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Friday, February 27th, 2015
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| 1:00p | Silicon Valley: A Landlord’s Data Center Market SAN FRANCISCO – Demand outpacing supply, Silicon Valley is a landlord’s wholesale data center market, a state of affairs very different from one year ago. That’s according to Jeff West, director of data center research at the commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. West, together with his colleague Bill Dougherty, an executive director at Cushman, delivered a presentation on the region’s data center market at the Northern California Data Center Summit in San Francisco earlier this week. Demand, he said, was currently three to four times bigger than supply, with all the appropriate pricing consequences. Data center rents in the Valley currently range from about $125 to about $165 per kilowatt per month, according to West, who expects the upper end of the range to move further up this year. Where to Find 2MW in the Valley?About 20 megawatts of data center requirements have “toured the market” since January 1 this year, Dougherty said. But, if you need 2 MW of data center capacity in Silicon Valley that’s ready for you to move equipment in, your options are very limited. Technically, there are about 10 options at the moment, but if you look closer, you’ll find that the number is misleading. If you don’t want to sublease your 2 MW, you’re down to eight. Facebook has multiple long-term data center leases in the Valley, but it has been vacating leased facilities over the past several years, moving equipment into the mega data centers it has built for itself around the country and subleasing the space that’s still under contract. If you want new-generation data center space, you are down to only three options in the area, Dougherty said. “We quickly go from a lot of options down to very little in our main market,” he said. Silicon Valley is Northern California’s main data center market. As a result, CoreSite Realty Corp. and Vantage Data Centers, two of the Valley’s biggest data center landlords, are racing to build out capacity on their campuses to capture the demand, and the big question of the day is when Digital Realty, another gorilla in the market, is going to start building again. Digital has been optimizing its real estate portfolio, identifying and selling off “non-core” properties and not building more capacity in the U.S., while it goes through that process. Who’s Looking?Demand for space in the Silicon Valley comes primarily from Asian and local companies. It comes from new and from existing tenants who are growing. “Server hugger mentality of the Bay Area is real,” Dougherty said. A lot of demand is being driven by Chinese Internet companies. The nature of demand is changing. Data center providers are increasingly finding themselves having to provide varying levels of redundancy under one roof (2N, N+1, N, etc.), which makes for a complicated engineering puzzle. One customer may be satisfied with N, while another, in the same facility, may want 2N redundancy all the way to the rack. Office Space Too Pricy for IT LabsBecause office real estate prices in the Valley have gone up so much, more companies are looking to put their IT labs into data center providers’ facilities instead of their office buildings, as they have traditionally done. A lab is a tricky proposition for a data center provider. A lab tenant doesn’t need the level of reliability a mission-critical tenant does, and they are not willing to pay for infrastructure redundancy you find in a typical data center, which makes it difficult for the provider to make a margin. Vantage recently closed a big 3 MW lab deal. The reason the provider was able to make it work financially was that it had enough bare-bones powered-shell building space it had not installed all the backup infrastructure in, Vantage CEO Sureel Choksi said during a panel at the summit. The company is currently in discussions for another multi-megawatt lab deal, he said. To be sure, most of the demand Vantage sees in both Silicon Valley and Quincy, Washington (its other location), is for 2N space. There is just more demand for lab space now than there was before. The demand for lab space illustrates how different Silicon Valley is from other data center markets. “Where else in the country do you see a 3-megawatt lab?” John Sheputis, president at Infomart Data Centers, which has a big data center in San Jose, California, asked. Lab or otherwise, more data center capacity in the Valley is in demand than there is supply, which the analysts expect to result in higher prices. While great for investors in data center providers, this certainly isn’t great news for the buyers. |
