Monday, November 11th, 2013

Time	Event
1:00p	Portugal Telecom’s High-Concept Green Data Center A rainfall storage feature at the new Portugal Telecom data center in Covilha creates a moat around the tower that houses the data halls. (Photo: Portugal Telecom) In a plain that unfurls beneath Portugal’s largest mountains, about 185 miles north of Lisbon, Portugal Telecom (PT) has set out to do something different. The town of Covilha is home to an ambitious new data center project that seeks to combine progressive architecture, sustainability and the latest in information technology. The $120 million (90 million Euro) data center, which opened in September, houses six data halls that each offer 56,000 square feet (520 square meters) of technical space designed to operate at a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.25. The entire project, once complete, will feature four block-like data center structures spanning 75,500 square meters – about 800,000 square feet. The PT facility is built to be sustainable, featuring a rain water collection system (which forms a moat around the data center building), an on-site photovoltaic solar power generation, and a garden with more than 600 trees. Portugal Telecom is seeking Gold LEED certification for the data center building, and LEED Platinum status for the attached office building. Covilhã was chosen for the location because it’s the coldest place in Portugal, with a climate that will allow PT to use fresh air cooling for 99 percent of the year, with chillers expected to be used four days a year. Making A Statement “When we designed the Covilhã data centre, we wanted to make sure that sustainability was engrained into the building from the very beginning,” said Zeinal Bava, CEO of Portugal Telecom. “This didn’t just mean having efficient hardware, it meant the whole infrastructure had to come together in a way that showed our customers that we are as serious about the efficiency as they are. Covilhã makes a definitive statement in that regard.” But there’s serious business happening within the three-story data center structure. PT opened the facility with 37 launch day clients, including IT services and outsourcing giants Accenture and Wipro and three major banks. PT is offering a full suite of cloud and data services, with solutions that include Software as a Service (SaaS), Collaboration as a service (CaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). “Within cloud computing there’s intense competition and so as well as our expertise in connectivity and communication we must also compete on sustainability,” said Bava. “The steps we have taken to be greener than our competitors also enable us to be 34 percent better priced than the average price for premium data centres in Europe. We have gone out of our way to ensure that we have used leading edge technology but even more important is the way that technology was put together.” This video provides an overview of the Covilha project, its sustainability features, design and technology. This video runs about 2 minutes. Next: A Closer Look at the PT Data Center (Comment on this)
2:00p	DBT-Data Repurchases Virginia Site From Harris Data center developer DBT-DATA has repurchased a data center in Harrisonburg, Virginia that it sold to IT contractor Harris Corp. in 2010, and has apparently gotten a bargain in the process. The acquisition of the Cyber Integration Center provides DBT-DATA with an operational high-security data center that has been optimized for government IT outsourcing. It remains to be seen whether DBT can succeed where Harris struggled. What’s safe to say is that DBT has had a much more successful relationship with this building than Harris, which bought the property for $41.6 million and reportedly invested $200 million in the facility through March 2012, when Harris said it was exiting the cloud hosting business and selling the facility. DBT bought the Cyber Integration Center last month for $35 million, according to local media. That’s more than $6 million less than DBT received when it sold the site to Harris – a deal that looks even better when you factor in the value of any improvements installed by Harris during its ownership. The building has one tenant, a service provider specializing in hosting for government agencies and other security-sensitive clients. The new/old owner announced the acquisition last month, while not naming the seller. “DBT is excited about bringing our new Harrisonburg, Virginia data center online as a state of the art facility,” said David Tolson, president of DBT Development. ”Demand for federal government and private sector data storage is enormous in the greater Washington area. With a total of 6,000kw of IT load conditioned power, the Cyber integration Center offers 4,500kw of power for immediate use for an existing customer and is built out with the capacity of 1,500kw reserved power.” DBT-DATA says it will operate the Harrisonburg facility to meet the strictest standards required by the Federal Government and private enterprise, ensuring the center adheres to the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA), which requires federal agencies and contractors to have cyber security programs that safeguard information. The Cyber Integration Center is protected by full perimeter fencing, card readers and biometric access at all control points, and on-site IT and security staff around the clock. The Cyber Integration Center is LEED Silver certified, incorporating efficiency measures that include compact fluorescent lighting, high-efficiency evaporative chillers, and air-side economizers for free cooling. DBT-DATA owns four data center properties in Ashburn, Virginia, a municipality through which 60% of the United States’ Internet traffic travels on a daily basis. The company plans to continue to grow its digital footprint in data storage capabilities to serve government and private sector clients. (Comment on this)
