My Friends build Data Centers, AWS's friends don't?

My friends like to build data centers.  Some are building a lot.  Thanks to Amazon, there is a view that “Friends don’t let Friends build Data Centers."

 “Friends don’t let friends build data centers,” Infor CEO Charles Phillips said in his presentation during the keynote.

My friends like building data centers.  And many of the partners of AWS’s Direct Connect build data centers.  Building data centers is not bad if you know what you are doing.   I thinkI would say “Friends don’t let the clueless build data centers.”  Some people shouldn’t build data centers.  Leave data centers to the pros.

US East (Virginia)	US West (N. California)	US West (Oregon)	EU West (Ireland)	South America (Sao Paulo)	Asia Pacific (Singapore)	Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	Asia Pacific (Sydney)
AAPT								✔
Amcom								✔
Atlantic Metro Communications	✔	✔	✔
Bestel	✔	✔
CFN Services	✔	✔		✔	✔	✔	✔
Cinenet								✔
CoreSite	✔	✔
Datapipe	✔	✔	✔	✔		✔
DBR360	✔	✔		✔
eircom Ltd.				✔
Exponential-e Ltd.				✔
Equinix, Inc.	✔	✔	✔	✔		✔	✔	✔
EUNetworks				✔
FiberLight	✔
Fiber Internet Center		✔
First Communications	✔
Global Capacity	✔	✔
Global Telecom & Technology, Inc. (GTT)	✔	✔	✔
Hibernia Atlantic	✔			✔		✔
InterCloud	✔			✔
IX Reach	✔	✔	✔	✔
KVH Co., Ltd.							✔
Level 3 Communications, Inc.	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Lightower	✔
Masergy	✔	✔	✔
Megaport								✔
Nomura Research Institute (NRI)							✔
NTT Communications Corporation							✔
Pacnet								✔
Smart421				✔
Softbank Telecom Corp.							✔
Splice Communications	✔	✔
TelecityGroup				✔
Telx	✔	✔
tw telecom	✔	✔	✔
Venus				✔
Vibe								✔
Vocus								✔
XO Communications	✔	✔	✔
Zayo Group	✔	✔	✔	✔

Are More Companies coming in the Data Center Operations Outsourced space?

The Economist has a post on how Facility Operations companies are attempting to expand beyond their current markets.  This market is huge.

Facilities management

Service elevators

Big outsourcing firms find that escaping the crowd is not so easy

Mar 15th 2014 | PARIS | From the print edition

IT IS a sprawling, unseen, unglamorous industry that is hard to define and harder still to measure. Outsourced facilities-management firms clean offices, guard premises, feed students, manage heating and lighting, move prisoners from cell to workshop, and so on, for customers who prefer to focus on their core activities.

Employing millions, outsourcing firms have combined revenues that some put as high as $1 trillion a year. The market is most established in Europe and North America, though it is on the rise in Asia too (see chart). Now the structure of the business is changing, as firms that used to specialise in one sort of outsourced service increasingly aim to be all things to all men, and trip over each other in the process.

One company that caught my eye is Sodexo because a friend works in the food service business andI was curious if their company does any work in data centers.

ISS’s larger main rival, Sodexo, sees the market in much the same light. The family-controlled French firm was originally known for running canteens in offices, hospitals and schools, diversifying into lucrative luncheon vouchers and employee benefits. It grew big in the 1980s as more businesses joined the outsourcing trend and bigger still when governments, beginning with Britain’s, started setting up public-private partnerships to build and run facilities. When “soft” services like catering and cleaning showed signs of becoming commodities, Sodexo expanded into “hard” services such as building maintenance and energy management. Acquisitions came thick and fast, helping Sodexo increase its foreign operations too.

Digging a bit I found there are 24 data centers the company lists, but I don’t know of any of data center friends who use Sodexo.

Many more friends have been switching to Norland Managed Services.

Capitol One Data Centers follow the pattern of the Innovators, 8 locations consolidated into 3

Capitol One had a data center event not unlike a Google Data Center event.  The local press covered the event in Richmond, VA.  How does this look like Google.  The VA governor and Capitol One CEO are at a data center event.  

Daniel Sangjib Min

Capital One founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, Richard Fairbank, left, and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, right, connect symbolic cables with the help of Brian Cobb, center, managing vice president of Capital One, during a grand opening ceremony of Capital One's new data center in Chesterfield County on Wednesday, March 12, 2014.

5 years ago you would never see an event like this.  Now you see data center openings as PR events.

