Green Data Center Blog

Yahoo wastes Carbon-Neutral efforts

Yahoo’s Christina Page presented a keynote at the Uptime Symposium 2008 and has a podcast on Uptime here.

Listening to Christina explain how Yahoo went carbon neutral in 2007 by buying carbon credits, questions came up in her keynote asking what was the business value of going carbon neutral. Christina danced around this. But, I think what the reality is that Yahoo’s management, probably specifically Jerry Yang supported the idea of going carbon neutral and gave Christina the job of purchasing carbon credits.

With all the recent news questioning Jerry Yang’s management decisions dealing with Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid who would ever follow in Yahoo’s footsteps for anything they have decided to do over the past couple of years.  BusinessWeek highlights again how many executives are leaving Yahoo.

Another day, another high-level exit—or three—from Yahoo! (YHOO). The most recent round came to light June 19, when TechCrunch reported the imminent departure of three prominent Yahoos: Vish Makhijani, general manager of Yahoo Search; Qi Lu, executive vice-president for search and advertising technology; and Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice-president for communications and communities and the author of a scathing 2006 memo dubbed the "peanut butter manifesto" that accused Yahoo of losing its focus (BusinessWeek.com, 6/12/08).

Garlinghouse and the others are among more than 50 high-profile Yahoo executives and managers who have left the company in the past three months or intend to leave, raising concerns that a leadership vacuum will ensue in light of failed merger discussions with Microsoft (MSFT), and amid withering public criticism of Yahoo management by billionaire investor Carl Icahn. The exodus makes it harder for remaining executives to persuade shareholders the company has the means to turn itself around.

The end result is Yahoo’s carbon neutrality is wasted as who would follow their lead in anything right now.

Smart Folks Leaving Yahoo

Yahoo is all over the news, outsourcing with Google to bring in revenue.  But as Michael Malone writes for ABCNews, the smart folks are leaving Yahoo.  Didn’t KC Mares, Yahoo’s data center strategist leave in April 2008?  Could he see the writing on the wall.

Jeff Weiner, the guy who runs Yahoo.com and Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail, is splitting from the company to go work for a couple of venture capital firms. He joins a growing list of Yahoo's best and brightest who have already bailed out of the company.

If there is any Intellectual Capital equivalent to Moore's Law it is that, no matter what their public explanations, when the smartest folks leave a company that company will soon be in serious trouble, and wherever those folks end up, that company will soon be a whole lot more successful.

Right now, Yahoo is bleeding talent from every doorway. And that means that even if Yang and what remains of his staff can manage to right their listing company, Yahoo will still be dead in the water, lacking in the kind of talent it will need to get moving again and keep up with the competition.

If you are looking for data center staff, maybe you should send someone to hang out in the Yahoo data center parking lots.

WSJ article "The War for the Web", mentions data center 7 times

WSJ has an independent opinion article written by Andy Kessler, The War For the Web, discussing the battle for the future of computing between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, and smaller players IBM, Sun. What caught my attention is in Andy's article he mentions data centers 7 times.

Today, there are several major clouds: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and smaller players IBM and Sun. Can there be more? Sure, but it would require a business model that could not only pay for it, but could rip it out every few years and modernize it. Google's $20 billion Web advertising business gives it the cash flow to do so. Advantage Google.

- Speed. Once you build the cloud, it's all about network operations. Whoever can deliver search results faster, wins. Users only realize this subconsciously, but it's true: Google's dominant share is as much about speed as it is for relevant results. Compare it to Microsoft or Yahoo and you'll see. Google built data centers next to waterfalls so electricity could be cheap enough to help it win the speed war.

The continuing battle between Microsoft and Google will mean fierce competition – adding features, building data centers, cutting deals and spending money on speed and customer convenience. That's the way to move technology forward. It's great to see Microsoft with some fight left in it. Not only hasn't the Internet yet matured, it's becoming an ever-more high stakes game.

This article helps to highlight a Green Data Center is part of a corporate strategy for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon to win the war, they need to be efficient with their resources. The most precious resource is power. Network is second, and water is going to quickly rise as another critical resource.

Industry Leader Roll Call* at The Green Grid Technical Forum - Microsoft...Here; Yahoo...Here;Google... Google... Is Google Here?

The Green Grid Forum held a Technical Forum in SF Feb 5 - 6, 2008.

An unprecedented opportunity to "Get Connected to Efficient IT", The Green Grid Technical Forum is a unique industry event designed to bring members and other industry stakeholders together to further The Green Grid’s mission of advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.  Attendees will learn about The Green Grid’s Data Center Metrics, current and emerging techniques for managing data centers for efficiency and future technical deliverables from the organization.  The Green Grid will also host discussions with leading industry policy-makers from around the world.

