The data center, which is slated for completion in early 2013, will be the third of its kind in Asia, joining two others that will be built in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Google has pledged an investment of $300 million in its Hong Kong data center and more than $100 million in Taiwan.

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HP will answer some of those questions today, with a big announcement of a new enterprise hardware, software and services platform at a company event in Vienna. HP calls this its Next Generation Information Platform: IDOL 10. Practically speaking, the suite includes Autonomy, with its software smarts around finding meaning in unstructured data as varied as TV interview transcripts or chains of email communications; and the analytical muscle of Vertica, a company HP acquired in February.

The way HP sees it — and, to be fair, it’s not the first company to make this kind of argument — the ratio of data that businesses are creating to what they actually use productively is pretty big. Only 15 percent of that information is neatly organized into the rows and columns of a traditional relational database, HP argues, leaving a lot more information — fully 85 percent — that would be useful if you could only capture it, determine its meaning, and analyze it: Video, audio, email, texts, social media, meeting notes. Add to that the explosion of other real-world information gathered from sensors and other measuring devices, and it gets even more complex. It’s a concept that HP is calling “information optimization.”

Mike Lynch, the former CEO of Autonomy, is expected to speak at today’s announcement event in Vienna. And if you happen to be there, you’ll probably also hear from Jan Zadak, HP’s executive vice president for global sales. I talked to Zadak last week, and he filled me in on the news.

It’s all about capturing that “lost” 50 percent to 85 percent of information and making it useful to businesses, Zadak told me. “What we’re trying to do is address the notion of how to enable enterprises around the world to harness the potential of data,” he said. “Traditionally, what you would do is run your relational databases and put all your information in columns and rows, and then you would crunch your data. That is what you would typically do to address what we call ‘structured data’ — everything we can pull into a structural database. But 85 percent of information is unstructured — images, charts, emails, tweets. All types of conversation.”

HP has researched the issue a bit, and reckons that more than half of the information produced at your average business remains unconnected, undiscovered and unused. It’s sort of like that old myth that people use only a small percentage of the capacity of their brains — except it’s probably true. Most business decisions are made with incomplete information, and who wouldn’t want to try to to address that shortcoming?

There’s a lot to the announcement from a product perspective. I won’t go into everything, but here are some highlights. There’s an HP social media solution, intended to help companies mine useful information out of feeds on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, to improve customer experiences and make sure the brand isn’t suffering because of some over-eager or ticked-off commenter.

And there’s a backup system, sold under HP’s StoreOnce brand, that came directly from work done by HP Labs. The idea is to store data once, rather than make unnecessary, redundant copies that take up precious storage space.

The announcements also contain some new dashboarding and performance monitoring tools that are aimed at helping IT execs better monitor what their systems are doing and whether or not they’re performing as efficiently as they should be.

Back to Zadak for a moment. As head of global sales, he’s the one who has been charged by CEO Meg Whitman with providing the “single face of HP” to enterprise clients. To that end, I asked him what his priorities are for 2012: Apparently that means spending a lot of time developing the sales force. He took over HP’s Sales University when Thomas Hogan left the company in April, and so far “several thousand” HP employees have been through it. Expect more investments around supporting the sales force generally. Given that so many business segments saw declines in sales in the most recent quarter, that doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

The Charlotte Observer reports that Apple has been issued the permits necessary to prepare the 171-acre parcel of vacant land adjacent to the data center for a new construction project. The name of that undertaking: “Project Dolphin Solar Farm A Expanded,” a riff on the data center’s original code name.

Details beyond that are slim, but sources close to Apple confirm that the Catawba County solar project is indeed under way.

Which makes perfect sense, really. A solar farm would be in keeping with Apple’s commitment to renewable energy. Apple’s manufacturing site in Cork, Ireland, is entirely wind-powered, and its Elk Grove, Calif., and Austin, Texas, facilities are now powered by 100 percent renewable energy resources, according to the company’s 2011 Facilities Report Environmental Update.

The Project Dolphin Solar Farm would advance this commitment even further by establishing an on-site resource for renewable energy generation and setting the bar a bit higher for an industry whose pollution-limiting efforts extend no further than purchasing renewable energy credits.

