In addition, an IT organization could actually resell the entire container to help recoup its initial investment, or pay for an upgrade to the next one. That’s a significant issue these days because server processing requirements continue to advance at a fairly rapid clip. That means that the lifecycle of the average data center, even in spite of virtualization, might actually be getting shorter as the number of servers in the environment continues to increase.
Traditional approaches to data center management are a challenge, and not just for large companies such as Google. Companies of all sizes are starting to rethink the physical dimensions of the data center, so don’t be too surprised to see a whole lot more in the way of modular containers that accommodate the needs of a larger enterprise as well as smaller offerings that can be used by companies of almost any size.

After a quick search, I do somewhat recall their name from the story last December where eBay awarded EDI with a contract, but Skanska was noted as putting forth a design called eHive that Dean Nelson described as “a very compelling ultra dense product.”

Here is the YouTube video of their data center construction simulation:

Datacenter Tops

Exclusive Datacenter Technology Event for the Elite Corporate and Government executives.

Where Data Center “Top” owners, operators, providers and vendors gather in one place, at one time!

The world’s leading data center manufacturers, technology and service providers, will be showcasing the latest technology advancements, developments, standards, practices and concepts gathered under one roof in one of the world’s most prestigious venues.

Data Center TOPS is an essential day not to be missed to maintain the lead in the field of data center investment, ownership, management, operation and services.

The objective is to observe, hear and interact with the world’s leading data center manufacturers, technology suppliers, and service providers as they showcase and share the latest advancements, developments, standards, best practices and concepts in an exclusive atmosphere.

Throughout the day we will be focusing on the innovations being introduced to the marketplace to ensure that IT and data center management CAN go green, implement compliances, standards, benchmarks, education, perform audits and qualify for certifications, feedback on compartmentalized data centers, innovative cooling, EMS / BMS, high-end security systems and control, revolutionary fire prevention technologies and precision civil works, to become an integral part of organizations’ quest in obtaining necessary efficiencies, corporate objectives all inline with government rulings.

Making the right moves to implement these latest technological systems and increase understanding and knowledge as to the difference these will make to an organization – providing a cutting-edge in the industry and a competitive-edge in today’s competitive markets.

All these veterans in the industry and senior experts will be gathered under one roof in one of the world’s most prestigious venues – Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi. Attendance is all-inclusive of this grand luxury hotel’s breakfast, sumptuous international lunch buffet and coffee breaks.

The exclusive free-to-attend event for VIPs, presents a unique experience to interface and network with our superb international panel of speakers – all senior specialists in their own fields – together with your like-minded peers who identify the need for the continuing improvement in data center efficiency, streamlining and its effect on profitability – and the environment!

“For data center geeks, we expect our Buffalo data center design will have an annualized average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.1 or better,” said Filo. That would challenge the most efficient facilities built by Google (GOOG), which has an average PUE of 1.16 for its six company-built data centers, with one facility currently running at a PUE of 1.12.

With its Lockport design, Yahoo is joining Google on the cutting-edge of energy efficiency by running a data center without chillers, which provide refrigerated water for cooling systesm and are among the most energy-intensive components of a data center.

In adopting a design that is less reliant on chillers, Yahoo is following the lead of Google (GOOG), which recently built a data center in Belgium that operates without any chillers. Google executives expect the Belgium facility will soon be the company’s most efficient, and may push its PUE below 1.1.

Plans filed today with the town of Lockport indicate that the Yahoo Computing Coops will be metal prefabricated structures measuring 120 feet by 60 feet. The company plans to use five of these structures in its Lockport complex. Each of the coops will have louvers built into the side of the building to allow cold air to enter the computing area. The complex is being laid out to take advantage of prevailing wind direction, which would blow directly into the louver system.

Each coop also has a peaked roof, with a “penthouse” running along the top of the structure to manage the release of  waste heat from the hot aisle, according to the Buffalo News.

Site plans suggest the coops are designed to support 5 megawatts of computing load.  The facility is designed to be completed in two phases, with a first phase using 10 megawatts of power and a second phase adding 15 megawatts.

