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Friday, February 1st, 2013

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    1:50p
    Top 10 Data Center Stories, January 2013
    bahnhof-dome-interior

    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)

    During the month of January, Open Compute Project’s open source hardware news dominated our reader’s attention, with three stories related to OCP hitting the Data Center Knowledge top 10 list. While Bahnhof’s unusual “space station” design in Sweden led the list, other items of interest included predictions for the 2013 in cloud technology and Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools.  Here are the most popular stories on Data Center Knowledge for January 2013, ranked by page views. Enjoy!

    Stay current on Data Center Knowledge’s data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook. DCK is now on Google+.

    1:51p
    Eurora Sets Supercomputing Energy Efficiency Record
    eurora

    A rack from the Euora supercomputer, which was deployed this week in Bologna, Italy and reached a record 3,150 megaflops per watt of sustained performance. (Photo: NVIDIA Corp.)

    NVIDIA (NVDA) announced that its Tesla GPU accelerators have helped the new Eurora supercomputer set a new record for data center energy efficiency. The supercomputer was deployed this week at the Cineca facility in Bologna, Italy and reached 3,150 megaflops per watt of sustained performance – a mark 26 percent higher than the top system on the most recent Green500 list of the world’s most efficient supercomputers.

    Built by Eurotech, Eurora set the efficiency benchmark by combining 128 high-performance, energy-efficient NVIDIA Tesla K20 accelerators with the Eurotech Aurora Tigon supercomputer, featuring innovative Aurora Hot Water Cooling technology, which uses direct hot water cooling on all electronic and electrical components of the HPC system. It packs 64 compute nodes with 2 Intel Xeon E5 processors and 2 Tesla K20 GPU accelerators into a single rack. It delivers 350 teraflops of peak performance, which would rank it among the top 100 supercomputers in the world.

    Enabling scientists to advance research and discovery across a range of disciplines, the Eurora is available to members of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE). ”Advanced computer simulations that enable scientists to discover new phenomena and test hypotheses require massive amounts of performance, which can consume a lot of power,” said Sanzio Bassini, director of HPC department at Cineca. “Equipped with the ultra-efficient Aurora system and NVIDIA GPU accelerators, Eurora will give European researchers the computing muscle to study all types of physical and biological systems, while allowing us to keep data center power consumption and costs in check.”

    Euora’s efficiency is derived partially from the Tesla K20 accelerators, and partially from the use of warm water to keep server components at optimal operating temperatures. Heated water produced from the supercomputer can be re-purposed to heat buildings or drive absorption chillers, and then returned back to the supercomputer at a cooler temperature. Over its five year lifespan, Eurotech estimates that Cineca will save a whopping 2.5 million kilowatt-hours, or $500k savings in energy costs, while eliminating over 1,500 tons of CO2 emissions as compared to a typical CPU cluster of similar performance.

    “GPU accelerators are inherently more energy efficient than CPUs, and Tesla K20 accelerators widen this gap considerably,” said Sumit Gupta, general manger of the Tesla accelerated computing business at NVIDIA. “Energy efficiency has become the defining element of computing performance. And GPUs enable data center computer systems of all sizes – from small clusters to future exascale-class systems — to achieve performance goals within an economically feasible energy budget.”

    2:30p
    Customer Wins for CyrusOne, Peak 10 and PEER 1

    Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

    CARFAX selects Cyrus One. CyrusOne (CONE) announced that CARFAX has selected the Carrollton Texas CyrusOne data center to house its 11 billion vehicle history records. Reasons cited for the selection were CyrusOne’s commitment to customer service, its high-quality facility specifications, the proximity of CyrusOne’s Carrollton facility to CARFAX operations, and the accessibility and interconnectedness of CyrusOne’s footprint overall. “We knew we wanted a data center partner so we could focus more of our attention on our core business. And while we expect to benefit from the space, power, cooling, and corresponding uptime delivery that CyrusOne offers, the big differentiator for selecting CyrusOne was the unmatched level of customer service its people deliver,” said Joedy Lenz, vice president and chief technology officer, CARFAX. “CyrusOne built a team to support us that is knowledgeable, helpful, and responsive, which helps develop a sense of trust.  They prove through every interaction that the company is truly interested in the success of our business.”

    Peak 10 selected by Tractor Supply. Peak 10 announced that it been selected to host the data center of Tractor Supply Company (TSC), the largest retail farm and ranch store chain in the United States. Looking to support growth plans, increase agility and lower costs, TSC will leverage the Peak 10 Nashville facility to maintain its data center environment. “Our relationship with Peak 10 provides us with best in class IT infrastructure that is both highly available and conveniently located,” said James Callison, chief information officer for Tractor Supply Company. “With our data center environment securely set up at Peak 10 Nashville, we are now able to dedicate our efforts to expanding our retail services for our customers knowing that our mission-critical data is in trusted hands.”

