Former DuPont Fabros CEO Fateh Starts New Data Center Company

Former DuPont Fabros CEO Fateh Starts New Data Center Company

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Hossein Fateh, co-founder and former CEO of DuPont Fabros Technology, one of the biggest data center Real Estate Investment Trusts in the US, has started a new company, which also provides data center space, a person familiar with the company, called CloudHQ, told Data Center Knowledge.

Fateh’s LinkedIn profile confirms that he is founder and principal at CloudHQ, which is described as a company that leases data center space and which, like DFT, builds data centers at “massive scale.”

Fateh left DFT last year, almost two decades since the company’s founding as DuPont Fabros Development. The company went public in 2007 and was named DuPont Fabros Technology, at which point Fateh was named its CEO.

Even though he left in 2015, DFT’s board announced it waslooking for someone to succeed him in 2013. Last February, it found that someone in Christopher Eldredge, the current DFT CEO who joined after three years as executive VP at NTT America.

Source: TheWHIR

Report: Microsoft and Oracle Gobble Up Data Center Space in Virginia

Report: Microsoft and Oracle Gobble Up Data Center Space in Virginia

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If you have been keeping an eye on the wholesale data center market in the US – that’s the market for big facilities leased to companies many megawatts (sometimes tens of megawatts) at a time – you know that the biggest cloud providers have been taking down space in top markets at a rapid pace.

While this is happening in a number of places, including Silicon Valley, Dallas, and Chicago, the Northern Virginia data center market has been seeing more action than others, and the latest report from a commercial real estate firm that tracks data center markets shows that the action isn’t letting up in the area west of Washington, DC.

Only two companies, however, were responsible for most of the action in Northern Virginia during the second quarter: Microsoft and Oracle. Both grew enormously in the past by selling software licenses, and both are now racing to expand their cloud services to compensate for shrinking software revenues, which are shrinking because of competition from other cloud providers.

Microsoft is ahead of Oracle in this race, and its cloud business is second only to Amazon Web Services, according to market analysts. The race has been accompanied by massive spending on data center construction and leasing.

Read more: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning

Collectively, the two companies either signed or were close to signing data center leases with multiple data center providers totaling 55MW of capacity in Northern Virginia over the last 30 days, according to the latest report by North American Data Centers, a real estate firm that specializes in helping companies find data center space and negotiate leases.

Microsoft is responsible for about 30MW of that capacity, while Oracle is responsible for the rest, Jim Kerrigan, the firm’s managing principal and the report’s author, said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. Not all of those leases had been signed as of Thursday, he cautioned.

Both Microsoft and Oracle were also among companies that signed some of the biggest single-transaction data center leases last year.

Microsoft signed at least three wholesale leases in 2015 – in Silicon Valley, Chicago, and Northern Virginia data center markets – totaling about 28MW of capacity, according to NADC’s annual report published in January. Oracle signed two deals, 5.5MW and 4.5MW in Chicago and Northern Virginia markets, respectively, the report said.

Source: TheWHIR

Google-Backed FASTER Submarine Cable to Go Live This Week

Google-Backed FASTER Submarine Cable to Go Live This Week

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FASTER, the Google-backed submarine cable that adds much needed network bandwidth between data centers in the US and data centers in Japan, Taiwan, and the broader Asia-Pacific market, has been completed, about two years after the project was first announced. The cable will start carrying traffic on Thursday, a Google spokesperson said via email.

As more and more data is generated and transferred around the world, demand for connectivity is skyrocketing. There has been an increase in submarine cable construction activity in response, with major internet and cloud services companies like Google, who are the biggest consumers of bandwidth, playing a bigger and bigger role in this industry.

The FASTER system lands in Bandon, Oregon; two cities in Japan, Chikura and Shima; and in Taishui, Taiwan, according to TeleGeography’ssubmarine cable map. The cable landing stations are connected to nearby data centers, from where the traffic is carried to other locations in their respective regions.

