Friday, August 1st, 2014

Time	Event
1:00p	Green House Data Launches 100-Percent-Renewable Wyoming Data Center Hosting and colocation service provider Green House Data held a grand opening for its data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Wednesday, whose entire energy consumption is offset through renewable-energy credit purchases. One-quarter of the facility’s data center floor was occupied by the day of the event, the state of Wyoming signed as its first customer. Green House Data uses sustainability as a differentiator. The company buys renewable energy credits to offset energy consumption of its facility in Portland, Oregon, and its Newark, New Jersey, facility has a 2-megawatt solar-panel system supplying a portion of the massive data center’s energy needs. The 35,000-square-foot Cheyenne facility provides 5 megawatts of power, expandable to 8 megawatts. It supplements an existing 10,000-square-foot data center on the property. Green House Data built the data center together with developer fifteenfortyseven Critical Systems. Construction crews broke ground on the site about one year ago. Green House Data CEO Shawn Mills documented every step of the project, from idea to ground breaking, in a series of articles on Data Center Knowledge last year. “It’s really exciting to see this new industry start to burgeon here in Wyoming, and we’re really excited to be a part of that reality,” Mills said in a statement announcing the facility’s opening. “This building represents a $200 million investment in Cheyenne.” A home of rare data centers Cheyenne has become home to a number of unique data center endeavors besides the latest green data center project. Microsoft has deployed a proof-of-concept set-up at a Cheyenne municipal waste treatment plant, which uses fuel cells to convert methane generated as a byproduct of waste treatment into electricity for one of its data center modules called ITPACs. In addition to the “Data Plant” research project, Microsoft has a massive production data center in town, which is about to get even bigger. In April, Microsoft announced a $274 million investment in expansion of the data center site. Two years ago, the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research had one of the world’s most energy efficient data centers built in Cheyenne to house Yellowstone, the world’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to studying climate change. (Comment on this)
2:00p	Retail-Colocation Startup Patronus Planning $250M Data Center Campus in Dallas-Fort Worth A new company called Patronus is developing a greenfield site in Frisco, Texas, into a four-building data center campus, expecting to invest more than $250 million in the project. Frisco is in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, where the company believes there’s an opportunity for a retail colocation play outside of a congested data center cluster in downtown Fort Worth. Its 35 acres of raw land lies in the main corridor of the Dallas tollway. “We started this in November of last year,” said Michael Carnes, one of the company’s founders. “The colocation market here is very fragmented. There’s a lot of providers in surrounding areas within rehabbed buildings. Not a lot in terms of new, greenfield space.” A seasoned leadership team While the company is new, Patronus is composed of former executives from Digital Realty Trust and CyrusOne. “Collectively as a group, we’re young; separately and individually we have a lot of experience,” Carnes said. “We’ve done the hard stuff. We’ve rehabbed facilities and filled them up. Doing a greenfield build with our history, we believe that the growth that is happening in our area has lined us up for success. We’ll focus on service and having a retail offering close to where people live and work. ” Carnes joined Digital Realty when the company was figuring out how to get into colocation. He has been in the industry a long time, going all the way back to Data Return, one of the early managed services providers. Co-founder Ryan Sullivan was also at Digital Realty, acting as head of management for a number of properties. “What we believe is the reliability, location, pricing, relationship and trust with the customers is different with us,” Carnes said. “Collectively between myself, Ryan and [co-founder and CEO] Kenneth Wolverton, we’ve done 1 million of total building gross square footage.” Due diligence done, interest high The first building will be 130,000 square feet with 30,000 square feet of office space. The acquired land has plenty of room for three additional buildings of similar size. The location has access to plenty of power. “A substation on site made it appealing, and there’s capacity for up to 250 megawatts,” Carnes said. “We got the utility to commit up to 50 megawatts for the site so far.” The company is currently working with design groups to nail down the site master plan. The hope is to eventually build 0.5 million square feet in Frisco. The project is in early stages but moving briskly. The company has already completed six months of due diligence. “During our due diligence, we got the zoning on the land changed for data center use,” Sullivan, Patronus vice president, said. “This has never been done in Frisco.” “Now we’re in the second round of the funding aspect. We do have some parties that are going through approval now.” Interest in the site has been high. Patronus has not broken ground, but several customers have already requested information. Collectively, those customers are shopping around for enough space to fill one-third of the initial building, Frisco’s silent boom Demand has always outpaced supply in DFW and Frisco is a particularly effective location, according