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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today emphasized that “when it comes to the cloud, we are all in.” He shared that message first in a speech at the University of Washington, later in an all-staff email, and also in a major ad campaign the company is launching today.

Most of Ballmer’s talk focused on the end-user experience of cloud computing services. But he brought a data center with him: one of the next-generation containers that Microsoft data center GM Kevin Timmons described yesterday in a presentation in New York. The prototype (seen above) is the latest in a series of evolving designs for Microsoft’s containers, also known as an IT-PAC (pre-assembled component). The design is likely to undergo additional refinements as Microsoft continues scouting locations for its next major data center.

“It includes the equivalent of about 10,000 servers,” said Ballmer .”It’s a cool, next-generation concept. We used to have to stick fire hoses into these things to cool them down. (With this) next generation technology, you can put a garden hose in to one of these things to cool down.”

From a data center perspective, one of Ballmer’s most interesting comments came during the question-and-answer session with students, in which he hinted that Microsoft may offer a container packed with Azure technology as a product for on-site installation.

“When you walk outside and see one of those containers, it would be OK with me if we have to dump one into every country or sell some to some people who want to implement them,” said Ballmer.

Sell a container? These kind of statements are sometimes parsed out of context by media. So here’s the full transcript of the exchange:

QUESTION: “So, I’m curious that we shouldn’t care where information is because it should be completely abstracted away, but it seems the laws and regulations do care where information is. I’m just curious how we should manage and take care of that.”

STEVE BALLMER: “That’s why we talk about a partner cloud, a customer cloud and a public cloud. I mean, I think for a lot of reasons it will be many years before many government organizations will grow comfortable with the notion of their data or citizen data living outside of the jurisdiction.

As technology people we can talk about whether that makes sense or doesn’t make sense, and why the protections can be the same, but it turns out the regulatory environment, as you highlight, is imperfect. I mean, the truth of the matter is – our guys were trying to explain this to me a week or two ago – the same data held in the same place but under different operating circumstances has different regulatory blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And we can’t assume all of the world’s important countries are going to even standardize the regulatory framework. That’s why when you walk outside and see one of those containers, it would be OK with me if we have to dump one into every country or sell some to some people who want to implement them.

I love Slovenia, it’s a great country, but there’s only a million and a half Slovenes. This company is not likely to build part of our public cloud in Slovenian anytime soon. So, somebody should be able to implement a Windows Azure cloud in that country. They should be able to buy a device that looks like that or a set of devices and go do that and have that be affiliated for the rapid advance of technology with other things going on in the world.

So, I hear you and I agree that there’s a set of issues, but they don’t have to be constraints.

Here’s just one simple way to think about it. Will all of the world’s centralized compute, storage and networking infrastructure all be built out by four or five companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, the cloud guys? Will we buy every server computer and every piece of storage in the world? No, that isn’t going to happen. I don’t think that – if you just think about the level of capital investment that involves.

We need to permit the private cloud, and the kind of thing we’re showing, the kinds of things we’re doing with Windows Azure is about making sure there’s a public version and there’s a customer version, and there can be a government version, all based on the same core technology, and there’s some innovation to go make that happen.”

From:
Microsoft ‘All In’ on Container-Powered Cloud

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Anthony Wanger is the President and Founder of i/o Data Centers. He directs the company’s strategic affairs, handles acquisition activities, and oversees the company’s marketing, HR and legal functions.

The transition from physical, “offline” processes to digital, online processes is referred to as digitization or dematerialization. Processes that are digitized produce less carbon emissions than their analog counterparts. Data centers provide the infrastructure that enables this digitization to occur, serving as the foundation for the energy efficient enterprise.

Over the past 20 years there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of offline processes that have been digitized – everything from software distribution to financial transactions to medical record keeping. The combined effect of all of these digital processes is a macro-scale reduction in the overall use of materials and a more efficient distribution of the materials.

With the advent of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, companies have improved how they interact with their customers, partners and employees. Prior to the World Wide Web and email, businesses and government transacted in mostly inefficient and unconnected ways. For example, in order to pay a bill, a buyer would send a paper-based check by mail, which would be delivered to the recipient by way of a network of carbon-emitting postal vehicles.

