Containers used to Build Starbucks Stores

Starbucks has more 20,000 stores worldwide, including 6 that are built from containers.

The first one is this one in Tukwila.

And, the latest is being built now.

New Starbucks drive through being dropped off in Ballard

New Starbucks drive through being dropped off in Ballard
By Jan 27, 2014

SEATTLE -- It's the pop-up of all pop-ups; a new Starbucks drive through being dropped off at the corner of NW 53rd St and 15th Ave NW. 

Full of dents from a career of moving goods across the globe, an oversized load crew and a crane operator lifted a 40-foot shipping container into place. The first of three containers to be delivered to this site, they will be fit together to create a new Starbucks drive through and walk up store in Ballard. 

Google's West and East Coast Floating Data Centers, taking a trip to South America?

CNET news reports on the 2nd spotting of Google’s Floating data center in Portland, Maine.

The registration on the Portland barge is "BAL 0011," which ties it to the barge in San Francisco Bay, which has the registration number "BAL 0010." Both are owned by By and Large, LLC.

(Credit: Tom Bell/Portland Press Herald)

If that wasn't enough to establish that the two are related, it's also clear that both were built on barges owned by the same company. The one in San Francisco Bay was built on top of a barge with the registration "BAL 0010," while the one in Portland harbor is on a barge with the registration "BAL 0011." According to online documents, both are owned by By and Large, LLC. That company, which has a miniscule online profile, is also the current tenant in Hangar 3, an immense building alongside the pier where the San Francisco Bay project is under construction.

With one in the SF Bay and the other in Portland that puts a Floating data center on each coast.  I wouldn’t think there is a plan to send these cross the Pacific and Atlantic.  Seems easier to build these in Taiwan or Amsterdam if you wanted them on the other side of the Ocean and minimize the risk of making a cross ocean excursion.

It will be interesting where these show up.  I would guess if the floating data centers move, they would move to South America to provide data center capacity like I wrote about earlier.

Do you know anyone who is line to buy IO IPO?

For years, when anyone asked me what I thought about IO Data Centers, I said the company is looking to be bought or go IPO.  Well now IO has filed a confidential S1 for IPO.   

Modular data center specialist IO files for IPO

by 

 

SEP. 24, 2013 - 10:56 AM PDT

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photo: IO
SUMMARY:

Modular data center manufacturer IO has filed a confidential S-1 form and plans to go public in the near future. The company has made a name for itself selling fully contained data centers that take up only 462 square feet of floor space.

I wonder how many of you are looking to buy the IPO shares and are putting your buy orders in.  Talking to my friends, we will be watching the IO stock to see if it flies, goes sideways, or ???  

Top 5 Modular Data Center Construction Companies

I have a post on the Top 5 Data Center Construction companies.  This post is a list of the Top 5 Modular Data Center Construction companies.  This list is based on conversations at conferences, bars, e-mail and phone calls and what companies come up.  If you don't already have these companies on your RFI list, you may now.

1. Dell Modula Data Center

The Smart Alternative to a Brick-and-Mortar Data Center: Dell MDC

Intelligent Connectivity and Flexibility: The Dell Modular Data Center
Take a look at the hyperefficient, snap-together, flexible choice over the traditional brick-and-mortar or pod-type data center: the Dell™ Modular Data Center (MDC) solution. Many key benefits make the Dell MDC a compelling alternative for your data center solution. Read a few of those benefits:
  • Speed: The Dell MDC can be designed, built, and up and running 75 percent faster than a traditional data center.
  • Efficient: Designed for hyperefficiency, the Dell MDC choice provides important advantages for flexible growth and cost reduction. When you choose an MDC from Dell, the Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) engineering team works hard to optimize your entire data center to reduce operational costs. Best of all, the MDC is modular, so you can add only the modules you need, incrementally, as you grow, without substantial up-front costs.
  • Flexible: Where the competition force fits IT into a rigid shipping container, we collaborate with customers like you to custom build your MDC.

2. HP POD (Performance Optimized Datacenters)

HP Data Center Solutions

HP Performance Optimized Data Centers (HP PODs) are a portfolio of breakthrough, modular data centers that help enterprises rapidly and efficiently expand data center capacity and meet increasing service level agreements. Compared to traditional brick-and-mortar data centers, HP PODs help you scale capacity on demand, reduce capital expenditures and increase energy efficiency.

Along with our complete portfolio of HP POD solutions, HP provides turnkey solutions that help customers deliver on their data center strategies saving time and maximizing performance.

3. Compass Data Centers

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Your mission critical applications are too important to be housed in the same data center with other customers in a data center located hundreds of miles from your operations team. A Compass dedicated data center is built for you alone to control your operational costs, enhance security, and simplify your day to day operations like moves, adds and changes; and it can be delivered within six (6) months of pad ready site. The benefits of a having a dedicated facility would be worthless if it wasn’t located where you needed it, and that’s why Compass will build your new data center exactly where you want it.

4. AST Modular 

AST Modular offers a range of fully integrated modular data centers which provide unmatched flexibility, resiliency, and energy efficiency. Our offering includes containerized ISO datacenters, NON ISO modular datacenters and datacenter modular rooms. The three systems offer a scalable method of quickly developing data centre capacity, require minimal work on site and can be operational in a fraction of the time it takes for a traditional build. -

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5. Commscope Data Center Solutions

Discover data center solutions that evolve with your needs

Data centers are at the center of everything a business does, and modern applications are demanding more and more of them than ever before. IT operations are struggling to meet demand, manage costs and maximize uptime in the face of several key challenges:

 

 

Ahh, now I get it Google uses Clusters the way others use Containers

Containers work if you want to have a unit of deployment with up to 2,000 servers.  Google used containers early on, but doesn't use them anymore.  Some of the biggest use of Containers is by Microsoft's data center group.  DCD covers Microsoft discussing how containers contain outages.

 “In the electrical and mechanical design of this data center, we considered each container as a discrete failure domain and modeled the availability of power and cooling with the expectation that maintenance events and unplanned outages would occur in the environment,” Gauthier writes. Failures would also be compartmentalized in a standard and predictable way.

I was looking at this presentation of Google's cluster system.  Note how the network and power topology is deployed to support a cluster.

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Mike Manos and I talked long time ago about how containers encapsulate compute, network, storage, power and cooling, but you can also encapsulate these principles if your data center uses the same principles to support a cluster of functionality.

Google achieves the same containment of power, cooling, compute, storage, and network as Microsoft does in a container, but without the physical container.

What is nice to see is that the SW team knows they have a big role in saving energy.

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