In a column  at GigaOm, Charlie Oppenheimerof Matrix Partners runs the numbers for using AWS versus in-house infrastructure. ”In most cases, the analysis illustrates why intuition is right (for example, that a highly variable compute load is a slam dunk for AWS). In other cases, certain high-sensitivity factors become evident and drive the economic answer. There are also cases where a hybrid infrastructure is at least worthy of consideration.”

That prompted a response from AWS blogger Jeff Barr, who said some of Oppenheimer’s assumptions skewed the analysis. “These analyses are always tricky to do and you always need to make apples-to-apples cost comparisons and the benefits associated with each approach,” said Barr. “We’re always happy to work with those wanting to get into the details of these analyses; we continue to focus on lowering infrastructure costs and we’re far from being done.”

The discussion echoes a similar debate in 2010, when networking executive Vijay Gill (then at Google) shared calculations suggesting colocation could be significantly cheaper than Amazon.  These discussions are unlikely to settle the issue, but provide useful data points for companies analyzing the most cost-effective way to deploy growing infrastructures.

“Our new facility fulfills the requirements set by customers wishing to outsource their IT infrastructure to a data center in the downtown core, directly within Canada’s telecommunications epicenter,” said Robert Offley, President and CEO at CentriLogic.

The company’s existing infrastructure consists of redundant interconnected data centers in Southern Ontario and Western New York, with expansion programs in place at facilities in Western Canada and Europe.

Growth Seen for Ontario Market

“It is expected that the Canadian hosting market will grow 11% in 2012,” said Mark Schrutt, Director, Services & Enterprise Applications, for IDC Canada. “Ontario is the largest segment and Toronto is particularly strong due to heavy demand, where demand outstrips supply. This expansion in Toronto’s downtown core provides needed capacity for Centrilogic’s portfolio of hosting and cloud services.”

CentriLogic says the mix of services desired by customers is evolving, and the new space provides additional flexibility to adapt to these demands.

“CentriLogic’s current infrastructure at 151 Front Street is primarily allocated to virtual hosting and cloud computing environments,” said Jim Latimer, CentriLogic’s Chief Strategy Officer. “For some customers, however, virtualization and cloud may not be the most appropriate solutions. For others, the transition from a traditional co-located environment to a virtual environment will take place over time. CentriLogic will utilize the new facility to extend our existing downtown infrastructure, and provide tailored, hybrid hosting solutions designed to accommodate each customer’s unique needs.”

Cisco has created a holistic structure by combining a service ecosystem while blending three of the most important technologies in the data center, these are classified as:
• Cisco Unified Computing – a scalable integration of computing, networking and storage
• Cisco Unified Fabric – end to end fabric at half the cost of competitive systems and twice the scalability
• Cisco Unified Management – Award winning solutions for IT service-creation and self-service capabilities

Considering a new framework may seem daunting and have you questioning if it’s worth the investment. But, an assessment of both CapEx and OpEx will prove otherwise. Read this overview and understand why an evolving data center should not be piecemealed as it grows but should be planned for maximum business and revenue potential. Click here to access this document (no registration required).

Mozilla now has six data centers, including four in Silicon Valley, where it has space at CoreSite’s Market Post Tower in San Jose, and with Internap and Layer 42 in Santa Clara.

“In the Bay Area alone we’re consuming about 500kW (of power in its data centers),” wrote Matthew Zeier from the Mozilla operations team in a blog post. “When we shopped around for what eventually became the Phoenix location, we knew that 500kW was around the tipping point to transition from retail to wholesale data center space. Mozilla IT spent most of Q1/Q2 2011 searching around the Bay Area. Sometime over the summer we decided to partner with Vantage Data Centers and have been extremely busy since then in lease negotiations and in getting started on the build-out of the space.

Mozilla also has data center space in Amsterdam and in the IO Phoenix data center. The company has been an early adopter of many-core low-power servers from SeaMicro.

Wholesale data center provider Vantage Data Centers has leased 93 percent of the available space in its first two data centers at its new Santa Clara campus

