When Incentives Don’t Work Out

Tax incentives have become the table stakes in data center site location. The growing number of states offering incentives has expanded the geography of the data center industry, and made it difficult for local governments to win major projects without generous tax packages.

The poster child for this movement has been the state of North Carolina, which has wielded tax breaks to bring two tech titans to virtually unknown small towns. In 2007 Google picked Lenoir, N.C. as the location for a $600 million data center, and earlier this year Apple Inc. chose Maiden, N.C. as the site of a $1 billion data storage site. Customized incentive packages were key factors in the decision process for both companies.

Dell Announces Plant Closing
But not all of the state’s incentives for tech firms have worked out. This week Dell Inc. announced that it is closing a computer manufacturing plant in Winston-Salem, and will pay back the incentives it has collected as part of a $280 million package of tax breaks used to sweeten the 2004 deal.

Raritan Partners With Capgemini

Data center management specialist Raritan Inc. today announced a strategic alliance with technology outsourcing frim Capgemini U.S. , which will focus on solutions to help data center customers reduce their energy costs.

Raritan and Capgemini will join their resources to support Capgemini’s Technology Services’ Network, Operations and Infrastructure Services evolution (NOISe) service, which helps customers optimize their current IT environments. Specifically, Capgemini will use Raritan’s PowerIQ energy management software, intelligent power distribution units (PDUs), environmental sensors, and the dcTrack IT asset and infrastructure management software.

Emerson Acquires Avocent in $1.2B Deal

Emerson (EMR) will acquire infrastructure management specialist Avocent Corporation (AVCT) for $1.2 billion in a deal that highlights the growing focus on tools to help data center operators track and manage the energy efficiency of their facilities. Avocent’s board unanimously endorsed Emerson’s all-cash tender offer of $25 per share, the companies said this morning. Shares of Avocent closed Monday at $20.52.

Emerson is a leading vendor of power and cooling technologies for the data center. The acquisition of Avocent allows Emerson to continue to enhance its offerings for tracking and managing data center assets, following on last year’s purchase of Aperture, which makes capacity planning software. Emerson’s data center-related revenues were approximately $2.6 billion in fiscal 2008.

“Combining Avocent’s technologies, relationships and installed base with Emerson’s power and cooling presence allows us to offer a more compelling solution to our data center customers’ most pressing challenge – energy efficiency,” said David N. Farr, Emerson chairman, CEO and president. “It furthers our customers’ ability to better manage reliability, availability and lifecycle costs through a simple yet comprehensive view of the complete data center physical infrastructure.”

Data Center and C-Suite: Lost in Translation?

The cloud computing conversation is taking place in the boardroom, and the data center manger needs to have a seat at the table, or risk losing control of key decisions about the future. That was the message from Andy Parham, the CEO of Bick Group, in this morning’s opening keynote of the AFCOM Data Center World conference.

“Ours is the most strategically relevant business to the future success of major companies,” Parham said in the opening session at the Marriott World Center in Orlando. “But I believe we don’t do a good enough job connecting the value we deliver to the priorities of the executive office. I don’t see a lot of dialogue between the CEO and the data center, and I think that’s going to change.”

With the onset of the economic crisis, the high cost of data center expansion has become a C-suite issue, Parham said, even as the emergence of cloud computing has offered a new utility model. There’s been plenty of hype and confusion in the cloud computing conversation, but that doesn’t diminish the disruptive impact of the tend over the long-term, Parham said.

Is Internet Routing Too Vulnerable?

It’s become an increasingly familiar story: A small ISP somewhere makes an error in its Internet routing announcements, triggering chaotic events like the IP “hijacking” of YouTube in 2008 and an incident in February that caused outages at major hosting providers. 

It happened again last week, according to Renesys, which reports that an incorrect BGP announcement by a small ISP in Nagoya, Japan triggered a wave of errant updates. This ripple effect was related to a weakness in updated code for a version of Cisco’s IOS operating system for routers. Cisco promptly posted a security advisory and patch. 

The incident prompted commentary from James Cowie of Renesys on the potential for future trouble due to software updates.

