The EFF and Carpathia Hosting announced this morning that they're working together to assist users who stored non-infringing files on Megaupload. Users can go to MegaRetrieval.com to connect with the EFF, which will review the cases and try to help resolve issues through their free legal services.“EFF is troubled that so many lawful users of Megaupload.com had their property taken from them without warning and that the government has taken no steps to help them,” said Julie Samuels, Staff Attorney at EFF. “We think it’s important that these users have their voices heard as this process moves forward.”
Data centers have always created very few jobs due to the high level of automation in these facilities. As a result, they don't appear to be a compelling candidate for economic development incentives, which have traditionally been all about job creation. But there's a political component to this. Data centers represent far more than jobs or bricks & mortar. They have become symbols of the new economy, a tangible sign that a community is making a successful transition to the digital economy. Governors and local legislators understand the value of a press conference to announce a new project from Google, Facebook or Apple. That's why North Carolina has hit the data center trifecta with projects for all three of those companies, and continues to offer aggressive incentives for new projects. We've been tracking this trend for years, and there are more states than ever before offering incentives for data centers. That competition will intensify as the Internet continues to transform our economy, and ensure that tax incentives for data center projects are here to stay.
There's actually been a bit of a boom in these underground data bunkers in recent years, but there are also plenty of "nuke-proof" data center projects projects that have failed due to cost issues. It's more challenging than you think to prepare a subterranean environment to meet the standards for hosting servers for enterprises - who are usually the target customers due to the high cost of finishing the space. There are plenty of old military facilities available for retrofits, including one that's been listed on eEBay a few times. But the old military facilities are now competing against caves - the state of Missouri has been trying to pass economic incentives to convince developers to covnert the state's many limestone caves into disaster recovery centers.
The $450 million number from Goldman is interesting because Facebook just announced plans to invest $450 million over the next 5 years in a huge new data center in North Carolina. Facebook's already spending about $50 million a year on leased data center space, and expects to spend about $200 million building its new Oregon server farm. It takes a lot of infrastructure and servers to support 500 million users.
This seems to hold true for data centers as well. There were a flurry of data center power outages in the first week of July 2009. In June 2010 there were major outages at Intuit and Amazon Web Services.
The Wired article is from last fall. Arbor's blog post this week by Labovitz has better information. The most interesting data is a chart showing how 60 percent of Google's traffic takes advantage of direct peering, up from 40 percent a year earlier. Given the volume of traffic, we're talking about, there's some meaningful economics in that change.
The source article misses some of the coolest design features of this facility. It has the equivalent of a 12-foot high raised floor, using the entire lower level of the facility as a cooling plenum. The fans bring the cool North Sea air into the lower chamber, and they manage the pressure to direct the air up into the server area. There's also a Computerworld story with more details but an erroneous headline that suggests that it's the "first-ever" wind cooled data center. The story makes it clear that the facility has chillers as backup for when the wind dies down or air temperature doesn't support free cooling. Both Microsoft and Google are already running data centers with no on-site chillers.
Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, said in a recent presentation that Facebook has 230 engineers supporting data for more than 300 million users. He says Facebook seeks to maintain a ratio of one engineer for 1 million or more users. Facebook is vague about exactly how many servers it has, saying it's "more than 30,000." But at 30,000 servers and 230 engineers, that's a ratio of about 130 servers per admin.
Microsoft says it has automated its data center operations to the point where its admins can each manage between 1,000 and 2,000 servers. That matters, as the company may pack more than 300,000 servers into its new container data center in Chicago. It expects to support that facility with about 30 employees, including admins and facility maintenance staff.
It's interesting how the government is portraying data centers as the problem. The video Kundra showed is like a bad political ad: when the data centers appear, the music turns ominous and the background grows dark. But when cloud computing is mentioned, the music turns happy and the landscape becomes green. I'm all for eliminating redundant technology spending, but where does Kundra believe these "clouds" actually live?