On the US side, data center providers Telx (owned by Digital Realty Trust), CoreSite, and Equinix have made deals to support the new system. A Telx data center in Hillsboro, Oregon, is connected to the landing station in Bandon. FASTER traffic will be backhauled to Equinix data centers in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and Seattle. CoreSite’s big connectivity hub in Los Angeles will also have direct accessto the system.

FASTER cable map telegeography

The FASTER submarine cable system lands in the US, Japan, and Taiwan (Source: TeleGeography, Submarine Cable Map)

Google invested $300 million as member of the consortium of companies that financed the submarine cable’s construction. Other members are China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Malaysian telco Global Transit Communications, Japanese telco KDDI, and Singaporean telco Singtel.

Both KDDI and Singtel are also major data center services players. Singtel is the biggest data center provider in Singapore, one of Asia’s most important network interconnection hubs, and has a partnership with Aliyun, the cloud services arm of China’s internet giant Alibaba. KDDI subsidiary Telehouse operates data centers throughout Asia, as well as in Europe, US, and Africa.

The rate of growth in global internet traffic has been breathtaking. Cisco’s latest Global Cloud Index projects the amount of traffic flowing between the world’s data centers and their end users to grow from 3.4 zettabytes in 2014 to 10.4 zettabytes in 2019. It would take the world’s entire 2019 population streaming music for 26 months straight to generate 10.4 zettabytes of traffic, according to Cisco’s analysts.

Learn more: Data Center Network Traffic Four Years From Now: 10 Key Figures

Cloud will be responsible for the majority of all that traffic four years from now, according to Cisco, so it comes as no surprise that the cloud giants have ramped up investment in global network infrastructure.

Amazon Web Services, the biggest cloud provider, made its first major investment in a submarine cable project earlier this year. The Hawaiki Submarine Cable, expected to go live in June 2018, will increase bandwidth on the network route between the US, Australia, and New Zealand. Amazon agreed to become the cable’s fourth anchor customer, which finalized the financing necessary to build the system.

Microsoft and Facebook announced in May a partnership to finance construction of a transatlantic cable called MAREA, which will land in Virginia and Bilbao, Spain.

Microsoft is also an investor in the New Cross Pacific Cable System, a transpacific cable that will land in Oregon, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, and the transatlantic system called Express, which will land in Canada, the UK, and Ireland.

Source: TheWHIR

Here's How Much Energy All US Data Centers Consume

Here's How Much Energy All US Data Centers Consume

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It’s no secret that data centers, the massive but bland, unremarkable-looking buildings housing the powerful engines that pump blood through the arteries of global economy, consume a huge amount of energy. But while our reliance on this infrastructure and its ability to scale capacity grows at a maddening pace, it turns out that on the whole, the data center industry’s ability to improve energy efficiency as it scales is extraordinary.

The demand for data center capacity in the US grew tremendously over the last five years, while total data center energy consumption grew only slightly, according to results of a new study of data center energy use by the US government, released today. This is the first comprehensive analysis of data center energy use in the US in about a decade.

US data centers consumed about 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2014, the most recent year examined, representing 2 percent of the country’s total energy consumption, according to the study. That’s equivalent to the amount consumed by about 6.4 million average American homes that year. This is a 4 percent increase in total data center energy consumption from 2010 to 2014, and a huge change from the preceding five years, during which total US data center energy consumption grew by 24 percent, and an even bigger change from the first half of last decade, when their energy consumption grew nearly 90 percent.

Efficiency improvements have played an enormous role in taming the growth rate of the data center industry’s energy consumption. Without these improvements, staying at the efficiency levels of 2010, data centers would have consumed close to 40 billion kWh more than they did in 2014 to do the same amount of work, according to the study, conducted by the US Department of Energy in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Energy efficiency improvements will have saved 620 billion kWh between 2010 and 2020, the study forecasts. The researchers expect total US data center energy consumption to grow by 4 percent between now and 2020 – they predict the same growth rate over the next five years as it was over the last five years – reaching about 73 billion kWh.

