It’s a little unbelievable that there was anyone who wasn’t already on Facebook, but the social networking site just keeps getting bigger and more complicated all the time.  With over 500 million users, clearly they do need massive facilities at their disposal, but the data center they’ve been working on in Oregon has raised a lot of arguments.

The problem at hand is Facebook’s choice of energy source.  Although historically they have been more conscious of the environment than this move seems to indicate, they’ve chosen to power their facility under construction with coal - a non-renewable and environmentally-unsound fuel.

This choice has outraged environmental organizations like Greenpeace, which is on the warpath at this point.  I guess Facebook’s selection is based on what they feel like they want to pay for, rather than a sense of social or environmental conscience.  It’s very disappointing, in any case, and now they’ve announced they are altering their original construction plans to include an additional 160,000 sq. ft. shell to the 147,000 sq. ft. structure already being built.

Construction does create a lot of work in the area for a time, but only thirty-five longterm jobs will come out of this environmental misstep.  The whole coal decision seems very strange for a company which ought to be pretty hip.  It’s incredibly clear that the trend in technology is towards renewable energy and green solutions, and it just seems like Facebook would be eager to get in on all the greenwashing.

It puts people in a pretty uncomfortable position - it really can be a serious social and even professional handicap not to have a Facebook, so it’s incredibly difficult to get a sizable boycott organized.  Facebook, as powerful and omnipresent as it is, has a responsibility to set a better example than this.

See the article at the Examiner for a more news-oriented take on the situation. 


Elizabeth English

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The Onizuka Air Force Station, located in Sunnyvale and nicknamed the Blue Cube, has just ceased to be a base for secretive US Air Force operations.

A sort of relic of the secret operations necessitated by the Cold War, the windowless, maze-like building remains rather mysterious.  What exactly went on in there is unclear, but it had a lot to do with satellites and spacecraft.  In fact, the article from the San Jose Mercury News makes me think of the graphic novel and movie Watchmen a little bit, with its talk of good and evil and intense government plotting and secrecy.

The question now that the Blue Cube is no longer needed for enigmatic Air Force goings-on is what will be done with the vacated building.  The Department of Veterans Affairs has laid claim to a bit of the complex, but most of it has a very shaky future.

From our perspective in the data center migration business, we’re looking at essentially a high-tech castle built from the start to support and protect sensitive data and operations.  In Sunnyvale, nonetheless.  Half the data centers you hear about are in nearby Santa Clara, and it doesn’t seem like much of a leap that the Blue Cube could be a pretty amazing high-security data center for a company with the capital to modify it to those purposes.

Anyone have thoughts on the feasibility and execution of this?

Elizabeth English

Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video courtesy of flickr creative commons license

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A data center that’s pre-designed, needs less than a year for construction, and offers excellent PUE, but isn’t just containerized... sounds revolutionary.  HP’s new offering in the works, the so-called butterfly data center, or Flexible Data Center, could well offer all this. 

Besides its environmental appeal, because it’s so much more economically viable than building an entire new facility from scratch, the Flexible Data Center could add an interesting nuance to the popularity of colocation.  It’s also more longterm than a containerized data center approach - not so cheap, but more customizable and bigger.

For great diagrams and further detail, see the article at the Register.  Suffice to say, the “butterfly” descriptor comes from the physical structure which involves a central portion where staff mainly work, with four 6000 square-foot data center wings grouped around it.  The design does in fact make the whole structure look a little like a butterfly.  Other components make it highly customizable depending on cooling and space requirements specific to physical location.

There’s no raised-floor, water-cooled option with the Flexible Data Center, but the options are flexible to different climates.  Multiples can be put together for more capacity, although they’re not interlockable.  They should be ready for sale in just a few months, and it’ll be interesting to see how they catch on.

Elizabeth English

Image by HaPe Gera under flickr creative commons license

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Well, it’s official, International Data Security (IDS) is back from what many thought was a watery grave...AND the initial phase of the first data center ship is set to be online and functional in October 2010!!

I had the pleasure of meeting with Ken Choi and Dick Naughton and was given an update on IDS, where they disappeared to, what they have been doing in secret, and when (if ever) the highly anticipated ‘data center on a ship’ was going to go live.

What I learned is that IDS suffered the same credit crunch every other data center and commercial builder has felt over the last few years, and they slowed progress on the first ship to a near standstill until the credit markets opened up. Now that money is starting to flow again, they have re-surfaced, stronger than ever.

While they were not building data centers over the last few years, that does not mean they were not busy. Ken and Dick have invested heavily in a few managed services organizations. These investments allow them to be their own first customer in a sense, bringing the managed service customers into the first ship.

It is also rumored they have a large network device company as an anchor tenant, although neither Ken nor Dick would confirm the rumor, much less provide a company name.

Now for the exciting stuff...

The first IDS Data Center on a Ship went into dry dock on July 15, 2010 and is scheduled to come out of dry dock and head to its new home at the end of August.

Now, I should point out that the first IDS Data ship is not going to San Francisco's Pier 50 as orginally thought. IDS has signed a dock lease with the Port of Redwood City!!

Redwood City's slogan is "Climate Best by Government Test!" which will hopefully allow for some *green* activities and upgrades as new benchmarks are set.

Needless to say, SilverBack (along with me personally) is involved with IDS on a few different fronts, and I hope to bring more news of their success to light.

IDS can be contacted through their website at http://www.idsstar.net.

For sales information, feel free to drop me a line at ken'@'teamsilverback'.'com and I can make a formal introduction.

More as it becomes available…oh and in case you forgot, here's the IDS news from 2008

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Kenneth Jamaca

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As some of you may already be aware, Team Silverback has launched a new site, http://www.technicaltavern.com/.  It's an exciting place where the technology community can come to connect.

As the name "tavern" implies, the Technical Tavern is designed to act as a neat meeting point for the technical community to get in on industry news and blogs, and for social networking.

The main page features news and site highlights, with links to technology videos, the blog, upcoming events of interest in the community, and your own personal page once you've made an account.

It's a great place to meet people and make connections, as well as to learn about current events and issues in not only the data center community but other branches of IT and technology in general.

Technical Tavern is built on the NING platform, so if for any reason you already have a NING ID, you can use it there too.  Even if not, the setup process is still perfectly painless.

So stop by, check it out, and see what you can learn at http://www.technicaltavern.com.

-Elizabeth English

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