”When enterprises and government agencies look at cloud for their IT infrastructure needs, they require high standards for the reliability of the underlying physical infrastructure that houses the cloud platform,” said Ellen Rubin, Terremark’s vice president of Cloud Products. “Terremark’s cloud-enabled data centers provide the diverse connectivity, robust physical security and top-tier data center space that these organizations are looking for from their cloud providers.”

The latest expansion follows a scaling up of Terremark’s Sao Paulo data center, the Network Access Point (NAP) do Brasil. Once completed, the cloud-enabled facility will have 70,000 square feet of raised data center floor space and will be able to house 150,000 servers in a connected, secure and redundant ecosystem.

The Denver data center facility is part of Terremark’s network of nearly 50 strategically located data centers around the world.

For more on subterranean data centers, check out our Data Bunkers Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Equinix selected by BT.  Colocation provider Equinix (EQIX) said this week that  BT has selected Equinix data centers for the roll-out of BT Radianz Venue, a cloud-based high-performance suite of services designed to enhance BT’s proximity hosting capabilities and provide optimized latency and interconnectivity between trading venues throughout the world’s top financial markets. The new capabilities from BT will be offered in an additional 10 financial ecosystems across Equinix data centers in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. BT Radianz Venue comprises three services now offered inside Equinix data centers that are specifically designed to help customers address the challenges of liquidity, fragmentation and new trading opportunities, while enhancing trade execution performance. “In order to scale presence across global markets, financial firms are positioning trading infrastructure inside Equinix’s global IBX data centers” says John Knuff, general manager, Global Financial Services at Equinix. “These dense interconnection points are critical to the global trading community, providing an environment where shared infrastructure, super-fast connections, reduced total cost of ownership, connectivity costs and a wide range of choices form a new industry backbone for service delivery, prospecting and innovation.”

Phoenix NAP selected by Yahoo Serious.  Phoenix NAP announced that Yahoo Serious, a back-end IT services provider, has selected the data center for its hosting needs. Yahoo Serious recently started up Firebird Broadband, with the intention of providing affordable high speed wireless business internet services out of Phoenix NAP to the Sky Harbor Airpark area. Phoenix NAP was selected because of its infrastructure, layered security systems and vast array of carrier options. ”Yahoo Serious, LLC has greatly benefited from Phoenix NAP’s infrastructure flexibility and versatility to expand its operations with zero downtime,” said Ian C. Park, Yahoo Serious, LLC owner.

Colocation America expanding Los Angeles data centers.  Colocation America announced that it is increasing its available Los Angeles data center space by fifty percent. The extra data center space means that both small businesses needing a dedicated server with minimal bandwidth and large companies requiring several server racks of space can continue to be accommodated. Reasons for the increase in demand include a rise in foreign and domestic companies seeking to have West Coast server redundancy. “If we are not prepared to immediately meet client demands for server space, then we are not staying committed to our mission of providing the highest level of customer service,” stated Albert Ahdoot, Colocation America’s Business Development Director.  “By making it incredibly easy for businesses to colocate or get a dedicated server with us, we can put our effort into staying on top of the latest data center technological developments.”

Global Capacity expands with Ethernet services.  Global Capacity announced the addition of Ethernet Access services to the One Marketplace Access Exchange with physical interconnection points in Chicago, IL and Dallas, TX.  Strategic network interconnections will facilitate revenue growth by exposing on-net Ethernet services to automated market demand. Once interconnected, clients have a cost-effective and efficient method to expand their reach leveraging the available capacity of other participating Carriers, Service Providers or Enterprise Customers. “With the increased demand for Ethernet Services across the industry, Global Capacity has a unique advantage by providing customers a streamlined and more efficient process to manage their off-net quoting and delivery solutions,” comments adds Patrick Shutt, CEO of Global Capacity. “By strategically interconnecting with partners, Global Capacity can deliver increased market transparency and leverage carrier’s excess capacity to provide a more comprehensive solution to its customers which will add value to the entire marketplace.”

Equinix is the new owner of a major data center at Kleyer90 connectivity hub in Frankffurt, pictured above in a cool evening time lapse. Equinix said today that it has agreed to acquire ancotel GmbH. (Photo: ancotel)netw

Interconnection specialist Equinix has agreed to buy ancotel GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany in a deal that will further boost the strength of its network in one of the world’s most important meeting points for Internet traffic and financial trading.

The acquisition provides Equinix with a data center in Frankfurt with 2,100 square meters of data center capacity. More importantly, it increases the provider’s European network density by adding more than 400 network customers, which includes 200 new networks and 6,000 cross connects.

