Terremark and Navisite’s acquisition is part of the M&A momentum in data centers.  Mergers typically reduce costs and reduce overlap between organizations to provide services which is a good way to green a data center.  Reducing the amount of data center assets you need.

Latest to join are stock exchanges. Here are some articles discussing the changes.

LSE and TMX.

LSE and TMX deal inevitable

By Philip Stafford and Jeremy Grant

The limelight may have rapidly moved to the US and Germany but those behind the merger of the London Stock Exchange and TMX, operator of Canada’s largest bourse, insist it was the right deal to do.

Reading about the current TSA pat-down/screening issues reminds me of IT users frustration with corporate IT.  When executives tell the users that the new IT procedures are essential to protect the corporate data do the users roll-over and say OK. 

President Obama says the TSA Pat-Downs are frustrating, but necessary. 

LISBON, Portugal — President Barack Obama on Saturday acknowledged some travelers' "frustrations" with having to go through full-body pat-downs and scans at airports, but he said the enhanced security measures are necessary to keep America safe.

In response to a question at a press conference in Lisbon, where he was attending a NATO summit , the president said that the Transportation Security Administration has been "under enormous pressure" to find better ways to screen for explosives and other dangerous items ever since the attempted 2009 Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner over Detroit. In that case, a passenger with links to an al-Qaida extremist group tried to set off plastic explosives concealed in his underwear.

Seth Godin makes an interesting point on a different way to look at the TSA situation.

Groping for a marketing solution: TSA and security theater

There's plenty of controversy about the new full body scanners that the TSA is installing at airports, and plenty more about the way some TSA agents arehandling those that choose to opt out.

The heart of the matter comes from the fact that the TSA often doesn't understand that it is in show business, not security business. A rational look at the threats facing travelers would indicate that intense scrutiny of a four ounce jar of mouthwash or aggressive frisking of a child is a misplaced use of resources. If the goal is to find dangerous items in cargo or track down Stinger missiles, this isn't going to help.

Instead, the mission appears to be twofold:

1. Reassure the public that the government is really trying and

2. Keep random bad actors off guard by frequently raising the bar on getting caught

One of the key successes to Steve Jobs and Apple is they put on a great show.  Watching the TSA show is painful, and it will probably get worse as Obama endorses the pat-down procedure as necessary and the TSA will keep on raising the bar.

Will the following video be the future TSA procedures?

Luckily no one was hurt in this video.

Note: during a demolition project do not stand under power lines.

Thinking about green in the data center can have people focusing on the their PUE and energy efficiency of their servers, but few are implementing transactions per watt dashboards.  It is rare to find someone who discusses data centers and the energy efficiency of their transactions.  The MPG of their data center.

Paypal CTO discusses their Oct 29 outage.

At around 08:07 am PT today, a network hardware failure in one of our data centers resulted in a service interruption for all PayPal users worldwide. Everyone in our organization was immediately engaged to identify the issue and get PayPal back up and running. We were not able to switch over to our back up systems as quickly as planned. We partially restored service by approximately 8:45 am PT and the issue was fully resolved by 9:24 am PT. A second service interruption started at around 11:30 am PT and was partially resolved at 11:55am with full recovery at 12:21pm.

When I read this description in reminds me of the Star Trek scene where Sulu can’t the Enterprise into Warp.

Hikaru Sulu: The fleet has cleared spacedock, Captain. All ships ready for warp.
Christopher Pike: Set a course for Vulcan.
Hikaru Sulu: Aye-Aye, Captain. Course laid in.
Christopher Pike: Maximum warp. Punch it.
Hikaru Sulu: [One by one, the rest of the star fleet jumps into warp drive, leaving the Enterprise behind. Sulu frowns at the console, puzzled]
Christopher Pike: Lieutenant, where is Helmsman McKenna?
Hikaru Sulu: He has lungworms, sir. He couldn't report to his post. I'm Hikaru Sulu.
Christopher Pike: And you are a pilot, right?
Hikaru Sulu: Very much so, sir.
Hikaru Sulu: [he trails off, hitting buttons]
Hikaru Sulu: Uh, I'm not sure what's wrong here.
Christopher Pike: Is the parking brake on?
Hikaru Sulu: Uh, no. I'll figure it out. I'm just...
Spock: Have you disengaged the external inertial dampener?
Hikaru Sulu: [Embarrassed. Without looking at anyone, he punches in the correct sequence] Ready for warp, sir.
Christopher Pike: Let's punch it.