2:30p	TelecityGroup Launches Cloud-IX, Acquires Two European Providers European data center operator TelecityGroup announced the launch of Cloud-IX, a cloud-neutral ecosystem, and expansion in Europe through acquisitions of 3DC in Bulgaria and PLIX in Poland. The TelecityGroup Cloud-IX platform will be rolled out to customers located in TelecityGroup’s facilities across Europe, providing direct connectivity with cloud providers,, including Amazon Web Services, iland, CSC, Fujitsu and Outsourcery.  “Businesses across Europe are looking at ways they can maximise the power of the cloud to enhance the performance of their core platforms, manage big data with ease, and deliver enhanced and scalable service offerings,” said Michael Tobin, CEO of TelecityGroup. ”At the same time, they have the traditional challenges of maintaining service levels and maximising the benefit of existing IT investments. Key to solving this challenge is building flexible solutions that utilise the elasticity and economic benefits of the public cloud alongside existing IT infrastructure, all with direct connectivity into local and international carriers.” European Expansion TelecityGroup announced the acquisition of 3DC, a leading Bulgarian independent data center provider. Bulgaria has two internet exchanges – the Bulgarian Internet Exchange and the Balkan Internet Exchange – establishing the country as one of the fastest growing sites for internet traffic in Europe and both of which are hosted in 3DC. “Bulgaria is a strategic location within the Balkans, with access to the EU, Turkey and beyond. 3DC has played a major role in the development of a thriving digital economy in the region, creating one of the fastest growing internet hubs in Europe,” said Michael Tobin, CEO of TelecityGroup. ”I am delighted to welcome Zdravko and the team at 3DC to TelecityGroup and look forward to working with them to position the region as the strategic choice for businesses looking for first class data centre services.” TelecityGroup also announced an agreement to acquire PLIX, the most-connected independent colocation business in Warsaw, Poland, which also incorporates the largest Polish internet exchange. PLIX customers include major international and domestic leaders in communications, cloud, content and applications. “Poland is fast becoming an extremely important European and international internet hub,” said Sylwester Biernacki, founder and CEO of PLIX. ”The agreement to combine our business with Europe’s leading datacentre provider will be a tremendous opportunity for PLIX and the region as a whole.” (Comment on this)
2:56p	Experience vs. Connectivity: What Should Really Matter to Today’s CIO Michael Bushong is the vice president of marketing at Plexxi. MICHAEL BUSHONG Plexxi For years, the primary role of the network has been to provide connectivity. Success was defined as all things being able to talk to all other things on the network. But as the function of the IT department shifts from “supporting cost center” to “active participant” in a company’s overall value proposition, is taking the lowest-common-denominator approach to declaring success adequate? The reality is mere connectivity is not cutting it anymore. The rise of “Shadow IT” is not in response to the lack of available applications. Rather, it is an organic movement in reaction to something bigger: overall experience. Simply sidestepping outright catastrophe doesn’t constitute a win in the eyes of those who use the infrastructure IT provides. Changing Role for IT So how does IT move from measuring connectivity to evaluating overall experience? The temptation is to build bigger and faster. If the infrastructure is scalable, the experience is guaranteed, right? Actually, no. While the solution might involve bigger, faster and better, the actual problem isn’t inherently tied to these three favorites. The real issue at hand is that experience, up until now, has been an implicit agreement between IT and the users it serves. It has been guaranteed through adherence to a set of minimums. The IT department needs to ask: If a new application is being turned up, what kind of server is required? How much storage is necessary? How many 10Gbs ports are required to connect to the network? Answering these questions are all minimum requirements. The notion that meeting these requirements will somehow guarantee a nondescript user experience without any real parameters is optimistic at best. And even if these physical requirements are all met, does that guarantee a satisfactory end-user experience? Take the ubiquitous conference call as an example. It is almost comical how difficult it is to get a conference call with any kind of media support to run smoothly. People expect things to break, so they start important calls 20 minutes early to allow enough time to troubleshoot whatever A/V or screen-sharing issues that arise. All too often, midway through the meeting the screen becomes pixelated or call quality renders every third word