LBNL DOE DC energy use efficiency impact

This chart shows past and projected growth rate of total US data center energy use from 2000 until 2020. It also illustrates how much faster data center energy use would grow if the industry, hypothetically, did not make any further efficiency improvements after 2010. (Source: US Department of Energy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Counting Electrons

Somewhere around the turn of the century, data center energy consumption started attracting a lot of public attention. The internet was developing fast, and many started asking questions about the role it was playing in the overall picture of the country’s energy use.

Many, including public officials, started ringing alarm bells, worried that continuing to power growth of the internet would soon become a big problem. These worries were stoked further by the coal lobby, which funded pseudo-scientific research by “experts” with questionable motives, who said the internet’s power consumption was out of control, and if the society wanted it to continue growing, it wouldn’t be wise to continue shutting down coal-burning power plants.

The DOE’s first attempt to quantify just how much energy data centers were consuming, whose results were published in a 2008 report to Congress, was a response to those rising concerns. It showed that yes, this infrastructure was consuming a lot of energy, and that its energy use was growing quickly, but the problem wasn’t nearly as big as those studies of murky origins had suggested.

“The last [DOE] study … was really the first time data center energy use for the entire country was quantified in some way,” Arman Shehabi, research scientist at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the new study’s lead autors, said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge.

What authors of both the 2008 report and this year’s report did not anticipate was how much the growth curve of the industry’s total energy use would flatten between then and now. This was the biggest surprise for Shehabi and his colleagues when analyzing the most recent data.

“It’s slowed down, and right now the rate of increase is fairly steady,” he said. “There’s more activity occurring, but that activity is happening in more efficient data centers.”

See also: Cleaning Up Data Center Power is Dirty Work

Fewer Servers

There’s a whole list of factors that contributed to flattening of the curve, but the most obvious one is that the amount of servers being deployed in data centers is simply not growing as quickly as it used to. Servers have gotten a lot more powerful and efficient, and the industry has figured out ways to utilize more of each server’s total capacity, thanks primarily to server virtualization, which enables a single physical server to host many virtual ones.

Each year between 2000 and 2005, companies bought 15 percent more servers on average than the previous year, the study says, citing server shipment estimates by the market research firm IDC. The total number of servers deployed in data centers just about doubled in those five years.

Growth rate in annual server shipments dropped to 5 percent over the second half of the decade, due in part to the 2008 market crash but also to server virtualization, which emerged during that period. Annual shipment growth dropped to 3 percent since 2010, and the researchers expect it to remain there until at least 2020.

The Hyperscale Factor

The end of the last decade and beginning of the current one also saw the rise of hyperscale data centers, the enormous facilities designed for maximum efficiency from the ground up. These are built by cloud and internet giants, such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, as well as data center providers, companies that specialize in designing and building data centers and leasing them to others.

According to the DOE study, most of the servers that have been responsible for that 3 percent annual increase in shipments have been going into hyperscale data centers. The cloud giants have created a science out of maximizing server utilization and data center efficiency, contributing in a big way to the slow-down of the industry’s overall energy use, while data center providers have made improvements in efficiency of their facilities infrastructure, the power and cooling equipment that supports their clients’ IT gear. Both of these groups of data center operators are well-incentivized to improve efficiency, since it has direct impact on their bottom lines.

The amount of applications companies deployed in the cloud or in data center provider facilities started growing as well. A recent survey by the Uptime Institute found that while enterprise-owned data centers host 71 percent of enterprise IT assets today, 20 percent is hosted by data center providers, and the remaining 9 percent is hosted in the cloud.

LBNL DOE 2016 dc energy use by space type

This chart shows the portion of energy use attributed to data centers of various types over time. SP data centers are data centers operated by service providers, including both colocation and cloud service providers, while internal data centers are typical single-user enterprise data centers. (Source: US Department of Energy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Additionally, while companies are deploying fewer servers, the amount of power each server needs has not been growing as quickly as it used to. Server power requirements were increasing from 2000 to 2005 but have been relatively static since then, according to the DOE. Servers have gotten better at reducing power consumption when running idle or at low utilization, while the underlying data center power and cooling infrastructure has gotten more efficient. Storage devices and networking hardware have also seen significant efficiency improvements.

