I want to provide some insight on why Kansas City is a good place to establish a data center or collocation presence.

• Second most affordable major market for data centers (Source: The Boyd Company)
• Geographically centered in the United States
• Located away from the coasts and hurricane threats
• Located outside of high risk earthquake zones
• Reliable and cost-effective electric utilities
• Highly educated talent pool
• Active technology community
• Robust telecommunications infrastructure
• Very competitive economic incentive programs
• Entreprenuer magazine named Kansas City the #1 place to start and grow a business in the Midwest

I want to share this article from whir.com written by Justin Lee about IBM’s data center on display at Disney’s Epcot Center. It appears data centers are going mainstream, they are not just for nerds anymore.

IBM Data Center Shown at Disney’s Epcot Center

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — An energy-efficient data center is currently on display at Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World, as part of IBM’s SmarterPlanet (www.ibm.com/smarterplanet) exhibit, according to a report by Data Center Knowledge.

The attraction is intended to give visitors a greater understanding of the increasing role technology plays in their daily lives, helping to tackle challenges such as reducing traffic and crime, and improving food safety and local water supplies.

(read more)

Here is an article I want to share from Web Hosting Industry Review written by Justin Lee about Facebook beginning construction of its own data centers.

FaceBook Begins Constructing Data Centers

UPDATE: Facebook confirmed via its blog that it has broken ground on a 117,000 square foot data center in Prineville.

By: Darren Bonawitz

Hi. This is Darren Bonawitz again, with 1102 GRAND. I’m one of the owners of the facility. For those of you not familiar with 1102 GRAND, we are one of the Midwest’s major Internet hubs and co-location facilities. This series of podcasts talks about different industry trends and topics that I find interesting as I stay up on the news and discussion with people in the industry.

Today I want to talk about what I call “low-power consumption and high heat servers.” These are the servers that are coming out that use less power and cooling in a data center.  Generally, the ones I’ve been seeing are based on AMD’s Opteron and Intel’s Atom Processor lines. The reason I want to talk about them today is because I think they are a solid first step, as data centers are looking for ways to cut their carbon-footprint, or become more energy efficient. In the past, the metric that really mattered in the “server world,” was Total Processing Power. No matter what, that’s seemed to matter.  Every new series of servers that came out really had to deal with how much processing-power it had, but if you look, especially as things with personalization evolved, one of the things that makes virtualization so interesting is that CPU usage on the server is generally low. So, what I think is interesting with these processors is that they are still powerful processors that use lower power, but at the same time, they’re going at it from a different angle. Really, what they are trying to do is figure out a way to increase performance per watt of power used. So, I think it’s really something that’s really relevant in today’s world, with “green” being such a big topic in datacenters. The thing I wanted to make people know is that while these servers are a great first step, just keep in mind that there is not going to be a single “silver bullet” that’s going to solve the issue of controlling heat in the datacenter. With that said, processor temperatures are definitely one of the big targets, and they are certainly one of the major culprits of the heat-generation. This is a solid first step. There are also new technologies that may be more “liable.” I guess that is what I would call it. That has to do with technologies that I would call “fail-in-place servers.” I’m not going to go into that today, but if you have time, go on and Google it. Check “fail-in-place server platform,” and read-up, and that’s something that I’ll be doing in the meantime as well, and we’ll be talking about how to do this. See when it makes sense and when it doesn’t make sense to use these servers.

The one thing that comes to mind for me today are legacy-datacenters that don’t have the ability to handle high-density heat loads. These servers, because of their cost and their price-point, make it so you can actually divide these servers and span them across the series of cabinets, and spread your heat-load and prevent heat-spots. I think that’s definitely something that folks that are battling cooling issues, but still have some floor space, can use as a possible avenue to combat this. If you have other ideas, or if you’ve been using these servers and could give some feedback, please let us know. As always, we welcome your feedback and future ideas for topics to discuss at podcast@1102Grand.com Thanks a lot, and have a good day.

Earlier this month, I was featured in an article by pacificra.com about five things to know about data center temperature.  I really appreciate the feature.  Here is a link to the article.

5 Things To Know About Data Center Temperature

Temperature is a critical factor in the modern data center, and it is only becoming more so. Increased processor speeds, smaller server form factors, and higher server rack densities have all contributed to tremendous challenges for data center administrators in the areas of cooling and air movement.

These physical challenges, and management’s mandate to maintain asset availability at all times, means data center administrators must strive to make environmental factors such as temperature and humidity priority No. 1.

But how can data center administrators start making the right decisions in terms of temperature and humidity? Where should the appropriate limits be set? What technologies are available to tackle these issues?

(read more)

Here’s an announcement that should prove beneficial to all parties involved by putting together two forward thinking groups that will hopefully serve as an example of how collaboration breeds progress. The Green Grid is working towards increased data center efficiency along with standardized measurements that are adopted by the industry, and Data Center Pulse is the industry’s users. In less than a year and a half, Data Center Pulse has done an amazing job of pulling together data center professionals who influence decisions within data centers and trends in the industry as a whole. They work hard to enforce their “no vendor” rule which helps keep discussions as unbiased as possible so people interact without hidden agendas, and they clearly understand the value of peers helping peers and shaping an industry together.  Here is the article written by Justin Lee form Web Host Industry Review.

Data Center Pulse Partners with The Green Grid

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Data Center Pulse (http://datacenterpulse.org) announced on Friday it has entered into an agreement with The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org) to further enhance its ability to influence the industry via collaboration on data center challenges.
The Green Grid is an international organization of IT companies that work toward advancing energy efficiency for data centers and business computing systems, with over 175 members.
Data Center Pulse is a global end user community of data center owners and operators focused on impacting the industry through the customer’s perspective, with 1350 members.

(read more)

By Darren Bonawitz

Hi this is Darren Bonawitz co-owner with 1102 GRAND Kansas City, Midwestern Internet hub and collocation facility, welcome back to another series on our podcast talking about trends and things that were seeing going on from a higher level within our industry. One of the things I have been following had to do with U.S. lawmakers and their talking about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, enacted in 2002, and it is coming under review. Right now there’s a lot of discussion and a lot of heated information going back and forth between both sides of the folks that want to leave it as is and the folks that really want to see some changes. So I just wanted to talk through it because this is something that can be important to public data centers as well as our collocation customers that are in these data centers.

By Greg Elliott

By Greg Elliott

By Darren Bonawitz

Hi, this is Darren Bonawitz, I am one of the co-owners of 1102 GRAND in Kansas City, were one of the Midwest major Internet hubs and colocation facilities, and were starting a series of podcast that I will be hosting covering high level trends and things going on in the industry.

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