• DuPont Fabros Technology – Wholesale data center developer DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) today announced that the control procedures for its data centers that required the certification have been found to be suitable in design and operating effectively according to Service Organization Control Reports (“SOC1″).  These were prepared under Statement of Standards for Attestation Engagement No. 16 (“SSAE 16″) by one of the Big 4 independent auditing firms. “We’re committed to operating our data centers and facilities at a level that meets or exceeds the highest industry and regulatory standards,” said Hossein Fateh, President and Chief Executive Officer of DuPont Fabros Technology, Inc.  “We will continue to obtain annual SSAE 16 reports for all future properties we develop, place in service and operate.”
• IO – Modular data center specialist IO said the company has completed a SSAE 16 Type 2 audit covering three operational data centers – IO New Jersey, IO Phoenix and IO Scottsdale. The company said the certification of IO New Jersey and IO Phoenix further validates the resiliency and operational excellence of IO’s next-generation modular data centers. “Designed, engineered and manufactured in the US using standards-based components and processes, IO.Anywhere offers unmatched reliability, in a repeatable manner,” said David Shaw, Chief Operating Officer of IO. “This SSAE 16 accreditation will only further accelerate the increased customer adoption of our highly secure and scalable modular Data Center solution.”

Intel ships Atom processors.  Intel (INTC) announced the availability of the latest Intel Atom processor-based platform, formerly codenamed “Cedar Trail.” This latest platform is designed to provide small, compact, on-the-go computing with great battery life.  The new design’s dedicated media engine enables full 1080p high-definition playback of videos and Blu-Ray content and includes additional digital display and output options including HDMI and DisplayPort. The dual-core Intel Atom processor N2600 and Intel Atom processor N2800 are paired with the Intel NM10 Express Chipset and feature a small form factor package size that saves system board real estate and enables thinner netbook designs. Devices with the new Atom processor will be available in early 2012 from major OEMs including: Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Toshiba.

IO selected by Solugenix. IO announced that it now provides IT consulting firm Solugenix with data center as a service at IO Phoenix, via its modular technology platform IO Anywhere. IO Anywhere adds capacity through data center as a service, which is delivered in a range of colocation cabinets, shared and dedicated modules, multi-megawatt, customer-dedicated data centers, and solutions that are deployed as a product. ”Today’s traditional data centers will soon become obsolete when you consider all the benefits modularity has to offer,” Shashi Jasthi, CEO at Solugenix said in a statement. “After reviewing a number of solutions, IO’s next-generation modular technology puts us at a significant advantage from a scalability, cost and reliability standpoint, to better support the dynamic needs of our IT customers.”

Fire at Airtel data center in Mumbai India.  A fire was reported Tuesday at the Bharti Airtel data center that took down mobile network service across the city for several hours.  The fire gutted the server room, damaging the entire electrical installation. Worst hit were data services offered by the company, particularly a large number of corporate customers from Mumbai. Airtel responded with several tweets throughout the past few days and a company spokesperson said, “a technical outage has affected our network in the western region, resulting in disruption of some services. We are working toward rectifying the outage at the earliest. We deeply regret the inconvenience caused to our customers.”

IO’s modular data center is named “IO Anywhere” for its portability and ability to be deployed at customer premises. But the early public deployments of modular capacity were installed within the company’s data centers in Phoenix and New Jersey.

Until now. Australian data center service provider Red Cloud has signed a multi-module contract with IO, and will deploy 4.5 megawatts of IT capacity in new modular facilities in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. The deal includes both data modules and power modules, which will be built in IO’s factory in Phoenix and then delivered across the Pacific and installed on-site in Australia.

The contract launches a strategic venture between IO and Red Cloud, which will work together in the region to promote IO Anywhere modular technology and the IO OS data center management software.

“IO’s modular technology will provide a foundation for our Australasian data center and cloud computing services,” said Garry Henley, CEO of Red Cloud. “With IO, capacity is not only delivered rapidly, but we will also be able to control efficiency, utilization and operating costs of our entire infrastructure using the capabilities of IO OS. This partnership provides us with the next-generation data center infrastructure to rapidly drive our business.”

Red Cloud’s Melbourne and Perth locations are expected to be live in the second quarter of 2012 with Sydney following shortly thereafter. Red Cloud’s IO Anywhere deployments will be delivered to Tier III standards.

“The Cloud requires an intelligently controlled elastic data center and that is what IO’s technology delivers to our customers ANYWHERE in the world.” said George Slessman, CEO of IO.

A screen capture of the i/o OS software for managing data center infrastructure.

