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Tuesday, September 20th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Apple, Amazon Unveil Major Renewable Energy Projects to Power Cloud Data Centers The current surge of data center construction projects by internet and cloud giants is accompanied by a surge in investment in renewable energy generation capacity to compensate for much of the energy the future data centers will consume. The latest examples are recent renewable energy projects by Apple and Amazon. On Monday, Apple announced completion of a 50MW solar farm in Arizona, which will offset energy consumption by the company’s new data center in Mesa, Arizona, currently under construction. Last week, Amazon announced construction of a 253MW wind farm in Texas, also meant to offset grid electricity that powers its massive cloud. The photovoltaic plant in Arizona is the fifth large-scale solar array the company has built for its data centers. Three solar arrays accompany its data center campus in North Carolina, and one accompanies its data centers in Nevada. Apple also has contracted for the output of 130MW of capacity from a solar project in Central California. Earlier this year, Apple created an energy company called Apple Energy as a subsidiary, which gives it more flexibility to buy and sell energy on the wholesale electricity market. Google has had a similar subsidiary for several years now. See also: How Renewable Energy is Changing the Data Center Market The future Amazon Wind Farm Texas will be the cloud giant’s fifth and largest renewable energy project to date. It has also announced wind and solar projects in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia, which will generate energy for the utility grids supplying existing and future Amazon data centers, the company said in a statement. The project in Scurry County, Texas, will include more than 100 wind turbines. Each turbine’s rotor diameter will be twice as long as the wingspan of a Boeing 747. According to Amazon, total annual output of the five renewable energy projects it has invested in will surpass 2.6 million MWh. Almost with no exceptions, these long-term commitments by cloud giants help renewable energy developers secure the financing necessary to get the projects going, so the current data center construction boom has greatly boosted the amount of renewable generation capacity on the grid. Apple’s Central California agreement, for example, was instrumental in making the project possible, according to Joe Kishkill, chief commercial officer at First Solar, the developer behind the California Flats project. Many hyperscale data center operators of Apple’s caliber use third-party data center providers in addition to building and operating their own server farms. Some of the biggest data center providers, such as Equinix, Digital Realty Trust, and Switch, have invested in renewable energy as they compete for these customers’ business. A recent survey by Data Center Knowledge found that colocation data center customers are increasingly interested in data center services powered by renewable energy. Download full survey results here: Renewable Energy and Data Center Services in 2016 |
| 5:25p | Silicon Valley Billionaires’ Data Center Investment Fund Makes Its First Move Iconiq Capital, the wealth management firm that lists some of Silicon Valley’s richest as its clients, has made its first data center investment since creating a subsidiary focused specifically on the data center sector. T5 Data Centers announced Monday an equity recapitalization of its Dallas and Portland facilities with an investment by Iconiq but stopped short of disclosing the amount. T5 has retained a “meaningful stake” in the properties and will continue operating and managing them. As we reported earlier this month, Iconiq, whose clients include the likes of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman, and Napster co-founder Sean Parker, filed papers to register its data center investment arm, Iconiq DC Management, in August. In the filing, the company said it plans to pool client money into private funds that would look for a variety of opportunities in the data center space, including direct investment in properties, joint ventures, debt and equity investments, and purchase of securities and companies that own or invest in data centers. The recent equity play with T5 is a relatively safe investment. According to T5, both properties are 100 percent leased.  T5 data center in Dallas (Photo: T5 Data Centers) This is the second round of funding T5 has announced this year. In January, the company said it had closed a new $68.5 million credit facility to finance construction of its data center campus in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, just outside of Charlotte. That round, as well as the original round that financed construction of the Portland data center, was arranged by CIT Communications and Technology Finance. CIT was involved in the latest investment by Iconiq as an agent. Portland, Dallas, and Charlotte facilities are three of six operational T5 data center locations. Its other sites are in Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It entered the Chicago market just last month, by acquiring a facility there from the data center provider Forsythe. The company is also building New York and Colorado markets. Read more: Silicon Valley Billionaires’ Wealth Manager Enters Data Center Market |
| 6:11p | UPS Cable Fault Blamed for Global Switch Data Center Outage The Global Switch data center outage in the London Docklands earlier this month has been traced to a cable end box on a UPS system. The power interruption lasted less than a second, but it took at least one customer two days to fully recover. The 222 millisecond outage was caused by a fault in a high-voltage cable end box of a circuit breaker on one of the facility’s diesel rotary UPS units, according to an incident report by Claranet reviewed by The Register. For years, UPS system failure has been the most common cause of data center outages, according to Emerson Network Power-funded studies by the Ponemon Institute. All Claranet customers lost access to services hosted in the GS2 data center, the report said. Claranet is a London-based managed hosting provider. See also: Delta: Data Center Outage Cost Us $150M Power was cut around 11am on September 10, but Claranet staff did not start powering its hardware back up for several hours, since they wanted to “ensure the facility was safe and that power supplies were reliable.” Only by around 5pm that day did they restore 85 percent of the services to customers. “All components damaged by the HV fault have been replaced prior to normal power operations being restored,” Claranet’s report read. “The cable terminations of the remaining available DRUPS have been checked for integrity to ensure the same issue is not manifesting in other areas of the Global Switch 2 Power system.” This was the second GS2 data center outage in three months, according to The Register. The first one, in June, also took out Claranet for several hours. |
| 6:42p | CenturyLink Looking to Cut 8% of Workforce, or About 3,400 (Bloomberg) — CenturyLink Inc., the Monroe, Louisiana-base phone company, is planning to eliminate 7 percent to 8 percent of its workforce to cut costs as sales decline in its landline communications business. “After careful consideration, CenturyLink has made the difficult decision to reduce its employee-related costs,” spokesman Mark Molzen said in an e-mail. Initial employee cuts will be voluntary, according to Molzen. The company had 42,800 employees as of June 30, which means it’s targeting the reduction of as many as 3,400 workers. CenturyLink Chief Executive Officer Glen Post notified employees in a memo Wednesday, Molzen said. The job cuts were first reported Friday by CRN, an industry publication. CenturyLink, which has no wireless service and has been exploring the sale of its data center business, saw sales fall 0.7 percent last year to $17.9 billion. Analysts project revenue will decline 2 percent this year, according to the average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Read more: CenturyLink Data Center Team Keeps Eye on the Ball Despite Uncertain Future |
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