Since the announcement by Microsoft at AFCOM that they would be using containers like Rackable’s Ice Cube in their new data centers, much attention has been focused on the container-based set-up. Sun led the way with their Blackbox, and now Dell is releasing their own containerized data center.

But not everyone in the world of data centers think that these boxes are the cat’s meow. I asked Pete Sacco, President of PTS Data Center Solutions, Inc. for his thoughts. He referred me to his blog post on the topic, “Reflections on the Data Center in a Box”, and shared some additional comments:

Many data center-in-a-box providers only offer a homogenous data processing environment, which for most users won’t fly. Even those that are equipment neutral are available but have not sold well (e.g., APC’s Data Center on Wheels). The facility limitation of a data center-in-a-box hamper their adaptation. Access to sufficient power and chilled water (a heat rejection source) has always been, and will remain a primary cost driver of data center development. Therefore, the savings are not as dramatic as portrayed. Besides, due to form-factor and other attributes they are a lower availability solution than a traditional brick-and-mortar data center. In my opinion, their use will be limited to large enterprise and fringe applications at best.

Sacco succinctly points out the criticisms that were levied at Microsoft’s adoption of the concept in Computer World’s article. But beyond Sacco’s points about cost and flexibility, the CW article also picked at specific design flaws that some interviewees perceived existed. These were responded to in a thorough post from Mike Manos.

With Dell jumping into the pool with Sun, Rackable, and Verari, and IBM planning a container using it’s iDataPlex server, one must ask the question: Are all these companies making the right move? Competition is key to a market economy, but is market saturation going to occur? If the uptake on containerized systems isn’t going to be widespread, are these companies taking too big a risk in developing their own container systems?

Ron Hughes, President of California Data Center Design Group pointed out that the container approach is in fact, nothing new:

They’ve been making these for at least 10 years. Like everything else, they have their place. In the right setting, for the right client, they can be very useful and they work very well. We typically see them as either a short term solution until a data center can be built, or as a permanent solution if building a data center is not an option. The upside is speed to market, potentially energy efficiency and portability. The downside is cost and capacity.

I’m not convinced that it will be a widespread solution due to the high cost and limited server capacity. The solutions also vary as to whether they require separate infrastructure support systems or not. I haven’t seen any cost comparison to a standard data center, but for a medium to large application, I doubt that it is cost competitive. It will be interesting to see how these play out long term.

For an end-user company like Microsoft that is in need of large amounts of servers, the plug-and-play and interchangeability of the containers is attractive. But for other data centers, this solution may cost too much or be too large for their limited needs.

What do you think? Are containers here to stay — are we looking at the future of data center technology? Or is it just one tool in the toolbox?

This week I sat down with Microsoft’s Senior Director of Data Center services, Michael Manos at the 2008 Uptime Symposium to talk about Scry, the company’s data center analytics tool that they touted at AFCOM. According to Manos, this tool allows him to look at his data centers’ energy use, carbon footprint, power bill and more — all at an incredibly granular level. It also allows him to slice and dice data to make decisions, for example Microsoft can look at the energy consumption of an individual product like Hotmail. The program is especially slick in that it ties into Microsoft’s CMDB and assett management tools. Microsoft has been touting this tool at various conferences throughout the past few months, but it’s not likely to become a commercial product for other companies since so much of the tool was built around Microsoft’s specific homegrown internal software. But the main point of Manos’s data center road show is to prove to people that it can be done. Microsoft is measuring and improving its energy efficiency in the data center and Manos is not waiting for someone to hand down the perfect metric or the perfect tool. Check out the video below, where Manos outlines how he uses Scry and in the second video he talks you through a 3-D rendering of the new containerized data center being built in Chicago.

Terry Rodgers, an associate partner at data center consultancy Syska Hennessy, recently wrote to us regarding our story on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling. He said that CFD modeling is too expensive to be used by data center managers simply to tell them that they should be following best practices on reducing bypass airflow.

“Why pay tens of thousands of dollars to find out that yes, you should follow accepted best practices?” he wrote. “CFD is not necessary to identify and seal cable cutouts, holes in the data center perimeter, use blanking panels in racks, and remove perf tiles from the hot aisle.”