Automated trading has been a growth engine for data center colo providers, who market "proximity hosting" space within their facilities to hedge funds who believe that they can get an edge by being physically closer to the exchange's servers than their trading rivals. In other words, once you max out the wire speed, it's about physical distance. Savvis says its ultra-low latency offerings can reduce connection speed to microseconds, rather than milliseconds. The NYSE's data center expansion purportedly will enable it to offer colo space to low latency trading operations.
It does make sense. That's exactly what i/o Data Centers is doing in Phoenix. They're installing a thermal storage system at their huge Phoenix ONE data center. The building chillers will cool a solution of water and 28 percent glycol. The thermal storage tank contains Cryogel ice balls, which freeze when the system is charging at night, and then cool the glycol solution during the day. The glycol solution is then pumped through a heat exchanger, which chills water in a separate loop used in the data center.
Not sure if this serves as prior art re e-books, but Chris Whittle was including ads in books in the late 1980s, before Amazon was launched and e-books existed in a meaningful commercial form.
This recalls Google's Toilet ISP April Fool's prank. But there was actually a broadband-via-sewer called CityNet, which raised $375 million back in 2001. It also used robots to run the cabling. This story recaps that initiative, and can serve as topical reading while TFA is Slashdotted.
Erlang is used in Facebook Chat, which just hit 1 billion messages a day. Eugene Letuchy discussed Facebook's use of Erlang at the Erlang Factory event.
We're featuring this video on Data Center Knowledge, but it was shot by Dean Nelson of Data Center Pulse, a relatively new industry group focused on information-sharing between end users (vendors and consultants are excluded). DCP started last fall as a group on LinkedIn, and also has a channel on YouTube with weekly webcasts and some other interesting videos. The group has more than 800 members already.
Netcraft's actual site report for qq.com shows it using Apache on Linux, so odds are qzhttp is either customized Apache or using altered headers.
Spoofing headers to fool Netcraft is nothing new. Bruce Perens did it with his Open Source Parking project. He was using lighttpd but wanted to help Apache's numbers.
There are a number of companies providing commercial DC solutions for data centers. Validus DC Power is providing products for DC power distribution, while Power Loft is building a brand new data center optimized for DC power.
We'veindeed reached the moment at which Internet news is putting print news out of business. The problem is that much of the genuine value found in print publications hasn't been ported to the new medium. Most web-only publications are making money, but still can't afford to hire trained journalists or underwrite investigative journalism. The reason you see less worthwhile investigative work in print is that these units were easy targets when newspapers cut staff.
We're near the tipping point at which online news sites need to hire or acquire the talent that supported print publications. The recession will speed the demise of newspapers, making lots of talent available. Can web companies afford to seize this opportunity and invest in staff? It can happen. The Politico is one example of this opportunity.
But the bottom line is that there are a number of lean years ahead for journalists, who will likely face pay cuts as they shift from print to online.
What the article doesn't say is that the NSA leased the former Sony site in 2005, with plans to locate as many as 6,000 employees at the site. It had scaled back those plans in 2006, but then decided to build a data center on the property in 2007. Microsoft's project certainly confirmed San Antonio's qualities as a data center site, but it's not really a case of the NSA following Microsoft.
Google said recently that it runs its data centers at 80 degrees as an energy-saving strategy, so chips that support higher temperatures would mean fewer hardware failures in their data center. Most data centers operate in a temperature range between 68 and 72 degrees, and I've been in some that are as cold as 55 degrees. Lots of companies are rethinking this. In the Intel study on air-side economizers, they cooled the data center with air as warm as 90 degrees. ASHRAE is also considering a broader temperature range for data center equipment.
Lots of interesting comments on this thread. The whole issue of heat and humidity levels in the data center was the subject of a heated debate last fall at Data Center World. Mark Monroe from Sun suggested raising the set point from 68 to 72 degrees and got all kinds of pushback from the audience.
A key concern about higher set points is that nudging the thermostat higher can save money, but may leave less time to recover from a cooling failure. That would certainly be relevant if you're using free cooling when it's 90 degrees outside.
Slashdot Mirror
The EFF and Carpathia Hosting announced this morning that they're working together to assist users who stored non-infringing files on Megaupload. Users can go to MegaRetrieval.com to connect with the EFF, which will review the cases and try to help resolve issues through their free legal services.“EFF is troubled that so many lawful users of Megaupload.com had their property taken from them without warning and that the government has taken no steps to help them,” said Julie Samuels, Staff Attorney at EFF. “We think it’s important that these users have their voices heard as this process moves forward.”
