Author: Colleen Miller

Ever wish you could speed up time? Well, ViaWest compressed time in this video of a data center build. ViaWest, a privately-held data center, cloud computing and managed services provider, recently opened its Lone Mountain data center facility in North Las Vegas. This short time-lapse video shows the construction of the Lone Mountain facility. This new data center in ViaWest’s fleet is a Tier IV design. The video runs 1:30 minutes.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

It’s Friday and time for a few laughs. Towards that end, we run our caption contest on Fridays, with cartoons drawn by Diane Alber, our fav data center cartoonist! Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.

First, we must announce the winner of the “Pot of Gold” cartoon: Congrats to Colton Brown of Dupont Fabros who submitted, “Don’t worry, Gary! He’s our new private equity investor!”

This week we present “Raised Floor Adventures.” Diane writes, “I’ve heard that people have found all sorts of weird things under the raised floor. . .” Enter your caption suggestion below.

The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion.

The winner will receive his or her caption in a signed print by Diane.

 

For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel.

While it is six times faster than its predecessor, JuQueen, a new supercomputer recently unveiled at Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Jülich, Germany, uses one-sixth of the energy. The supercomputer is the fastest in Europe and capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second. A group of doctors, computer scientists and others will be embarking on a 10-year-long project to use the computer’s capabilities to map the entire human brain – from individual cells to large areas of the brain. The video runs 2:20 minutes.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

What goes into making a supercomputer? For Blue Waters, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) project at the University of Illinois, there will be more than 235 Cray XE6 cabinets, each with 24 blade assemblies. In this video, Cray’s Director of Manufacture Logistics Group Steve Samse demonstrates the assembly of the board and components that make up each blade. The work is being performed at the Cray facility in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The video runs 2:49 minutes.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

IMN’s Spring Data Center Forum on Financing, Investing and Real Estate Development is scheduled for May 30-31 at the Conrad Hotel in New York.

Agenda topics  include:

• The Macroeconomy & Data Centers
• The President/CEO Panel
• Mergers, Private Equity & IPOs
• The President/CEO Panel: Colo Players
• Scale vs. Scalability vs. Rightsizing
• Connectivity-Creating & Tapping into New Revenue Streams
• Evaluating & Standardizing Data Center Standards & Performance Metrics
• Should you Own the Underlying Data Center Real Estate?
• Closing the Lease: Top Negotiation Points

Venue
Conrad Hotel
102 North End Avenue
New York, New York, 10282, USA
P: 212.945.0100
F: 212.945.3755

For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar.

FedInsider News is hosting a complimentary briefing on the federal data center consolidation and cloud computing efforts. Participants will hear the perspectives of Commerce, NRC, DHS, among other government entities. The event will be held March 20 from 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

Registration is available at http://www.fedinsider.com/datacenter.

SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

• Scott Lewis, Former Publisher of Washington Technology; President of PS Partnerships
• Kirit Amin, Deputy CIO and CTO, Department of Commerce
• Jim Flanagan, Director, Office of Information Services, Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Edward Rhyne, Program Manager, Cyber Security Division, Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate.

Venue:
immixGroup Education Center
8444 Westpark Drive, Suite 200
McLean, VA  22102
(Westpark Corporate Center at the corner of Route 7 & Westpark Drive)

Convenient parking lot under the building. Validation for parking provided.

For more information, visit www.fedinsider.com/datacenter  or by Phone 202-237-0300.

For more events, return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar.

It’s Friday! You know what that means — it’s time for our Friday Funny caption contest. Take a moment to vote for the best caption for the Pot of Gold cartoon.

Data Center Knowledge features a cartoon drawn by Diane Alber, our fav data center cartoonist, and our readers suggest funny captions. Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.

Our contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion. Please vote below.

For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel.

The AFCOM Data Center World Spring 2013 conference will bring together data center professionals in a dialogue about real-world events and needs. In response to feedback from data center and facilities management professionals, new AFCOM President and Data Center World Chairman Tom Roberts has put together an educational program of more than 60 sessions that addresses topics such as disaster recovery, cloud, management, data protection, data center design, among other areas.

Slated for April 28 – May 3, 2013 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, thought leaders and subject matter experts from across the industry will host the educational sessions and make presentations that will address those issues.

Brian Janous, Utility Architect, Data Center Advanced Development, Microsoft, will deliver the keynote address, “Commoditization of the Cloud: Ensuring Sustainability and Resiliency for Data Centers,” which will focus on how data center operators must become well versed in the dynamics of commodity markets for power, water, carbon and materials and develop strategies to mitigate the long-term impacts on operating costs.

