Green Data Center Blog

Eleven Criteria in Site Selection – Green Data Center

Here is an excerpt from Douglas Alger’s Grow a Green Data Center book that lists eleven criteria in site selection.

• Electrical mix: As discussed in Chapter 2, some energy sources spawn much more carbon dioxide when used to produce electricity than others. Deciding to locate your Data Center in a region where electricity has a lower carbon emissions factor is an excellent way to make the facility greener before design work even begins. (More information about electrical mix is provided in Chapter 4: Powering Your Way to a Greener Data Center.)
• Weather: Some Data Center energy efficiency measures can only be implemented with the cooperation of Mother Nature. For instance, air side economizers that use outside air to chill a Data Center (and are discussed in Chapter 5: Cooling Your Way to a Greener Data Center) are more practical to use in regions where it’s cold much of the year rather than in areas where it’s usually warm or mild.
• Building codes: Are the green measures that you intend to include in your building allowed by the regional building codes? If they aren’t, are you willing to either do without that efficiency or else invest the time and effort to negotiate for a variance for your project?

  NOTE

  The Robert Redford Building in Santa Monica, California, houses offices of the Natural Resource Defense Council and in 2004 became one of the first buildings to achieve a LEED platinum rating. Design efforts began in 1999 but the 15,000 square foot (1,393.5 square meter), three-story building was not completed until late 2003.

  Green design elements including rainwater collection, the use of recycled plastic piping (in lieu of copper) and the use of waterless urinals all had to be negotiated with the city because they either conflicted with or else were not addressed by building codes at the time.

• Workforce proximity: Although not a Data Center design issue per se, the distance that employees commute to reach your facility affects how much carbon dioxide they generate every day. It’s for this reason that some environmental building assessment systems award points for features that promote alternative transportation, such as close proximity to public transit or installing bicycle storage units.

Other Data Center Site Selection Factors

As green as you want your Data Center to be, it’s impractical to select a site solely on its environmental merits. Several other factors should be considered, including:

• Property zoning: Is construction of a Data Center allowed at the location?
• Natural disasters: Is the region prone to earthquakes, ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, landslides, fire or other severe events?
• Pollution: How is the air quality at the location? Is there any risk of IT equipment exposure to dust, industrial byproducts or other contaminants?
• Interference: Are there any nearby sources of electromagnetic interference (also called radio frequency interference) such as telecommunication signal facilities or airports?
• Vibration: Are there any nearby sources of vibration such as railroads, major roads or construction?
• Political climate: Is the region politically stable or do conditions exist that might jeopardize the safety of employees or operation of a Data Center?
• Flight paths: Is the property within the flight path of an airport, increasing the possibility of a plane crashing onto the site?

Site selection considerations, including how to evaluate the a property’s risk factors and mitigate them, are discussed in greater detail in my previous book on Data Center physical design, “Build the Best Data Center Facility for Your Business.”

The referenced book has more details.

Chapter 2   Choosing an Optimal Site

Assessing Viable Locations for Your Data Center

• Building Codes and the Data Center Site
• Site Risk Factors
• Natural Disasters
• Pollution
• Electromagnetic Interference
• Vibration
• Political Climates
• Flight Paths

Evaluating Physical Attributes of the Data Center Site

Relative Location

• Accessibility
• Disaster Recovery Options

Pre-Existing Infrastructure

• Power Analysis
• Cooling Capabilities
• Structured Cabling

Amenities and Obstacles

• Clearances
• Weight Issues
• Loading Dock
• Freight Elevators
• Problem Areas
• Distribution of Key Systems

Cisco Grow a Greener Data Center Book, missing a piece – THE SOFTWARE

InfomIT has an interview with Cisco’s Douglas Alger on his new book Grow a Green Data Center.

Paint Your Data Center Green: An Interview with Douglas Alger

• By Linda Leung and Douglas Alger
• Jul 1, 2009
• Article is provided courtesy of Cisco Press

From the author of
Grow a Greener Data Center, Rough Cuts

In an interview with Linda Leung, Douglas Alger explains what it takes for businesses to green their data centers, how Cisco is eating its own green dog food, and how his former career as a journalist has helped him in his career at Cisco.

