Interxion selected by Infront.  Interxion (INXN) announced that Infront, a real-time market data and electronic trading solution company, has selected Interxion’s Stockholm data center and City of London data center to house its solutions.  This will give Infront customers faster connectivity to exchanges and key liquidity venues. Infront has has over 9,000 customers in Europe spanning from large financial institutions to private investors. “The fact that we are based in all of Europe’s key financial hubs, offer access to over 400 carriers and have a truly diverse financial community makes Interxion an ideal environment for financial firms such as Infront to house their business critical applications,” said Peder Bank, Managing Director at Interxion in the Nordics. “This deal further reinforces Interxion’s commitment to the financial services market and continues to position us as a key liquidity centre within Europe.”

Ciena upgrades NASA network.  Ciena Corporation (CIEN) announced a new partnership with Abacus Technology Corporation to upgrade the expansive campus IT network at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Leveraging Optical Transport Network technology from Ciena KSC will support a variety of activities on the 144,000 acre complex to consolidate the Center’s Ethernet video and legacy ATM and TDM traffic. The new intelligent network is connecting major campus facilities via a fiber optic infrastructure using Ciena’s 4200 Advanced Services Platform. “The use of OTN technology provides an elegant solution for complex networks like the one at Kennedy Space Center that support many types of legacy, Ethernet and real-time applications,” said David Peed, vice president and general manager, Ciena Government Solutions. “Ciena’s solution can more efficiently carry this multiservice traffic over a single infrastructure, and easily add new types of applications to the network as NASA’s Kennedy Space Center continues to push the boundaries of exploration.”

SGI selected by Sikorsky Innovations.  SGI announced that Sikorsky Innovations, the technology development organization within Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, has selected an SGI UV 1000 high performance computing (HPC) system with 576 cores and 1.5 TB of RAM. The three rack system will consist of six blade enclosures, each with 96 cores and 256GB of memory and be powered by Intel Xeon processor X7500 series.  ”The SGI UV 1000 meets our stringent requirements for computing power, scalability, program security and configurability, all within our control” said Joseph Pantalone, technical fellow and chief engineer of Special Programs at Sikorsky Innovations. “With this computing platform we conduct iterative design and analyses of highly detailed aircraft subsystems as well as full helicopter models and simulations, greatly reducing our iterations in hardware.”

Jerry Yang resigns from Yahoo.  Yahoo (YHOO) announced that Jerry Yang has resigned from its Board of Directors and all other positions with the company. Yang co-founded Yahoo! Inc. in 1995 with David Filo and served as a member of the Board of Directors since March 1995 and as Chief Executive Officer from June 2007 to January 2009. ”Jerry Yang is a visionary and a pioneer, who has contributed enormously to Yahoo! during his many years of service,” said Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board. “It has been a pleasure to work with Jerry. His unique strategic insights have been invaluable.”

The past few months haven’t been easy ones for Yahoo, with the contentious exit of CEO Carol Bartz followed rumors that the company might be sold. We’ve always maintained that Yahoo’s data center strategy has been one of the company’s major success stories. The Yahoo team has been overhauling the company’s infrastructure to run its IT infrastructure more efficiently, saving many millions of dollars in the process.

The influence of the data center team assembled by Yahoo has spread across the industry, as I was reminded when I encountered this photo from the 2006 groundbreaking for the Yahoo data center in Quincy, Washington. Wielding the shovels in the photo above are purple-clad Yahoo team members (from left) Kevin Timmons, Lars Rabbe, Scott Noteboom and Tom Furlong. Timmons now directs the data center effort for CyrusOne, Rabbe is presently the CIO of Skype, Furlong is Director of Site Operations for Facebook, and Noteboom now works for Apple’s data center operations.

Yahoo has had its struggles lately, but this photo provides a reminder of its role in seeding innovation in the industry, both within Yahoo and in the data center operations of some of its competitors.

