Data center hosting

Sun using SuperNAP data center facility for cloud computing

Sun Microsystems chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos gave some insight today into Sun’s cloud computing venture while speaking at the AFCOM Data Center World show in Las Vegas.

He said Sun will be use Switch Communications’ SuperNAP facility for some aspects of the infrastructure. Sun made a splash in the cloud computing industry earlier this year, acquiring a company called QLayer that focuses on internal private clouds.

The SuperNAP data center that Sun will be in is built on slab, engineered around overhead cooling and hot-aisle containment. Switch claims power densities around 1,500 per square foot, or about triple the industry standard for air cooling. The hot exhaust air enters the contained hot aisle, rises into a ceiling plenum and circulates outside the IT equipment room through a bunch of huge heat exchangers. Then it recirculates back into the room as cool air.

So it appears that Sun will be using the cloud to provide the cloud.

“We have thousands of nodes and petabytes of storage there,” Papadopolous said.

He added that with Sun entering the cloud computing market, it may have to change its logo from “The network is the computer” to “The network is your computer.”

Cloud computing versus colocation: What’s the right fit?

What can the cloud do for you? That depends on your field of vision. At the 451 Group’s 3rd Annual Client Conference this week, I spoke with Antonio Piraino, a senior analyst of managed hosting at Tier1 Research, about the opportunities and disadvantages of cloud computing, managed hosting and data center colocation. Piraino said that companies’ view of these models is partly a function of size.  

Larger companies are wary of the cloud for its vagueness, Piraino said, while companies with limited resources are more receptive to the possibilities of this.  If your company has a generous supply of IT funding — an increasingly less likely possibility in this economic downturn — the cloud may be “good for your enterprise to play around with, but nothing more,” according to Dan Golding, also of Tier1 Research. Managed hosting appeals to companies that know which services they want and desire to receive them as directly as possible, Piraino said.   

Those with less funding and more flexibility, however, have more to gain from the evolving status of cloud computing. “The cloud is a developer’s dream,” said Piraino. “They can come up with any new application that a company might need, and then get Salesforce.com, Amazon EC2 [Elastic Compute Cloud] or Google App Engine  to host it. Everyone’s hoping that theirs will be the next application to gain mass popularity in the enterprise.” 

Colocation, Piraino said, suits companies that need to expand their physical hardware volume without losing their current level of administrative security. It involves a management company running the company’s software securely from anywhere in the world.  

Piraino ultimately doused the cloud exuberance with a reality check for companies of all sizes: “If you look at computing services as a car, cloud computing is like the rental car you pick up at the airport - not a good option for long-term use.” he said. “Managed hosting is better in that regard, more like a leased car. You know what you’re getting, and how much it will cost.” 

LinkedIn links into Equinix’s Chicago data center

Equinix, the large data center hosting company, announced today that LinkedIn, an online social network for professionals, is expanding their presence within the company by renting out space in one of Equinix’s Chicago data centers.

LinkedIn already rents space in two of Equinix’s Silicon Valley area locations. The release didn’t say how much space in Chicago LinkedIn would be renting out, or in which Chicago data center it would be in. Equinix now has three data centers totaling about 500,000 square feet of space in the Chicago area.

Equinix’s newest location in the Chicago area is located in a northwestern suburb called Elk Grove Village. We went on a video tour of that Equinix facility earlier this year.