Built from the ground up by Google, these three facilities will be the first in the Asia-Pacific region to be fully owned by the company. Google expects them to be operational in one to two years, barring any major hiccups.

The investment comes as demand for Internet services in the region soars and competition between local players heats up.

“More people are coming online every day in Asia than in any other part of the world, so locating data centers here is an important next stage of Google’s investment in the region,” Google said in a statement.

Along with other Internet giants, Google has spent large amounts on building server capacity, to allow users remote access to stored files and programs through so-called cloud computing. In the past two years, it has converted an old paper mill close to the small town of Hamina, on the Baltic Sea coast of Finland, into a massive data center.

The mill was built to produce paper for magazines and newspapers, but the paper industry has seen demand for its products decrease as competition from online media has left many newspapers struggling. Paper manufacturer Stora Enso Oyj closed production at the mill in 2008, and Google saw the opportunity to fill the structure with the technology that contributed to the demise of papermaking in Hamina. A main attraction for the U.S.-based company was the cool Finnish climate.

Read the rest of this pst on the original site »

Next we saw Violin Memory — which makes flash-based storage arrays that are intended to make enterprise applications run faster — land $40 million in venture capital funding.

Now we see a third player entering the “flash madness” narrative. Pure Storage is coming out of stealth today, announcing its plans to sell flash-based storage arrays. It is also announcing that it has landed a $30 million C-round led by Redpoint Ventures, with Samsung Venture Investment joining. (Yes, that would be the venture capital arm of the South Korean electronics giant that happens to be the world’s biggest manufacturer of flash memory.) Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated. The latest round brings Pure’s total funding raised to date to $55 million.

So what is Pure Storage all about? I met up with CEO Scott Dietzen last week and got the download.

The fundamental problem with enterprise storage is that hard drives just can’t keep up with everything else that’s gotten faster in the data center. Flash memory is fundamentally faster, it uses less energy and it takes up less space. We all know this.

The problem with flash is that it has always tended to be more expensive than hard drives. Today, you can buy a one terabyte hard drive for $100 or less. But just try getting that same amount in flash memory and see if the price isn’t, well, a lot higher.

The same principles apply in the data center. CIOs would love to convert to flash-based systems, as long as they’re reliable and affordable and work with the applications and other hardware they already have.

Pure Storage is essentially promising to deliver just that, Dietzen says. The company’s first product is an all-flash storage array that is 10 times faster and 10 times smaller than hard-disk-based systems. It’s called the Pure Storage FlashArray, and it is being aimed at mainstream enterprises in a manner that’s easy to deploy.

Pure’s founders are John Colgrove — one of the founding engineers at Veritas, now part of Symantec — and John Hayes, a founding engineer at Bix, which was ultimately swallowed up by Yahoo. Dietzen hails from Yahoo as well, by way of its acquisition of Zimbra, where he was CTO.

An early key hire was Michael Cornwell, who was lead technologist for flash at Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle). Cornwell also worked at Apple, where he was Manager of Storage Engineering for the iPod division, and oversaw that product’s transition to — you guessed it — flash memory. Remember the first iPod nano? That was his baby.

Another key name: Greylock venture partner Frank Slootman, the former CEO of Data Domain, is on Pure’s board.

So what’s so special about a storage array built on flash memory? “Disks get slower every year,” Dietzen says. “Intel says processors have gotten 175 times faster over the last 15 years.” Disks just keep getting more data packed onto them, which doesn’t really make them any faster. The mechanical arm inside the disk that grabs data from the platter really can’t go much faster. “Disks today are comparably slower than tape was 15 years ago,” he says.

This creates a problem. Storage needs are going up, but hard drives are slowing data centers down, preventing them from reaching their full potential. It’s only because of cost — about $5 per gigabyte — that hard drives are still appealing. Enterprise-grade flash, on the other hand, tends to cost $40 to $100 per gigabyte, and because flash is historically less reliable, you have to buy double what you really need.

Pure’s play is to get over the cost hurdle. Dietzen says the company can get the cost down to $5 per gigabyte and less.

How does it do that? By reducing the amount of data you actually store. What happens in enterprise environments is that various bits of data get copied and recopied, over and over. Imagine a big filing cabinet with 50 copies of each document scattered around in different folders, when you really only need one. Suddenly the size of that file cabinet need not be so big. The same applies in data storage: Why bother having 10 copies of the same block of data, when one or two will do?

