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Friday, May 17th, 2013
| Time | Event |
| 12:19p | Data Center Jobs: RagingWire Data Centers At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from RagingWire Data Centers, which is seeking a Sr. National Account Manager (Sales Hunter) in San Francisco, California. The Sr. National Account Manager (Sales Hunter) must develop and manage territory coverage and account strategy plans and execute against sales objectives, margin goals, and overall business strategy , develop client relationships throughout the organization in each pertinent area of the business, develop a technology plan, communication plan, and develop an overall client satisfaction plan, create and implement a plan for using corporate, regional, local, and global marketing programs for lead development, participate in firm-wide sales activities including focused sales campaigns, and perform strategic account reviews with team to identify and target practice area specific opportunities. To view full details and apply, see job listing details. Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed. |
| 1:43p | AlteredScale Opens Doors at 601 Polk in Chicago  601 West Polk in Chicago is the home of a new data cneter for AlteredScale. The facility will be managed by Norland Managed Services. . 601 West Polk is alive and kicking. The 100 year old structure just west of the Loop in Chicago has been through a lot over the years, including a previous owner passing through bankruptcy. After several millions of dollars worth of renovations. AlteredScale, a provider of mission critical data center solutions, announced this week that it has chosen Norland Managed Services to operate and maintain its data center at 601 West Polk. 601 West Polk is an historic, 100-year-old structure, which features 25,000 square feet of newly-built raised floor space, which AlteredScale says is the largest contiguous chunk of colocation space in downtown Chicago. Real estate pickings downtown Chicago can be slim, and there’s a lot of history around this building. “Despite being one of North America’s most strategic data center markets, Chicago has suffered from a lack of capacity in the central business district,” said Kevin Francis, President of AlteredScale. “With the completion of phase one at 601 West Polk we are excited to serve the colocation needs of enterprises throughout Chicago and the Midwest. AlteredScale provides IT capacity in a convenient downtown location.” 601 Polk is situated on the primary fiber-optic ring serving downtown Chicago, and near multiple power substations. In addition to the 25,000 square feet of data center space on the first floor, 601 Polk also includes 28,000 square feet of expansion space available for data center and office use. AlteredScale chose Norland Managed Services, Inc. to operate and maintain the critical facilities and Chicago-based Tiburon Security Inc., who custom built security protocols and staffs guard personnel for the site. 601 Polk’s Long HistoryBuilt more than 100 years ago, the 601 Polk building was at one point a warehouse for the retailer Marshall Fields and was later slated to be a “carrier hotel” for a telecommunications company. Purchased out of bankruptcy by Pi Data Holdings, LLC in 2011 for $10 million, the deal allowed the previous owner to pay off creditors and drop a Chapter 11 bankruptcy case, according Chicago Real Estate Daily. Several million was spent on renovation, leaving about 25,000 square feet of first floor space for multi-tenant usage. Existing tenants of the building at the time included Comcast Corp., France Telecom and Kozy’s Cyclery, a bike shop. The 108,000-square-foot building was renovated extensively and turned from raw industrial space into modern, flexible data center space. It was a worthwhile endeavor, given the building’s location, access to power and connectivity. |
| 3:05p | Friday Funny: Green Lighting in the Data Center It’s Friday and we’re ready for some humor. So let’s get to our Data Center Knowledge caption contest, with a new cartoon drawn by Diane Alber, our favorite data center cartoonist! This week we present “Green Lighting.” Diane writes: “I just went to tour an amazing lighting center and they talked about they had a very large focus on green lighting by using LEDs and other light fixtures. So I thought Kip and Gary would take this “green lighting” thing to a new level.” Enter your caption suggestion below. Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.  Click to enlarge. The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion. The winner will receive his or her caption in a signed print by Diane. Also, we must announce the winner of the previous cartoon, Joe, who submitted, “LEED Platinum here we come!” for May Flowers. For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. |
| 6:29p | IO Immersant Brings Virtual Reality to the Data Center  A look at some of the visuals provided by IO.Immersant, a new tool that provides a 3D “virtual reality” representation of a modular data center. (Image via IO). Ready or not, virtual reality is coming to the data center. IO this week demonstrated a new application that provides a 3D visual representation of a customer’s data center environment, allowing them to “walk through” their data center and check operating conditions, much as players in World of Warcraft explore Azeroth. The technology was on display at IO’s booth at The Uptime Symposium in Santa Clara, allowing expo visitors to go inside a 3D representation of an IO.Anywhere modular data center. The application, called IO.Immersant, draws real-time data from the company’s IO.OS data center management software and creates a graphical version of the module, servers and cooling equipment. “It’s a gamification of the data center,” said Kevin Malik,the CIO of IO and General Manager of IO Labs, the company’s R&D division. “It renders (the data center) in real-time and allows you to walk through it like a first-person shooter. It reads from the database and displays the information virtually. This is bringing some glamour to the data center.” Six Months of DevelopmentThe visual display is created using libraries of images of the IO modules and equipment. About six months of development went into creating Immersant, which was built by IO’s in-house team, including alumni of Pixar and Qualcomm. The version being demonstrated at Uptime featured a D400 module with 18 racks. The demo allowed user to walk into the module, which was housed 700 miles away in Phoenix, and see a real-time representation of the state of the module. “If a valve is set at 30 degrees, Immersant will display it set to 30 degrees,” said Malik. “The first challenge is getting people to believe it’s not a video, and that it’s based on real data.” It’s one thing to move from spreadsheets to graphical software interfaces. But are data center managers and admins ready to hug their servers virtually? Or is this just a cool marketing tool to showcase IO’s modular data center technology. Malik believes that Immersant is the next step in making data centers relevant to customers, including executives and admins who have grown up in online worlds. “We’re skating where the puck is going,” said Malik. “From a security and training perspective, we see this as the next generation of data center management. I think they’re ready for this.” Here’s a look at a brief video from Uptime showing the IO team demonstrating Immersant for attendees. |
| 6:59p | The Quid Pro Quo of Trade Show Swag We’ve all experienced it. You walk by a booth at a trade show, and something catches your eye. It might be a T-shirt, or a flashing bouncy-ball emblazoned with a vendor’s logo. Almost every exhibitor has some kind of giveaway to catch the attention of delegates walking the expo floor, in hopes it will lead to the purchase of a million dollar generator. It’s trade show swag – also sometimes known as a “tchotchke” an old Yiddish term for a bauble. Compass Data Centers CEO Chris Crosby offers an entertaining reflection on trade show goodies at the Compass Points blog. “I think the tchotchke satisfies our material desire in any vendor exchange. In other words, it’s the answer to the ubiquitous ‘what’s in it for me’ question. One might even compare it to a unique form of barter. ‘Sure I’ll read your white paper, but I want a T-shirt for doing it’ or ‘I’ll agree to attend your webinar but, whether I ultimately buy or not, your gyroscopic pen is mine to keep.’ In essence, the tchotchke is the compensation that we expect for agreeing to a vendor’s request. In the world of the tchotchke, everything is a quid pro quo arrangement.” Like reading a blog post to enjoy a foam rubber representation of the Compass’ mascot? Yep, it looks like there’s a Data Center Fairy tchotchke as well. |
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