From 8:07a to 8:45a there was no Warp drive for Paypal.  Dozens of people looking at displays.  Why are transactions not completing?  We have power.  Services are live.  Is the parking break on?

StorefrontBacktalk provides more details.

Two major technology glitches in a row knocked PayPal offline on Friday (Oct. 29), preventing the alternative payment giant from processing any E-tailer transactions for 80 minutes. First a network hardware failure shut down all PayPal payments. Then the backup plan failed when a handoff to a secondary datacenter didn’t go smoothly.

StorefrontBacktalk provides a timeline of outage, switch to backup data center, switch back to primary, repeat outage issue, then back up.  Then provides these words.

Like American Eagle, PayPal had a fallback plan. But it didn’t work the way it was supposed to. And though it had a technical plan (that didn’t work) for dealing with the outage, like Wal-Mart, PayPal didn’t have any plan at all for quickly notifying the people most affected (Wal-Mart’s store personnel, PayPal’s biggest E-Commerce partners).

The lesson about failed backup plans just keeps getting bigger. Yes, improbable failures can happen. When they do, failover plans can fail. And when that happens, you need a plan already in place to warn those affected in real time.

I predict over the next 5 years we will see an outage at scale that will cripple a company permanently.  We saw this last year with T-Mobile Sidekick outage, and imagine it on a bigger scale.

T-Mobile Sidekick Data Outage Turns Into Epic Customer Data Fail

By Laura Northrup on October 11, 2009 4:00 PM

This time last week, we thought of the T-Mobile Sidekick data outage as a mere inconvenient outage, but a temporary one. We grossly misunderstimated how badly T-Mobile and Danger/Microsoft could screw things up.

It turns out that their promise that service would be restored "soon" actually meant "never."

Want to avoid the risk.  Invest in better people and processes.  Technology is what you use, not the answer to the problem.

Many think the green data center topic is not important and have moved on to other issues, but consider this article from the Harvard Business Review.

Winning in the Green Frenzy

by Gregory Unruh and Richard Ettenson

Don’t let your competitors control what “sustainable” means in your industry.

Right now somebody, somewhere, is defining what sustainability means for your industry, business, and products. Almost everywhere you look—textiles, communications, agriculture, autos, high tech—green competition is shifting from a race to launch ecofriendly products to a battle over what constitutes a green product in the first place. The definition can vary from one industry, business, or product class to the next. But whatever your business, if you’re not engaged in the debate and in shaping the rules, you risk being assessed against sustainability standards you can’t meet. Worse, you may be left behind by a shrewd competitor that has strategically positioned itself as a certified paragon of the new green ideal.

HBR points to the coffee industry as an example of the battle.

Producing sustainability standards is a multiplayer melee we call the green frenzy, because it is like a feeding frenzy in the wild—a tooth-and-claw competition among a growing pack of stakeholders including environmental activists, think tanks, bloggers, industry associations, consultants, and your rivals, all clamoring to establish and impose their own green standards.

In the coffee industry, for example, more than a dozen standards currently compete, affecting everything from pesticide use to workers’ housing to bird friendliness. (Just one of these, the Rainforest Alliance sustainable agriculture certification for coffee production, has some 100 criteria.) Each of the various standards has a constituency working to define the benchmarks for “sustainable coffee.” Some are backed by nonprofits such as the Audubon Society and TransFair, others by companies such as Starbucks and Nestlé.

Imagine Greenpeace being one of the most vocal groups on what green data center standards should be.