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San Diego colocation specialist American Internet Services (AIS) has expanded to the Phoenix market, opening a new data center in 120 East Van Buren, a data center hub operated by Digital Realty Trust. The new facility is the sixth data center for AIS, and the first outside its core southern California market. The push into Phoenix is part of a larger expansion into “several new key markets” over the next several years, the company said.

“We are extremely excited about AIS’s expansion into the Phoenix Data Center market,” said Chris Orlando, Director of Strategic Channels for AIS. “Our Southern California clients are eager to take advantage of the geographic diversity offered by this new facility, while the entire AIS team looks forward to introducing Phoenix businesses to AIS’s quality of service. We are already seeing tremendous interest in our unique blend of colocation and client-centric support from the local Phoenix community.”

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American Internet Expands to Phoenix

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Horizon Data Center Solutions has raised $7.5 million in equity funding from Ballast Point Ventures, and will use the money to open new data centers in Virginia and Los Angeles, the company said this week. The funding will alsollow Horizon to expand development of its managed IT services and private cloud computing platform.

“This new investment accelerates our plans for expansion with the addition of new data centers in new markets,” said Lance Smith, CEO of Horizon. “We have been working on opportunities in both Northern Virginia and California, in addition to expansion in our Dallas home market. This investment will allow us to move quickly on those opportunities to provide much needed top tier data center services to enterprise, Web 2.0 businesses and government entities in these regions.”

Horizon currently operates two data centers in Digital Realty Trust (DLR) buildings in Carrollton, Texas and is working with Dallas-based broker GVA Cawley to evaluate new sites. Horizon says it will make an announcement about is Virginia expansion by the close of 2009. The company web site says Horizon’s Dallas Three data center will be at Digital Realty’s new data center campus in Richardson, Texas.

Ballast Point Ventures (BPV), a growth equity firm based in St. Petersburg, Fla. with $200 million under management,received a minority equity stake and a seat on the Horizon board for BPV partner Paul Johan.

“Horizon has delivered outstanding service to its customers and has brought to the marketplace a new approach that provides access to top tier data center space in a format that is scalable and agile,” said Johan. “The Horizon approach has been well received by both data center industry analysts and customers, as is evident in their rapid growth, which we found particularly impressive in a very difficult economic environment. We believe the company is well positioned to continue their growth, and we’re excited to partner with such a high quality management team.”

Horizon Data Center Solutions was founded in 2007 by co-founders Lance A. Smith and Chuck Smith, long-time data center industry executives, with investment from the Eric Chancellor Family LTC Partnership (ECFLP), which will continue its relationship with Horizon in an equity position.

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Horizon Data Centers Raises $7.5 Million

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I’m hosting another Chiller Side Chat with Michael Manos of Digital Realty Trust on Monday, Dec. 7 from 12 noon to 1 p.m. Central time. Mike is the Senior Vice President of Technical Services for Digital Realty and one of the leading voices in the data center industry. His previous Chiller Side Chats on his Loose Bolts blog have shared his insights on issues ranging from data center design to impending regulation that will affect the data center.

The webinar format of the Chiller Side Chat offers you the opportunity to ask questions and share your thoughts and opinions on key data center issues with Mike, who in his previous post was responsible for the construction and operations of Microsoft’s data center facilities. To get a feel for the format, you can listen to a podcast of the first event on Sept. 14.

Be sure to register for this event to learn more about the changes facing the data center industry and share information and perspectives from Mike and your fellow data center professionals.

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Reminder: Chiller Side Chat on Dec. 7

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Will the data center of the future have no central UPS units, and be filled with servers with on-board batteries? The data center team at Facebook believes it should, and is pledging to share its best practices - and perhaps wield some of its clout with vendors and data center operators - as it presses its case for change.   

Facebook recently disclosed its plans to adopt a novel power distribution design pioneered by Google that removes uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and power distribution units (PDUs) from the data center. The new design shifts the UPS and battery backup functions from the data center into the cabinet by adding a 12 volt battery to each server power supply.

While many best practices shared by Google, Microsoft and Facebook can help other data center operators save energy and money, other customizations are impractical.   

Big Companies, Big Innovation 
“A lot of the innovation in the field is being driven by companies with thousands of servers who really care about the efficiency of these things,” said Facebook’s Amir Michael, who previously worked on Google’s data center team. “We have capital to be able to afford engineers to solve these problems. It’s not really benefiting the rest of the industry. Smaller companies who might deploy fewer servers can’t go and design their own systems.”

