Digital Realty (DLR) will manage the construction of 30,000 square feet of raised floor data center space, which will be owned and operated by the customer, who was not identified. The project is underway and projected completion date is summer 2010.

“The value proposition for customers is clear: by using our POD Architecture Services the customer is able to complete large data center projects, faster, more cost effectively and with lower risk than if they take a purely do-it-yourself approach,” said Chris Crosby, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, at Digital Realty Trust. “When companies collaborate with us on their data center projects, they can save as much as tens of millions of dollars and months or even years by utilizing our supply chain, design and construction expertise, and other proprietary resources.

“We are continuing to receive a very positive response from the market for this service,” Crosby added. “It has a strong value proposition for companies that want to reduce the complexity and cost of their data center projects.”

Digital Realty (DLR) has been a pioneer in building data centers faster and cheaper through the “industrialization” of data center design. The company, which operates 13 million square feet of data center space, has been able to reduce costs and streamline construction using standard components and repeatable design concepts and leveraging its buying power with suppliers.

The company has refined its development process building more than 1.2 million square feet of space for its Turn-Key Datacenter program, which delivers finished raised-floor technical space for clients including Facebook, Savvis, IBM, EDS, CSC and Yahoo.

Features of Digital Realty Trust’s fee-based POD Architecture Services include:

• The ability to license Digital Realty Trust’s Turn-Key Datacenter design package, including its proprietary Design Engineering Guidelines, schematics, one-lines, BOMs, project/site basis and airflow modeling.
• Access to Digital Realty Trust’s supply chain for procuring data center components with “significant pricing advantages” and prompt delivery through Digital Realty Trust’s vendor partnerships.
• Digital Realty Trust’s proprietary Gating Process that provides enterprises with a series of sign offs and checks that give them complete control of the program, with transparency at key stages of the project – “from scope and schematic through commissioning and completion.”
• The ability to leverage Digital Realty Trust’s construction management process, including negotiation of contracts, coordination with contractors and oversight of commissioning procedures.

The VMware Express, a data center on wheels that will offer demos of virtualization technology.

VMware is going on the road to showcase its virtualization technology. And it’s bringing all its equipment with it in a rolling mobile data center packed with gear from Cisco Systems, NetApp, Dell Xsigo and parent EMC Corp.The VMware Express is making its debut at this week’s VMware Partner Exchange Event. The Express will be crossing the U.S. and Canada to bring VMware demos to customers, but the exact schedule of apeparances hasn’t yet been worked out.

The road show follows on the example of Sun Microsystems, which put its Blackbox data center container on a truck and stopped outside industry events and customer sites in the U.S. and Europe. The 2007 road trip helped familiarize many data center professionals with containerized data centers, and was good for a few photo ops along the way.

Rather than using a shipping container to house its demonstration equipment, VMware (VMW) has opted for a trailer. The approach is similar to that taken by APC with its InfraStruXure Express, a fully mobile data center in a 53-foot long trailer. The challenges of this form factor: when packed with gear, the trailer is heavy. This also is a challenge for some fully-loaded 40-foot data center containers, an issue cited by HP in its recent decision to offer a lighter, cheaper 20-foot version of its HP POD container.

“We were impressed at how C7 demonstrated great flexibility in accommodating our high growth needs,” said Dan Marriott, Director of Production Operations, Answers Corporation. “In addition to being located in a disaster-free zone, they provide secure, enterprise-level facilities, a range of cost-effective services including local technical and admin support and importantly, the geographic load balancing we require for our organization.”

“We are delighted to welcome another dynamic and innovative company to our customer ranks,” said Nate Hatch, C7’s CEO and President. “C7’s facilities offer the resilience, disaster recovery, and data protection required by heavily frequented Top 20 websites like Answers.com. C7’s technical team is completely dedicated to Answers as they further streamline their IT infrastructure.”

Along with its colocation, bandwidth and managed service offerings, C7 offers disaster recovery and remote backup services.

Researcher Enterprise Management Associates defines BSM as “Optimizing IT processes and technologies to more effectively manage, monitor, measure, and govern IT from a holistic business contribution perspective in terms of costs, value, and competitiveness.”

EMA’s recent Responsible Cloud survey found that 27 percent of the respondents using cloud computing said they would be integrating BSM and service level management monitoring tools with their cloud management systems. Network- and applications- specific monitoring tools were the top two most common tools, as cited by 62 percent and 56 percent of respondents, respectively. Larger enterprises tend to be more focused on BSM-related areas, according to the research.

