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Although Lists isn’t a new concept (Friendfeed has had them for months) they have proven to be a great addition to Twitter. Lists make it easier than ever to categorize users and curate content for your followers and yourself. The ability to create lists does indeed add fantastic value to Twitter, and lists can even be grabbed as an embeddable widget that can easily be customized and added to your personal website.

Looking for cool twitterers for your lists? Look no further. Here are 25 notable geeks, picked from five excellent tech lists.

The Twitter team (by @Twitter)

List URL: http://twitter.com/twitter/team

The Twitter team list is the most followed list on Twitter and contains a complete list of the Twitter staff. Five of my favorite team members include:

@jack – Jack Dorsey is a very cool and brilliant man who recently announced a new company he has been working on called Square (@square). Square is very cool technology that allows merchants to accept payment via a little square that plugs into the headphone jack of mobile phones. This is a disruptive technology because it allows merchants to wirelessly process credit cards for several hundred dollars cheaper than any alternative technology. Oh yeah, he invented Twitter, too.

@ev – Evan Williams is Twitter’s CEO. Prior to Twitter he helped started Blogger.com, which sold to Google for $500 million. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin praised Evan as a testament to the impact an entrepreneur can make on the Web.

@biz – Biz Stone is a co-founder of Twitter. He worked with Evan as a co-founder of Blogger.com and has over 500 blog posts written, although these days he usually tweets. He is a self-declared genius and despite this bold claim it is hard to doubt him given his track record.

@nk – Nick Kallen has the Twitter bio “Wealth and personal achievement expert.” He is the chief engineer of Twitter Lists.

@vl – Vitor Lourenço is a product designer at Twitter. Thank him for Twitter looking smooth. Check out his homepage for a better idea of his influential style.

Most influential in tech (by @Scobleizer)

List URL: http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/most-influential-in-tech

To quote Robert Scoble’s own description, this list is about “people who make stuff happen in and to the technology industry.”

Five notable people from this list are:

@chr1sa – According to his bio, Chris Anderson is “Wired, Long Tail, Free, DIY Drones, and BookTour.” He is the editor in chief of Wired magazine and wrote the highly influential book on how the future of business is selling more of less, The Long Tail.

@rww – Richard MacManus is the founder of Read Write Web, one of the most popular Blogs on the net. Follow ReadWriteWeb for the latest in web technology and social media trends.

@loic – Loic Le Meur is the founder of Seesmic and the annual LeWeb conference in France. His video blog can be found at loic.tv. Seesmic is a software company that makes third party social media software for Twitter and Facebook. The two most popular Seesmic programs include Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop. Seesmic Desktop also offers list support, but right now this is only for the PC version. Desktop is currently my Twitter application of choice.

@steverubel – Steve Rubel is a SVP and the Director of Insights for Edelman Digital. He is also an AdAge columnist and an influential lifestreamer.

@finkd – Not an active tweeter, finkd is the nickname of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Great content (by @Jason_Pollock)

List URL: http://twitter.com/Jason_Pollock/great-content

Great Content is currently the 37th most popular list on Twitter, according to Listorious.com, and is followed by over 700 people.

@Jason_Pollock – The founder of this list, Jason Pollock is a documentary filmmaker, who recently finished producing the movie The Youngest Candidate. Jason is friends with Twitter’s most followed user, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and is the former assistant to filmmaker Michael Moore.

@Gar1n – Hey, it’s me Garin, I am the author of this post, and if you have not guessed already I am an avid Twitterer. I have built 19 Twitter lists so far, so I am fast approaching the maximum of 20. You should follow me on Twitter because I create and share the best content I find on the web from awesome companies like @pingdom, and everywhere else on the Web!

@mattcutts – Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Web Spam team. He is a likable geek and an informative blogger about SEO and Google over at mattcutts.com.

@zee – Zee is a prolific blogger and the CEO of The Next Web. He is a young, recently married, prolific, and outspoken geek from the Netherlands. Well worth a follow.

