Digital Realty Trust gets first “POD” customer

Data center real estate giant Digital Realty Trust has announced that it has completed its first customer agreement for its POD Architecture Services, with a Fortune 100 financial services company.

The company’s name wasn’t revealed, but its data center plans were. The company’s first phase of its data center plans include 30,000 square feet of raised floor space, and almost 3.4 megawatts of IT load. The project is ongoing and expected to be complete by 2010.

Digital’s POD Architecture Services is something of a middle ground between colocation and building a data center on your own. Digital lends its expertise and resources to help a company build and operate its own data center.

“The value proposition for customers is clear: by using our POD Architecture Services the customer is able to complete large datacenter projects, faster, more cost effectively and with lower risk than if they take a purely do-it-yourself approach,” Chris Crosby, senior VP of corporate development at Digital, said in a statement.

Digital first introduced the service in August.

Mike Manos leaves Digital Realty Trust to go to Nokia

Mike Manos, one of the more well-known and well-respected figures in the data center industry, is making another job change.

It was less than a year ago when Manos decided to leave Microsoft’s data center team, where he was the general manager of its data center services division. He decided to go to Digital Realty Trust to become a senior vice president there, summing up his decision in a post on his LooseBolts blog by saying:

In the end, my belief is that it will be companies like Digital Realty Trust at the spearhead of driving the design, physical technology application and requirements for the global Information Utility infrastructure.  They will clearly be situated the closest to those changing requirements for the largest amount of affected groups.  It is going to be a huge challenge. A challenge, I for one am extremely excited about and can’t wait to dig in and get started.

Manos wrote that in May. Now it’s January, and Manos is moving on, saying he “decided to leave the company to focus a bit more on some personal work/life balance issues.” We can only speculate what he means by the balance issues he refers to.

But then yesterday, Manos wrote another blog post saying he will be working for Nokia as their vice president of service operations. Manos describes the role in a new blog post:

In this role I will have global responsibility for the strategy, operation and run of infrastructure aspects for Nokia’s new cloud and mobile services platforms.

It appears Nokia is working to challenge big players like Google and Apple in the cloud computing space (whatever that means), and Manos will be a big part of building up Nokia to get there.

Hosting companies join to help Haiti

A group of five data center hosting companies has joined hands to help in the relief effort following the massive earthquake in Haiti. The effort is called Hosting for Haiti.

It’s not entirely clear what the five companies - Rackspace, Peer1, The Planet, GoGrid and ServInt - are doing, but it seems like they’ve come together to encourage people to donate, particularly their customers.

Data Center Pulse and The Green Grid team up

Data Center Pulse, a data center end user group, has formed a collaboration with The Green Grid, a nonprofit data center efficiency group.

A monkey is better than Jim Cramer at picking data center stocks

In October, Jim Cramer, the host of “Mad Money” on CNBC, predicted that data center stocks would tumble, in part because the Intel Nehalem chip would do so much more inside a server.

Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge took issue with it and called Cramer “dumber than a bag of hammers” when it came to data centers. As it turns out, Miller was right. He’s been tracking data center stocks since then and found that many actually had double-digit increases — Internap, Akamai, Equinix, Switch and Data, and Rackspace. Only one, Savvis, had a double-digit decrease since then.

Miller’s take on it all:

To be sure, data center stocks won’t go higher forever, particularly after the stellar runup for the sector during 2009. But if you’re interested in understanding the industry and its future, take the time to understand the factors that are driving the demand for data center space, and how technology is impacting these facilities and their design. As we noted in our October post, Nehalem processors will allow companies to do more with less, but they’re not going to empty out all the data centers.

In the comments, someone wrote that “(w)hile this particular rant of his is about your specific industry, his predictions in general are around 48% good. (That % came from a study someone did over the past 3-5 years, if memory serves.) Point being, don’t get all bent out of shape about it.”

I found that kind of funny, because at that rate, a monkey would be a better predictor than Jim Cramer. Check it out: Take a monkey and put two pieces of paper in front of it, one that says “buy” and one that says “sell,” and follow the advice on whichever piece of paper the monkey chooses. Over the long run, you’ll have a success rate of 50%, better than Jim Cramer. You’re welcome!

Helsinki to be heated using recycled data center heat

Reuters has a story today on a plan to recycled data center heat to help heat Helsinki, the capital of Finland.

The data center will be located underground, below a city cathedral. The heat will be directed into the city’s heating system, which according to the story includes “water-heated pipes” used to warm homes in Helsinki.

The data center is expected to be up and running in January. The company building and operating the data center is Academica, a local IT services firm. The heat from the facility will have the ability to heat the equivalent of about 500 homes.

Using the recycled heat in a data center has gained more traction in recent years, as data center operators have looked for ways to put the heat to good use after it has traveled through the servers. Check out “Companies reuse data center waste heat to improve energy efficiency” and “Data center air recycling saves cash-strapped greenhouse.”

Microsoft’s new data center container, designed for fresh air

Microsoft has unveiled a new container-based data center at the Windows Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week. The container looks to be moving toward an even more open architecture in terms of eschewing raised floors, traditional cooling and even roofs. Take a look:

This is part of what Microsoft calls its “Generation 4″ data center design. It’s the next step up from its container-based data center in the Chicago area, the grand opening of which we attended a couple months ago. The Generation 4 design looks enabled to take in fresh air from the outside of the container through filters into the cold aisle, rather than using traditional cooling.

