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?

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Microsoft Blog - 2008 Green IT Predictions

Lewis Curtis at Microsoft has thrown out his 2008 predictions and below I have highlights. Many of these same ideas have been discussed by Christian Belady, Microsoft's new Power and Cooling architect who was hired from HP.  I'll see if we can get Christian to make his own 2008 predictions.

Prediction one:

2008 is the year that more realize Green IT is not a passing fad in the industry,  More will realize that Green IT is a permanent regulatory and operational reality in IT Architecture and Operations and it cannot be ignored.   Regulations and oversight as well as public scrutiny will increase in 2008 (as well as poor metrics in power consumption and carbon footprint).  We will see more laws and regulations, more audits, around the world.   

Prediction Two:

Companies who only rely on performance per watt (ppw) justifications for capital expenditures will see their power consumption increase (you read it right).

ppw has been a mainstay for vendors to justify new hardware and software it sells to IT organizations for the last thirty years.   

The logic goes like this:

"your (server/SAN/network/database/operating system) can do more work with the same amount of power,  therefore, you will need fewer of them,  hence you can reduce your power bill"

Most Vendors are still parading the ppw marketing plan as their green answer today.   

So why doesn’t this argument work in the real world?    Answer: because it never factors in its impact on the velocity of demand as well as the impact of the environment which must now support it.

As technology capability increases, the velocity of people's demands of that technology will increase more.   Therefore the demand for more servers, storage and network capability will increase. This, in turn, will increase the demand for power.   This does not mention the cooling efficiency challenges of power dense racks (accounting for a substantial percentage of datacenter's power budget).

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Chicago next Green Data Center Location

In ZDNet GreenTech Pastures blog, Microsoft's latest data center in Northlake, IL is discussed as a Green Location.

From a tech industry standpoint, one big side effect of the software as a service (SaaS) movement will be the build-out of massive data centers capable of scaling to handle ever-growing user traffic. That doesn’t sound so green now, does it?

No wonder Google refuses to reveal just how much power its operations consume on a worldwide basis. In all fairness, arch-rival Microsoft also holds certain information related to its data centers pretty close to the vest. But the big Seattle-based software developer was eager to trumpet its move last month to invest about $500 million in a major data center located in Northlake, Ill.

The facility, being developed by green data center design expert Ascent in partnership with real estate company The Koman Group, will be Microsoft’s single largest data center when it comes online in the June 2008 timeframe.

Data Centers are interesting distribution logistics problems applied to information instead of goods. Chicago given its history of being a hub of commerce works well for information distribution.

Phil Horstmann, CEO of Ascent, says his company looks at each data center as an intersection of a lot of vitally important utilities—namely power, water and connectivity. The Northlake facility will feature a number of design innovations, such as an arrangement to tie right into nearby electricity transmission lines. Because Chicago is a deregulated market, his company can buy from 15 different utility companies.

Ascent's marketing site for the Northlake Data Center facility gives you an idea of the additional factors which made the site appealing.

Other green features of the area are cold air allows airside ecomomization for cooling, and Chicago power has a low carbon footprint. This Computerworld article discusses the most energy-efficient locations.

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