The exterior of the super-efficient Yahoo Computing Coop data center in Lockport, New York.

Carol Bartz is out as the CEO at Yahoo. Does that mean anything for the company’s data center and hosting operations? I doubt that IT infrastructure is at the top of the “to do” list for interim CEO Timothy Morse and the Yahoo board. But there are several ways in which the changes in Yahoo’s executive suite could have implications – at least in the short term – for Yahoo’s hosting operations and data center network.

Any executive transition creates uncertainty for ongoing initiatives and spending. In announcing yesterday’s reorganization, the Yahoo board signaled that it may be considering asset sales. “We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders,” the board said.

Yahoo has reportedly hired investment bankers to advise the company on its options. Some analysts expect Yahoo may sell its profitable Asian operations, while others believe the entire company is now in play and may be sold. The Wall Street Journal cited a source as saying that Yahoo is “open to selling itself to the right bidder.”

The Enduring Value of Infrastructure

Even during a time of strategic change, you have to keep the servers online. Yahoo’s data center strategy has been one of the company’s major success stories. It has been overhauling its infrastructure to run its IT infrastructure more efficiently, saving many millions of dollars in the process. Scott Noteboom and his Yahoo data center team have built some of the world’s most efficient facilities using a unique “chicken coop” design that runs almost entirely on free cooling.

At the company’s annual meeting in June, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock cited the infrastructure overhaul as one of the key accomplishments of Bartz’s tenure. In light of that, it seems unlikely that the Yahoo board and transition team would spend time tinkering with data center operations and spending. They clearly have larger issues to address.

Will that green light for additional spending continue? It remains to be seen.

Earlier this year Yahoo announced plans to invest at least $500 million in further expanding its data center network. The company is also preparing a new data center design for a series of next-generation facilities it plans to build in 2012 and beyond. “We are in essence rewiring the entire infrastructure of Yahoo,” said Noteboom. “We’ve gained approval to invest half a billion dollars to build new data centers.”

What About Yahoo Hosting?

What about Yahoo’s web hosting operation, which was reportedly on the block during the last major round  of asset sales in 2009-2010 and has been losing ground ever since. Yahoo Small Business was once one of the largest shared hosting operations in the U.S. 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.

But since it was taken off the market in early 2010, Yahoo Small Business has shrunk from about 2.2 million domains hosted to about 1.8 million today. The recent trends indicate a continuing slide

If it helps, the hosting unit may have an advocate on the Executive Leadership Council. The six-person council includes Rich Riley, currently Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the EMEA Region. Riley was previously senior vice president of Yahoo’s online channel division, which includes its hosting operations.

Not necessarily. A case in point: Microsoft will renew one of its largest wholesale data center leases. Industry sources indicate Microsoft will renew a lease for a 10 megawatt data center in northern Virginia that was originally scheduled to expire in increments between 2012 and 2017. The lease will be renewed for eight years.

Need for Capacity

Microsoft has been building its own data centers throughout North America. Last year Microsoft announced plans to invest up to $499 million in a major new data center project in southern Virginia.  The company said that a 175-acre site near Boydton, Virginia would be the location of a state-of-the-art facility featuring  IT-PACs, Microsoft’s air-cooled modular data centers. That announcement raised an obvious question: Would Microsoft still need a large chunk of leased space in the same state?

Microsoft wouldn’t comment on the lease renewal, but confirmed that it is moving ahead full speed with the new data center in southern Virginia, citing stronger than anticipated demand for its cloud computing services – which in turn requires additional data center capacity.

Yahoo Migrating to New Facilities

Yahoo, meanwhile, is vacating one of its northern Virginia facilities as it shifts server capacity out of third-party facilities and into its new company-built data centers. The company told its landlord, DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT), that it will not renew a lease for 5.7 megawatts of space, which expires April 30, 2012. DuPont Fabros executives say they are already working on re-leasing the space and expect no problem filling it amid strong demand in northern Virginia.

