Archive for June, 2008

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2220339/fujitsu-opens-44-million-centre

Fujitsu has opened a £44m energy-efficient data centre in the UK which it says will contribute towards saving enough electricity each year to power up to 6,000 homes.

The centre was announced last August and is designed to address the shortage of data storage in London.

Located 35 miles from the capital, the site will serve customers in the UK and Europe, giving them increased capacity without the need to build their own facilities.

“Fujitsu’s new data centre combines high resilience and high efficiency, which is difficult to achieve,” said Martin Provoost, head of data centres at Fujitsu Services.

“Attaining high resilience requires more redundant infrastructure, which in turn consumes more energy.

“However, through new technology, Fujitsu’s data centre achieves the optimum resilience level and a leading efficiency rating.”

Very cool, the demand for data center space continues in the London area in particular, whether it’s new capacity for a grid/virtualization solution or a disaster recovery or additional business capacity will depend on your business. An interesting read, it’s always interesting to see what best practices, what technologies are being used to achieve the power/cooling requirements, do check it out.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/governmentFilingsNews/idUKN2630634220080626 

BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it started selling its new server virtualization software about six weeks ahead of schedule, putting pressure on market leader VMware Inc.

Server virtualization software allows one machine to perform the work of multiple servers, letting companies save money on equipment, electricity, maintenance and other costs.

Microsoft says it charges $28 per server for its software, dubbed Hyper-V, which was put up on its website for download on Thursday. The company previously said it would make the product available in August.

VMware said it charges $495 for the most comparable software in its product line, which is known as ESXi.

I’m genuinely excited about Hyper-V, it does look very cool. Oh there will be those that have an alternative view, but let’s abstract ourselves from any emotional statements and welcome another vendor into the virtualization market, recognize the value of another viewpoint, another solution for the end user, and the furthering of the business processes, the technology and the platform. That one product has functionality over the other, that one product is more innovative than the other (regardless of your personal viewpoint), can only encourage further investment, innovation and integration of the platform which has to be a good thing. Understanding that there might not be one virtualization platform for an organization, for a business line, that we might use one platform for one project, one use, and another platform for another, that what matters is the functionality, the benefit for the end user, everything else is just noise.

I’ve been interviewing a few people over the last few days and I’ll be publishing the interviews tomorrow. One of the interviews is with Mike, a senior data center manager and consultant. Mike was telling me what he’s doing to minimize the impact of rising energy costs on the operational costs of his data centers for this multinational organization, and what steps he is taking within the data center, the server estate and the business to reduce their energy consumption. It’s interesting the small changes they have made to gain quantifiable results, do check it out.

http://www.broad-group.com

London, 22 June 2008 – A new report from consulting company and data centre market specialist BroadGroup finds that the India market is experiencing substantial growth and will reach more than USD1.5 billion in value by 2010. Yet power supply remains a critical challenge for the country.
Based on a study detailing the profiles of 34 players, the study reveals that while growth is occurring at unprecedented levels, challenges remain particularly those relating to infrastructure, power – and the quality of power –and land availability.
Technical space will nevertheless more than double over the next two years. Fuelled by offshoring, overseas MNCs, and domestic demand, data centres in India have experienced significant growth over recent years, and as the survey reveals, new build and plans for new build are well advanced producing a spike in space that will more than double current capacity.
The core of the report details profiles of 34 players in India, both overseas and domestic, and the report examines current availability, location and expansion plans. The scale and capacity of the international ambitions of the top five players is supported by significant and growing demand from the local market. Although Global MNCs are becoming selective about the robustness of power supply, security and green credentials, overseas systems integrators and consultancies are sustaining and expanding their investments in India.

Check out this article talking about the demand for data centers in India, as we connect more consumers, more markets, the infrastructure needs to be brought online to host these users from telecoms, to rich media content, online storage/rich media, how we manage the demand for data center space and at the same time, costs against availability will be the challenge. Do we need to have separate infrastructure for separate applications, business lines, could we find we have the tier’d data center - development, staging and production data centers? Where we have different levels of availability of service uptime dependent on the business need/application resilience.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/061808-hp-vmware-manage-virtual-servers.html?hpg1=bn

LAS VEGAS — HP Wednesday announced an expanded partnership with VMware to jointly develop software to manage VMware hypervisor technology.

While HP today offers base-level capabilities to manage VMware environments, company officials explained going forward the partnership will enable HP to instrument its management and automation software to tackle performance, configuration and availability on VMware servers. The announcement was made at HP’s Technology Forum & Expo and Software Universe conferences in Las Vegas.

Very cool, anything HP and VMWare can do to improve management of the virtual platform has to be a good thing, it will be interesting to see what products, best practice and solutions result from this joint partnership, do check it out.