Posted by Brant Bernet on Fri, Jan 27, 2012 @ 01:38 PM
Twentieth century philosopher Jeff Foxworthy once said, “If you ask your wife to sit in the truck bed so your dog will be comfortable in the cab … you might be a redneck.” Although it is wise for me to not even think those words, I’m pretty sure I pass the redneck sniff-test all the same. How about this one: ”If you drive one car to the panhandle of Florida with your wife, five grown children, and two big dogs, just so you can trailer your beach toys and a couple of bicycles … you might be a redneck.” That was the scene at the Bernet house this past Christmas break.
Oil change—check; pure nitrogen in the tires (“for a smoother ride”)—check; cookies for the trip that will be eaten before we get out of Dallas—check; three boys in the middle row (my two boys home from college and a nephew in from LA; all three are big boys, 6’3″+)—check; third seat down, and pallet built for our four girls (two daughters, two dogs)—check; mama in the passenger seat and ol’ dad (with the most room) in the command module—check. If fact, had I closed my eyes (something I only did for a few minutes between Jackson and Hattiesburg), I could have been on a leisurely drive to the office. All that and a U-Haul trailer filled with everything we own, and off we went.
Actually, that’s a lie, the departure wasn’t quite that smooth. The family knew that we were “wheels up” at 0500, which is why my oldest had his buddy drop him off at 0459—just enough time to brush his teeth and go to sleep in his seat—but that is another blog.
Anyway, all present and accounted for, and off we went like a herd of turtles. It was crowded, and with the trailer, all my stops had to be strategic—no tight spots for this trucker. Side note: Do you remember the beer commercial with the guy miserably trying to back his new boat into his garage while his neighbor is just looking at him, shaking his head in embarrassment? That guy (the driver, not the neighbor) is me.
Did I mention that it was crowded? Lunchtime was especially cozy. Bags of trash being ripped to shreds by the dogs (or was it the boys?); French fries everywhere; dogs fighting for scraps (or was it the boys?); etc., etc. Despite being loaded down and getting around 8 gallons to the mile, we made it: 739.8 miles door to door, each way. No fights, no major mishaps, heck they didn’t even spill a drink! By some wonderful act of God, we made it in one piece and totally without incident.
The data center world is getting a bit crowded these days. In fact, I read a press release by international finance researcher, BroadGroup, which said that merger and acquisition activity in the data center sector “generated more than $12.3 billion in deal value globally in 2011.” Last year, several massive deals by companies such as KKR, Silver Lake, Go Daddy, PAETEC, Windstream, CenturyLink, Savvis, and others closed. Digital Realty alone raised $1.5 billion, and Global Switch followed suit with a bond issue that was just shy of $1 billion. The industry is on fire.
And how about this, Gartner, one of the world’s largest information technology research companies, predicts that hardware spending in data centers will be well over $100 billion (coincidentally, Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil held the world ransom for the exact same amount of money … hmmmm) in 2012, and more than $125 billion in 2015! The funny thing is, with all this spending, with all this activity, with all the would-be chaos, the industry is running remarkably smoothly.
Telephone companies are recognizing the profitability of their managed-services cousins: Verizon + Terremark; Cincinnati Bell + CyrusOne; Windstream + Hosted Solution/PAETEC; and the list goes on. I am not alone in my belief that this industry is just pulling out of the driveway, and I will be carefully watching as they navigate the potholes, the traffic, and the many bathroom breaks.
As for me and my brood, we spent seven glorious days in Florida. The weather cooperated, and we were able to spend time with 24 other family members. On several occasions, we had all of us crammed in our little rented beach house—kids ranging from 2 to 25 years old, celebrating the season and our happy reunion. The chaos just worked; so let it be with data centers!
Brant Bernet is co-founder and managing director of Lincoln Rackhouse. Contact him at bbernet@lpc.com.
Posted by Brant Bernet on Tue, Dec 27, 2011 @ 08:08 AM
“If it doesn’t say Sunkist, you don’t know what’s inside.” Or so the old ad campaign went. If you were watching TV in the ’70s, you remember the commercial. It was a cheaply made cartoon that showed two boys debating what makes an orange an orange. After the brief exchange, they fumble the orange, it breaks open, and out pops an ugly dinosaur doing bad W.C. Fields impersonation: ”Go back to your senses, kid … If it doesn’t say Sunkist, you don’t know what’s inside!” Then he eats an orange, peel and all.
