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Friday, June 13th, 2014
| Time |
Event |
| 12:30p |
CommScope’s Rack-Size Fuel Cells Fit on Raised Floor, Replace Generators and Batteries CommScope has launched an in-door hydrogen fuel cell backup power system that can be installed right on the data center floor at the end of an IT row.
The company is offering the solution as an environmentally friendly and space-efficient alternative to traditional diesel generators and battery cabinets, which require separate rooms in data center buildings.
Nearly all of the world’s data centers use generators for backup power. Fuel cells are a novelty in the data center industry, and while there is a number of companies that deployed the technology to supplement their power supply, completely abandoning the tried and true diesel gen-set in favor of the gas-fueled alternative will be a difficult sell.
Scalable rack-size power source
CommScope’s pitch relies on the solution’s relatively small footprint, no greenhouse gas emissions and quite operation, as well as cost over time. The fuel-cell rack is as wide as a standard server cabinet and 6.5 feet tall, and the vendor says it can be installed on the data center floor with the hydrogen tank outside of the building.
The solution does produce heat and a small amount of water, the company said.
The system is built by CommScope’s partner Hydrogenics Corporation, which specializes in hydrogen-fueled power systems.
Hydrogenics CEO Daryl Wilson said space in data centers came at a premium and the solution took up much less of it than battery racks and other backup power solutions. “Operating expense is another growing concern for data centers and, depending on the configuration, the indoor hydrogen fuel cell solution can be a lower-cost solution than traditional power solutions after just two or three years,” he said.
Each rack can be configured to provide 10 kW, 20 kW or 30 kW of alternating current (AC). Multiple racks can be installed in a data hall, paired with uninterruptible power supply systems.
CommScope and Hydrogenics launched an outdoor hydrogen fuel cell solution for data centers in February.
Market dominated by Bloom
A number of service providers, including Verizon, AT&T, Equinix and CenturyLink, have bought fuel cells to supplement power in their data centers and to test the technology out. Examples of enterprise customers include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Walmart and Coca-Cola.
These customers all bought natural gas-powered fuel cells from Bloom Energy, currently the biggest player in this niche market. Another Bloom customer is Apple, which is using the fuel cells to get a portion of the electrical load needed for its massive data center in Maiden, North Carolina.
eBay arguably has the most radical data center fuel-cell deployment, using Bloom’s solution to power its entire Salt Lake City, Utah, data center. The company abandoned generators completely for this project, using the local electrical grid as backup for the fuel cells. | | 12:45p |
Rackspace CTO John Engates on Developing Native Support for Docker Docker, a hot new name in the cloud infrastructure world, held its first big conference called DockerCon in San Franco this week.
Docker is an open source technology that creates Linux “containers” for applications which make it easy to move apps from one type of infrastructure to another. The idea is to free developers from worrying about what kind of infrastructure their app is going to run on.
The containers ensure the same application can run unchanged on laptops, virtual machines, on premises or in the cloud.
There is also a company called Docker, which dresses the technology with enterprise features and provides commercial support. Docker the company released its first commercial product this week in conjunction with DockerCon.
Docker has been around for only 15 months but already enjoys support from numerous industry giants, including Google, Amazon Web Services, Red Hat and Rackspace.
John Engates, Rackspace CTO, delivered an opening keynote at DockerCon, talking about the ways Rackspace uses Docker and works with the company to create native support for the technology that will work with any cloud.
Rackspace has posted a video with highlights from Engates’ presentation:
| | 1:00p |
Why Your Cloud May Be Getting a Lot Smaller You know what they’ve been calling it? “The miniaturization of cloud computing.” New types of platforms are being deployed at remote offices and within data centers which require less infrastructure and more logical controls. The entire data center landscape is being re-evaluated for better performance and improved resource utilization. Already technologies like those from Nutanix are actively trying to redefine the resource utilization standard for cloud.
Very soon, logical technologies will become so powerful, that physical infrastructure will be used only for resources at a minimal scale.