Using a technique known as deduplication, a system can eliminate all those unneeded copies and thus streamline the whole operation. Deduplication, combined with compression, was the primary principle behind Slootman’s Data Domain, which is now part of EMC.

But deduplication is expensive on hard drives, and really doesn’t make sense. Because the mechanical arm in a hard drive is always searching around for where its next needed block of data is to be found, if you employ deduplication, you end up with a bunch of reference signs telling the arm where to go, Dietzen says. The end result is that the disk has to spin more, not less. Flash memory chips don’t have that problem. “We make that process fast, because there’s no performance hit to the deduping process,” he says.

On top of that, Pure has created some algorithms that make the process a lot more granular than on hard-disk-based systems, by working with smaller disk-sector sizes. How small? He wouldn’t say exactly.

Unlike other storage companies — like, say, EMC — Pure’s array, Dietzen says, is built from the ground up for running flash. “The disk-centric companies are slotting flash into places where disks used to be, but they’re not changing the software to take advantage of the flash, to protect the flash from uneven wear and other things.”

A few early companies have tried the hardware, among them the law firm of Fenwick & West, whose CIO Matt Kesner is quoted in Pure’s press release as saying that the data used for various workloads was reduced from 50 to 90 percent.

One key thing that’s going on in the data center these days is virtualization — running several virtual computers within one single physical computer. When you run a lot of virtual machines, you have a lot of data that, like the paper in that big file cabinet, is essentially the same. Dietzen says that Pure’s flash array is able to eliminate a lot of that data. “Even if those virtual machines are a mix of Windows and Linux, there are a lot of commonalities between them,” he says. It’s not uncommon to see the data footprint for virtual machines reduced by a factor of 15 or 20 to one.

And that has caused some interesting reactions among early customers trying out the array. “Some people try it and are shocked when they put 15 terabytes on it and see there’s only one terabyte and think we’ve lost a lot of their data,” Dietzen says. “It’s a little scary at first, but then they run all their workloads and see all the data is there.”

Having closed on Friday at $14.97, the price of Cisco shares is nearing its lowest point in about five years (Cisco hit $14.18 in March of 2009). CEO John Chambers has blamed toughening competition in its main networking business, lower profit margins resulting from a product transition and a drop in government spending for many of its troubles. A significant restructuring is coming some time before the end of the summer that will combine offering retirement packages to eligible employees and laying off others. It’s also possible that other parts of Cisco’s business may be sold, spun off or shut down.

Chambers’ plan is to trim Cisco’s operating costs by $1 billion a year. Meanwhile, the video business that Chambers constantly talks about is starting to get interesting and competitive, and other products, like its blade servers, are starting to show some traction. And by the way, the Internet isn’t exactly getting smaller, you know.

Whatever it is, it better happen soon, Wu says, because investors are getting impatient. “In sum, we believe Cisco is fixable and not structurally flawed, but admit we need to see more dramatic steps be taken,” he writes.

While some investors have been calling for Chambers to step down, Wu isn’t with them. “From an investor standpoint, most believe that Cisco will be very difficult to turn around and that a management change is needed. While we do not believe that John Chambers needs to go, as we believe he has proven to be one of the greatest managers and visionaries of the modern era, we do believe he needs to make bigger moves than what has been done so far.” One suggestion? Boost the dividend to 3 percent from its current 1.6 percent.

Also? Cisco may have to take some “bitter medicine” on the price of its switches and other networking gear. Many Cisco customers and its channel resellers told Wu that Cisco’s prices are too high when compared to competitors, and that it may be pricing itself out of the market. “Many believe that Cisco still deserves a premium, but 50 to 100 percent seems a bit excessive,” he writes. “Because of this, we believe Cisco will likely need to take the bitter medicine of lower gross margin for longer-term good.” He cut his assumptions on Cisco’s gross margin accordingly from about 62 percent to a little higher than 55 percent.

That said, most of the the bad news at Cisco is priced in, making its depressed price a fair buying opportunity, he says. “We believe the Cisco story is getting better, and we’d rather be a buyer at these depressed levels than wait for obvious evidence of improvement. By then it may be too late.”