• i/o Data Centers SAS 70 Certification: Wholesale colocation provider i/o Data Centers has achieved SAS 70 Type II certification at its data centers in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona the company said this week. The audit, conducted by Deloitte & Touche, confirms that i/o Data Centers’ controls have been suitably designed and tested to meet the needs of its clients. “Having an independent audit affirm the reliability of our data center operations is important for our customers and gives them the peace of mind that their data center adheres to strict quality and operational standards,” said Bill Slessman, chief operating officer for i/o Data Centers.
• Hurricane Electric Opens Data Center Expansion: Colocation specialist Hurricane Electric this week announced the build-out of the third phase of its 208,000 square-foot data center in Fremont, Calif. The 24,000 square foot expansion of the former Apple manufacturing facility earned a “substantial incentive” from Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) for its use of efficient technology, including Eaton Corporation’s 9395 UPS system, which operates at 99% efficiency in Energy Saver Mode, and McQuay’s Maverick II Rooftop HVAC System featuring variable-frequency drives (VFDs), powered exhaust, and a 100% economizer mode. “Our energy efficient infrastructure reduces our carbon footprint,” said Benny Ng, Hurricane Electric’s Director of Infrastructure. “But it also reduces our energy bills, making our services more cost-competitive.”

• Terremark CEO Medina Profiled:Industry veteran Manuel Medina, the founder and CEO of Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) is profiled this week in an interesting seven-part interview with tech blogger and analyst Sramana Mitra. The interview details Medina’s personal story, but also offers insight into some of his thoughts about business (as well as the fact that he dances a wicked salsa).
• AirTight Partners With PDU Cables: HVAC service contractor AirTight has announced a strategic partnership with PDU Cables, which makes under-floor power cable assemblies. Through this agreement, AirTight will include PDU Cables’ products and services in its data center solutions packages.

• Facebook Now Has 30,000 Servers (Oct. 13)
• Google Envisions 10 Million Servers (Oct. 20)
• Raise the Temperature, Fight The Fans (Oct. 21)
• Peering Disputes Migrate to IPv6 (Oct. 22)
• Inside Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center (Oct. 1)
• Microsoft Unveils Its Container-Powered Cloud (Sept. 30)
• The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability (Oct. 12)
• T-Mobile: Microsoft Lost All the Sidekick Backups (Oct. 10)
• Amazon Offers MySQL in the Cloud (Oct. 27)
• Report: EC2 Running 40,000 Servers (Oct. 1)

You can stay current on the latest data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook.

• Terremark announces new managed security services.  On Wednesday Terremark Worldwide announced the addition of NetWitness NextGen to the managed security services offered to the company’s Enterprise Cloud customers.  The new solution delivers proactive intelligence and analytics regarding the most advanced network threats.  NetWitness has patented security solutions that help government and private organizations discover, prioritize and remediate complex IT risks.  The NextGen solution performs both rules-based and interactive session analysis across the entire protocol stack and is based on a dedicated and extensible full-packet capture and session-analysis infrastructure.  Terremark Chief Security Architect Christopher Day said “Within enterprises and Federal government agencies, seucurity in the ‘cloud’ is a primary concern and protecting customers against network threats is vital to the overall security of any cloud infrastructure.”
• Cloud Storage and SSDs at Storage Networking World. Paul Shread from the Enterprise Storage Forum has a nice wrap-up of the announcements and news coming out of this week’s Storage Networking World conference in Phoenix.  Announcements focused on cloud storage and Solid State Drives (SSD) and came from IBM, Hitachi, Sun and 3PAR.  IBM announced SSD support for the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller and adding 8Gbps Fibre Channel and iSCSI support, tripling the maximum cache to 24GB per engine.  Sun Microsystems announced their storage F5100 flash array, designed to accelerate Oracle and mySQL database workloads.  3PAR added four new software products: Thin Conversion, Thin Persistence, Thin Copy Reclamation and Thin Reclamation for Veritas Storage Foundation. On Tuesday MySpace announced it has switched from using hard disk drives in its servers to using PCI cards loaded with solid state chips as primary storage for their data center operations.

• nlyte Selected by Computacenter. Performance management solutions provider nylte Software announced that their software suite has been selected by IT Infrastructure Services company Computacenter to provide an integrated, real-time control and power management solution across its UK data centers.  Computacenter will use nlyte to gain more effective control of data center resources and to build an accurate understanding of the current and future costs and capacity of its physical infrastructure.
• The Planet to host IPv6 conference. IT hosting provider The Planet announced plans to host the Texas IPv6 Task Force in Houston on Nov.3-4.  The Texas task force is a sub-chapter of the IPv6 forum.  More than 100 participants are expected for the free two-day event.  Speakers for the event come from NTT America, Global Crossing and author Charlie E. Perkins.  Stan Barber, vice president of Network Operations at The Planet said “The transition to the new protocol is inevitable, so individuals in the IT arena are faced with the impending challenge of how best to help their companies escalate their adoption plans.”

