I ran across this article on CIOInsight.com on the prediction that hardware spending will reach $99 billion this year. At 1102 GRAND we are definitely seeing evidence of this spending on a daily basis. We are watching customers moving gear into newly built out collocation rooms within our building, as well as existing customers adding new or upgrading existing equipment. The growth appears to span many different verticals, but web hosting, managed IT service companies, healthcare IT and call centers are definitely the front-runners this year at 1102 GRAND.

Gartner: Data Center Hardware Spending to Hit $99B in 2011

Who says the future of IT is all in software? All software has to run on some sort of processor, physical or virtual, and all those have to run on something you can see and touch. And with the continuing deluge of data pouring into servers and storage arrays, there is no shortage of processors happening anytime soon.

Thus, IT hardware sales are going nowhere but up and to the right. Gartner has some new numbers that back up this trend.

The industry researcher is projecting that worldwide data center hardware spending will reach $98.9 billion by the end of calendar year 2011, up 12.7 percent from $87.8 billion in 2010, according to a report it published Oct. 13. Data center hardware spending is forecast to total $106.4 billion in 2012 and surpass $126.2 billion in 2015.

Data center hardware spending includes servers, storage and enterprise data center networking equipment.

Back to Pre-Downturn Levels
“Worldwide data center hardware spending will finally reach and surpass 2008 levels,” said Jon Hardcastle, research director at Gartner. “Growth in emerging regions particularly Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries) is balanced by continued weakness relative to pre-downturn levels in Japan and Western Europe.”

Storage is the main driver for growth, Hardcastle said. “Although only a quarter of data center hardware spending is on storage, almost half of the growth in spending will be from the storage market,” he said.

READ MORE

Thank you to all the golfers, sponsors and Deer Creek Golf Club for another successful golf tournament and IT networking event. The competition was fierce yet friendly and great connections were made.

Congratulations to the winners:
1st Place- Bluebird Network: Mike Brigman, Steve Crane, Don Gehringer and Scott Brown
2nd Place- K&W Underground: Rex Schick, Bill Reidy, Scott Plumb and Dwight Davis
3rd Place- Gary Kapperman, George Porta, Wayne Walker and Connie Walker

Longest Drive- Wayne Walker
Longest Putt- Bill Reidy
Closest to the Pin- DJ Good

Thank you again to our tournament sponsors: Rockefeller Group Technology Solutions (RGTS), K&W Underground, Stanger Industries, Lantel, Time Warner Business Class, KNK Telecom, Westhues Electric, Boulevard Brewery, Clayman Promotions, and Centriq IT Training. We couldn’t have done it without your generosity!

There are have recently been numerous changes in the federal government, including Steven VanRoekel being named the new chief information officer. In the midst of those changes the federal government has decided to make data center consolidation, cloud and security the main focus of its information technology spending. Here is an article from itworld.com about the government’s IT spending decision.

Report: Fed IT spending to focus on cloud, data center consolidation, security

Federal IT spending will be sluggish over the next five years, with the exception of spending on some emerging technologies, a new research report predicts.

“Federal Information Technology Market, 2011-2016”, by enterprise software vendor Deltek predicts “moderate growth in a limited number of high-priority areas,” with overall federal IT expenditures expected to grow less than 2 percent annually through 2016.

Deltek predicts “demand for vendor-furnished information systems and services by the U.S. government” will go to $91.3 billion in 2016 from $84.1 billion this year, an annual growth rate of just 1.7 percent.

Deniece Peterson, Deltek’s senior manager of federal industry analysis and co-author of the report, said, “While the administration is still focused on key cost-saving measures such as cloud computing and data center consolidation, agencies will be under pressure to execute those plans under strict budgets. This means opportunities may be rescoped or restructured as agencies struggle with funding and managing these projects.”

READ MORE

Event Date & Location:
Technology Entrepreneur Speaker Series: Crossing the Clean Technology Chasm
August 16th from 5:30-7:00 p.m.
Polsinelli Shughart P.C.
Kansas City, MO
$25 Advance Registration, $30 On-Site Registration

Hear from Patrick J. Piper of QM Power and learn more about managing the risks in an early stage Clean Technology venture. P.J. will share examples from his own background and those of other clean technology entrepreneurs.

Attendees will learn about:
•Leveraging Government contracts for commercial success
•The pros and cons of venture capital
•Commercial and academic partnering
•Building your team
•The outlook for clean technologies and alternative energy

Register Now!