@gapingvoid – Hugh Macleod was the keynote speaker at the MeshMarketing conference I recently attended in Toronto. He is an influential business man, winery owner, and cartoonist with a unique outlook on life that has managed to make him very successful. He is also a part of both Chris Brogan’s Third Tribe list and Copyblogger’s Third Tribe list, and those two guys are two of the most powerful bloggers on the Internet today.

iPhone (by @ravenme)

List URL: http://twitter.com/ravenme/iphone

Since I am an Apple and iPhone fanboy I like to stay informed about all of the latest apps and trends. This list is great to get all of the latest, greatest iPhone news.

@macrumors – Live updates about everything Apple. They have 82,000+ followers because they are a solid source of information and rumors about Apple and its products.

@gruber – I don’t know too much about Gruber, but his blog Daring Fireball is quite successful with anything but timid tidbits about tech and Apple. He also has one of my favorite Twitter bios out there: “Raconteur”

@handmark – Handmark is a world-leading creator and distributor of mobile applications and services for BlackBerry, iPhone, Window Mobile, Android, Palm, Java and Symbian.

@taptaptap – Bio: “tasty bits for your iPhone,” and that just about sums it up. Tweets about iPhone apps, mostly.

@iPhone – Although this guy has the official iPhone Twitter name he is not endorsed by Apple. He’s still worth a follow since he usually posts useful info.

Note: If you are an iPhone user you can now monitor your site with the wicked new Pingdom iPhone app, version 2.0!

Top 50 tech (by @favstar)

List URL: http://twitter.com/Favstar/top-50-tech

Favstar.fm is a site that tracks how many favorites certain tweets get. They also made some cool lists, and this one with 50 the finest folks from tech is my favorite. Here are five of the best:

@problogger – Darren Rowse is one of the most successful bloggers on the net who has been earning a six figure income from the medium for the past several years.

@wired – Wired is an awesome magazine about how technology is changing the world. Also, their site has several of the world’s most popular blogs.

@mashable – Pete Cashmore has built his blog Mashable.com into the definitive social media source on the Web. This has earned him a spot on Twitter’s Suggested Users List and he has been able to use this position to expand his Twitter influence to almost two million followers.

@zeldman – Jeffrey Zeldman is a highly influential web designer and author of the book Designing With Web Standards. He is the founder of web design studio Happy Cog and is also behind A List Apart.

@jeresig – John Resig is the creator of jQuery and works for Mozilla. He also invented the Easy Retweet Button, which makes it even easier for people to retweet cool posts. (Like this one )

More about Twitter lists

A third-party site called Listorious has already been built to organize Twitter lists in different meaningful ways. In addition to allowing users to recommend people for lists, Listorious also lists the top 140 lists, and the top 140 most listed people.

Want to get listing but not sure where to start? Create a conversationlist. A “Conversation List” is an auto-generated and auto-updated list of the people you talk to on Twitter.

Cool as Twitter lists are, they are not without some restrictions. Each Twitter account can create up to a maximum of 20 lists, and each list can include up to 500 users. This may sound like plenty but I have almost maxed out my 20 lists, and I have noticed several other people in the same situation. Robert Scoble has maxed out the 500 users limit for five of his lists already and is complaining. Do you think these restrictions are reasonable? What is your favorite Twitter List? Let us know in the comments below!

About the author:
Garin Kilpatrick is a community manager for the writing website for students, eduify.com. Check out his personal blog at Gar1n.com.

Original post:
5 awesome Twitter lists and 25 cool geeks worth listing

Popularity: 32% [?]

The credit crunch has boosted adoption of colocation, as some companies who might normally have built their own data centers have instead leased colo space to conserve cash. But the majority of enterprise companies still want to build their own facilities, and will likely pursue either new construction or retrofits to meet their expansion needs in the next two years.

Those were some of the key points emerging from a session by Gartner analyst Lydia Leong at last week’s Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. Leong examined the expansion options available for companies with growing IT operations, and the economics influencing the choices in today’s data center marketplace.

“The colo market has seen a real upsurge over the past several years,” said Leong. “Colocation is where you go when you need space right now. Most people choose colo close to home, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”

National Search = Savings
She noted that colocation facilities vary in quality, meaning that it may sometimes be better to look outside your immediate area. “The greater your willingness to conduct a national search, the lower your costs will be,” Leong said. “We have providers who are terrible in one facility and great in another city. The difference is often the data center manager.”

