Fortrust, Consonus Partner on Disaster Recovery

Fortrust and Consonus have become the latest regional data center specialists to arrange “DR swap” relationships in which they provide data center disaster recovery space and services to one another’s customers.

 Fortrust is a high-availability data center and colocation company based in Denver, while Consonus provides hosting and managed services from its facility in Salt Lake City, Utah. The partnership announced late last week enables customers to utilize both providers’ data center and colocation facilities for geographically diverse disaster recovery and business continuity options.

With customers increasingly are seeking to house their data in at least two separate locations, the quest for geographic redundancy works to the advantage of providers with multiple data centers around the country. DR swap partnerships, which have been seen since 2007, allow regional providers to level the playing field.

BT, Logica New Tenants at Next Generation

An exterior view of the Next Generation Data Ltd. facility in Newport, Wales.

A huge new data center in Wales has unveiled its first two tenants. Next Generation Data Ltd said Friday that BT and Logica will occupy two large data halls at its NGD Europe facility, which at 75,000 square meters (750,000 square feet) is one of the world’s largest data centers. Build outs for both clients were completed in less than 16 weeks, despite challenging weather conditions during late December and early January.

“Making these halls ready in record time for BT and Logica was largely down to excellent planning and project management by our resident and highly experienced operations team, the calibre and professionalism of our chosen infrastructure partners and sheer hard work by all concerned,” said Simon Taylor, Chairman of Next Generation Data.

Cisco OTV: Virtually Spanning Data Centers

In the beginning, there were text files. As the Internet evolved, the files moving across the network grew in size – first photos, then videos, then widgets. And now, with virtualization transforming many IT departments, virtual machines loom as the next payload networks must confront.

On Monday Cisco Systems (CSCO) will officially introduce a new technology that will make it easier to seamlessly move groups of virtual machines between data centers.

Cisco says its Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) solves many of the challenges that have made it difficult to shift large workloads between facilities, potentially opening new frontiers in disaster recovery, data center consolidation, and even energy management.

Tunneling Over IP
OTV is a new feature of the Nexus OS operating system that encapsulates Layer 2 Ethernet traffic within IP packets, allowing Ethernet traffic from a local area network (LAN) to be tunneled over an IP network to create a “logical data center” spanning several data centers in different locations. OTV technology will be supported in Cisco’s Nexus 7000 in April 2010, and existing Nexus customers can deploy OTV through a software upgrade.

Data Center Haiku Contest

Look what Jonathan Schwartz has wrought! By resigning on Twitter via a haiku tweet, the former Sun Microsystems president have focused fresh attention on haiku, the three-line Japanese poetry form. 

This has inspired the folks at newScale to start a Data Center Haiku Contest for those inspired to pan gems such as:

Be strong, blade server
Stay in your rack and burn hot
You are beautiful

The contest runs through Feb. 15, and you can submit via Twitter (@CarolDirig) or by emailing your entry to marketing@newscale.com. The winner receives a coffee mug emblazoned with their winning data center haiku.

UPDATE: Chuck Goolsbee has some wortwhile chiller haiku.

Bick Group Acquires Cloud Consultants

Data center design/build firm Bick Group has announced the acquisition of Blue Mountain Labs (BML), a consulting firm focused on the adoption of cloud computing within enterprise and government organizations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

BML was founded by David Linthicum, a well known thought leader in the cloud computing and service oriented architecture (SOA) space, and the author of the best selling cloud computing book Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in your Enterprise…a Step-by-Step Guide. Linthicum will join Bick Group as CTO and focus on expanding Bick Group’s leadership within the emerging cloud computing space.

“In our 45-year history we have repeatedly adapted to technology evolution in the data center,” said Andrew Parham, Bick Group CEO. “The addition of BML to our existing IT Services Practice is a natural extension of our portfolio. We are excited about bringing BML into the Bick Group family and look forward to helping our clients exploit the advantages of true SOA combined with cloud computing.”

Bick Group designs and builds data centers for enterprises, government agencies and third-party data center operators worldwide.

Parham discussed Bick Group’s growing interest in cloud computing in his keynote presentation at the fall 2009 Data Center World conference. “The cloud contains a storm, not a shower,” Parham said. “Your role as a data center professional will be completely turned upside down in this period of change.”