It's easy to do your bit to green up your life. From taking public transportation to work, to switching off your computer every night, to recycling and composting, every little counts. And every little bit counts a lot more when you're involved in greening data centers. By being smart with data center equipment layout and design and using energy-efficient devices, green data centers can save hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars depending on the size of the facilities. Douglas Alger, author of Grow a Greener Data Center, and Build the Best Data Center Facility for Your Business says Cisco's savings due to its green initiatives could be in the millions of dollars.

I haven’t read the book, but took a look at the Table of Contents.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Going Green in the Data Center
Chapter 2  Greener Construction Strategies
Chapter 3  Powering Your Way to a Greener Data Center
Chapter 4 Cooling Your Way to a Greener Data Center
Chapter 5 Cabling Your Way to a Greener Data Center
Chapter 6  Refrigerants and Fire Suppressants
Chapter 7 Choosing Greener Gear
Chapter 8 Saving Energy Through Consolidation and Virtualization  [Contributing Chapter 9 Greening Other Business Practices
Chapter 10 Measuring and Managing Green
Appendix - Sources of Data Center Green Information
Glossary

Douglas’s background is interesting in that he is a journalist and learned his trade in Cisco’s data center group.

Linda Leung: You have a bachelor's degree in journalism, and you had stints as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Syracuse University. Why did you change careers? Are there elements of journalism that have helped you in your career as an IT professional?

Douglas Alger: My career change was actually put into motion by a desire to relocate to San Jose, where I had gone to college years before and where several friends still lived. One of them worked at Cisco, so I called him and asked if he knew whether the company had any openings for technical writers. It did, but my friend also mentioned that his manager was looking to hire someone to do support work for their data centers and ideally create a website to document their data center-related operational policies and procedures, many of which were still taking shape. The position sounded like a new way for me to apply my writing background, and Cisco seemed like a good company to work for, so I decided to apply.

Being able to communicate clearly in writing and produce work while up against daily deadlines are certainly useful skills that can be applied to any field. Probably most helpful from my days as a newspaper reporter, though, has been the ability to investigate unfamiliar subject matter, figure out what are the key elements and then communicate their importance to other people.

The one big thing though I found missing is the lack of discussion on the role of software in a green data center.  Virtualization in many ways is just a hardware utilization technology, working at a low level close to the hardware that software doesn’t care.

There is a communication gap between the software developers, IT operations, and data center facilities.  These groups speak different languages and have different priorities. I actually think it is too hard to get all of these groups in one room, and even if you did get them together once, you’ll have a rapid fall off in any remaining discussions.

The good thing is there are some groups who get the role of software (the consumers of data center resources) need too be aware of their energy use and the impact of their actions.  Look for more on the topic Software and a Green Data Center.

Yahoo Announces NY Green Data Center & Drops Carbon Credit Strategy, Why?

Yahoo made their site selection in Buffalo NY, beating out Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009, 2:39pm EDT

NY beats Ohio, Pa., Ill. for Yahoo! data center site

The Business Review (Albany) - by James Fink For The Business Review

Months of aggressive pitching and a coordinated economic development approach laid the groundwork for computer industry giant Yahoo! Inc. to decide to build a northeast data center in the the Buffalo area.

Yahoo!, Tuesday morning, confirmed it will be building the 190,000-square-foot center at the Lockport Industrial Park. The data center could employ, initially, 125 people. Yahoo! has pegged a 30-acre site in the park for the complex.

Yahoo!’s decision is considered a major victory, especially against a backdrop of a weakened economy where unemployment has increased in the past year in Erie County to 8.1 percent from 5.5 percent, and in Niagara County to 9.3 percent from 6.6 percent.

“This is a big win for the community,” said Tom Kucharski, Buffalo Niagara Enterprise president and chief executive officer. “We won the day.”

Yahoo! was being courted by several states including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois for the center. All offered a handsome array of incentives.

“When a high tech company like Yahoo! picks a community like Western New York, it’s like a lighthouse,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, New York’s senior senator, who played a key role in Lockport landing the data center.

Part of the incentive package is 15 mW of low-cost hydropower.

The region crafted its own aggressive incentive package including the New York Power Authority offering 15 megawatts of low-cost hydropower that could save Yahoo! an estimated $100 million over a 15-year period. Empire State Development Corp. also offered job training grants and other incentives.

The executives and local officials are excited as they say the site will be built in ten months – Aug 2009 start, finish May 2010.