The credit crunch has led many companies to forego data center construction projects that would require a significant outlay of capital. Some enterprises companies have opted for colocation, in which they lease cages or cabinets within a third-party data center.

Others have chosen wholesale data center space, in which tenants lease entire suites of data center space with dedicated power capacity. The wholesale market has been particularly attractive for fast-growing Internet companies, such as Facebook and Rackspace, who have been major players in the wholesale space. Most wholesale leases are in the seven to 10-year range, although Leong noted that a number of recent deals have featured five-year leases.

Both models have benefited from the credit crunch, which has made it harder for companies to borrow money. The tight capital market has meant closer scrutiny of construction requirements. In an instapoll of the audience, financial considerations were the top factor in company data center decisions.

Seven to 10-Year Lifespan
“If you want to be really honest, the lifetime of your data centers is 10 years, maybe only seven,” said Leong. “The cost effectiveness of a building with that lifespan is limited.” What about retrofits as opposed to ground-up “greenfield” construction. “The up-front investment is still pretty high,” said Leong. “These are for tenant improvements you’re going to make that you don’t own.”

Leong said the economics only make sense if a company needs at least 50,000 square feet of data center space.

But many attendees at the Gartner event appear undeterred, and say they will build their next data center. An audience poll found 34 percent indicating their preference for data center expansion in the next 24 months would be greenfield construction, followed by 31 percent preferring a retrofit. Twenty one percent cited colocation as their preference, followed by wholesale space at 15 percent.

Cloud Aptions Abound
What about cloud computing? “A lot of you will probably be thinking about cloud,” Leong said. “You’re going to have a wide range of options. Just about all the major outsourcers are building clouds. It will affect the way you think about servers, particularly if you have less than 50 servers. For most of you, the cloud will be a tactical option, and not your main option.”

What’s the number one mistake companies should beware of in planning data center expansions? Leong says it’s getting the power capacity right. “Power density is going to be your major limiting factor,” she said. “But most of you completely overestimate how much power you’re going to need. One of the best ways you can contain cost is by not overbuying power. If you overestimate your power needs, you can grotesquely inflate your costs.”

Original post:
Economy Boosts Colo, But Many Prefer to Build

Popularity: 12% [?]

With the release of Google Public DNS, it appears that Google is making good on their earlier call to action for making the Web faster. In conjunction with that announcement several months ago, they launched the “Speed” site at Google Code with the headline “Let’s make the Web faster.” After setting up their DNS servers, which replaces the DNS servers from my ISP, I can confirm that my web browsing is indeed much zippier than before. So much so that it’s sort of shocking that ISP’s don’t seem to do much DNS optimization on their own – then again, why would they?

At first, this got me thinking about the self-serving aspects of Google Public DNS, in addition to Google’s other speed initiatives – which include Chrome, Chrome OS, and the announcement of the SPDY protocol. After all, these initiatives are aimed at more than just purely altruistic ends, they’re helping to make the Web a better platform for Google products. I quickly learned that we had already covered that material here on Pingdom’s blog, but the thought kept gnawing at me.

I decided at that point to take things a bit further. Of course Google wants to make the Web faster and more stable, but what will it all mean for the technology giant down the line? And how will their current projects evolve to take advantage of a better performing Web?

Looking ahead five years from now may not allow us to see the full extent of Google’s ambition, so I’ve decided to make a bit of a gamble. Based on the many chess pieces they’ve laid down since the launch of Gmail in 2004, along with a general sense of where today’s technology is headed, let’s jump forward ten years and imagine how things could end up for Google*.

*Assuming that we’re all still around after the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, Skynet remains fiction, and somehow the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t doom us all.

Google’s focus on speed will help bring us to a faster, lag-free Internet sooner

It probably won’t blow any minds to say that the Web will be significantly faster ten years from now. I’m not going to try and argue that Google Public DNS and the SPDY protocol will directly lead to a faster Internet, but Google’s increased focus on speed surely won’t be entirely in vain. Internet access speeds and infrastructure will naturally improve over time, but Google’s DNS service and Chrome browser are also making significantly faster speeds a reality today, and bringing to light the many inefficiencies we currently face on the Internet.

