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“Downtime Period” means, for a domain, a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime. Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted towards any Downtime Periods.”

This loophole has been used to posit unlikely worst-case scenarios in which Google could have repeated short outages and still honor its SLA guarantees (which in turn has prompted discussion over at TechCrunch). The larger issue is whether Google is defining outages in a way that waters down the uptime guarantee, serving to provide additional protection to the provider rather than the customer.

How does your SLA define an outage?

It’s not immediately clear how the cuts in staff and capital spending will affect AT&T’s huge data center network, which includes 38 facilities around the world with more than 2.3 million square feet of data center space. Larry Dignan notes that the company’s 2008 capital spending is likely to reach $20 billion.

AT&T’s data center operations have been the beneficiary of additional capital spending in recent years as the company added infrastructure, citing an “explosive surge in data, voice and video traffic.”

Earlier this year it said it would expand its data center space in Boston, Dallas, Singapore and Amsterdam. In 2007 AT&T added  data centers in Toronto and Piscataway, New Jersey, and in late 2006 expanded in Chicago and Shanghai, China. The company’s most recent investment has supported the launch of its cloud computing service, Synaptic Hosting.

The Providence Journal notes that the data center relocation effort is being launched as Rhode Island faces a huge budget deficit. Amy Kempe, a spokesperson for Gov. Donald Carcieri, said the search is driven by the condition of the existing state data center. “The current center is a former used-car-lot building that is in poor shape and has more value to the surrounding businesses in the area,” Kempe told the Journal. “By relocating the IT department, the building and land can be sold at the appropriate time.”

The state’s main data center is housed in a former Volkswagen dealership in Johnston, which was bought for $505,000 in 1981. The state’s capital plan includes $8.9 million for a new IT center, but officials said the depressed state of the commercial real estate market may allow them to acquire a property for less than that and bank the savings.

The Providence paper outlined the state’s search criteria:  

The state is seeking to buy a handicapped-accessible building that is within 15 miles of the generating source for its power, has 250 dedicated parking spaces and a security system that is already equipped with “multi-layer entry, card access, camera active surveillance,” has a rooftop gas-fired heating, cooling and ventilation system and meets specific electrical-power requirements, according to the State Properties Committee Web page.

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“We believe it will be significantly different than anything that has come before,” Manos said of the design plans for West Des Moines. “We are not willing to share specifics just yet, other than the fact that this will represent the combined learning, research, and engineering we have come up with over the course of the program.”

That sure sounds a lot like the Generation 4 design, which features data center containers, modular power and cooling components, no roof and no chillers. Manos said the Generation 4 design improvements “have been in initial development and prototyping for over a year and are based on cumulative knowledge of previous facility generations and the advances we have made since we began our investments in earnest on this new design.”

Will West Des Moines be the first site built with the Generation 4 design? Microsoft’s not confirming or denying, exactly. “Modular data centers represent Microsoft’s vision for the future of the industry in the next five years but do not impact current data centers at this time,” said a Microsoft spokesperson.

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For more news about the Microsoft’s containers, visit our Microsoft Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.