He added that CFD isn’t even necessary to finding hot spots in the data center. “Just walk around and check and take a temperature sensor with you.”

The better strategy, he argued, is to correct all of those airflow issues that you can, and then use CFD modeling to help you rearrange server cabinets, for example, or determine whether your air conditioning units are providing the airflow pressure that they should.

“Another use for CFD is to validate design strategies before proceeding with costly construction,” he wrote. “But to tell me to seal cable cutouts???”

We agree. A CFD analysis can cost a pretty penny and should be used primarily to pick up the more nuanced cooling issues in your data center, the ones not easily seen with the naked eye. When half of your floor tile is gone to get some cables through it, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist analyzing complex algorithms to determine that you’ve got to fill them up. Thanks to Rodgers for writing in.

Google seems to be everywhere. But where does the omnipresent company actually exist? This topic has gained a lot of attention lately from this Google Data Center FAQ to the subsequent map put together by the folks at Pingdom. But why is the location of the super-secret-yet-ubiquitous Google getting such a large amount of attention?

Google’s data centers have had a lot of attention around the country. In Oregon, initial secrecy surrounding the company’s development of The Dalles facility was an object of a lot of public discussion, which resulted in the facility earning the moniker of “Voldemort” (a reference to the fact that the Harry Potter series character is most commonly referred to as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and that local officials couldn’t say the “G” word while the facility was under construction). But Google let up a bit and put on a more public face in 2007, including a site tour by local reporters from The Dalles Chronicle. Google had changed its tune on keeping the activities on site “super secret” after a public backlash concerning the 15-year tax break the company received from the State of Oregon, and power consumption concerns. Indeed, the energy consumption of the company’s data centers has attracted national media attention, beyond IT-focused outlets. As the company has grown in power over the past ten years, it has increasingly attracted attention, first with its quirky dot-com work environments and employees (including Google bean-bag chairs that grace the Googleplex), to controversy over acceptance of Chinese government restrictions over search-engine deployment.

But the company hasn’t turned to total transparency with all of their locations, and thus, members of the IT community still get excited when they can learn one more “secret” about where the company actually exists.

So the question that’s nagging me is, what can everyone else learn from Google’s experience? Secrecy is good for business, but up until what point? I come to TechTarget with a background in journalism and public affairs, so this question is not unfamiliar to me. Many companies rely on keeping their activities and intellectual property secured, it’s common in business. But, is Google being too extreme? Do their data center facility locations really need to be kept on the “down-low”? And why do datacenter insiders care?

I asked this question to Robert Cringley, of I, Cringley. And he gave me some interesting insight into the big-picture as it were.

“Google wants a peering relationship with every broadband ISP of substance,” explained Cringley. So, by having data centers located in proximity to ISPs, the ISPs and end-users benefit through high-speed connections at low cost. However, the self-serving part is that this relationship makes everyone more dependant on Google for everything (storage, search, carriage, etc.). “It’s all aimed at the ultimate replacement by Google of current audio and video distribution networks. Look 5-10 years out. That’s why geographic distribution is so important, because they really need to have a copy of the Google data set one hop from every broadband ISP.”

What do you think?

Last year we wrote about the IT-facilities gap. What is it? A lack of communication between IT workers and facilities employees, which can often lead to mismatched timelines that cause a data center to run out of space and power while servers are still waiting on the loading dock.

Oftentimes it comes down to the refresh rate. The IT refresh rate is usually only a few years — that’s when servers start being replaced. In larger organizations, new servers are coming in all the time, sometimes dozens or hundreds every day. Meanwhile, it can take years to plan, permit and build a new data center facility. And so data center capacity planning becomes key.

According to a user survey this year by The Uptime Institute, relations between IT and facilities folks seem to be improving. More than 57% of respondents said communication between IT and facilities were good or excellent, a number that Institute founder and executive director Ken Brill didn’t foresee.

“These results paint a rosier than expected picture of IT/Facilities relations,” Brill wrote in a report on energy efficiency strategies. “It may be that businesses are being forced by the changing economics of the data center to forge more productive relationships between these departments.”