Filko said the NewYork project is the next step in a long-term process to improve Yahoo’s data center energy efficiency.

“Today we’re committing to reduce the carbon intensity of our data centers by at least 40% by 2014,” Filo wrote. “In other words, we’ll decrease our average electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from our data centers around the world. We’ll get there through a combination of innovative data center design, improving how we utilize our servers, cloud computing, and locating our data centers in areas where cleaner energy is available.”

Google (GOOG) has begun operating a data center in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, a strategy that will improve its energy efficiency while making local weather forecasting a larger factor in its data center management.

Chillers, which are used to refrigerate water, are widely used in data center cooling systems but require a large amount of electricity to operate. With the growing focus on power costs, many data centers are reducing their reliance on chillers to improve the energy efficiency of their facilities.

This has boosted adoption of “free cooling,” the use of fresh air from outside the data center to support the cooling systems. This approach allows data centers to use outside air when the temperature is cool, while falling back on chillers on warmer days.

Google has taken the strategy to the next level. Rather than using chillers part-time, the company has eliminated them entirely in its data center near Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, which began operating in late 2008 and also features an on-site water purification facility that allows it to use water from a nearby industrial canal rather than a municipal water utility.

Year-Round Free Cooling
The climate in Belgium will support free cooling almost year-round, according to Google engineers, with temperatures rising above the acceptable range for free cooling about seven days per year on average. The average temperature in Brussels during summer reaches 66 to 71 degrees, while Google maintains its data centers at temperatures above 80 degrees.

So what happens if the weather gets hot? On those days, Google says it will turn off equipment as needed in Belgium and shift computing load to other data centers. This approach is made possible by the scope of the company’s global network of data centers, which provide the ability to shift an entire data center’s workload to other facilities.

In a March interview, Urs Holzle, Google’s Senior Vice President of Operations, said the company typically uses manual tools to manage data center level outages and downtime.  “Teams regularly practice failing out of or routing around specific data centers as part of scheduled maintenance,” he said. “Sometimes we need to build new tools when new classes of problems happen.”

Redirecting Workloads Instantly
At last month’s Structure 09 conference, Google’s Vijay Gill hinted that the company has developed automated tools to manage data center heat loads and quickly redistribute workloads during thermal events (a topic covered by The Register).

“You have to have integration with everything right from the chillers down all the way to the CPU,” said Gill, Google’s Senior Manager of Engineering and Architecture. “Sometimes, there’s a temperature excursion, and you might want to do a quick load-shedding to prevent a temperature excursion because, hey, you have a data center with no chillers. You want to move some load off. You want to cut some CPUs and some of the processes in RAM.”

Gill was asked if this was a technology Google is using today. “I could not possibly comment on that,” Gill replied.

Look Ma: No Chillers!
But Google engineers had already disclosed the existence of the chiller-less Belgium data center at the Google Data Center Efficiency Summit in April in Mountain View, Calif. At the event, we asked specifically: are there chillers on-site that are rarely used, or no chillers at all?

The answer: no chillers at all. The facility will rely entirely on free cooling, and redirect workload on days when it’s too hot to operate. This approach makes local weather an issue in network management, although advanced forecasting can help Google anticipate days when it may need to divert work from the Belgium facility.

Nonetheless, even Google is periodically challenged by rerouting entire data centers, as seen in a February Gmail outage when a data center was overloaded while shifting workloads. Traffic redirection was also an issue in a brief outage in May.

An Enabler for “Follow the Moon”?
The ability to seamlessly shift workloads between data centers also creates intriguing long-term energy management possibilities, including a “follow the moon” strategy which takes advantage of lower costs for power and cooling during overnight hours. In this scenario, virtualized workloads are shifted across data centers in different time zones to capture savings from off-peak utility rates.

This approach has been discussed by cloud technologists Geva Perry and James Urquhart as a strategy for cloud computing providers with global data networks, who could offer a “follow-the-moon” service to enterprise customers who would normally build data centers where power is cheap. But this approach could also produce energy savings for a single company with a global network – someone like Google.