I was reminded of that ad a couple years ago when my wife Clemmie and I bought three fruit trees for our back yard. I’m pretty sure I was not a candidate for fruit trees, but when my buddy called from Nicholson-Hardie (love those guys) and said that the labels had fallen off a shipment of trees and he wasn’t sure what they were, I was intrigued. When he said I could take them off his hands at “deep discount,” I grabbed my keys.
I babied those trees. But with a crazy Dallas wind, record-breaking heat and a total lack of citrus acumen, our first harvest was not to be. As I dolefully moved them inside for the winter, I still could only wonder what we had.
A few months went by, and sure enough, in late winter we started seeing buds. In the spring, those buds popped open and overnight our house was filled with the fragrance (not an altogether good fragrance, I might add) of a hundred soon-to-be … somethings. When we were sure we were clear of any freeze danger, we carefully moved the trees back into the yard and watched. We longed for the day that they would provide us some hint of what they might produce. But, dang it, to my eyes, all citrus flowers look alike, they seem to smell alike and the young fruit is always green and round. By mid-summer it was apparent that we had three different varieties.
The limes came in first. The crazy thing was one tree produced limes with seeds and another produced limes without seeds (something about them not needing to be pollinated to produce fruit—doesn’t sound like much fun, if you ask me). We made margaritas (very small margaritas) and for a few days used the juice from our limes in just about everything we ate. But it was the third tree that kept us guessing. The fruit was round like an orange, but the leaves didn’t look quite right. By late summer they were still green, but the size of a billiard ball. We waited … and waited … and waited.
Were you careful to “look under the hood” before you signed a long term contract for your data center? Did you know what you were getting because you spent the necessary time in your due diligence period and did you ask all the right questions? More important, did you get all the right answers?
Your data center doesn’t have to say Sunkist, but I hope it was fully vetted, stem to stern. What is the age of the equipment? Will you be responsible if something breaks or just gets old and dies? Like the peel protects the orange until it is ready to be turned into OJ, does your data center roof meet minimal standards? Will the walls protect your valuable servers, and the equipment that makes it all run, in the event of natural disaster?
How about the people? Arguably, nothing is more important than the engineers, the help desk and security personnel that care for the facility. It is about the skin, but it is also about the label—what’s inside. Who designed the facility? Who built it? What is its track record, the uptime history? Who is your operator?
Are the bathrooms clean? (Seriously, let that go and the rest is sure to follow.) Are the generators tested regularly? How about the batteries? When you asked if you could lift up a floor tile and check the underbelly, did they walk you to the same one they lift every time (the one that stays spotlessly clean) or did they let you chose where to go?
Were you careful, diligent and demanding? If you didn’t do all these things or ask all these questions, shame on you … you don’t know what’s inside.
Clemmie and I stopped waiting one Saturday afternoon in mid October. We plucked several of our mystery fruit, squeezed them into a glass and enjoyed the inaugural sips of our sweet, orangey juice. It was so good we plucked some more and made mimosas. (Are you seeing a pattern?) Our final tree produced … world class Tangors!
Before that Saturday, I had never tasted Tangor juice, but now I am a believer. The sweetness of a TANGerine and the heartiness of and ORange made a combination that is better than either alone.
When you are looking for your next data center, make sure you read the label. Make sure the operator has combined the right ingredients … ingredients that together will take the mystery out of your data center experience. Know what’s inside.
Brant Bernet is co-founder and managing director of Lincoln Rackhouse. Contact him at bbernet@lpc.com.
Posted by Brant Bernet on Thu, Sep 29, 2011 @ 11:54 AM
I am a gardener. If not for the long hours, back-breaking work, and sheer unpredictability of crops, I think I would have made a good farmer. Actually, probably not. I do love the idea of strolling into my backyard garden, pulling a carrot out of the ground, giving it a quick rinse with cold water from the well, and then eating it whole in all its earthy goodness. In that particular dream, the carrot even tastes good.