Data centers have always created very few jobs due to the high level of automation in these facilities. As a result, they don't appear to be a compelling candidate for economic development incentives, which have traditionally been all about job creation. But there's a political component to this. Data centers represent far more than jobs or bricks & mortar. They have become symbols of the new economy, a tangible sign that a community is making a successful transition to the digital economy. Governors and local legislators understand the value of a press conference to announce a new project from Google, Facebook or Apple. That's why North Carolina has hit the data center trifecta with projects for all three of those companies, and continues to offer aggressive incentives for new projects. We've been tracking this trend for years, and there are more states than ever before offering incentives for data centers. That competition will intensify as the Internet continues to transform our economy, and ensure that tax incentives for data center projects are here to stay.
There's actually been a bit of a boom in these underground data bunkers in recent years, but there are also plenty of "nuke-proof" data center projects projects that have failed due to cost issues. It's more challenging than you think to prepare a subterranean environment to meet the standards for hosting servers for enterprises - who are usually the target customers due to the high cost of finishing the space. There are plenty of old military facilities available for retrofits, including one that's been listed on eEBay a few times. But the old military facilities are now competing against caves - the state of Missouri has been trying to pass economic incentives to convince developers to covnert the state's many limestone caves into disaster recovery centers.
The $450 million number from Goldman is interesting because Facebook just announced plans to invest $450 million over the next 5 years in a huge new data center in North Carolina. Facebook's already spending about $50 million a year on leased data center space, and expects to spend about $200 million building its new Oregon server farm. It takes a lot of infrastructure and servers to support 500 million users.
This seems to hold true for data centers as well. There were a flurry of data center power outages in the first week of July 2009. In June 2010 there were major outages at Intuit and Amazon Web Services.
The Wired article is from last fall. Arbor's blog post this week by Labovitz has better information. The most interesting data is a chart showing how 60 percent of Google's traffic takes advantage of direct peering, up from 40 percent a year earlier. Given the volume of traffic, we're talking about, there's some meaningful economics in that change.
The source article misses some of the coolest design features of this facility. It has the equivalent of a 12-foot high raised floor, using the entire lower level of the facility as a cooling plenum. The fans bring the cool North Sea air into the lower chamber, and they manage the pressure to direct the air up into the server area. There's also a Computerworld story with more details but an erroneous headline that suggests that it's the "first-ever" wind cooled data center. The story makes it clear that the facility has chillers as backup for when the wind dies down or air temperature doesn't support free cooling. Both Microsoft and Google are already running data centers with no on-site chillers.
Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, said in a recent presentation that Facebook has 230 engineers supporting data for more than 300 million users. He says Facebook seeks to maintain a ratio of one engineer for 1 million or more users. Facebook is vague about exactly how many servers it has, saying it's "more than 30,000." But at 30,000 servers and 230 engineers, that's a ratio of about 130 servers per admin.
Microsoft says it has automated its data center operations to the point where its admins can each manage between 1,000 and 2,000 servers. That matters, as the company may pack more than 300,000 servers into its new container data center in Chicago. It expects to support that facility with about 30 employees, including admins and facility maintenance staff.
Yes, we were down. The previous database turned out to be a girly man database. We're back now with a (hopefully) manlier database.
It's interesting how the government is portraying data centers as the problem. The video Kundra showed is like a bad political ad: when the data centers appear, the music turns ominous and the background grows dark. But when cloud computing is mentioned, the music turns happy and the landscape becomes green. I'm all for eliminating redundant technology spending, but where does Kundra believe these "clouds" actually live?
Automated trading has been a growth engine for data center colo providers, who market "proximity hosting" space within their facilities to hedge funds who believe that they can get an edge by being physically closer to the exchange's servers than their trading rivals. In other words, once you max out the wire speed, it's about physical distance. Savvis says its ultra-low latency offerings can reduce connection speed to microseconds, rather than milliseconds. The NYSE's data center expansion purportedly will enable it to offer colo space to low latency trading operations.