Frankfurt is one of the world’s busiest data hubs, and home to a major stock exchange that is a focal point for low-latency trading, a key business vertical for Equinix. The ancotel campus in Frankfurt will offer a broad mix of networks from Western and Eastern Europe and beyond, and significant growth opportunities for customers looking to expand their data center footprint. ancotel also owns edge nodes in Hong Kong, London and Miami, giving Equinix additional points of presence in these markets.

Equinix Now Has 900 Network Customers

“The acquisition of ancotel significantly strengthens Equinix’s value proposition and capabilities both in Europe and globally,” said Eric Schwartz, president of Equinix EMEA. “Both companies enjoy strong reputations in the market and serve the world’s leading companies. The agreement will also grow the total number of network customers available at Equinix from 700 to 900.”

“For more than a decade, ancotel’s Kleyer90 has been a key point of interconnection for network service providers in Frankfurt and beyond,” said K.J. Orth, one of the two founders and managing director of ancotel. “The global reach of Platform Equinix bundled with services such as the Equinix Marketplace and the Equinix Ethernet Exchange will add great value for customers looking to expand in Europe and around the world.”

ancotel generated approximately $21.4 million in revenue in 2011, and has seen annual revenue growth of better than 20 percent CAGR for the past three years. ancotel was Founded in 1999, and serves more than 400 customers from 60+ countries.

This white paper from Emerson discusses a system that meets simplification needs of customer – the Trellis platform.  First, it describes the Trellis platform, calling it a family of software and hardware that manages data center infrastructure.  Next, the benefits of the Avocent Universal Management Gateway, a Trellis hardware appliance that aggregates access and control capabilities with real0time data collection, are examined.  Lastly, the paper demonstrates the capabilities of the Trellis platform through a detailed before-and-after infographic representing a Trellis powered rack and network.

Learn how the Trellis platform enables greater simplification within your data center.  Click here to download this white paper on the Trellis platform and its benefits to networking infrastructure.

As with many of these site selection battles, the competition, this time from Arizona and South Carolina, was fierce and incentives were critical.  Governor John Kasich’s administration is offering a tax credit worth $4.1 million that will go before the Ohio Tax Credit Authority next week. Additionally the city is offering a property tax abatement and potentially additional tax breaks.

“We weren’t going to lose everything, but we could’ve lost jobs here, there isn’t any question about it,” said Governor John Kasich. “These other states were ferociously competing against us. Not only did we avoid the loss, but we have exciting new gains.”

The data center site is inside the Research and Information District of the New Albany Business Park, which has attracted other data centers, such as one in 2008 for Nationwide Mutual Insurance. The combined office space and data center will be 97,900 square feet.  The data center is expected to open in late 2013 and the project included a total of 162 permanent jobs at its Albany campus. Discover has around 1,500 employees currently in New Albany.

RON DIERSEN
Infosys Ltd.

No two data centers are alike, and they should not be, for it is the business that drives the requirements for IT and the data centers which form the heart of IT are custom built and evolve based on the requirements and the culture of the organization. The type of IT infrastructure in today’s data center is designed to provide specific business services, and this can impact the physical design of the data center.

For example, thin blade rack-mounted web servers will be required for high speed user interaction, while data mining applications will require larger mainframe-style servers.  The physical infrastructure to support these different servers can vary greatly. Given their criticality, data center design becomes an issue of paramount importance in terms of technical architecture, business requirements, energy efficiency and environmental requirements.

This two-part article focuses on elaborating on design models and trends in the data center, their significance in data center infrastructure design and which are the most planet and business friendly.

Modern data center designs broadly follow one of the following principles

(a) Raised Floor/Access Floor

(b) Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle Containment (on a slab)

(c) Containerized/Modular

Each of these principles have their pros and cons when it comes to data center build, management, total cost of ownership, ease of consolidation/migration and energy efficiency.  Each has their own unique physical infrastructure designs that should be based on the IT architecture they are going to house. For example a data center of a telecommunications company will have completely different requirements from those of a banking or IT major.

Data Centers and Business Alignment

IT architects must understand strategic business needs and strategic business direction in order to plan and design sound technical solutions for the data center that support the business in the most economical and eco-friendly means possible. The IT technical solution will support the business model by implementing the technology that supports the business. The physical data center architectural design should be the one that compliments the IT architecture in the most economical manner, while providing flexibility to change with the changing needs of the business.