Yahoo is in the midst of a $500 million global expansion of its data center network, with a goal of shifting its operations to newer, highly-efficient infrastructure.”We’ll be migrating the entire footprint of Yahoo to these more efficient facilities,” said Scott Noteboom, the head of data center operations at Yahoo.

What About Facebook?

Facebook says that it will gradually shift most of its server capacity from leased data centers to company-owned facilities, migrating out of many third-party facilities as its leases expire. For most of the company’s leases, those expirations aren’t until 2016 to 2022.

A first indicator of Facebook’s intentions may be its lease at a CoreSite data center in the Silicon Valley market, which expires next April. In the company’s earnings call last week, CoreSite said Facebook had not yet indicated its intentions for that lease.

The exterior of the Yahoo Computing Coop buildings in Lockport, New York. The data center opened for business today.

The New York Power Authority has approved an additional megawatt of hydropower capacity for Yahoo, which will allow the company to complete the second phase of its data center in Lockport, N.Y. The facility, which pioneered the Yahoo Computing Coop data center design, is part of an ongoing expansion of Yahoo’s data center.

The new allocation expands upon the 15 megawatts of power capacity Yahoo acquired at the outset of construction at the Lockport data center. The first phase of the project, which opened in September, featured 155,000 square feet of data center space housed in three 120-by-60 foot prefabricated metal structures. The new 120,000 square foot phase, which is nearly complete, will feature two additional “coops” and be backed by approximately $130 million in investment for construction and IT equipment, according to the NYPA.

Affordable hydropower was one of western New York’s key attractions for Yahoo, which has several additional data centers backed by hydro power in Washington state.

“The expansion plans of Yahoo demonstrate how the Power Authority’s resources can be the catalyst for improving and diversifying the economy of Western New York,” said John S. Dyson, NYPA trustee. “Yaho! has demonstrated its commitment to investing in New York State and to continuing to add new high-tech jobs. We are committed to working with Governor Cuomo to advance his Recharge New York agenda by using low-cost hydropower to support economic development efforts throughout the state.”

The Lockport data center will operate without chillers, which provide refrigerated water for cooling systems and are among the most energy-intensive components of a data center. The facility will use an evaporative cooling system during those 9 days a year when it is too warm to use fresh air. The buildings were positioned on the Lockport property to allow Yahoo to bring in cool air from either side of the coop, based on the prevailing winds.

An aerial view of the Yahoo Computing Coop data center in Lockport, N.Y. Yahoo has announced plans to invest $500 million in additional data centers.

Yahoo plans to invest at least $500 million in further expanding its data center infrastructure and shifting its operations to newer, highly-efficient infrastructure. The company is also preparing a new data center design for a series of next-generation facilities it plans to build in 2012 and beyond, in which much of the infrastructure will operate with minimal UPS and generator support.

“We are in essence rewiring the entire infrastructure of Yahoo,” said Scott Noteboom, the head of data center operations at Yahoo. “We’ve gained approval to invest half a billion dollars to build new data centers. We’ll be migrating the entire footprint of Yahoo to these more efficient facilities.”

The announcement is the latest step in Yahoo’s ongoing effort to retool its infrastructure and reduce the cost of operating its data centers. Last year it unveiled the Yahoo Computing Coop, an innovative design using factory-built components and relying upon fresh air rather than mechanical cooling. The design has been hailed for its efficiency and use of hydro-electric power.

“All this efficiency is cool,” said Noteboom, who announced the expansion Thursday at the DataCenterDynamics New York conference. “But we’re saving our company $200 million a year. At our scale, these (new data centers) have a three-year payback.”

Five Active Data Center Projects

Yahoo currently has five active data center construction projects, including expansions at existing U.S. data centers in Buffalo, Omaha and Washington state and new facilities in Singapore and Avenches, Switzerland. These will be followed in 2012 by a new phase of construction, most if which will involve additional phases at its existing data center campuses.