In real life, you can’t stroll through my garden—it is an 80 square foot patch of soil in my backyard), I don’t grow carrots (I don’t even like carrots) and I don’t have a well. I have tried cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, blueberries and many other frustrating vegetables. Squirrels, birds, bugs and the occasional rabbit, who all hate me by the way, must have a deal with the produce guy at Tom Thumb; I kept growing it and they kept eating it, forcing me to get store-bought ‘maters.
A few years ago, however, I figured out that none of my neighborhood enemies liked my peppers; for those, they stayed away, and my harvest was always great. I have grown jalapeños, habaneros, cayennes, bells, and many other varieties.
But this year was going to be special. This year I would plant seeds from an online seed company. This year I would try something new. Shishitos peppers are about the size of my little finger; they’re mild and taste great cooked in a hot skillet with olive oil and sea salt. I babied my shishitos. I lovingly started them inside, and then in mid-March, I ceremoniously moved them out of the nest and into the real world, carefully planting them in the garden. And they grew. The tiny white flowers became peppers and in early July I harvested my first crop. A week or so later, I harvested again, then again.
Unfortunately, the Texas heat was brutal this summer, and my poor shishitos kept growing smaller and smaller each week. In mid August, my fully ripened peppers were only one-tenth of the normal size and totally inedible. I was devastated, crushed. No, not really, but it did move me enough to go to my local garden center (Nicholson Hardie—the best in Dallas), where the nice clerk simply said, “No way to grow those in this heat. But, if you can wait until October, you should have a bountiful crop again.”
Of course I could wait, that is what we farmers do … we wait. And wait.
Then one glorious Saturday morning, a few weeks ago, I walked into the back yard and, behold, it wasn’t 90 degrees. Dallas was getting its first glimpse of fall. I ran to share the news with my beloved shishitos and … WHAT-THE? … WHERE? … WHO-THE?!
Every leaf on every plant was gone. Not most of the leaves, but every single, stinking leaf—gone. What could have done this? How could it have happened so fast? Wasn’t I just with them last night?
Then I saw it—a big, fat, green tomato horn worm. Then I saw another, and another. Four, horrible, evil death bugs had turned my lush green garden into a bunch of sticks, seemingly overnight. My shishitos had survived the hottest summer on record, only to be picked clean by an ugly worm.
Back to the garden center I went. This time my friend told me how to get rid of the worms: ”Pluck them off and step on them.” Way ahead of you, pal. I hoped they were burning in some corner of bug hell or wherever unrepentant bugs go when they die. Anyway, he loaded me up with high-nitrogen fertilizer and said I should see new leaves within a few days.
If you have read my blog before, you know that I tend to get off track now and again. I’ve never really had writers block; my problem is usually one of connection. Something reminds me of something else totally unrelated and I have to work to make the connection understandable to readers.
In 1992, I had been in the real estate business for six years. It was then that I had my first data center experience; it felt a lot like seeing those first sprouts poke out of the dirt. New, exciting, full of potential. Then in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecom Act of 1996 and the floodgate opened wide. The act, which was the first major overhaul of U.S. telecommunications law in more than 60 years, allowed for open lines of competition in the industry.
Money for growth was easy to find, and our business went through the roof—like moving my shishitos outside and reaping the harvest. But then, just as we were thanking our lucky stars that we survived Y2K (whatever that was), the Texas heat and fat green worms crept into the industry. The dot-com bubble burst in early 2000, then 9/11 happened, and in 2002, everything that resembled normalcy in our industry had changed. Promised revenue had completely dried up, and the overbuilding and overspending was so monumental, massive companies like MCI WorldCom found themselves in a free fall.
By 2005 we were all asking, where is the nitrogen-laced fertilizer, baby?!
But guess what, the world didn’t stop turning; the industry took a breather (from someone on the front lines I can tell you the sector lost ALL its leaves); the industry had to catch up, it had to sprout new leaves, and it needed a gardener to study it, pay attention to it, and baby it back to health.
I think it’s safe to say we are back. The data center industry continues to evolve, and this time we are being much more cautious. Tenants will face a new set of rules and a new spectrum of options: outsource, in-house, managed services, cloud computing? A bit confusing, but extremely exciting.
My shishito peppers are healthier today that they have ever been. I am expecting my first fall crop in mid to late October. The little white flowers are bigger than they ever were in the summer, the leaves are greener, and the stem growth is more prolific. I will use the seeds from this healthier batch of shishitos in my garden next year and the cycle of new growth, stronger plants, and sweeter fruit will continue.
