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Here’s a cool new animation of VISI’s new Eden Prairie data center facility.
I attended the annual CIO Panel organized by the Minnesota High Tech Association this morning. The CIO Panel attracts CIO’s and technical leaders from a broad array of industries around the Twin Cities area. I had the opportunity to welcome the participants at the event because VISI was the official sponsor. During my speech we played a new 3-D animated video showing the key design elements of our new Tier III Eden Prairie, MN data center facility.
Later in the day I participated in a webinar sponsored by VISI and the Uptime Institute titled “Why Data Center Tiers Matter”. I learned some interesting facts about the Uptime Institute’s data center certification process that I hadn’t heard before. Did you know that there are currently less than 50 Tier III certified data centers in the world? And less than 6 Tier IV data centers?
VISI is the first service provider to build a certified Tier III data center in the state of Minnesota. We are not the first company to build a Tier III data center in the state. A few companies (Target, United Health Group) have built Tier III data centers for their own private use. But VISI’s data center was built for “public” consumption. If you are willing to pay the price you can now lease a slice of a Tier III data center in Minnesota.
Tier III data centers matter to businesses that have to be running 24×7 with almost zero downtime. These businesses can’t afford to shutdown their services for maintenance or facility upgrades. Tier III data centers are 2-3 times more expensive to build than Tier II facilities due to all the redundant infrastructure involved.
I’m participating on a podcast with the Minnov8 guys tomorrow morning… talking about our new Tier3 data center and possibly cloudy stuff.
Update: Here’s the podcast link
I was pretty excited to learn that the new VISI data center we are building in Eden Prairie, MN recently received Tier-3 Design Certification from the Uptime Institute. That’s a really big deal because to my knowledge no other commercial data center facility in this region has received a Tier-3 certification. Sure, there are a couple other data center providers who say their facilities meet Tier-3 requirements. But the fact is that none of their data centers have been independently audited. We spent a lot of time and effort to ensure our new facility would meet Tier-3 requirements. And we had the luxury (and capital) to build toward these requirements from day one.
Rackspace (RAX) announced the hiring of Andy Schroepfer today as its new VP of Strategy. Many people are familiar with Andy’s analyst work in the telecommunications and hosting space over the years. I got to know Andy several years ago when my young startup hosting company was selected to host the Tier1Research website. And this summer I had the opportunity to work closely with Andy fine tuning some of the strategic initiatives at VISI. Congrats to a great guy from Minnesota!
Full disclosure: I am a Rackspace shareholder.
Apparently officials in the UK discovered that one of their supercomputers used to model climate change is one of the worst contributors to “pollution” in the UK. First, you have to consider CO2 to be a pollutant in order to see the irony here. Second, environmentalist are aiming their sights on datacenters and cloud providers. Here’s the deal. Say we rolled back the clock and used people, lead pencils, paper, and slide rulers to perform these calculations. Also assume we have to feed, house, and transport these people. My guess is that the supercomputer and datacenter would come out far ahead in terms of CO2 contribution. That’s just a guess.
I keep thinking about VMware’s vCloud initiative. The idea seems pretty straightforward. Companies will build private clouds in their datacenters using VMware’s vSphere technologies. Those companies will then move applications into the cloud (vCloud Service Providers) when they need more capacity. Okay, I get that. But here’s the question. Why would those companies move their applications back? Why not just leave those applications running in the cloud? The cloud will provide cost savings and scale that only the largest enterprises could hope to achieve.
The cloud is a trojan horse for VMware. They must realize that a mass move to the cloud is inevitable. So their vCloud hybrid is just a step in that direction. When you think of it this way it makes sense why VMware would invest in a service provider like Terremark. They need service providers to start buying vSphere licenses because the license volume from enterprises will eventually dwindle. Right now VMware is getting killed in the cloud. For every cloud server running on VMware’s hypervisor there are probably a hundred others running on Xen or some other virtualization platform.
Here’s a bit of a departure from the clouds. My latest article was published today in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The article describes the security challenges facing employers that are laying off technology employees. I’ve worked with thousands of technology people over the years and the vast majority of them are decent ethical people. Every once in a while you encounter that bad apple. It’s just a fact of life in our business and probably every other business.
According to this article change management is a pretty interesting ride at Google.
Making changes to Google’s search infrastructure is akin to “changing the tires on a car while you’re going at 60 down the freeway.” –Urs Holzle, Google
Here’s a youtube video explaining Cisco’s new Unified Computing vision. Beware of the marketing-speak.