But what kind of data centers responded to this survey? About one-third had data center floor space exceeding 30,000 square feet. So many of them are large organizations that may be more advanced in their data center development. Where the IT-facilities gap probably exists just as strongly is in smaller companies where the facilities guy focuses on the entire company and all its office buildings, and not just the data center.

Brill realizes there is still a ways to go, writing that “it is clear a large number of organizations still need to build bridges between the Facilities and IT departments in order to approach data center energy consumption holistically.”

Windows in the data center should be avoided. During the summer they let in unwanted heat, and during the winter they let in unwanted cold. In all, they introduce an unaccounted for factor in temperature that could mess with regulating how cool the data center is.

Yet another reason for avoiding windows in the data centers is in the video below. You don’t want water leaking in, pouring under your raised floor (or just pouring into your non-raised floor), and destroying your IT equipment. That’s not to say they wouldn’t have had water problems if they didn’t have windows — it may have just ended up coming through the ceiling anyway. But it would probably would have been a lot less disastrous than this mess.

It’s one thing when you’re building a new data center to be worried about whether the gen-sets will get there on time, or whether the utility will be able to provide you enough power, or if you’ll get the go-ahead from the fire marshal that you need.

It’s quite another to be delayed because 150 feral cats are standing in the way.

That’s the story the Los Angeles Times had earlier this week. The county government was planning on tearing down an old, abandoned Downey, Calif. building that it owned to put up a new state-of-the-art data center complete with environmentally friendly features like a green roof and berms to handle storm runoff.

But the felines are deep in the middle of a defiant sit-in. And you know how cats are. They don’t listen very well.

As the story goes, construction on the building isn’t expected to start for at least another year. Still, when designing a new $68 million county data center, it’s never too early to start planning, especially when the planning involves displacing scores of feral cats.

“We’ve been back and forth with [the county] trying to find a resolution,” said Linda East (a feline lover who regularly feeds the feral cats). “We all know they have to be relocated. It’s just, where do you put so many cats?”

This could end up being a happy story for all. The county is working with the cat feeders to get them relocated, possibly to local barns where they can fight off the rat problems there. That would probably be a better spot for them than inside a tangled web of cables under the data center raised floor.

The photos were taken by Francine Orr at the L.A. Times.

San Diego, Calif.-based Verari Systems has joined Sun Microsystems and Rackable Systems, Inc. in the data center mobilization trend with its new Verari FOREST containerized data center.

These mobile data center offerings address the need for space and low cost power. Companies without room for more servers can buy one of these containers for less than it would cost to build a brick and mortar data center, fill it with servers and storage, and plop it down in an area where electricity costs are low - like an abandoned coal mine in Japan.

Case in point, Verari’s FOREST container can house up to 1400 blade-based compute servers or nearly 12 petabytes of blade-based storage using Verari’s new BladeRack 2 X-Series platforms in the modular unit.

Sun’s containerized data center, project BlackBox, is in a standard metal shipping container — 20 feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet tall — and can house about 250 single unit rack servers. Introduced in March 2007, Rackable Systems Inc.’s Concentro is a 40 foot by 8 foot shipping container that houses up to 1,200 of Rackable Systems’ rack-mount DC powered servers and up to 3.5 petabytes of storage. The company came out with a denser mobile data center called ICE cube in October. IBM came out with one, the Scalable Modular Data Center in July 2007.

Who first invented the idea of a mobile data center? Probably Google, which patented the containerized data center in October, and which reportedly has been using them for its own purposes since long before Sun or anyone else did. Whether the patent will cause issues for other vendors has yet to be seen, as no infringement suits have been filed yet.

But for all this activity, mobile data centers aren’t exactly selling like hotcakes; Sun announced its first customer in June 2007, and Rackable hasn’t disclosed any, other than saying they have some.

Should you use a drop ceiling in your data center design? It shrinks the amount of room you have for equipment, but it can also provide a return air plenum to help isolate hot and cold air. There is an interesting comment string on IT Knowledge Exchange, talking about the pros and cons of each approach.

Our data center design expert Bob McFarlane recommends a minimum data center ceiling height of 14 feet. But as you go higher, gas fire suppression systems become increasingly expensive.

If you do go with a drop ceiling, McFarlane recommends perforated metal pan tiles with high-density fiberglass insulation behind them, rather than standard office ceiling tiles.

