CloudBurst: gdgt Liveblog Scales to 4.7M Views

I worked in newspapers for about 20 years. Getting the news from my notebook  to your doorstep involved editors, compositors, reams of newsprint, a fleet of trucks and maybe a paperboy or two. In the Internet economy, that model’s been overtaken by the “one guy with a laptop” distribution method, which takes all the cost out of the process. On Monday we had an interesting example of how the new model is extending to “one guy with a laptop and a cloud.”

Ryan Block’s live-blogging coverage of the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on gdgt.com drew 4.7 million page views in less than two hours. The live.gdgt.com site was hosted by The Rackspace Cloud, with the blog running on Cloud Sites while Block and his photographer shot and uploaded photos to Cloud Files which auto-integrated into the site. What’s interesting is the gdgt.com site hasn’t officially launched yet. On its first day online, this new-world news organization delivered 656 page views per second in real-time.

Ten Cool Supercomputers, Illustrated

The Jaguar supercomputer combines processing power with a little bit of style. Photo credit: National Center for Computing Science.

Pingdom has assembled a review of Ten of the Coolest and Most Powerful Supercomputers, starting with the Cray 1 in the 1970s right up through Roadrunner 2. The story provides a timeline of the advancements in processing power over the years, but also provides photos of these mighty systems, and links to more. Highly recommended.

FedEx Expands Colorado Springs Data Center

Federal Express is building out unfinished space in its Colorado Springs data center, and adding an addition to boot, reports the Colorado Springs Gazette. The paper says FedEx is converting an unfinished 35,838-square-foot second floor of the FedEx data center into technical space, and also adding a 24,000 square foot expansion. The company is also adding five new generators to provide backup power for the expanded footprint.

“We are upgrading our existing information technology operation in Colorado Springs and expect the project to be completed in late 2010,” FedEx spokesman Jim McCluskey told the Gazette. “While we don’t disclose specific information about our information technology operations, we anticipate the facility will qualify for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification once it is completed.”

FedEx began building the 113,000 square foot data center in 2007. The new building replaced a leased data center facility that was about half that size.

Debt Markets Open, Construction to Follow

The credit crunch has had a meaningful impact on data center supply, sidelining many projects that weren’t fully funded prior to the meltdown on Wall Street last fall. But the deep freeze in the credit markets appears to be thawing, as two leading colocation providers announced debt financing this week:

• On Monday Equinix (EQIX) announced plans to issue $250 million in convertible debt to “fund the development of expansion opportunities.” Interest in the offering was strong enough that Equinix wound up selling $325 million in debt, while granting an over-allotment to underwriters for another $48 million.
• On Tuesday Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) announced plans to borrow $400 million through a private debt placement. The company will use the funds to repay $258 million in existing debt and make “capital investments to build out facilities and acquisitions of complementary businesses.”

As we’ve noted, the supply of data center space is getting tight in some key markets. Now that expansion-minded colocation providers are able to raise money through the debt markets, we can expect to see new construction soon. Data center REITs Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros previosuly raised debt financing this spring. These companies, along with Equinix and Terremark, are well known to lenders and have a serious track record in building and filling data centers, and thus good candidates to serve as “icebreakers” for the data center industry in the credit markets. In the short run, this market access will likely extend the “incumbent advantage” for these veteran players in the data center industry, allowing them to build while smaller and newer players must wait for the credit crunch to ease further - a development we predicted back in March 2008.

NY Times Magazine Spotlights Data Centers

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine will include a feature article about the growing importance of data centers, which has been posted to the Times web site. “As data centers increasingly become the nerve centers of business and society — even the storehouses of our fleeting cultural memory (that dancing cockatoo on YouTube!) — the demand for bigger and better ones increases: there is a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources,” writes Tom Vanderbilt. “All of which is bringing a new level of attention, and challenges, to a once rather hidden phenomenon.”

The story quotes industry executives including Mike Manos (Microsoft/Digital Realty), Debra Chrapaty (Microsoft), Jonathan Heiliger (Facebook), Chris Crosby (Digital Realty Trust), Ken Brill (Uptime Institute), Bryan Doerr and Varghese Thomas (both of Savvis), Jonathan Koomey (Lawrence Berkeley Labs) and also some guy who writes a web site about data centers.

A nice touch: author Vanderbilt itemizes the web services he uses, and all the data centers in different places that are storing or managing the data he relies upon every day. There’s also a slide show with photos from Microsoft’s Quincy, Washington data center (including the clearly marked EPO button) and the Savvis data center in Weehawken.

The Geography of Green Job Growth

Energy efficiency and “green” data centers are frequent topics here at Data Center Knowledge. A new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts presents an interesting snapshot of the clean energy economy, which Pew says grew nearly two and a half times faster than overall jobs between 1998 and 2007. The report includes a state-by-state breakdown of where the most green jobs are being created. Leading the way are California and Texas, which are also major data center markets.

“The clean energy economy is poised for explosive growth,” said Lori Grange of the Pew Center on the States. “These jobs are driving economic growth and environmental sustainability at a time when America needs both. There is a potential competitive advantage for federal and state policy leaders who act now to spur jobs, businesses and investments in the clean energy sector.”

Lightning Strike Triggers Amazon EC2 Outage

Some customers of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service were offline for more than four hours Wednesday night after an electrical storm damaged power equipment at one of the company’s data centers. The problems began at about 6:30 pm Pacific time, and most affected customers were back online by 11 p.m., according to Amazon’s status dashboard. The company said the outage was limited to customers in one of Amazon’s four availability zones in the U.S.

“A lightning storm caused damage to a single Power Distribution Unit (PDU) in a single Availability Zone, the company reported. “While most instances were unaffected, a set of racks does not currently have power, so the instances on those racks are down. We have technicians on site, and we are working to replace the affected PDU.”

EC2 previously experienced extended outages in February 2008 and October 2007.

HP Retools Cooling Management Solution

HP has repackaged its data center cooling management tool, hoping a new scaled-down version will resonate with a broader set of data center customers. The HP Data Center Environmental Edge solution combines wireless sensors and management software to give data center operators a visual overview of the temperature in their racks.

Environmental Edge is a stripped-down version of Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC), the flagship cooling management solution HP began selling in 2007. Like DSC, the new cooling solution is designed to provide precise management of air conditioning systems in response to changes in server temperatures. The system deploys sensors throughout the data center, which take regular readings and report the results back to HP’s Environmental Observer visualization software.