Modular Data Center Momentum builds, Dell and Ascent projects

December 16, 2010 Dave Ohara

Dell announced the start of Tier 5 using the Dell Modular Data Center solution.

Tier5 first to fire up Dell’s 3rd-gen Modular Data Center

Last week, Tier5 who has taken over an old Mitsubishi facility in Adelaide was the first company globally to deploy Dell’s third generation Modular Data Center. Tier5 is an eight-person start up that is turning the former auto plant into a state-of-the-art data center park to be leased by wholesale tenants including managed service providers, resellers and large users.

Instead of building out a traditional data center Tier5 went with Dell’s Modular Data Center (MDC) which snaps together like ginormous Legos allowing systems to be up and running in as little as a week. The MDC’s modular nature also allows capacity to be added incrementally as needed.

For a great overview, check out the short video that ITNews did at the opening press conference on Tuesday.

Hand-in-hand

To get Tier5 exactly what they wanted Dell’s DCS team worked collaboratively with the Tier5 engineers over a period of nine to 10 months to nail down the exact specs. As Tier5 founder Marty Gauvin said, “Our engagement with Dell DCS was enormously collaborative. We were able to achieve our objectives in a very collaborative way, and then go beyond them.”

Ascent just announced their anchor tenant for their CH2 facility.

Ascent Corporation Builds Out First Dynamic Data Center Suite™ in Chicago CH2 Data Center

CHICAGO, Dec., 16, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Ascent Corporation, a leading provider of comprehensive data center solutions, has signed a FORTUNE 100 multimedia company as the first tenant of its Chicago CH2 Data Center. Ascent will provide a custom-built autonomous suite offering up to 4MW of critical power, which will enable the tenant to develop and expand its services within a highly efficient, completely autonomous data center space.

CH2 is a multi-tenant data center facility in Northlake, Illinois that offers autonomous Suites featuring customized infrastructure for companies seeking to build or lease data center space via Powered shell or Turnkey Infrastructure. Each CH2 data center suite will provide its tenant with an independent secured entrance, dedicated shipping area, and non-shared infrastructure and support space. Tenants can choose from a wide range of design options, including power density, Tier level and operational services.

"Our ability to quickly sign the anchor tenant for CH2 is a real validation of our product and the continued strength of the greater Chicago market," said Phil Horstmann, CEO, Ascent Corporation. "The autonomous suite model has proved to be very popular with customers that want a customized, build-to-suit data center space that takes advantage of hyper-entitled data center attributes. By letting our tenants control their Suites' design parameters, we can provide them with a flexible, cost-effective custom data center solution that maximizes energy efficiency with no capital outlay through a turnkey lease."

I’ve been to the CH2 Ascent facility, and it will be interesting to see who is the next tenant and whose modular data center design will be used.

eBay VP of IT Operations, Mazen Rawashdeh keynote at Gartner DC LV

December 16, 2010 Dave Ohara

I ran into Mazen before he presented his keynote at Gartner DC LV, and we caught up as we hadn’t chatted for a while. I sat up front and created a video of Mazen discussing the process change that eBay made to improve the performance per watt for eBay systems. Sitting with the eBay team we were also able to catch up a bit discussing Olivier Sanche passing away.

Mazen does a if good job of explaining what eBay did to change the behaviors in IT to be greener in the data center and reduce watts per transaction by 70%.

I apologize for the video quality as the camera was out of focus in manual focus mode. Here are better pictures with the camera in focus. My Canon 7D rocks, and sometimes it feels like I am carrying rocks in my backpack as it is no light camera.

Starting your own blogging site, asking the platform question

December 16, 2010 Dave Ohara

Twitter is popular and so is Facebook. For many blogging is considered old, and many of the youth have moved off of blogs.

Interestingly enough, blogging is not one of them, as only half as many online teens blog compared to 2006, while users ages 18 to 33 also blog less than before. Blogging did see a slight uptick among older generations (ages 33 and up), but still accounts for a relatively small number of total users.

Overall, virtual worlds and blogging aren’t very popular in any age group, which probably indicates that tools such as Facebook and Twitter – which also enables users to express themselves online – have substituted blogging for many users. E-mail, on the other hand, has become nearly ubiquitous, even among adults ages 74 or over.

Being a platform is a hot topic, and Seth Godin makes a good point thinking of your job as a platform.

Where's your platform?

That needs to be the goal when you seek out a job.

Bob Dylan earned the right to make records, and instead of using it to create ever more commercial versions of his old stuff, he used it as a platform to do art.

A brilliant programmer finds a job in a small company and instead of seeing it as a grind, churning out what's asked, he uses it as a platform to hone his skills and to ship code that changes everything.

A waiter uses his job serving patrons as a platform for engagement, for building a reputation and for learning how to delight.

A blogger starts measuring pageviews and ends up racing to the bottom with nothing but scintillating gossip and pandering. Or, perhaps, she decides to use the blog as a platform to take herself and her readers somewhere they will be glad to go...

So, one way to think of a blog as a platform. Which is why I wouldn’t use Facebook or Twitter. When I blog at Typepad I own the content. I can take it somewhere else. I own the url www.greenm3.com which crosslinks to greenm3.typepad.com. I can take all of this and move the hosting of my blog to somewhere else.

