Air cooled State of the Art Molecular Lab/Office, shares its design and assumptions

Air cooling has been a hot topic for the data center industry with some of the most going to Yahoo's chicken coop which people don't really talk much about.  What is disappointing when companies say they have a new and better way, they don't share the details. What kind of details?

UW has opened a new Molecular Biology office/lab that has a focus on clean energy.

SEATTLE (AP) — As a building, the University of Washington's new molecular engineering lab is interesting in its own right — designed with cutting-edge features to make it energy efficient, and bright lab spaces with killer views of Mount Rainier and the Olympics.

But what really marks the newest building on the UW campus is the work going on inside, where scientists are designing proteins that could one day cure diseases, and clean technology materials that could make it easier to convert solar energy into electricity.

The building is mandated to LEED silver, and should be gold.  But what is the best part is the air cooling in this PDF.

It would be nice if the air cooled data center projects shared this amount of data.  Then, people could harvest best practices that would apply to their projects

There are diagrams of the airflow.

Seattle climate data.

Netflix open sources its middle-tier load balancer, Why?

GigaOm's Barb Darrow reports on Netflix's latest open sourcing of its middle tier load balancer.

According to the blog:

In AWS cloud, because of its inherent nature, servers come and go. Unlike the traditional load balancers which work with servers with well known IP addresses and host names, in AWS load balancing requires much more sophistication in registering and de-registering servers with the load balancer on the fly. Since AWS does not yet provide a middle tier load balancer, Eureka fills a big gap in that area.

The consistency of Netflix open sourcing its infrastructure makes it a pattern.  And, to understand the a pattern you need to ask what problems is Netflix trying to solve.  Why is Netflix sharing its infrastructure?

1. The process of open sourcing the code gets the developers to clean up their code and document.  There is some bad open source code out there, but there is also some very good.  The Netflix team takes pride in their sharing, so they want it to look good. 
2. Sharing this infrastructure makes Netflix an active member of the open source community.
3. The open source community then comments and makes input on Netflix contributions which are resources not  paid for.
4. The above makes the developers feel good about their participation in solving plumbing type (fundamental infrastructure) of problems that are not critical for protecting their IP.
5. The above allows Netflix to recruit new people.  Note almost every one of these postings ends with sentence, and we are hiring more people.  Finding really good people is a priority for Netflix.
6. Netflix gets positive PR consistently at conferences as they get mentioned for sharing and innovating in their IT infrastructure.

There are probably many more, but you get the basic idea.

Virtualization as a management tool

I was reading GigaOm's Barb Darrow's post on the 5 changes that VMware is going through.  Barb's closing point.

The company’s aggressive goal is to get enterprise data centers — which Gartner estimates are about 60 percent virtualized now — to the 90 percent mark. Servers are just the tip of the iceberg there. Networking gear — switches, routers — and storage all need to make that leap as well.

Got me thinking.  Maybe part of VMware/EMC's strategy is to transition VMware into a management tool for servers, storage, and network.  Virtualization is simply a method to get control over each of these areas.  If you have control you can manage.  

If VMware's vision is fulfilled it would seem that all the rest of the management tools would be obsolete.  Or at least in the past vs. an environment that moves at the speed of VM deployment.  VMware doesn't care what OS you run on your Servers, Network, or Storage as long as it runs on their virtualization layer which they can manage and control.

Do you want to be a VMware shop?  It may be too late for many to make a choice.

Baidu launches mobile browser

Reuters has an article announcing Baidu shipping a mobile browser.

* Baidu launches mobile browser to compete with UCWeb, Google, Apple

* Baidu's mobile browser highlights shift to mobile, cloud computing

* Baidu's monetization of mobile is medium-term concern - analyst

BEIJING, Sept 3 (Reuters) - China's dominant search engine Baidu Inc rolled out a mobile browser on Monday to help secure its share in a mobile Internet market that surpasses the U.S. population in size and to fend off smaller rivals such as Qihoo 360 Technology Co.

Most of you have been around long enough to remember the Internet Explorer fight with Netscape for market share.  When Microsoft won the battle it cut back on its IE staff, dropping the Mac, and a skeleton crew on mobile.  Baidu, Apple, Google, Mozilla, and many others are fighting for the mobile browser share.

Notice how all the big data center players have a browser play - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon.

The desktop battle is intense again.  The mobile market is even more fierce.

Microsoft has a TV commercial for IE9 with no mobile in it.

Compass Data Center achieves Funding milestone, $45 mil for first round

Compass Data Centers in trying to be different than the rest, and part of building something different takes money.  Today, Compass Data Centers announced funding.

Compass Datacenters Completes First Major Round if Funding

 

 

 

For Immediate Release

$45 Million Dollar Credit Facility is Expandable to $100 Million; Will Finance Data Center Construction Projects Across United States

Dallas – September 4, 2012 – Compass Datacenters has completed its first major round of financial funding: a $45 million credit facility with an accordion feature up to $100 million from KeyCorp’s commercial finance unit, KeyBank, NA. This is the company’s first formal round of funding since the company began operations earlier this year, and it will be used to finance its aggressive growth plan over the coming months.

Compass convinced its financier that its business model will work.

“Compass Datacenters is pioneering a major area of growth for the data center industry by offering wholesale standalone data center products that meet the needs of companies that are in geographic areas that are not well served by traditional providers. They have assembled a strong management team comprised of executives with proven track records in data centers and real estate development. Their wholesale business model and proprietary design architecture have the company positioned to be the leader in this growth market,” said John Murphy, Managing Director of Real Estate Capital at KeyBank.

Next step is to see data centers build by Compass which should happen quickly with a modular design.