How big are Russian Data Centers?

January 12, 2011 Dave Ohara

A question I got from a friend is how big are Russian Data Centers? As Facebook pointed out Facebook traffic is almost non-existent given they are not an approved site for the country. Huh?

Here is post on Facebook’s traffic.

Paul Butler on Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:16pm

Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle.

When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

Note how dark Russia and China are.

What are the Russia web sites if Facebook and others are not allowed?

•Yandex=Google Search

•VKontakte=Facebook

•Odnoklassniki=Classmates

•LiveJournal=blogging platform

•RuTube=YouTube

The biggest data center so far in Russia is claimed to be a 8MW data center as reported by Data Center Dynamics, Yevgeniy Sverdlik.

MegaFon launches new data center in Russia

Telecom says the 8MW data center is the largest of its kind in Russia, offering colocaiton, managed hosting and Internet services out of six 4,300-sq-ft data halls

Published 12th October, 2010 by Yevgeniy Sverdlik

Russian telecommunications company MegaFon has launched what it says is the largest data center of its caliber in the nation. The 8MW facility in Samara is the first facility of the future “national data center network,” according to a MegaFon news release.
Valeriy Ermakov, chief operations officer at MegaFon, said this was the first time a new state-of-the-art data center of this size was built in Russia for commercial use.

Another Yevgyeniy reports on is a Telecom data center.

Rostelecom embarks on $219m data center build-out in Russia

Telecom will build two new data centers and retrofit existing facilities

Published 24th May, 2010 by DatacenterDynamics

Large Russian telecommunications firm Rostelecom is planning to invest $219m into building new data centers and retrofitting its existing facilities into data centers to begin providing data center services in the country, reported Russian news serviceKommersant. The plan is to make the investment over the next four years.
The company is going to build two new data centers in Moscow and Saint Petersburg metropolitan areas. The Moscow facility is designed to accommodate 3,500 IT racks and the St. Petersburg one will support 500. Rostelecom’s existing facilities can support 399 racks.

Megafon and Rostelcom look like the biggest data center builders, but given 8 MW is the largest so far, we’ll see when Russian breaks the 10 MW mark.

BTW, it does like Dell DCS is a supplier to Yandex.

Brannon boasts that while Google famously makes its own servers, Dell caters to three others from the ‘Search engine top five', hinting that Facebook is also a DCS customer.

But, sensing a great business opportunity in hand-me-downs and cheap knock-offs, Dell cunningly decided it would sell on its custom-made designs to smaller outfits, like Russian search engine and portal Yandex, for less cash.

Fiber Optic Network at the extremes, metro and undersea cable

December 30, 2010 Dave Ohara

Internet Networks are in growth mode as profits and margins improve. WSJ has a post on growth in metro markets.

Fiber-Optic Networks Regain Some Glow

Data Traffic Turns Regional Operators Into Buyout Targets

By SHAYNDI RAICE

After the telecom bubble burst a decade ago, fiber was a dirty word.

Finding Fiber | A look at local providers

Zayo Group manages about 21,500 route miles of fiber in 146 markets across the U.S., including Philadelphia.

Zayo has purchased a series of smaller fiber companies, including American Fiber Systems, Memphis Networx and Columbia Fiber Solutions.

Lightower Fiber Networks, which operates a network in Boston and other Northeast cities, has about 5,500 route miles of fiber.

Lightower, which was spun off by utility National Grid and backed by private-equity firms, has bought five other fiber companies since 2008.

Now, the fiber-optic network business is enjoying a resurgence, particularly for metro fiber, the high-capacity lines that connect a city's office buildings, data centers and cellular towers to the Internet.

There have been 14 acquisitions in the industry this year alone and 45 since the fiber market began its turnaround in 2006, according to investment bank Cowen & Co.

"There's a shortage of metro fiber, and the demand is just going through the roof," said Rob Shanahan, chief executive of Lightower Fiber Networks, a fiber company serving the Northeast that has acquired five other companies since 2008.

CNET news has a photo essay on an Alcatel-Lucent undersea cable ship.

Aboard an Alcatel-Lucent undersea cable ship (photos)

September 5, 2010 6:00 AM PDT

This is one of Alcatel-Lucent's repeaters, which are used to amplify the signal at various points along the cable. This repeater, a model from two years ago, has a throughput of around 1.5 terabits per second.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/2300-1035_3-10004733-11.html?tag=mncol#ixzz19c8nU4tp

The project highlighted is an Africa cable.

Philippe Dumont is in charge of Alcatel-Lucent's submarine network business. The market for such deployments, he said, has remained "quite stable" over the last couple of recessionary years, which "came as quite a surprise" to Alcatel-Lucent.