Today, bills can be paid online in a matter of minutes. By digitizing this offline process, the need for material (i.e. paper) to be created and transported has been eliminated. This in turn has resulted in a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.

The impact of dematerialization has been quantified by a number of prominent corporations and research institutions including Microsoft, Intel, Lawrence Berkley Labs and Stanford University.

• A recent paper by Dr. Jonathan Koomey, senior researcher for Lawrence Berkley Labs, studied the impact on CO2 emissions resulting from the purchase of music online as compared to the purchase of a compact disc at a music store. Their research shows that the process of purchasing music online can reduce CO2 emissions, on a conservative basis, between 40%-80%.
• A comparative carbon footprint study of Microsoft’s Office 2007 product suite found that the digital delivery of their product to customers reduced carbon emissions by 88%.
• According to NPG Group, Apple leads the U.S. with 25% of all music sold, surpassing both Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Apple’s iTunes music service has materially changed the way music is purchased and in so doing has eliminated a substantial portion of the carbon footprint related to the offline distribution of music.

iTunes, software distribution, online bill payment and many other digital services are delivered by a complex array of IT systems including servers and telecommunications networks. These servers and networks are located in data centers. Data centers provide the infrastructure (i.e. power, cooling, network access) required by these digital services to function.

Most corporate data centers are built to accommodate the IT needs of a single business unit or department. Large, commercial-grade data centers leverage the economies of scale to reduce energy consumption. Instead of operating ten smaller data centers, an organization could consolidate their IT infrastructure into one or two large data centers and reduce the costs and energy associated with operating separate cooling, UPS, backup power and network access systems.

Modern data centers use the latest technologies and engineering best practices including variable frequency drives, light-emitting diodes (LED) fixtures, thermal energy storage, photovoltaic (PV) solar arrays, ultrasonic humidification and sealed cabinets. Collectively, these systems contribute to a significant reduction in energy consumption – especially during peak load periods.

Conclusion
By combining digitized processes with the economies of scale recognized at large, modern, commercial-grade data centers, today’s enterprise can materially reduce the energy it consumes and greatly improve its efficiency. As consumers, businesses and government look for more efficient ways to communicate and transact, dematerialization and the data center will provide the foundation for a more energy efficient enterprise.

Industry Perspectives is a new content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating in Industry Perspectives.

Original post:
How Digitization Drives Energy Efficiency

Popularity: 13% [?]

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% [?]

You’ve probably heard it many times before: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The benefits of monitoring energy usage in the data center are well-established, and have been highlighted at virtually every industry event for the past two years. So why are so many companies still not monitoring their facilities and using one of the emerging data center metrics to track their progress?

Christian Belady of Microsoft discusses this question today at the MS DataCenters blog, picking up on some Gartner data we reported last week. Christian has been actively involved in industry conversations on efficiency, and has some thoughts about the low numbers for adoption of data center metrics.

“Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that maybe the respondents should have been weighted by their relative data center sizes,” he writes. “I would argue that any company where a bulk of their costs are driven by their IT operations (which by the way are likely to be huge operations such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, etc.) are further to the left on the graph because it has such a large impact on profitability. Similarly, those who have either small operations or their IT costs are low relative to other costs are further to the right. So in essence, we have a polarization of the data center industry: the Leftists and the Rightists.”

Will this split continue if carbon regulation alters the price of energy and the cost of inefficiency? Read The Polarization of the Data Center Industry for more.

Original post:
A Tale of Two Data Center Industries?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Mission West Properties, a major player in Silicon Valley real estate, is planning two major data center projects in Oregon, citing the state as one of the country’s most attractive areas for data center development. Mission West (MSW) is a major public real estate investment trust (REIT) headed by billionaire investor Carl Berg, who said he believes the data sector is poised for major growth.

“As a result of cloud computing, we believe the demand for Web hosting will increase dramatically in the next two to three years,” Berg recently told The Registry.

One of the properties is in Ontario, Oregon, where CDH Consulting is seeking to buy 66 acres of land to build a major data center. CDH, which is headed by industry veteran Chris Hardin, is partnering with Mission West on the project. The Ontario City Council is expected to vote tonight on the proposed $1.3 million land sale, according to local media.

The second site has not been publicly identified. One possibility: Local officials in Prineville, Oregon have been in discussions with a site selection company representing a ”well known, well funded company” planning a major data center.

