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Monday, January 14th, 2013
| Time | Event |
| 12:30p | Future Facilities Releases 6SigmaDC 7.1 Future Facilities announced the availability of the 6SigmaDC Suite Release 7.1. The update of the data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software offers improved functionality with a major focus on increased usability for modeling and reporting. The new release features the ability to build complex models of data center halls. New functionality’ provides continuous visual feedback about the placement of objects relative to one another in a model. A new search tool has been added to enable dynamic searches of the entire 6SigmaDC library. The addition of 250 new symbols, as well as a catalog of Great Lakes’ 5-star E, EN and ES Series equipment cabinets has enhanced the database of equipment images. Also new in release 7.1 is the improvement to cooling duct design and modeling with easier sketching. “With higher levels of granularity, 6SigmaDC Release 7.1 promises even more realistic data centre modeling,” said Mark Seymour, CTO at Future Facilities. “As a result, users of the 6SigmaDC suite can expect to see improvements in usability and productivity throughout the data centre lifecycle from design to decommissioning.” Other new features include flexible controllers that can be set control both temperature and pressure simultaneously, and an extension to allow full connectivity of the power chain from utility supply to the socket. |
| 1:00p | Substation Unleashes More Power in Prineville
The opening of a new electrical substation in Prineville, Oregon will add 350 megawatts of capacity to the local power grid, clearing the way for additional data center development. The small town of 10,000 in rural central Oregon has emerged as a major data center hub, and is home to major data center campuses for Facebook and Apple. But all those servers absorbed much of the available power on the Prineville grid, prompting the acceleration of a planned Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) substation to expand the region’s capacity. On Friday local officials marked the completion of the Ponderosa substation, which will immediately boost the local grid’s capacity from 650 megwatts to 1,000 megawatts, according to The Bend Bulletin. Planned upgrades to transmission lines will eventually boost total capacity to 1,300 megawatts. The additional capacity will allow officials in Prineville to make power available for future data center projects. Several large companies are reported to have scouted sites in Prineville, where the cool, dry climate allows data centers to take advantage of “free cooling,” the practice of using cool outside temperatures to support the cooling systems. Facebook put Prineville on the data center map by choosing the small town as the site of an ultra-efficient data center. The company has spent more than $210 million on the Prineville facility. The Apple project, along with Facebook’s three data centers, means Prineville may soon be home to more than 1 million square feet of data center capacity – and almost certainly more servers than people – with tens of millions of status updates, music downloads and online videos flowing through the town’s data centers. Last February Apple confirmed plans to build a data center across the street from the Facebook campus. The arrival of a second huge project sharpened the focus on the regional power capacity. Shortly after Apple’s arrival, the BPA and Pacific Power announced plans to accelerate the completion of the Ponderosa substation, which was originally scheduled for completion in June 2013. |
| 4:11p | The Space Station Data Center  Bahnhof is deploying its first modular data center in Kista, Sweden featuring an unusual design that incorporate an inflatable “command module” connected to IT modules made of bullet-proof steel. (Image: Bahnhof) The team behind the stylish “James Bond villain” data center in Stockholm has begun deploying its first modular data center. As you might expect, the project embraces a futuristic design that doesn’t resemble your typical data center. “The goal with this installation is to make it look like a space station,” said Jon Karlung, the CEO of Bahnhof. The design features a spacious double-wide module built with bullet-proof steel that will house servers, which attaches to “The Dome,” an inflatable central vestibule that houses security staff. Karlung is the visionary behind the Bahnhof data center, the former nuclear bunker beneath Stockholm that now houses servers for Swedish ISP Bahnhof. The subterranean lair is outfitted with waterfalls, a greenhouse-style NOC, and a glass-enclosed conference room “floating” above the colocation floor. The facility reflects Karlung’s belief that data centers shouldn’t just be cool – they should LOOK cool, too. That extends to the company’s foray into modular data centers. Bahnhof joins a growing number of providers seeking to provide faster and cheaper deployment of IT capacity through the use of factory-build modules that can be installed quickly and expanded as needed based on the customer’s needs. On a snowy property in Kista, Sweden, Bahnhof is deploying its first “space station” data center – complete with automated pneumatic entry doors that will make a Star Trek-style whooshing noise as they open and close. In this video, Karlung provides a tour of the Kista project and a closer look at how they are applying “Bahnhof Style” to the design. Karlung believes his flair for futuristic visual design can build a distinctive brand. “Containers are ugly,” Karlung told Data Center Knowledge last year. “I think design is too often neglected in our field of business.” Karlung says that designing sleeker and larger modules can turn around some of the early reservations about containers and modular designs. One of the distinctive features is the inflatable Dome developed by Lindstrand Technologies, which previously built a parachute that deposited the Beagle 2 space probe on the surface of Mars. An inflatable structure raises security questions, which are addressed in the design of the IT modules, which are protected by steel plates made of Armox 500, which Bahnhof says is one of the strongest protection plates available. Here’s a closer look at the interior of The Dome, also known as the “Command Module” (similar to NASA’s Apollo space program).  The view from inside the inflatable command module “dome” that plays a central role in the design of Bahnhof’s modular data center prototype. (Image: Bahnhof) |
| 7:59p | Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit Save the date! 451 Research‘s 9th Annual Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit will be held at the Bellagio Hotel & Resort in Las Vegas 2013, on September 23- 25. More details to be announced. |
| 8:02p | It’s Official: Ashburn is Wikipedia’s New Home One of the world’s busiest websites has a new home. The Wikimedia Foundation, operators of Wikipedia, is making an Equinix data center in Ashburn its primary data center, while its previous data center in Tampa, Florida becomes the backup. The foundation has migrated most of its main infrastructure over recent months, with the remainder of the move o be completed on the week of January 22, 2013. “The Migration team is in the last lap on completing the remaining tasks to ready our software stack and Ashburn infrastructure for the big switchover day,” CT Woo, Director of Technical Operations at Wikimedia wrote last Friday. Wikimedia will block a 8-hour migration window on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th. During those periods, there will be intermittent blackouts and they will be treated as ‘planned’ outages. The Ashburn data center has already been serving most of the traffic — about 90% of it — and it has been set to replace the Tampa location as primary for a while. Now it will be known officially as the “home” of Wikipedia. This is part of a long range plan to improve performance and reliability. Why the Move? As a non-profit running one of the world’s busiest web destinations, Wikipedia provides an unusual case study of a high-performance site. In an era when Apple can spend $1 billion on a single data center, Wikimedia spent $2.6 million on Internet hosting in 2011, with a server count measured in hundreds, not thousands. Despite its low-budget approach to supporting a high-traffic site, the Wikimedia Foundation made reliability a priority in 2010, when it expanded its U.S. infrastructure. “Our projects are vulnerable to primary data center failure,” the group said in its annual report. “We will build out a second data center to enable safe failover in the case of disaster. We will also increase uptime by improving site monitoring, capacity planning and operations response.” That meant a long-range plan to shift its server footprint beyond Tampa to Ashburn, probably America’s busiest intersection of networks. Loudoun County, Virginia is home to millions of square feet of data center space and many of the Internet’s key interconnection facilities. Placing Wikipedia’s servers in Ashburn improves its connection to high-traffic networks that serve its users. In addition to the Tampa and Ashburn locations, Wikimedia has data centers in San Francisco and Amsterdam. The group also may add a server farm in Asia to support its global traffic. Last August, a Fiber cut knocked Wikipedia Ashburn offline . |
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