IO is getting into the software business. Today the Phoenix-based colocation provider said that it is offering IO OS, its “data center operating system,” as a stand-alone software product. IO OS was initially developed to manage the IO Anywhere modular data center technology platform, and has since been adapted to manage raised-floor environments as well.

“By extending IO OS to traditional data centers, IO empowers our customers to understand and optimize their legacy data centers and enables their enterprises to seamlessly transition to Data Center 2.0 technology and cloud computing,” said George Slessman, CEO of IO.

Focus on DCIM Category

The release of IO OS as a stand-alone product comes as companies are actively seeking tools to help them manage increasingly complex data center environments. This software category – known broadly as data center infrastructure management or DCIM – has become more crowded in recent years, as a flurry of new companies have introduced software to manage and automate elements of the data center. IO sees its software development efforts as a way to leverage its in-house research-and-development operation and distinguish its offerings in a changing market for IT infrastructure.

IO OS is written in the C#, and provides application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow customers to tie into its capabilities. IO is developing an extensibility roadmap, including a software development kit (SDK) to allow clients and developers to build their own apps to plug into the system. IO says its OS supports most apps and equipment, but the company is also offering an integration service for customers.

In addition to tracking and management capabilities, IO is emphasizing its software’s ability to provide continuous feedback to help identify potential problems and take preventative action.

Features of IO OS software include:

• Real-time data to accurately reflect the current mechanical, power, cooling and electrical usage.
• Centralized monitoring that tracks and maintains a record of all critical systems and provides a continuous feedback mechanism to staff when pre-defined thresholds have been met. IO OS is compliant with ITIL and provides real-time incident recording and analysis with the ability to integrate current ticketing systems and audit trail processes.
• Physical, Logical and Infrastructure views that organize critical infrastructure by its location and access hundreds of devices from one view. In addition to seeing what is in the data center, IO OS provides views into generators, switchgear, paralleling systems, chillers and any other supporting systems.
• Service Level Management: IO OS enables continuous monitoring, control and ITIL-based managed services integration for the data center providing complete management of the data center from a “single pane of glass.”

Suntron Adopts IO Anywhere

IO also said Monday that it has been awarded a contract with Suntron Corporation, a leading provider of electronics manufacturing services and embedded computing solutions. IO will provide Suntron with Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) at its IO Phoenix location, delivered through its IO Anywhere modular data center technology platform.

Suntron operates prototyping facilities in the United States and Mexico. Their Phoenix facility serves as the corporate headquarters and southwest manufacturing facility, producing high reliability products for aerospace, defense, medical and industrial markets. IO’s compartmentalized architecture provides Suntron and its customers with an added level of security and flexibility to ensure information assets are always protected.

“In dealing with the defense customers that require our NADCAP, AS9100 and ITAR certifications, security and availability of our data are our number one priorities,” said Tony Portela, Director of IT at Suntron. “We selected IO because, like us, they deliver innovative solutions tailored to match specific customer requirements, while meeting the highest quality standards.”

A row of Io Anywhere data center modules at the IO Phoenix facility.

Photobucket is shifting much of its infrastructure to a modular data center deployment at IO Phoenix, the companies said today. Photobucket will house its IT equipment in two dedicated IPO Anywhere modules inside the 540,000 square foot facility in Phoenix.

The content-sharing service said the new space will help it keep pace with accelerated video uploads by its 100 million users. Photobucket says the pace of video uploads has surged over the last year, and is now 3.5 times the volume seen in July 2010. That capacity demand prompted the company to update its infrastructure.

“It was more cost effective for us to relocate out of our then current provider’s data center than to execute a renewal with them,” said Jim Goss, Vice President of Operations at Photobucket. “With IO Anywhere, we gained a higher quality data center with greater density and at lower total cost of ownership.”

The Photobucket deployment is the latest in a series of customer announcements for IO’s modular data centers, including deals with Logicalis, Allianz Global Investors, Binary Pulse, Technical & Business Consulting,

IO Anywhere enclosures offer a predictable energy-efficient design that can be deployed rapidly and bought in smaller installments than wholesale space. The systems are scalable from installations from 200 kilowatts to multiple megawatts.

Green House Data to build second Wyoming data center. Cheyenne, Wyoming-based Green House Data announced plans to build a second data center in the state – expanding its footprint by 25,000 square feet to meet the growing customer demand for energy efficient IT infrastructure. The second facility will be a Tier 3 facility utilizing 100 percent renewable energy power, boosting total capacity to 4.5 megawatts between the two facilities. The company was profiled last year as using electricity provided by Cheyenne, Light, Fuel and Power, which has partnered on a 30-megawatt wind generation site in Cheyenne. “Wyoming offers many benefits to support high tech companies like ours,” said Shawn Mills, President of Green House Data. “The State and local economic development agencies have provided immense support to encourage our business to expand in Wyoming.” Set to be complete in the first quarter of 2013 the plan calls for a total of 50,000 square feet when at full capacity.