Wu still rates Cisco shares a buy, with a price target of $25, which is a drop from his previous target of $29. He also lowered his fiscal year 2012 estimates on Cisco’s revenue and per-share earnings to $45.9 billion and $1.50 per share, from $46.5 billion and $1.80 a share. The new target price represents a multiple of 12.5 times Cisco’s projected calendar year earnings of $1.62.

Wu also thinks Cisco will start setting more realistic expectations going forward, and back away from its projecting a long-term annual growth rate of 12 to 17 percent, which, he says, “no one believed anyway.”

Given all that, Cisco’s close to turning the corner, he says, though it won’t happen right away. “We realize that Cisco may take a few quarters in fixing itself, but we believe management will make the right moves in restoring investor creditability.”

(Image borrowed from the 1938 Warner Bros. classic animated short, Porky In Wackyland.)

To coincide with Earth Day, which apparently was today, Google decided to give a little peek inside its data center in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. Google would like you to know that its data centers are very energy efficient, as you’ll learn toward the end of this segment.

Google probably also wants to take advantage of the fact that it scored higher that Apple on the Greenpeace Dirty Data report because its facilities rely less on coal-generated power than those of Apple, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, IBM or Twitter. But the environmental stuff is saved for the end.

And if this isn’t enough data center fun, you might have missed my tour of the Lucasfilm data center last month, the one that when I last saw it, was actively cranking on the bits behind all the special effects for the summer blockbuster movies. Hey, Memorial Day is about five weeks away!

The bulk of the video focuses more on how Google protects data belonging to its customers with multiple layers of physical security (hint: don’t even think of trying to sneak in), and destroying hard drives when they wear out. After watching it twice, what I really want to know is this: Where can I get myself one of those crushers?

(Fort Knox Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Mark Zuckerberg up first: calls this the Open Compute Project.

It’s easy to think that the operations is just kind of this cost part of the business, but really products and operations fundamentally are linked, he says.

Zuckerberg is pandering to the infrastructure crowd in attendance by talking up how essential data centers are. Adding capacity improves the Facebook experience by enabling better “type-ahead” features when users search, and helps speed up the site. And these challenges are the same for partners too.

What the mass manufacturers put out wasn’t what we needed for social apps, so we made it more custom, Zuckerberg says. Now Facebook wants to share its improvements with everyone else in the industry so they can improve too. “We’re not the only ones who need the kind of hardware that we’re building out.”

Jonathan Heiliger, VP Technical Operations, up next. He points to a rack of servers behind them, says “they’re real Facebook servers, or rather, real Open Compute servers.”

Facebook designed and built its own data center in Prineville, Oregon over the last year and a half, and tailored the servers there to work on its software, Heilinger said. The goal was to be as efficient as possible. The industry average power effective usage is 1.5, average for leased data centers is 1.4-1.6, but Facebook has got it down to 1.07. Across the table from me, a hardware guy mutters, “That’s really good.”

The data center design team is only three people, Heilinger said, because it was built on top of other people’s work, so now the company wants to give back by sharing its specifications and design documents.

The servers Facebook built are 38 percent more energy efficient and cost 24 percent less, according to Heilinger.

Another Facebook data center guy is now digging into the specifics, but I already have a statement from Greenpeace in the inbox about how Facebook’s announcement isn’t good enough.

“It’s commendable that Facebook is working to increase the energy efficiency of its business, and specifically its data centers–an area of neglect for many years. But as the global warming footprint of the IT industry, and Facebook specifically, continues to grow significantly, a focus on energy efficiency alone will only slow the speeding train of unsustainable emissions growth. Efficiency is simply not enough.

“If Facebook wants to be a truly green company, it needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The way to do that is decouple its growth from its emissions footprint by using clean, renewable energy to power its business instead of dirty coal and dangerous nuclear power.”

Some of the data center design innovation includes the voltage of the electrical distribution system, localized power supply and a ductless evaporative cooling system (no air conditioning at all).

Now Amir Michael is describing and demoing Facebook’s redesigned servers and racks themselves. Facebook motherboards don’t usually need to be expanded, so that plastic and extra size was removed, for example. And servers are mounted on shelves rather than traditional rails.

