Data Center Construction Hiring in Spotlight

Building a data center requires a variety of skill sets, and typically involves many types of trades and contractors. The hiring of contractors and sub-contractors usually gets little attention outside the industry or work site. That’s changing, as seen in a series of articles (including one this weekend by the Salt Lake Tribune) tracking the hiring process at the 1 billion data center project for the National Security Agency at Camp Williams.

As data center projects emerge as important economic development opportunities, they are increasingly seen as a potential source of jobs. In a difficult economy, data center construction attract tremendous interest from job seekers. And as local governments use tax incentives to lure major data centers, residents are watching to see whether these projects create jobs for local residents or out-of-state contractors.

Mindful of this, Facebook has posted a list of the contractors (see the Notes tab) that it is hiring for its new data center in Prineville, Oregon, with contact information for each company. “The Facebook Prineville Data Center project will seek to provide as many local construction opportunities for workers and companies as possible, and seek to purchase materials locally whenever possible,” the company says.

Data Center Haiku Contest

Look what Jonathan Schwartz has wrought! By resigning on Twitter via a haiku tweet, the former Sun Microsystems president have focused fresh attention on haiku, the three-line Japanese poetry form. 

This has inspired the folks at newScale to start a Data Center Haiku Contest for those inspired to pan gems such as:

Be strong, blade server
Stay in your rack and burn hot
You are beautiful

The contest runs through Feb. 15, and you can submit via Twitter (@CarolDirig) or by emailing your entry to marketing@newscale.com. The winner receives a coffee mug emblazoned with their winning data center haiku.

UPDATE: Chuck Goolsbee has some wortwhile chiller haiku.

Opscode Equips DevOps to Automate the Cloud

Opscode is a new company built for a new breed of IT professional. The Seattle startup says its community of developers is creating a pool of open source tools for developer operations (DevOps), a combination of a systems administrator and developer who is required to quickly configure and update systems in dynamic data center environments.

Opscode is led by executives who have been responsible for managing some of the world’s largest and highly dynamic computing infrastructures. As Master of Disaster at Amazon.com, Opscode Co-Founder and CEO Jesse Robbins was responsible for Web site availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand, while Opscode VP of Engineering Christopher Brown was a founding member, architect and lead developer for Amazon’s EC2. Co-founder and CTO Adam Jacob also founded HJK Solutions, an automated infrastructure consultancy.

Beyond the ‘SysAdmin’
“The importance of the operating system and low-level configuration is being pushed away as people have standardized on platforms,” says Robbins. “Now the next-generation approach to infrastructure is more dynamic, as we get into virtualization and cloud computing. In a dynamic infrastructure, the SysAdmin is required to think in a different way when there are shorter release times.”

In a traditional infrastructure, it may take months to get a server online. SysAdmins in a dynamic infrastructure, such as those at Amazon.com, Yahoo, and Google, are required to have new servers up and ready in a matter of minutes. They’re also required to have some software development knowledge to be able to quickly configure software for the systems.

DC People: Rittal, Fortrust, Wright Line, PDI

It’s been a busy week for executive appointments in the data center industry. Here’s a review of some of the news:

New president for Rittal: Ken Fairleigh is the new president of Rittal Corporation, a maker of IT modular enclosure, cooling and electronic packaging systems. Fairleigh has more than 25 years of experience in global sales management, marketing, distribution and operations. Prior to joining Rittal, he held positions at General Electric, Square D and Fluke, and most recently served as vice president and general manager of Rexnord in the product service group. “We are excited to welcome Mr. Fairleigh to the Rittal team, and look forward to his contributions as he leads our U.S. subsidiary in serving our customers and expanding our market share,” said Bernd Eckel, Rittal’s president of sales international.

New VP of Sales for Fortrust: Denver colocation provider Fortrust announced Thursday that Rob Timmons has joined the Denver data center team as its new Vice President of Sales. Timmons brings more than a decade of sales, management and strategic experience to Fortrust, and will be responsible for managing direct sales, agent sales, account development and marketing. Prior to joining Fortrust, Timmons held various sales and management positions with tw telecom, USLEC, Net2000 and e-spire communications. “I am extremely pleased to welcome Rob to our executive team,” said Steve Knudson, chief executive officer of Fortrust. “His extensive sales leadership experience and proven abilities to impact business development and growth make him a great asset to the Denver data center team.”