Other session topics and speakers include:

Avoiding Data Center Disasters: What Professionals Need to Know
James Nelson, President BCS & Chairperson ICOR
The International Consortium for Organizational Service (ICOR)

Finding the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Paul Schlattman, VP Mission Critical Facilities
Environmental Systems Design, Inc. (ESD)

Impact and Learning from Hurricane Sandy (Panel Discussion)
Donna Manley, IT Senior Director
President AFCOM Midlantic Chapter, DCI Board Member, University of Pennsylvania
Alex Delgado, Global Operations and Data Center Manager
International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF)

The Future of Disaster Recovery
Pete Manca, President & CEO, Egenera

Building IT Resilience: Why Systems and Data Need Full Protection
Ralph Wynn, Sr Manager, Product Marketing
FalconStor

Does Your Cloud Really Need Its Own Data Center? (Panel Discussion)
Margaret Dawson, Vice President of Product Marketing & Cloud Evangelist
HP Cloud Services
Mark Thiele, EVP of Data Center Technologies
Switch

Intelligent Modular Design and Build–A Case Study
Martin Olsen, Vice President
Active Power
Dave Rotheroe, Senior Technologist, Global Data Center Services
HP IT

See full program on Data Center World website.

Increased Roundtables, Unconference Sessions

This year, there’s more open roundtable discussions on tap, focused on providing practical, real-life solutions organized around specific topics including disaster recovery/business continuity, energy efficiency rebates, DCIM, and data center builds.

Unconference Sessions, which are educational sessions organized for attendees from distinct industries, will be available for a variety of areas including health care, education, government, colocation and finance. Unconference meetings allow for peers to share best practices, benchmarks, and provide problem identification and resolution. Subject matter experts from each industry segment are available for Q&A and networking.

There’s also opportunities to network with peers at a variety of venues during the conference. On the expo floor, there’s the chance to demo, discuss and see the latest in data center and facilities management technology.

Data Center World is both an educational conference and an expo for data center and facilities management professionals, which provides real-world solutions, vendor-neutral education, peer-to-peer networking and access to technology service providers. The optional tutorials and virtual data center tours offer an added in-depth experience for areas of particular interest.

For more information and registration, see the Data Center World website.

The Data Center Knowledge Webinar series continues with the next one titled, “A Roadmap for Data Center Transformation.”

You’re invited to learn more about data center transformation when IO Senior Vice President Aaron Peterson has an in-depth conversation with the Editor-in-Chief of Data Center Knowledge, Rich Miller, during the next DCK Webinar. The discussion will revolve around the increasing pace that the global demands being placed on data center providers.

Register now for the DCK Data Center Transformation Webinar on March 28 at 2 p.m EDT. The event lasts 1 hour.

In the webinar, various vital topics around the existing and future data center transformation areas will be covered. This includes:

• The predominantly static data center and its limitations.
• The approaching crisis, a “perfect storm” on the data center horizon, made up of supply and demand constraints, which must be prioritized and transformed.
• The technology-based, sustainable solution that is Data Center 2.0 which represents a fundamental transformation of data center DNA.

Register for this event on March 28 to gain a greater understand of the current and future roadmap around data center transformation.

This week, our contributors to the Industry Perspectives channel shared thoughts on cloud-ready apps, data warehouse strategy, brokering IT services internally and today’s outlook on the vendor scene. This channel at DCK is growing and providing industry professionals with the opportunity to share their insight and expertise. For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of this week’s columns:

Unleash Your Applications with Cloud-aware Application Delivery – The evolution of cloud architectures and their ability to deliver a greater level of efficiency and flexibility has been a hot topic recently. So why put your apps in the cloud? Kavitha Mariappan of Riverbed outlines the benefits of putting your apps in the cloud.

Creating An Effective Data Warehouse Strategy – Contrary to what some companies may still believe, effective data warehouse solutions do not have to be costly. Nor do they have to be complex or limited to a single size and scope, writes Alan McMahon of Dell.

Brokering IT Services Internally: Building the Order ProcessTypically, when the busy internal consumer seeks access to an IT resource, he or she is faced with a daunting obstacle course of approvals. Dick Benton of Glasshouse covers how the advent of cloud has changed the order and provisioning process.

A Great Time to be in the Data Center Industry – A decade or so ago, however, data center specialists were scarce. Today, there’s many companies available, writes Tom Roberts of AFCOM. Select a build and/or design partner that matches your company’s culture and style.

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.

It’s Friday! Time for some data center humor with the Data Center Knowledge caption contest.

Please take a minute a vote for the funniest captions in the poll below.

Each Friday, Data Center Knowledge features a cartoon drawn by Diane Alber, our fav data center cartoonist, and our readers suggest funny captions. Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.

The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion.

We are voting on submissions for the Harlem Shake cartoon, titled “Shaking in the Data Center.”

For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel.