Chrome’s release made browser developers focus more heavily on Javascript performance, and also turned it into a hot topic among power users. Basically, it forced the competition to actually compete, and now improved Javascript performance figures are almost a requirement for developers to tout with every new browser version.

This is a pattern we’ll see repeated several times throughout this piece. It honestly doesn’t matter if Chrome becomes the top browser on the Web, or if its growth remains stagnant. Google made everyone step up their Javascript crunching game – and since that will make their apps faster across all browsers, Google wins no matter what.

Similarly, Google DNS has made more people aware of the issues with DNS resolution when left to ISPs, who haven’t really made DNS optimization a priority. Google DNS makes web browsing faster and safer, the only problem is that the process of changing DNS servers can be a little troublesome for general users (and of course, it introduces some new privacy concerns). The mere existence of Google Public DNS will make people aware of other DNS alternatives, like Open DNS, and ISPs may eventually be able to offer Google’s DNS optimizations on their own servers as an option to customers.

The Internet will be powerful enough to handle today’s offline applications

Many Internet users are already moving away from desktop applications and over to web applications, often without even realizing it. Few webmail users go through the trouble of configuring desktop client access anymore (unless they’re business users that really need Outlook), and I’ve seen many users make far more use of Google Docs than Microsoft Office in the past few years. You can even do some rudimentary audio and video editing using Aviary’s apps.

Ten years from now, we’ll be seeing even more powerful applications residing on the Web, and desktop apps will most likely be relegated to high-end media production and PC gaming. In addition to increased Internet speeds, we can attribute the future rise of better web apps to more robust web standards and plugins.

We’re already taking steps toward that today. Google recently announced that they’ll be moving away from Gears – their technology which allows for offline support, geolocation, and other robust desktop-like features for web applications – and will instead look toward the HTML 5 specification in the future since it supports many similar features.

It should be no surprise that HTML 5 mimics Gears so closely. In 2004, the specification was proposed by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, and one of the founding members, Ian Hickson, is also a web standards proponent who has been working for Google since 2005. The group also includes individuals from Mozilla and Apple. Before it was called HTML 5, they referred to their specification proposal as “Web Applications 1.0″. With features like built-in media playback, drag and drop support, and offline storage, it’s clear that HTML 5 is still being built with web applications in mind.

Gears was another example of Google pushing the Web in a direction that they wanted. Now, along with Mozilla and Apple, they’ll be helping to shape the very standards the Web is based on with HTML 5.

In ten years, we’ll likely be looking at HTML 6 or 7, and even more powerful plugins from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. HTML 5 is making strides towards reducing our dependence on third-party plugins, but I don’t think their respective companies will allow Flash or Silverlight to die off too easily.

Internet access will be ubiquitous, free to many, and Google will help make it happen

Now here’s where things become a little more speculative. We’ve already established that a faster and more powerful Web will ultimately be good for Google, and that they’re trying to jump-start innovation when it comes to making that a reality. But what of actual access to the Web? I predict that over the next decade, Google will see a great deal of value in helping to make Internet access more widespread, dirt cheap, and possibly even free. Decently fast web access could very well be ubiquitous in first-world countries.

If a faster and more powerful Web is good for Google, then surely getting more eyes on the Web is in their best interest as well. Broadband adoption will undoubtedly increase on its own over the next decade, but Google could help by figuring out ways to bring Internet access for free to emerging markets like Africa and South America, and low-income users in cities. They could also help to push legislation that would make cheap nationwide broadband a reality in America.

Wave will be an integral part of collaborative communication on the Web

Currently, Google Wave is suffering from confusion and dismissal by many users, which is very similar to what Twitter faced a few years ago (and is still facing today). It’s something that occurs every time a new technology appears and the public doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Sometimes the technology just disappears into oblivion, but once in a while it ends up changing the way we live.

Having used Google Wave in several capacities, from planning podcast episodes, to brain storming this very article, I can understand the confusion. On the face of it, the service is just a glorified chat client with an email interface. Dig a little deeper though, and the true face of Wave quickly makes itself clear.

