Data Center: I’m Going to Disney World!

This viewing area provides a glimpse into the Smarter Data Center, a section of the IBM Smarter Planet exhibit at Epcot that showcases information technology.

It’s not quite Space Mountain. But an IBM data center features prominently in a new attraction at the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World, giving visitors a closer look at the technology playing an ever-larger role in their daily lives. 

The data center is part of IBM’s SmarterPlanet exhibit within Epcot’s Innoventions center, which illustrates the role computers play in addressing complex challenges like reducing  traffic and crime, and improving food safety and local water supplies.

The exhibit’s glass storefront provides a glimpse of the working IBM Smarter Data Center, which powers the exhibit, and educates visitors about the servers, storage and networking equipment that serve up their favorite web sites and cloud computing services.

Higher Profile for Racks and Servers
The exhibit is the latest sign data center technology is gaining a higher profile, slowly shedding the anonymity of the back-office server room or remote data center in a secure, undisclosed location. As the Internet becomes a more integral part of everyday life and the American economy, the back-end is moving out front. 

The SmarterPlanet exhibit “brings to life the many ways in which IBM technologies are invisibly woven into the way people live, work and play,” said Gary Cohen, IBM General Manager, Global Communications Sector. “The objective is for guests to walk away understanding the increasing role technology will play in improving the quality of life for people across the world.”

Roundup: CloudKick, Tieto, IBM, Juniper

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

Cloud management Start-up Cloudkick launches. San Francisco start-up Cloudkick announced its cloud server management and monitoring services coming out of beta. Cloudkick is trying to leverage the trend towards monitoring as a service by creating a unified dashboard that helps end users monitor the workings of a variety of cloud services. The service currently works with EC2, Rackspace, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, Rimuhosting and VPS.net. Cloudkick recently posted charts showing periodic ping latency between EC2 nodes in an embattled debate over cloud capacity issues.

Tieto builds new data centre in Finland. Helsinki based IT services company Tieto announced they are building a new, energy efficient data centre in Espoo, Finland.  The 1,000 square meter (10,764 square feet) data centre consists of two 500 square meter modules and will double the area of Tieto’s data centers located in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The EUR $18 million project began this month and is expected to begin operations near the end of the year. ”Modern data centre technology will enable full-scale production of the growing cloud computing services and the energy-saving virtualization of servers. Through new data centres, Tieto can also respond to the future growth of the market and IT outsourcing in particular,” says Ari Karppinen, Tieto’s Country head of Finland.

Container Collaboration by IBM, APC

Attendees at the Gartner Data Center Conference tour the IBM Portable Modular Data center (PMDC) on display on the expo floor at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

Power and cooling vendor APC by Schneider Electric today announced an expanded relationship with IBM to offer Big Blue’s Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC) container based on APC’s InfraStruxure architecture. The PMDC provides a data center in a shipping container with a complete physical infrastructure including power and cooling systems and remote monitoring.

The announcement builds on the global alliance between APC and IBM announced in 2006 when APC was selected as an infrastructure provider for IBM’s Scalable Modular Data Center (SMDC) and High Density Zone (HDZ) solution, which allows customers to deploy a high density environment rapidly within an existing data center.

APC previously announced a similar partnership with Datapod, an Australian company whose containers include specialized modules which can include “entrypods” that serve as access control man-trap systems or “utilitypods” holding generators and fuel tanks.

Roundup: Q9 Networks, Cisco, IBM

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

Cisco to Power NBC’s Olympic HD Coverage. Cisco announced Wednesday thatit is will provide NBC with a  media-aware IP video network infrastructure during the network’s all-HD coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games. To support production and video-archiving functions NBC will be testing the Cisco Media Data Center and Unified Computing System. Cisco Flip video cameras will help NBC analysts and bloggers shoot on-the-fly video around the winter games. “The NBC network powered by Cisco technology is a medianet in action, making a great example of what a network optimized for extreme video traffic and rich media applications can handle,” said Pankaj Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Service Provider Group.

IBM Provides Modular Server Room with India Bank.  IBM has entered into an agreement with India’s Karad Urban Co-operative Bank Ltd. (KUCB) to deploy a Scalable Modular Server Room (SMSR), a pre-designed and pre-fabricated data center. The deal is expected to enable KUCB to save nearly 75% on resource allocation costs. Additionally IBM will provide facility and maintenance services for both the data center and disaster recovery sites of KUCB.  “With the scale of our operations expanding, it is imperative for us to invest in technology solutions that are ready-to-deploy and continuously meet the unique requirements associated with our growth,” said KUCB’s Chairman, Dr. Subhash S. Erram. “IBM’s unique value proposition through SMSR and their consultative approach was in synch with our requirements.”

Q9 Networks selected by Canadian Automobile Association. Toronto based Q9 Networks announced that it was selected by the Canadian Automobile Association South Central Ontario to provide a comprehensive data center colocation solution. As a consolidation plan for the Association they will go from two internal and two external facilities to a single Q9 data center with failover to a second Q9 facility. “Q9 sells its colocation services based on a power reservation model that gives us an incentive to understand and closely manage the power draw of our IT assets,” says CAA SCO Chief Operating Officer, Jay Woo.

IBM Steps Up Its Partner-Driven Container Game

Attendees at the Gartner Data Center Conference tour the IBM Portable Modular Data center (PMDC) on display on the expo floor Tuesday at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS – IBM is getting serious about data center containers. Big Blue brought one of its 40-foot Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC) containers to the Gartner Data Center Conference, where it shares the expo floor with the HP and SGI containers that have been regulars at industry conferences for several years now. Today IBM announced a formidable lineup of partners who will help it outfit the containers to customer specifications.