Dennis Drogseth, vice president of Research, IT Megatrends, Analytics and CMDB Systems at EMA says the big management platform vendors that combine multiple tools in one suite are the furthest along in providing BSM capabilities. The maturity of BSM tools that enable customers to view their both their cloud and internal data center-based applications is still nascent. The requirements for viewing and acting upon dynamic real-time information is quite complex for vendors to achieve, says Drogseth, and it will take a while for tools to become full-featured for the cloud computing market.

Zyrion is one management company that is making BSM for virtualized and cloud applications a niche. CEO Vikas Aggarwal argues that traditional network management technologies focus only on point or component monitoring as opposed to a holistic view of the virtual IT infrastructure.

“Traditional network management products tell you the performance of servers, routers, etc., but now the environment might have thousands of servers,” Aggarwal said. “I need to know that if my email server is down, whether it’s because the cloud is running slow.”

Getting visibility into the cloud may not be a big issue for Zyrion customers yet, though. Of its 100-strong customer base of mid- to large-sized companies, none is using cloud computing in earnest. Most are testing the waters by putting a few applications in the cloud, Aggarwal said. The biggest barrier to customers going into full cloud production is a fear of losing control over their applications, according to Aggarwal.

While vendors work on developing BSM functionality into their cloud-facing management tools, Drogseth recommends prospective cloud customers to best start by moving parts of their infrastructure that’s supported by BSM tools to the cloud. “BSM should be the end point and starting point,” said Drogseth.

STEVE YELLEN
Emerson Network
Power

As governments around the world continue to explore and implement carbon emissions standards and carbon reduction commitments, many companies will be required to participate in auction-based carbon emissions trading schemes that are designed to provide economic and reputational incentives for achieving reductions in emissions. In many cases, those companies that do not reduce emissions could face financial penalties in the form of emissions credits they will need to purchase.

For example, in the United Kingdom, the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme will begin in April 2010 to promote energy efficiency and help reduce carbon emissions. This carbon cap and trade program requires companies in the UK, including those headquartered in the country and foreign companies with UK subsidiaries, to forecast their energy usage, purchase carbon allowances from the government and monitor actual usage against forecast emissions.

In a report issued at the end of 2009, research firm IDC predicted that there will be a renewed focus on reducing CO2 emissions, at both national and international levels. The firm suggested that by 2011 all G-20 nations will mandate companies to report carbon footprints.

What This Means for the Data Center
While these developments are not specifically aimed at data centers, they will impact how data centers operate and the amount of energy used. As a result, data centers will need to implement mechanisms for monitoring, managing and reporting carbon emissions.

By improving their data center management processes, organizations can gain a comprehensive view of energy consumption and identify opportunities for improving efficiency. This increased discipline and maturity to data center management will help uncover carbon reduction opportunities and allow better management and tracking of data center carbon reduction commitments.

Improving data center management maturity and processes can support data center carbon reduction commitments by helping uncover and identify:

• The amount of currently produced carbon in a facility, as well as the total future amount
• The amount of carbon credits/allowances needed to be purchased for any given year to meet business demands
• How close a facility is to its carbon allowance threshold and a projected time when it might exceed it
• Past carbon production over any given time period
• Projected carbon production tied to any data center expansions or new requirements
• Non-productive servers that can be scheduled for decommissioning and the impact it would have on carbon production
• Technology refresh areas where older devices might be replaced with new higher-efficiency equipment

While the United States has yet to enact a carbon cap and trade program, the government is heading in this direction. In late 2009, the U.S. government announced reporting requirements for greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, recognizing that they pose a hazard to human health. What this means is that the EPA is now taking steps to regulate them. Smart organizations will be ready when regulation begins.

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

Deepening data center skills crisis. ComputerWorld reports on a skills crisis for data centers and IT departments everywhere, which we’ve previously reported about (see The Data Center Skills Gap from March 2009). The thrust of the problem is that people are not generally versed in the data center of today.  The data center of today means mixing facilities and IT, working with highly automated systems, and needs a wide variety of skill sets.  Add on an ever-changing IT landscape and economic recession and maintaining and managing skills becomes more difficult.  Joanne Kossuth, vice president of operations and CIO for Franklin W. Olin College notes that the “situation is exacerbated because IT folks who have lost their jobs during the downturn tend to have held specific jobs at large corporations.”  In a 2009 Nemertes Research study it was noted that “at 37% of the organizations, IT executives reported having put projects on hold because of the skills shortage.” Many of the people that businesses are looking to hire are multi-talented professionals and currently employed. However with demand starting to pick up again for higher-level, hard to find skills, there are plenty of opportunities to enhance skill sets and train on the job.