Real-time updating, threaded conversations, and the ability to play back updates all end up making Google Wave the best collaborative resource on the Web. It’s better than Google Docs for simultaneous collaboration because of the real-time updates (instead of the “whenever it feels like it” updating of Docs), and the threaded conversation allow for some order amidst the collaborative chaos. And to make even further sense of how the conversation evolved, the ability to play back edits is immensely useful.

Many have seemed to forget this, but when it was first announced, Google intended for anyone to be able to deploy their own Wave server. It’s a protocol, like any other, and individually deployed Wave servers will be able to interact with the greater community.

What does this mean in ten years? For one, we’ll quickly see Wave implemented across the board on Google’s services. Businesses and other organizations will adopt it for in-group collaboration. I’d even wager as far to say that anyone who has an email account will have access to Wave. Wave’s real-time updating features will also see widespread use among mobile devices.

Android will have won the mobile platform wars

Yeah, I said it. Apple’s current lead in the smartphone space won’t last for long once Android finally gathers some steam. Android’s victory will be in sheer number of devices, as well as the ability to hit price points that Apple would never dare. Top-end Android phones will continue to compete with Apple’s iPhone successors, but Android will take Nokia’s place in ruling the dirt-cheap and free phone segment.

Not everyone needs a fancy smartphone with a huge screen and a fast processor, and the low-end Android phones will cater to that market. Of course, in a decade even the low-end phones will probably blow us away, but I think we’ll begin seeing cheap Android phones within the next few years. Then there’s also the speculation about the data-only VOIP Google phone, which could radically change the landscape for phone service.

In the end, having the fastest hardware, and the most apps in their online store (although that won’t last for long either), won’t be enough to keep Apple on top. That is, unless they come up with a radically cheap phone of their own. The fact that Android is free, customizable for handset makers, and deployable on a wide variety of mobile hardware, makes its mobile takeover more than just speculation. It’s inevitable.

Google Search will be able to find anything instantly – a harbinger of the Technological Singularity?

Short of reading minds, there will be nothing that touches the Web left that Google’s search engine can’t tackle. Just today they announced how they’re integrating real-time search results, using their secret sauce relevancy engine. Google Fellow Amit Singhal’s also mentioned the following, which seems especially prescient for this article, “Light can travel around the world in 1/10th of a second, and we won’t rest until the speed of light is the only barrier to getting good search results to you.”

While I’m not sure the laws of physics will ever allow that to be possible (unless everything between you and Google was pure fiber optic cabling), it’s nice to see that they’re always looking for that next milestone.

Relevancy will become increasingly important to Google as they have more and more information to deal with. Their problem won’t be gathering all the data, it’ll be making sense of it. It looks like they’ve already gotten a handle on how to implement Twitter, Facebook, and the like – it’ll be interesting to see how they tackle the rest of the upcoming deluge.

The increasing powers of Google Search will also be of great interest to Sci-Fi fans like myself a decade from now. Futurist types like Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil have long predicted a point where artificial intelligence becomes self-improving, at which point they will quickly surpass human intelligence. Who knows what sort of tricks Google will employ down the line to stay ahead in the search engine game, but be wary if your search queries ever start seeming too smart.

But of course, the moment you realize that Google Search has become sentient, it’s already too late.

Wrapping up

While the past decade has in many ways been ruled by Apple and their many instances of redefining the technological landscape, I predict that the next ten years will be Google’s reign. They’re now more than a young search engine startup. Google is a technological powerhouse that’s reshaping the Internet, the way we use it, and our overall relationship with technology.

Special thanks to my friends Carl Angiolillo and Dwayne De Freitas for their help with brainstorming this article.

Photo credit: Cheetah by Jason Bechtel.

About the author:
Devindra Hardawar is a tech/film blogger and podcast host. You can find him writing at the Far Side of Tech and Slashfilm.

Original post:
What the Google Web will look like in 10 years

Popularity: 6% [?]

Gear6 today announced a Web Cache Server for Cloud, offering a memcached service running atop the Amazon EC2 cloud compute platform. Memcached is an open source caching system that improves the performance of many large database-driven sites. That includes Facebook, where memcached is important enough that CEO Mark Zuckerberg can give seminars on the technology.

