Salesforce.com opens Tokyo data center. Salesforce.com (CRM) and NTT Communications announced today that salesforce.com’s Tokyo data center has gone live. Housed in a NTT  data center, the Tokyo data center will support adoption of salesforce.com’s social enterprise services among the company’s rapidly growing customer base across Japan and Asia Pacific. “Salesforce.com continues to expand its infrastructure to support the adoption of the social enterprise among our rapidly growing global customer base,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “The opening of our Tokyo data center with our trusted partner NTT Communications represents a long-term commitment to our customers across Japan and Asia Pacific.”

Telx selected by Justin.tv.  Telx announced that Justin.tv has selected Telx as its mission-critical infrastructure colocation provider for the launch of TwitchTV, a new online gaming community. Already a customer in the Telx San Francisco C3 Cloud Connection Center, Justin.tv has expanded its vital gaming infrastructure in this key location, leveraging an industry-leading community of telecommunications carriers and ISPs. Justin.tv lets users stream video content live to the Internet from their webcams and mobile phones. “While Justin.tv is powered by several global data centers, Telx’s San Francisco facility is the ‘brains’ of our infrastructure operations,” said Jonathan Shipman, Director of Operations, Justin.tv.  ”Telx has been a vital partner for us as we execute our growth strategy to include the gaming customer base. We have leveraged the large community of network providers Telx offers in this location for three years. When it came time to launch our online gaming community, TwitchTV, we were able to expand our presence with Telx in an organized, cost-effective way.

Internap opens Dallas Fort Worth data center.  Internap Network Services (INAP) announced the official opening of its new data center in the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) market, located in Plano, Texas. The DFW facility offers 55,000 square feet of floor space and will provide access to Internap’s platform of IT Infrastructure services, including managed hosting and colocation, as well as its global, route-optimized Performance IP service. An exclusive open house and networking event at the facility will be held on December 15th for facility tours.  A virtual tour of the facility can be viewed here.  “The new Internap DFW facility has been designed from the ground up to serve the advanced IT Infrastructure demands of enterprises in the DFW area and beyond – from its flexible, high-performance platform that can scale on demand with customers’ business needs to cutting-edge power and cooling capabilities,” said Mike Higgins, senior vice president of data center services at Internap. “With this opening, Internap also continues to deliver on our strategy to build a geographically diverse footprint of premium, company-owned data centers in key markets.”

Peak 10 selected by iPractice Group.  Peak 10 announced today that it is delivering cloud and managed services to Nashville-based healthcare technology company iPractice Group. iPractice will utilize Peak 10′s cloud solutions and managed services to deliver its all-inclusive IT services for independent medical practices. “We chose Peak 10 because the company has a great reputation in the market, offers unparalleled expertise and was able to provide us with a comprehensive portfolio of services,” said Jason Morgan, iPractice Group’s chief operating officer. “Peak 10’s interconnected network of data centers and its numerous compliance certifications will be a valuable enhancement to our IT infrastructure.”

CASE Commercial Real Estate is finalizing plans for a 10-megawatt, 150,000 square foot data center as part of Cuban’s Wonderview project, a 175-acre mixed-use development that will also include Cuban’s corporate headquarters, practice facilities for the Dallas Mavericks, offices, restaurants, housing and hospital facilities.

“We’re basically ready to go,” said Ken Walter, Senior Managing Director at CASE Commercial, who said the data centers at Wonderview will be designed with major enterprise tenants in mind. The facilities will be built with extra-thick concrete walls that will be able to withstand a direct hit from an F4 tornado, and meeting current DOD and Homeland Security requirements for blast tolerances, Walter said.

Cogen Plant Provides Renewable Power

The energy for the data centers will come from a combination of wind power and a nearby cogeneration plants operated by Synergy Renewables, a company backed by Pickens that generates renewable fuel through a waste-to-energy conversion process. The fuel sources will include sludge from a nearby water treatment plant, medical waste and city garbage diverted from landfill disposal.

When garbage arrives at a Synergy cogeneration facility, waste is shredded and moisture is added to create “feedstock.” High temperatures are used to convert the waste feedstock into a gas called synthesis gas. This gas is fired in an internal combustion engine to produce electrical power or in a boiler to create steam for a steam turbine. The only residue is an inert ash which can be used in construction materials.

