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

---

Share this with your network!

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

--

Kenneth Jamaca

---

Share this with your network!

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

---

Share this with your network!

NetApp has the distinction of being the first data center to win the coveted Energy Star for data centers label from the Environmental Protection Agency.  The guidelines (of course) are already receiving some criticism, but when facilities feature as much variety in style and location as data centers do, this is to be expected.

Not only did NetApp get the Energy Star - they scored ninety-nine out of a hundred possible points.  Only seventy-five points are required to secure the certification.

The facility is an excellent example for other companies looking to improve energy efficiency and is frequently toured by data center representatives looking into the matter.  They use overhead air distribution instead of a raised-floor strategy - and clearly it's working out for them.  They're also able to use outside-air cooling at their location in North Carolina, maintaining an average temperature of 74 degrees inside.

The honor of receiving the first Energy Star certification definitely seems deserved, since NetApp apparently saves 95,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually.

As I've often discussed, although at first the systems are bound to be flawed, it's important to strive for consistency between facilities in the interest of protecting the environment and ensuring the best possible service to customers.

See the article at greenbiz.com for more.

-Elizabeth English

---

Share this with your network!

There’s excitement in the data center community over the Green Grid’s release of “Recommendations For Measuring and Reporting Overall Data Center Efficiency.”

A lot of important figures in the industry collaborated in developing the recommendations -  besides the Green Grid, there was ASHRAE, the EPA’s Energy Star Program, the United States Green Building Council, and the Uptime Institute, among others.  It’s for dedicated data centers, and a Version 2 is in the works which will apply to mixed-use facilities.

PUE has historically been difficult to trust because of different ways of calculating it, and this represents yet another good, solid step towards regularizing the data center industry and achieving reliability and consistency from facility to facility.

I don’t know who would be reading our blog who wouldn’t already know, but just in case: PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness, and it involves comparing how much total power is used in a facility with what goes to actual IT equipment.

Learn more from the document itself, linked above, or check out the article at Datacenter Dynamics.


Elizabeth English

---

Share this with your network!