Construction on the data center will begin in August, said David Dibble, Yahoo! senior vice president. The center will be open by May.

News.com adds more.

Yahoo redesigns data center, ditches carbon offsets

by Tom Krazit

Yahoo thinks its plan for a new data center could eventually help the company achieve carbon-neutral status without having to resort to the purchase of carbon offsets.

Yahoo's David Dibble discusses the company's plans for a Buffalo-area data center with New York Senator Charles Schumer (right, red tie) and other state officials.

Yahoo designed its forthcoming data center to let outside air cool the servers at all times, borrowing the idea from the design of a chicken coop, according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo. The company joined New York officials such as Governor David Patterson and Senator Charles Schumer Tuesday to unveil plans for the data center, the design of which Yahoo is attempting to patent.

With One Yahoo data center in Eastern Washing with Hydro-electric and another in NY, Yahoo must see themselves as leaders in carbon neutral data center.

As part of the announcement of the new data center in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo, Yahoo also revealed that it will no longer purchase carbon offsets as part of its energy strategy. Carbon offsets have been controversial in some quarters, but they allow companies to claim they are "carbon neutral," in that purchasing offsets diverts money to green projects.

The original Yahoo Blog gives more details about PUE and energy efficiency.

For data center geeks, we expect our Buffalo data center design will have an annualized average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.1 or better. To achieve that, we’ve come up with a unique building design that we call the Yahoo! Computing Coop (because it looks like something chickens live in), which is angled to take advantage of Buffalo’s microclimate, using 100% outside air to cool the servers.

We’ve been pushing green data center standards since we started building our own data centers two years ago. For example, our facilities in Washington are powered by zero-carbon wind and hydroelectric sources, and we use free cooling for most of the year, dropping energy consumption by 40-50%. As we build more capacity to meet demand, we’ll continue to focus on innovations and inventions that improve energy efficiency. And we’ve been sharing best practices to encourage the entire industry to put smarter policies in play.

For years Yahoo has been promoting its carbon neutrality by buying carbon offsets, but now have shifted to carbon reduction vs offsets.  Yahoo will be able to claim a big reduction in carbon when they shut down their existing data center capacity and shift it to NY.  Keep this in mind when you think about your carbon strategy.  The public is wising up to carbon offsets are not as good as carbon reduction.

Twitter Presents on Metrics and Monitoring

I am down in SJ on my now regular visit. Velocity 90 conference just occurred, but I was not able to attend.

The great thing about a conference like Velocity you can get to much of the content on their web site. I am going through a bunch of them, and the Twitter presentation by John Adams triggered some thoughts.

After going through the presentation I found it interesting that data centers are not built to Twitter’s requirements which is a boon  for the collocation companies. Twitter uses AT&T hosting services.

Can data centers be built for companies like Twitter?  Or do collocation companies need to be building different type of facilities for this market?

It was quite refreshing to see an operations team who gets what it takes to green its  operations.  John says nothing about being “Green” in his presentation, but in his passion for performance he is being green.

Here is the full video of the twitter presentation.

Slides that caught my attention for the data center crowd are below.

It is typical that IT Operations doesn’t deal with the physical plant.

And, Twitter figured out clouds don’t work for them as performance and latency is a top issue.

They use closed loop feedbacks.

Prioritize the issues by finding weak points.

Have metrics as a priority.

Present the data with dashboards and admit to data porn.

Then turn the data into actionable information.

The Intel gang must be doing a little jig when they saw this slide about efficiency, and how to people can green their data center with Intel Nehalem.

And makes an excellent point on disk in their scenario.

And provide transparency on the status of the site.  This would be great to have a PUE Status for those who claim record PUE numbers.

Facebook Technical Operations VP Jonathan Heiliger tells Server OEMs “You guys just don’t get it,”

GigaOm has an interview with Facebook VP Jonathan Heileger.

Heiliger had strong words for OEMs and system builders during his chat with Om. To compete with sites like Facebook and Google, Heiliger said, OEMs and system builders need to be more power- and cost-efficient. “You guys just don’t get it,” he said, adding that Facebook has reaped success from investing heavily in its infrastructure.

InternetNews focused on the Intel and AMD dig.