He tells an endearing story about choosing to use blue LEDs to light the data center rather than green ones even though they were more expensive, concluding that the end result looked “so sweet.”

Now Michael and Heiliger are narrating a video describing their accomplishments and their commitment to openness, complete with uplifting music and camera shots that lovingly pan and linger over racks of servers.

“It’s time to start treating data centers like Fight Club, and really demystify the software and hardware,” said Heiliger.

Om Malik of GigaOM (and my old boss, hey Om!) is brought up to moderate a panel of experts from companies like Zynga, Intel and Dell to talk about how the Open Compute Project affects the industry.

“We commend Facebook for taking this step,” says Zynga infrastructure head Allen Leinwand, who adds he is “definitely considering” using it.

Here’s a link to the YouTube post of that video I described.

And here‘s a site dedicated to the Open Compute Project.

As the testimonials continue at the event, here’s one sent via email: Forrester Analyst Rich Fichera comments,

“The results speak for themselves – a high volume data center with a claimed PUE of 1.07, certainly one of the most efficient large data centers in the world,” writes Fichera. “What’s more valuable is Facebook’s decision to publish its server, rack and power specifications as part of the ‘Open Compute Project,’ making these specifications available to users and vendors in the hopes of creating an ecosystem around these stripped down cost optimized servers and associated infrastructure.”

Back at the event, Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston says, “We’re seeing the emergence of a new stack: data center, server and software working together,” says .

Weston said Rackspace will incorporate Facebook’s innovations in future data centers, in order to benefit from the dramatic decrease in energy costs.

Facebook also sent, via email, a response to Greenpeace’s statement:

From the beginning, we realized that the biggest impact we could have is focusing on efficiency, both for our own operations and the world. The Open Compute Project has the potential to save many times the energy that Facebook will ever use. We sent information on OCP to Greenpeace earlier today and we’ve offered to answer their questions. We hope Greenpeace “friends” the Open Compute Project and we encourage others to do the same.

Jason Waxman of Dell tries to put the announcement in context, “It’s putting something viable on the map that gives a clear direction on efficiency,” he says. Forrest Norrod of Dell adds that the demystification of data centers is “seminal.”

OK, everyone’s looking down at their phones at this point. Time to wrap it up, Facebook!

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

NetworkEffect will be at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. on Thursday morning for a press conference that promises “a behind-the-scenes look at the latest technology powering Facebook.”

Asked for detail, a Facebook spokesperson said the event would cover “Facebook’s hardware and software technology.”

With that as a hint, there are some infrastructure and operations deadlines on the horizon for the company: first, the planned opening of its Oregon data center this spring. And second, the Earth Day deadline Greenpeace has proactively declared for Facebook to stop depending on coal to power its service.

Facebook, in fact, told a local TV news reporter the Oregon data center has been built to be especially green, with recycled and local materials, and a system where one out of every 1.15 watts in the system actually powering computer infrastructure, rather than the typical one out of 1.8.

Will that be tomorrow’s main news topic? We’ll have to see. Tune in to NetworkEffect around 10 a.m. PT for coverage, or watch the press conference on Facebook’s live channel.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The order is said to coincide with the forthcoming release of a new product that Isilon is expected to announce next week.

So huge an order for data storage would coincide with the construction of Apple’s huge data center in Maiden, N.C., and that’s expected to be the hub for a new version of iTunes that relies more on storing media in the cloud and less on using its customers local hard drives.

If you have trouble getting your head around the petabyte, the fine folks at another EMC unit, the backup service Mozy (soon to be a unit of VMWare) produced this fascinating graphic. As they tell it, one petabyte is enough to store more than 13.3 years worth of HD video, meaning 12 petabytes would be enough to store nearly 160 years worth.

The scale of the storage infrastructure, if true, would amount to another potentially intriguing clue to the environment Apple is using inside its data center. Previously it had disclosed in job ads on its Web site that its hardware there will include a mix of systems running Mac OS X, IBM’s AIX, Oracle’s Sun/Solaris, and some Red Hat Linux-based machines.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple’s Area 51: The Truth Is Out There
• Apple’s N.C. Data Center Intended for iTunes, MobileMe
• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

As part of my recent visit to ILM, where first I interviewed CIO Kevin Clark and then toured the ILM data center, I got a look behind the scenes of “Rango,” the tale of a pet chameleon who is unexpectedly stranded in the desert and then finds his way to a tiny Wild West-like town called Dirt.