See also: After Break, Internet Giants Resume Data Center Spending

From IT Closet to Hyperscale Facilities

To put this new data in perspective, it’s important to understand the trajectory of the data center industry’s development. It was still a young field in 2007, when the first DOE study was published, Shehabi said. There was no need for data centers not too long ago, when instead of a data center there was a single server sitting next to somebody’s desk. They would soon add another server, and another, until they needed a separate room or a closet. Eventually, that footprint increased to a point where servers needed dedicated facilities.

All this happened very quickly, and the main concern of the first data center operators was keeping up with demand, not keeping the energy bill low. “Now that [data centers] are so large, they’re being designed from a point of view of looking at the whole system to find a way to make them as efficient and as productive as possible, and that process has led to a lot of the efficiencies that we’re seeing in this new report,” Shehabi said.

Efficiency Won’t Be the Final Answer

While the industry as a whole has managed to flatten the growth curve of its energy use, it’s important to keep in mind that a huge portion of all existing software still runs in highly inefficient data centers, the small enterprise IT facilities built a decade ago or earlier that support applications for hospitals, banks, insurance companies, and so on. “The lowest-hanging fruit will be trying to address efficiency of the really small data centers,” Shehabi said. “Even though they haven’t been growing very much … it’s still millions of servers that are out there, and those are just very inefficient.” Going forward, it will be important to find ways to either make those smaller data centers more efficient or to replace them with footprint in efficient hyperscale facilities.

See also: The Problem of Inefficient Cooling in Smaller Data Centers

As with the first data center study by the DOE, the new results are encouraging for the industry, but they don’t indicate that it has effectively addressed energy problems it is likely to face in the future. There are only a “couple of knobs you can turn” to improve efficiency – you can design more efficient facilities and improve server utilization – and operators of the world’s largest data centers have been turning them both, but demand for data center services is increasing, and there are no signs that it will be slowing down any time soon. “We can only get to 100 percent efficiency,” Shehabi said.

Writing in the report on the study, he and his colleagues warn that as information and communication technologies continue to evolve rapidly, it is likely that deployment of new systems and services is happening “without much consideration of energy impacts.” Unlike 15 years ago, however, the industry now has a lot more knowledge about deploying these systems efficiently. Waiting to identify specific efficient deployment plans can lead to setbacks in the future.

“The potential for data center services, especially from a global perspective, is still in a fairly nascent stage, and future demand could continue to increase after our current strategies to improve energy efficiency have been maximized. Understanding if and when this transition may occur and the ways in which data centers can minimize their costs and environmental impacts under such a scenario is an important direction for future research.”

Source: TheWHIR

Uptime: Colocation Firms are Building Fewer Data Centers

Uptime: Colocation Firms are Building Fewer Data Centers

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If you look at recent earnings reports by the biggest data center providers, you’ll get the impression that the industry is booming.

And it is. Enterprises are moving more workloads either to the cloud or to commercial colocation facilities, and data center providers are benefiting from both. As more companies use cloud services, cloud providers are racing to lease as much data center capacity as they can get their hands on, resulting in a boom for the big data center providers who can’t build new facilities fast enough to satisfy all the demand.

Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last?

The sound of champagne corks popping after earnings reports by the biggest players in the market, however, can mask the fact that in general, the amount of new data centers being built for lease by one or multiple tenants in the US has been declining.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the amount of new data center capacity being brought to market is shrinking. This is the age of the mega data center: service providers may be building fewer facilities, but the size of each individual building is getting bigger and bigger.

Market studies by IDC in 2014 and 2015 found that the trend in the data center provider industry was toward building fewer but larger buildings.

In a more recent study, 24 percent of colocation providers Uptime Institute surveyed this past February said their company had built a new data center within the previous 12 months. That’s down from 29 percent in 2015 and 45 percent in 2014.