Some of the considerations in order to arrive at the right design could be:

Raised floor – A raised floor data center may make sense in an environment that has the need for mainframe (“big iron”) or similar processing needs and the network, power and cooling needs are fairly constant. Further, an enforced raised floor or slab may be required for data centers in seismically active areas.

Aisle containment – Hot aisle/cold aisle on a slab may be driven by the need to have a flexible environment where the power bus is overhead, localized network distribution centers, and the HVAC requirements are centralized. Colocation or service providers may provide such a scenario because of how easy and quickly they must change configurations based on client needs.

Modular – Modular data centers address businesses that have space constraints and unique location needs, such as remote areas. One of the drivers may be a short time or temporary installation of IT capacity.

There is not one  ”right” solution. In fact, some datacenters can contain a hybrid scenario where part of the center is raised floor and another part is slab. Business drivers dictate the need and the designers must understand the strategic business direction in order to design the data center(s) that provide the most effective solution. Their understanding of which IT solutions meet the strategic business need will directly impact the architectural design.

 In part 2, we will highlight some of the emerging trends such as Energy Management, Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and PUE/CUE management and reporting. These, and others, can have a significant impact on the architecture of the Data Center, some of which should be incorporated in the data center as early as possible in the design phase.

Please note:  Vaibhav Bhatia, Senior Consultant with the Sustainability Practice at Infosys Limited and a certified Data Center Associate, contributed to this column. With 9 years of IT experience, he has managed operations of a data center, and worked on several data center optimizing and Green IT initiatives.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

Prefabricated modular data centers like this IO.Anywhere unit were on display at the Uptime Symposium 2012, held this week in Silicon Valley. (Photo: Colleen Miller).

About 1,700 data center professionals and vendors gathered this week for the seventh annual Uptime Institute Symposium at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif. The conference featured analysts from The Uptime Institute and its parent, The 451 Group, as well as thought leaders from companies including eBay, Yahoo, Digital Realty, IO, Schneider Electric, RagingWire, Cisco and many others. In addition to the annual emphasis on reliability and operations the symposium also featured a focus on modular data centers. For highlights, see our special photo feature, Scenes From the Uptime Symposium 2012.

The Chef community now includes 26,000 active users, 120 corporate contributors and more than 450 “cookbooks” – repeatable code to automate the configuration and management processes, enabling users to quickly deploy servers.

“The rapid adoption of Chef underscores a major transition to scale-out computing in the enterprise,” said Mitch Hill, CEO of Opscode. “This shift is creating a major skills gap in IT, with access to compute resources far outpacing the number of professionals capable of managing these complex environments. Opscode Chef is a force multiplier that solves for this skill gap, providing a model for re-use which enables businesses to automate IT infrastructure and maximize the potential of cloud computing.”

Chef’s enriched functionality includes a number of new features. These include:

• Improved Scalability: Private Chef now leverages the scalability and fault-tolerance of the Erlang programming language, and proven relational database management system principles. Opscode says Private Chef’s 3X increase in scalability over will enable enterprise businesses to create multi-tenant environments and automate much larger infrastructures with the same hardware footprint.
• Easier Installation: The release of Chef’s new ‘one-click’ installer enables easy and rapid deployment of Chef regardless of IT environment. Opscode today also announced publicly available plugins to the knife command-line tool for a broad spectrum of public cloud platforms, providing simple, one-command deployment of cloud infrastructure automation for Amazon EC2, HP Cloud Services, Rackspace, OpenStack and many more.
• Change Modeling: The new versions of Opscode’s open source and commercial Chef solutions feature ‘Dry-Run’ mode, enabling development and operations teams to model changes to any resource or environment before the changes are made. With this enhanced functionality, Chef now provides users with significantly increased visibility and control, ensuring changes don’t negatively impact their infrastructure.
• Windows Integration: Enterprises can now leverage their existing Active Directory user identities to manage access control in Chef, eliminating the need for separate log-ins and improving security throughout the change management process. In addition, Chef now supports rich native Windows file access controls, enabling enterprises to securely manipulate files in Windows environments.
• Native Support for Solaris: Chef now features native support for Solaris, one of the most common legacy Unix implementations, in addition to popular Linux and Windows platforms, enabling businesses to easily deploy Chef across all mainstream enterprise compute infrastructures.

Opscode said the new installation plugins were a particularly important feature.

“Working collaboratively with the Chef community, we’ve developed plugins for a number of leading public cloud services, ensuring easy integration and consistent model of interaction,” said Christopher Brown, CTO, Opscode. “By using Chef to automate infrastructure in public cloud environments, businesses can speed the delivery of applications, while using fewer resources to do so, helping them get the most from their investment in the cloud.”

