Data Centers

This is probably the wrong forum, but does anybody know who owns/runs all the data centers that are popping up on Shellhorn?

 

Digital Realty Trust. DRT or DiRT for short.

 

Any idea who the 'tenants' are?

 

I have a related question............why spend the time/investment in data centers in that location with the pending metro coming? Vs. just hanging onto the land as an investment and building the data centers over by all the other ones by the ice rink rather than paying to rebuild/move everything. I would assume in 10-20 years, the people here will want homes, shops, offices, etc. by the metro not big computer boxes.

Just something I think about while driving by every morning.

 

DRT is a VERY profitable REIT. They specialize in data center construction and facilities operation; either building from the ground-up 'on spec' or even taking over struggling or stalled construction projects for other companies and then leasing them back to the company once complete.

It allows a company big enough to need its own data center to have one without the hassling of construction management or ongoing building management.

And don't try to find out anything about what's inside; they have very high-end physical and logical security!!

 

AS far as why build... Tier 1 research is telling us that the need for data center space will continue to out pace available floor space for the next year or two.

 

I agree with twohokies, why that location? It's not like they are blending in...I mean, talk about a great big target for mayhem. I know you guys know who is in there, but I also know it's supposed to be a secret. I just think the location is odd and very in our faces. And if DiRT is profitable, is it public? I would think that all the cloud computing, SaaS, there would be demand far beyond the next few years. I just can't get over all of the bank branches that keep popping up!

 

The thing is servers are getting smaller, requiring less cooling, and using less power....

With each generation people will need less and less floor space....

 

Not only that, Rich, but a LOT of companies are going virtual (usually with VMWare). Companies are reducing their required footprints exponentially but converting all their physical servers to virtual servers. I manage the networking for a few data centers and we went this way in our San Diego facility. We went from 7 rows of servers to 2 rows and we're still virtualizing. Our goal is to get it all down to 1/2 row (5 racks).

 

County loves them. Good tax revenue while requiring very little in services.
This area is desirable because of available power and the internet backbones that run through here.

 

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/03/29/digital-realty-buys-no-virginia-centers/

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/18/digital-realty-expands-ashburn-campus/

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/04/06/the-ashburn-building-boom-continues/

I don't think virtualization is going to make much of a dent in demand for top tier data center space. A lot of the cloud providers (Amazon, Rackspace, etc.) are building out the virtualization / cloud infrastructer in data centers like these.

 

Ken,
Bear with me here...With the Virtual Server, doesn't there still need to be some kind of back up server? All of these data centers are 'virtual' to me anyway when I use SasS, say I use TurboTax and they store the info...But if Intuit goes virtual to reduce their footprint...just where is the data stored if not on a machine somewhere? Sorry, trying to wrap my head around this.

 

So, what he's saying is this; Let's say you have a web based application that stored data to a DB. Traditionally you'de have atleast three physical machines: the web server, the app server & the DB server. Now that you can pack more horsepower intot he same sized box, you can virtualize those three duties on one server while maintaining security and separation of duties. Better yet, you build a second server identical to the first so that a falure in the prime results in instant failover to the DR box. So, instead of taking up half a rack (in the six server scenario) now you only use 4 rack units.

 

Thanks. With VMWare, does it compress the data to make more space or is just adding HP to the engine...um, like the stuff you guys do to cars? And is the data server actually storing data or is it a pass thru to the SAN things? The SAN things I'm assuming are in a physical location in a data center. I'm glad you're willing to share this info with me, I find it fascinating...as scary as that is....My job uses this stuff, but I'd really like to understand how it works too. Thanks again.

 

Yep. Basically a VMWare host server is a physical server (the most popular VMWare package is called ESX and it runs on Linux). VMWare hosts servers are, in the most basic terms, holders of virtual machines. For example, like Kaosdad says, if you have three servers called WEB1, APP1 and SQL1. On the network, they look and feel like real servers, but they're nothing more than large files on the VMware host server that are being read by the VMWare host application. The VMWare host application will advertise each virtual machines' IP addresses to the network, just as if they're additional addresses on a regular server and route all traffic destined for it to the running virtual machine. Of course it's a lot more complex than that, but that's in essence what's happening. The basic motivation behind VMWare is that physical hardware has a lot of unused resources most of the time, so why not get most out of them? Share the resources! And not only that but you cut down on a variety of expenses. If your physical VMWare host has 1TB of disk space, 32 GB of RAM, and 8 processors, that's about the total resources that can be allocated to all the virtual machines on this particular host. So, for example, if you allocate 500GB of space each to WEB1 and APP1, you'll have nothing else to give to SQL1, so you have plan pretty carefully.

VMWare has lots of techniques to maintain the availability of these virtual servers. Let's say you have two VMWare hosts in a single VMWare cluster. There's a mechanism called VMotion that can "move" a virtual machine from one physical VMWare host server to the other in a cluster in the event of needing to allocate more resources (disk, RAM, CPU) to a given virtual machine. Or you'd move it in case you need to perform maintenance on the physical hardware of its VMWare host box. There's also a method where the virtual machines are up and running on each VMWare host, but one is inactive, becoming active only when it's active counterpart is unreachable.

As far as a SAN goes, the VMWare physical hosts usually have a physical connection to the SAN, so it just looks like available disk space to the VMWare application. The SAN device is nothing more than a complex configuration of a lot of physical disks on a network available to a number of servers. These disks are striped together to form an extremely large logical drive and their space is carved up into logical units and associated with a given (virtual, in this case) server. Again, this is a really basic description and there's a lot more going on behind the scenes, but this is the gist.

Hope this helps.

 

That's awesome Ken, thanks!