Memcached helps database performance by storing commonly requested data in memory. Since memcached is open source, developers are free to build their own implementations on cloud platforms like EC2. Gear6 says its service can simplify the deployment of memcached on EC2, and is the first cloud caching service to leverage Amazon’s High-Memory Instances on Amazon EC2, which are designed for memory-intensive workloads. Gear 6 has supplied a use case featuring Glam Media.

“Memcached is the linchpin for any ‘web scale architecture’ where rapid dynamic data services are required,” said Joaquin Ruiz, Executive Vice President of Products for Gear6. “As with data center-based Web 2.0 sites, cloud-based dynamic sites need to run from memory in order to deliver a satisfactory user experience. And Memcached is the most effective onramp to memory, period.”

For additional background on Gear 6, here’s a look at our interview from Velocity 2009 with Bill Takacs, the company’s Director of Product Development, whol spoke with us about the importance of memcached and how Gear 6 is approaching the market for memcached solutions. This video runs about 7 minutes, 30 seconds.

Original post:
Gear 6 Expands Memcached Cloud Offerings

Popularity: 8% [?]

We’re a little tardy with our review of last month’s most popular story, as we were busy at the Gartner Data Center Conference last week. But there continues to be huge interest in data center power and cooling innovations at Facebook and Google, which accounted for four of our top five stories for the month. Here’s a look at the 10 most popular stories of November 2009, ranked by total page views:

• Facebook Follows Google to Data Center Savings (Nov. 27)
• A Closer Look at Google’s New Cooling Design (Nov. 30)
• WoW’s Back End: 10 Data centers, 75,000 Cores (Nov. 25)
• Google Patent Reveals Data Center Innovations (Nov. 30)
• Inside A Cloud Computing Data Center (Nov. 4)
• Should Servers Come With Batteries? (Nov. 27)
• Power Outage Effects Rackspace Cloud (Nov. 3)
• Facebook Goes Green With New Data Centers (Nov. 5)
• Rackspace: We Have Work to Do (Nov. 4)
• Microsoft’s Windows Azure Cloud Container (Nov. 18)

You can stay current on the latest data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates.

Original post:
Best of Data Center Knowledge, November 2009

Popularity: 12% [?]

Data center developer DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) said today that it has arranged a $150 million loan that will allow it to finish its huge ACC5 data center in Ashburn, Virginia, where it has leased additional space. The company also plans to sell $550 million in notes to build a huge data center project in New Jersey and repay existing debt.

If successful, the debt sale would allow DuPont Fabros to bring new space online in the active New Jersey market without having to sell common stock. Management has expressed a preference to fund construction through debt rather than an equity offering that would dilute the holdings of current stockholders. The company’s confidence in its ability to find buyers for its debt may have been boosted by the successful sale of more than $400 million in debt by Terremark Worldwide earlier this year.

Leasing Remains Strong
DuPont Fabros’ effort to fund its growth has been boosted by the strong leasing activity in its core northern Virginia market. the company has now leased nearly two thirds of the ACC5 data center, where Net2EZ and Facebook have leased space. Today the company announced two new leases at ACC5, with one tenant signing a five-year lease for 1.138 megawatts (MW) of critical load , and another signing a 12-year deal for 2.275 MW.

Here’s an overview of the financial transactions DuPont Fabros announced today:

• The company closed on a $150 million secured loan with a syndicate of lenders led by TD Bank. The loan, which is is secured by the ACC5 data center, has a five-year term at a floating rate of LIBOR plus 4.25% with a LIBOR floor of 1.50%. DuPont Fabros will use $25 million to repay a previous term loan secured by ACC5. DuPont Fabros will use the balance of the funds to complete construction on Phase II of ACC5, and set aside $10 million in reserve.
• The new loan includes an “accordion” feature that allows new lenders to join the existing bank syndicate to increase the amount of the loan up to an additional $100 million if certain leasing and other covenants have been met. DuPont Fabros previously used an accordion feature to restructure loans used to build its Chicago data center.
• DuPont Fabros also today announced that a subsidiary will offer $550 million in senior notes due 2017, a move designed to allow the company to complete construction on a planned 360,000 square foot data center complex in Piscataway, New Jersey, which was postponed last year. Company executives said recently that it would take approximately $75 million to restart construction in new Jersey and complete the project’s first phase. DFT will use the remaining funds from the note sale to repay $50 million that it borrowed to build its ACC4 data center, and pay off a loan for a planned project in Santa Clara, Calif., which is currently mothballed.