In discussing Facebook’s plans for on-board batteries, Michael discussed ways these innovations might become more widely available.

“It’s a chicken and the egg problem,” said Michael. “No one really makes a data center without a UPS, and no one makes server with a battery on board. Server manufacturers aren’t going to build a server with a battery on board, because no one has a place to deploy that.”

Facebook’s buying power gives it some influence with hardware vendors. Michael noted that Facebook is working with vendors on power supply customizations, and has gotten little pushback from server vendors on its modifications to motherboards.

“Volumes are large enough that server vendors are helping us with that rather than opposing us,” he said. “We’re actually being supported quite well.”

Not all equipment vendors would endorse an industry shift to servers with on-board batteries, however. Makers of UPS equipment and power distribution units (PDUs) are significant players in discussions of industry best practices, and would be unlikely to advocate designs that reduce demand for those products.

Is there a transition that could lead to more options for innovation in power distribution? Michael suggested potential changes in wholesale data center leasing models.

“One example could be to build a data center where you have a portion that has no UPS,” he said. ”The data center operator can charge customers a lower rate to deploy their servers in a part of the facility that doesn’t have a UPS. The customer, if they’re savvy, can go and purchase a server which has a battery on board. They’ll pay a little more up front, but in the long run they’ll save money because they’re paying less to operate that server over a period of time.

“We hope to see the industry move to a model like this,” said Michael. ”As a customer that leases space in data centers, I would welcome a change like this.”

Facebook is one of the largest customers in the market for turn-key data center space, and leases space from leading providers like Digital Realty Trust, DuPont Fabros Technology and Fortune Data Centers. 

Are these cutting-edge energy efficiency strategies only appropriate for large-scale operations like Google and Facebook? Or would enterprises and smaller companies adopt these practices if they had access to them? Facebook says it will be more active in the growing industry conversation about best practices, which it hopes will reveal the answer.  

“It’s no longer okay just to be secretive,” said Michael. “There’s too much at stake.  Smaller companies might use too much of their resources and too much of their capital on their data center infrastructure. They should be allowed to benefit from the same type of optimizations that we’re making here at Facebook.”

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Should Servers Come With Batteries?

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The 3rd International Finance and Investment Forum for data centres will take place in London on Dec. 3 at King’s Place, and will focus on the emergence of data centres as a new asset class. Panels at the event will examine the financing options for data centres, investment performance and the focus of future investment, a review of market demand and drivers, financing expansion and M&A, the importance of internationalisation in data centre expansion and a special review of Data Centres in Emerging Markets.

Researched and produced by BroadGroup Consulting, the forum brings together data centre owners with investors, financiers, analysts, private equity and law firms. Although Data Centres are holding up relatively well in the slowdown and investment appears to continue from existing players. Speakers at the event will include Harry Beusker (Equinix Europe), Anthony Foy (Interxion), Guy Willner (Teraco South Africa), Steve Wallage (BroadGroup Consulting), Peter Hopper (DH Capital), Mark Lambourne (TREGlobal) and Chris Crosby (Digital Realty Trust).

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Finance & Investment Forum for Data Centres

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1201 Comstock is one of the Digital Realty data centers in Santa Clara, Calif. that has received a LEED Platinum certification.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – An unassuming industrial park near San Jose Airport is hardly where you’d expect to find some the greenest acres in the data center industry. The Santa Clara, Calif., campus operated by Digital Realty Trust is home to three data centers with a Platinum or Gold rating under the LEED standard for energy efficient buildings.

Digital Realty, the largest data center operator in the U.S., has used its Santa Clara operation to refine an energy efficient design using fresh-air cooling, which has made the site a magnet for some of the fastest-growing companies in the digital economy.

Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo all have their servers housed here. NVIDIA, which is seeking to harness its GPU technology to power cloud and high performance computing, has leased an entire data center here as well.

Clients Like LEED Data Centers
The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard is not designed with data centers in mind, and is just one of several indicators of the energy efficiency of a data center, along with Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). But there are signs that the LEED designation is growing in importance for data center tenants, who like the standard as a benchmark for corporate social responsibility.

Where LEED certification was once seen as a difficult hurdle for mission-critical sites, companies like Digital Realty are demonstrating the ability to build data centers to the very highest levels of the specification, and do so with remarkable speed. The two LEED Platinum facilities at the Santa Clara campus were completed in less than eight months, far less than the 18 to 24 months typically required for an enterprise data center project.