I, for one, am liking the analogy to the industry I love so much; how about you?
Brant Bernet is co-founder and managing director of Lincoln Rackhouse. Contact him at bbernet@lpc.com.
Posted by Brant Bernet on Fri, Sep 02, 2011 @ 10:57 AM
“Be Prepared.” The ubiquitous Boy Scouts motto. As the father of two Eagle Scouts (I personally made it through half a year of Cub Scouts and ditched my little hat and dress blues in second grade), I have come to know these two words well. “Will it rain at the camp out?” Be prepared. “Will someone run out of water half way through the hike?” Be prepared. “Will I run out of matches just before I build my fire and the temperature drops to below freezing?” Be prepared. “How will I open this can of beans?” Be prepared.
The list is endless. So, when one of our monthly camp outs was scheduled at a beautiful ranch outside of Dallas on a beautiful Saturday night, I naturally made my list. Note that I was careful to make sure my boys were aware of my list-making prowess. In the days leading up to the camp out, I was vocal about my incredible preparedness and more than a bit ashamed of the fact that my offspring had no clue how to pack for a night on the open range.
When my wife saw the stockpile of camping gear that was causing a fire hazard in the front hall, she asked if I was finally cleaning out the garage. Not to be deterred by the domestic jeers, and the fact that they boys had taken exactly three minutes to stuff what they needed into their oversized backpacks, I loaded the car in a manner that would have made Leonardo da Vinci proud, and we headed out.
“Storm clouds? What?” I checked the weather and it said nothing about storm clouds, much less a flash flood and freak drop in temperature! I had my air mattress and enough wood to heat a Roman castle, but no rain fly for my tent—a rain fly that would have taken up about 4 square inches. The night was to be cool, but not cold, not toe-freezing, lose-your-nose-to-frostbite, cold. I was cold, I was wet, I was miserable. I did not sleep a wink.
Hell is thought of as a place of unspeakable heat and constant misery, I found its first cousin in West Texas that night.
I remember the first dad that I saw the next morning; he looked as bad as I felt. He, too, was unprepared for the weather. He told me that he had drifted off at around 11 p.m. into a long, deep sleep and woke up relaxed and alive, ready to face the day. Unfortunately, when he looked at his watch, he realized he had been sleeping for just over 45 minutes, and when he realized the weather had taken a turn for the worse, he never drifted off again.
Then, gasp!!!, I thought of my children, my poor boys, frozen like popsicles, I was sure. “Why didn’t you prepare them for the weather?” I could just hear their mother asking.
As I walked the 100 yards to the boy’s campsite, I heard the faint sound of laughter and I caught a whiff of bacon and eggs being cooked over a hardwood campfire. It was 7 o’clock in the morning and the boys had broken camp, packed their bags, and cooked breakfast. The first thing they said was, “Hey, Dad, you look awful. We hear it rained last night?”
So … did you survive Irene? For a data center user, Irene provided way too much drama over the weekend. If you build a data center in California, building code mandates that you plan to certain seismic specifications. If you build in Miami, you plan for the multiple annual hurricanes. In Oklahoma, tornados. But if you build a data center in New York, New Jersey, or Virginia, what do you prepare for? All of the above? None of the above? Given the recent events of nature, it is more the former than the latter.
You don’t think much about the 100-year (or 500-year) floodplain until Irene is breathing down your neck. Is your data center on high ground? Did you check the FEMA maps before you built or signed a long-term lease? We talk a lot about diverse paths for power and fiber, but what about diverse paths for employees? If a tree limb is down or flooding makes it impossible to get to your data center through the front drive, do your engineers, employees, and customers have a back-up plan?
Make sure you have thought through all forms of diverse path architecture. Many on the East Coast were forced to move to generator power. From the reports that I have read, most made the switch over without a hitch. But once you have depleted the fuel in your on-site tank, how will you replenish your supply? The massive generators are worthless without the diesel that makes them fire. Make sure your plan includes a safe (and dedicated) supply of fuel.
Finally, many IT departments are spending the additional funds necessary to set up an alternate, out-of-region data center. Disaster recovery plans include secondary sites that range from simply running a few critical applications to a complete, mirrored site. In any case, that is the next step in the evolution of data center preparedness.