The process produces a net reduction of greenhouse gases, Synergy says. Garbage diverted from landfills to the waste-to-energy facility will eliminate methane, a greenhouse gas that forms when waste is landfilled. For every ton of garbage that is diverted from a landfill and used as fuel in the waste-to-energy facility, there will be an elimination of approximately one ton of greenhouse gases (CO2e) that otherwise would be emitted into the atmosphere.

The electric cost for the waste-to-energy electricity at Wonderview is expected to be slightly more expensive than the local utility – perhaps between 1 cent and 1.25 cents per kilowatt hour more. But Case’s Walter said current wholesale rates but could be fixed over a 20 year period. Long-term stability in power pricing is appealing to data center users concerned about potential price fluctuations due to changes in the business and regulatory environment for utilities.

Other green initiatives will include a grey water line to the waste treatment plant to allow data centers access to free water to their chillers and evaporative cooling systems. Recycled or “grey” water isn’t fresh or drinkable but is not contaminated by any toxic substances or toilet wastes. Grey water is considered environmentally friendly because it reduces demands for fresh water and doesn’t consume the energy required to purify it at waste water treatment sites.

Walter is working on the Wonderview project with Joe Cavagnaro, Senior Managing Directo of Development for CASE, who previously served as director of real estate services for The Mark Cuban Companies ,where he began working on the Wonderview venture. Cavagnaro also spent 14 years at Stream Realty, a Dallas real estate company that has been active in the data center market.

The new Stream Data Centers private data center property in Richardson, Texas.

In its 12 years in the data center business, Stream Data Centers has leased or sold data centers to blue chip companies like Apple, Home Depot, AT&T, Sprint and Nokia. It has followed the opportunities the market has presented, and recent shifts in demand have led the company to focus on the wholesale data center market.

Stream Data Centers is part of Dallas-based Stream Realty, and has targeted the Dallas market for several of its developments of wholesale space – which it calls “private data centers.” The company broke ground on its first project in Richardson, Texas in March 2010. The 20,000 square foot facility, which included 10,000 square feet of data center space, was fully leased shortly after it was completed, and was sold in June to Carter Validus Mission Critical REIT for $28.9 million.

New Project in Richardson

Stream recently broke ground on its Richardson II private data center project, a 72,500 square foot facility that will house  three 10,000 square foot pods, each with 1.125 megawatts of critical power capacity.

“We’ve always been about delivering data center space to top quality companies,” said Paul Moser, co-Managing Director of Stream Data Centers. “In our first 5 to 6 years, we bought property and leased it to companies.”

But soon the market changed, and Stream adapted its strategy. “In about 2006, when we saw no properties available to buy, we developed our first ready to fit data center,” Moser said. In the new model, Stream provided a “powered shell” in which customers could build out their data center environment.

Economic Crisis Prompts Shift 

One of Stream’s projects was a ready-to-fit (RTF) data center in San Antonio, which was built in late 2008 around the time of the U.S. financial crisis. The company recently sold the facility to a Fortune 100 customer. But the process of leasing the site revealed a shift in customer interest.

“When we were marketing our San Antonio site, nearly every company we spoke with asked about wholesale space,” said Anthony Bolner, Senior Vice President of Stream Data Centers. “It’s the financial crisis  – that’s when we begin to see the demand for operational data center space. It’s really the market telling us what it needed, so now we’re focused on the private data center.”

Bolner said the dynamics of the market for powered shell space has changed in recent years, as more states have begun competing for data center projects. “We’ve seen a huge shift in the last three years,” he said. “Incentives are playing an enormous role, with property and income tax abatements in play.”

Stream says the Dallas market continues to see strength in a number of industries. “We have a good, diverse economy in Dallas,” said Moser. “We have seen good strong demand from Dallas-based companies, but we also see Dallas as one of the top five or six markets nationally.”

Texas House Bill 1841 states that an individual or business whose only activity in the state is Internet hosting is not “engaged in business” in the state and thus does not have to collect Texas sales and use taxes from customers.

The bill reverses a rule change made by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts during 2010, which said that renting a space on a server in Texas effectively establishes a business presence in the state. This is a huge deal, as Texas is home to many of the largest hosting and data center companies in the world, including SoftLayer, Rackspace, Layered Technologies, CI Host, CyrusOne and Horizon Data Centers. These companies’ data centers house servers for hundreds of hosting providers around the world.