Dumont said the biggest cabling project in the world right now is Africa, but the connectivity being deployed there will be quite different from what people in the U.K. are used to. "Access to the Internet in Africa is mostly based on mobile," he said. "You will not see DSL, but you will see mobile broadband through smartphones and USB dongles."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/2300-1035_3-10004733-2.html?tag=mncol#ixzz19c93vlIx

Data Center Cooling revenue predicted to double by 2016 in Southeast Asia

December 29, 2010 Dave Ohara

Frost and Sullivan has a press release on a study they conducted.

Frost & Sullivan: New Datacenters and Green Technology to Double PAC Revenues in Southeast Asia

The increasing demand in the telecommunication, industrial and IT sectors are increasing the deployment of Precision air conditioning (PAC) as a viable and cost-effective power solution.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRLog (Press Release) – Dec 27, 2010 – Singapore – Precision air conditioning (PAC) is gaining ground due to the increasing demand from the telecommunication, industrial, and IT sectors. Development in these industries is driving new installations and commissioning of datacenters, data communication, and power equipment. The resulting uptake of blade servers and high-power servers translates to higher heat dissipation, which can affect electronic and electrical systems. Deploying PAC systems can help suppress the rising average operating temperature in datacenters.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.energy.frost.com), Southeast Asian and Australasian Precision Air Conditioning (PAC) Market, finds that the PAC market in these regions earned revenues of $217.7 million in 2009 and estimates this to reach $415.7 million in 2016.

The Green (energy-efficiency) aspect is part of their study.

“Technological evolvement has led to energy-efficient PAC systems with sophisticated architecture or structural orientation such as rack or row cooling methods,” says Frost & Sullivan Analyst Teoh Chew Yew. “With its ability to efficiently manage and regulate working environmental conditions like temperature and humidity, PAC is gaining market traction in the IT and telecom industry as a viable and cost-effective power solution.”
However, competition and environmental concerns are putting pressure on power systems and equipment to perform effectively and meet stringent requirements and specifications. As research and development emphasizes on energy and system efficiency, average power density and heat dissipation per power system is anticipated to decline. This, in turn, can eventually erode the demand for PAC.

Can China build Green Data Centers?

May 6, 2010 Dave Ohara

I am having conversations with an entrepreneur in China who is working on the Green Data Center idea in China. All the big data center operators have been to China to look for data center sites. I would expect most cannot find the right site for their data center operations for a variety of reasons. Building data centers will be difficult with a short term approach if you only want to build one building. What makes more sense is to take small incremental steps with continuous build out in China and other areas in Asia Pacific.

I've been to Beijing,Shanghai, and Hong Kong over a dozen times when I was working at Microsoft and Apple. As well as Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore. I saw many different sides of the country working with hardware suppliers, internal development groups, and software entrepreneurs.

Google's recent pullout of China can be interpreted in many ways and there are some interesting assumptions I can make based on some key people who are coincidentally now working in Google Asia who I used to work with. These ideas are much too complicated and subtle to try and write in a blog entry.

So, back to the problem of can China build Green Data Centers? Ideally China would have a few big US companies building data centers in China that Chinese engineers can learn from. But as far as I know no one has done this, even though a lot of have evaluated sites. Which makes things difficult, but creates an opportunity. China doesn't have data center people who have been doing the same thing for the last 20 years who want to build data centers the same way they did in the past.

China can build smaller data centers, using geo-redundancy as part of the design. Power may not exist, but China is building power generation faster than anyone else. So, it isn't what power is available. Tell me what power will be available. See this Economist article.

Electricity and development in China

Lights and action

China is parlaying its hunger for power into yet more economic clout

Apr 29th 2010 | HONG KONG | From The Economist print edition

AFTER a brief blip caused by the global economic slowdown, the electricity business in China is back to normal: in other words, it is buzzing. On April 26th Huaneng Power, the country’s biggest utility, began work on a nuclear reactor on the island of Hainan. The week before, the firm had announced that its power output had risen by 40% during the first quarter. The day before that, Datang International Power, the second-largest utility, had said its output was up by 33%. Surges of this magnitude, unimaginable in most countries, are commonplace in China.

China’s endless power-plant construction boom has accounted for 80% of the world’s new generating capacity in recent years and will continue to do so for many years to come, says Edwin Chen of Credit Suisse, an investment bank. Capacity added this year alone will exceed the installed total of Brazil, Italy and Britain, and come close to that of Germany and France. By 2012 China should produce more power annually than America, the current leader.