I guess it is impossible to think of everything. Over the last 20 years many mistakes have been made, studied, corrected, and eliminated in the critical facility world. When making your list, don’t forget your “rain fly,” even if the weatherman says you won’t need it.
My boys knew exactly what to take to survive a cold, wet night; they were truly prepared. With camping, as with data centers, being prepared will allow you to sleep more comfortably. Did you remember your rain fly?
Brant Bernet is co-founder and managing director of Lincoln Rackhouse. Contact him at brant@rackhouse.com.
Posted by Brant Bernet on Thu, Aug 04, 2011 @ 02:10 PM
I have never really been much of a cat person. So when American Airlines denied boarding rights to Willie Nelson Bernet due to excessive under-cabin heat, I knew that I was in for some unexpected—I should say unwanted—feline bonding. As my wife and our two daughters boarded the plane, I could hear one of them whisper, “Does Dad even know what Willie eats?” I’m sure they noticed the panic in my eyes and the long, thick silence that followed Clemmie’s calming comment: “It’s no big deal (the rest plays back in slow-mo) just…bring…Willie…with…you…when…you…come.”
Our two boys and I were scheduled to follow the girls five days later on the annual 2,000-mile family drive to Five Islands, Maine. Except this time the “family” was sans the women and now included Willie the cat (as well as Ferdie the beagle and Blue the Australian shepherd—cue the Jed Clampett music. Well, the days passed and with the trip’s stops finally mapped—including games at Camden Yards, Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park—I woke the boys and we loaded the car, careful to make sure Willie was locked in a bathroom until the very last minute.
They say the best way to transfer an agitated cat in is a pillow case. I’m not sure who “they” are, but my limited experience on the subject confirms that “they” never put their theory to the test. By the time we had Willie in the suburban his meows sounded oddly satanic and the boys and I were actually afraid of what might emerge from his death satchel.
When we let Willie out, we were surprised and relieved to see that he had not grown an extra head; he was, in fact, completely still, staring at me as if to say, “Sleep with one eye open, pops, because you will pay for that.” And then, without warning, Willie did a spiderman leap from the middle of the car to the barely cracked back window and before we could grab him, he was gone. Now this is no ordinary cat, he has no claws, only one canine tooth, he is rail skinny, one eye was maimed in a fight, he can jump 10 times his own body length, he is black (and difficult to see in the pre-dawn dark), and the baddest cat in the entire neighborhood. He is a guerrilla fighter, and he was in his jungle. The boys and I chased that cat over fences, around corners and through gates until we were a ticked off, sweaty mess.
Marine Gunnery Sgt. Highway’s mantra of “adapt, overcome, improvise” kept running through my head as we pulled out of Dallas that morning. Surely Willie could survive on mice and birds for 10 days. Surely Clemmie would understand how hard we tried to find Willie. Surely the boys would forgive some of the words I used to describe their beloved cat.
As someone responsible for your company’s data center plan, are you prepared to adapt, overcome, and improve as the situation warrants? Have you carefully crafted a lease document and SLA so that you can make changes, if changes are necessary? We remind our clients that there are more than 150 negotiable items in a data center lease, issues that range from the mundane to the significant to the essential.
Have you factored in a mechanism for growth, an expansion option? Despite what you think your growth will be over the term of your lease/contract, you should make sure that the facility you choose has expansion capabilities and your contract should painstakingly describe how your assumed expansion will take place. Is the expansion a “must-take”—in other words, are you contractually obligated to take the space on a date certain? Or is it rather a “right of refusal” or “right of offer?” Is it an ongoing right or one-time offer? Details and flexibility rule the day in this paragraph.
Then, what if the world goes the other way and you find yourself needing to shed space? Have you negotiated for the right to sublease? If so, what approvals are required and how long will those approvals take? Can you sublease to another tenant in the facility? What about a prospect that your landlord is also chasing? Can you assign your lease to another company and, if so, will it take an act of Congress to paper, potentially derailing the anticipated assignment? Did you consider the right to terminate at a particular date? Is a penalty involved? How and when will the penalty be paid? How much is the penalty? Your ability to adapt and overcome (improvisation in the data center world is rarely thought of as a virtue, so we’ll leave that one out) will be determined by how you structure you lease/contract months or even years before a situation comes up.
