Yahoo Opens New Nebraska Data Center

Yahoo has purchased this building in La Vista, Nebraska for $14.8 million.

Yahoo (YHOO) has opened its new data center in La Vista Nebraska. The 180,000 square foot facility near Omaha will hold about 100,000 servers, employ around 50 people and will become the largest Yahoo data center when expansions are completed.

Yahoo began the 17-state location process that led them to Nebraska in early 2008.  Similar to other Midwest deals that were negotiated earlier with Google in Council Bluffs, Iowa and Microsoft in West Des Moines, Yahoo selected Nebraska for state tax incentives, low energy costs and a quality workforce.  The announced $100 million deal included the La Vista data center and a customer care center in Omaha, with a combined 200 jobs created.

Report: Yahoo Seeks Buyer for Hosting Unit

Does web hosting knit together neatly with news, search and advertising sales in a business plan for an Internet portal? That’s a question that has come up frequently in recent years as Yahoo has gone through several phases of redefinition, prompting speculation that the company would eventually divest its large web hosting operation.

It looks like “eventually” has arrived. Reuters reports that Yahoo is seeking to sell its Yahoo Small Business hosting service, and is seeking a sale price of $350 million to $500 million. The move is part of a broader strategic refocusing that also includes a major marketing campaign that is expected to be unveiled today by CEO Carol Bartz. The company is said to be selling off assets that don’t reflect its new consumer focus.

Yahoo Small Business operates one of the largest U.S. shared hosting hosts, with about 2.2 million sites, according to recent data. That includes its online store, one of the leading turnkey e-commerce offerings for small businesses. That base of e-commerce customers is a valuable asset at a time when profit margins are being squeezed and pundits see cloud computing emerging as a competitive threat.

First Look at Yahoo’s New Design

The first look sat the Yahoo Computing Coop design for its new data center in Lockport, N.Y. The design features an unusual roof design to allow hot air to escape from the facility.

Yahoo has broken ground on its new data center in Lockport, N.Y. The $150 million project features a new design called the Yahoo Computing Coop, which emphasizes free cooling and air flow management. The Yahoo Computing Coops will be metal prefabricated structures measuring 120 feet by 60 feet. The company plans to use five of these structures in its Lockport complex.

Microsoft, Yahoo Finalize Search Deal (Really!)

The storyline that launched a thousand rumors has finally led to an actual real-world business deal. Microsoft and Yahoo announced this morning that Microsoft will now power Yahoo search while Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies.

“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry, and I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development,” said Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz.

“Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”

It’s not immediately clear whether the search and advertising deal will have any iimplications on the back-end infrastructure required to power the two companies’ operations, and how it might impact their data center requirements.

See coverage at TechCrunch, Search Engine Land and a roundup from TechMeme.

Inside Yahoo’s Site Selection Process

What goes into landing a major data center project? The Buffalo News takes an in-depth look at the effort to land a $150 million Yahoo data center project for the town of Lockport in western New York. It was an effort that involved more than 100 officials from 31 different entities, with Buffalo Niagara Enterprise directing traffic.   

“In the end, it was a real team approach. This very rarely happens in New York,” said Richard Kessel, president and CEO of the New York Power Authority. “The governor said get it done. We got it done.”

Yahoo officials would ultimately make five site visits to the area before deciding on the Lockport site, which will feature an innovative energy-efficient design dubbed the Yahoo Computing Coop. Technical specifications were critical, and local officials sought to keep pace with the company’s questions. “Everybody had to rely on each other to keep it in the forefront, keep up the urgency, address the company’s needs and push it through approval,” Thomas Kucharski, president of Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, told the paper. “You had to keep bird-dogging it on a daily basis.”

Yahoo’s ‘Chicken Coop’ Data Center Design

Yahoo’s new data center in Lockport, New York will feature a new design that the company has dubbed the Yahoo Computing Coop. Chief Yahoo David Filo announced the new design today in a blog post, saying the name was adopted “because it looks like something chickens live in” and will use outside air to cool Yahoo’s servers.