Intel, AMD Get Thumbs Down from Facebook

Head of the social network's technical operations say the latest and greatest from Intel and AMD don't make the grade.

June 25, 2009
By Andy Patrizio: More stories by this author:

SAN FRANCISCO – Intel and AMD just got a nasty smackdown from the person who run's Facebook's datacenters, saying the chips don't deliver on their promises.

Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations for Facebook, was being interview by GigaOm Network founder Om Malik here at the GigaOm Structure 09 conference. Malik asked him about unexpected problems in managing the fast-growing company's datacenters.

Reps from Intel (NASDQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD), both running panels and present at the show, must have clenched their teeth when they heard this:

"The biggest thing … was less-than-anticipated performance gains from new microarchitectures, so new CPUs from guys like Intel and AMD. The performance gains they're touting in the press, we're not seeing in our applications," Heiliger told the audience.

He didn't let the tier one server vendors off any easier. "I'm not sure if I'm embarrassed or pleased for OEM vendors in the audience, but you guys don't get it. To build servers for a company like Facebook and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, they have to be cheap and super power efficient," said Heiliger.

He added he's not sure why hardware vendors fail at the job, but thinks customers need to step up and apply pressure. ""Perhaps in the coming months we'll see more collaboration with people running small clusters and large clusters," he said.

Yahoo Joins PUE Disclosure with 1.21, but Under What Conditions?

Datacenterknowledge reports on Yahoo’s disclosure of its 1.21 PUE at O’Reilly’s Velocity 2009.

Yahoo Unstealths Its Data Center Efficiency

June 24th, 2009 : Rich Miller

 

The Yahoo data center in Quincy, Washington includes cooling-optimized "podules" with a PUE of 1.21 (Photo: Yahoo Inc.)

When it comes to data center efficiency, Yahoo has maintained a lower profile than rivals Google and Microsoft. But the Yahoo team is building a compelling data center story of its own, with innovations in cooling design and energy efficiency ratings approaching the best that Google has achieved.

Yahoo’s Adam Bechtel began telling the story yesterday at the O’Reilly Velocity 2009 conference in San Jose, Calif. Bechtel, the chief architect of Yahoo’s data center operations, shared details of a patented cold-aisle containment system that integrates an overhead cooling module, building the air conditioning units into the top of a “podule” of cabinets packed with servers.

That design has helped Yahoo lower its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to 1.21, according to Bechtel, just a hair shy of the best numbers disclosed by Google and a slightly better than the lowest PUE reported by Microsoft. The PUE metric (PDF) compares a facility’s total power usage to the amount of power used by the IT equipment, revealing how much is lost in distribution and conversion.

What is missing is under what conditions was 1.21 determined.

What is needed is transparency for PUE claims.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could connect to a web service at google, microsoft, and yahoo data centers to get their PUE at any time of the day with the current weather conditions?   And, make a request for any other time for the PUE number?

Once we see a data center do this, I’ll believe the PUE claims would stand up to a compliance audit.

I am waiting for a claim of 1.10 PUE.  Competition is good, and this all helps educate more people.  But, we need more transparency on how PUE is calculated.

Frontline PBS Special: Digital Dumping Ground – eWaste Documented

PBS has a special that just aired on June 23, 2009 on Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground.

The video is here.

On the outskirts of Ghana's biggest city sits a smoldering wasteland, a slum carved into the banks of the Korle Lagoon, one of the most polluted bodies of water on earth. The locals call it Sodom and Gomorrah.

Correspondent Peter Klein and a group of graduate journalism students from the University of British Columbia have come here as part of a global investigation -- to track a shadowy industry that's causing big problems here and around the world.

Their guide is a 13-year-old boy named Alex. He shows them his home, a small room in a mass of shanty dwellings, and offers to take them across a dead river to a notorious area called Agbogbloshie.

Agbogbloshie has become one of the world's digital dumping grounds, where the West's electronic waste, or e-waste, piles up -- hundreds of millions of tons of it each year.

The team meets with Mike Anane, a local journalist who has been writing about the boys at this e-waste dump.

“Life is really difficult; they eat here, surrounded by e-waste,” Anane tells them. “They basically are here to earn a living. But you can imagine the health implications.”

Some of the boys burn old foam on top of computers to melt away the plastic, leaving behind scraps of copper and iron they can collect to sell. The younger boys use magnets from old speakers to gather up the smaller pieces left behind at the burn site.