Judge Tosses Most Counts Against SysAdmin

Following up on a story we first covered last July: A judge has dismissed three of the four charges against former network administrator Terry Childs, who is accused of inappropriately locking down the city of San Francisco’s main computer network. Childs has been jailed since last summer, charged with four felony counts of computer network tampering. Last week Superior Court Judge Kevin McCarthy found insufficient evidence for three of the four counts. The remaining count alleges that Childs denied access to his supervisors. Childs later surrendered the info in a meeting with Mayor Gavin Newsom. See the San Francisco Examiner for more details and Slashdot for additional discussion of the case.

Roundup: Monolith, Raritan, Fortrust, Brocade

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

• Equinix monitors European data centers with Monolith software. Equinix (EQIX) operates 19 Internet Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in Europe and announced Wednesday that they have chosen Monolith Software as its technology monitoring platform. Equinix said it evaluated various monitoring tools and then standardized on Monolith’s network operations monitoring solution. “Monolith was able to meet all of our requirements and since deploying Monolith, we have been satisfied with its flexibility and scalability,” said Andy Castle, vice president of IT – Equinix Europe.
• Raritan unveils major upgrade to dcTrack. Infrastructure and KVM management solution provider Raritan announced a major upgrade to dcTrack , its data center infrastructure management solution. The software helps data center staff visualize and automate the tracking and management of IT and facility systems. “The new enhancements are designed to improve capacity planning and utilization, support change management, and drive costs out of data center operations,” said Khaled Nassoura of Raritan. The software upgrade features new built-in wizards, importing of existing spreadsheets containing IT assets and connectivity details without the need to modify the spreadsheets’ structure or format. dcTrack is able to dynamically link to AutoCAD and Visio floor plan drawings and can use the built-in SNMP auto-discovery features to maintain accurate records of IT systems, MAC and IP addressing and software applications.
• Fortrust announces virtualized disaster recovery service. Data center and colocation provider FORTRUST announced availability of AppSafe, an advanced disaster recovery service Tuesday. AppSafe is a managed disaster recovery service for rapid recovery of business-critical applications in the event of an outage or disaster. Images of customer’s servers are maintained in FORTRUST’s virtual server environment. AppSafe has 3 standard solutions for Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives, starting at $500 one-time cost.

Roundup: nlyte, Avocent, Rackwise, Riverbed

It’s already been a busy week for news announcements from data center software companies. Here’s a roundup:

• New Name for Global DataCenter Management (GDCM): While the legal structure of the company stays intact, GDCM is changing its name to nlyte Software to enhance market recognition and simplify its branding. The company’s nlyte software is a leading solution for data center planning and performance management. In conjunction with the name change, the company also secured $8 million in investment from UK firm Ruffer, LLP. The funds will be used to support the company’s aggressive global growth plans. “nlyte Software has a rapidly expanding customer base that demonstrates its value to the enterprise,” said Tim Youngman from Ruffer, LLP.
• Avocent unveils major upgrade to LANDesk. IT Operations management software provider Avocent (AVCT) announced an upgrade to its LANDesk Service Desk IT Business Management Suite Monday. The latest release has tighter integration with LANDesk solutions and systems, enabling a quicker return on investment. New features include a new web desk application, integration with SolarWindows Orion Network Performance Monitor, better query results, multiple dashboards and calculations on queries and forms. The new version of the software is available immediately.

IPv4 DeathWatch App for the iPhone

Wondering when the Internet will run out of IPv4 addresses? If you ever need that information in a flash, Hurricane Electric has you covered. The company has released a suite of widgets to help track the shrinking supply of Internet addresses using IPv4, along with the growth of the IPv6 standard which will succeed it. The tools include an iPhone App as well as a web page widget, an iGoogle Gadget, a Google Desktop Gadget and a Windows Vista Gadget.

“CIOs and network administrators cannot continue to postpone the transition to IPv6,” said Martin Levy, Hurricane Electric’s Director of IPv6 Strategy. “We hope that this iPhone App and the other tools we have developed will be a fun way to bring attention to a serious issue facing the networking community.”