“Cloud computing models are the future of the data center,” said Bill Russell, Executive VP of IT Services for Bick Group. “Our clients have come to rely on our strategic insight and our ability to execute.  The acquisition of BML will allow us to deliver a set of offerings to cut through the hype and deliver on the promise of the cloud.”

“I found the synergy between BML and Bick Group to be extremely compelling,” said Linthicum. “With the thought leadership and strategic guidance provided by BML, and Bick Group’s ability to execute, the combined organization will provide clients with a clear path to cloud computing and the ability to get them there to support the requirements of the business.”

Scientists Offered Free Access to Azure Cloud

Microsoft is giving scientists and researchers supported by the National Science Foundation free access to its Azure cloud computing platform for three years. The deal would potentially, in one fell swoop, give Microsoft access to research projects that the NSF funds in nearly 2,000 universities and institutions in all 50 states.

The agreement would also give Microsoft access to computer scientists who could help the software giant to develop new ways to simplify the use of cloud computing for the scientific and research community.

Microsoft formed the eXtreme Computing Group in June 2009 as part of its Microsoft Research arm. Its goal is to develop “radical new approaches to ultrascale and high-performance computing hardware and software,” specifically for computer security, cloud computing, and data center architecture, among other areas.

“I am very excited about this, as it is the fruit of nearly two years of planning and collaboration across Microsoft product and research teams, as well as many discussions with researchers, university leaders and government agencies,” wrote Dan Reed, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s eXtreme Computing Group, in his blog.

‘More Than Adequate’ Horsepower
Microsoft didn’t detail how much Azure capacity it would give away, but during a conference call announcing the deal, Reed said the compute power would be “more than adequate” for researchers’ needs.

HPC Customers Get a Cloud Computing Option

Six months after launching its Penguin on Demand (POD) cloud computing service, high-performance Linux cluster provider Penguin Computing said up to 200 of its 2,000-strong customer base are using its on-demand offering, including some new customer wins in the life-sciences sector.

POD is a complete high-performance computing (HPC) system in the cloud, but no virtualization technology is used because Penguin wanted to offer each of its HPC customers dedicated servers to ensure optimum performance.

HPC users, particularly academic researchers, are naturally drawn to the cost benefits of dynamic compute environments, as illustrated by the many shared networks of academic and research organizations, such as ESnet, a high-speed network managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that’s used by thousands of Department of Energy scientists and collaborators worldwide. Some researchers have also been drawn to public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, which offers free usage credits to educators, academic researchers and students.

HPC on Azure, Too
Microsoft is reporting HPC customers using traditional HPC systems in conjunction with its Azure hosted platform. RiskMetrics, a financial risk management firm used Azure to help it measure and model complex financial instruments. According to Microsoft, RiskMetrics “anticipates developing increasingly seamless and scalable applications that span Windows Azure and Windows HPC Server 2008 … to deliver both on-premises and cloud computing capacity as needed.”

Virginia, NC Battle for Microsoft Data Center

Will dozens of these Microsoft data center containers soon be filling a facility in Virginia or North Carolina? The two states are battling for the project.

Economic development teams in Virginia and North Carolina are competing for a huge Microsoft data center project. The tech giant is in the late stages of site location for a new East Coast regional data center, and has looked at sites in both states, sources say.

Microsoft has built four huge data centers to support the growth of its online business, including its Windows Azure cloud computing platform. The sites in Chicago, Dublin, San Antonio and Quincy, Washington have each been in the neighborhood of 500,000 square feet and involved enormous capital investment.

Microsoft’s focus on the mid-Atlantic region means another battle between Virginia and North Carolina, which competed head-to-head for the huge Apple data center that is now under construction in Maiden, North Carolina.

Video: Inside IBM’s North Carolina Data Center

IBM has published a video offering a closer look at the operations of its $360 million data center at IBM’s Research Triangle Park (RTP) campus in North Carolina, where Big Blue has implemented its latest energy efficient design features. IBM, which owns or operates more than 450 data centers worldwide, has submitted the facility for Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. This video runs about 3 minutes.

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