Inside Rackspace

This short clip takes a peek into the Rackspace Hosting headquarters. They’ve just opened the 120,000 square foot second phase of their headquarters facility within a former shopping mall in San Antonio.

(via DataCenterKnowledge)

A look into a Google datacenter

Following up to the recent entry about Google’s custom server chassis, in this video we get a glimpse into one of Google’s datacenters where those servers are in operation.

Again, Google does it their own way by using separate containers with the necessary infrastructure built in instead of having different rooms for all the racks. The data center building itself delivers power and cooling. I guess it’s because of the more modular structure that allows replacement of a complete server “room” why Google chose that approach.

Google’s homebrew server chassis

At this year’s Efficient Data Center Summit, held April 1st 2009 at Google’s Mountain View, CA campus, Ben Jai, Google Server Platform Architect, displayed one of the servers they deploy in all of their global datacenters:

While there probably are many other well-known ISPs that use custom-built servers, I find it interesting that Google goes as far as to add a 12V battery to every server to replace the traditional large UPS systems normally used in datacenters.

Coming to OSDC

On April 29th and 30th, I’m taking the “opportunity to meet with Open Source professionals and insiders, gather and share information over 2 days of presentations, hands-on workshops and social networking” by visiting the Open Source Data Center Conference.

Talks I’m especially interested in are:

• Luke Kanies: Using Puppet for Unix automation and configuration management
• Alexei Vladishev: Open Source Enterprise Monitoring with Zabbix
• Florian Haas: Virtual consolidated HA: Virtualization with KVM, Pacemaker, and DRBD
• Balazs Scheidler: syslog-ng 3.0, opening new possibilities
• Kristian Köhntopp: Using kickstart and puppet to automate system administration
• Kristian Köhntopp: MySQL database architecture and performance in big environments
• Florian Forster: Performance analysis in big environments with collectd
• Michael Prokop: Open Source and enterprise: the attempt at convergence
• Marco Knüttel: Load balancing with Linux Virtual Server
• Jens Bothe: Design of CI classes for data centers in OTRS::ITSM
• Dr. Michael Schwartzkopff: Linux-HA Version 2
• Dennis Stücken: i-doit / Open Source CMDB
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Benedikt Stockebrand: IPv6 in the data center — but not without Open Source

I’m looking forward to getting insight into current developments and even more to meeting up with other IT executives. Are any of my ex-colleagues (apart from Kris, obviously) going to go to OSDC? I’d be happy to get together with you for some beer in the evening!

Rackspace leases new data center

Since Rackspace Hosting is running out of floor space in their primary data center, they had to decide between building a new location and to buy or lease existing data center space.

As Data Center Knowledge reports, they chose leasing:

The company considered building additional data center space in its new headquarters facility in a former shopping center in San Antonio, but later indicated that it believed it could save money by buying or leasing instead.

Finally, the company decided on expanding by leasing a data center in Auburn, Virginia, because this “will enable it to serve customer demand more quickly and cost effectively than if Rackspace built its own facility”.

Like after the first dot com bubble, there’s unused data center space at many places because companies decided (and had to money) to build big. In the current economic situation, though, it seems wise to buy or lease that existing space instead of incurring huge new building costs.