Before we get into the commodity conversation, however, it’s important to understand why and how the cloud model is becoming a lot more converged:
- Rethinking the physical infrastructure. We’ve come a long way from mapping one application to one server. The modern infrastructure has become a lot more compact with the advent of powerful converged platforms. Even rack-mount servers have become exceedingly more powerful and efficient. As the data center and cloud model continue to evolve, you’ll begin to see micro-cloud environments pop up. In using blade systems or other converged platforms, you’re able to deliver every cloud component under one roof. Nutanix, Simplivity, Scale Computing and several others are redefining the concept of a unified platform. Moving forward, the data center will become a lot more efficient and a lot more compact.
- Incorporating logical controls. Just as the physical platform and underlying hardware resources have evolved – the logical layer has progressed as well. Software-defined technologies and advanced levels of resource virtualization are literally creating the virtual, or software-defined, data center platform. In using bandwidth and resources more economically, data centers are able to replicate data between geographic points much more effectively. Also, these logical controls introduce the concept of a “commodity cloud.” Basically, you’ve got all logical controls with commodity hardware (network, storage and even compute) at the back-end. The great part here is that logical controls allow you to manipulate workloads and data without depending on the underlying hardware.
- Software-defined technologies. Let’s get a bit more specific here. There is now a software-defined acronym for pretty much every component in the data center. The entire modern data center can be seen as software-defined component. That said, storage, network, compute, security and cloud computing can all be abstracted into the software-defined layer. Basically, this means better monitoring, management and control capabilities. This also means a smaller cloud footprint. The great part about software-defined technologies is that agnostic nature of the software. Soon, it won’t matter the type of hypervisor your running or even what type of underlying hardware you have. The software-defined controls are capable of managing your entire cloud and data center platform from a logical layer.
- New types of convergence (creating micro-clouds). The concept of convergence is really taking off. Many organizations are deploying purpose-built converged systems for a variety of purposes. A Nutanix system can host virtual applications being delivered via the cloud while HP’s Moonshot chassis is helping you process numerous parallel, cloud-based workloads. The point is that converged platforms are a very real piece of the modern data center and are definitely being widely adopted. Their efficiency, ability to scale and resiliency make these systems very attractive. Plus, the right type of converged infrastructure can be very cost effective.
- Better data distribution. Our ability to scale our data now versus what it was just a few years ago is hard to measure. As we lay down larger fiber networks and optimize wireless infrastructures, our ability to deliver rich content over great scale will only improve. This type of data distribution over a powerful logical network allows data centers to be more distributed and smaller. It also allows the data to live closer to applications, users and required resources dynamically. Still, given the trends, it seems that there will only be more data and information to process. Open-source platforms for Big Data management are also allowing organizations to control and quantify valuable information across the cloud.
Remember: even with the proliferation of cloud computing all of these technologies are still tied to some type of physical resource. We’ve seen dynamic growth around network, compute and storage. Now, administrators are actively looking at ways to move into the hardware consolidation direction while still creating an agile and robust cloud platform. This means deploying intelligent physical control methods and next-generation data center hardware pieces. Through virtualization and logical controls the data center is evolving into a distributed model capable of delivering powerful types of workloads and rich content. The user, organization and our industry is continuing to evolve with new types of demands. To keep up with these trends data center and cloud technologies are looking at both logical and physical optimizations to make their cloud model a lot more extensible and consolidated. | | 1:52p |
Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption for ‘Computer Crash’ Another work week has come and gone and our two-day vacation is just hours away. Let’s start the weekend right with some Friday Funny humor.
Several great submissions came in for last week’s cartoon so now all we need is a winner. Help us out by scrolling down to vote!
Here’s how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon and we challenge our readers to submit a humorous and clever caption that fits the comedic situation. Then we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon!
Take Our Poll
For more cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. For more of Diane’s work visit Kip and Gary‘s website. | | 3:33p |
With Energy Harvesting Circuits Spansion Aims for Greener Internet of Things Embedded systems company Spansion launched a new family of power management integrated circuits (PMICs) for energy harvesting it says can enable a greener Internet of Things by eliminating the need for or extending the life of batteries in a multitude of IoT devices from individual wearable electronics to the nodes in wireless sensor networks. The technology will be used for battery-less product development or supporting battery charging.