unintelligible. In these moments, the system is certainly connected–traffic is getting through–but the user experience is horrible. Setting the Bar Too Low Connectivity isn’t enough to guarantee experience. Avoiding calamity, while still a requirement, is too low a bar for next-generation IT. Taking control of the end-user experience starts with moving from implicit to explicit definitions of expectations. In the case of a conference call, success might be measured partly in terms of availability, but it is likely to also include things like guaranteed transmission throughput and traffic drop rates. For applications like CRM and ERP, experience may be determined by application response times for certain types of workloads. For new application deployments, experience is likely related to time-to-deploy. The underlying message is that CIOs need to move to an environment where the most critical application experience is defined in explicit terms that are concrete and well-understood by all parties. Clear definitions move experience from an unquantifiable, unqualified observation to an explicit contract between user and IT. Setting expectations in concrete terms helps CIOs eliminate uncertainty while introducing a degree of objectivity that is useful in reporting success metrics. Moving to a Measurement-Driven Infrastructure However, such a move does not come easily. A metrics-driven infrastructure requires a degree of instrumentation and data correlation that simply does not exist in most IT shops today. In traditional IT organizations, reporting happens along infrastructure silo lines. Server teams are well aware of capacity and utilization, storage teams understand IOPS, and network teams are well-versed in throughput and availability. But application experience is not limited to a single silo. If, for example, a critical application experience service-level agreement (SLA) is tied to system response time, it becomes necessary to instrument all aspects of that application and combine the results into a single, reportable metric. This level of orchestration is difficult enough without making explicit infrastructure, tooling, process, and organizational decisions. If the CIO is ultimately accountable to the CEO for providing a responsive, productive work environment, anything short of this is simply hand-waving and hoping for the best. CIOs that want to move away from lowest-common-denominator practices need to understand the changing landscape around orchestration, analytics, DevOps and software-defined everything. Each of these brings a piece of the solution. How they work together in a real-world setting might not be obvious, but those who solve this problem first will create a meaningful, competitive advantage through their corporate IT function. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
3:15p	Industry Perspectives: Green House Data Chronicles Design, Build Just what are the steps to building a data center from a green field and who’s involved? We recently ran a series of Industry Perspectives columns about the process of planning and building a data center by Shawn Mills of Green House Data. The articles, listed below, follow the development of a new Green House Data facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming, tracing its path from our initial decisions to expand through to site selection, business grants and incentives, the design process, and finally, wrapping up with ground breaking and construction. The intent was to showcase a “standard” data center, rather than an enormous mega-scale Internet giant’s data center, in order to inform companies of Green House Data’s size and help those small- and mid-size companies come away with new insight into the balancing act of building a highly efficient facility with limited experience and access to resources. Building Efficient Data Centers – Facility development for smaller operators varies from what the Big Boys at Apple and Google are able to do. This article kicks off a series on data center construction for the smaller company and how to leverage the experience of an enterprise more scaled to the small- or mid-sized business. Picking the Right Partner: Facility Development for Smaller Operators - How do you choose development and design partners? While you may want to design and build your facility yourself, there are many advantages to working with partners so you can stay focused on your customers, while still meeting the goals for your new facility. From the Ground Up: Building an Efficient Data Center - This column explains more about designing an efficient facility, where design partners are the most useful and how site limitations and local ordinances force a compromise between the ideal infrastructure and realistic expectations. A Data Center Build: Site Development, Permits & Zoning - Once the design wheels are turning, it’s time to work with state and local governments on site development, permits and zoning. Many people groan at the thought of the politics involved, but this can actually be a rewarding chance to engage your community—and also improve business relationships. A Data Center Build: Breaking Ground – With permits starting to be issued, contractors in place, state and local government on board, and schedules starting to really crystallize, it’s time to break ground, and celebrate with the community. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)

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