When USA Today starts talking about data centers, the sector has hit the big time. The USA today ran a piece about the secret rooms that run the Internet. You'd think they were talking about the NSA rooms that read every single piece of email.
QTS Atlanta Metro Data Center is the second largest data center in the world with 990,000 square feet of total space (of which 300k sf is raised floor space) and its own on-site Georgia Power substation.
There is a lot of talk about green when it comes to data centers. (See this article about dirty data centers in InfoTech mag.) As data center space grows, so too does power consumption. I got to speak with Tom Burns of Greenhouse Data in Cheyenne, Wyoming, "the planet's greenest data center". Greenhouse offers managed hosting, vCloud, virtualization,and collocation, utilizing "40% less energy than its traditional data center competitors -- all while being powered 100% through renewable wind energy." Burns explained that the data center space will soon have a larger carbon footprint than airlines. That might be true but the two industries are inversely growing - data centers are increasing due to the unlimited hunger for data and apps while airlines are cutting routes and flights to stay as close to profitable as they can get.
Data centers consume power twice: once for all the hardware housed in racks throughout the space and again to power the air conditioning to cool that same space that is heated by the hardware housed there. See that cycle? Power is the limiting factor for most data centers (not space). Greenhouse Data does a few things here differently. One, they re-use the heat to warm up office space. Two, some utlity equipment is outside the building; thus not adding to the heat inside the building. Lastly, they design the hot and cold racks more efficiently to contain the heat and send it above the drop ceiling for re-use.
When we talk about data centers, it's location, location, location. Most colo customers want to be within 4 hours drive of their colo space. There are about 7000 data centers in America. How do you differentiate? Greenhouse Data uses its green initiative as its brand. What do you use?
PS Energy efficiency means more margin, too.
BTW, COLOTRAQ, the foremost global sourcing advisory firm and master agency for colocation, managed services and cloud computing, proudly announces successfully completing its one thousandth project. This milestone brings the total value of business that COLOTRAQ has brought to the industry to more than 45 million dollars in annually recurring revenue. Congrats!
From Brad Feld: "StillSecure has been nailing it in the service provider segment with deals with XO, ViaWest, CoreSite, and others recently. StillSecure fundamentally believes that service providers - telcos, datacenter, cloud providers - will be the channel to market for security solutions and I agree. They have built an amazing set of solutions for colocation and dedicated server environments and have solutions that can apply to some higher-end cloud users. Today they are announcing a new host-based firewall management solution in conjunction with SoftLayer - a leader in the cloud market. Aimed at all cloud users, StillSecure's new solution is the start of a major initiative for the company and is also a new category of solutions."
One last tidbit: Datapipe launched PCI Certified Cloud.
