Monday, January 20th, 2014

Time	Event
1:00p	OVH Fills Massive Quebec Data Center With Cube-Shaped Hosting Towers The framework for a “cube” assembly rises inside the OVH data center in Quebec. Each four-sided stack of containers can hold approximately 10,000 servers. (Photo: OVH) The Cube has come indoors. French hosting company OVH is adapting its innovative data center design for its new facility in Quebec, where it plans to deploy up to 36 cube-shaped “hosting towers” filled with servers. This approach builds on a design concept that OVH pioneered at its facility in Roubaix, France and replicated using shipping containers at a second site in Strasbourg. The company’s newest campus in Quebec is a unique facility, housing a factory to assemble servers as well as the data center to house them. It is the engine for OVH’s ambitions in North America, where it hopes to sell hundreds of thousands of servers. OVH is super-sizing its design in Beauharnois, Quebec, where it houses its servers inside a former Rio Tinto Alcan alumnium plant located alongside a dam that will provide 120 megawatts of hydropower to support the facility. The property includes several long buildings that serve as air handlers, using an airflow design reminiscent of the Yahoo Computing Coop. “This building was already designed to let the air in from different sides and have warm air rise and exit out the top,” said Germain Masse, the Chief Operating Office of OVH. Within these large halls, OVH is deploying the “data center within a data center” concept. Each building is filled with multiple hosting towers. Fresh air enters from the exterior wall, travels through the racks of servers, and then exits the IT corridor via large fans that vent the air outside into the open center. Last year OVH North America built two hosting towers capable of housing 10,000 servers each. Today OVH has nearly 15,000 servers in production at Beauharnois (BHS for short). During the first quarter of 2014, a third tower will be built. “We can deploy a new cube every four months or so,” said Masse. “You can wind up spending a lot of money so we do it in phases.” The property can accommodate as many as 36 towers, creating a potential capacity of 360,000 servers. Here’s a look at the data center: A cross-section cutaway provides a visualization of how the cube structures fit inside the larger building at the OVH Quebec data center. (Image: OVH) A close-up of a finished hosting tower, with the power and cooling infrastructure in place. Each assembly can house up to 10,000 servers. (Comment on this)
2:22p	Revisiting the Dollars and Sense of Storage Ajay Nilaver is the Vice President of Products at Fusion-io where he oversees the development of flash memory solutions that accelerate IT systems for enterprises world-wide. Connect with Fusion-io on Twitter via @Fusionio. AJAY NILAVER Fusion-io As we enter the New Year, predicting that mobile connections and mobile devices will continue to grow in 2014 is not a revelation that would surprise many in the IT industry. With IBM estimating that 90 percent of the data stored today was created in the last two years, clearly we’re now hungrier for information and connections than we’ve ever been before. Businesses of all kinds are eager to help feed our hunger. From hyperscale leaders like Facebook and LinkedIn who satiate our need for connection, to software-as-a-service and business intelligence platform leaders like Salesforce.com who help businesses make sense of all of this data, technology innovators are working out how to build empires on information. The challenge facing our digital world is that the binary bits storing all our information still need to live somewhere in a physical state. Enter NAND flash memory, the high-capacity super medium used to power IT systems in data centers across the globe. IT innovation in the year of the horse: Revisiting how we think about total costs of opportunity Continued growth in PCIe flash memory adoption is also not a prediction that most IT professionals would find surprising as we enter the year of the horse. What I believe will change in 2014 is how we assess the costs and benefits of the essential elements of our modern information technology infrastructure. Focus On the End Goal Since the dawn of storage, we’ve looked at the cost analysis of storage as a simple dollar per gigabyte equation based on raw capacity. That worked well when the only option for storage was the humble disk drive. In the flash era, things are changing. In our real-time, instant gratification world, we expect information to load as fast as we can click. To keep customers happy, databases need to provide instantaneous information on websites and mobile applications. Enterprise flash memory is a solution IT innovators add to their datacenters to accelerate applications and databases like Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, SAP HANA, Cassandra, MongoDB and Oracle. In 2014, as flash moves along the adoption curve, more IT professionals will be looking at how to add flash to their data center. Flash far outperforms disk when you look at the cost analysis as a dollar per input/output (I/O) operation equation. This helps us focus on the real-world end goals facing IT today. Often, we’re not primarily interested in providing storage capacity, but rather, speeding up application responsiveness, even when faced with heavy loads like a VDI boot storm, or a Black Friday super sale. Cost per operation analyses are a solid step forward in breaking free from only thinking about capacity, as flash provides far more performance and value per gigabyte than disk. The next step in the evolution of ROI analysis is looking at the dollar cost per application transaction. By factoring in the cost savings delivered in power, cooling, consolidation, reliability and management, taking a cost per application transaction perspective considers the aggregate cost savings possible with flash. Looking at the real-world performance flash provides for applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle databases, and VMware virtualization solutions, many