It does make sense. That's exactly what i/o Data Centers is doing in Phoenix. They're installing a thermal storage system at their huge Phoenix ONE data center. The building chillers will cool a solution of water and 28 percent glycol. The thermal storage tank contains Cryogel ice balls, which freeze when the system is charging at night, and then cool the glycol solution during the day. The glycol solution is then pumped through a heat exchanger, which chills water in a separate loop used in the data center.
Not sure if this serves as prior art re e-books, but Chris Whittle was including ads in books in the late 1980s, before Amazon was launched and e-books existed in a meaningful commercial form.
This recalls Google's Toilet ISP April Fool's prank. But there was actually a broadband-via-sewer called CityNet, which raised $375 million back in 2001. It also used robots to run the cabling. This story recaps that initiative, and can serve as topical reading while TFA is Slashdotted.
Erlang is used in Facebook Chat, which just hit 1 billion messages a day. Eugene Letuchy discussed Facebook's use of Erlang at the Erlang Factory event.
We're featuring this video on Data Center Knowledge, but it was shot by Dean Nelson of Data Center Pulse, a relatively new industry group focused on information-sharing between end users (vendors and consultants are excluded). DCP started last fall as a group on LinkedIn, and also has a channel on YouTube with weekly webcasts and some other interesting videos. The group has more than 800 members already.
Netcraft's actual site report for qq.com shows it using Apache on Linux, so odds are qzhttp is either customized Apache or using altered headers.
Spoofing headers to fool Netcraft is nothing new. Bruce Perens did it with his Open Source Parking project. He was using lighttpd but wanted to help Apache's numbers.
This incident knocked several major hosting providers offline, including Media Temple in Los Angeles and Canada's iWeb.
There are a number of companies providing commercial DC solutions for data centers. Validus DC Power is providing products for DC power distribution, while Power Loft is building a brand new data center optimized for DC power.
We'veindeed reached the moment at which Internet news is putting print news out of business. The problem is that much of the genuine value found in print publications hasn't been ported to the new medium. Most web-only publications are making money, but still can't afford to hire trained journalists or underwrite investigative journalism. The reason you see less worthwhile investigative work in print is that these units were easy targets when newspapers cut staff.
We're near the tipping point at which online news sites need to hire or acquire the talent that supported print publications. The recession will speed the demise of newspapers, making lots of talent available. Can web companies afford to seize this opportunity and invest in staff? It can happen. The Politico is one example of this opportunity.
But the bottom line is that there are a number of lean years ahead for journalists, who will likely face pay cuts as they shift from print to online.
What the article doesn't say is that the NSA leased the former Sony site in 2005, with plans to locate as many as 6,000 employees at the site. It had scaled back those plans in 2006, but then decided to build a data center on the property in 2007. Microsoft's project certainly confirmed San Antonio's qualities as a data center site, but it's not really a case of the NSA following Microsoft.
I'm busted. Guess it was also dumb to put that "By Rich Miller" on the article. Here's the actual URL for the photo on Flickr, which we've fixed.
We're more robust now ... We're back. sorry for the downtime.
... chalk it up the the power of Google. :)
DCK has remained up through many prior Slashdottings
Google said recently that it runs its data centers at 80 degrees as an energy-saving strategy, so chips that support higher temperatures would mean fewer hardware failures in their data center. Most data centers operate in a temperature range between 68 and 72 degrees, and I've been in some that are as cold as 55 degrees. Lots of companies are rethinking this. In the Intel study on air-side economizers, they cooled the data center with air as warm as 90 degrees. ASHRAE is also considering a broader temperature range for data center equipment.
Lots of interesting comments on this thread. The whole issue of heat and humidity levels in the data center was the subject of a heated debate last fall at Data Center World. Mark Monroe from Sun suggested raising the set point from 68 to 72 degrees and got all kinds of pushback from the audience.
A key concern about higher set points is that nudging the thermostat higher can save money, but may leave less time to recover from a cooling failure. That would certainly be relevant if you're using free cooling when it's 90 degrees outside.