Part of going Green in a Data Center is to figure out what works, and this event was a great opportunity for industry leaders to exchange ideas. There were over 300 attendees registered for the event, including the biggest of data center operators; Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. Well, not Google as they didn't show up. Which is confusing given Google's claims of being an environmental leader. Google's Green Energy Czar says

we launched the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which aims to set efficiency standards for power supplies and dc-to-dc converters, both for servers and also for desktops. It’s about taking what we’ve done on the server side and getting some of the same efficiency improvements on the desktop side where there’s a huge opportunity in terms of total savings.

Google's motto is "do no evil." Given Google operates more servers than anyone else should "do no evil" include participating in The Green Grid Technical Forum? Google has taken on the environmental task by starting projects like Renewable Energy Initiatives, but wouldn't it be better if Google helped validate data center best practices?

Why didn't Google join The Green Grid?

As a side, someone saw Microsoft's Christian Belady, talking to Yahoo's Christina Page.That would have been a fun conversation to list to.

* I was just joking about the roll call analogy.

Yahoo Green Data Centers in Central Washington

Surfing Yahoo's corporate blog, I found their blog entries on their data centers they opened in Central Washington in 2006 and 2007.

Their latest in Quincy.

Our second data center in Central Washington is open for business! Earlier this month we hosted more than 250 local community members and officials, contractors, and construction crew in Quincy, Washington to celebrate the opening of our first data center built from the ground up. We take great care to find the right combination of fiber connectivity, network availability, low cost of power, land and operations, and a skilled workforce to operate a state-of-the-art facility when looking for new data center locations. In Quincy and nearby Wenatchee (where we opened a data center last November), we not only found all the right resources, we were also embraced by a welcoming community.

And, their first in Wenatchee.

Our facility makes use of “green” initiatives to help us efficiently use resources. We are using hydroelectric power, which is plentiful in this area, and our building uses the cold external air to cool the inside of the data center, a special design element that helps reduce electricity needs and control cooling costs.

In addition Yahoo!'s Director of Climate and Energy strategy has a podcast.

-This Podcast features an interview with Christina Page, Yahoo!’s (YHOO) Director of Climate and Energy Strategy discussing their mandate and progress on becoming "carbon neutral”.
Christina speaks passionately about their projects in India and Brazil equivalent to taking 35,000 cars off the road or turning off the lights on the Vegas strip for two months.

Source: http://cleanenergynews.blogspot.com/2007/10/recent-podcast-with-christina-page.html

How big is Microsoft and Yahoo Datacenter combination?

Found this graphic on Capital Expenditures (Source: Morgan Stanley, Thomson, Morningstar) for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon. Eyeballing the below graphic it looks Google and a combined Microsoft/Yahoo are equal.

# of Data Center Employees (Yahoo, Ask.com, Intuit, and Microsoft) in Washington Columbia Basin

I've seen #'s thrown around that Google employs 200 people at a data center

Eventually, we plan to employ approximately 200 people, ranging from technology assistants to experienced data center managers. We’re confident this $600 million investment will be good for Council Bluffs, Google and our Internet users.

In the Columbia Basin Herald reports on total employment changes, if you add up Yahoo, Ask,com, Intuit and Microsoft employee #'s they add up to 180.  Something seems strange that 4 big data centers in the Columbia Basin have less employees than one Google data center.  What are those 200 people doing?  Are they maintaining and building Google's custom servers?  All of the below people use industry standard servers.

In April the first of three data centers in Quincy went live. The Microsoft data center will be used to house information that is essential to Microsoft's Windows Live Internet service. Employment at Microsoft was around 50 employees in April and will continue to increase as more servers are added to the facility.

In mid June, Intuit, the makers of TurboTax and Quickbooks, broke ground for a data center in Quincy across the street from the Yahoo! data center. The facility is expected to be complete by fall of 2008 and will employ around 50 people.

In December Yahoo! officially declared its data center in Quincy operational as it held a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The data center will employ around 50 people and will house information for the Yahoo! search engine and other properties.

Ask.com , Moses Lake, Data Center, 30 people.

T-Mobile Data Center joins Central Washington Neighborhood Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit, ask.com

Sabey has found a primary tenant for its new data center in Eastern Washington. 

The primary T-Mobile' data center in Bothell, Washington was flooded last month when torrential rains hit the Seattle area. The outage knocked the T-mobile website offline and disrupted new customer activations nationwide. Bothell is more vulnerable to flooding than other data center hubs in the Seattle area. East Wenatchee is in an area of central Washington that has seen a boom in data centers since 2006, when Microsoft announced a major new facility in Quincy to support its new online services.

