Digital Realty Trust has in its 2009 10-K statement on page 35 a list of its top 20 tenants.

I've been staring at this table for a while, seeing what could be learned from this public disclosure.

Top 3 tenants are resellers of space - Savvis, Equinix and Qwest comprise 24.8% of the sq ft, but are only 18.9% of the rent.

The 3 financials - JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and HSBC are 2.8% of the sq ft and 7.1% of the revenue which can be explained by the high availability requirements for their space and requirements to support financial transactions.

Google is not in the Top 20 listed.  But, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Facebook are. Microsoft has the most amount of space of these 3 with 2.5% of the space and 1.6% of revenue.  Yahoo! has 0.9% of the sq ft and 1.9% of the revenue.  With Facebook at #4 in revenue with 3.6%, they have only 1.1% of the space in Digital's data centers.  Facebook being a young company could be in high density space, so judging just by sq ft and not knowing power leaves more questions.

Comverse Technology looks like they have the most amount of space in one location 2.9% of the sq ft and only 1.4% of the revenue.  But, all spaces are not created equal and it would seem the space Comverse got into had little demand from others which may explain why there is so much space.

Why are these numbers important?  As companies decide to build data centers, they use their colocation costs as part of the business justification.  But, how many look at the costs others are paying for colocation space to judge the ROI of a data center?

Dams are notorious for their environmental impact.  James Cameron has protested one Brazilian dam.

Brazil dam project prompts animated response from director Cameron

September 01, 2010|By Matthew Knight for CNN

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Movie director, James Cameron has teamed up with environmental campaigners in an effort to help Brazilian tribes' epic fight against the construction of a controversial dam in northern Brazil.

But, another Brazilian dam has a strategy to be free of critics or at least minimize the social and environmental impact. WSJ reports on this effort.

Brazil Engineers a Critic-Proof Dam

By JOHN LYONS

Ana Ottoni

The Santo Antonio dam rises in the Amazon, one of 24 planned there.

PORTO VELHO, Brazil—Tethered to scaffolding on concrete towers by a clay-colored river, workers clad head to toe for protection from sun and mosquitoes are building the first large dam in the Amazon in decades.

Greenpeace has focused its sights on Facebook's data center.  The Brazilian company has spent $600 million to reduce the impact of the dam.

Yet few people have heard of the $8 billion Santo Antonio project, even in Brazil—which is just how the builders planned it. They designed it to avoid the controversies that have delayed other dam projects for years and multiplied their costs.

The builders spent some $600 million to head off trouble with regulators, environmental groups and Indian tribes before it arose. They trained thousands of rain-forest residents to provide a local labor pool and built modern houses for families who will be displaced. They created a high-tech fish ladder so species like giant catfish can get around the dam—and to meet one local demand, they built an alligator slaughterhouse.

For those who doubt a green fits in a data center.  Consider these words.

The dam's greener hue isn't because of any special environmental ardor on the part of the builders. It reflects a calculation about the unpredictable extra costs that environmental suits, Indian protests and political backlashes can cause.

Note the dam staff member who comes from World Wildlife Fund.

"In the end, this is business," said Gabriel Azevedo, a former World Bank and World Wildlife Fund executive who serves as sustainability director at the energy division of the dam's lead construction company, Odebrecht SA. Odebrecht is a closely held Brazilian concern whose other projects include boring a 12-mile tunnel through the Andes to carry Amazon water to Peru. Its co-builder is another private Brazilian company, Andrade Gutierrez SA.

Is this the future of data centers?  Well maybe not all of you.  As Greenpeace stays focused on Facebook as the target, others sigh in relief.

HP announced new servers for solution providers.

Accelerate application performance and efficiency for service providers

When supporting a business model based on large-scale application service delivery, service providers need to consider every CPU, millisecond, watt, dollar and square foot to gain a competitive advantage in the market.

The new HP ProLiant SL6500 Scalable System features a common modular architecture that can scale from one node to thousands while delivering breakthrough energy efficiency and performance of up to 1 teraFLOPS per unit of rack space. This standard platform can be highly customized and tuned with the HP ProLiant SL390s G7 server and HP ProLiant SL170s G6 server to meet varying application demands, such as high-performance computing, web services, cloud computing and hosting.

As part of HP's Converged Infrastructure.

HP is targeting the solution provider market with this current announcement.

HP POD-Works and HP PODs are ideal for any service provider / enterprise customer requiring:

• Quick IT deployment using HP POD-Works and HP Factory Express
• Pay as you grow to minimize up front capital outlay - add additional HP PODs as you need more datacenter space
• Decrease operating expenses with PUEs as low as 1.25

HP POD meets demanding requirements for service providers

• High efficient power distribution delivering 3-phase power through the HP POD, 240V within racks, and supporting N+N power redundancy
• Easily accommodates very dense IT deployments supplying up to 600kW in a 40ft/12m HP POD, and 290kW in a 20ft/6m HP POD