to Patronus. “Dallas Fort Worth is growing in general,” Carnes said. “The tollways and highways are congested. Most data centers are in downtown Fort Worth. If you get on tollway, it takes two hours to get downtown. If it’s the first time you’re doing colocation, speed is important. This is a reverse commute for most and will be that safety blanket that a lot of them are looking for.” Toyota and FedEx have announced corporate offices n Frisco, and the town is the future home of the Dallas Cowboys indoor practice arena. It’s suddenly booming with vendors, making it ideal for businesses and for potential Patronus clients. “We really put our stake in the ground for commercial growth,” Sullivan said. “There’s nothing like this in the area. There is not an owner-operator in Frisco going after retail as a main focus.” Other providers in the area include T5 in nearby Plano, which goes after large multi-megawatt deals. In Richardson, which is 25 miles south of Frisco (a longer commute than distance suggests), there are 17 data centers, totaling more than 1.6 million square feet. West of Patronus are CyrusOne and QTS. Frisco offering a reverse commute for potential customers helps attract enterprises looking to outsource but wanting to remain close. “We’ll pick up enterprise and retail just because of our location,” said Carnes. “We’ll focus on service and having a retail offering close to where people live and work.” The project is anticipated to bring in millions of dollars in tax revenue for the city. Data centers are appraised much higher than other types of real estate and generate much more tax money. “Long term, this is good for the community. It means better public schools,” said Carnes. “We’ve been educating the residents through four public hearings during the due diligence.” (Comment on this)
3:00p	Video: Green House Data’s New Cheyenne Data Center Green House Data recently launched a 5-megawatt data center in its hometown of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The facility was built to advanced energy efficient design and the company offsets its entire power load with renewable energy credit purchases. We covered the opening this morning, and here’s a video the company made about the Wyoming data center, where the team gives a tour of the facility and explains why they chose the location: (Comment on this)
5:00p	Cisco Unleashes Slew of ACI Products for SDN Into General Availability Cisco has finally launched its flagship data center network solution, Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), which binds physical and virtual elements and also allows its Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to be ordered with ACI enabled. Cisco began the shift to ACI last summer during its Cisco Live! conference and has continued to proclaim that it will lead the battle for SDN and future networking platforms. The software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) market has certainly been active in the time Cisco focused efforts on its spin-in startup Insieme Networks to develop its ACI approach, which communicates high-level application requirements to intelligent network hardware, which self-configures accordingly. ACI started shipping earlier this week. Cisco’s senior vice president of marketing for the Insieme business unit Soni Jiandani said its ACI vision was focused on leapfrogging SDN with a holistic approach that focused on the delivery of the application, “allowing our customers to pick and choose the best-of-breed virtual or physical appliances to meet their needs.” Jiandani described the future of networks as a set of mixed workloads that will be matched appropriately to virtual machines, bare-metal and Linux containers, such as Docker’s. The simplicity of ACI provides a common policy framework that empowers teams across the IT environment with the ability to more rapidly and cost-effectively deploy applications. Easing customers into ACI Cisco is offering four ACI starter bundles, intended to act as proof-of-concept deployments or small production environments to start. Users can then scale and extend to existing networks as they wish. The bundles start at $250,000 and allow organizations to extend ACI policies to existing Nexus fabrics and redirect traffic to the ACI fabric for policy enforcement as needed. The four starter packages have two options that feature two fixed spine switches and four leaf switches, or two packages that have two modular spine switches and two leaf switches. Two of the bundles can be used to scale out a Cisco Unified Computing System-based converged infrastructure solution, such NetApp FlexPod or VCE VBlock. Cisco ACI pricing is based on a per-leaf perpetual ACI software license, instead of a monthly per-virtual-machine cost. Catalyst 6000 and 6500 customers have starter-kit options as well, which support an upgrade to a Nexus 9508 and either the new X9464TX or X9564TX line card. Cisco customers may also start with ACI via Nexus 9516 merchant-silicon chassis and new line cards. With this a customer could migrate to an ACI environment with ACI-capable line cards and APIC whenever they are ready.  New eight- and 12-port 100 Gigabit Ethernet line cards will be available later this year for the Nexus 9500, giving 128 ports of 100 GbE in a single chassis. The Nexus 9000 series can operate in standard NX-OS mode or in ACI mode. Cisco, NetApp deploy ACI in own IT environments Taking the ‘eat your own dogfood’ approach to extolling the benefits and use case for ACI, Cisco’s IT teams set it up in their own IT environment. Cisco’s senior vice president of IT for Global Infrastructure Services John Manville said, “We have deployed ACI in production, and we are continuously giving feedback to our engineering teams.” Cisco said more than 175 customers signed up for the APIC trial during the hardware beta period. One of those customers, NetApp, setup a DevOps private cloud. NetApp’s CTO Jay Kidd said the cloud spanned 2,300 racks and was wired end-to-end with 40 GbE capacity with Nexus 9000.  “One of the beauties of the (Nexus) 9K is the ability to gracefully transition and combine 10Gig and 40Gig together in the same infrastructure,” he said. “Then, with ACI being able to build up these profiles for the applications or the test scenarios for those applications, store them, provision them dynamically.” In the competition for enterprise networking funds, VMware, one of Cisco’s closest partners, offers an alternative vision for the future of networking. While Cisco blends physical and virtual network components with ACI, VMware’s NSX software overlay abstracts network control and is independent of the underlying physical network. (Comment on this)
6:00p	Report: Microsoft Buys 100 Acres of Iowa land for Data center Microsoft has dished out about $6 million for a chunk of land in West Des Moines, Iowa, for its next data center build-out. The 100 acres consists of golf-course and farm land, The Des Moines Register reported. The company announced plans to build a $1.1 billion data center in town in April. Microsoft already operates a massive server farm there. Construction work on a portion of the Willow Creek Golf Course has been going on for several weeks already. Following the sale, Willow Creek still has three nine-hole courses left, according to the Register. Plans for the project announced earlier described development of more than 150 acres of land, and construction of a 1.2-million-square-foot data center. The site is located about eight miles east of the company’s existing West Des Moines data center. Local officials and Microsoft agreed on an $87 million incentive package for the project. Iowa was reportedly competing for the massive construction project with the state of Washington, and some had suggested that it won because it was willing to offer tax incentives the contender was not willing to beat. The Microsoft data center is expected to generate $8 million per year in property-tax revenue for the city. The company has also committed to creating 84 jobs at the site, 66 of which would pay at least $24.32 an hour. As its Azure cloud services grow in importance as a source of revenue for Microsoft, the company has been expanding the data center infrastructure to support the cloud. In July, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Channel division Phil Sorgen announced in a blog post that the company was planning to add two Azure regions – one in Virginia and one in Iowa. Construction work on a $350 million data center expansion in Virginia kicked off in June. Microsoft also announced in April that it would invest $270 million to expand its Cheyenne, Wyoming, data center. (Comment on this)
7:00p	Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption for “Chicken Coop” Well folks, it’s hard to believe but the end of the work week is here! Let’s have some afternoon fun with our Friday Funny Caption Contest. 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 the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. Visit Kip and Gary’s website for more of Diane’s work!   (Comment on this)
8:00p	Comcast Plugs Into Newest C7 Data Center in Utah Comcast Business has started offering Ethernet services to customers at the Bluffdale, Utah, data center owned and operated by C7 Data Centers. One of four C7 facilities connected to the Comcast network in Utah, the 95,000-square-foot data center is located just outside of Salt Lake City and considered the company’s flagship facility. The provider positions it as a lower-cost alternative to data centers in Las Vegas, Phoenix or Denver. C7 describes Utah as the “crossroads of the West for Internet connectivity.” In 1969, one computer in the state was connected to three in California, which made up ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet. Today, numerous carriers offer connectivity services at C7 facilities, all four of which are interconnected by the operator’s own private backbone. Its City Creek data center is Salt Lake City’s primary carrier hotel. Paul Merritt, director of Comcast Business, said extending the company’s fiber network to the Bluffdale facility, called Granite Point II, gives C7 customers more options and gives Comcast customers elsewhere access to another data center location. “By adding another data center to our network, it also gives our Ethernet customers in Utah and around the U.S. another option for cloud and hosting services and remote back-up,” he said. C7 launched Granite Point II in 2013, supplying 10 megawatts to its 70,000-square-foot raised floor. Its strategy of marketing its Utah facilities to out-of-state customers seems to have worked. Wes Swenson, the company’s CEO, told us last year that 80 percent of its customers were not from Utah. Interestingly, most of them were not using the facilities as a remote sites or as disaster-recovery locations. According to Swenson, 80 percent of the company’s customers were using its footprint for production workloads. C7 has been recently pursuing a new category of data center customers and has done so successfully. In going after companies that use data centers to house Bitcoin mining equipment, the provider has set some space aside in one of its Utah facilities especially for them, since they require extremely high densities and nowhere near the level of reliability traditional data center users need. In addition to the C7 facility, Bluffdale is home to the infamous data center of the U.S. National Security Agency. (Comment on this)