The campus is anchored by the carrier hotel at 1100 Space Park Drive, which was Digital’s first acquisition at the site and has tenants including AT&T, Verizon and Tata Communications. The operation has grown from there to include three other buildings:

• In 2007 Digital Realty bought an interest in an adjacent building at 1500 Space Park Drive, which it retrofitted to focus on the use of free cooling. In June, 1500 Space Park received a Gold certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).
• In 2008 Digital Realty acquired 1201 Comstock Street, a former furniture store which borders 1100 Space Park. It gutted the structure, leaving only the walls standing, and converted the building into a finished data center in just 26 weeks. This fully-leased site recently earned LEED Platinum certification, the highest tier available, and achieved a peak power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.31 during the commissioning process.
• Next up was 1525 Comstock, which Digital Realty demolished and rebuilt from the ground up as a “greenfield” data center project, which was completed in 31 weeks. The site is fully leased to two brand name tenants. Digital Realty has submitted the site for LEED certification with enough points for a Platinum rating.

The energy efficiency of Digital Realty’s Santa Clara properties is driven by a design optimized to use fresh air in its cooling system, rather than relying on energy-intensive chillers and refrigerated water. This “free cooling” (also known as air economization) can be used for about 65 percent of the year in Silicon Valley. 

Side Plenums and Raised Floor
Each data center has air handlers located on its rooftop, which draw in outside air. The air handlers move the air through side plenums wrapping around the side of each server room, and under the raised floor area. The air then enters the cold aisles through perforated floor tiles, where it can cool tenant equipment, and exits through the ceiling.

Digital Realty employs a Turn-Key Datacenter design offering customer data center pods available in units of 1.125 megawatts. The company, which operates 13 million square feet of data center space, has been able to reduce costs and streamline construction using standard components and repeatable design concepts and leveraging its buying power with suppliers.  

Still Expanding in Santa Clara
It’s not done expanding in Santa Clara, either. Digital Realty has also bought the property next to 1500 Space Park and demolished the existing structure. It is currently marketing the site, which will be known as 1550 Space Park Drive, as a build-to-suit opportunity for a 6 megawatt data center.

The company has also deeded a tract of land between 1100 and 1500 Space Park Drive to the municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power, for a new substation to expand the power capacity for the campus.

Eaerlier this month Digital Realty spent $90 million to acquire two data center facilities on nearby properties. The facilities at 1350 Duane Avenue, and 3080 Raymond Street are both fully-leased to Internet service providers.

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In Santa Clara, ‘Green’ Speeds Toward Platinum

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The interior of a 40-foot container inside the new Microsoft Chicago data center, packed with servers on either side of a center aisle.

One of the keys to the success of shipping containers is standardization, as detailed by author Marc Levinson, whose book explains how containers “made the world smaller and the world economy bigger.” Standardizing on a 40-foot size spurred the international growth of intermodal freight transport by either rail, ship or truck.

Is there a similar boom in store for data center containers? That may depend on whether the industry can agree on a standard for modular designs, including those using containers. Microsoft, for one, is doing its best to nudge the data center industry toward the use of standard Pre-Assembled Components (PACs), which is how the company describes the server-filled containers in its new Chicago data center.

Some may see Microsoft’s “container farm” as an outlier – an anomaly representing a particular approach unlikely to be replicated in other data centers. Could Microsoft’s effort instead represent a tipping point in a broader movement towards modular data center design? The company’s cloud operation is large enough to focus vendors’ attention on the concept, which could result in an ecosystem that lowers costs for end users.  

‘Standard Platform’
Microsoft aspires to create a container-based “standard platform that our industry can innovate around,” providing common interfaces and an RFP (request for proposal) process that allows many vendors to develop products and compete for business.

But Microsoft isn’t alone in this effort, and some industry executives warn that Microsoft’s vision of a containerized future may not work for everyone. Two other industry heavyweights, Digital Realty Trust and IBM, are also standardizing their designs around modular systems and repeatable designs that can drive the cost and delays out of data center construction, while leveraging the power of bulk purchasing and RFPs with large numbers attached to them.

Server-filled containers are just the beginning of Microsoft’s PAC strategy, according to Microsoft’s Daniel Costello, who said the company will also issue RFPs for containerized electrical and mechanical equipment. “For us, it’s about pre-manufactured modularization,” said Costello. “The same thing that’s happened to servers will happen to the back of the house.”

What happened with servers? When a company buys 2,000 servers at a time, server markers pay attention. And when a company plans to repeat that purchase 100 times, vendors begin jumping through hoops.