There is an interactive map.

A slide show.

Microsoft rides Bing success, maybe they should rename the company - BingSoft

Microsoft is riding a wave of excitement as bing.com makes progress.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24TH, 2009 BY JORDAN MCCOLLUM

0

Bing’s Paid Clicks Still Up

Bing’s flash in the pan—supposed to burn out a while ago—is extending every day, at least in one important area: paid clicks. So far this month, we’ve seen that

• Bing might be making more per query than Google
• Bing saw an 8% increase in paid clicks and a 20% query volume lift
• Bing is taking a hardline on click fraud
• Bing is increasing its searcher penetration and overall share of SERPs (in the post with the best Bing title ever: Pre Bing Sting With a Post Bing Bang?)

Efficient Frontier is back again this week with more good news: Bing continues to see increases in their paid clicks:

According to our data analysis, Bing expanded its share of paid clicks for the two weeks post launch. Bing’s share of paid clicks is up 13% for the second week post launch as compared to pre-launch. And, it represents an incremental 5% lift over the first week.

 

Maybe Microsoft should rename the company to BingSoft.

What do you think?  It could be part of the plan now that Bill Gates has left.  Rebrand the company.The stock has performed as well.

I would like to see the utilization of those Microsoft Search servers now that they have something to do.

Data Centers as Targets for Regulation

Mike Manos just posted a great entry on his latest visit to London.

CRC – its not just a cycle redundancy check

I have been tracking the energy efficiency work being done in the United Kingdom for quite some time and developments in the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).  My recent trip to London afforded me the opportunity to drive significantly harder into the draft and discuss it with a user community (at the Digital Realty Round table event) who will likely be the first impacted by such legislation. For those of you unfamiliar with the initiative let me give a quick overview of the CRC and how it will work. 

The main purpose of the CRC is a mandatory carbon reduction and energy efficiency scheme aimed at changing energy use behaviors and further incent the adoption of technology and infrastructure.  While not specifically aimed at Data Centers (its aimed at everyone) you can see that by its definition Data Centers will be significantly affected.  It was introduced as part of the Climate Change Act 2008.

How are data centers targets?

In effect it is an auction based carbon emissions trading scheme designed to operate under a Cap and Trade mechanism.  While its base claim says that it will be revenue neutral to the government (except of course for penalties resulting from non-compliance), it provides a very handy vehicle for future taxation and revenue.  This is important, because as data center managers you are now placed in a position where you have primary regulatory reporting responsibilities for your company.  No more hiding under the radar, your roles will now be front and center.      

All organizations including governmental agencies who consume more than 6000 MWh in 2008 are required to participate.  The mechanism is expected to go live in April 2010.  Please keep in mind that this consumption requirement is called out as MWh and not Megawatts.  What’s the difference? Its energy use over time for your whole company.  If you as a data center manager run a 500 kilowatt facility you account for almost 11% of the total energy consumption.  You can bet you will be front and center on that issue. Especially when the proposed introductory price is £12/tCO2 (or $19.48/tCO2).  Its real money.  Again, while not specifically focused on data centers you can see that they will be an active contributor and participant in the process.  For those firms with larger facilities, lets say 5MW of data center space – dont forget to add in your annual average PUE – the data centers will qualify all to themselves.

While many of you may be reading this and feel poorly for your brothers and sisters in Great Britain while sighing in relief that its not you, keep in mind that there are already other mechanisms being put in place.  The EU has the ETS, and the Obama Administration has been very public about a similar cap and trade program here in the United States.  You can bet that the US and other countries will be closely watching the success and performance of the CRC initiative in the UK. They are likely to model their own versions after the CRC (why invent the wheel over again, when you can just localize to your country or region).  SO it might be a good idea to read through it and start preparing how you and your organization will respond and/or collect.

and where Mike helps to illustrate why data centers are targets.

Someone once decried to me that data centers are actually extremely efficient as they have to integrate themselves into the grid, they generally purchase and procure the most energy efficient technologies, and are incented from an operating budget perspective to keep costs low.  Why would the government go after them before they went after the end users who typically do not have the most energy efficient servers or perhaps the OEMs that manufacture them.  The simple answer is that data centers are easy high energy concentration targets.   Politically going after users is a dicey affair and as such DCs will bear the initial brunt.