This eco-friendly option for powering millions of sensors and IoT devices is an innovative approach that has the potential to reduce electrical infrastructure needs and reduce or eliminate the toxic disposal of batteries used in IoT devices. It also opens the door for future use cases that can be flexible in device placement and use, such as monitoring on wearables.
The Energy Harvesting family has PMIC chips and is complemented with a comprehensive online design support tool, which calculates the energy budget balance while providing a recommended bill of materials list that can be purchased online. The MB39C811 model can harvest from both solar and vibration energy, and the MB39C811 is an ultra-low-voltage boost PMIC for solar or thermal.
The Spansion Energy Harvesting family of devices works seamlessly with Spansion FM0+ microcontrollers (MCUs). These are ultra-low-power microcontrollers (based on the ARM Cortex-M0+ core) for industrial and cost-sensitive applications with low-power requirements.
“Spansion has a long-standing commitment to the environment and has been recognized globally and formally as a green partner by customers, governments and industry watchdogs for our policies, processes and results in reducing waste and resources,” said Tom Sparkman, senior vice president of Spansion’s Analog business unit. “Our customers can say goodbye to battery usage in their next-generation electronics. Coupled with our low-power MCUs and the energy-budget calculator in the Spansion Easy DesignSim support tool, the Spansion Energy Harvesting PMICs offer a differentiated solution that can help our customers offer more eco-friendly devices across a broad spectrum of applications.”
Sunnyvale, California-based Spansion has a broad and differentiated Flash memory portfolio and provides embedded systems solutions to automotive, consumer and gaming, communications and industrial segments. The company uses a global ecosystem of energy harvesting and storage device partners. | | 4:24p |
Peak 10 Building Tampa Data Center From Scratch Fresh off its acquisition by GI Partners, Peak 10 announced it was constructing a 60,000 square foot data center in Tampa, Florida. This will be the first facility designed and constructed from scratch for the provider that offers colo, managed services and cloud.
Located on a 6.88 acre plot of land, the facility will have 36,400 of raised floor, or capacity for roughly 600 more customers, and will also include 23,600 square feet of office space. The facility will have 25,000 square feet of potential expansion space.
The data center joins another Tampa facility, bringing Peak 10’s total footprint in the area to more than 129,000 square feet. In the state, the company operates around 230,000 square feet of space. The company’s facilities are primarily in the southeastern U.S.
GI Partners recently acquired Peak 10 in a deal believed to be between $800-$900 million. CEO of Peak 10 David Jones noted that it’s a pivotal time in the infrastructure space, and that Peak 10 had aggressive expansion plans. The new Tampa build speaks to this.
“Supporting our mission to continue expanding our robust national presence, we are excited to see the construction of our newest generation of data centers underway,” said David Jones, president and CEO of Peak 10. “This facility will meet hurricane weather ratings for the Tampa region, making this a very sound facility for the IT business community. Adding a new facility across town from our existing Tampa data centers provides additional redundancy and is connected via Peak 10′s reliable network to our nine other major metropolitan locations.”
The two-story data center is located outside of the area’s flood zone and will be constructed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane – a necessity in a state that isn’t a stranger to hurricanes. Office windows will have a high-impact glazing system to protect against 150 mph winds.
Stepping into new markets carefully
The company didn’t want to sacrifice security needs and it felt that existing buildings in the area wouldn’t meet its standards, according to Cheryl Kleiman, vice president for Peak 10 overseeing Tampa operations.
Peak 10 often hires executives with local knowledge to run its facilities. The provider has continued to add capacity in its core markets while expanding selectively into new markets. With each expansion to a new market comes the hiring of local professionals and a general manager that knows the scene.
Helping pull Florida out of recession
The new facility will be located on Parkedge Drive in the University of South Florida area, supporting the budding economic development there.