The new Yahoo facility in Quincy, Washington will be its most efficient data center yet, further refining the Yahoo Computing Coop (YCC) concept that has yielded a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.08 for its facility in Lockport, New York. The new data center in Switzerland will be the first implementation of the YCC design in a retrofit of an existing building. The previous YCC designs have all been ground-up “greenfield” construction.

These projects have helped Yahoo migrate much of its infrastructure out of older data center facilities, many of which were leased from third parties. The new phase of growth will continue that process.

Yahoo will also deploy about 20 “edge pods,” smaller data centers that can store content closer to users. Yahoo currently has 17 edge pods, but will expand that number to 38 as part of its new construction. These facilities would support caching and content delivery.

Noteboom said Yahoo can now build new data center space at a cost of less than $5 million per megawatt of electric power, well below the industry average of $9 million to $15 million, meaning that the next phase of growth could add nearly 100 megawatts of capacity to Yahoo’s data center footprint.

The Flex Tier Data Factory

Noteboom also outlined Yahoo’s plans for its next-generation design, known as the Flex Tier Data Factory. Noteboom said the design will be a radical departure from traditional data centers that target a particular reliability tier using the four-level Tier System from the Utime Institute, which has been a leading tool in the design of enterprise data centers.

Yahoo’s current data centers are the equivalent of Tier III facilities, with some elements typical of of Tier II and Tier IV sites. The Flex Tier design will be “our data center of the future,” said Noteboom. “Most of it will be less than Tier I, and some of it will be beyond Tier IV.”

Yahoo has been exploring scenarios in which it would build data centers without generators or UPS, and use its network to route around any power outages that occur at individual facilities, shifting production to other data centers. The Flex Tier will segment the data center into zones with different levels of reliability (a concept previously embraced by HP) , with much of the infrastructure running on conditioned utility power while a core group of critical services have highly redundant UPS and generator support.

Archived mail, which is rarely accessed and stored in several locations on the Yahoo network, is an example of a service that can survive a local outage at a single data center and operate with little or no UPS support. At the other end of the spectrum are Yahoo’s core network infrastructure and data center tools, which would manage the shifting of capacity between data centers if an outage occurs. Because of their critical role in managing outages, these assets can never go down, Noteboom said.

Construction equipment have begun work on an expansion of the Yahoo data center in Quincy, Washington (Photo by Data Center News Network).

The Yahoo Computing Coop is going west. Yahoo will deploy its innovative energy-efficient data center design in Quincy, Washington as it expands its campus in the fast-growing data center hub. The new facility will be built on land adjacent to Yahoo’s existing 180,000 square foot data center in Quincy, which was completed in 2007.

Scott Noteboom, Yahoo’s director of global data center operations, confirmed that the company has begun construction of additional data center capacity in Quincy. “We just broke ground and will be complete by end of May,” said Noteboom, who said the current phase of construction will add two  Yahoo Computing Coop modules, including one optimized for high-density workloads.

Pre-Fab, Air-Cooled Data Centers
The Yahoo Computing Coops (YCC) are prefabricated metal structures measuring about 120 feet long by 60 feet wide. Each of the coops has louvers built into the side  to allow cool air to enter the computing area. The air then flows through two rows of cabinets and into a contained center hot aisle, which is topped by a chimney on top. The chimney directs the waste heat into the upper level of the facility, where it can either be recirculated or vented through the cupola.

The YCC is an example of how standardization and the use of factory-built components can accelerate data center construction. Noteboom expects the Quincy expansion to be completed in six months, matching the deployment timetable for the latest phase at the initial YCC project in Lockport, New York.  That’s a significant improvement over the 330,000 man hours required to build the company’s first data center in Quincy.

New Tax Incentives A Factor
The expansion comes more than two years after Yahoo put its Quincy project on hold, citing a tax ruling that left the company ineligible for a key tax break on server equipment. The resumption of work on the Quincy campus appears to be a direct result of the  restoration of those tax incentives by the state legislature earlier this year.