The Geography of Hosting

“This amendment immediately created issues for web hosts with data centers in Texas,” writes Suzy Fulton in a summary on the SoftLayer blog. “Why would customers get servers from a host in Texas and have to worry about this tax obligation, when they could do business with another host outside of Texas and not have this obligation? The Comptroller’s Office started to realize the effect of this regulation and began to backpedal and say that they didn’t really mean what they said.”

The hosting industry mobilized to amend the amendment. “The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that a state can only require a company to collect its sales tax if the company has a substantial physical presence in the state,” notes Alan Schoenbaum, General Counsel for Rackspace. “HB 1841 removes any lingering doubt and effectively repeals the regulation and eliminates any unintended confusion about state policy on the subject. This is a very positive outcome for Rackspace customers and the cloud computing and hosting industry.”

Crisis averted. But the Texas bill – along with the tax issues for data centers in Washington state – serve as a reminder that the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds aren’t always easy to define, and can sometimes lead to unintended consequences.

The purchase was disclosed in an SEC filing by Carter Validus, which raised $1.7 billion in an initial public offering in December.

Carter Validus is based in Tampa and headed by John Carter, a veteran real estate investor and principal of Carter & Associates. The company joins a growing number of real estate investment trusts focused on the data center business. Existing data center REITs include Digital Realty Trust (DLR), DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) and CoreSite Realty (COR).

Data centers are part of a broader strategy in which Carter Validus hopes to take advantage of opportunities created by health care reform and its pending impact on medical real estate and IT infrastructure.

The Richardson property was developed by Stream Realty, and marked the second recent sale of one of the company’s data centers n the greater Dallas market. Last week a Stream Realty property in Plano was purchased by Lincoln Rackhouse.

“Today’s high density data center users are searching for robust and secure environments within purpose built facilities, not converted warehouses or manufacturing buildings,” said Martin Peck, Managing Director for Lincoln Rackhouse. “We just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to control such a facility in what we consider the best business location in Texas.”

The data center was built by Stream Realty in 2006, and features a minimum clear height of 18 feet above a designed 42-inch raised floor. The site allows for expansion up to 350,000 square feet.

Lincoln Rackhouse , the data center division of Lincoln Property Company, one of the nation’s largest property and construction management firms with more than 4,000 professionals in 100 markets in the United States and Europe. Lincoln Rackhouse focuses exclusively on mission critical facilities through data center investments and development as well as site selection and brokerage.

“ORIX coming on board as a new equity investor is compelling validation of the CoreXchange business model and the continued strong growth of our business,” said Peter Pathos, chairman of CoreXchange. “They bring a highly experienced team of investment professionals and significant access to a variety of capital solutions that will help us achieve even greater scale in our company’s growth.”

CoreXchange will use a significant portion of the proceeds to enhance its data center infrastructure in its two colocation facilities at the Dallas Infomart and The Connection at 8600 Harry Hines.

“The ORIX team is excited about its new equity investment in CoreXchange,” said John Lenocker, director at ORIX Corporate Capital. “The combination of CoreXchange’s experienced management team and compelling value proposition in the large and growing colocation services market presents significant investor upside.”

CoreXchange operates a network connectivity exchange that allows customers to quickly get quotes on multi-homed connectivity using the CoreXchange Configurator, which currently offers six carriers. Connectivity services are available in the CoreXchange data center or at a customer’s remote location via local loop or metro Ethernet.

The new Dallas facility builds on Internap’s strategy to expand its platform of company-operated data centers, while reducing its reliance on colocation services offered though partners. In 2010 the company expanded in four markets, adding data center space in Seattle, Santa Clara, Houston and Boston that added of 36,500 square feet of data center space.

“The Dallas/Fort Worth metro area boasts the largest concentration of corporate headquarters in the U.S. with 10,000 companies calling the city home, including numerous organizations ranked on the Fortune 500,” said Mike Higgins, senior vice president of data center services at Internap. “With the addition of DFW to our portfolio of company-controlled data centers, we are able to provide these bedrock corporations with sorely-needed data center space that can be tailored to their specific IT infrastructure needs – from colocation, managed hosting and cloudstorage services to premium connectivity and Content Delivery Network services – and can quickly scale to support their business growth requirements.”

Demand for colocation space in the DFW metroplex is expected to outpace supply through 2013, according to a recent report on multi-tenant data center supply from Tier1 Research. The new Dallas/Fort Worth facility is expected to open Phase I in the first quarter of 2012.

