Data Center

Tour: ICT Center

Tour: Century College Kopp Center

Tour: Inside NVIDIA’s engine room

Tour: IBM data center in Second Life

Tour: CyGem, Ltd. Data Center

Overheard: When the big box from HP arrived, it was like Christmas

“Whenever I get to open up brand-new cutting-edge gear, it feels a little like Christmas for me. The crinkle of plastic, that crisp electronics smell, the unscratched metal–it’s a data center manager holiday. So, last December, when I started the installation of thirty-two blade servers in our new facility it was Christmas morning all over again.” Kyle Rankin, No assembly required: How I lost two days in the data center

I’m hoping for a little box from HP this year.

Overheard: Need more electricity to power your datacenters? Make it yourself!

“Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades. (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.) If we meet this goal, and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well.” Larry Page, Google’s Goal: Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal

Google’s putting a new slant on the phrase utility computing.

There should be a sexy word for “monetizing your infrastructure.”  Then we can call it the _______ Revolution and compare it to the Industrial Revolution.

Overheard: Google’s Larry Page is modern day Andrew Carnegie

But when I saw the icons I remembered a dinner with Larry Page at the Clinton Global Initiative in NYC last September when I asked him what he thought was the limits to growth of Google and much to my surprise he did not say servers, or people, but he said electricity. It turns out that Google is by now the largest owner of computers in the world and that computers are consuming more and more of the electricity that is used in the world. Therefore Google has the largest utility bill in the planet. And Larry is concerned about this. Martin Varsavsky, April 25 2006

I just finished a biography about Edith Roosevelt and when I heard about Google’s plan to make their own electricity yesterday, all I could think of was “How American!” It’s just like the turn of the last century with Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Need a reliable, cheap source of steel to build your railroad cars? Tired of being jerked around by market prices? Buy a steel plant and make the raw product yourself.

Overheard: Microsoft in Siberia

Microsoft is discussing plans to build a data center in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Siberia. Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia

Cheap electricity and moving the datacenter someplace cold may prove to be a good solution until we have more efficient hardware. Or maybe Siberia is just where they’re sending the Vista developers.

Overheard: Datacenter in a box coming to a batcave near you

“Sun and a consortium of other businesses are going to lower Blackbox self-contained computing facilities into a Japanese coal mine to set up an underground datacentre, using up to 50 percent less power than a ground-level datacentre.” Chris Mellor, Sun to set up datacentre in coal mine

Sun Microsystems promoted their ”datacenter in a box” concept earlier this year. The datacenters are basically 20-foot shipping containers with racks of pre-configured servers and storage. The idea is that you’d be able to build a datacenter as big as you need because the Blackboxes are modular units — and because they’re self-contained shipping containers, you could ship them  just about anywhere – including outer space.  

When I first read about Project Blackbox, I was thinking military.  But I hadn’t thought about using caves and abandoned mines for commercial use. Genius.

In the Japan project, the coolant is going to be ground water — a little controversial, but they’re working on getting away from water altogether.  Since the cave’s temperature is a constant 59 degrees F,  the cost of running the underground center is expected to be $9 million less than if it were above ground.