Old Willie made it 10 days on his own; he has even forgiven me for the Santa Clause act. I really had no backup plan for his jail break other than to drive north and pray for his little black soul. I finally ‘fessed up to Willie’s AWOL status over the phone from Memphis. (I needed to wait until we were far enough from Dallas to remove the “turn around and get him” option.) I have often wondered if Willie would have jumped out of the car, knowing that he would be alone for 10 days. First of all, I’m pretty sure cats don’t think like that, but more important, I think he was imprinted early on with the ability to survive, to adapt. It has served him well over his 12 years. How about you?
Brant Bernet is co-founder and managing director of Lincoln Rackhouse. Contact him at brant@rackhouse.com.
Posted by Brant Bernet on Wed, Jun 29, 2011 @ 02:01 PM
When I was a kid, I was always tinkering with something. I wasn’t particularly adept at it, but tinker away I did. On one ridiculously hot summer day, I decided that I would replace the faded and cracked dashboard on my maroon-colored, Chevy Monte Carlo (“Monty”), and off to the junkyard I went. The only one I could find was black—not maroon—but in perfect condition.
After I removed the 800 or so screws that held the damaged dash in place and peeled back the plastic and foam board, I had my first of many “Oh crap” moments. Springs, and gears and tiny strings wrapped around coils were all I could see; it looked like something from a Dr. Seuss book. However, it was kind of like swimming across a lake; once you reach the middle, you realize the swim was a really bad idea, but it would be of no benefit to turn around, so you power on to the other side.
I powered on … in the Texas heat … no instructions … dwindling confidence … very limited mechanical skills. I was about five hours into my project (the opposite shore was in plain view) when I heard bowwoing! And in a whiz, the little spring that controlled the speedometer needle was gone (the opposite shore was a mirage). I looked for that stupid spring for what seemed like an hour.
Never one to give up easily, and not about to go back to the junk yard, I remembered that the little spring inside of a cheap pen looked very similar to the one that had just flown the coop. After some careful handiwork, my pen’s sacrifice rang true. Finally, with all the springs and coils back in place, and 700 of the 800 screws where they belonged, the great Dashboard Caper of 1981 finally was over.
These days, corporate chief information officers are doing some tinkering of their own. Some of the necessary changes will be painful—and most will take time. International Data Corp. reports that the average data center in the United States is more than 12 years old. That, folks, is old. Over the years, companies are able to change a spring here and replace a dashboard there, but eventually technology outruns the bones of the data center and a more permanent retrofit must take place.
Twelve years ago a “data center” might have been housed in an abandoned office closet and, as the company grew, the cancerous data center metastasized into every available nook, eating space and power like I eat cheese grits (I just discovered Rex’s cheese grits in Dallas—they are unmatched). When these internal data centers can grow no more, the technology departments within these companies have a decision to make; ”Do we start moving people out to make room for more servers, or do we focus on our core business and leave the electronic storage to someone else?”
This question is being asked all over the world, and the decision to outsource the data center is growing by leaps and bounds. But where do I go? Who is the best provider? What is the best climate? Can I really escape all natural disasters? The list of questions is endless, and each must be carefully considered.
In a recent panel i/o Data Centers’ president, Anthony Wanger said, “Data centers as a big construction project is over…and is being replaced by the era of mass production.” That bodes well for i/o and other big-scale data center operators that are attempting to automate the construction process, reduce costs, and ramp up the speed-to-market process. But I’m not sure I totally agree. Data centers are intricate, working bodies, and one company’s computing needs rarely match those of another. A little bit of uniqueness will always be the signature of a good data center. Someone will master the automation of data center construction, and when they do, we will all benefit from the lower cost and the expanded reliability.
By the way, it turns out that the pen spring was a little too high strung, and my speedometer was always 30 MPH off. As I look back on that project, I really had two decisions—either live with the cruddy old beat up, outdated dashboard, or let someone who knew what they were doing take care of the replacement.
What will you do?
Brant Bernet is co-founder and managing director of Lincoln Rackhouse. Contact him at brant@rackhouse.com.
