Roundup: Savvis, Raritan, NaviSite, Active Power

Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• Savvis Selected by BATS Global Markets.  Savvis announced Monday that BATS Global Markets is expanding its hosting space in Savvis’ Weehawken data center to support business growth and its second U.S. equities exchange (BYX).  Expansion in the Savvis Docklands data center in London will also take place to support the BATS Europe multilateral trading facility.  BATS is a global financial markets technology company in Kansas City, Missouri and has been a Savvis customer since they were founded in 2005.  Savvis announced major expansion to the NJ2 data center in Weekhawken, New Jersey in July 2009, citing strong customer demand for proximity hosting and low latency connectivity to major financial exchanges.
• Raritan Introduces Intelligent Inline-meter Rack PDUs. Raritan introduced the new Dominion PX-3000 series Monday to its portfolio of intelligent rack power distribution and energy management products.  The new series of power meters are designed to be used in conjunction with dumb rack PDUs (Power Distribution Units) to provide strip-level metering and environmental monitoring.  The Dominion PX-3000 gathers a variety of power and environmental statistics and this real-time information can been seen with a local display or from a remote graphical user interface via a web browser.

Inside HP’s Huge Tulsa Data Center

Yesterday marked a transition for EDS, which was officially rebranded as HP Enterprise Services. There’s been a lot of coverage of the business and employment impact of the deal. But the acquisition also brought some exceptional data center facilities, including the Service Management Center (SMC) built by EDS in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Earlier this year the Tulsa data center opened an expansion that doubled its size to 179,000 square feet, including 80,000 square feet of raised-floor space that can house more than 12,000 servers. HP has released a video providing a look inside the Tulsa facility. While not a full tour, the video reviews some of the energy efficiency features and offers views of the raised-floor area (check out the chimneys on the high-density cabinets) and water cooling system, including a look inside the cooling towers.

HP also will benefit from a data center being built by EDS/HP Enterprise in Wynyard, England which features use an unusual architecture for its free cooling system, treating the entire 12-foot high first floor of the facility as a cold air plenum, with the server cabinets housed on the second floor. The 305,000 square foot facility in Wynyard is being called “Eco 2″ for its energy efficiency features.

Check out our Green Data Center Channel for more on this topic. For additional video, visit our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

First Look: HP’s New ProCurve Blade Switch

The HP ProCurve 6120XG Blade Switch is designed for next-generation networks and emerging standards including FCoE and CEE.

HP today unveiled new ProCurve networking products, equipping it to do battle with Cisco Systems (CSCO) in the widening battle to manage converged networks powering the next-generation data center.    

The new offerings include the ProCurve 6120 series of 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, which integrates with HP’s popular BladeSystem infrastructure, as well as an expansion of the HP ProCurve 8200 and 5400 Ethernet switch portfolio.

HP’s introduction of new switches was expected, as the company has indicated its intent to offer products to prepare for unified networks running the emerging Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) protocols. Cisco has launched a family of switches for next-generation converged networks, and its no surprise that its subsequent entry into the blade server market has been followed by an expansion of HP’s networking gear.

Rumor Patrol: HP May Buy Sun Hardware?

Fortune has a report that once Oracle closes on its deal to buy Sun Microsystsems, it will sell Sun’s hardware business to HP. Fortune’s Jon Fortt writes that “a person with knowledge of the communication between Oracle and HP suggested to me recently that Oracle still might deal those hardware assets to HP.”

Any sentence that includes the phrases “suggested” and “might” strikes me as pretty speculative. The chatter has since spilled onto financial blogs but doesn’t appear to have had a meaningful impact on the shares of any of the companies involved.

For what it’s worth, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is on the record saying he intends to keep the Sun hardware business intact. “We are definitely not going to exit the hardware business,” Ellison said in May. ”While most hardware businesses are low-margin, companies like Apple and Cisco enjoy very high margins because they do a good job of designing their hardware and software to work together. If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That’s why Apple’s iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones.”

That hasn’t cooled persistent speculation that the hardware unit is for sale. In June The Register cited a source close to Oracle as saying that the company “has continued to shop Sun’s hardware business around to potential buyers” but was seeking an “unrealistic” price.