In 2007 the state of Washington ruled that Yahoo was not eligible for  a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises in rural counties, and thus must pay a 7.9 percent tax on data center construction and equipment.  The state ruled that data centers did not qualify as manufacturing facilities.

In March the Washington legislature passed a targeted tax break would allow a 15-month sales tax exemption on the purchase and installation of computers and energy for new data centers in 32 rural counties. To qualify for the incentives, companies must commence construction by July 1, 20111 to qualify. The measure’s backers are hoping for an extension, citing the level of development activity since the passage of the incentives. Microsoft, Yahoo and Sabey have all announced new phases of data center construction, while Dell has purchased land in Quincy.

Tax Breaks Key to Yahoo Plans
Noteboom said any future development in Quincy beyond the current two YCC pods would hinge on the tax situation. “We are not building capacity as far into the future as we could, due to our concerns relative to the tax incentive package,” said Noteboom. ” In the event that tax incentive packages in Washington don’t go well, we are continuing to discuss future opportunities in other states that could meet our future need.”

For the moment, the Yahoo project places the small farm town of Quincy on the bleeding edge of data center development. Just down the street from the Yahoo Computing Coop, Microsoft is building a next-generation facility based on its container-based IT PAC design.

Quincy has become a magnet for data centers because of its abundant supply of cheap, “green” hydro power generated by area dams. Microsoft pays just 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour for its power in Quincy.

Intel invests billions in next-generation manufacturing. Intel (INTC) announced that the company will invest between $6 billion and $8 billion on future generations of manufacturing technology in its American facilities.  The investment will focus on manufacturing to support future technology advancements in Arizona and Oregon and bring 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs and 800-1,000 permanent high-tech jobs.  “Intel makes approximately 10 billion transistors per second. Our factories produce the most advanced computer technology in the world and these investments will create capacity for innovation we haven’t yet imagined,” said Brian Krzanich, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Manufacturing and Supply Chain. “Intel and the world of technology lie at the heart of this future. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we can retain a vibrant manufacturing economy here in the United States by focusing on the industries of the future.”  The funding will drive the deployment of Intel’s next-generation 22-nanometer manufacturing process across several existing U.S. factories, along with construction of a new developmental fabrication plant in Oregon.

The Bunker extends ISO27001.  The Bunker Secure Hosting announced that its ISO/IEC 27001:2005 accreditation has been extended to cover its Newbury based data center. “The Bunker has always maintained a reputation for security,” said Simon Neal, COO at The Bunker. “When we achieved the ISO27001 accreditation at our Kent site, we also applied all the processes to our Newbury site right away. Extending the accreditation was the next logical step. We wanted to offer clients who require an ISO accredited data centre the choice of location and the possibility of dual site solutions.”

SGI selected by University of Queensland.  SGI announced that The University of Queensland has commissioned a high performance computing (HPC) solution consisting of SGI Rackable half-depth servers to support a broad range of research applications.  With 3,144 Intel Xeon 5500 and 7500 processor cores and 11.52TB of memory it is one of the largest HPC systems in Australia.  The system will be used for research applications such as bioinformatics, computational chemistry, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics and earth sciences.  “These computers will strengthen an important part of the University’s research capacity. Tasks such as processing enormous amounts of biological data generated through techniques such as genome-sequencing, micro-arrays and imaging cannot be done on standard desktop computers,” said Professor Max Lu, deputy vice-chancellor (Research) at The University of Queensland.

Yahoo reports third quarter results.  Yahoo (YHOO) reported results for the third quarter, period ending September 30, 2010.  Revenue was up 2 percent to $1.6 million with net earnings per diluted share up 126 percent to $0.29 compared to the third quarter of 2009.  “We delivered a solid quarter with good display advertising revenue growth, big gains in operating income, and margins that were double what they were last year,” said Carol Bartz, president and CEO of Yahoo!. “Because we recognize the tremendous value of our assets, we also dramatically stepped up our stock repurchases. We’ve now bought back more than 7% of the company’s stock this year alone.” During the third quarter Yahoo began the migration to the Microsoft adCenter platform and opened their energy-efficient data center in New York.