Hat tip to Data Center Knowledge for pointing us to this video.

FBI InfraGard program key to data center physical security

By John Parkinson, Contributor

According to one data center pro, the FBI’s InfraGard program is key to his data center’s physical security. The FBI InfraGard program was initially started to share information between government and private industry about cyber threats. After the 9/11 attacks, the program’s mandate widened to include physical security threats to all of the nation’s critical infrastructure, including businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants.

InfraGard has geographically-linked chapters with FBI field office territories throughout the U.S. These chapters meet regularly to share information on the latest threats and solutions, according to Noel Rojas, vice president of corporate security at the colocation company Terremark, and a member of InfraGard.

Rojas says this type of cooperation between the government, private industry, and academia had never existed at this level, and its importance cannot be overstated. “It is probably one of the most significant trends, if not the most significant in security, that has come about in the last few years,” states Rojas.

In addition to meetings and online forums, InfraGard has a secure Web site where information is posted regarding the latest threat advisories. One benefit of the site is that members can receive alerts on mobile communication devices about situations that need immediate attention, says Rojas. For example, if there is a regional or national alert, members would receive an email on their Blackberry advising them to sign in to their accounts to view the message.

Separately, but not mutually exclusive to this is the ongoing trend of downsizing the federal government’s traditional duties and responsibilities by outsourcing—including holding its confidential data. “It is estimated that 85% of the nation’s critical infrastructure is owned and operated by private industry,” says Rojas.

With so much data and infrastructure out of the federal government’s hands, the hope and the plan is that programs like InfraGard can open up the communication channels between the public and private sectors and keep the latter in the loop about potential threats and its vulnerabilities.

Click here to sign up for InfraGard and find your local chapter.

Mark Bramfitt leaves PG&E, and a gap in data center utility relations

Northern California utility Pacific Gas and Electric Co. made headlines by finding novel ways to offer rebates for energy efficiency in the data center. The company’s programs have become a model for other utilities in the state and around the world. Mark Bramfitt had headed up PG&E’s data center energy initiatives, until last Thursday when Bramfitt announced he was leaving PG&E.

John Sheputis, CEO of Fortune Data Centers and a recipient of nearly $1 million in PG&E data center efficiency rebates was at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit when Bramfitt broke the news.

“The reaction from the crowd was impressive… and for good reason. Mark is an excellent speaker, a very well known entity in the valley, and among the most outspoken people I know of regarding the broader engagement opportunities between data centers and electricity providers,” Sheputis said. “No one has done more to fund efficiency programs and award high tech consumers for efficient behavior.”

Bramfitt and PG&E started focusing on data center utility rebates and incentives in 2006. According to Bramfitt, PG&E’s data center program saved three megawatts of load in 2007, and doubled that in 2008 saving seven megawatts. But getting IT pros to jump through the hoops to get the rebates was a difficult task.

“The effort Mark was undertaking was critical and immensely difficult,” said Mark Thiele, Director Business Operations R&D at VMware and co-founder of Data Center Pulse. “I sincerely hope that PG&E hires someone to pick up where Mark left off. However, if his replacement is to be successful, I think s/he will have to do more to bring the public and government agencies into the fight. It’s possible that getting new blood, as well as renewed enthusiasm for the effort will be just what the doctor ordered.”

“PG&E had the leading program in the US to reward the end user for their efficiency choices, but it was rather difficult to obtain the rebates,” said Dean Nelson, data center director at Ebay. Many companies found the effort not worth the return. I think Mark Bramfitt had some very good successes and all the right intentions but lacked the future support within PG&E to continue. I believe it is crucial that the utilities (all of them) interface with their corporate customers, and each other, to decrease consumption and optimize efficiencies. I hope that PG&E has plans to fill this position and/or refocus the program to make it simpler for data center users to take advantage it. They have momentum and should continue. Killing it would be a mistake.”

Data center earns nearly $1 million in utility rebates from PG&E

Hosting and wholesale data center provider Fortune Data Centers walked away with a $900,000 check from Northern California energy utility Pacific Gas & Electric for making energy efficiency investments in its new San Jose data center.

Fortune opened the new data center for business in April, 2009, reclaiming a former manufacturing site. After phase I of construction, the 78,000 square foot facility has 43,000 square feet of IT space, and the company is claiming a PUE of 1.37, which if correct would mean that the facility’s data center mechanical infrastructure is highly efficient compared to the industry average of 2.0. See Mark Fontecchio’s article for more on evaluating public data center PUE claims.

The utility rebate came from PG&E’s High Tech-IT Facility program, which offers incentives for California data centers to reduce energy demand.

According to Fortune Data Centers CEO John Sheputis, the energy savings came from optimizing the cooling system and purchasing the most efficient uninterruptible power supply systems possible. Sheputis said the PG&E payments offset about half the cost of the premium for implementing high efficiency infrastructure.

PG&E engineers were very involved in the design and commissioning of the project. “PG&E has a commissioning agent to make sure you’ve installed the energy efficient devices and to make sure that it’s working,” Sheputis said. “They have to see the equipment operating. We get payments as the measures are brought online. They’re not allowed to just go around handing out checks.”

While $900,000 is a lot of cash, it’s not the largest data center utility rebate so far. NetApp scored $1.4 million from PG&E for its data center efficiency measures. Sheputis golfs with NetApp data center execs, and joked that “They’re dissing me for not getting as big a check as they did.”