Interestingly, construction slowdown in the data center provider industry has been more drastic than the slowdown in enterprise data center construction. Fifteen percent of enterprise IT respondents said their company had built a new data center within the previous 12 months both this February and the year before. Eighteen percent said so in 2014.

Uptime 2016 survey colo budget chart

Source: Uptime Institute Data Center Industry Survey 2016

Far from Perfect

While overall colocation customer satisfaction levels are high – only 7 percent of respondents to Uptime’s survey said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their primary data center provider – colocation isn’t the perfect answer for everybody. According to Uptime, 40 percent of enterprise IT respondents were paying more for colo contracts than they expected to pay when they signed those contracts.

See also: Slow Waning of the Enterprise Data Center, in Numbers

Nearly one-third said they had experienced a data center outage at a colocation site, and the bulk of enterprise respondents said downtime compensation in their agreements with colo providers was insufficient. About 60 percent said the cost of data center outages overshadowed whatever downtime penalties were included in their Service Level Agreements.

Lots of Business Still on the Table

While many of the biggest data center providers are chasing the multi-megawatt wholesale deals with cloud giants, there is a huge portion of the enterprise market that remains untapped, and companies like Equinix, QTS Realty, and CyrusOne, as well as the cloud giants themselves, are pursuing that opportunity.

Uptime enterprise IT share of cloud colo onprem

Source: Uptime Institute Data Center Industry Survey 2016

Enterprise-owned data centers still host 71 percent of enterprise IT assets, according to Uptime. Data center providers have 20 percent of those assets, while the remaining 9 percent is in the cloud.

The big question today is how much of that 71 percent will go to the cloud, and how much of it will end up in colocation data centers.

Further reading: Why Keep the Enterprise Data Center?

Source: TheWHIR

Report: Data Center Provider Peak Hosting Files for Bankruptcy

Report: Data Center Provider Peak Hosting Files for Bankruptcy

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Peak Hosting, an Oregon-based data center service provider, has filed for bankruptcy following the loss of a customer that was responsible for 80 percent of its revenue, Oregon Live reported, citing the company’s bankruptcy filing.

The customer is Machine Zone, maker of the popular mobile games Game of War and Mobile Strike. Last year, following a Peak Hosting data center outage, Machine Zone started moving its infrastructure into a different facility in Las Vegas, according to the report.

Peak is seeking bankruptcy protection while it undergoes restructuring as well as financing to pay for its lawsuit with Machine Zone. It recently hired a chief restructuring officer and let go most of its staff, according to the report.

Peak’s bankruptcy is likely to have an adverse effect on its own data center providers, who are its biggest creditors. According to its website, they include Digital Realty Trust, with whom it recently contracted for space in the Dallas and Silicon Valley markets, as well as Equinix, CoreSite, and Interxion.

The managed hosting company has five data centers in the US and one in Europe.

Machine Zone has a $14-million-per-month contract with Peak through next October, but it stopped paying for services starting three months ago, Peak said in the bankruptcy filing. Peak is suing the customer for $100 million, saying the agreement between the two companies does not allow for a premature cancelation.

Peak says it invested $35 million in equipment to host Machine Zone’s applications and that the customer has been using some of Peak’s proprietary technology.

The data center provider has attributed last fall’s outage to a bug in Cisco Systems software.

Original article appeared here: Report: Data Center Provider Peak Hosting Files for Bankruptcy

Source: TheWHIR

Second Google Data Center Comes Online in Ireland

Second Google Data Center Comes Online in Ireland

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Google has launched its second data center on the outskirts of Dublin, the city where its European headquarters are located.

The company invested €150 million in the new data center, according to news reports. Including this latest investment, the company has now invested a total of €750 million in Irish capital assets, Irish Times reported, citing Google.

The facility is adjacent to the first Google data center in Ireland, launched in 2012 on the company’s campus in Clondalkin, a town 10 kilometers west of Dublin.

