Feral Cats Block $68M Los Angeles Data Center

A $68 million project to build a new high-tech data center for Los Angeles County is being held up because the property is occupied - by 150 wild cats. The new facility is to be built at the Rancho Los Amigos South Campus in Downey, parts of which have fallen into disrepair. Plans to raze buildings to make way for the data center have been held up by the presence of the feral cats, as reported in today’s Los Angeles Times. Here’s an excerpt:

“It’s a [long pause] difficult situation,” said Jan Takata of the county’s Chief Administrative Office, which oversees Rancho’s south campus. … For starters, figuring out what to do with feral cats has vexed animal control managers, veterinarians and biologists around the world. The never-tamed offspring of abandoned or lost pets, they are usually too wild to be adopted as house pets. Trapping feral cats to euthanize them is time-consuming, expensive and far from foolproof. And killing the cats on site is not palatable to the public, as Wisconsinites discovered in 2005 when not even hunters wanted to legalize cat shoots.

Many of the buildings on the Rancho Los Amigos South Campus have stood empty since the late 1980s. The county data center was seen as an ideal project to rehabilitate the site.

One Wilshire, Illustrated

Wired provides a photo tour of One Wilshire, the Los Angeles carrier hotel that provides space and interconnections for more than 260 ISPs and telcos. The photos illustrate the kind of cabling you see in the world’s densest meet-me room. If you like data center tours and cabling photos, you’ll want to have a look.

“If this facility went down, most of California and parts of the rest of the world would not be able to connect to the Internet,” notes Wired, which describes One Wilshire as “one of the web’s largest nerve centers, hidden in an otherwise nondescript office building.” Hines REIT bought One Wilshire from The Carlyle Group for $287 million last August.

InteleNet Expands Irvine Data Center

Managed Data Holdings (MDH) is already expanding its data center footprint. The company, which is backed by private equity firms and acquired Data393 earlier this month, is pumping up the infrastructure at one of its existing properties. Irvine, Calif.-based managed hosting provider InteleNet Communications, which was bought by MDH in October, has started construction on a data center expansion that will add 12,000 square feet of space engineered to support high density computing customers.

Intelenet had planned the expansion for later in 2008. With its acquisition by Managed Data Holdings, the new space is now expected to be ready for customers in March. InteleNet has already begun pre-selling space in the expansion space.

DreamHost Evicted From LA Offices

In an item yesterday we noted that DreamHost was among the remaining data center tenants at the Garland Building in Los Angeles. We may have spoken too soon. The hosting company has posted a blog item announcing its eviction from its Los Angeles offices, which the company attributes to “a little bit too much bringing alcohol into the building, playing pool, neighbor complaints about loud profanities.” What’s more, the item (attributed to co-founder Josh Jones) ads that “our new office space isn’t even ready yet!” (See the end of this post for an update).

I have to wonder what DreamHost’s new landlords will think when they read the blog item. I can appreciate that a humorous, offbeat reputation may play well for some hosting companies. DreamHost has certainly cultivated that image with its blog. But the eviction post (complete with photos) screams the question of whether there are any grown-ups running either the company or the blog.

Upgrades Planned for LA’s Garland Building

The Garland Building (1200 W. 7th) in Los Angeles, which hosts several data centers, has been plagued by power capacity and reliability problems for several years. Help may be on the way, as the building’s management is promising $30 million in infrastructure upgrades for the 740,000 square foot building. The Internet companies at 1200 W. 7th have been pressing for upgrades since the building suffered major outages in 2005 and 2006.

The impetus for the upgrades is a new lease by anchor tenant Bank of America, which will pay $28 million to continue leasing 83,000 square feet on the lower levels. Real estate sources said the Bank of America lease was the key to a plan by master lease holder Charter Holdings to upgrade the building. Jason Warner of CB Richard Ellis told industry journal Globe Street that Charter Holdings will invest $30 million to upgrade the infrastructure by doubling the size of the central plant and “significantly increasing the building’s power, back-up power and mechanical equipment.”

NPR Features One Wilshire Carrier Hotel

National Public Radio technology correspondent Xeni Jardin featured Internet carrier hotels in a segment that aired yesterday. The piece spotlighted One Wilshire, the huge Los Angeles Internet hub owned and operated by CRG West, the technology real estate arm of the Carlyle Group. The report introduced carrier hotels and the basics of Internet infrastructure to a general audience, but also highlighted the fact that “business is booming” at One Wilshire, according to CRG West’s David Dunn, who said One Wilshire has experienced demand from the emerging market for Internet video games.

Jardin, also one of the anchor bloggers at Boing Boing, used the recent earthquake in Taiwan to illustrate the resiliency of Internet infrastructure, noting that the networks housed at One Wilshire were able to route around the outages within several days of the earthquake. The segment also mentions the possibility the carrier hotels could be targeted by terrorists, an angle that has often turned up in media coverage of this industry. Internet security guru Bruce Schneier contributed a sound clip that placed the terrorist issue in perspective. You can listen here or check out the photos at Flickr.