enterprises find that flash accelerates their applications by 20 to 30 times. These numbers are impressive, but the business value flash offers is even more compelling. Value and Savings Sweeten the Deal With applications running from three times to more than 20 times faster, retailers can run reports on weekend sales in time for a Monday morning review meeting. Online advertisers can serve up targeted content on a customer’s first visit to a website. Energy companies can conduct faster analysis of potential resources, meaning they can do more testing to ensure accuracy before moving forward on a project that could cost millions. These benefits add tremendous value to enterprises. In addition to opening up new business opportunities, flash also provides significant savings on operating expenses, sweetening the deal even further. Racks of spinning disks need more energy to spin, and they create more heat, which requires more cooling. Flash does not have moving parts, so it is a much more energy-efficient solution. Enterprise flash is much more reliable than disk drives, so it also enables IT professionals to spend more time on strategic projects rather than servicing arrays. The Flexibility and Simplicity Scale Flash solutions vary in terms of flexibility and simplicity, and there are options to fit every enterprise’s need. Some flash solutions provide more simplicity by being integrated into a shared storage solution, while others provide more flexibility by being based in servers. Many IT professionals determine what is the best fit for their needs by examining their goals and resources, and some opt to add flash in multiple locations within their data center to meet different application objectives. 2014 is sure to bring us more pop culture events that go viral as they unite us through the social and digital channels we take for granted today. With flash underfoot in the data center, enterprises should be able to easily scale access to information we’re all trying to access at the same time. Whether that’s a new track from Daft Punk making its debut on Spotify, or a story breaking about the passing of great humanist (RIP, Nelson Mandela), or the birth of a new prince being reported online, rethinking yesterday’s cost-benefit equations should help enterprises stay on top of the trends in the year ahead. 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)
4:03p	BYTEGRID Acquires Facility In Chicago Suburb The new BYTEGRID data center in Aurora, IL. (Photo: BYTEGRID) BYTEGRID continues its national expansion into underserved markets. The company has acquired a 70,000 square foot data center from insurance company CNA (Continental Casualty Company) under a sale and partial leaseback agreement. CNA will operate out of a portion of the building, while BYTEGRID will convert the remaining space into a multi-tenant data center. The company will begin leasing 25,000 square feet of space and 6 megawatts of power at the Tier III data center, which sits on 5.25 acres of land “Chicago is one of the best markets in the country,” said Ken Parent, CEO of BYTEGRID. “It’s a top six market, and of those, probably one of the most supply constrained. The suburbs are very strong. Aurora is a great location, with great proximity to Chicago. This fits into our strategy because we like to go places that are underserved, and Aurora has no multi-tenant data center product out there despite being the second-largest city without data centers.” The acquisition fits BYTEGRID’s template of buying corporate data centers in underserved markets through a sale-leaseback with a tenant in place, then developing the remaining of the building for multi-tenant wholesale data center space.  It’s a model that provides a reduced risk profile, but more revenue upside than simply buying a single-tenant facility. “Our blueprint for converting single tenant data centers to multi-tenant data centers is proven as a complimentary strategy for large organizations seeking to optimize IT performance and operating costs in a way that is completely transparent,” said Parent. Aurora has a lot of parallels to Silver Spring, Maryland, a market where the company acquired its first data center in 2011. Aurora and Silver Spring are both located near massive data center markets (Chicago and Ashburn, respectively) and can take full advantage of rich connectivity, but without the competition next door.  Another advantage of Aurora is the cheap cost of power, at around 5 cents per Kilowatt-hour. “We’re a little bit unique in the space in that we don’t need to put data centers next to data centers,” said Parent. “We evaluate our risks. Silver Spring has a lot of inventory that’s doing extremely well.  We are also expanding to develop the inventory in Cleveland and Atlanta.” Cleveland is another underserved market the company recently entered following the securing of a $100 million credit facility. The company has the money to make this a big year for expansion and acquisition. Facility History CNA built the facility in 2007 for business continuity and to increase capacity and scale over time. The facility features 34,000 square feet of existing raised floor. CNA will continue to occupy approximately 30 percent of the facility and remains the primary tenant under a newly created long-term lease agreement. The facility is connected with multiple tier one telecommunication and fiber carriers, and BYTEGRID says many are expressing interest in establishing a presence in the facility based on proximity to Chicago and BYTEGRID’s customer profile. “CNA’s success and leadership position has been built upon a long-term commitment to customer satisfaction combined with strong financial acumen,” said Thomas Pontarelli, CNA’s Executive Vice President and Chief Administration Officer. “Our partnership with BYTEGRID allows us to lower our future IT operating costs and to leverage alternative facilities while taking advantage of BYTEGRID’s proven data center operations experience and all the benefits a multi-tenant data center has to offer.” (Comment on this)

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