| 3:00p | Top 10 Data Center Stories, February 2015 From Google and AOL suffering downtime to Apple expanding its footprint, here are the 10 most read articles on Data Center Knowledge during the month of February. Enjoy! New ‘Six Pack’ Switch Powers Facebook Data Center Fabric – In Facebook data centers, the meaning of the words “six pack” no longer has anything to do with beer or abs. Google Compute Engine, AOL Mail Suffer Early Morning Outages – Today started with a pair of outages. Google Compute Engine suffered downtime across multiple zones lasting roughly an hour, while AOL Mail suffered an extended outage most of the morning. Report: AT&T to Sell $2B Worth of Data Center Assets – AT&T wants to sell about $2 billion worth of data center assets as it looks for ways to pay down debt after making huge investments in spectrum and acquisitions, Reuters reported, citing three anonymous sources.  AT&T’s technology recovery demonstration in Paris (Photo: AT&T) VMware Vets Unveil Software Defined Storage Startup, Raise $34M – Springpath, a startup founded by VMware veterans that has been building a software defined storage platform that isn’t tied to any specific hardware, came out of stealth today, announcing $34 million in funding by New Enterprise Associates, Redpoint Ventures, and Sequoia Capital. Why Cisco is Warming to Non-ACI Data Center SDN – There are three basic ways to do software defined networking in a data center. One way is to use OpenFlow, an SDN standard often criticized for poor scalability. Another, much more popular way, is to use virtual network overlays. And the third is Cisco’s way. Why Hybrid Cloud Continues to Grow: A Look at Real Use-Cases – Cloud computing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, there are more cloud platforms, services and environments being developed each and every day. Firmer Pricing in US Data Center Market Expected in 2015 – Despite healthy market dynamics and strong leasing activity, pricing trends in the U.S. data center market have been somewhat at odds, according to a recent Cushman & Wakefield report. Pricing was largely soft in 2014, but the real estate company expects firmer pricing in 2015.  Digital Realty’s Digital Dallas campus Why Cloudera and MapR Opted Out of Pivotal’s Hadoop Consortium – When it announced it would open source its entire suite of big data analytics tools earlier this week, Pivotal also announced formation of an industry group that would bring what the EMC- and VMware-owned software company said was a much needed common set of standards to ensure compatibility across technologies in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. EdgeConneX Plans to Add 10 Edge Data Centers in 2015 – Edge data center colocation provider EdgeConneX expects to be north of 30 data centers this year. The company currently has 20 facilities, all but two of which were added in 2014. While the expansion expectations suggest the company might be calling a few racks a data center, these are all facilities of between 15,000 and 40,000 square feet.  Data hall at the Phoenix EdgeConneX data center (Photo: EdgeConneX) Apple Data Center Coming to Arizona – Apple will spend $2 billion to convert a former 1.3 million square foot manufacturing plant in Mesa, Arizona, into a data center. The facility will be powered entirely by renewable energy, supplied partially by a new local solar farm, the company said. Stay current on data center news by subscribing to our daily email updates and RSS feed, or by following us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. |
| 5:00p | Friday Funny Caption Contest: Rainbow We’re adding extra color to our Friday afternoon with this week’s Kip and Gary. Help us find gold at the end of this rainbow by submitting your caption below! Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, has a new cartoon for Data Center Knowledge’s cartoon caption contest. We challenge you to submit a humorous and clever caption that fits the comedic situation. Then, next week, our readers will vote for the best submission. Here’s what Diane had to say about this week’s cartoon, “You never know what to expect when you open a cabinet!” Congratulations to the last cartoon winner, Andi, who won with, “Nope, the cloud isn’t back there either!” For more cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. For more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website. |
| 5:50p | Officials in Ohio Approve Amazon Data Center Development Plans Amazon’s planned data center project in Dublin, Ohio, is a step closer, with a panel of city officials approving development plans for a data-processing center on a 70-acre plot of land. The next step will be building permits. The project is expected to cost $1.1 billion and create 120 jobs with average pay of $80,000 a year. Many localities are vying for the Amazon data center build, though it is now believed the project will be divided among three locations, the other two being Hilliard and Orange Township in Delaware County. Details as to how the project would be split are unknown, with Amazon still not commenting. Dublin offered Amazon land valued at $6.8 million and performance incentives worth up to $500,000 over ten years. Hilliard is offering a real estate tax abatement valued at $5.4 million, wage tax rebates and permit fee waivers. Orange is rezoning a parcel of land for data center use. This is in addition to incentives from the Ohio Tax Credit Authority, worth an estimated $81 million. “I don’t believe we’re in competition with anyone,” Dublin Mayor Michael Keenan told the Columbus Dispatch. “That’s been the premise since day one.” The Dublin site being considered for a future Amazon data center is in a research and development park called the West Innovation District, north of Darree Fields Park. According to Hilliard legislation, the first phase of the project, under code name Vadata, is expected to cost upwards of $300 million. Vadata is a wholly owned subsidiary Amazon uses to build data centers. Incentives are tied to variables such as job creation and square footage. In terms of overall economic impact, a recent Facebook-funded study in Forest City, North Carolina, provides a rough measuring stick. The study found the social network’s data center there generated an economic impact of $707 million for the local economy. Incentives in general continue to be a hot topic of debate. Arizona is courting Apple, and Oregon is close to modifying a controversial “brand tax” that assesses based on the intangible brand value. Local news organizations in Oregon are reporting that the cities themselves, however, are not happy with the prospect of losing that tax revenue. |