    Peer 1 selected by Sociocast.  PEER 1 Hosting (PIX) announced that big data predictive analytics platform provider Sociocast has selected the company to host its processing infrastructure. After its infrastructure experienced a rough initial launch Sociocast sought out PEER 1 for a more flexible hosting approach. “Each day, our customers receive hundreds of requests per second via our real-time APIs. Combined with the millions of unique online users and billions of user events, this generates hundreds of billions of data rows in our system – every single day,” said Giri Iyengar, chief technology officer at Sociocast. “Our customers, and in turn, their customers, expect fast and consistent performance in order to analyze trends and make predictions based on their big data streams. When we hosted our infrastructure in the cloud, we did not have reliable results. With PEER 1 Hosting’s dedicated hosting options, we are seeing consistent bandwidth availability, a lower financial burden and happier end users.”

    3:25p
    Friday Funny: What’s the Best Caption?

    It’s Friday and you know what that means, it’s time for another one of our Data Center Knowledge cartoon caption contests.

    Thanks to all our readers who submitted funny caption suggestions. Please take a moment to vote on the caption suggestions for our latest cartoon which was inspired by the movie, “Up.” (Scroll down to vote!)

    The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon (drawn by Diane Alber, our fav data center cartoonist) and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion.

    The winner will receive their caption in a signed print by Diane.
    Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.

    Take Our Poll

    For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel.

    3:25p
    $1.5 Billion Iowa Project is Still Alive. Is it Apple?
    apple-nc-solar-470

    This huge array of solar panels supports the Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina. A new mystery project in Iowa will likely include both solar power and fuel cells, an unusual paring first seen at Apple in Maiden. (Photo: Rich Miller)

    The mysterious $1.5 billion project known as Project Catapult is apparently back in play. Local officials in Altoona, Iowa this week revived a site plan for the project, which has been shrouded in secrecy as a large company has scouted sites in both Iowa and Nebraska.

    Who is the company behind the project? Local officials aren’t saying. But an intriguing clue has emerged from documents supporting the Altoona project. One of the proposed zoning amendments would allow the operator of the data center to use on-site generation from solar panels, fuel cells and wind energy.

    The only companies that have deployed both solar energy and fuel cells at a data center are Apple and eBay. Apple has installed both technologies at its data center in Maiden, North Carolina, while eBay is using both solar and fuel cells at its new campus in South Jordan, Utah.

    The unnamed company, operating in Iowa as Project Catapult, has an option on land in Altoona and has submitted site plans to local officials showing phased construction of three data centers, each between 350,000 and 380,000 square feet in size. The site plan was originally approved last June, but there were few signs of activity over the summer. The mystery company made site visits to Altoona in both September and October, and by November officials in Altoona were working on “fine details” to finalize a deal.

    The company has also scouted sites in Nebraska, where officials are using a codename of Project Edge. Nebraska’s leading candidate has appeared to be Kearney, Nebraska, where local officials were confident enough about their chances that in late March the city council approved spending $1.7 million to acquire land for the project.

    Narrowing the Field of Suspects

    As we’ve previously noted, the field of prospects is narrowed by the scope of the project and the the fact that three of the huge companies best known for secretive site selections – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo – already operate major data centers in either Iowa or Nebraska. Possible candidates include Apple or Facebook, neither of which has a major data center presence in the middle of the country. There’s also a chance – albeit a smaller one – that the mystery company could be a financial services company or other enterprise.

    Much of the speculation has focused on Facebook, as the multi-building site plan submitted in Altoona is similar to the site plans for Facebook’s project in Oregon and North Carolina. But a growing number of companies are now pursuing multi-facility campuses.

    The potential use of solar arrays and fuel cells in Altoona moves Apple up the list of suspects. Apple has deployed two large solar arrays to support its Maiden facility, generating up to 20 megawatts of electricity. Apple has also announced plans to deploy a 5 megawatt fuel cell facility, featuring Bloom Energy Servers powered by methane from landfills, which will be transported via a natural gas pipeline system.

    Solar Now Common, But Not Fuel Cells

    eBay is using Bloom boxes to support the newest phase of its data center project in Utah, where it is employing a new power infrastructure that eliminates traditional uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units and backup generators. Bloom fuel cells will provide primary power, while eBay will use the utility grid as its backup power source. The Utah campus also features a solar array, which is significantly smaller in scope than the massive Apple solar project. It’s worth noting that eBay has largely abandoned the secrecy around its data center projects, sponsoring open design RFPs for the first two phases of the Utah project.

    A growing number of data center operators are installing solar arrays to add a solar power, but fuel cells are rarely used in data centers due to their cost – which would make them an unlikely fit for a cost-conscious operator like Facebook or Google.

    When will the identity of Project Catapult be known? This project first began making headlines a year ago. The renewed activity in Altoona suggests there might be an answer soon.

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