FOCUS NEWS DCD SEATTLE
Issue 16, June/July
NEWS FROM SEATTLE 2011 WRAPPING MINDS AROUND THE CLOUD
DatacenterDynamics continued to push the bar higher with its 2011 Seattle conference. Themes covered by the event’s program ranged from improving total cost of ownership by optimizing cooling systems through to cyber security in the age of cloud computing. Presentations were delivered by high-level technology executives from Microsoft, Citrix, Intel, Walt Disney and HP, among many others.
On the expo floor at DatacenterDynamics Seattle 2011
History seemed to make a comeback at this event. Simon Crosby, CTO of the big virtualization player Citrix, talked IT’s complete transformation to the present and its impact on the industry. Christian Belady, general manager for data center advanced development at Microsoft, gave his keynote audience a history lesson on the evolution of its data centers.
WHOEVER CAN BUILD CHEAPEST WINS
Belady shared some of his personal philosophy on what cloud computing means for the data center industry. He said he believes that whoever provides compute capacity at the lowest cost wins.
Microsoft has consistently evolved its approach to deploying data center capacity to lower cost, eventually arriving to the current fourth- generation modular data center design it calls ITPAC.
Belady said he expects the data center industry as a whole to shift in the same direction over the next five years, lowering the cost to build substantially. The elimination of electrical redundancy through shifting redundancy to the application layer; elimination of mechanical cooling through the emergence of servers that can operate in wider temperature
WHERE QUALITY SPACE IS IN HIGH DEMAND
The Seattle-area data center market is characterized by a large amount of wholesale powered-shell data center space and a shortage of built-out data center capacity.
Conan Lee, VP and head of the data center practice group for the Northwest region at Jones Lang LaSalle, said quality space in downtown Seattle is in especially short supply. The demand there is driven by colocation companies and end users that want to use their services.
“To have their racks and servers located in a colocation facility that’s downtown is very valuable to them,” Lee said. “And there’s just not a lot of quality data center space in downtown Seattle.”
The Westin building downtown – Seattle’s key carrier hotel and data center hub – is virtually at capacity. So is Fisher Plaza – another key hub in the city.
When capacity does become available downtown it usually does so in relatively small chunks. About 25,000 sq ft of white space recently became available because Isilon Systems is migrating its data center to the east coast.
Market dynamics for wholesale powered-shell space outside of Seattle could not be more different.
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ranges; and the integration of components from chip to utility will bring costs down.
CONSUMER-DRIVEN EVOLUTION IN ENTERPRISE IT
Citrix’s Crosby warned the audience that reaching the true enterprise cloud will be “tricky”. This is where users deploy capacity through on- premise clouds by themselves as needed, where the capacity is elastic and usage is metered.
One of the ways Citrix is helping this transition is by contributing to the OpenStack project – a collaboration of numerous technology companies, including the likes of Rackspace, Dell and Cisco – to develop an open- source cloud operating system.
Consumers are driving technological progress quicker than the enterprise, Crosby said. Consumer products, such as mobile devices, are much further along in terms of cloud adoption than enterprises are. He cited Gartner, saying consumerization will challenge IT more than any other trend over the next decade.
The region’s dominant player in this category is Sabey, with plenty of space and power available in eastern Washington. “Their deals mean something here in the market,” Lee said. “When they set prices, I’m sure, in one way or another, the competition responds.”
Other big players are Benaroya and Server Farm Realty, subsidiary of the Red Sea Group.
An interesting aspect of the Seattle market is a high volume of companies that own office space or industrial properties evaluating the possibility of converting that property into data center space. These are companies that often already have a data enter tenant in their building, so some infrastructure is already there and they are considering whether they should convert the rest of the building into data center space.
How quickly the big supply of wholesale space in the region gets absorbed and at what lease rates remains to be seen. The demand is there and Lee said he believes it will sustain into the near future because of the high concentration of high-tech companies in the area.
“We’re still not considered a first-tier city from the data center demand standpoint,” he said, explaining that the region is behind markets like Atlanta, Dallas or Chicago. So really, the question is: is data center demand going to continue here? And I would say that it certainly is.”
SEATTLE - 17 MAY 2011
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