Ideally what we need is regulation supports transparency, simplicity, fairness, and access, but this is a new idea as the WSJ discusses.

About Time: Regulation Based On Human Nature

• By JASON ZWEIG

Franklin D. Roosevelt sent Wall Street to the torture rack. Barack Obama is sending Wall Street to the psychology lab.

A key component of President Obama's financial-reform package is its proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would apply findings from the science of human behavior to ensure "transparency, simplicity, fairness, and access" for borrowers, savers and other financial consumers.

That could make it a lot harder for a part-time worker to end up with an exploding mortgage that eats all her take-home pay. It might even mean that regulators will finally pay attention to the visual presentation of financial data -- color, graphics and other factors that exert powerful sway over your decisions.

Heath Hinegardner

The proposal is an outgrowth of "Nudge," the brilliant book published last year by two University of Chicago scholars, economist Richard H. Thaler and law professor Cass R. Sunstein. A longtime friend of President Obama, Prof. Sunstein has been nominated to head the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a job often described as "the regulation czar."

In my view, a behavioral approach is decades overdue. Financial regulations always have been written mainly by lawyers and legislators -- then promptly shot full of holes by promoters who understand how real human beings think and behave.

Unfortunately for the data center I doubt we are going to get people who think like this.

Regulation that recognizes the limits of human rationality is an idea whose time has come. Like any good psychology lab, the proposed new agency will gather reams of data on how real people actually behave and adjust its rules accordingly, in real time. Of course, the financial industry will adjust its own behavior, trying to outsmart the new rules as fast as they are printed. But the war between the regulators and the regulated might finally be based on a realistic view of human nature, not fantasy.

Microsoft Hires Yahoo Data Center Executive, Nine Articles So Far

Who would have thought there would would nine articles regarding Microsoft hiring the replacement for Mike Manos.  Must be a combination of Microsoft hiring another Yahoo executive.

Microsoft plucks Yahoo! data center efficiency expert

Register - ‎8 hours ago‎

Microsoft has hired a Yahoo! data center veteran to help build an energy efficient infrastructure beneath its planned cloud and online services. ...

Microsoft hires Yahoo data center exec Silicon Valley / San Jose ...

Bizjournals.com - ‎8 hours ago‎

Microsoft Corp. on Monday said it poached a top data center executive from rival Yahoo Inc. The Redmond-based software giant (NASDAQ:MSFT), in a blog post, ...

Microsoft nabs Yahoo data center executive

CNET News - Ina Fried - ‎11 hours ago‎

In his new role, Timmons will lead a data center services team, Microsoft infrastructure services general manager Arne Josefsberg said in a blog posting. ...

Microsoft Hires Key Yahoo Data Center Executive

ChannelWeb - Kevin McLaughlin - ‎7 hours ago‎

At Yahoo, Timmons led the buildout of Yahoo's data center strategy and has a reputation for placing great importance on the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) ...

Yahoo data center executive jumps to Microsoft

Ars Technica - ‎9 hours ago‎

Redmond has hired a former Yahoo Operations vice president to lead its Data Center Services team. Kevin Timmons today joined the Global Foundation Services ...

Microsoft Steals Away Another Top Yahoo

InternetNews.com - Stuart J. Johnston - ‎7 hours ago‎

In a posting on the MS Datacenters blog, the software giant announced it has hired Kevin Timmons, former Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) vice president of operations, ...

Former Yahoo Exec Joins Microsoft

Web Host Industry Review - Justin Lee - ‎7 hours ago‎

Most recently serving as vice president of operations at Yahoo, Timmons led the build-out of the company's data centers and infrastructure. ...

Microsoft Hires Its Sixth Yahoo Exec (In Just Over Six Months)

paidContent.org - ‎11 hours ago‎

Timmons was the vice president of operations at Yahoo, where he led the build-out of the company's data centers and infrastructure. He had previously served ...

Kevin Timmons: Microsoft hires yet another Yahoo executive

TechWhack - ‎13 hours ago‎

Microsoft has announced the appointment of Kevin Timmons as the new head of their Data Center Services. He takes over from Michael Manos who had left the ...

Google News didn’t have Rich Miller’s Data Center Knowledge.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/22/microsoft-hires-yahoo-data-center-chief/