Dell Data Centers in China

Some friends have been asking about what is going on in China with data centers.  For a while I have been kind of lazy knowing studying China is not easy and difficult.  Always up for a good challenge when someone asks a question, I started digging and have now added "China" category.

Here is Dell's plans for a data centers in China.

Dell Plans To Build Two New Data Centers In China

November 16, 2010 | Category: Business, Computing

The international PC maker Dell, who is on its way of transferring to a services and solutions provider, has announced plans to build two new data centers in China within one year.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of large enterprise for Dell, said at a press conference in Hong Kong that Dell will keep an open attitude towards acquisitions. Its acquisitions will focus on appropriateness, instead of scale. Schuckenbrock emphasized that Dell will keep investing in the Chinese market and will continue to enlarge its recruitment in China.

Dell previously announced that it will build its second Chinese operation center, integrating manufacturing, customer service and sales, in Chengdu; and promised to invest USD100 billion in China in the next ten years. The investments will be used for purchase, production construction, and recruitment.

Here is the specific Dell Data Center announcement.

Rong revealed that Dell will build data centers in China within one year, in the form of joint ventures to make them be consistent with Chinese laws and regulations. However, Rong did not disclose which company Dell will cooperate with to build the data centers and the detailed investments for the data centers.

It is much too complex to discuss in one blog entry the issues for building data centers in China.  The good thing is Dell, HP, IBM, Digital Realty Trust and Equinix are all starting data center projects in China.

With China's investment in renewable energy we can hope green data centers will be a priority as China plans its future data center growth.

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Blog entry translated to Dutch, ComputerWorld.nl

I follow Barton George’s blog and twitter comments.  While I was flying into LV, Barton was covering one of the Gartner keynotes and tweeted.

barton808 Barton George

by sean_kelley_ms

66% of folks here say they will be pursuing private cloud by 2014.#gartnerDC

After talking to a few folks including Barton I wrote a post the next morning that the Private Cloud will bring some really bad $h*!

What the Private Cloud will bring? Really Bad $h*!

I had a full day at Gartner DC LV conference.  At the end of the day I got a good question on what I saw in the future.  Cloud is top of the topics being discussed.

Within an hour computerworld.nl contacted me and asked if they could translate the article into Dutch.  And, here is the Dutch version on computerworld.nl.

Private cloud leidt tot misbaksels

Gepubliceerd:08-12-2010 om 12:29 Auteur:Dave Ohara

Is cloud de toekomst? Afgelopen dagen heb ik doorgebracht op het datacenter congres van Gartner in Las Vegas. Daar kreeg ik een goed beeld van die toekomst.

monster, cloud, sky

Veel bedrijven denken na over het bouwen van private cloud. Maar hoeveel mensen weten hoe je een besturingssysteem voor de cloud opzet? Een tweet zoals je die heel veel voorbij zag komen op het congres:

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Social Networking gives clues to data center location

Data Center site selection is part art and science.  There are many Facebook partners looking for peering relationships with Facebook data centers.  600 million users is an appealing number.  A graphic shows the users in an interesting display.

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Here is background on the data to create the graph.

After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.

Later I replaced the lines with great circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth. Because the Earth is a sphere, these are often not straight lines on the projection.

When I shared the image with others within Facebook, it resonated with many people. It's not just a pretty picture, it's a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders.

Think about all the data Facebook has for its site selection process.  Europe and Asia look like obvious next places.

Note as GigaOm points out there are some dark spots in the Facebook network.

There are gaps in the data, of course, with dark spots in China and other countries that block the social network (or have large competitors of their own, as Russia does with VKontakte), but the result is quite an amazing picture of a connected world. If that’s what an intern at Facebook can come up with, imagine what else would be possible with that data.

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Dell DCS Cloud Evangelist, Barton George

One of the main lessons I learned and had ingrained in my thinking when I worked for Apple is focusing on quality and not quantity.  This same idea rubs off when I pick who I look to network with. I have only 157 twitter followers, 1,200 RSS subscribers to www.greenm3.com.  my linkedin connection is only 200, and 80 Facebook friends.

There are many who want these numbers to be as big as possible.  I don’t really care about the quantity as much as the quality.

One of the good connections I found only a few weeks ago is Barton George who blogs at http://bartongeorge.net/

About

What I do, and have done, for a living

Last year I joined Dell as their cloud computing evangelist.  As such I act as Dell’s ambassador to the cloud computing community (I had to supply my own sash).  I also work with analysts and press and am responsible for messaging as well as blogging and tweeting (you can follow me on twitter at barton808 and you know where my blog is).

Prior to Dell I spent 13 years at Sun Microsystems in a variety of roles from manufacturing to product and corporate marketing.  My last three years there I spent as an Open Source evangelist, avid blogger, and driver of Sun’s GNU/Linux strategy and relationships.

I was lucky to connect with Barton at Gartner DC LV and after an hour or so chatting he asked to interview me to discuss the data center ecosystem.

The Data Center ecosystem of players

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As I mentioned in a recent entry, last week I attended the Gartner Data Center conference where I learned a ton.  One of the folks I learned a lot from was Dave Ohara who consults in the data center arena.  Dave is uber connected in this space and pens the blog, Green (low carbon) Data Center blog.  Dave provided a bunch of introductions while I was there and sat down with me to do the following short video on the ecosystem of data center players.

Some of the ground that Dave covers:

  • What he covers in his blog Green Data Center
  • How do you go about building a data center and who are the players in each phase e.g site selection -> architecture/engineering design -> construction…
  • What are some of the key disruptions coming to this long standing industry e.g. cloud, Google

I am looking forward to future conversations with Barton as he learns more about data centers.  And my learning what Dell DCS’s group is doing in cloud computing.

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Validating Kindle 3 Sales of Millions sold this quarter

One of my technical helpers is getting a Kindle 3 for Xmas and we were talking about setting it up for the family.  At $139 it is hard to argue with as a gift, and they know I’ll be totally into how to set it up and I know the tip for what happens if the Kindle 3 locks up and has a frozen screen.

Today CNET news digs into the Kindle Community to find some data on the #' sold.  How well is the Kindle 3 selling?

Amazon: 'Millions' of Kindles sold this quarter

by David Carnoy

Amazon continues to hint at very strong sales numbers for the Kindle without giving exact figures.

(Credit: Amazon)

Last week, Barnes & Noble's chairman Len Riggio mentioned in an interview that his company was producing 18,000 Nook Colors per day, straining to keep up with holiday demand. This week it's Amazon's turn to trumpet Kindle sales, but it isn't CEO Jeff Bezos doing the talking. The company sometimes prefers to do its PR via its own "Kindle Community" message boards.

In this case, the little nugget of info was embedded in a thank you to customers for helping Amazon sell millions of Kindles and a reminder that the device is offering the latest, "most advanced" E Ink Pearl display (which the e-ink Nook doesn't have).

"Thanks to you, in just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we've already sold millions of our all-new Kindles with the latest E Ink Pearl display," the post reads. "In fact, in the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009."

Going to my own data source my blog entry on resetting the Kindle here is the past 3 months of traffic.  Note there is no big drop off in hits to my blog entry.  I think my blog entry gives some pretty solid evidence of Kindle 3 sales.  I wonder how much my data analytics is worth to the Barnes and Noble Nook guys.  Smile

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What is kind of scary is there are 13,000 page views for frozen Kindles. 

Top 10 search terms.

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Another top traffic entry I have is on the top 5 data center construction companies.

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