Wenatchee World gives details on the site and timing.

Talking to a technology executive who was born in Wenatchee and is familiar with the local economy.  He says that past gov't officials had made the decision to invest funds to put in extensive fiber network, including Fiber to the Home.  On page 13 of this pdf you can see where Quincy, WA and Wenatchee, WA are listed as 2 of 7 areas with Fiber to the Home.  This infrastructure coincidentally is good for data center locations along with low cost of hydroelectric power.  Unfortunately, for the local gov't officials who drove this project they were a little ahead of their time and their constituents expected immediate results as they were voted out of office.  Well, the next gov't officials are reaping those rewards as Microsoft discovered how Quincy is a top location for a green data center with excellent Internet connectivity.  Yahoo soon followed along with Intuit, Ask.com to the same area.

So far, this has turned out to have billions of economic construction impact to the area and given the range of companies there is a diversification beyond Microsoft's initial construction.  Mike Manos gives an interview on his data center construction on Channel 10.

So far I haven't run into similar stories about how Google has impacted the local economy as Microsoft has done in Quincy.  Has any one seen anything about the broader economic impact of Google arriving to a local area?

Yahoo gets hit with 7.9 sales tax for Quincy Data Center

Yahoo had a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new facility in Quincy with David Filo, co-founder attending. A recent finding by the Washington state attorney general removes a 7.9 tax break for this new data center.

The loss of the tax break could keep Yahoo from investing in future phases of the data center that opened Monday, Filo said.

"So far everything has worked out well," he said, noting the favorable economic, political and geographic conditions that have made building data centers in the middle of farm fields in Central Washington a sensible thing to do. The abundance of cheap power available in the region is the bottom-line benefit for server farms, but the rural tax break is so significant that Yahoo would not have built in Quincy had it not been part of the equation, said Laurence Mann, a Yahoo senior vice president.

The sales tax break would have saved Yahoo and other data centers the 7.9 percent tax charged on construction and equipping of a facility, said Mike Gowrylow, a spokesman for the state Department of Revenue.

Microsoft opened a portion of a 500,000-square-foot data center in Quincy in April. The tech company Intuit also is building a facility in Quincy.

Purple Yahoo Data Center in Quincy, WA

Found a posting about Yahoo's new data center. A bunch of us are wondering why Yahoo would paint their building purple? I've been to the Microsoft Data Center in Quincy a couple of times, and it is a lot bigger. I can't quote you the size, but if you walk around the building you'll have traveled 1.3 miles.  That's a lot bigger than 14,000 140,000 square ft (Below is a typo, the building is 140,000 sq ft) , and the Microsoft guys painted the roof white to help reflect the sun during the hot summers. I wonder how much hotter the building gets when they are purple? I've got to believe it was the PR/corporate image team who decided to paint the building purple.

Yahoo! builds new Data Center the green way

December 13, 2007 at 4:55 pm · Filed under Environment, Tech Industry

A new 14,000 sq. ft Yahoo! data center was open in Quincy, Washington and had a welcome ribbon cutting by David Filo as well as Wylie Gustafson, the original guy who yodels “Yahoo!” at the end of commercials. Quincy, Washington was chosen as the prime location due to its fiber connectivity, network availability, affordable power, land and operations, and welcoming community. The best part about this data center was that it was custom built as opposed to all the other data centers that are usually rented. This allowed Yahoo! to put energy efficiency as a top priority in the design and construction of the data center. One advantange of being in Washington was the ability to draw in the cold air outside to cool the servers without using air conditioning. Carbon-free electricity using hydro and wind power the facility and all the lights operate on motion sensors. This is a great step in Yahoo!’s step in reducing energy consumption and becoming carbon neutral by the end of this year.

Here are more details about the Microsoft Data Center for comparison.

Microsoft has completed its first building at its Quincy, Washington data center and a leisurely walk around it is about 1.3 miles.

That little ditty comes from Michael Manos, senior director of Microsoft’s data center services unit. Manos was interviewed by Tina Wood at Channel 10.

Some other key highlights from Manos:

• The general idea for Microsoft’s data centers is to make them a development platform (presumably for cloud services in the future).
• Microsoft takes being green and sustainability seriously to be socially conscious and save money. Manos didn’t serve up many specifics.
• The software giant goes through a 31-factor heat map to select locations for data centers. These factors include the price of land, power capacity and fiber-optic availability. These maps are also used to find good locations to position Microsoft for the future.
• Microsoft has started a data center in San Antonio.