Container Competition Heats Up
When Microsoft announced its plan for a container data center in Chicago, only Sun Microsystems, Rackable Systems (SGI) and Verari had container products. With Microsoft planning to fill the Chicago site with between 250,000 and 400,000 servers – at a time when enterprise server sales were slowing – the container competition heated up as IBM, HP and Dell soon offered their own “data center in a box” offerings.

“We’re trying to create an ecosystem,” said Microsoft data center architect Christian Belady. “Think about a world where everyone is doing this. It’s truly about commoditization. We don’t have any problem with (vendors) knocking on our doors. Ultimately, what will drive acceptance is cost.”

Cost is also the driving factor in Digital Realty Trust’s push toward an “industrialization” of data center design and construction, featuring pre-assembled or modular components that can be quickly brought together at a construction site. Digital Realty has built more than 1 million square feet of Turn-Key Datacenter space and now operates more than 80 mission-critical buildings.

Who Sets the Standard?
The industry has a way to go before the vision of “one size fits many” modular data centers can come together, according to Digital Realty’s Michael Manos, who previously worked on the Microsoft team that planned the Chicago facility.

“There is no set industry standards when it comes to data center containers,” Manos wrote in a recent blog post. “This means that each vendor might have their own approach on what goes in, and what stays out of the container.

“Some look to the widely publicized Microsoft C-Blox specification as a potential basis for a standard,” Manos adds. “This is their internal container specification that many vendors have configurations for, but you need to keep in mind that’s based on Microsoft’s requirements and might not meet yours. Until the Green Grid, ASHRAE, or other such standards body starts looking to drive standards in this space, its probably something to be concerned about.”

IBM, meanwhile, is building data centers for clients based on four modular designs – including a container – that Big Blue announced in 2008. A growing number of vendors are offering containerized mechanical and electrical equipment, including the PowerHousefrom Active Power (ACPW) and modular chillers from MultiStack.

While the cost benefits of modularity and PACs are intriguing, not all the players in the data center business can bring the same bulk-purchasing power to bear as Microsoft or Digital Realty.

Microsoft is sharing its process because it believes the benefits can drive better efficiencies for the entire data center industry. “Every one of these vendors who sell to use can sell the designs to other customers,” said Costello. “We ‘d be ecstatic if they sold it to someone else.”

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A Standard for Data Center Containers?

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Our first “Chiller Side Chat” with Michael Manos of Digital Realty Trust proved to be an engaging and informative discussion, as Mike fielded questions from Data Center Knowledge readers on a wide variety of topics on data center design and operations. As a result, I’m hosting another Chiller Side Chat with Mike on Monday, Dec. 7 from 12 noon to 1 p.m. Central time. Mike is the Senior Vice President of Technical Services for Digital Realty and one of the leading voices in the data center industry. His previous Chiller Side Chats on his Loose Bolts blog have shared his insights on issues ranging from data center design to impending regulation that will affect the data center.

The webinar format of the Chiller Side Chat offers you the opportunity to ask questions and share your thoughts and opinions on key data center issues with Mike, who in his previous post was responsible for the construction and operations of Microsoft’s data center facilities. To get a feel for the format, you can listen to a podcast of the first event on Sept. 14.

Be sure to register for this event to learn more about the changes facing the data center industry and share information and perspectives from Mike and your fellow data center professionals.

Original post:
The Chiller Side Chat is Back!

Popularity: 42% [?]

A design concept for a six-story, 300,000 square foot data center in Chicago proposed by McHugh Construction.

McHugh Construction Co. has announced plans to build a major data center in downtown Chicago, just blocks from the city’s major Internet connectivity hub. The Chicago-based company has asked city officials to approve a six-story, 300,000 square foot data center project at 2222 South Indiana Avenue, adjacent to the McCormick Place convention center and 350 East Cermak Road, the enormous carrier hotel operated by Digital Realty Trust.

The project revives a plan for a data center at the site, which was first proposed in 2001 but shelved after the dot-com bust left an oversupply of data center space. In 2008 McHugh tried to sell the site for possible use as a hotel or entertainment complex to support the convention center. But the credit crunch made it difficult to finance those types of projects, and with demand for data center space in downtown Chicago remaining strong, McHugh revisited the data center concept.

Supply Running Low
A likely factor in the decision is the dwindling amount of space remaining at 350 East Cermak, which spans 1.1 million square feet but is 95.9 percent occupied as of Sept. 30, according to Digital Realty. The only other building in downtown Chicago with space for large footprints available is the CoreSite building at 427 South LaSalle Street.