| 7:28p | IO Offers Renewable Energy to Phoenix Data Center Clients IO has introduced the option for customers to use 100 percent renewable energy to power their IT equipment within the provider’s Phoenix data centers. While there is some interest among data center customers in using renewable energy to power their colocation space, there isn’t an overwhelming amount of demand for such a service, according to a recent survey by Cheyenne, Wyoming-based data center provider Green House Data. IO’s new offering illustrates that there is some degree of demand, however. Digital Realty, a San Francisco-based data center provider, said in January it would give new customers in any of its data centers around the world one year of fully renewable energy completely free of charge, also illustrating that there was some interest in the market. In addition to its Phoenix data center, IO also has a facility in nearby Scottsdale. The company’s other data centers are in Ohio, New Jersey, U.K., and Singapore. The company will offer the renewable energy option for a premium it said would be “incremental,” but did not provide specifics. A company spokesperson did not respond to a request to clarify in time for publication. The data center provider is partnering on the program with local utility Arizona Public Service. IO said it would leverage the scale of power purchases by multiple customers to bring the cost of renewable energy down. “By aggregating the energy use of our customers, IO applies scale efficiencies to data center operations and renewable energy procurement,” IO President Anthony Wanger said in a statement. IO was recently split into two companies: IO the data center provider and BaseLayer, a maker of modular data centers and data center infrastructure management software. BaseLayer and ASP, the Arizona utility, are currently conducting a proof-of-concept for a data center module running without backup generators, being fed power directly from bulk utility transmission lines, which are more reliable than the “last-mile” energy delivery infrastructure. A bill that would incentivize investment in renewable energy by data center operators is currently moving through the Arizona legislature. If passed, it will benefit Apple, which announced earlier this month it would convert a defunct manufacturing facility in the City of Mesa into a massive data center. |
| 7:49p | Equinix Partners With Science Logic on Cloud Migration The relationship between Equinix and infrastructure monitoring provider ScienceLogic has deepened. Equinix already monitors its worldwide footprint through ScienceLogic, but now the two are collaborating on simplifying and easing cloud migration for enterprises. The companies are pitching a combo of Equinix’s Cloud Exchange with ScienceLogic’s integrated monitoring solution to help enterprises on the journey to hybrid cloud. The partnership also means that Equinix’s managed service provider partners can strengthen public cloud offerings in their portfolio. ScienceLogic is able to help them handle cloud migrations for enterprise customers, as well help with ongoing monitoring. The solution will initially be available in the Washington, D.C., area, which is where ScienceLogic is headquartered. Future expansions worldwide are planned, including Asia Pacific in 2015. Equinix’s mission has been to meet hybrid needs through private connectivity and partners lending a helping hand. It’s the rationale behind the company’s acquisition of cloud services firm Nimbo and a recent partnership with Datapipe, which is offering managed services for hybrid. Datapipe will also be using ScienceLogic. Data center providers are increasingly finding themselves in a position of needing to offer services beyond facility management to differentiate. There are two routes: directly offering these services in-house or offering these services through close partners who take space in their facilities. Equinix does the latter, as well as maintaining its traditional focus on connectivity. “Our goal at Equinix is to help enterprise customers realize the full benefits of the cloud without worrying about application latency or cost issues,” Chris Sharp, vice president of cloud innovation at Equinix, said in a statement. Hybrid continues to be the big buzzword. It simply means putting the right workloads on the right infrastructure based on determining factors like cost, performance, and security. ScienceLogic estimates 80 percent of big companies use clouds like Amazon Web Services. Equinix now offers several different avenues for hybrid infrastructure. Enterprises can do it themselves, have someone else do it for them and get extra visibility into what’s going on if they choose. ScienceLogic recently raised a $43 million funding round led by Goldman Sachs, exceeding the previous three rounds raised combined. The positive news followed some tragic news of a house fire taking lives of the company’s chief operating officer Don Pyle and members of his family in January. |
