Pacific NW gets $89 mil of the $620 mil DOE Smart Grid grants

November 24, 2009 Dave Ohara

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will manage the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration project.

NW power grid project gets $89 million from DOE

A project to examine how high technology can improve the Pacific Northwest's electric power grid has received an $88.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

By The Associated Press

RICHLAND — A project to examine how high technology can improve the Pacific Northwest's electric power grid has received an $88.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The money, to help pay for the $177.6 million Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project, was the largest among 32 grants DOE announced Tuesday as part of $620 million in stimulus aid.

The grant will go to Battelle Memorial Institute's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, which will manage the project. The remainder of the project's cost will be borne by energy providers, utilities, technology companies and research organizations taking part.

Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center

Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center by PNNL - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center at PNNL is a user-based facility dedicated to energy and hydropower research, operations training and back-up resources for energy utilities and industry groups.

Smart meters are part of the project.

Among those taking part in the project are the campuses of the University of Washington in Seattle and Washington State University in Pullman. At both schools, "smart meters" will be installed to provide real-time information on power consumption, along with software and other gear to automate and monitor the electricity distribution system.

I wonder if anyone has thought including the Pacific NW data centers in Washington and Oregon in the project? Problem is almost all the big data center operators wouldn’t want the public to know the power consumption of their data centers.

I hope someone proves me wrong and signs up with PNNL.

Infiniband networking saves energy

November 24, 2009 Dave Ohara

If you are not familiar with the InfiniBand standard you should think about it as a way to save energy.

InfiniBand™ is an industry-standard specification that defines an input/output architecture used to interconnect servers, communications infrastructure equipment, storage and embedded systems. InfiniBand is a true fabric architecture that leverages switched, point-to-point channels with data transfers today at up to 120 gigabits per second, both in chassis backplane applications as well as through external copper and optical fiber connections.

InfiniBand™ has a robust roadmap defining increasing speeds through 2011 and 40 Gb/s InfiniBand™ products are shipping today. The roadmap shows projected increased market demand for InfiniBand™ 1x EDR, 4x EDR, 8x EDR and 12x EDR beyond 2011, which translates to bandwidths nearing 1,000 Gb's in the next three years.

InfiniBand is a pervasive, low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect which requires low processing overhead and is ideal to carry multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection. As a mature and field-proven technology, InfiniBand is used in thousands of data centers, high-performance compute clusters and embedded applications that scale from two nodes up to a single cluster that interconnect thousands of nodes.

How good is InfiniBand? It is used in 18of the top 20 green super computers.

The TOP500 showed InfiniBand rising and connecting 182 systems (36 percent of the TOP500) and it clearly dominated the TOP10 through TOP300 systems. Half of the TOP10 systems are connected via InfiniBand and, although the new #1 system (JAGUAR from ORNL) is a Cray, it’s important to note that InfiniBand is being used as the storage interconnect to connect Jaguar to “Spider” storage systems.

But let’s talk efficiency for a moment… this edition of the TOP500 showed that 18 out of the 20 most efficient systems on the TOP500 used InfiniBand and that InfiniBand system efficiency levels reached up to 96 percent! That’s over 50 percent more efficiency than the best GigE cluster. Bottom line: WHEN PURCHASING NEW SYSTEMS, DON’T IGNORE THE NETWORK! You may be saving pennies on the network and spending dollars on the processors with an unbalanced architecture.

If you don’t have a supercomputer, then virtualized I/O is another area.

The StorageMojo take
Good to see Iband used as a big cheap pipe. Its low latency, cheap switch ports and high bandwidth make it the best choice for this application.

VMware and Hyper-V have serious I/O problems. Xsigo helps manage them.

Amazon.com data center Boardman, OR in local news

November 24, 2009 Dave Ohara

Leave it to the local news to publish a video of Amazon.com’s data center in Boardman, OR.

Story Published: Nov 10, 2008 at 6:13 PM PST

By Molly Kelleher

Video

BOARDMAN - First an Amazon.com call center in came to Kennewick and now a data center is planned in Boardman.
Amazon is tapping into the Columbia Basin once again.
Back out in the corn fields, on a dirt road, a building is taking shape.
The Port of Morrow isn't allowed to say who's moving in to this 60 acre spot, but they can tell us a data center is being built out here in Boardman.
Oregon newspapers say, it's Amazon.com.

The news video is embedded below.

What I found interesting is how lean Amazon is in its data center construction and employment numbers.

The data center will bring in up to 200 construction jobs and once it's up and running, 20 people will work here full time.
And that's only phase one, there's also talks to adding two more centers just like this one.

WHIR says.

If all goes as planned, the $100-million site project will be completed in the third quarter of 2010, says Port of Morrow general manager Gary Neal.