Posted by Brant Bernet on Tue, Jun 14, 2011 @ 03:05 PM
I am a dinosaur. I’m not really all that old (I’ll be 46 this summer; my four kids are firmly committed to the notion that 46 is, in fact, old), but I entered the real estate brokerage business as a 20-year-old junior at Southern Methodist University, and 25 years of anything is a long time. Plus, real estate brokerage tends to unnaturally age a person.
What the heck was I going to write about? Oh yes, the maturation of the data center business.
Ours is an industry that is in its early childhood, maybe even infancy. We will continue to mature, continue to grow for many, many years. As terabytes of storage turn into exabytes and exabytes trun into yottabytes (by the way, we don’t have a word for what comes next, but I’ve seen some wacky suggestions; I’m voting for a brantobyte), the world of data storage will continue to change. New ways to house or store information will emerge and evolve, along with new ways to cool the massive amounts of heat generated by the information-gobbling servers.
Real estate brokers have had to adapt or be left behind. Although the components of a data center transaction have traditional roots—net rent, taxes, insurance, CAM, janitorial and utilities—the line items associated within those components look nothing like their earlier counterparts. Take power, for instance. Did we brokers used to care about the hedging mechanisms used by landlords to ensure the absolute lowest cost of power? I sure didn’t. The math necessary to figure a tenant’s cost of power is elementary (I should know, elementary school math is about when I told my kids they were on their own), but you wouldn’t believe the teams of risk managers and Wall Street gamblers that are constantly working to shave nickels and dimes off the power bill.
And what about the PUE (power usage effectiveness)? Are brokers really expected to know how that is calculated and what constitutes a good PUE? Yes sir, we are. Simply put, the PUE gauges the efficiency of a data center by comparing the overall cost of power to the cost of power needed to run the IT equipment (total power/IT power). The higher the number, the less efficient the data center; the less efficient the data center, the higher the overall power cost. And then, is the landlord charging for metered power (the amount actually used by the tenant) or by the breaker (the amount the tenant has the right to use), and how should the landlord be charging? Whew, it’s just not fair; where have the simpler times gone?
For data center users, simpler times are gone for good. The complexities and the enormous costs associated with data center real estate require keen and focused attention. I grew up in Dallas. In August, when the asphalt was boiling hot, we would step on the gooey mess and pretend we were dinosaurs being slowly consumed by the Le Brea tar pits. Someone would inevitably lose a shoe or ruin a sock, but none of us ever went the way of the woolly mammoth.
Today, if you are an IT director, a chief information officer or a … gulp … real estate broker, and you are not well versed in the perils of data center real estate, you might not be so lucky.
Brant Bernet is co-founder and managing director of Lincoln Rackhouse. Contact him at brant@rackhouse.com.
Posted by Brant Bernet on Fri, Jan 07, 2011 @ 04:11 PM
Some of the best data center real estate in the world can be found right here in Dallas, Texas. Good friend and wonderful writer, Christine Perez penned the attached article for the latest edition of D-CEO magazine.
Follow the D CEO: Where to House Your Data link for the story.
Photo by: Sam Fleishman
Posted by Brant Bernet on Mon, Oct 18, 2010 @ 01:32 PM
Data Center demand in Silicon Valley is causing some to find more efficient power distribution methods.
Watch the video...
Posted by Brant Bernet on Tue, Oct 05, 2010 @ 06:00 PM
I have a friend who owns a great little piece of property in Dallas. He has owned it for years and will likely own it until frosty snowballs are merrily rolling down the hills in hell. You see, he was approached by a big developer many years ago that wanted to buy his little building. They went back and forth on the price but they never could agree.
The deal died and a few years later the developer built high rise condominiums right up to his property line on three sides. Sometimes holding out doesn't pay.
Donnie and Kathy Fullbright have quite a different story today. After paying just $6,000 for an acre of land back in 1975 in Maiden, North Carolina, they held out just long enough to sell to search engine giant, Google for over $1,700,000. The fact that it snuggles up next to Google’s 500,000 square foot shiny new data center didn’t hurt the negotiations.
Way to go Donnie and Kathy…the $1.7MM will be less than a rounding error on Google’s $1 Billion dollar spend, but that’s about $40 per square foot and isn’t bad for farmland in rural North Carolina.
Image from the children's book The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton; 1942