| 7:55p | Another Xen Hypervisor Security Issue Pushes AWS, Rackspace to Reboot Cloud Servers
This article originally appeared at The WHIR A new Xen hypervisor security issue is forcing cloud service providers Amazon Web Services and Rackspace to reboot cloud servers for the second time in five months. According to a report by Gigaom on Friday, AWS told customers in a premium support bulletin that 10 percent of all EC2 instances will be affected and updated by March 10. “We have built the capability to live-update the vast majority of our fleet; however, we have not yet enabled this capability on some of our older hardware. This older hardware is what’s being rebooted,” AWS said. Rackspace said the update requires critical maintenance, and affects a portion of its First and Next Generation Cloud Servers. Its OnMetal Cloud Servers are not affected. “While we do everything we can to minimize service interruptions, the security of your environment is our highest priority,” Rackspace said in a community post. “We understand that any downtime impacts your business and we do not make this decision lightly. In preparation for a potential reboot, we recommend that you take proactive steps to ensure your environment is configured to return to proper operations.” Both providers are staggering the reboot so instances in different regions will not be rebooted at the same time. In September, both AWS and Rackspace had to reboot parts of their clouds because of a security vulnerability affecting certain versions of XenServer. While there were no reports of compromised data, the vulnerability could have allowed those with malicious intent to read snippets of data belonging to others or to crash the host server through following a certain series of memory commands. This article originally appeared at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/a |
| 11:17p | Swedish Utility Behind Green Data Center Project Exactly one week ago we reported on a “CO2-negative” green data center project that was in the works in Sweden. Nothing besides a YouTube video was available at the time, since the project had not been officially announced. Some more details emerged earlier this week, however, from a press release by Schneider Electric, the French energy infrastructure and automation giant that’s one of the data center industry’s biggest vendors. Swedish utility Falu Energi & Vatten itself is behind the project, in partnership with a company called EcoDC AB, which was apparently formed specifically to participate in the project. Schneider will be one of the vendors providing infrastructure components for the future data center. The project is unique in that the future data center will be fully integrated with the local energy grid and the central district heating and cooling system in the City of Falun. It will be powered by a mix of solar, wind, and hydro power, and will also take advantage of the utility’s co-generation plant, which converts woodchips, sawdust, and discarded wooden furniture into energy. More and more data center operators are spending time and resources on powering their facilities with renewable energy. Big data center end users, such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, invest in renewable energy development projects and make big long-term power purchase commitments with the developers behind them. The most recent examples include Apple’s plans to power two future data centers in Europe with renewable energy and Amazon’s big wind power purchase agreement in Indiana. There is some forward movement on renewable energy on the multi-tenant data center side of the market. Data center service providers are beholden to their customers’ wishes, and most data center customers appear to care little about powering their servers with renewable energy, according to a recent survey by Wyoming-based provider Green House Data. There is however at least some demand for renewable energy in multi-tenant facilities. Digital Realty recently rolled out a renewable energy program for its tenants around the world, and so did IO. Both providers said they were driven to add the renewable option by customer demand. The future green data center in Sweden will use free cooling for most of the year but will also get cooling capacity through excess heat energy generated by the co-generation plant. It will push server heat to the central heating system, contributing to the city’s comfort heating capacity. In a statement, Falu Energi CEO Bengt Gustafsson said the data center’s integration with the city’s district heating system will reduce potential CO2 emissions enough for the facility to have negative carbon dioxide footprint. “We are connecting the data center to an already sustainable energy system and can make use of all the energy,” he said. This will be a large, high-capacity data center campus. Its three buildings will total about 250,000 square feet, and its total power capacity will be 18 megawatts. EcoDC is led by CEO Børge Granli, a long-time Swedish ICT industry veteran. |
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