Interxion to build sixth facility in Amsterdam.  Interxion (INXN) announced that it will build its sixth data center (AMS6) in its Amsterdam campus area. Scheduled to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2012 the 4,000 square meter (43,000 square feet) data center will have 10 megawatts of customer available power. “We are seeing significant demand in Amsterdam for carrier neutral colocation space, particularly among cloud service providers and digital media providers,” said David Ruberg, Interxion’s Chief Executive Officer. “By continuing to expand in this key market, we are demonstrating our commitment to support our customers’ current and future growth plans.” The design calls for innovative features such as aquifer thermal energy storage infrastructure and a highly efficient power topology to minimize the data centre’s carbon footprint.

Nirvanix selected by USC.  Nirvanix announced that the University of Southern California (USC) will deploy over 8 petabytes of unstructured data on a Nirvanix Private Cloud Storage solution. The fully-managed solution from Nirvanix will include digital content from multiple USC entities, including the USC Shoah Foundation Institute in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the USC Digital Repository, a division of the USC Libraries. “In the current economic environment, the combination of hypergrowth in digital content and the need for greater return on investment at all academic institutions is driving the need for a new generation of IT solutions,” said Sam Gustman, CTO for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and Associate Dean of the USC Libraries. “We shifted to the cloud because it provides USC with a geographically diverse and cost-effective way of storing, preserving and distributing our content on a truly global scale.”

IO selected by Binary Pulse.  IO announced today that it has been awarded a contract with Binary Pulse, a leader in private cloud and IT solutions for professional services practices. Within the IO Phoenix data center Binary Pulse will use IO’s Data Center as a Service solution, delivered through its modular data center technology platform IO Anywhwere. Binary Pulse will utilize IO’s state-of-the art environment to ensure its professional IT services, private cloud solutions, and physical and virtual hosting services are always available 24x7xForever. ”Companies with IT infrastructures in a traditional data center are missing an opportunity to create efficiencies that reduce capital and operational costs,” stated Brant Roberts, CEO of Binary Pulse. “IO’s modular data center platform allows us to only buy what we require to eliminate over provisioning and significantly reduce total cost of ownership.”

IO selected to support large health-care data center. IO announced that it has been awarded a contract with the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health (CSS Institute), NantWorks LLC and National LambdaRail (NLR), to support the largest health-care data center in the world.  IO will provide private cloud computing services at IO Phoenix. ”In addition to generating massive volumes of information requiring high-performance IT, the regulatory environment of the healthcare ecosystem also requires a highly protected and reliable infrastructure,” said Anthony D’Ambrosi, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. “IO’s high-density and ultra-secure infrastructure enables healthcare IT to accomplish their goals both today and into the future.” When completed, the central health-care database will securely store patient information, to be accessible nationally and eventually globally and be connected to LambdaRail, a 12,000 high-performance communications network linking major research institutions throughout the United States.

Equinix opens second IBX in Hong Kong.  Equinix (EQIX) announced the opening of the first phase of its second International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Hong Kong. The $63 million investment in the HK2 facility extends Platform Equinix to 99 data centers worldwide across 38 strategic markets. The expansion in the western part of the New Territories region of Hong Kong was driven by demand from financial services and cloud service providers in the region. “Commercial growth and the continuation of Hong Kong’s dominance as a financial hub in Asia are key drivers of demand for data center services in the local market,” said Alex Tam, managing director, Equinix Greater China. “Data centers are an essential part of the city’s infrastructure and the opening of HK2 ensures the supply of data center availability needed to support the sustainable growth of traditional pillar industries such as financial services and trading.”

CloudSigma launches SSD in Public Cloud IaaS.  During the 2011 Cloud Computing Expo CloudSigma launched the industry’s first solid-state drive (SSD) storage solution for a public cloud IaaS environment. As I/O operations become even more random in multi-tenant, public cloud environments, magnetic storage solutions that rely on physical, spinning disks simply cannot keep up. Using a multi drive-to-server model the ability exists to create a tiered storage system and stage critical application data and files on SSD. “With our new SSD storage product, companies can, for the first time, easily handle the random nature of I/O loads in public clouds while minimizing necessary servers and realizing significant cost savings. Because the storage performance of hard drives has not kept pace with server performance or networking bandwidths, incorporating an SSD storage solution was a necessity, and will significantly expand the breadth of computing tasks that our public cloud can handle effectively,” said Patrick Baillie, CloudSigma CEO.

