EBay develops ‘miles per gallon’ metric for data centers
There's a maxim in the data center business that you can't manage what you can't measure, and eBay has come up with the mother of all measurement systems for calculating data center efficiency.
The online auction giant has devised a methodology that looks at the cost of its IT operations in dollars, kilowatt hours and carbon emissions, and ties those costs back to a single performance metric -- in eBay's case, the number of buy and sell transactions its customers make at eBay.com.
The result is a set of data that provides the equivalent of a "miles per gallon" metric for data centers, which organizations can use as a baseline to improve on over time, said Dean Nelson, head of eBay's Global Foundation Services, which manages its data centers worldwide. Read more...
Cisco acquires Virtuata to secure virtual machine data
Cisco has acquired Virtuata, a privately held developer of technology for securing virtual machine data in multi-tenant data centers, the company said Monday.
Virtuata helps to isolate each virtual machine from others in the same virtualized data center or cloud environment, Cisco said. It can help to address the security concerns of enterprises or service providers that want to host multiple customers, departments or applications in a single infrastructure. Cisco said the acquisition complements its mission to help customers create unified data centers. Read more...
Google buys land to build three data centers in Asia
Google has acquired land in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore to build data centers in these three locations, it said Wednesday.
The data centers will be the "first Google proprietary data centers in Asia," and will be fully owned and operated by the company, said Taj Meadows, the company's policy communications manager for Asia Pacific.
More people are coming online every day in Asia than in any other part of the world, so locating data centers there is an important next stage of Google's investment in the region, the company said Local data centers will help the company provide faster and more reliable access to Google's services, it added.
There is a large surge in Internet use in Asia, particularly for consumer applications, said Jun Fwu Chin, research manager for virtualization and data center at IDC Malaysia. Read more...
How 9/11 changed data centers
Data centers have always been secure, tightly controlled facilities, but 9/11 brought about changes that pushed security and physical protections to even higher levels.
Data centers today, particularly those serving as colocation facilities, are more likely to have multiple points of security that may include physical barriers such as crash-resistant fences and high-tech defenses such as biometric identification systems.
It's less likely today that backup and recovery data centers will be built near one another. And new data centers are more likely to be built outside of urban areas.
"Data center designers have always been mindful of security concerns," said Tad Davies, an executive vice president at Bick Group, an IT services provider whose work includes data center design. "What 9/11 caused us to do is think broader and on a massive scale." Read more...
Google, data centers using less power than expected
Data centers have been using less electricity than you think ... or at least, compared with what they have in the past.
According to a study by Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford and a climate and energy researcher, data center energy use in the last five years rose only about 56 percent vs. doubling in the period between 2000 and 2005. And in the U.S., it rose only 36 percent instead of doubling.
Electricity used in global data centers in 2010 accounted for between 1.1 percent and 1.5 percent of total electricity use, the Koomey study found. For the U.S. that number was between 1.7 and 2.2 percent. Read more...
Fulcrum buy could deepen Intel’s data-center role
Intel's acquisition of Ethernet chip vendor Fulcrum Microsystems is just the latest step in integrating the components within data centers to help them work smoothly as a single virtual system.
Fulcrum makes silicon for data-center switches with 10-Gigabit and 40-Gigabit Ethernet ports. Its chips are known for low latency. The small, privately held company's technology will give Intel a place inside the switches atop server racks that link servers to each other and to the overall network.
Intel wants to pair Fulcrum's chips with its own silicon used in Ethernet adapters and controllers so they can exchange new types of information about security, quality of service, management and other variables. Read more...
U.S. agencies aren’t tracking data center use
Even though the U.S. White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has pushed government agencies to reduce the number of data centers they operate, a new survey has found that most agencies aren't tracking how close to capacity their data centers are or how much energy they're using.
The survey, of 157 U.S government IT decision-makers, found that only 25 percent are tracking the amount of storage capacity used at their data centers, and only 26 percent are tracking their data centers' energy consumption. Twenty-three percent of respondents said they can track the savings from data center consolidation, the survey said.
Just 41 percent of respondents said their agencies track the number of servers they operate at data centers, and just 32 percent track their annual storage spending, according to the survey, released this week by MeriTalk, an online network focused on the government IT community. Read more...
How Japan’s data centers survived the earthquake
Smart construction and good planning allowed Japan's data centers to escape virtually unharmed from the massive earthquake that rocked the country in March, a Japanese data center executive said Thursday.
Operators there had to grapple with blackouts and shortages of generator fuel and equipment. They have also fought hard to be exempt from nationwide power caps that go into effect Friday. But despite enduring the biggest earthquake in recorded history, none of Japan's data centers were severely damaged or knocked offline by the disaster, the executive said.
"So far there has been no critical damage reported to the Japan Data Center Council," said Atsushi Yamanaka, a general manager with data center operations company IDC Frontier, who gave a talk at the DatacenterDynamics conference in San Francisco about the impact of the quake. Read more...
Data centers, under strain, expand at furious pace
About a third to half of all data centers will be physically expanding or leasing new space in the next two years, according to recent surveys.
These surveys are providing a picture of strains facing the facilities that cradle the digital economy, as well as the pressure data center and IT managers are under to keep up with demand.
The Uptime Institute, for the first time, recently surveyed 525 data center operators and owners, 71% of whom are in North America. Of respondents, 36% said they will run out of power, cooling and space through 2012. Read more...