CDH has been scouting Oregon data center sites for several years. In early 2008 it leased vacant land within the Port of Morrow in Heppner, Ore. for evaluation as a data center site.

Mission West owns more than 100 properties totaling almost 8 million square feet, with major tenants including Apple and Microsoft. Berg told The Registry that the company’s plans call for two 200,000 square foot data centers. The projects were sparked by interest from a “former tenant who is an expert on web hosting.”

Hardin told the Argus Observer that the search for a tenant for the Ontario project has already begun, but could take nine months to a year. Ontario City Manager Henry Lawrence, who flew to California to tour one of Berg’s facilities, told the paper that the city’s economic development team have been working on this deal for about six months.

Original post:
Mission West Targets Oregon for Data Centers

Popularity: 6% [?]

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: 6% [?]

Microsoft’s Bing search engine was offline Thursday evening, experiencing an outage of between 45 minutes and an hour. Outages for major search engines are relatively rare, and the downtime was quickly noted around Twitter and tech news sites. Microsoft’s Bing team acknowledged the outage, and later confirmed the site’s return to service. “Details to come once we have the full picture,” Microsoft said on its Twitter account for Bing.

Original post:
Bing Busted, Briefly

Popularity: 1% [?]

Cloud computing is one of the latest internet technologies that affords companies the ability to present their data and information within outside sources.  With recent concerns with regard to cloud computing and security, it is no wonder that many businesses may be a bit hesitant to jump on board.

Rackspace is endeavoring to reverse the latest cloud computing intimidation by offering solutions that will enable businesses to move their applications from in-house to the cloud.

Rackspace

Based in San Antonio, Texas, Rackspace started its services in 1998 and has grown to provide enterprise-level hosting services to businesses both small and large all around the globe.  At the latest count, this web hosting solution provider caters to over 70,000 customers of which over 51,000 are cloud computing clients.  The company specializes in managed hosting, e-mail and applications as well as cloud hosting.

New Cloud Products

In a continuing effort to bring companies onto cloud computing, Rackspace has recently announced a new set of product offerings.

The Rackspace Cloud Drive is the company’s solution to file server management.  With this product, customers can store and share files with ease, backup and restore files without a hitch and can be accessed remotely.  Additionally, all files located on this cloud solution can be quickly synced across teams and desktops.

For those in need of an online backup solution, Rackspace offers the Rackspace Server Backup product.  Powered by Jungle Disk (Rackspace sister division), this product works for both Windows and Linux servers.  Users can backup files and directories onto either the Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files storage services.

A product that has not been released yet (December 2009 release date) is the Rackspace Hosted Microsoft SharePoint solution.  This product will enable customers to utilized a centralized document repository that allows for collaboration, project tracking, content management and other business communication tools.

Best reason to use cloud computing

All online businesses strive to increase their customer base and in doing so, increase the need for resources.  Increased resources means having to purchase and implement new hardware to keep up with the demand and growth.  Cloud computing allows online businesses to increase their productivity and customer base without having to pour out money into either optimizing current hardware or purchasing new equipment.

Rackspace is leading the charge in cloud computing.  With outstanding services the hosting provider already is well-known for, the addition of new cloud computing solutions will place Rackspace as a leader in the cloud.

Popularity: 6% [?]

What do you get when you combine cloud computing and data center containers? You get NASA’s Nebula, the space agency’s new data powerhouse, which provides on-demand computing power for NASA researchers. Nebula was recently cited by federal CIO Vivek Kundra as an example of the government’s ability to “leverage the most innovative technologies.”

The Nebula application lives in a 40-foot container at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The “data center in a box” was built inside a FOREST container from Verari Systems, which is filled with Cisco Systems’ Unified Computing System and servers from Silicon Mechanics.

Science Compute Power on Demand
Nebula is a self-service platform built from open source software that provides high capacity computing, storage, and network connectivity for NASA research. “Nebula has been designed to automatically increase the computing power and storage available to science- and data-oriented web applications as demand rises,” explains Chris C. Kemp, Chief Information Officer of NASA Ames Research Center.

