Did coal power in SLC scare the Twitter bird away?

December 15, 2010 Dave Ohara

DataCenterKnowledge reports on Twitter looking at Sacramento.

Twitter Scouting Sites in Sacramento
December 15th, 2010 : Rich Miller

What’s the latest on Twitter’s data center expansion? The company’s not saying. But we’re hearing that Twitter has been scouting data center space in Sacramento, Calif. What does that mean for Twitter’s announced plans to open a new facility in Salt Lake City? It’s not entirely clear.

Rich Miller tried to ask more.

Opening “Later This Year”?
In July Twitter said that its new facility would be located in Salt Lake City and open “later this year.” With 2010 drawing to a close, we touched base with Twitter spokesman Matt Graves and asked whether the Salt Lake City data center project was on schedule, or whether the expansion had been postponed or shifted to another location. “We’re still not commenting on our data center,” Graves wrote in an email.

That’s consistent with Twitter’s practice with most data center inquiries. So we don’t know for certain whether the company’s interest in Sacramento represents an additional expansion, or a rethinking of its announced plans.

The Data Center World is so small it is hard to keep secrets. A little bird told me four months ago that Twitter was looking at Sacramento and the reasons we speculated on the possible reasons for change. Given it has been over 4 months I would expect Twitter has already made its decisions by now even though there is now a whole lot of activity base on DataCenterKnowledge breaking the news.

One thing we'll probably never know for sure is whether the 100% coal power in SLC part of what scared Twitter to look at other locations.

HP's China Data Center, Suzhou/Shanghai

December 14, 2010 Dave Ohara

HP participates in the Suzhou Industrial Park Data Center located near Shangai.

Chinese Cloud Computing On HP's Menu In Suzhou
October 28, 2010 |

Hewlett-Packard has announced that it has established a new information service center and the Chinese hub of its Best Shore global outsourcing service center in Suzhou, to provide customized information technology consulting and outsourcing services to its clients in eastern China.

Named Suzhou Hewlett-Packard Information Service Company Ltd., the new company is currently cooperating with Suzhou International Science Data Center in the construction of a cloud computing platform for the Suzhou Industrial Park, and to help the operation and management of the park to ensure the availability and flexibility of its information technology system, so as to upgrade the service and management level of the park and to improve its investment environment.

Here are pictures from the opening ceremony.

Suzhou International Science-Park Data Center in 4T Standard Opens

The guests of honor activate the ceremony

Suzhou International Science-Park Data Center, the largest third-party data center in East China built by the highest international standard (T4), officially opened for business on October 28. With 840 million yuan investment from Suzhou Industrial Pak (SIP), the Center specializes in providing professional data services of international first-class network communication, information security, data disaster recovery, high performance computing and integrated management system for hi-tech R&D enterprises at home and abroad, enterprises in modern service sector and new-emerging Internet service suppliers, and etc.

Ma Minglong (R), Executive Member of CPC Suzhou Municipal Committee and Secretary of SIP Party Working Committee, confers the plaque to strategic partners of the Center

And more details on the facilites.

Located in SIP Innovation Industry Park with 42,000-square-meter construction area, the Center is constructed and operated by Suzhou International Science Data Co., Ltd (SISDC). According to the plan, the Center will focus on value-added services of data management, high-performance computing and system integration based on the service strategy of "combination of independent operation and cooperation" and strive to build up the largest center of data disaster recovery, cloud computing and IT outsourcing services in Jiangsu Province and even in East China. Meanwhile, the establishment of the Center fills up the blank of value-added business of Jiangsu Data center.

The monitoring room of the Center

The Center is located in A2 Building, Innovation Industry Park, 328 Xinghu St.

Dell Data Centers in China

December 14, 2010 Dave Ohara

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.

Blog entry translated to Dutch, ComputerWorld.nl

December 14, 2010 Dave Ohara

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.

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:

Social Networking gives clues to data center location

December 14, 2010 Dave Ohara

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.

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.