“Ensuring that our global IT customers can proactively automate the configurations of applications and the orchestration of elastic infrastructure resources through Eucalyptus is critical to their successful adoption of cloud,” said David Butler, senior vice preside of marketing at Eucalyptus. “With Opscode Chef, users can easily configure and deliver applications and servers to our infrastructure as a service cloud, enabling them to get the most from our services, while we take care of the rest.”

ChefConf features three days of technical sessions, workshops, training and keynotes designed to help businesses maximize the value of their IT investment and accelerate the speed of business. From in-depth discussions on the latest trends in IT infrastructure management, DevOps and cloud configuration, to engaging panel discussions on real-world use cases, #ChefConf is shaping the future of infrastructure automation.

28 processors announced

Intel introduced 28 processors across three product families Monday to address a range of energy-efficient and affordable solutions for server and workstation customers.

“To satisfy the increasing diversity of IT needs and workloads, Intel is excited to offer additional processor options to enterprises of all sizes with the Intel Xeon processor E5-4600/2400 and E3-1200 v2 product families,” said Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of the Datacenter Infrastructure Group at Intel. ”Our new products feature the flexibility, value and performance that businesses demand in a market that is ever less tolerant of compromise.  We are also continuing to drive momentum in the micro server market by introducing new lower power processors within the Intel Xeon processor E3-1200 v2 product family.”

The  E5-4600 product family offers the performance and energy efficiency benefits of the Intel Xeon processor E5 family to allow higher density designs than available with previous 4-socket systems. Intel also introduced the Xeon processor E3-1200 v2 product family as an entry-level server and workstation processor built for the unique demands of small business customers. The Intel Xeon processor E3-1200 v2 product family also features two low-power processors optimized for micro servers to address the needs of the emerging scale out datacenter workloads and usages.

ZT Systems

ZT Systems announced new server platforms powered by the Intel Xeon E3-1200  v2 product family. “For scale computing customers operating large server fleets, it’s important to dial in the right mix of performance, efficiency and density for each component of a larger compute solution,” said Raymond Miles, ZT Systems VP of Engineering. “Single-socket platforms powered by the Intel Xeon processor E3 can be a great fit for certain server and storage workloads where density and energy efficiency considerations are paramount. With the power savings associated with the move to 22nm manufacturing, and TDP as low as 17 watts, these new processors represent an attractive addition to the array of ingredients ZT can access when designing best-fit solutions.” Standard 1U and 2U rack-mount server platforms based on the Intel Xeon processor E3-1200 v2 product family are available immediately, and serve as starting points for customization to meet specific customer needs.

Dell

Dell announced nine new optimized servers for its PowerEdge portfolio with new blade, rack and tower servers. The PowerEdge M420 is a  quarter height 2-socket blade server, offering extreme computational density, performance and efficiency. Up to 32 M420′s can be placed in the chassis of a single PowerEdge M1000e.

“Dell is experiencing exceptional demand for the first wave of PowerEdge 12th generation servers from customers around the globe looking to power their most demanding workload requirements,” said Forrest Norrod, Vice President and General Manager, Dell Server Solutions. ”We are now pleased to introduce a second wave of 12th generation servers that delivers exceptional value for performance and continues our successful integration of customer feedback and design requirements. Dell is enabling customers to deliver results faster through our tight integration of Dell servers, storage, networking, client and services that take advantage of Dell’s latest innovations resulting from both R&D and key acquisitions of IP.”

SGI

SGI announced full support for the newest Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 and E5-4600 product families. SGI is incorporating the newest Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 into SGI’s future shared memory platforms with many new, unique capabilities. The Xeon processor E5-2400 is now the base processor in the SGI Hadoop Starter Kits and is available in the SGI Rackable product line for use in other applications.

SGI’s UV platform will be based on the Intel Xeon E5-4600 processor family and will gain significant performance improvements due to a single system image scaling to thousands of cores and many terabytes of memory versus alternatives which require hundreds of nodes. The UV system will allow users to solve their most demanding problems with fast, scalable performance operating at up to 64 terabytes of memory and with up to 4096 cores in the world’s largest coherent shared memory single-instance system. Stephen Hawking’s COSMOS Consortium has committed to the UV platform to continue to drive cosmology research.

“The collaboration with SGI will enable researchers using the COSMOS supercomputer across the UK to advance their ambitious programme of research in both cosmology and exoplanets,” said Professor Paul Shellard, director, Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. “The incredible flexibility and scalability of this next-generation shared memory high performance computing solution from SGI accelerates our work exploiting large data sets and tackling complex simulations.”