Using Twitter and Facebook is easy for many, but is this how you want to run your platform?

If you create a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Blogger, etc, your platform to reach your audience can be shut down, and you have no way to bring yourself back up.

The same applies if you choose to blog on corporate blogs. The corporation can shut you down, remove all your posts, and when you leave all you wrote and the readers/subscribers are property of the corporation.

The best move Robert Scoble did was keep www.scobleizer.com when he was a Microsoft employee. All the traffic he gained became his IP and Microsoft did not have any ownership.

BTW, at some point I may get tired using TypePad and the blogging style which then means I can transform www.greenm3.com into the next thing.

GreenM3 is my platform to build new ideas. What is yours?

What is wrong with the integrated IT infrastructure stacks? lack of choice

December 16, 2010 Dave Ohara

WSJ has an article on behavior that strikes fear in retailers.

Phone-Wielding Shoppers Strike Fear Into Retailers

By MIGUEL BUSTILLO And ANN ZIMMERMAN

Tri Tang, a 25-year-old marketer, walked into a Best Buy Co. store in Sunnyvale, Calif., this past weekend and spotted the perfect gift for his girlfriend.

Last year, he might have just dropped the $184.85 Garmin global positioning system into his cart. This time, he took out his Android phone and typed the model number into an app that instantly compared the Best Buy price to those of other retailers. He found that he could get the same item on Amazon.com Inc.'s website for only $106.75, no shipping, no tax.

Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal

Tri Tang uses his mobile phone app, TheFind, to scan product bar codes and immediately troll online for the best price at various retailers.

Mr. Tang bought the Garmin from Amazon right on the spot.

"It's so useful," Mr. Tang says of his new shopping companion, a price comparison app called TheFind. He says he relies on it "to make sure I am getting the best price."

What first came to mind when I read this is the set of people I know in the data center industry who I can reach out to get a 2nd, 3rd or 4th opinion on almost any part of a data center project. No one person can know it all, but if you have a network you can tap you can make different choices.

Retail shopping has changed as retailers can no longer count on spreading out high margin products in the midst of selling the power of a big merchant’s buying power.

Until recently, retailers could reasonably assume that if they just lured shoppers to stores with enticing specials, the customers could be coaxed into buying more profitable stuff, too.

Now, marketers must contend with shoppers who can use their smartphones inside stores to check whether the specials are really so special, and if the rest of the merchandise is reasonably priced.

While many holiday consumers refuse to pay full price, retailers are trying to outdo one another by encouraging shoppers to spend more, but without giving away the store. Elizabeth Holmes discusses some of retailers' most popular discount tactics.

"The retailer's advantage has been eroded," says Greg Girard of consultancy IDC Retail Insights, which recently found that roughly 45% of customers with smartphones had used them to perform due diligence on a store's prices. "The four walls of the store have become porous."

Integrated HW, SW, Networking, Storage, and manageability is the popular way to sell services. And, even Larry Ellison has changed his position on cloud as cloud is a great way to sell an integrated stack.

Oracle Rolls Out Private Cloud Architecture And World-Record Transaction Performance

Posted by Richard Fichera on December 6, 2010

On Dec. 2, Oracle announced the next move in its program to integrate its hardware and software assets, with the introduction of Oracle Private Cloud Architecture, an integrated infrastructure stack with Infiniband and/or 10G Ethernet fabric, integrated virtualization, management and servers along with software content, both Oracle’s and customer-supplied. Oracle has rolled out the architecture as a general platform for a variety of cloud environments, along with three specific implementations, Exadata, Exalogic and the new Sunrise Supercluster, as proof points for the architecture.

Cloud vendors are busy partnering and buying companies to build cloud stacks, but what happens if the buyer wants choice? The answer most will give is you don’t want to do that because the stack works best with our products. Or worse we can guarantee performance if you buy only our products.

Imagine what Apple would look like if the iPod or iPhone only worked with the Mac.

People expect choice. Even in Cloud Infrastructure.

No vendor wants this in the same way Best Buy would love to be able to disable cell phones or more specifically smart phones that are hitting shopping sites.

All of this creates a good opportunity to be disruptive.

Quanta Computing and Digital China partner for Shanghai data center

December 15, 2010 Dave Ohara

The big OEM server vendors have got into the data center business. Quanta Computing has joined the OEMs with a partnership for a Shanghai data center with Digital China.

Digital China cooperates with Quanta Computer to set up data center in China

Yen-Shyang Hwang, Taipei; Joseph Tsai, DIGITIMES [Thursday 16 December 2010]

China-based IT service provider Digital China at TecMall Forum in Taiwan, revealed that the company is in cooperation with Quanta Computer to establish a data center in Shanghai. Quanta will provide hardware infrastructure and Digital China is responsible for developing the application platform, according to Digital China CEO Guo Wei.

Guo pointed out that the two firms' cooperation has just started and still needs to get approval from the Shanghai government to proceed; therefore, he expects details of the cooperation to be clearer in 2011, when an official announcement will be made.

As for Digital China's sales performance, Guo pointed out that the company has seen over 30% on-year growth each year in the past and believes the company will continue to see strong growth in the future.

As system consolidate, there will be more efficiency which is part a greener data center.