This past Friday, DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) raised $640 million in an IPO. DFT is a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) which specializes in large-scale commercial data centers. More to the point, they specialize in the sort of facilities which are desired by the largest technology companies. I’ve mentioned before that building and operating facilities is often desirable for larger players, but when it isn’t, they increasingly turn to DFT.
Archive for the ‘Data Centers’ Category
Really Big Data Centers for Lease
Sunday, October 21st, 2007Things Fall Apart, Datacenter Edition
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007The relentless pursuit by Operations staff of 100% uptime has always struck me as something more than just a job, but a battle against the relentless forces of nature. Everything ultimately breaks down — systems, buildings, even people — and attempting to maintain 100% availability is the Ops equivalent of trying to cheat death. Sooner or later, despite our best efforts, our number will ultimately be up. Most recently in the news, self-proclaimed World’s Finest Data Center operator 365 Main suffered an approximately 45 minute power outage at their San Francisco facility. Much to their credit., and unlike most of their competitors, 365 Main has been extremely open about their investigation. I’ll examine this a bit today, as it’s a rare public glimpse into what goes on inside a large data center facility.
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Really Big Data Centers
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007While most of my time these days is spent contemplating software and application considerations, I’d like to take a moment to address a topic which only occasionally gets the attention it deserves: the role of a high quality data center. While a few folks may think that networking and data center infrastructure are dead arts, I’m quite confident that there is still significant work going on in this space. Case in point: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Google, and (shockingly) Google are building massive new data centers taking advantage of all of the latest features to increase density and automation and reduce cost. At the end of the day, scale wins, and these facilities (which have price tags in the half-a-billion dollar range) have scale. Not to be outdone, incidentally, AOL has built a few big data centers — and sold them too. (more…)