Partnerships are critical to IBM’s strategy in the container market, where it has followed a different path than several of its competitors. Rather than advancing a particular design vision, IBM has positioned its container as perhaps the most flexible of the major container offerings, promising to customize the PMDC to each customer’s requirements. That includes the basic container configuration, as IBM offers its “data center in a box” in 20, 40 and 53-foot sizes, and can either place the mechanical and electrical gear in a separate container or have it share a single container with racks of IT gear.

Introduced in 2008
IBM introduced its container product in May 2008 as part of a broader rollout of modular data center designs for pods and zones within larger environments. The higher profile of the IBM container at the Gartner Data center Conference likely reflects growing interest in containers among the enterprise companies that make up a substantial chunk of the attendees for the Gartner event.

Roundup: IBM, NTT, SC09 demo, PhoenixNAP

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

• Key milestone to 100 Gigabit Ethernet demonstrated. At the SC09 conference in Oregon Monday Infinera, Internet2, Juniper Networks and Level 3 demonstrated 100 Gbps data transport between Seattle and the SC09 show floor in Portland.  The 100 Gbps of test data was sent via a single slot on the Juniper T1600 Series Core Router, populated with a new 10×10GbE physical interface card and an Infinera optical system, over Level 3 and Internet2’s fiber-optic network.  An 802.3ba compliant 100GbE router interface was demonstrated by Juniper as well.  The demonstrations follow-up on an initiative announced at the SC08 conference last year between the same partners and the U.S. Department of Energy Sciences Network.  Kanalya Vasani, vice president of product management at Juniper said “with ‘Big Science’ projects like the Large Hadron Collider expected to be generating data flows of 100Gbps as soon as 2010, it’s clear that the world’s scientific research and education community needs to move beyond groups of 10Gbps waves and be ready with 100GbE solutions in the very near term.”
• IBM selected by LBNL for cloud research. Monday IBM announced that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has selected an IBM System x iDataPlex server to run the Lab’s program to explore how cloud computing can be used to advance scientific discovery.  The LBNL program is being funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Department of Energy and will allow scientists to accelerate discoveries in energy efficiency, climate change and genomics.  According to the August 2009 Green500 list, the iDatPlex system is one of the most energy efficient computers in the world.  It also will have the theoretical peak speed of more than 60 teraflops.
• NTT to Power OpSource Cloud: NTT America, the U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), and OpSource today announced their intention to accelerate the adoption of enterprise cloud computing by powering OpSource Cloud, which will use  NTT America’s secure data centers and Tier-1 global IP network. OpSource Cloud is designed to allow IT departments to manage their security as they would within their internal IT infrastructure. OpSource Cloud provides every user with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public cloud, allowing them to determine their own degree of Internet connectivity.

IBM Unveils VMControl for Data Centers

A screen shot from the IBM VMControl data center management software.

IBM has introduced new sofware to help companies manage virtualized data center environments. IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition, combined with IBM Tivoli software, allows combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to be managed as a single entity. This approach – known as system pooling – expands the benefits of virtualization by helping corporate data centers simplify complex management functions and better share resources such as CPU, memory and storage.

VMControl Enterprise supports IBM’s PowerVM and z/VM as well as x86 virtualization technologies such as VMWare, Hyper-V and open x86 virtualization solutions. It will be available on IBM Power Systems running AIX in December, with support for other platforms planned for next year.

IBM Generator Failure Causes Airline Chaos

A generator failure Sunday at an IBM data center in Auckland, New Zealand crippled key services for Air New Zealand, prompting the airline’s CEO to publicly chastise Big Blue for the failure. The data center outage crashed airport check-in systems, as well as on-line bookings and call center systems Sunday morning, affecting more than 10,000 passengers and throwing airports into disarray.

The problem occurred during planned maintenance at IBM’s Newton data center in Auckland. A generator failed during the maintenance window, dropping power to parts of the data center, including the mainframe operations supporting Air New Zealand’s ticketing. IBM says service was restored to most clients within an hour, but local media reports say Air New Zealand’s ticketing kiosks were offline for up to six hours.

Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe is not happy.

Getting Faster: SGI, IBM, Pliant SSDs, Akamai

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines on benchmarks, speed records, and response times:

• IBM breaks processing speed record. IBM announced Monday that the company set a new technology benchmark for the financial services industry, delivering the fastest recorded throughput performance and lowest network latency on Reuters Market Data System v6.0 (RMDS). Using the IBM BladeCenter HS22 server they processed 1.3 million market data updates per second, while maintaining a latency of less than 1 millisecond. Alex Yost, vice president IBM Systems and Technology Group said “The new generation of System x and BladeCenter solutions redefine how x86 clients can address today’s challenges with servers that have less than half the power consumption, one-third the management cost, and more than twice the performance.”
• SSD startup offers more than twice the input/output. Startup Solid State Drive (SSD) company Pliant Technologies announced Monday an enterprise flash drive (EFD) family, a new class of high-performance, high reliability storage drives.  The EFD’s deliver 2 -4 times faster input/output operations per second and 10 times higher data reliability than existing SSD’s.  The Pliant Lighting EFDs are the first flash-based storage devices to feature a cache-less design to prevent data loss on power interuptions, and a number of advanced data reliability features to deliver complete end-to-end data protection.  The Lightning EFDs have been specificaly designed for demanding, mission-critical 24×7 applications.   The products are being delivered for OEM evaluation and qualification and will be available in September 2009.