• AdaptivCool’s Energy Solution Secures Incentive.  On Wednesday AdaptivCool announced that the installation of its data center cooling technology at a large New York bank resulted in the customer receiving a $16,000 incentive from the New York Research and Development Authority.  The bank’s energy consumption is estimated to be reduced by just over 200,000 kilowatt hours in the first year.  AdaptivCool’s Room Scale Intelligent Cooling (RSIC) technology was used, which uses strategically-placed temperature sensors to send information to a sophisticated Cooling Resource Manager that calculates minute-by-minute cooling demand throughout the data center.  AdaptiveCool is the data center division of New Hampshire based Degree Controls, Inc.
• Switch and Data Announces Intermedia Expansion.  On Wednesday network-neutral data center provider Swtich and Data announced that Intermedia, a leading hosted Microsoft Exchange provider, has added a Switch and Data site on the east coast as its fourth data center.  In order to meet unprecedented demand, Intermedia wanted to add geographic diversity and network resiliency.  The site selected by Intermedia is supplied with more than 20 megawatts of power with full N+1 redundancy for its UPS, generator and cooling infrastructure.

• Data Cave Protects UPS with Active Power. Columbus Indiana based Data Cave announced that they have recently deployed a highly energy efficient, green flywheel-based backup power system to protect its mission critical server equipment from power disturbances.  In June 2009 Data Cave deployed two of Active Power’s CleanSource UPS systems and last month they added additional modules of UPS capacity to double the power capability of each system to 1200kVA.  “Active Power was a no brainer, knowing our customers demand high efficiency and reliability,” said Data Cave president Caleb Tennis. “Because of its modular product design, we seamlessly doubled the capacity of each UPS system.”
• NetApp to host energy efficiency summit. NetApp and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group announced that they will host the 2009 Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit on Oct. 15th at  NetApp headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.  The summit will feature twelve case studies and demonstrations, a CIO roundtable lunch, a panel on strategies for a carbon-constrained future, updates on DOE programs and funding, and a chill off (CO2).  For more information or to register, go to http://dcee.svlg.org

• AdaptivCool’s Energy Solution Secures Incentive.  On Wednesday AdaptivCool announced that the installation of its data center cooling technology at a large New York bank resulted in the customer receiving a $16,000 incentive from the New York Research and Development Authority.  The bank’s energy consumption is estimated to be reduced by just over 200,000 kilowatt hours in the first year.  AdaptivCool’s Room Scale Intelligent Cooling (RSIC) technology was used, which uses strategically-placed temperature sensors to send information to a sophisticated Cooling Resource Manager that calculates minute-by-minute cooling demand throughout the data center.  AdaptiveCool is the data center division of New Hampshire based Degree Controls, Inc.
• Switch and Data Announces Intermedia Expansion.  On Wednesday network-neutral data center provider Swtich and Data announced that Intermedia, a leading hosted Microsoft Exchange provider, has added a Switch and Data site on the east coast as its fourth data center.  In order to meet unprecedented demand, Intermedia wanted to add geographic diversity and network resiliency.  The site selected by Intermedia is supplied with more than 20 megawatts of power with full N+1 redundancy for its UPS, generator and cooling infrastructure.

• Data Cave Protects UPS with Active Power. Columbus Indiana based Data Cave announced that they have recently deployed a highly energy efficient, green flywheel-based backup power system to protect its mission critical server equipment from power disturbances.  In June 2009 Data Cave deployed two of Active Power’s CleanSource UPS systems and last month they added additional modules of UPS capacity to double the power capability of each system to 1200kVA.  “Active Power was a no brainer, knowing our customers demand high efficiency and reliability,” said Data Cave president Caleb Tennis. “Because of its modular product design, we seamlessly doubled the capacity of each UPS system.”
• NetApp to host energy efficiency summit. NetApp and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group announced that they will host the 2009 Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit on Oct. 15th at  NetApp headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.  The summit will feature twelve case studies and demonstrations, a CIO roundtable lunch, a panel on strategies for a carbon-constrained future, updates on DOE programs and funding, and a chill off (CO2).  For more information or to register, go to http://dcee.svlg.org

The largest quarterly gains were seen from companies whose shares have struggled, led by managed hosting provider NaviSite (NAVI), which is up 59.9 percent for the quarter. Other managed hosting companies with solid gains included Savvis (SVVS, up 38 percent) and Rackspace (RAX, up 23 percent). Strong quarters for data center REITS Digital Realty Trust (+27%) and DuPont Fabros Technology (+41%) reflected the strength of the wholesale data center market, while leading colocation specialists also had solid performance.

All was not rosy everywhere, though, as content delivery providers took a beating amid growing concerns about pricing pressures and margins. Here’s a look at the performance of the leading public data center companies in the quarter:

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