Internap’s data center services revenue for the full-year 2010 declined by 2 percent to $128.2 million, while dourth quarter data center services revenue was $31.7 million, down 4 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2009.  The declines were related to Internap’s program to churn less profitable customer contracts in partner data center sites.

At 3 million square feet, Cowboy Stadium is the largest domed stadium in the world and host to a mega-sized network of technology.

As 100,000 fans pour into Cowboys Stadium Sunday for Super Bowl XLV, the fans will have little awareness that there’s a data center serving as the technological nerve center of the stadium. But the staff at CDW and HP and the Cowboys’ IT team know how vital the stadium’s IT infrastructure is in creating the “ultimate fan experience.”

“Everything uses technology, the lighting system, the HVAC system, the point-of-sale system,” said
Peter Walsh, the Cowboys’ CIO, in a CDW video about the stadium,

There’s plenty of hardware enabling the communications, operations and sales at Cowboys Stadium, providing the ultimate intersection of football and technology. In addition to the world’s largest HDTV video board, the stadium includes 3,100 networked flat-screen TVs, 884 wireless access points, 655 point-of-sale terminals and 185 IP security cameras, according to a CDW case study.

They like things big in Texas, and that includes infrastructure. The Cowboys have a 100-terabyte storage area network to hold the data supporting the world’s largest domed stadium. The technology throughout the 3 million square-foot facility is connected by 250 miles of fiber optic cable, 6 million feet of copper wiring and 70 wiring closets, CDW said.

Consolidation Leads to Efficiencies

Yet, like smart business people, the team wanted to leverage efficiencies that come with new technology. The  new equipment in the Cowboys’ on-site data center was optimized to reduce space as well as conserve energy and cooling. For example, the team’s old servers that were located at three different sites were retired along with the former stadium. The new consolidated data center now houses 127 new blade servers, CDW reports.

“As a result of centralizing the servers, everything in the stadium now operates on one system and one network,” CDW said. “The new point of sale (POS) system requires that each of the team’s 212 concession stands uses its own server for processing sales. Instead of purchasing 212 individual servers to run each concession stand, the IT team deployed 212 VMware virtual machines on 16 physical blade servers.”

HP’s case study about the project pointed out the business benefits of the new, efficient infrastructure. “By consolidating IT resources on a virtualized, converged HP infrastructure, the Cowboys have lowered their total cost of IT ownership by an estimated $1,000,000 per year,” HP reported. “Now, the Cowboys’ IT team has tools and processes that enable a small staff—now 15—to manage 250 servers and 200 storage disks.” The IT staff, like the team, are there to make for a great experience for the fans.

And the fans can do what they do best – eat, drink, watch football and spend money on gear – all without stopping to think about the IT underpinning the giant stadium infrastructure.

For more details, see CDW and HP case studies. Here are some photos from CDW that provide a look inside the stadium’s data center. For more photos, visit CBS News.

The inside of the Texas Stadium data center, complete with the Cowboy logo emblazoned across the raised floor tiles.

Inside the aisles at the data center supporting the Super Bowl.

CDW Solution Architect Lance Caserotti in fromt of a viewing area that provides a look at some of the data center equipment.

]]> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/02/03/the-data-center-powering-the-super-bowl/feed/ 2 http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/12/21/cologix-buys-navisite-dallas-colo-business/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/12/21/cologix-buys-navisite-dallas-colo-business/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:08:57 +0000 Rich Miller http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/?p=39889 Managed hosting provider NaviSite has sold its Dallas colocation business to Cologix Dallas Inc. for $12.75 million in cash, the company said yesterday. All NaviSite’s Dallas colocation customers will be transferred to Cologix as part of the deal, in which Cologix will assume NaviSite’s data center lease at the Dallas Infomart. NaviSite will use the proceeds from the sale to repay debt, and will be a customer and bandwidth service provider in the Cologix facility in Dallas.

In June 2009 NaviSite (NAVI) announced an initiative to sell some facilities as part of the company’s NaviSite’s strategic plan to divest its colocation-only data centers and focus on complex hosting, application management, and cloud solutions for enterprise clients. In April it announced announced the sale of two data centers in northern Virginia and San Francisco to Virtustream for $5.4 million.

“The sale of the Dallas data center strengthens our balance sheet and allows us to continue focusing on our rapidly expanding enterprise cloud business,” said R. Brooks Borcherding, NaviSite’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “We are pleased to remain a customer of Cologix in Dallas and are confident that customers will be well supported by Cologix moving forward.”