An aerial view of the Yahoo data center in Lockport, N.Y.

The Yahoo Computing Coop is coming to Europe. Yahoo confirmed Thursday that it will build its next major data center in Avenches, Switzerland. The new facility, which will come online in 2012, will use a Yahoo design that allows the data center to be cooled with fresh air, foregoing the use of energy-hungry chillers. This approach, modeled loosely on heat management principles used in chicken coops, was first implemented in the company’s new data center in Lockport, New York.

There’s one key difference in the Swiss project: Yahoo is converting an existing facility for use as a data center, rather than a greenfield project using factory-built modules, as was the case in Lockport.

“We’re proud of this design because it’s a retrofit of an older structure (build in the 60’s) that will allow operation of YCC technology,” said Scott Noteboom, Director of Data Center Operations for Yahoo. “We’ve figured out how to make it work in other situations aside from just pre-engineered structure built from the ground up. The design approach is almost identical in efficiency and approach to what we did in Lockport.”

Noteboom said the new facility in Switzerland is expected to operate at a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.08, equivalent to the PUE for the Lockport data center.

Yahoo has been scouting sites in the Avenches area since 2007, and considered several locations before commencing construction this week.

For more on Yahoo’s data centers, here’s some links to our recent coverage of Yahoo’s data center operations:

• Inside the Yahoo Computing Coop
• Yahoo’s Next Efficiency Target: Fan Energy
• Yahoo is Ready for a Data Center Revolution
• Yahoo Computing Coop: The Shape of Things to Come?
• Data Centers With No UPS or Generator?

Scott Noteboom of Yahoo presented at Data Center World on building data centers cheaper, faster and with improved performance.

In its ongoing effort to make its data centers more efficient, Yahoo has eliminated the use of humidifiers and chillers in its facilities. What’s next? Fan energy, according to Scott Noteboom, Yahoo’s director of global data center operations, who said the company is busy developing custom racks and server trays.

In a presentation Monday at the AFCOM Data Center World Fall 2010 conference in Las Vegas, Noteboom reviewed the evolution of Yahoo’s data center designs, which have targeted multiple barriers to energy efficiency in a series of systematic improvements to each new facility. The newest Yahoo data center, the Yahoo Computing Coop opened last week in upstate New York, is cooled almost entirely by fresh air, resulting in exceptional energy efficiency.

Targeting Server-Level Fan Activity
But Noteboom still sees room for improvement. After overhauling the design for its data centers using pre-fab structures, Noteboom says Yahoo is now focusing on the design of its racks and server trays. The goal? Reduce the amount of energy used by server-level fans, which kick on when the temperature rises within the rack.

Raising the temperature in the data center can save big money on power costs. But studies have found that if you nudge the thermostat too high, the energy savings can evaporate in a flurry of fan activity. Yahoo currently operates its data centers with a target server intake temperature of 75 degrees F. When the temperature rises to 78 or 80 degrees, fan activity increases, Noteboom said.

Most server vendors will warranty their equipment to operate at temperatures much higher than 80 degrees, Noteboom said. So how can data center operators gain more granular control over server fans?

“We’re looking at taking control of the form factor, the tray or blade,” said Noteboom. That effort involves working with vendors to design server trays and racks that move fans to the back of the rack or cabinet, and provide sleeker trays to improve airflow through the equipment. He said that it’s been difficult to get server manufacturers to think beyond proprietary designs.

At least one server vendor has developed racks that embrace this concept. In 2008 SGI (then known as Rackable) introduced CloudRack, which featured server trays with no covers and no fans, using larger fans in the rear door of the rack to cool the equipment. See our video demo of CloudRack for more.