“We are pleased to have secured this loan in a challenging credit environment,” said Hossein Fateh, President and CEO of DuPont Fabros Technology. “This loan will allow us to continue to make progress on our development pipeline by completing Phase II of ACC5. We now expect that ACC5 Phase II will be placed in service in October 2010.”

Original post:
DuPont Fabros Reveals Funding, New Leases

Popularity: 6% [?]

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.”

Original post:
Should Servers Come With Batteries?

Popularity: 48% [?]

Facebook is stepping up its efforts to make its data centers cheaper and more efficient, and is following in the footsteps of Google in several of its key initiatives. Facebook says it’s streamlining its servers, and also plans to adopt a novel power distribution design pioneered by Google.

The social network’s plans were discussed by Amir Michael, a server and data center engineer at Facebook, in a Nov. 17 engineering Tech Talk in Palo Alto, Calif. Michael joined Facebook in March after six years on the data center team at Google, where he designed cooling and electrical systems.

“The industry has discussed many ways of optimizing servers and data centers,” Michael said. “We don’t claim to be the original thought leader on many of these things, but we are gonna be one of the few companies who’s actually going to begin implementing them.”

Shift to On-Board Battery
That’s true of the most significant change outlined by Michael: a new power distribution design that removes traditional 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, adding a 12 volt battery to each server power supply.

In April, Google revealed its use of a power supply that integrates a 12 volt battery, allowing it to function as an on-board UPS. The company cited this design as a key factor in the exceptional energy efficiency data it has reported for its data centers, including Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratings between 1.1 and 1.2.

Major Efficiency Gains
Facebook says it expects to gain similar efficiency benefits, reducing the energy loss during power distribution from the current 35 percent to about 15 percent. The company said it can lower its power bill by simplifying how electricity travels to its servers. 

In most data centers, a UPS system stands between the utility power grid and the data center equipment. When there is a grid outage, the UPS taps a large bank of batteries (or in some cases, a flywheel) for “ride-through” power until the generator can be started. The AC power from the grid is converted into DC power to charge the batteries, and then converted back to AC for the equipment.

Saving on Equipment
In addition to improving efficiency, the new design could yield enormous savings on equipment purchases. “You no longer need to buy a traditional UPS and PDU system,” said Michael. “On the capex side, it’s a huge win. This can save millions of dollars that you no longer have to spend on a UPS system. We hope to see the industry move to a model like this.”

Facebook’s enormous growth is clearly giving it leverage with its vendors, which are working with the company as it customizes its equipment. An example: typical servers use 208 volt power to the servers. Most power supplies can also support the 230 volt and 240 volt configurations now being implemented to capture extra efficiency.

Facebook’s new distribution scheme calls for 277 volt power to the servers. ”We’re working with power supply vendors to create a (server) power supply that will accept 277 volts on the input,” said Michael. 

Stripped-Down Servers
Michael said Facebook is also stripping down servers, noting that most servers are tailored for enterprise customers, and include cosmetic features and extras that can impede air flow for cooling. 

“I would prefer to have an ugly server,” said Michael. “An ugly server is a beautiful server because I paid less money for it. We can remove a lot of connectors and a lot of cost from the motherboard itself. This can come in the form of removing video cards, removing extra disk connectors we don’t need, (and) removing PCIe connectors which really don’t provide us with any functionality.”

Few Details on Timeline
Michael didn’t provide details on Facebook’s progress in implementing these new approaches, but the power distribution plans were discussed in the future tense. Michael also outlined the company’s plans to make greater use of free cooling, which uses fresh air rather than chilled water to cool servers. Facebook is known to be using free cooling in at least one of its data centers.

Facebook also said it intends to raise the temperature in its data centers, a strategy that expands the number of hours in which you can use free cooling. This is a strategy that is being widely implemented by large data center users, including Google. “Because we’re taking more ownership of our server design, we can now design it in a way which allows us to raise the temperature in the data center,” Michael said.

