Cheap Data Center Space, Shuttered Retailers

July 6, 2009 Dave Ohara

MSNBC.com/AP has an article about empty big retail space. The interesting thing about these big retail spaces, is they are built like warehouses. Seems like a good space to put in containerized data centers as long as you can get the power and network infrastructure in place.

‘Ghostboxes’ haunt communities across U.S.

As big retailers go under, consolidate, blight is monument to lost jobs

With the recent spate of bankruptcies and store closures, including Circuit City and Linens ’N Things, more abandoned buildings like this Sportsman's Warehouse in Allen Park, Mich., will be added to a struggling commercial real estate market.

View related photos

Carlos Osorio / AP

updated 2:48 p.m. PT, Mon., July 6, 2009

BISMARCK, N.D. - Hundreds of anxious shoppers watched as city officials used power saws to cut 2-by-4s during Home Depot Inc.’s ribbon-cutting ceremony for its 102,700-square-foot building center in Bismarck. Less than three years later, the home improvement retailer shuttered the underperforming store, leaving a big orange empty eyesore on the outskirts of town.

The building, sitting derelict and silent on acres of asphalt, is now listed for sale at $10.5 million. But there’s been little interest in the near windowless warehouse-like building that occupies a lot the size of a dozen football fields.

Or maybe you could even use the space for a content delivery network in strategy locations.

Eleven Criteria in Site Selection – Green Data Center

July 3, 2009 Dave Ohara

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

July 3, 2009 Dave Ohara

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?

July 1, 2009 Dave Ohara

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

June 26, 2009 Dave Ohara

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.