February was a month for “big” news, such as Dell gaining a contract for 3 petabyte storage, a mysterious $1.5 billion project in Iowa, and Microsoft reaching the $15 billion benchmark in data center spending. But there was also levity with viral dance videos released by EMC and Rackspace. So here’s the line up of the most popular stories for February 2013, ranked by page views.

Dell To Build 3 Petabyte Storage Infrastructure For JAIST – February 8

Dell announced that Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) has selected Dell Compellent arrays to provide high-performance and large capacity storage for its growing, private cloud environment that supports its students and researchers.

Facebook Scales Servers with Retooled Chef – February 4

Facebook was looking for improved tools to help it manage its growing armada of servers. The team at Opscode was looking for new ways to improve the scalability of its Chef tool for automating infrastructure.

$1.5 Billion Iowa Project is Still Alive. Is it Apple? – February 1

The mysterious $1.5 billion project known as Project Catapult is apparently back in play. Local officials in Altoona, Iowa this week revived a site plan for the project, which has been shrouded in secrecy as a large company has scouted sites in both Iowa and Nebraska.

Gangnam Style in the Data Center – February 8

It had to happen eventually: A “Gangnam Style” parody with IT professionals doing the Psy “horse dance” in the aisles of a data center. This “Oopa EMC Style” performance is brought to you via a YouTube video from “Chad Sakac and the EMC Giddyups.”

Superdome Infrastructure Eyed in Super Bowl Power Loss – February 4

It’s probably the most high-profile outage imaginable: A power loss at the stadium hosting the Super Bowl, in the middle of the game. How could this happen?

The Evolution of Microsoft’s Data Center Design – February 4

The dramatic changes in web-scale data center design in recent years can be seen in the evolution of the Internet infrastructure at Microsoft, which has been among the leading proponents of deploying servers on pre-fabricated modules rather than traditional data halls. The company says this shift has allowed it to deploy servers at a faster pace with lower cost.

Windows Azure Cloud Crashed by Expired SSL Certificate – February 25

Microsoft has spent more than $15 billion building one of the largest global cloud computing infrastructures. An SSL certificate can be had for as little as $70 a year from a commercial certificate authority, or can be effectively free if you issue your own, as Microsoft does.

Eucalyptus: We’ll Be More Open Than Other Open Clouds – February 12

In a landscape with dueling open clouds, which is the most open? Cloud software specialist Eucalyptus sees pushing boundaries of open clouds as an opportunity. This philosophy is driving changes at the company, with a sharper focus on its “open” roots from its origins in academia. Eucalyptus has open sourced its courseware and training, making all those materials available for free.

Rackspace Does The “Harlem Shake” – February 15

Rackspace, a cloud hosting provider, is known for its corporate culture. This week, it’s email and apps team demonstrated their energy and levity through their own version of the viral video hit, the “Harlem Shake.”

Video: LeaseWeb Migrates 3,000 Servers – February 12

What’s it like to move 3,000 servers into a new data center? As part of its expansion in the U.S. market, LeaseWeb recently migrated 100 server-filled racks into a new data center hall at the COPT6 facility in Manassas, Virginia.

Stay updated on the latest news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook. DCK is now on Google+.

The Datacentres Europe 2013 event will take place in Nice, France on May 29-30. The event, run by BroadGroup, is focused on end users in vertical markets and the data centre and IT infrastructure they use.

BroadGroup research forecasts that strong vertical market demand will drive growth in outsourcing to third-party data centres in Europe, but this still leaves approximately 70 percent of the market that has not yet outsourced by 2016. However, the consulting firm also believes that this linear perspective of the market will largely disappear as the computing environment changes. BroadGroup’s research suggests that IT departments emerge as cloud brokers, hosting applications across a range of datacentres and distributed architectures. Businesses will be offered a flexible menu of options, automated and on demand. For data centres and users, this dénouement brings a completely new set of challenges and opportunities.

Sponsors of the event include Schneider Electric, Hewlett Packard, Bird & Bird, eco Verband der deutschen Internetwirtschaft e.V., APL, MigSolv, Cofely GDF Suez, Invest in Iceland, Scholzegruppe, Future Facilities, ABB, Bouygues, EBRC, DEF, Scottish Development International, Conteg, Smacs, Partner Organizations are the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA) and CESIT. Industry Partners include Colo-X, Colo Research, Globeron and EPI.

The event includes an industry exhibition with more than 70 companies represented.

For more information visit, Datacentres Europe 2013 website. The event advanced discount offers close on Feb. 28.

Venue
Palais des Congrès Acropolis
Nice, Côte d’Azur, France

Hotel information can be found on the conference website.

For more events, please return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar.