Oracle-Sun, Layered Tech, NetApp, Brocade

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• Oracle’s Sun acquisition approved.  Oracle announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of Justice has approved the proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems.  On April 20th, 2009 Oracle agreed to buy Sun for $7.4 Billion after the collapse of a bid by IBM to buy Sun.
• Layered Tech #622 on Inc.’s Fastest Growing Private Companies list. Global provider of managed dedicated hosting, Layered Technologies announced Wednesday that they were listed at number 622 on the Inc. 5000.  The Plano, Texas based company listed a three year growth rate of 441 percent and invests heavily in research and development.
• Netapp announces 1st quarter 2010 results. Revenues were $838 million, down 4% and GAAP net income was $52 million.  Netapp also announced that President and COO Tom Georgens will succeed Dan Warmenhoven as CEO of the company.

HP Scales Out With New Cloud Servers

The HP Proliant SL2x170z G6, configured for high performance computing, is part of the HP Extreme Scale-Out line announced today.

HP is stripping down to scale out. Today the company is launching a line of servers and services targeting the cloud computing market, which is accounting for a growing chunk of server sales. HP’s Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) portfolio is designed to appeal to cloud-builders’ focus on energy efficiency and cost, and be delivered by the rackload.

HP’s ambitions are built around the ProLiant SL server line, which features a “skinless”  architecture with a lightweight rail and tray design. The new servers are deployed in HP’s new ProLiant z6000 chassis, a 2U frame housing shared power supply and fans. The common chassis allows customers to choose between three ProLiant SL configurations optimized for maximum memory, storage or processing power.

On each server, HP is mounting the disks on the side rather than the front, allowing better air flow through to the fans on the rear of the chassis. The i/o cabling is on the front of the server, allowing it to be serviced from the cold aisle.

“We’ve designed it for power efficiency and good airflow,” said Ed Turkel, manager of business development for HP Scalable Computing & Infrastructure. “In this environment they typically don’t need a lot of management features. We think of this as a lean and mean environment.”

A 12-Foot Raised Floor?

That’s not a typo. A new data center being built by EDS in England will use an unusual architecture for its free cooling system, treating the entire 12-foot high first floor of the facility as a cold air plenum, with the server cabinets housed on the second floor. The 305,000 square foot facility in Wynyard is being called “Eco 2″ for its energy efficiency features.

The fresh air will be introduced into the plenum by 7-foot high low-velocity fans designed to maintain a consistent air pressure across the entire room/plenum. Slotted vents in the ceiling allow the fresh air to enter the cold aisles of the data center, which are fully-enclosed by a cold-aisle containment system. The containment allows the system to operate with lower airflow rate than typical raised floors in an open hot aisle/cold aisle configuration.

HP Gets $4.8M in Incentives in Colorado

The Colorado Springs City Council has approved $4.8 million in tax rebate incentives as part of an economic development agreement with HP for a $260 million data center project, according to local media.

The company filed plans April 14 to build a 250,000 square foot two-story data center next to its three-building, 1.1 million-square-foot complex on Rockrimmon Boulevard and said its plans include a “potential two-story addition to the north that would also be for data center use.” HP already operates several older data centers at the complex.

The planned HP facility in Colorado Springs center would be the fourth major data center opened or expanded in the Springs since 2006, including a facility Verizon Wireless is building in a former semiconductor plant, a FedEx Corp. data center and a facility for Progressive Corp./Drive Group that opened in 2006.

HP on FCoE and Convergence

Last week HP unveiled its BladeSystem Matrix, an integrated data center infrastructure offering that will compete with Cisco’s Unified Computing System. But what about Cisco’s focus on a unified fabric connecting the LAN and storage networks using Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and lossless Ethernet?

We recently had a conversation with Jieming Zhu, distinguished technologist at HP StorageWorks, about HP’s view of FCoE and the adoption of converged network technologies. Here are some of Zhu’s comments from that discussion:

On HP’s roadmap: “(HP Chairman and CEO) Mark Hurd has clearly indicated his resolve that we’ll play even bigger in the networking space. We think FCoE fits well into our adaptive infrastructure vision. HP is in a very good position to bring benefits to customers and ease the migration pain. ProCurve (Networking) is the hidden jewel that HP never exposed that much. It’s number two in the enterprise LAN market. We’ve revamped the whole line to play more strongly in the data center networking market. Down the road, ProCurve will play a much bigger role.”

On the potential of FCoE: “It is quite significant technology. FCoE will eventually deliver compelling value for data center customers. It can cut quite a bit of power used for input-output connectivity. Another benefit we see is consolidation. The boundary between servers and networks and storage will disappear, and the true vision of virtualization and dynamic provisioning will become a reality.”