The TV station recently shot footage of the Amazon site at the Port of Morrow, a 9,000-acre industrial park along the Columbia River that's about 160 miles east of Portland.

The 116,700-square-foot building is to be constructed over six phases, with two data centers to follow.

Here is a low res picture of the industrial park.

Partly Cloud Computing

November 23, 2009 Dave Ohara

Pixar has an entertaining video you can see as part of the movie Up, called Partly Cloudy.

Google’s Dan Dodge makes a good point for moving some IT services to the cloud. The new term that people need to think about is Partly Cloud Computing. You don’t have to go complete cloud. And no clouds are not good.

Moving to the Cloud is not an all or nothing proposition

The Enterprise Cloud Summit panel at the Interop Conference yesterday discussed some of the challenges and concerns of large enterprises and government agencies in moving their applications to the cloud. While there are some regulatory and compliance concerns for some applications, it isn’t an all or nothing proposition. Moving your email, calendar, spreadsheet, word processor, and other productivity apps to the cloud now can save big money, and free up your IT resources to focus on more strategic issues.

InformationWeek says “The vendors argued that cloud computing offers enough real benefits at the present time that most organizations should at least consider it for some functions. One approach, said Google's Don Dodge, is to move low-level data and services to the cloud while continuing to maintain sensitive information in-house.

Dodge told New York's CIO Rico Singleton that his cash-strapped state could save $50 to $100 million per year just by moving its 190,000 employees to Google's cloud-based Google Apps desktop applications. "It's not all or nothing," said Dodge. "Take advantage of the cost savings for the simple things," he said.”

CRN’s Channel Web captured the essence of the discussion;

Cloud evangelists from the technology companies led off the keynote extolling the various virtues of the cloud model, fromGoogle developer advocate Don Dodge emphasizing simplicity and cost-savings to Microsoft's Yousef Khalidi, distinguished engineer for Windows Azure, explaining how to leverage public and private cloud models to maximize efficiency for enterprises both public and private.

Next big Oregon Data Center customer? well-funded, well-known

November 23, 2009 Dave Ohara

updated Jan 22, 2010

Company X is Facebook /2010/01/facebook-data-center-115-pue.html

DataCenterKnowledge has a post on Company X Plans for Oregon Data Center.

Company X Plans Oregon Data Center
November 23rd, 2009 : Rich Miller

The city of Prineville, Oregon is negotiating with a large, secretive company that wants to build a data center in its enterprise zone.

A “well-funded, well-known company” is negotiating to build a large data center in central Oregon, and the secrecy surrounding the negotiations has folks in the town of Prineville wondering who it might be. Officials in Prineville have been negotiating with Vitesse LLC, a company performing site selection for the unnamed end user that would build operate the data center, according to local media reports.

The site is several hours from an existing Google data center in The Dalles and a Boardman site whereAmazon is said to be resuming construction on a major data center project. Like those projects, the process in Prineville has been cloaked in secrecy.

Hints of the company are hard to find.

Oregon business registration records indicate that Vitesse LLC was registered Oct 21 and shares a San Francisco address with the law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofksy & Walker. Attorneys with Paul, Hastings have data center site acquisition experience, including past engagements with large financial companies and Internet companies.

The proposed facility would be located near the Prineville Airport in an enterprise zone, which allows the city to waive property taxes for eligible projects. Tomorrow the Prineville City Council is scheduled to consider selling a 1-acre piece of property to Vitesse for $50,000, annex two adjacent properties to the city and approve a 15-year property tax exemption for the company that would operate the data center.

I am off to Oregon for Thanksgiving this weekend and we are planning our own tax-free purchases compared to Washington’s high state sales tax. But, I wouldn’t do that because I would have to pay the sales tax anyway when I brought the goods back to state of Washington. :-)

DataCenterKnowledge makes the same point for data centers and state sales tax.

Washington Repeals Tax Break
In late 2007 Washington State ruled that data centers aren’t manufacturers and were no longer covered by a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises, and thus must pay a 7.9 percent tax on data center construction and equipment. This prompted protests from Microsoft and Yahoo, who said they had relied upon the tax break in their decision to build facilities in Quincy.

In a letter to legislators, Yahoo co-founder David Filo said the withdrawal of the sales tax incentive “swings the decision strongly in favor of freezing construction in Washington, and building instead in Oregon (which has no sales tax), as some of our competitors are already doing.”

Microsoft subsequently migrated its Windows Azure cloud computing infrastructure from its data center in Quincy to another Microsoft facility in San Antonio.

How important is it to blog about this problem of Washington State Sales Tax? A funny piece of data for me is Google Search has my one of my blog posts #9 for “Washington State Sales Tax”