Hosting industry conference HostingCon 2013 will be held on June 17-19 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. This annual event includes 52 educational sessions across 3 days. More than 100 speakers and panelists, including numerous industry thought leaders and trend setters, share their knowledge of the ever-evolving Web hosting industry. More than 1,900 people from all areas and niches of the hosted services industry are expected to attend the conference.

More information is available on HostingCon’s website. For DCK readers, use this coupon code when registering: DCK2013 to receive a discount on the registration fee.

For hotel information and to book online, visit the hotel page.

Venue
Hilton Austin
500 East 4th Street
Austin, TX 78701
1-512-482-8000
1-800-HILTONS

For more events, please return to the Data Center Knowledge Events Calendar.

At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Alban Cat, which is seeking a EPG Field Service Supervisor in Sterling, VA.

The EPG Field Supervisor is responsible for directing and supervising activities of field operations and repairs; traveling from site to site and providing guidance and support to the EPG field technicians; and addressing customer concerns and disputes and resolving them in a timely manner. To view full details and apply, see job listing details.

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed.

At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Silver Linings Systems, which is seeking a Business Development Manager in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The Business Development Manager is responsible for developing and executing a tactical sales plan that will start moving Silver Linings into the number one position among modular data center providers. To view full details and apply, see job listing details.

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed.

Happy Friday! You’ve made it to the end of the work week. Time for some data center levity.

Each Friday, Data Center Knowledge features a cartoon drawn by Diane Alber, our fav data center cartoonist, and our readers suggest funny captions. Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.

The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion.

Congratulations to Jim Leach of Raging Wire for “I like her, but I’m just not ready for a 2N relationship.” for the Valentine’s Day cartoon.

This week Diane writes, “So the newest craze on youtube is called the “Harlem Shake” and I just love it! If you haven’t seen it yet, you soon will, it’s becoming as popular as the “plank”. Anyway, the Harlem shake is basically when a single person starts dancing all by themselves with a mask or helmet over there head and then as soon as the base drops the entire room starts going crazy. Well, I had to have Kip and Gary par take in the fun and what better place than the tape storage room! The only problem is I don’t think Gary has any idea of what is going on. . .”

For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel.

At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from RagingWire, which is seeking a Director of Critical Facilities Operations in Sacramento, California.

The Director of Critical Facilities Operations is responsible for the strategic facility planning, daily operational oversight, and planned maintenance and repairs of RagingWire’s CA-based critical facilities. The position includes oversight of electrical and mechanical systems as well as fire/life safety, and the director is expected to have expertise in all areas of data center facility design, operations and maintenance. To view full details and apply, see job listing details.

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed.

Red Hat announced it will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the Apache Hadoop open community to add another component to the big data ecosystem.

“The big data market is ripe for disruption,” said Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Storage Business Unit. “Big data is more than just Hadoop to most enterprise customers. We are taking a broad view of big data.”

RedHat already has a large share of the big data and cloud markets. According to Rangachari, 72 percent of big data workloads run on Linux and Linux is the primary platform for the majority of cloud-based applications.

Red Hat intends to make its Hadoop plug-in for Red Hat Storage (gained through the acquistion of Gluster, an open source object storage firm) available to the Hadoop community later this year. Currently in technology preview, the Red Hat Storage Apache Hadoop plug-in provides a new storage option for enterprise Hadoop deployments that delivers enterprise storage features, while maintaining the API compatibility and local data access the Hadoop community expects. Red Hat Storage brings enterprise-class features to big data environments, such as Geo replication, High Availability, POSIX compliance, disaster recovery, and management.

Users will have have a unified data and scale-out storage software platform to accommodate files and objects deployed across physical, virtual, public and hybrid cloud resources. The enterprise big data analysis is supported by RedHat’s approach, with “the ability to create workloads in private cloud and move to public cloud, back and forth, without retooling the applications,” said Rangachari.

Red Hat is also building a robust network of ecosystem and enterprise integration partners to deliver comprehensive big data solutions to enterprise customers.

• Big Data Ecosystem Partners – To provide a comprehensive big data solution set to enterprises, Red Hat plans to partner with leading big data software and hardware providers to offer interoperability. Development of certified and documented reference architectures are expected to allow users to integrate and install comprehension enterprise big data solutions.
• Enterprise Partners – Red Hat anticipates enabling the delivery of a comprehensive big data solution to its customers through leading enterprise integration partners utilizing the reference architectures developed by Red Hat and its big data ecosystem partners.

Keep up on Data Center Knowledge’s cloud computing coverage, check the Cloud Computing channel.

Rackspace, a cloud hosting provider, is known for its corporate culture. This week, it’s email and apps team demonstrated their energy and levity through their own version of the viral video hit, the “Harlem Shake.” Apparently, this helps with recruiting.

For the previous humor posts on DCK, see our Humor Channel.