“For data center geeks, we expect our Buffalo data center design will have an annualized average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.1 or better,” said Filo. That would challenge the most efficient facilities built by Google (GOOG), which has an average PUE of 1.16 for its six company-built data centers, with one facility currently running at a PUE of 1.12.

With its Lockport design, Yahoo is joining Google on the cutting-edge of energy efficiency by running a data center without chillers, which provide refrigerated water for cooling systesm and are among the most energy-intensive components of a data center.

In adopting a design that is less reliant on chillers, Yahoo is following the lead of Google (GOOG), which recently built a data center in Belgium that operates without any chillers. Google executives expect the Belgium facility will soon be the company’s most efficient, and may push its PUE below 1.1.

It’s Official: Yahoo Building in Lockport, NY

Yahoo and state officials today confirmed the worst-kept secret in Western New York: that the company will build a $150 million data center on a 30-acre property in Lockport, New York. The Yahoo site was officially confirmed at a news conference this afternoon, and will create 125 local jobs paying $65,000 to $75,000 a year once its two-phase construction plan is completed.

Yahoo filed site plans in Lockport earlier this month. Construction on the 181,000 square foot, six-structure complex is scheduled to begin in August and be completed by May 2010. Yahoo executive David Dibble said the facility will feature a “brand new design and engineering approach” focused on energy efficiency. The first phase will receive 10 megawatts of hydro-electric power from the New York Power Authority, which will also provision 15 megwawatts for the second phase of construction.

Yahoois paying $450,000 to buy 30 acres of land from the Lockport Industrial Development Agency for the data center. 

“The greater Buffalo area possess all of the resources required to run a world-class data center that uses leading edge technology to drive new milestones in energy efficiency,” said Dibble, Yahoo’s Executive Vice President, Service Engineering & Operations. “Everyone we have worked with – from Governor Paterson and Senator Schumer, to the New York Power Authority, Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, the Town of Lockport, and Empire State Development – has been supportive in understanding Yahoo!’s needs and in moving this project forward.”

Velocity: Flickr on Devs, Ops and Teamwork

There were many excellent presentations at the Velocity 2009 conference this week in San Jose, Calif. But the one that generated he most buzz was a talk by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond of the Flickr team at Yahoo titled “10+ Deploys A Day: Devs & Ops Cooperation at Flickr.” A summary: “Flickr takes the idea of ‘release early, release often’ to an extreme – on a normal day there are 10 full deployments of the site to our servers. This session discusses why this rate of change works so well, and the culture and technology needed to make it possible.” The Velocity team has posted full video of the session, which we’ve embedded below. The presentation is also online so you can follow along, but be warned that it’s a large PDF file.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Yahoo Unstealths Its Data Center Efficiency

The Yahoo data center in Quincy, Washington includes cooling-optimized "podules" with a PUE of 1.21 (Photo: Yahoo Inc.)

When it comes to data center efficiency, Yahoo has maintained a lower profile than rivals Google and Microsoft. But the Yahoo team is building a compelling data center story of its own, with innovations in cooling design and energy efficiency ratings approaching the best that Google has achieved.

Yahoo’s Adam Bechtel began telling the story yesterday at the O’Reilly Velocity 2009 conference in San Jose, Calif. Bechtel, the chief architect of Yahoo’s data center operations, shared details of a patented cold-aisle containment system that integrates an overhead cooling module, building the air conditioning units into the top of a “podule” of cabinets packed with servers.

That design has helped Yahoo lower its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to 1.21, according to Bechtel, just a hair shy of the best numbers disclosed by Google and a slightly better than the lowest PUE reported by Microsoft. The PUE metric (PDF) compares a facility’s total power usage to the amount of power used by the IT equipment, revealing how much is lost in distribution and conversion.

Costs Driving Innovation
Bechtel notes that although PUE is a useful benchmark, Yahoo’s focus on efficiency was driven by the bottom line. “We were spending obscene amounts on infrastructure,” Bechtel recalled. “Our power consumption was doubling every 10 months, and that was just a shocker. We started to look at energy consumption in a very different way.”