Operations had already started there. But on Wednesday, the McLean-based company held a ceremony to serve as symbolic opening for the center, located in a highly secured facility surrounded by a wooded area and tall, reinforced fencing.

The security is important because the Meadowville site is one of Capital One’s three primary data centers where the company stores and manages vast amounts of information produced by its business providing financial services to roughly 65 million customers.

The other pattern Capitol One has followed used by Google, eBay and others for high availability is three main data centers.

Capital One is consolidating operations at its eight data centers that it has been operating because of numerous recent acquisitions of other banks and credit card providers.

The data operations are being consolidated into three centers — the one in Chesterfield, one in Henrico County, and one near Chicago.

The latency to the customers isn’t as important as the latency between the data centers. The data centers are all located East of Mississippi.

And just like other efficient data center operators the headcount is low.

The center has about 50 employees now, but the company expects it will employ more than 100 eventually.

Lean Construction Keynote Video by 2 Second Lean's Paul Akers

I was chatting with Compass Data Center’s Chris Crosby about Lean Construction and we were having a good laugh that the media makes it seem like Lean Construction is something new because Facebook and a few others have seen the light of Lean Construction.  Lean vs. Waste - Simple vs. Complicated.  Chris mentioned the 2 Second Lean book and I went to the website.  The company FastCap which 2 Second Lean’s Paul Akers founded is in Bellingham, WA the same city that my Woodstone Oven is made.

A local friend who works in the construction is active in Lean Construction and I saw that a conference he went to has Paul Akers Keynoting.  Below is his talk at the conference.

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Some notes I took from the video are:

Paul believes in videos to illustrate points.  Check out this F1 pit stop.

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Lean is a choice of being Simple vs. Complicated.  Simple & Fun vs. Complicated & Painful.  Most places of work are complicated & painful because management doesn’t believe in being Lean.

Lean is simply to see waste and to focus on the teaching and training of the people to eliminate waste.  This supports more quality and more value which is good for the customer and good for the business.

Paul tells the story of how he thought the answer was to be organized, but he was clueless  compared to the Toyota Production System, Lean Manufacturing, and Kaizen.  Now Paul is a speaker and author on the concept of Lean.

Lean Construction is not new.  There are probably at least 50% of the construction industry who don’t get Lean.  It is a simpler less wasteful way to do work.  Lean is greener and more sustainable.  But, many think a Lean Construction project is innovative.  No it is not innovative.  It is about time.

Facebook figures out the way to bring down Data Center Cost is Lean

The idea of Lean started in Manufacturing and has spread through construction.  Now Facebook has chosen to build its 7th data center with Lean Construction techniques.

Faster, Leaner, Smarter, Better Data Centers

Friday, March 07, 2014 · Posted by Marco Magarelli at 1:30 AM

Four years ago, Facebook broke ground on its first greenfield data center project in Prineville, Oregon. In the years since, we’ve deployed six iterations of that design, culminating in the first building currently under construction at our new campus in Altoona, Iowa. With facilities around the world, we constantly challenge ourselves to improve our data center designs to maximize efficiency, reduce material use, and speed up build times.

At this year’s Open Compute Summit, we previewed what we believe will be a step change in those ongoing efficiency efforts: a new “rapid deployment data center” (RDDC) concept that takes modular and lean construction principles and applies them at the scale of a Facebook data center.

We expect this new approach to data center design will enable us to construct and deploy new capacity twice as fast as our previous approach. We also believe it will prove to be much more site-agnostic and will greatly reduce the amount of material used in the construction. And with today’s exciting news from my colleague Joel Kjellgren, we will get to test these theses: Our newly announced second building at our Luleå, Sweden, campus will be the first Facebook data center to be built to our RDDC design.

If you want to watch a video that shows the presentation you can go to this one. http://youtu.be/yu8jin33G64?t=21m50s

I found this information thanks to GigaOm’s Derrick Harris who was at the Open Compute Summit.

The first method Facebook is employing, called the “chassis approach,” is actually more similar to an automobile assembly line, where the chassis is built separately and then built upon from there. In Facebook’s case, the chassis is a 12-foot by 40-foot unit that will sit above rows of racks and house lighting, cable trays, and everything else that typically goes above a row of servers. Facebook data center engineer Marco Magarelli wrote in the blog post detailing the new methods that the company chose the chassis approach over standard containers “to avoid shipping the empty space that will eventually be occupied by the racks.”

How a chassis is built and delivered. Source: Facebook

Sample instructions for putting together the pieces in the flat pack. Source: Facebook