EVENT DATE & LOCATION:

Smart Communications Summit 2011
7:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Kansas City Convention Center
Kansas City, MO

SKC Communications invites IT and technology professionals to a day of show-and-tell and networking with top experts in the Collaboration of Unified Communications industry including Cisco, Polycom, Microsoft, Plantronics and Avaya. Come see how you can make your business work smarter. This event is complimentary, but registration is required. Please register at SKCcom.com/TechSummit

1102 GRAND would like to congratulate Kansas City, Mo. for being selected “to collaborate with Google on the deployment of Google’s one-gigabit-per-second, ultra-high speed, fiber-to-the-home broadband network.” 1102 GRAND is extremely excited about Google’s extended investment in the Kansas City area.

According to an article from kcmonitor.com, “As the second city to be selected for this initiative, Kansas City, Mo., joins its sister city, Kansas City, Kan., in a regional partnership that will help to ensure our communities’ shared success.

Read More

Kansas City (MO, USA) carrier hotel 1102 GRAND announced that it had “recently implemented Kansas City Power & Light’s (KCP&L’s) Custom Rebate Retrofit Program and projects a Wattage reduction of 53 percent just in time for Earth Day 2011.” 1102 Grand principal Darren Bonawitz emailed these lessons learned. “In our experience, it is always easier to cost justify implementing large scale infrastructure replacements with more eco-friendly options when expanding or replacing equipment at the end of its life cycle. Those projects do not happen every month or year even. In between, commercial companies can take advantage of programs to complete smaller projects that still provide incremental energy savings. A series of smaller projects are often easier to implement and the sum of their energy reduction can be just as significant as a single large scale retrofit.”

Read More

Vantage, 1102 GRAND Showcased Green Data Centers for Earth Day

To celebrate last Friday’s Earth Day, Rosendin Electric and Vantage Data Centers (www.vantagedatacenters.com) held the Smart Data Center Revolution, providing a tour of Vantage’s new energy-efficient data center campus.

First announced last month, the event included a tour of the first of three data center buildings, presentations by David Gottfried, founder of the US Green Building Council, Fujitsu, GE Intelligent Platforms, Symantec, and VMware.

Electrical contractor Rosendin Electric has been working closely with Vantage Data Centers on the design and buildthe electrical systems for the $300 million, 18-acre data center campus.

The first 60,000-square-foot building was completed at the start of 2011 after five months of construction, while the other two buildings are set for completion later this year.

The facility is the largest LEED Platinum candidate data center project in the United States.

Once completed, the campus will have 195,000 square feet of data center space.

As part of the electrical design/build, Rosendin Electric has incorporated a number of features to conserve energy and promote greater efficiency.

In another Earth Day-related announcement, Kansas City carrier hotel 1102 GRAND recently implemented Kansas City Power & Light’s Custom Rebate Retrofit Program, resulting in a Wattage reduction of 53 percent.

1102 GRAND is a Midwestern carrier hotel and network neutral colocation facility that hosts and provides services to a range of global network operators including carriers, service providers and enterprise customer.

Darren Bonawitz, principal of 1102 GRAND, said that this project was a retrofit of existing lighting in strategic areas of the 1102 GRAND building.

The data center offers a wide range of colocation options including cabinets, cage space, suites and space for private data centers, all of which are connected to a carrier neutral Meet Me Room, housing nearly 30 carriers and service providers.

Read More

Thank you, Barbara Vergetis Lundin, writer for fierceenergy.com, for interviewing Darren Bonawitz, principal of 1102 GRAND, regarding 1102 GRAND’s press release about their participation in Kansas City Power and Light’s (KCP&L) Custom Rebate Retrofit Program.

KCP&L Custom Rebate Retrofit Program saves hotel 53%

After recently implementing Kansas City Power & Light’s (KCP&L) Custom Rebate Retrofit Program, 1102 GRAND, Kansas City’s Carrier Hotel, is projecting a 53 percent savings in wattage reduction through simple, readily available T8 lighting technology.

“In our experience, it is always easier to cost justify implementing large scale infrastructure replacements with more eco-friendly options when expanding or replacing equipment at the end of its life cycle. Those projects do not happen every month or year even,” said Darren Bonawitz, principal of 1102 GRAND, in an interview. “In between, commercial companies can take advantage of programs to complete smaller projects that still provide incremental energy savings. A series of smaller projects are often easier to implement and the sum of their energy reduction can be just as significant as a single large scale retrofit.”

While programs such as the one 1102 GRAND utilized require utilities to invest time and financial resources, commercial customers are willing to partner in order to make environmentally sound decisions.

“Commercial customers have an interest in making eco-friendly decisions when the cost can be justified,” said Bonawitz. “In addition, if programs are structured in a manner that reduces the time and effort on the customer side, companies are more likely to take advantage of available incentives.”

Read More