Enda Kenny, Ireland’s Taoiseach (head of government, equivalent to prime minister), spoke at the data center opening Thursday, applauding the company’s sizable investment in the country, creating jobs and being a “leader within Ireland’s digital community,” Irish Independent reported.

See also: What Cloud and AI Do and Don’t Mean for Google’s Data Center Strategy

At the event, Ronan Harris, Google’s head in Ireland, addressed the upcoming referendum on Britain’s exit from the European Union and implications the potential Brexit may have for Google’s Irish operations.

“We are going to wait and see what the outcome of the referendum is and then we’ll assess what the British people have decided and the British government then decide to do,” Harris said, according to Irish Times. “At the moment we don’t have clarity on that so we haven’t made any decisions, accordingly.”

While data center expansion is always an ongoing process for Google, the company has been ramping up data center investment this year to support a push to grow its cloud services business. The company announced in March it would add 10 new data center locations that will host its public cloud infrastructure.

Google reported capital expenditures of $2 billion in the first quarter of this year, saying the spending reflected its “investments in production equipment, facilities, and data center construction.”

This expansion push includes both building and leasing data center capacity from third-party providers.

Read more: Google to Build and Lease Data Centers in Big Cloud Expansion

Source: TheWHIR

LinkedIn Deal Means More Microsoft in Digital Realty Data Centers

LinkedIn Deal Means More Microsoft in Digital Realty Data Centers

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Its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn will make Microsoft one of the top 10 customers of Digital Realty Trust. While Microsoft has done business with the San Francisco-based data center provider, it has not leased enough capacity to be considered even one of Digital’s top 20 customers.

Microsoft is one of the world’s biggest consumers of leased data center space, and it has been leasing more and more recently, as it expands its cloud services business, competing with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM SoftLayer, in addition to several smaller players. Together, the cloud giants are fueling a data center land grab that has created a boom for data center providers, many of whom have found it difficult to build more data centers fast enough to satisfy the demand.

Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last

LinkedIn is Digital Realty’s sixth-largest customer, judging by the amount of rent it pays to the San Francisco-based data center REIT annually. Its top tenant is IBM, and CenturyLink, Equinix, Facebook, and AT&T are second, third, fourth, and fifth, respectively.

If Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn closes successfully, Digital Realty will be able to claim it as one of its biggest customers, which should be good news for the data center provider, considering the rate with which the Redmond, Washington-based giant has been ramping up its data center spending. The company spent 65 percent more on data centers in the first quarter of this year than it did in the first three months of 2015.

See also: New LinkedIn Data Center Strategy Similar to Microsoft’s

In the first quarter, Microsoft leased close to 50MW of data center capacity in three locations from two different providers: CyrusOne and DuPont Fabros Technology, according to the commercial real estate firm North American Data Centers. Last year, Microsoft’s data center leasing activity included about 28MW total in three deals, with Digital Realty, DuPont Fabros, and Vantage Data Centers.

LinkedIn has five data center locations, using Digital Realty in four of them, according to Digital’s investor report for the first quarter. Digital doesn’t disclose specific locations its customers are in, but, as Data Center Knowledge has reported in the past, LinkedIn is in Digital’s data centers inNorthern Virginia and Dallas-Fort Worth markets. The social network has also said publicly that Digital is its data center provider in Singapore. It is unclear where the fourth LinkedIn location Digital has cited is.

Overall, LinkedIn occupies about 280,000 square feet of data center space in the four Digital locations.

In 2014, it also signed a 2MW lease with Equinix in Los Angeles, according to North American Data Centers, and last year took 10MW with Infomart Data Centers in the Portland market.

Original article appeared here: LinkedIn Deal Means More Microsoft in Digital Realty Data Centers

Source: TheWHIR

Apple Creates Energy Company to Sell Renewable Energy it Generates

Apple Creates Energy Company to Sell Renewable Energy it Generates

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Apple has created an energy company called Apple Energy LLC so it can sell energy generated by renewable-energy plants it has invested in around the US, including utility-scale solar installations and fuel-cell plants that convert biogas to energy.