Juniper Upgrades T series core routers. Juniper (JNPR) announced a new generation of silicon that will enable customers to quickly, efficiently and non-disruptively upgrade existing T series core routers.  Juniper touts the T series as the only core router in the industry capable of supporting true line-rate 100 GigE interfaces.  The new chipset will lay a foundation for single half-rack system to scale to a total capacity of 4 Tbps (Terabits per second).  “The chipset we are introducing today is the next step in our core routing strategy, delivering unparalleled investment protection and enabling our customers to continually scale their networks,” said Stefan Dyckerhoff, senior vice president and general manager, Core Business Unit, Juniper Networks.  The first products set to use the new chipset are scheduled for the second half of 2010 and will be available for purchase in early 2011.

Verisign data center consolidation. Forbes interviews Verisign (VRSN) CTO Ken Silva about a data center consolidation project. Silva discusses the issues with keeping services available at all times, even when migrating from smaller satellite data centers into larger facilities. Capitalizing on the data center moves, he also notes that this is when applications are inventoried, scrutinized and consolidated as well. In the June 2009 Domain Brief, Verisign noted that their average daily DNS query load was 38 billion during the first quarter of 2009. In 2007 Verisign planned a $100 million infrastructure upgrade, including new data centers, to manage the explosive growth in Internet traffic.

Go Daddy has become one of the most recognized advertisers in recent Super Bowls with its trademark “edgy” commercials. The Scottsdale, Ariz. company has cultivated controversies about whether its ads would meet network standards, driving traffic to its web site to “see more”  in unrated “Internet-Only” versions.

“Everything came together beautifully this year,” said Go Daddy CEO and founder Bob Parsons. “We had a tremendous surge in Web traffic, sustained the spike, converted new customers and shot overall sales off the chart. This is a textbook Super Bowl campaign for Go Daddy.”

As usual, the ads were roundly panned by critics, but Parsons says the visits from voyeuristic TV watchers translate into new sales of domains and web hosting products. “We signed up more new customers than any other Super Bowl Sunday in our six year history and set a sales record too.”

The Super Bowl ads have been a factor in the phenomenal growth of Go Daddy, which hosts more sites than any other hosting company in the world, manages more than 39 million domains and has 7.5 million customers. It is the best known brand in the booming domain industry, largely through a promotional strategy that has blended high-profile ad campaigns with savvy use of new media, including blogs and podcasts.

Go Daddy’s breakthrough moment came in 2005, when its provocative Super Bowl commercial featuring WWE diva Candice Michelle generated controversy. After the ad aired in the first quarter, NFL executives pressured Fox to cancel a scheduled second showing of the company’s edgy commercial. The broadcast monitoring firm MultiVision estimated that the Super Bowl controversy supplied Go Daddy with the equivalent of $11.7 million in free publicity. Go Daddy saw a huge surge in domain registrations in 2005.

See NewTeeVee for additional coverage of Internet traffic data related to Super Bowl advertising.

Dimension is the third investment company to take a large position in Internap in the past two weeks. On Jan. 29 BlackRock Inc. disclosed a 5.9 percent stake in Internap, while Kornitzer Capital Managment said on Jan. 22 that it owns 6.7 percent of INAP shares.

Internap provides colocation, content delivery and network optimization services from a network footprint of about 250,000 square feet of space. Since taking over last year, CEO Eric Cooney has focused on an expansion of the company’s data centers, while it reduces its dependence upon space leased from third-party providers.

For more news about cloud computing, see our Cloud Computing Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

First there’s this from The Register: “Sometime in the middle of October, Google silently launched a new net domain – a barely-disguised doppelgänger to the familiar google.com – and according to the latest stats from the site watchers at Alexa, this mystery domain is now visited by nearly three per cent of all net users, making it the 44th most visited domain on the interwebs.”

Separately, Network World notes that Google has “quietly turned on IPv6 support for its YouTube video streaming Web site, sending a spike of IPv6 traffic across the Internet that has continued from last Thursday until Monday. Industry observers say YouTube appeared to be supporting IPv6 in production mode, as opposed to running a test of the next-generation Internet protocol.”