Some ISPs Spurn 10 GigE Video Peering

Some ISPs are turning away paid high-speed transit traffic from video companies, citing the cost of the equipment needed to upgrade to 10 gigabit Ethernet connections. These ISPs are sticking with slower connections, even though the growing volume of video traffic could create periodic capacity challenges. This trend was noted earlier this month by Bill Norton, a founder of Equinix and leading researcher on Internet peering, who predicts that the surging popularity of online video will bring “a new wave of disruption that potentially dwarfs currently peered Internet traffic.”

“This has become a significant issue NOW because a few of the largest US ISPs are turning away these n*10G Internet video transit customers,” Norton said in a post in the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), which prompted a lengthy discussion of online video’s impact on network capacity. The topic has become even more relevant in light of the potentially disruptive impact of the peer-to-peer IPTV app Joost (The Venice Project) and NetFlix’ announcement that it will stream full-length feature films.

Several providers, including Equinix, say video growth is driving strong demand for 10 gigabit Ethernet connections, high-capacity pipes that enable providers to move enormous volumes of traffic. But the volume of traffic generated by online video is altering the economics of these connections. In some cases, the financial benefits of big-pipe peering don’t offset the short-term expense of network upgrades needed to support 10 gigabit Ethernet equipment. While the parties can continue to peer over existing connections, the growing volume of video traffic could stress networks and affect performance.

365 Main Unveils Further Expansion

365 Main Inc. continues to expand its network of data centers, adding two facilities in California markets where existing centers are nearing capacity. The San Francisco-based company today announced the acquisition of a facility in Oakland, Calif. and plans to construct a new data center in Vernon, Calif. (Los Angeles market) to meet continuing strong demand for data center space. The announcement comes as the company has sold out its flagship facility in San Francisco and as its El Segundo, Calif. data center, which opened in June 2006, is nearing capacity.

On Tuesday 365 Main closed on the acquisition of an 111,000 square-foot Oakland data center near Jack London Square, which includes 80,000 square feet of technical space with a 30-inch raised floor. Metro PCS Wireless Inc. and T-Mobile USA are existing tenants in the property, which was built in 2001. 365 Main is investing in additional infrastructure for power, cooling, connectivity and security at the property, which is less than 10 miles from 365 Main’s original San Francisco data center. 365 Main says demand for the remaining space in Oakland is significant, and the first lease for a private colocation room has already been signed by GNi, a California-based managed services provider that provides support services for 365 Main tenants and leases space at most of its facilities.

“The demand for high-quality data center space in the San Francisco Bay Area is the greatest in the country, and we’ve simply run out of room at our San Francisco facility,” said Chris Dolan, chief executive officer of 365 Main. “Expanding to Oakland fits all our criteria: existing demand, existing tenants, good location, well-defined pipeline. It’s a strategic move that makes sense for our business, and we look forward to becoming part of the Oakland community.”

MySpace Shifts to Peering For Video Delivery

When MySpace decided to use an in-house solution for delivering streaming video to its 75 million users, it was a blow to VitalStream, the content distribution network (CDN) and video delivery provider which relied on MySpace for a third of revenue. Within a week, VitalStream announced that it had been acquired by Internap for $217 million.

The winner in the MySpace technology shift was Equinix, whose peering capabilities were a major factor in the social networking hub’s decision to lease space in the new Equinix data center in Los Angeles.

“MySpace’s (video streaming) announcement was all about the value of peering in an Equinix facility,” Peter Van Camp, CEO of Equinix, said in the company’s recent analyst briefing. “MySpace wants to manage their own content distribution, so they are moving to more of a peering model in the way they deliver their content. By being in our data centers and next to all these other networks, they can get their content onto these downstream networks, which is really what the CDNs did for them.”

Power Woes Continue at LA’s Garland Building

Tenants at the Garland Building (1200 W. 7th) in Los Angeles have been enduring a difficult week. On July 24 the building lost all power for the second time in less than a year, as an automatic transfer switch and UPS backup system failed. The resulting outage made headlines, as it knocked MySpace off the Web for an extended period. Then on July 28, the Garland building suffered *another* loss of power, which was attributed to a “dead short” that occurred while the building was on generator power.

The outages have been especially difficult for Dreamhost, a growing hosting provider which colocates servers in two facilities within Garland (Switch & Data and Alchemy). Dreamhost had been struggling with network problems when the July 24 power outage hit, and has had rolling performance problems ever since. The Dreamhost team maintains a weblog, and today it provided its frustrated customers with a lengthy chapter-and-verse timetable of the problems, titled Anatomy on a(n Ongoing) Disaster.

As Dreamhost’s Josh Jones explains, the repeated outages at 1200 W. 7th are related to power capacity issues and the cost of redundancy.