“When a business makes a multi-million dollar investment in Tampa, it sends a pretty clear message about the economic strength of our community,” said Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn. “We’re leading Florida out of the recession, and companies like Peak 10 are helping us do it.”
Mark Sharpe, chairman of the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners, said, “This investment speaks volumes about our potential for IT growth and supports recent community developments like the establishment of the Florida Center for Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida.”
Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Peak 10 operates 24 data centers in the U.S., including six in Florida. Other ongoing expansions include a new location in the Atlanta market, located on Windward Parkway in the Alpharetta, Georgia, High Tech Corridor. | | 8:00p |
AFCOM Symposium: Boston 2014 AFCOM Symposium: Boston 2014 will convene Wednesday, June 18 from 8 – 6pm at Gillette Stadium.
This value-packed day includes 6 hours of education sessions, 4 hours of networking, 3 hours of open trade exhibits and more.
Overview:
The data center ecosystem is evolving. Demand is exploding. Rapid growth in technology. New business models. New regulations. New demands on data center personnel. The inaugural AFCOM Symposium-Boston will help data center and facilities managers achieve more together by harnessing the collective wisdom and experience of professionals, like yourself, in the greater Boston region. Through vendor-neutral education, networking, and access to the latest technology and services, the symposium will provide practical solutions that you can implement immediately upon return to your office, a list of valuable peer contacts that you can network with year-round, and access to some of the latest technologies and service providers in the region.
Venue Gillette Stadium 1 Patriot Pl, Foxborough, MA 02035
For further information and to register, follow this link. Have questions? Call 888-615-3939.
For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar. | | 8:30p |
Microsoft Kicks Off $350M Data Center Expansion in Virginia Microsoft is planning to invest about $350 million in expanding its data center site in Boydton, Virginia – a tiny town with about 400 residents at the state’s southern edge.
This is the company’s third expansion project at the site and the biggest data center investment it has announced publicly this year. Its first construction project in Boydton was started in 2010 and involved about $500 million in investment, according to a statement issued by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe’s office.
Microsoft has been expanding its data center capacity around the world quickly and aggressively to support its growing cloud services business. “The expansion will help support Microsoft’s more than 200 cloud and online services, which are consumed by over 1 billion customers across 89 markets globally,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email.
Advanced energy efficient design
Microsoft has substantial in-house data center design expertise and its facilities evolve with every new build. The Boydton site is not an exception.
“Each phase of the facility represents a different rapidly evolving design that enables the integration of new efficiencies, best practices and capabilities,” the spokesperson wrote.
The first phase of the facility was built using Microsoft’s ITPAC concept. ITPACs are container-like modules with large louvers along the walls which pull in outside air for cooing.
In the company’s first build in Boydton, the ITPACs were placed outside, without roofs or walls, with an open-air “electrical breezeway” powering them. The phase also included colocation rooms with enclosed server PODs.
The latest expansion, whose first phase is expected to be completed in the summer of 2015, will be a recent iteration of that design. “Learning from these designs, we have been able to remove even more inefficiencies, carbon, water use and costs out of our data center environment for this expansion,” the spokesperson wrote.
The facility uses adiabatic cooling – a form of free cooling that relies on evaporation of water which causes temperature to drop.
Building to support cloud growth
As it transforms itself into a cloud-services-centric company, Microsoft has been on data center expansion kick. In addition to its Azure Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, it is also now providing products in its popular Office suite on a Software-as-a-Service basis under the Office 365 brand.
The company’s infrastructure provides services to its massive network of Xbox gaming console users and supports its video conferencing platform Skype.
Earlier this month Microsoft announced the launch of a data center in Brazil to host the Brazil South region of its Azure cloud, following Azure expansions in China and Japan.
Its most recent U.S. expansion announcement (other than the Boydton expansion) came in April, when the company said it would invest about $270 million in an expansion of its Cheyenne, Wyoming, data center. Prior to that, in November 2013, the company kicked off a $230 million expansion project in Dublin, Ireland.
In addition to building its own data centers, Microsoft leases large amounts of data center capacity from wholesale providers, such as DuPont Fabros Technology. |
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