2009/07/06
TheRegister: Niagara Falls to power next Yahoo! data centre
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
In one of the brighter moments of New York governor David Patterson's unanticipated and beleaguered administration, Yahoo! has announced that it will plunk down its next data centre just east of Buffalo, New York, so it can tap the carbon-free hydroelectric power generated by Niagara Falls.
When - not if - New York City has a blackout, as it gets very hot in the summer and there are not enough megawatts to go around, we'll all know who to blame. It will be the exclamation point that broke the generator's back.
Governor Patterson - who has his hands tied by a deadlocked state senate that has been refusing to do its job because it cannot decide which party is in charge - and (federal) Senator Chuck Schumer of New York have been pushing to win the $150m Yahoo! data centre deal for Buffalo. They got some credit from David Dibble, Yahoo!'s executive vice president of service engineering and operations, who announced the winning bid.
But the real reason why this deal went down in New York - and not in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois or Virginia, as was reported in the Albany Business Review - is the New York Power Authority. It runs the hydropower in western New York, which has Niagara Falls as its main generating facility. NYPA has guaranteed a total of 15 megawatts of hydropower that the Business Review says will save Yahoo! around $100m over a 15-year period.
The statement put out by Patterson's office concerning the Yahoo! data centres says it will be located in the town of Lockport, east of Buffalo in Niagara County. Yahoo! plans to invest "tens of millions of dollars" to put its East Coast regional data centre, weighing in at 190,000 square feet, on a 30-acre plot in an industrial park. Not counting construction work, the data centre is expected to create 125 jobs.
The Lockport data centre has been allocated 10 megawatts of power during the initial construction phase and data centre buildup. Construction is expected to start in August, with the first phase of the facility being operational in January 2011. In a second phase that starts in the spring of 2012, Yahoo! will build out the Lockport data centre, spending an additional "tens of millions of dollars," and would get an extra allotment of 5 megawatts of guaranteed power from NYPA.
Based on that power consumption, you would assume that another 95,000 square feet of data centre space will be built in the second phase of the project. It is not clear how many servers Yahoo! will put into the data centre, but using modern half-width two-socket "Nehalem EP" servers, you could put about 167,000 server nodes in that 190,000 square feet of space. The second phase of the Lockport data centre would push it up to around 250,000 server nodes.
Western New York has been courting big data centres thanks to the relatively cheap electricity it can generate from Niagara Falls, and was disappointed last year when HSBC pulled the plug on a $139m, 275,000 square foot data centre that was to open in nearby Cambria, New York. The subprime mortgage mess killed that deal, and HSBC decided to load up its data centres in Chicago rather than pour new concrete in Cambria. It is also planning to shut down facilities in Buffalo and the suburb city of Amherst.
Bringing in Yahoo! to replace the lost HSBC centres was something all politicians were clearly interested in doing. This is why so many of them lined up in Patterson's statement. Still, we're talking about 125 jobs and maybe an aggregate payroll for them of $8m to $9m. The incentives that New York state and the regional governments gave were not divulged, but those jobs are only worth about $125m to $130m over a 15-year term. Hopefully the economics works out in the long run.
According to a report at CNET, Yahoo! co-founder David Filo said the Lockport data centre will use outside air for cooling, something you can do for many months of the year in the chilly Buffalo region. Filo also said that Yahoo! would stop buying carbon offsets in an effort to make itself carbon neutral, and would instead focus on getting its data centres to be as efficient as possible. ®
InfoWorld: RSA: Cloud computing not secure enough
by Sumner Lemon
Cloud-based services are being rolled out without enough attention being paid to securing these services and the information they handle. That was the finding of a recent study commissioned by RSA Security.
While the report's findings are alarming, there is still time for providers of these services to address the problem, said Art Coviello, executive vice president at EMC and president of RSA Security. The key is to look at security as an integral part of the service and not as an add-on feature, he said.
Coviello recently sat down with IDG News Service to discuss the security of cloud-based services. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:
Art Coviello: It was startling to me that a lot of this cloud computing was being done with security left behind, because I viewed cloud computing as an opportunity to really change the way people approached security. In essence, you're rebuilding the information infrastructure from the ground up. It'll be years before all these legacy systems get moved over, either to internal, private clouds or external clouds, or some combination thereof. Ultimately, that's where it's headed and because of that, because we have knowledge and forethought of all the issues we've had in security over the last decade and a half.
One would think that we've learned our lesson about building security in. Having said that, it's still very early days. Although I find the research alarming, I don't necessarily find it conclusive that this is the way it will turn out.
IDGNS: Is part of the problem that vendors aren't necessarily liable for all of the risk associated with offering these services? Would the services be more secure if they had to fully assume all of that risk?
Coviello: It could be if the person that purchases these services are not careful. But it's hard to imagine that any responsible provider of these services would deliberately make their offering insecure. Woe unto them, they'll be out of business pretty quick. The one thing you can rest assured of is if there's any security breach in one of these services, someone is just going to take their infrastructure and go elsewhere. It's a lot easier to do that in a cloud environment than it might be if you've outsourced your infrastructure.
IDGNS: How does a company know that a cloud-computing provider offers a secure service?
Coviello: Enterprises have the wherewithal and the skill to evaluate the cloud provider's capability and their capability in security, and they would be stupid not to do a thorough investigation because they're outsourcing everything.
IDGNS: What do you think is the greatest security weakness for cloud-computing services?
Coviello: It's almost too early to tell. How many instances do you see of cloud computing out there? I can give you a number of places where there could be insecurities. What people tend to worry about is the co-mingling of information, and that's probably the least of anybody's worries because it's very easy to partition data. What they ought to be more worried about is what are the access controls, what the authentication mechanisms are, how you ensure information doesn't somehow leak out to somebody outside.
I'd worry about those things, but these are things that are going to have to be investigated and developed as people start to get a feeling for what cloud computing is all about.
CNet: Open source to shape cloud computing, but not dominate it
by Matt Asay
Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady writes a bleak, but likely accurate, eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing. In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses," in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging "Goliath" are slim.
It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business.
Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is "a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today." He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds.
This 'David' alternative to the 'Goliath' big vendors doesn't beat them, but instead helps to keep Goliath honest. Really, when you think about it for more than a few seconds, that's what open source has done for traditional computing, too.
Look around. The big vendors controlling IT and the Web are...the same vendors that controlled it yesterday, and are likely the same vendors that will control it 10 years from now. Sure, they'll swap places for a few years, but does anyone really believe that IBM and Microsoft won't still be cat-fighting a decade from now?
But now consider what open source has been doing, mostly behind the scenes. Open source is changing the way these big vendors operate, because it's altering customer expectations.
Open source has permeated Microsoft to the point that it is now considering throwing its weight behind the Spring Framework and other open-source projects.
Google, for its part, went from a happy consumer of open source to an active contributor to open source on a very big scale. Not because Google is "not evil," but because it realizes that open source can give it a competitive advantage in the market.
We'll see more of this as open source challenges otherwise proprietary vendors to compete through openness. We're already seeing some of this as vendors like Red Hat seek to claim parts of the cloud for open source.
In so doing, open source will continue to challenge and change the buying conversation, resetting expectations to transparency, something we desperately need: if the allegation that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pressuring governments to buy Microsoft technologies is even remotely true, the best antidote may be open-source procurement policies.
In sum, don't expect open source to "win" in the cloud; at least, not in the form of an open-source vendor doing the winning. Rather, look to open source to influence, to shape the cloud.
Just like it has to traditional, proprietary software.