As more virtualized servers generate larger quantities of data, access to storage becomes increasingly critical. Providing flexibility in terms of how to access that storage is equally critical because different environments have varying needs.

Join Rick Villars from IDC as he discusses the shifting role of storage, and access to that storage, in today’s Data Center. Click here to register for this live webcast.

* Getting to work: We’ve got a shuttle service that brings employees from around the Bay Area to the Googleplex every day. These shuttles are outfitted with wi-fi and fueled by B20 biodiesel. And employees who bike, walk, skip, hop or otherwise self-power to work can earn points that translate into a donation from Google to their charity of choice.

* Turning on the lights: The rooftops at our headquarters are covered in 9,212 photovoltaic solar panels that produce 1.6 MW of electricity — enough energy to power about 1,000 California homes.

* Healthy buildings: The facilities at our main campus use sustainable building materials that are environmentally friendly and healthier, such as “cradle-to-cradle” certified products designed to never end up in landfills, fresh air ventilation, daylighting, and whenever possible, PVC- and formaldehyde-free materials.

* No, we’re not kidding: We’ve been known to use goats instead of lawn mowers to graze the fields surrounding our campus.

* Getting around town: We have a fleet of 8 plug-in vehicles that Google employees can use free of charge to run errands during the day. (In the summer of 2008 our Google.org RechargeIT initiative launched a controlled driving experiment, and our plug-in hybrids achieved more than 90 MPG!) Shared bicycles are also scattered among our buildings for Googlers to use for short trips around campus, reducing the need for cars during the work day.

* Waste not, want not: Waste from our Mountain View cafes is separated and the organic component is composted. As a result, we’ve reduced waste sent to landfills, reduced greenhouse gases and recycled nutrients leading to improved soil quality without chemicals. And any disposable plateware and cutlery we continue to use in the cafés is now compostable.

The Wikipedia site is hosted on about 300 servers in a primary data center in Tampa, Fla. The 50 servers at the EvoSwitch data center in Amsterdam will provide content storage and delivery. Amsterdam is one of the world’s most important network hubs, with hundreds of European networks exchanging traffic in the city’s data centers.

“We’re very pleased with EvoSwitch’s professional and well secured data center environment, which includes a highly cost-efficient infrastructure in a location that is of great strategic importance to us,” said Brion Vibber, Chief Technology Officer for the Foundation. “We will be using the Amsterdam site for caching in particular, aiming to reduce the response time of our project websites in Europe. EvoSwitch will also be a good location for backing up content that is stored at our Florida data center. Finally, we will be relocating European publishing projects to EvoSwitch, such as Toolserver.org – a project of the German Wikimedia chapter.

“The Amsterdam servers will both retrieve the content from the servers in Florida, as well as store it,” Vibber added. “Web pages can then be displayed to Internet users directly from Amsterdam, which will improve the speed and accessibility of the web pages in Europe significantly. I expect that we will further increase our capacity at EvoSwitch in the near future due to the required storage capacity and new European publishing projects.”

EvoSwitch is a 100,000 square foot data center supported by 20 megawatts of power capacity that is generated entirely from sustainable energy sources including, solar, wind and biomass. The facility uses free cooling (fresh air economization) to reduce its use of energy for air conditioning. Vibber says this was a factor in Wikimedia’s selection of EvoSwitch.

“As operators of one of the most heavily accessed web property on the web, we are aware of the impact that the Internet and its energy consumption have on the environment,” said Vibber. “EvoSwitch’s energy-saving measures, combined with their use of green energy and CO2 compensation are very attractive to us.”

“We are strong supporters of Wikimedia and their Wikipedia publishing project in particular,” said Eric Boonstra, EvoSwitch’s Commercial Director. “The Foundation’s operations coincide with the objectives of our own organization, to keep the Internet ‘open’ and stimulate freedom of expression and the transmission of knowledge via the Internet. This partnership is all the more special to us because of Wikimedia’s faith in EvoSwitch.”