The company revealed its new subsidiary in documents filed with the Federal Energy Regulation Commission, spotted first by 9to5Mac. In the documents, Apple is asking for FERC permission to sell energy from close to 90MW of renewable-energy generation capacity it owns and its 130MW power purchase agreement with a solar-farm developer in California.

Apple has been striving to power 100 percent of its operations, including several large-scale data centers, with renewable energy. Its data centers started consuming more energy than any other part of the company’s operations in 2013.

See also: Cleaning Up Data Center Power is Dirty Work

With the exception of colocation facilities it uses in addition to the data centers it owns, Apple has been able to claim that its data center infrastructure is powered entirely by renewable energy, using a combination of its own generation capacity and renewable energy purchases.

The application doesn’t mean Apple may eventually sell energy directly to consumers. The company is asking the commission to grant its new subsidiary market-based rate authority, which is a license to sell energy on the wholesale market at market rates, as opposed to rates established by energy regulators.

The authority is a mechanism to enable energy companies that aren’t vertically integrated in a given market – meaning they don’t own enough generation and transmission infrastructure to be essential to ensuring the region has enough power – to compete with the ones that do, while the ones that do have to sell energy at rates set by regulators because they hold too much power in the market.

There’s also no indication that Apple is looking for a way to sell excess energy its renewable-energy generation projects produce. The commission’s approval would simply give it more flexibility to sell the energy it generates to make it more economical.

Google has had a subsidiary registered as an energy company for years for this reason. If a company invests in a utility-scale photovoltaic installation or a wind farm, it usually cannot plug its data center into the generation source directly. The energy has to go to the same utility grid all other electricity users in the area are on.

Google sells the clean energy it pays for on the wholesale energy market, recouping its costs and applying renewable energy credits to the regular grid power it buys for its data centers, making it “carbon-neutral” as a result. The company has said this scheme makes using renewable energy at least as economical as simply buying grid energy if not more economical in some cases. As the cost of renewable energy goes down over time, Google expects to actually make a profit from the energy it sells.

See also: Google Makes its Biggest Renewable Energy Purchase Yet

Apple owns four data center sites in the US, which together consumed 455 million kilowatt-hours of energy in 2015, according to the company’s latest sustainability report:

  • Newark, California: 137 million kWh in 2015
  • Reno, Nevada: 46 million kWh in 2015
  • Prineville, Oregon: 54 million kWh in 2015
  • Maiden, North Carolina: 218 million kWh in 2015

The company has data center projects underway in Mesa, Arizona, Athenry, Ireland, and Viborg, Denmark.

It also uses shared colocation data centers in the US and elsewhere around the world, but says the vast majority of its online services are supported by its own facilities.

The company has built three solar arrays and a fuel-cell plant in North Carolina, a solar array in Nevada, and two micro-hydro systems in Oregon, which use the power of water flowing through local irrigation canals.

Original article appeared here: Apple Creates Energy Company to Sell Renewable Energy it Generates

Source: TheWHIR

Cogeco Peer1 Recovers from Atlanta Data Center Outage

Cogeco Peer1 Recovers from Atlanta Data Center Outage

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Cogeco Peer1’s data center in Atlanta experienced a partial power outage Thursday afternoon, affecting some of the customers in the facility.

The data center outage started around 1:30 pm local time, company spokesperson, Shawna Gee, said. The company posted regular updates on its Twitter feed during the outage, and in a tweet around 6:30 pm Eastern reported that full power had been restored to the facility.

“There was a disruption in power to the facility,” Gee said. “It was partially affecting certain areas of the facility.”

As of Thursday evening, the root cause of the outage or the reason the facility’s backup power systems did not pick up the load had not been determined, she said.

“Everything has been restored. Our customer are back online.”

As with any major data center outage, some of Peer1’s customers took to Twitter to vent their frustration:

Another common occurrence is a competitor trying to lure angry customers from the provider experiencing the outage:

Original article appeared here: Cogeco Peer1 Recovers from Atlanta Data Center Outage

Source: TheWHIR