9:21p	Arizona Data Center Marketed for Bitcoin Mining Services We’ve been doing a lot of coverage of the new market niche for data centers providers – Bitcoin mining – this week and earlier in July. In addition to CenturyLink’s deal with mining outfit CoinTerra and mining ASIC vendor BitFury’s entry into the mining data center business, another company, called NextFort, is marketing a data center as a place to host the power-hungry servers that crunch numbers to grow cryptocurrency value. Earlier this month, NextFort announced a deal with Gray Matter Industries, a company that provides managed hosting, hardware support and services to the Bitcoin mining industry, whereby Gray Matter will use NextFort’s Chandler, Arizona, data center (just outside of Phoenix) to house its infrastructure. NextFort will provide VPN access to the mining equipment to Gray Matter customers, enabling them to manage it remotely. Users will even be able to control PDUs their hardware is plugged into to remotely “power cycle,” or reboot their hardware. That service is available for an additional fee. Gray Matter will handle setup and installation of equipment for users who mail it to the data center. Unlike traditional multi-year data center contracts, Gray Matter offers six-month deals to customers, which is yet another example of just how different Bitcoin mining customers are from the typical data center user. In addition to shorter-term contracts, they extremely high power densities (mining hardware guzzles energy), a lot of cooling (it performs better and generates more revenue when cooled efficiently) and not a whole lot of redundancy. Mining hardware operators prefer tolerating intermittent outages to paying high premiums for data center SLAs. NextFort announced completion of the data center late last year. Here’s a promotional video tour of the facility by NextFort: Visit the dedicated Bitcoin data center market section on Data Center Knowledge for more coverage of this space. (Comment on this)
10:30p	Bitcoin Hardware Player BitFury Enters Cloud Mining With 20MW Data Center BitFury, a major Bitcoin hardware vendor, has entered the hosting and cloud mining business. Fueled by $20 million in recent venture funding, the company is rolling out a global data center network, anchored by a new 20 megawatt facility in the Republic of Georgia. The announcement is bound to fuel the company’s status as a contender to be the first major Bitcoin IPO. BitFury is a leader in the fast-growing market for specialized semiconductors for Bitcoin transaction processing, commonly known as mining. BitFury ASICs are well known in the mining world and the company is a major supplier of chips for some of the largest players in industrial mining, including several who will serve as anchors in its new facility in Georgia. The company estimates that 40 percent of all Bitcoins are mined using its chips. With its entry into hosting and managed mining, BitFury reinforces a trend in which Bitcoin hardware vendors are becoming vertically-integrated one-stop shops, handling everything from chip design to data center deployments. “Mining has become more than just hardware, and we are excited to offer managed services to enable customers to benefit from our specially designed data centers and cheap energy prices from clean energy sources,” said Valery Vavilov, the company’s CEO. BitFury has deployed data centers in Finland and Iceland, in addition to the new site in Georgia, which it says was deployed in about 30 days. That speed is possible because the company uses designs known as “hashing centers,” which combine high density and low redundancy and are often built in warehouses or other powered shells. Here’s what the facility looks like inside: In the broad hot aisle in the BitFury data center, hot air exits the back of the racks and is vented through the roof of the coop-style building. The clear plastic barriers above the racks prevent the hot air from mixing with the cold aisle. (Photo: BitFury). “Data center operations will become very important” in Bitcoin mining, said Marc Aafjes, chief strategy officer at BitFury. “I think that will be a differentiator in the near future.” CryptX and DigitalBTC are among the first clients using the new managed mining services offered by BitFury. Cryptx says its PetaMine operation controls about 2 percent of the global Bitcoin hash-rate (the number of Bitcoin calculations that hardware can perform every second). “Professional hosted mining operations are the future of this market,” said CryptX CEO Bert Valkenborgs. “CryptX operates in this space and has chosen BitFury’s hosted mining services for its project, PetaMine. We have worked together with BitFury on several occasions and we are very pleased with this business relationship.” There’s more facilities like these in the works. Bitcoin mining operations are expected to spend at least $600 million to deploy infrastructure in the second half of 2014. BitFury raised $20 million in funding in May, which CEO Vavilov said “validates our strategy and brings us closer to our aspiration of becoming the world’s first publicly listed Bitcoin company.” In another recent example, CoinTerra, one of BitFury’s competitors, told us earlier this week that it is building a 20-megawatt data center in Canada. This will be the first purpose-built data center for the company, which has been relying on data center providers. It recently signed a major colocation deal with CenturyLink Technology Solutions. BitFury was founded in 2011 and currently has more than 40 employees working at offices in San Francisco and Amsterdam. (Comment on this)

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