“The containerized data center solution from Verari Systems and Cisco delivers the foundation for a next-generation cloud computing environment that is responsive to the needs of our developers so they can focus on mission success – without worrying about the capacity and availability of the computing infrastructure,” said Kemp. “his solution is transforming how we think about NASA’s future computing environment.”

Momentum for Containers
Data center containers allow for rapid expansion of IT infrastructure, and can provide excellent energy efficiency by offering more precise control of airflow within the container. Microsoft and Google have used containers as building blocks in  large data centers, while some enterprises, universities and research ;abs have used containers to add incremental compute capacity.

“Verari is simplifying data center deployment,” says Dan Gatti, senior vice president of Worldwide Market Operations, Verari Systems. “Our customers are able to meet their computing and storage requirements much more quickly and easily than ever before. The planning cycle for a data center has been cut from two years down to 120 days, on average. And our customers are able to recognize huge cost savings in both OpEx and CapEx spend.”

“Cisco and Verari Systems are delivering the data center of the future – today,” said Brad Boston, senior vice president of Cisco Global Government Solutions Group. “As NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Environment demonstrates, customers have a great deal of flexibility in how they integrate computing, storage, and networking capabilities with Cisco UCS to ensure a solution designed for mission success today and in the future.”

Original post:
NASA’s Nebula: The Cloud in a Container

Popularity: 2% [?]

Several stories from recent weeks highlight the vibrant data center industry in Europe. Here’s a roundup:

European data centre revenue set to double
A report published by Tariff Consultancy Ltd notes that European data centre revenue is “set to more than double over the five year period from 2010 to 2015, with net raised floor space to increase by 70%, driven primarily by price increases.” The report gives pricing and forecasts for 19 of the EU25 countries and analyzes pricing of a standard 19″ rack, a small cage space and a 50 KVA suite of space for each of the countries.  It also dives into trends impacting data centres such as raised floor capacity in markets, revenue per square meter forecasts, electricity pricing, pricing per rack and cage, and the most expensive data centre countries.

Savvis received EuroFIT award
Financial technology publication Waters published their innagural EuroFIT awards earlier in the month, to recognize Europe’s hottest financial IT products and services.  In the category of Best Datacenter Hosting Provider, Savvis (SVVS) took the award as a company capitalizing on the rising demand for data center services.  Equinix was listed as an honorable mention in the category. A little over a year ago Savvis marked the completion of a global data center expansion by opening a 37,500 square foot facility on the outskirts of London in Slough. The award also noted that Savvis services seven of the top ten Fortune 500 financial services and banking firms. Amazon (AMZN) won the Best Cloud Provider award as an “overwhelming leader in the field.”

The Bunker selected by Cimar
The Bunker announced that it was selected by Cimar (UK) Limited to provide managed ultra secure hosting of its radiology image sharing web service. The Bunker delivered a scalable platform to Cimar built on Microsoft technology.  Howard Jenkinson, managing director of Cimar said “absolute information security is a pre-requisite for any digital service carrying sensitive patient information.”  Click here for a video of ‘The Bunker’ and details of a July 2009 130,000 square foot expansion.

Tata Communications London outage
Several reports came in late last week regarding an outage experienced at Tata Communications’ London data center.  Apparently a power cut followed by generator and UPS failures caused the two hour outage Thursday evening in the Stratford facility.  Grid power was restored around 7:30pm that day as servers came back online.  Colocation provider C4L posted a detailed timeline of the Stratford Tata outage. The Register also reported on the outage. They mention that a Tata spokeswoman was still looking into what caused the outage and the subsequent failure of backup power.

Node4 plans fourth data center
Data centre and communications specialists Node4 announced plans for their next data centre site, to be located in Northampton. Plans are being finalized for the facility and customers are expected to move in by the end of 2010.  The DC4 data centre will house up to 600 racks and will feature N+1 or N+N UPS, generators and climate controls. The DC3 facility in Wakefield opened in July 2009.

Investment Forum for Data Centres
Broad Group will host the 3rd annual International Finance and Investment forum for data centres December 3rd in King’s Place, London. In this forum financiers, investors, private equity firms and others will come together to discuss data centre geographic location choices, data storage infrastructure investment and other critical issues, as well as generate new ideas and opportunities for future development.

Original post:
European Data Center Revenue May Double

Popularity: 12% [?]