The Modular Market

While the modular market is still fairly young, there has been some tremendous innovation and engineering design efforts put into solutions.  As engineered solutions continue to grow the adoption from businesses of all sizes continue to grow as well.

Many of the major server vendors have modular data center products and while they are optimized to work with their hardware, will typically support anything a standard rack supports. Vendors worldwide have engineered their own version of a container or module and incorporated a variety of unique capabilities into their solution. Having one vendor supply all components for and within the rack for a module enables them to engineer it as a complete solution that can then have modular power and cooling products complement the IT module.  Modular data center products, including containers, are available from: IO, HP, IBM, SGI, Dell, Cisco, Cirrascale, Bull, AST, Schneider Electric, PDI (acquired by Smiths Interconnect), Emerson Network Power, Silver Linings, and Telenetix.

Within the everything-as-a-Service model, a modular provider is able to offer the entire data center as a service, by quickly adding a module of IT with all supporting power and cooling infrastructure. The entire module is available as a package, integrating all aspects of the IT within and subsystems through DCIM or other management tools. Modular data center Providers include: IO, NxGen Modular, COLT, Cannon, Pacific Voice and Data, BladeRoom, Pelio & Associates, Dock IT, Lee Technologies (acquired by Schneider Electric), Datapod and Turbine Air Systems (TAS)/Celestica (CLS).

The entire Guide to Modular Data Centers white paper can be downloaded here, courtesy of IO.

DCK Guide to Modular Data Centers Home

The interior of an IO Anywhere modular data center, with racks at left and the data center management screen at right.

Modular data center service provider IO has been awarded a contract with Technical & Business Consulting (TB Consulting) and will house and support TB Consulting’s IT systems in a dedicated IO Anywhere module in the IO Phoenix data center.

“IO provides TB Consulting the most secure and reliable data center capabilities available in the market today with IO Anywhere,” said Dieter Gable, CEO of TB Consulting. “Our clients depend on us for 100 percent uptime and we’re able to deliver this through IO’s large-scale, cost-effective data centers.”

IO Anywhere enclosures offer a predictable energy-efficient design that can be deployed rapidly and bought in smaller installments than wholesale space. The systems are scalable from installations from 200 kilowatts  to multiple megawatts.

A screen capture of the i/o OS software for managing data center infrastructure.

As IT infrastructure becomes more complex, software is playing a growing role in the data center business. That’s certainly true for i/o, which has developed its own software to manage and automate its  modular data centers.

The development of the i/o OS “data center operating system” software is part of the Phoenix-based company’s broader bid to redefine the infrastructure and vocabulary of the data center business. i/o now describers itself as a digital energy company, reflecting a shift in which data centers are now leased in terms of megawatts of power capacity rather than square feet of space. In shifting its focus from traditional colocation facilities, i/o is now advancing modular deployment as “data center 2.0.”

So why software? i/o sees it as a way to leverage its in-house research-and-development operation and distinguish its offerings in a changing market for IT infrastructure. “We’re putting a lot of investment into this software,” said Anthony D’Ambrosi, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for i/o. The company has been expanding its development team as part of that effort.

The Data Center and the ‘”Single Pane of Glass”
i/o isn’t the first or only data center service provider to develop its own software, as IBM and HP could certainly attest. It joins a growing number of competitors in the market for data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software.

The data center optimization field has become more crowded in recent years, as a flurry of new companies have introduced software to manage and automate elements of the data center. Equipment vendors have also stepped up efforts to offer software to centralize management of devices and conditions within the data center. The bid to create a “single pane of glass” – one DCIM tool to rule them all – is the holy grail for these companies.

i/o says its software opportunity ties into a larger paradigm shift in how companies deploy IT infrastructure. “We’re making a bet on the entire business model being modular,” said D’Ambrosi. “Think of it as a refresh of the data center strategy. What we’re creating is an IT appliance and turning the data center into another part of the IT stack. We’re going to empower the IT organization to take over the data center.”

APIs, SDK and Integration
i/o OS is written in the C#, and provides application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow customers to tie into its capabilities. D’Ambrosi says i/o is developing an extensibility roadmap, including a software development kit (SDK) to allow clients and developers to build their own apps to plug into the system. i/o says its OS supports most apps and equipment, but the company is also offering an integration service for customers.

In addition to tracking and management capabilities, i/o is emphasizing its software’s ability to provide continuous feedback to help identify potential problems and take preventative action.

i/o President Anthony Wanger says the software will be upgradeable, allowing for additional capabilities as the company’s modules and hardware offerings evolve. He says i/o OS is part of the company’s larger effort to “separate the improvements from the real estate.”

“We’ve invested in research,” said Wanger. “We think it’s a sustainable advantage.”