The US gov't hasn't treated the Data Center industry as a strategic industry to provide special treatment. China will.

Much of the data centers are built and designed to maximize profits for the vendors. Data Centers are the most profitable construction. The silos in Real Estate, Facilities, Data Center Ops, IT Ops, Finance, and SW are ripe for over specification for features that have little business value in the holistic view, but look right from a limited perspective. The top data center people know this which is why they have broken down the silos and integrated the functionality within one manager. Look to Google's Urs Hoelzle as the epitome of owning the data center stack, including SW infrastructure.

It is a bit of irony if China's data center strategy targeted Urs and his thinking as the customer, asking what he wants in data center infrastructure. Google wants cheap, reliable, cleaner power. Multiple Fiber paths. And, government support for the data center build out. In the US we hear about the tax incentives, and this is proof the local community wants the data center construction.

An example of the opportunity is to be work with the SinoHydro on a China Data Center strategy. Here a perspective you'll enjoy reading on China's HydroElectric build out.

China: Not the Rogue Dam Builder We Feared It would Be?

Hydropwer accounts for the overwhelming share of China’s alternative energy mix, but is perhaps also the one of the more controversial alternative energy options due to the ecological and social impacts of dam construction. This guest post by Peter Bosshard, policy director of International Rivers Network, examines China’s growing pains in its increasing role as an exporter of hydropower technology and expertise.

A few years ago, Chinese dam builders and financiers appeared on the global hydropower market with a bang. China Exim Bank and companies such as Sinohydro started to take on large, destructive projects in countries like Burma and Sudan, which had before been shunned by the international community. Their emergence threatened to roll back progress regarding human rights and the environment which civil society had achieved over many years. However, new evidence suggests that Chinese dam builders and financiers are trying to become good corporate citizens rather than rogue players on the global market. Here is a progress report.

Could you partner with China to build data centers around the world where dams are being built? The power generation is one part, and Fiber is next. Government support fits in easily as governments were involved in the Hydro construction.

One of Google's crown jewels are its data center designs. Is part of the reason why Google pulled out of China are the issues they ran into if they built a data center in China?

Emerging Market Data Centers, what should they look like?

April 20, 2010 Dave Ohara

The Economist has a 14 page section on Emerging Markets and points out the pace of business innovation.

A special report on innovation in emerging markets

The world turned upside down

First break all the rules

Easier said than done

Grow, grow, grow

Here be dragons

New masters of management

The power to disrupt

A special report on innovation in emerging markets

The world turned upside down

The emerging world, long a source of cheap labour, now rivals the rich countries for business innovation, says Adrian Wooldridge (interviewedhere)

Apr 15th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IN 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing”.

This special report will argue that something comparable is now happening in the emerging world. Developing countries are becoming hotbeds of business innovation in much the same way as Japan did from the 1950s onwards. They are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers and $30 mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just 2 cents a minute. They are reinventing systems of production and distribution, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the elements of modern business, from supply-chain management to recruitment and retention, are being rejigged or reinvented in one emerging market or another.

Coincidentally, a Microsoft friend who is based in China just introduced me to a clean energy entrepreneur in China. We had a quick conversation on the opportunities for data center innovation in emerging markets, and it got me thinking about the Economist articles more.

Here is the latest ClustrMaps showing the WW readership of GreenM3. The readership is significant in emerging market countries.

One of the other articles I liked is "First Break the Rules" To be innovative requires a willingness to break the rules. Which many times is a forbidden approach in enterprises. Consider the post I wrote on the Social Security Administration. An insider said, the SSA is evaluating hot and cold aisles, and is not convinced it will work. I don't expect to be doing any work with the SSA any time soon. :-)

First break all the rules

The charms of frugal innovation

Apr 15th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

GENERAL ELECTRIC’S health-care laboratory in Bangalore contains some of the company’s most sophisticated products—from giant body scanners that can accommodate the bulkiest American football players to state-of-the-art intensive-care units that can nurse the tiniest premature babies. But the device that has captured the heart of the centre’s boss, Ashish Shah, is much less fancy: a hand-held electrocardiogram (ECG) called the Mac 400.

The device is a masterpiece of simplification. The multiple buttons on conventional ECGs have been reduced to just four. The bulky printer has been replaced by one of those tiny gadgets used in portable ticket machines. The whole thing is small enough to fit into a small backpack and can run on batteries as well as on the mains. This miracle of compression sells for $800, instead of $2,000 for a conventional ECG, and has reduced the cost of an ECG test to just $1 per patient.

Can you imagine taking this same approach to data center systems?

I am looking forward to discuss what Emerging Market Data Centers should look like.