Productivity a Key ‘Green’ Theme for 2009

What will the year 2009 bring for the data center sector? The big story will be the economy, and how companies balance the mission-critical nature of their data center operations with the new austerity.

“With revenue growth and profitability at risk for many companies in today’s global economy, IT and Infrastructure plans will be scrutinized as never before,” said Christian Belady, Principal Power & Cooling Architect for Microsoft. “As a result, a company’s growing IT demands will need to be met with existing infrastructures, and efficiency will be more important. Data center costs will need to be flat or decrease to maintain viability.

“Even more importantly, companies will need to do more with less, which will create the stimulus for greater adoption of new technologies and processes that improve both IT and infrastructure utilizations.”

The changed economic climate will drive a renewed focus on productivity within the data center in 2009, agreed Jack Pouchet, director of energy initiatives for Emerson Network Power, who said he expects continued focus on data center efficiency metrics.

“Given the severe restrictions on budgets and the paucity of capital, everyone from line managers to the C-suite will need, to paraphrase Jerry McGuire, to ’show me the productivity,’ ” said Pouchet. “This attention to productivity will shift the data center discussion away from PUE (Power Usage Effectivness), which is merely a ratio of power distribution with no impact on productivity, and towards defining a MPG metric for servers, storage, networks and the data center as a whole.”

CAPSTAR Plans Data Center Near Dallas

CAPSTAR Real Estate Advisors plans to convert a former telecom facility in Mesquite, Texas into a huge data center, and says it has a capital partner willing to provide funding for the project. CAPSTAR is seeking township approval of tax incentives to develop the former AT&T/Lucent facility at 3000 Skyline Drive.

The building’s current tenant is Lineage Power, a unit of Tyco Electronics that builds power supplies for telecom and networking equipment. Mesquite is an eastern suburb of Dallas, which had been a hot market for data center development in 2008.

CAPSTAR hopes to purchase the 960,000 square foot facility, lease some of the space back to Lineage and partition the remaining space into “pods” of powered shell space ready for data center tenants. Brad Enloe, vice president of CAPSTAR Real Estate Advisors, said the facility represents “a unique opportunity for a data center, with a confluence of power and fiber.”

Data Loss Dooms Blog Hosting Service

The blog hosting service Journalspace is shutting down after all its user data was lost. Rather than backing up its data at another location, Journalspace mirrored the data on a separate drive on the same server. When the data on both drives went missing, the service apparently had no backups it could use to restore the data.

“There was no hardware failure,” reads the notice to users. “Both drives are operating fine. The data was simply gone. Overwritten. … Clearly, we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry. So, after nearly six years, journalspace is no more.”

The site had a rank of 106,000 on Alexa, suggesting some meaningful traffic. Obviously, a cautionary tale about back and recovery practices. See Slashdot for more discussion.

Investing: Digital Realty Best of Bleak 2008

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the 2008 performance of data center stocks is that it can no longer get any worse. All 13 stocks we track at the Data Center Investor showed losses for the year, with only Digital Realty Trust (DLR) outperforming the Dow (-33.8%) and S&P 500 (-38.5%). The performance list shows a clear bias toward the industry’s most established players, reflecting a “flight to quality” on the part of investors in the sector. The top five performers are all known quantities with track records that predate the dot-com boom and bust.

At the other end of the spectrum are DuPont Fabros and NaviSite, two companies that have been active in the business for many years but saw their shares take a beating during the fourth quarter selloff. The board and management team at DuPont Fabros remain confident of a comeback, and have been active purchasers of the company’s shares in recent weeks.

Why You Shouldn’t Shout in the Data Center

Data centers are noisy places. Sometimes you have to raise your voice to be heard. But you shouldn’t shout right next to a rack of equipment, as illustrated by Brendan Gregg of Sun Microsystems. Brendan used analytics software developed by Sun’s Fishworks team to demonstrate that shouting next to working racks can cause significant disk latency. In this example, Brendan screams into a rack housing JBODs (Just A Bunch of Disks), producing an immediate pop in input/output latency. The increase is caused by disk vibration resulting from the nearby noise. While the example is extreme, it’s worth considering the next time you’re trying to make yourself heard in the data center. This video is 2 minutes in length.

Brendan shares more data on his blog. For more news from Sun Microsystems, check out our Sun Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Roundup: Hamilton, Savvis, Bhutan and More

I wasn’t writing over the holidays, but I had time to do a lot of reading, both online and off. Here are some interesting news links about the data center industry:

• Amazon’s James Hamilton has a wide-ranging post that looks at various aspects of data center efficiency, including temperature set points, power supplies, 2-in-1 servers and containers. James, who says he’s skeptical about reports that Google has deployed data center containers, also did an interview with Deborah Grove that touches on PUE issues.
• How do you rebuild morale and trust after a CEO exits amid controversy? Smart Business St. Louis has a lengthy piece about Savvis Inc. CEO Phil Koen and the challenges he faced when he took the helm in 2006. The article focuses on leadership and culture, rather than Savvis’ business strategy, but will be of interest to readers tracking Savvis.
• Is the Asian nation of Bhutan the next data center hub? Some regional analysts believe Bhutan’s emergent supply of hydro power could attract tech companies to the landlocked country at the foot of the Himalayas. Sounds like a stretch to me.   

Can Cloud Computing Handle Compliance?

Is cloud computing secure enough to meet enterprise regulatory compliance requirements? There was an interesting back and forth on this topic Wednesday between Chuck Goolsbee at SearchDataCenter.com and Michael Sheehan from GoGrid. Chuck’s big-picture take is reflected in the title of his column: “Don’t buy cloud computing hype: Business model will evaporate.” He bases his skepticism on a number of factors, including his doubts that cloud computing providers can meet regulatory compliance requirements such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which is essential for e-commerce:

The auditors have a very clear idea of exactly what they want to see in terms of server infrastructure, software configuration and network deployment. Deviations from the script are hard to get away with. Paramount to everything is the ability to audit. To see where, when and how payment card data is used. When they ask ‘where is X?’ you have to point to a specific spot (be it a server, a file system or a database table) and say, ‘X is right there.’ You also have to prove that X has not been altered without record of it, nor has ever left the building in an insecure or unencrypted state. So can any of this be trusted to a cloud? I doubt it.

Chuck has other reservations about the cloud computing business model. But since concerns about security are cited as the leading barrier to cloud computing adoption, let’s take a moment to examine the compliance issue in greater detail.

What Will Be The Big Stories of 2009?

As 2008 draws to a close, it’s time to look ahead to 2009. Next week we’ll have stories looking at some hot topics in the coming year. But first we’d like to hear from you: what do you think will be the hot trends in the data center world in 2009? Share your predictions in the comments. (Note: comments are moderated, so there may be a short delay before your comments appear.)