Geist Acquires EnviroNet Monitoring Tools

A screen shot of the Environet monitoring software, which is now part of Geist Intelligent Facilities.

RLE Technologies has sold its Environet Product Group to Plastic Companies Enterprises, Inc., the parent company of power and monitoring specialist Geist Manufacturing, the companies said today. The Environet product line, along with other building automation and asset management software applications, will be managed by the newly formed Geist Intelligent Facilities (Geist I.F.) which will be located in Fort Collins, Colo.

Environet provides monitoring, alarming, trending, control, and notification to help monitor, manage, and protect remote operations and critical infrastructure. Environet systems are capable of capturing information from a variety of protocols (including SNMP, BACNet, Modbus, and LON) and combining the data into a single, integrated system with a graphical interfaces and alarming and reporting functions. 

Nimsoft Tool Offers ‘Unified Monitoring’

A look at the dashboard for Nimsoft NMS Unified Monitoring.

“The era of unified monitoring has begun. 10/20/2009.”That was the slogan on a t-shirt at the Gartner ITxpo Tuesday from Nimsoft, which announced Tuesday that its Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) now provides real-time monitoring of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service applications alongsides virtualized in-house data center operations.

The enhanced monitoring allows customers to gain complete visibility over their entire IT infrastructure, monitoring both internal and external environments. Cloud and SaaS probes monitor and benchmark Google Apps, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and EC2, Salesforce.com and other services.  A complete API is available to both customers and third party developers to enable extensions to NMS. 

Roundup: BMC, Nirvanix, United Layer

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

• BMC Acquires Tideway: BMC Software (BMC) said Monday that it will acquire Tideway Systems Ltd., a provider of IT discovery solutions. BMC said the acquisition will enhance its Business Service Management (BSM) platform and help organizations minimize the risks associated with business-critical initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization and compliance.
• Nirvanix digital archive for National September 11 Memorial and Museum.  Cloud storage service provider Nirvanix announced that the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN) is the digital archive platform for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum’s archive of audio, video and photographs.  Museum president Joe Daniels said “With so much audio, photos and videos thus far collected as part of the Museum’s permanent collection, we found that we had an immediate need to archive a very high volume of digital data quickly.”  The memorial and museum will use digital media to document what happened that day as well as the aftermath and will be located on eight of the 16 acres of the World Trade Center site.

Credit Thaw Boosts Data Center Construction

Data center companies are finding it easier to raise capital for data center construction, which is helping business for companies in engineering and construction management. That’s the word from Fortress International Group (FIGI) which said today that a surge in data center construction has helped it win six contracts totaling $39.4 million in recent weeks.

“Our private sector project wins are the direct result of the credit markets opening up in our sector,” said Fortress Chief Executive Officer Thomas Rosato. “Capital spending has been very slow since October of 2008. We are now beginning to see our capacity-constrained data center customers executing their facilities expansion plans to meet pent up demand. The credit markets are responding favorably to this segment and we expect to see increased project spending over the next few quarters.”

Fortress’ new contracts included four design and construction projects for two colocation customers totaling $36.4 million in revenue over the next eight months with projects. The facilities will be located in Chicago, Toronto and Atlanta. Fortress said it was also awarded a three-year, $2.7 million facility management contract to commission and service multiple containerized data center modules.

Data Centers, Carrier Hotels and Security

Telecom and data center industry veteran John Savageau has published a four-part series of blog posts on Telecom Risk and Security that provides a thorough overview of the issues involved in securing telcom and data center services. Here are some quick links:

• Part 1: Risk and Security in the Telecommunications Industry
• Part 2: The Carrier Hotel SuperNode
• Part 3: Human Factors
• Part 4: Facilities

Savageau is President of Pacific-Tier Communications based in Honolulu, Hawaii.