What is your take on drop ceilings in the data center?

Upon hearing that the Google data center in The Dalles, Ore. will take up as much electricity as Tacoma, Wash., a colleague of mine said: “I’ve been to Tacoma, Google’s a better use for it.”

There has been some hand-wringing, both in trade journals and the mainstream press, over Google building data centers here and there and everywhere. Every time Google is rumored to be building a new facility in Oregon, or Iowa, or wherever, the blogs go aflutter. And now there are some, such as Ginger Strand at Harper’s, who question whether the Google construction-mania is such a good thing. The blueprint for The Dalles data center is shown above.

The title of Strand’s little article, “Google’s addiction to cheap electricity,” had some at Slashdot a little nonplussed. “News at 11,” one poster sarcastically wrote, and another agreed:

Well, yes, and it’s a strange point of view to say that a company is “addicted” to one of its inputs. One may as well say that Google is addicted to CPUS, or to buildings, or to fiber optic cables, or to people.

Google and others addicted to people? Not so much

It was that last bullet item that caught my eye, because from reading Strand’s article, it seemed like Google wasn’t addicted to people as much as previous employers. While Google is promising to bring 100-200 employees to the region around The Dalles, two former aluminum smelters in the area employed 1,100. Now don’t get me wrong. A job at Google is probably a lot nicer than a job smelting aluminum. But if you’re one of the 1,000 or so local residents that once worked at the aluminum smelter but couldn’t land a job at Google, that doesn’t mean much.

(As a quick aside, another poster said if you’re looking for cheap electricity, look for aluminum smelters. As a second aside, while Google is addicted to cheap electricity, I think I’m addicted to the word “smelt.”)

Give us our tax breaks or else

Well so what, right? If Google wants to build their data center on the banks of the Columbia, and they meet local and state building codes to do so, they can employ as many people as they want. This is true, but Google and others also come looking for other breaks.

We did a recent story about how central Washington has become a hot data center location, in part because of dirt-cheap electricity rates. Sabey Corp., a Seattle-based commercial development company specializing in data center construction and leasing, said it would be paying 1.85 cents per kilowatt hour. The average industrial electric rate in the U.S. was 6.37 cents per kilowatt hour in November, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Electric Power Monthly report.

Still, so what? If the electric utility is willing to grant them that bargain, they’re in their right to do that. But in addition, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a recent story saying that tech behemoths like Microsoft and Yahoo are on the verge of winning a $1 billion tax break from the state of Washington for building their data centers there. And they’re threatening to stop building in the state if they don’t get them. From the Post-Intelligencer story:

“States such as Iowa and others have come on board with very attractive tax incentive packages to get data centers to locate in their communities,” said DeLee Shoemaker, Microsoft’s state government affairs director. “These other states that are in tough economic times and are looking to attract new business and new investments … Washington state is no longer competitive for this type of business.”

Microsoft and Yahoo already have server farms in Eastern Washington and had planned to build more. But when the state Department of Revenue recently determined that the server farms aren’t eligible for an existing tax exemption for rural manufacturers, both companies halted new construction and began pushing for a new tax break.

Now there’s no doubt that the building of these facilities brings jobs and can help the local economy; according to the story, the “server farms generate many temporary construction jobs and a small number of full-time positions. They also reduce the tax burden on local communities by expanding the property tax base.”

At the same time, once the construction is done, you’re not going to have nearly as many permanent full-time jobs as you would if there was an aluminum smelter in town. In addition to that, Michael Mazerov of the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told the P-I that giving these companies millions of dollars in tax breaks could take funds away from education and economic improvement. Washington state Sen. Eric Oemig agreed:

“Right now we attract business because we have an excellent business climate,” Oemig said. “Part of doing business in the state is paying rent. These server farms kind of want to come in here and have a reduced rent and I fail to see what the extraordinary value is that they are creating for Washington state that we should discount their rent.”

So in the end, when all these data centers are built, there will still be plenty of people without full-time jobs. Some of them will be former aluminum smelters. Thankfully, though, they’ll have something to do, because the building of the data centers will help them to use search engines to more quickly see what Britney Spears is doing on a day-to-day basis, or who advanced in the latest round of American Idol.