RELATED STORIES:

• Efficient UPS Aids Google’s Extreme PUE
• Facebook Goes Green with New Data Centers
• Facebook Now Has 30,000 Servers
• How Facebook Serves Up 30 Million Users

Original post:
Facebook Follows Google to Data Center Savings

Popularity: 6% [?]

Have you ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?

We have tracked down this information for a number of social network sites (19 of them). All the major ones have been included, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and also some of the most popular social news sites; Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.

Full list of sites in this mini study: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Last.fm, Friendster, LiveJournal, Hi5, Imeem, Ning, Xanga, Classmates.com, Bebo.

To determine the ratio between male and female users on these sites we used site demographics data for the United States gathered from Google’s Ad Planner service.

Male/female site user statistics

Before we move on to the chart, here are a few quick observations based on the results we got.

• 84% (16 out of 19) of the sites have more female than male users.
• The social news sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have significantly more male users than female. The standout here is Slashdot which takes male geekdom to new heights with 82% male users.
• If we hadn’t included the three social news sites, all of the sites would have had more females than males.
• Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio; Twitter with 59% female users and Facebook with 57%.
• The most female-dominated site? Bebo (66% female users), closely followed by MySpace and Classmates.com (64%).
• The average ratio of all 19 sites was 47% male, 53% female.

And here’s a chart with the male/female ratio for all the sites, for your viewing pleasure:

The big question

Why do you think certain sites attract more males than females and vice versa? We’d love to hear what you think, so please let us know in the comments.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The open source groupware, Open-Xchange, recently released improvements on the software that allows for easier aggregation of e-mail and contact information all while incorporating the use of social networking tools.  This all-in-one piece of software is a boon to those business web site owners who happen to be just about everywhere when it comes to social media outlets.

Background

With offices in New York and Germany, Open-Xchange has been in the business of creating collaboration software tools for quite some time.  The company works with technology partners such as Novell, Red Hat and Parallels to enable it to bring SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to providers from around the globe.

Beginning in 2001, Open-Xchange combined forces with SUSE Linux (now a Novell business) to create the Openexchange server – one of the top selling Linux-based groupware solutions around.  Over 3,500 businesses in 65 countries now run Open-Xchange solutions.

Dealing with 1&1 Internet, Network Solutions, Dotster and Hostpoint has brought Open-Xchange over 15 million paid mailboxes this year alone.  This is a quadrupled increase from the company’s previous year.  Open-Xchange shows no signs of stopping now.

Solutions

Because no two businesses are exactly alike, Open-Xchange offers several solutions to fit one’s particular business requirements.  Each offering allows for a free testing period prior to purchasing – the perfect way to figure which solution is the right one.

The Appliance solution offered is perfect for small and medium-sized businesses who require a document and e-mail server without the need for an internet expert on hand.

The Server edition is geared more toward mid-sized businesses and is available in two versions – the standard server edition and the edition built for the Univention Corporate Server (UCS).  The later is perfect for those businesses wishing to combine the CRM tool with an entire IT infrastructure or those already running the UCS server.

For those not wanting to completely overhaul and start with an entirely new solution, Open-Xchange offers the Hosting edition of their software.  This solution allows users to keep their existing e-mail setup without the need to completely migrate over to a new system.

The Open-Xchange Server 5 steps things up from mere e-mail solution to a full-blown collaboration tool – e-mail, documents, calendars, tasks, and contacts.  This CRM offering allows businesses to grow from webmail to complete groupware.

The company also offers mobility solutions and migration services.  Open-Xchange completes the fullness of its software by also including a Mac OS version of its collaboration tool.

What is unique about all the company’s offerings is that a wizard has been incorporated into the software that searches and gathers information from several online sources, including social media sites.  Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn as well as many others are thoroughly scoured and the pertinent data is fed back into the groupware solution chosen.  A great way to gather all one’s social media contacts into one neat package.

Final Thoughts

A good business will not only rely on its standard CRM tools but also social media outlets.  Open-Xchange offers some fabulous open source CRM solutions that combines both of these items into one very powerful and useful groupware solution.

Popularity: 6% [?]