ shed 81 points (3.6 percent).  

Data center shares were hit harder, in percentage terms, with 10 of the 13 companies we track suffering declines of 6 percent or more on the day. Hardest hit was Switch & Data (SDXC) which slid 13.5 percent, while Level 3 (LVLT), Limelight Networks (LLNW) and Navisite (NAVI) also taking double-digit hits.

How Digg Works: A Look Under The Hood

The social media site Digg is known for the huge volume of traffic it sends to sites that are linked on its front page. How does Digg manage its web site to support all that activity - 22 million users and 220 million page views in August, according to QuantCast)? Joe Stump provides an overview of How Digg Works in the first post on the Digg Technology Blog, which made its debut Thursday. An excerpt:

Ask Ron - our Systems Engineering Lead - the exact number of servers we have in production and he’ll probably respond with, “I don’t honestly know.” I can say we’ve got dozens of web servers and dozens more DB servers. I can say with certainty it takes six specialized graph database servers to run the Recommendation Engine and we have another six to ten machines that serve files from MogileFS. But really, the numbers are the least interesting part of the equation. What makes Digg an interesting place to work are what the pieces are and how they fit together.

Stump’s post shares some details on Dogg’s architecture and how the various pieces work together to process typical requests from Diggers like me.

Digg isn’t alone among social networking sites sharing information about their efforts on the back-end. The Engineering @ Facebook blog provides an inside look at some of the infrastructure challenges face by Facebook.