The supply of data center space in downtown Chicago is running low at a time when demand remains strong, driven largely by financial firms’ appetite for additional capacity for fast-growing electronic trading operations.

The planning board has not yet considered McHugh’s proposal, which seeks to reduce the number of required parking spaces at the site from 156 to just 20, reflecting the lower foot traffic at data centers. But McHugh has outlined details of the project in meetings with community leaders. Architectural drawings show that McHugh hopes to gain certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program for energy efficient buildings.

Design Features Louvers, Solar Power
The design drawings include louvers along the side of the building, a feature often used to support fresh air cooling. The plans calls for a rooftop solar power installation, with about 8,300 square feet of photovoltaic panels. That’s not large enough to cover the power requirements of most data center tenants, but could help earn LEED points for on-site generation and be attractive to companies grooming their power footprints to add more renewable sources.

The drawings also feature a “green roof” with vegetation covering about 10,000 square feet. The design calls for diesel generators to be housed inside the lower floor, which will reduce the noise profile of the building, which is often a concern for large data centers in densely-populated urban areas.

McHugh had its headquarters on the property from 1970 to 2002, when the company moved to 1737 South Michigan Ave.

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McHugh Plans Major Chicago Data Center

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The growing importance of electric power is remaking the business of leasing data center space, with megawatts replacing square feet as the primary benchmark for real estate deals.

“Our business is all about leasing access to power,” said Michael Foust, the CEO of Digital Realty Trust, the largest data center developer landlord. “The square footage is almost secondary in some cases.”

DuPont Fabros Technology, another large developer of wholesale data center space, now describes all its leases in megawatts in its financial reporting. As data centers consume more power, electricity is the benchmark that matters, according to DuPont Fabros president and CEO Hossein Fateh.

“Any customer that needs a megawatt – that’s 4,000 servers – better be ready to talk power, or they’re not even qualified to have that job,” Fateh said earlier this year. “What we’re charging for is the availability of power.”

Wanted: Cheap, Abundant Power
As companies like Google and Microsoft build ever-larger data centers packed with tens of thousands of servers, they are choosing to build in places with cheap and abundant power like central Washington state, Iowa and North Carolina.

It’s not just the cloud-builders that are making decisions based on power. In a recent survey by the industry group AFCOM, 67 prcent of data center operators said the availability of sufficient power is the number one challenge in data center consolidation projects, which can eliminate servers but result in higher-density environments.

This shift is changing the way companies determine their data center requirements as they max out the capacity of their existing facilities. Many data center operators are running out of power before they run out of space, underscoring the need to have good metrics on existing power usage for capacity planning purposes.

Measure by the Kilowatt
“If your company isn’t measuring whatever the widget is by kilowatts, you need to,” said Chris Crosby, VP of business development at Digital Realty. “Power is really the key element for measurement. The clients that understand things in these terms make the best decisions.

“If you talk about square footage in the data center, you’ll get confused in your buying decision,” Crosby added. “Getting an understanding of your kilowatts will give you a lot of insight into your costs.”

An example is Currenex, an electronic trading platform specializing in the foreign exchange markets. The company’s business was growing quickly, but its two third-party data center providers had limited capacity.

“We were operating in data centers that were out of power,” said Chad Parris, VP of technical operations at Currenex. “We’re not big enough to build our own facility, so it became tempting to buy cage or cabinet solutions (in colocation centers).”

Converting Workloads into Power
Instead, Currenex performed a detailed analysis of the power required to execute its trades, and then used those numbers to convert daily volume of foreign exchange trades into kilowatts. This allowed the company to model its future power needs based on estimates of its future trading volume.

Currenex wound up leasing 2,500 square feet space in a Digital Realty data center in New Jersey, with an option for additional space as its operation expands. The wholesale data center model “was the cheapest way to buy a long-term position in kilowatts,” Parris said. “In year four, our cost per kilowatt a month is about a third of what it would have been.”

Complicator in Lease Renewals
The new focus on power as a leasing benchmark creates some challenges for enterprise companies that use leased data center space, according to Jim Kerrigan, the director of the data center real estate practice at Grubb & Ellis.

Kerrigan estimates that 32 percent of all leased data center space in the U.S. will come up for renewal between now and 2013. Nearly all of those leases were based on square footage, while power capacity will be the key issue in many renegotiations. Reconciling that difference will introduce an added wrinkle in many lease renewal talks.

The primacy of electricity in data center real estate isn’t likely to end anytime soon.”Power is really the core commodity of the information age,” said Crosby.

Original post:
Data Center Leasing: It’s All About the Megawatts

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