That was the takeaway from several presentations at last week’s Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit (DCEE) in Sunnyvale, Calif. The case studies documented the benefits of raising the temperature in a data center environment, which can help save on energy used for air handlers and the chiller plant. But they also offered data on increased activity by server fans, which kick on as the temperature rises, nullifying gains from a warmer server room.

No More ‘Meat Lockers’?
The presentations at DCEE, which was sponsored by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, provide guidance for data center operators as the industry moves away from “meat locker” server environments. Companies like Google and Sun Microsystems have advocated raising the temperature to reduce the power required for cooling server-packed racks. The trend has also received a boost from ASHRAE, the industry group for heating and air conditioning professionals, which increased the top end of its recommended temperature range from 77 to 80 degrees.

In one case study, Cisco Systems (CSCO) said it expects to realize savings of $2 million a year by raising the temperature in its research labs. Cisco’s Chris Noland and Vipha Kanakakorn oversaw the proof-of-concept project, in which they raised the temperature in three research labs on Cisco’s San Jose campus. Most of the increases were implemented gradually, but in one lab the team hiked the temperature by two degrees per day for four consecutive days.

Raising Chiller Set Point
As the server room neared 80 degrees F (27 C), the Cisco researchers raised the chiller water set point from 44 to 46 degrees F (6 tp 7 degrees C). “Optimizing the room opened the door to raising the room temperature, which opened the door to raising the chiller temperatures,” said Noland.

Because of the number of research labs at Cisco, optimizing the server rooms in lab environments offers substantial savings. But some of the variables change in data centers filled with high-dfensity racks, as seen in two case studies examined higher temperatures as part of broader testing on data center efficiency.

The Chill-Off 2 team, which included technologists from Data Center Pulse and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, found that energy use declined as the temperature in the cold aisle increased – until it hit 80 degrees. At that point, the trend reversed and power usage soared as server fans kicked on. “If the fans start running at higher temperatures, we lose all those savings,” said Bill Tschudi of LBNL.

Vali Sorrel of Syska Hennessy Group presented a similar case study in which he evaluated cooling options for a financial client, testing five different configurations at a power density of 20 kilowatts per rack. Once the supply air exceeded 75 degrees, there was a six-fold surge in fan energy. “You’ve got to be really careful about that,” said Sorrel. “I think there’s a happy medium (between higher temperatures and fan energy).

In its new Chicago data center project, developer Ascent Corp. has adopted a flexible approach designed to accommodate a variety of customer requirements within a single multi-tenant facility. It’s an approach to data center design that that echoes the old Burger King slogan: ”Have it Your Way.”

“We think that users are looking for a lot more choices in the ability to customize solutions,” said Phil Horstmann, the CEO of Ascent, who calls the approach Dynamic Data Center Suites.

Ascent’s CH2 site is near the huge facility the company recently built for Microsoft Corp., and will be able to leverage the extraordinary power and fiber infrastructure supporting that project. CH2 will have 50 megawatts of power capacity and its own substation.

Once the power and telecom infrastructure are in place, Ascent will subdivide the facility according to customer requirements. “We’ll move the demising walls where they need to be, and then wall off the equipment yard,” said Horstmann. “The customer space and equipment yard become plug-and-play.”

Ascent can deliver a powered shell for companies who want to build out their own facility, or completed data center space for customers seeking turn-key solutions. With the turn-key space, each customer can select the design and infrastructure they desire.

As a result, one company’s raised floor space may reside next to another data center with its equipment on slab, with each customer using dedicated mechanical and electrical infrastructure and their own equipment yard.

This kind of flexibility could be important in Chicago, a composite market in which data center tenant profiles are spread across a range of industries. That includes financial tenants seeking low-latency trading faciltiies, web hosting companies, Fortune 500 enterprise customers, and Internet companies.

“We still see a high degreee of demand for this market,” said Horstmann. “Some of the other data center providers have inventory in this market. But it’s a great peering city, and there’s a lot of interest from enterprise, financial and hosting customers.”