Dirt doesn’t exist. There’s no movie set to visit to plan shots as you might do with a set for a live-action movie. So the folks at ILM created a virtual version of the town–and the interiors of all its buildings–to help Verbinski and his team map out how they wanted to shoot each scene.

The mock-up of the town of Dirt was created inside an empty studio at ILM, with numerous cameras pointing into the center from the walls and ceilings, and as you’ll see in the video below, a director can “see” it using a digital tablet that presents a scene as it would appear if you were a character walking around in it. ILM’s Colin Benoit, who was layout supervisor on “Rango,” and Michael Sanders, digital supervisor on the film, were my tour guides. The video ends with a clip of the movie, where you see how the technology comes into use. Enjoy.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110328/a-virtual-tour-of-the-town-of-dirt-from-the-animated-film-rango/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110325/lucasfilms-data-center-and-an-encounter-with-the-real-death-star-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110325/lucasfilms-data-center-and-an-encounter-with-the-real-death-star-video/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 18:00:44 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4362 Wednesday I introduced you to Kevin Clark, master of all things data at Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic. Today, as promised, I’m taking you into the data center Clark commands.

Shortly after my chat with Clark, ILM’s publicist Greg Grusby ushered me into the room, where, as you’ll hear, the roar of air conditioning units cooling all the machines makes it hard to hear much else.

The room is 10,500 square feet and contains the systems running all the things that you’d find in pretty much any other corporate data center for things like email and Web service. StarWars.com is hosted in the room, for example. But I was more interested in the machines used to produce the crazy cool visual effects. As Clark mentioned in our chat, ILM is using almost a full petabyte of storage–or nearly 1 million gigabytes–and for that it relies upon NetApp appliances.

I lingered over an older rack of machines nicknamed the Death Star. These are the old customized Racksaver servers, each containing a single AMD Athlon processor and 2 gigabytes of memory, that were used to render imagery for “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith.” They’re also now considered so old that it’s not cost-effective to run them any longer.

Then we saw the new machines: The IBM racks, which to me actually look like they belong on the Death Star, are a mix of LS22 servers with AMD processors and newer HS22‘s with Intel processors. They average 32GB of memory per blade and currently cranking away on several movies. If you’re among those eagerly awaiting the release of films like “Cowboys and Aliens,” “Pirates of the Caribbean 4,” “Super 8,” “Transformers 3,” “Battleship” and “The Avengers,” every blink of the lights on the Bladecenter brings them one step closer to completion.

We’re not done with the tours. Next up, I’ll take you on a walking tour of the Town of Dirt seen in the animated feature “Rango.” And before we’re done with all this, I’ll tell you what ILM considers its “secret weapon,” at least from a computing perspective. Enjoy the video.

(Image via Wookiepedia)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110325/lucasfilms-data-center-and-an-encounter-with-the-real-death-star-video/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110323/apple-data-center-theories/ http://allthingsd.com/20110323/apple-data-center-theories/#comments Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:50:13 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=59016 Scheduled to go live sometime this spring, Apple’s 505,000-square-foot North Carolina data center is, according to COO Tim Cook, intended to support iTunes and MobileMe. But we don’t yet know in what capacity, and Cook’s remark, which is at once unambiguous and utterly cryptic, leaves plenty of room for speculation. And theories about the potential capabilities of this new facility abound.

In a research note this week, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi reviewed a few of the more plausible ones, which run the gamut from the long-rumored iTunes streaming service to the back end for a natural language voice interface and navigation service for its iOS devices.

The first: an easy way of scaling the company’s iAd mobile advertising program. With its installed base of iOS devices likely to hit 200 million by the end of fiscal 2011, iAds could put quite a strain on Apple’s ad serving capabilities. Says Sacconaghi, “If iAd gets traction while serving interactive, multimedia ads then Apple’s underlying advertising platform will need to be significantly larger, and at a scale comparable to Google’s or Microsoft’s ad platforms.”

The second is a no-brainer and seems fairly likely to pan out given recent chatter about Apple’s MobileMe service going free come April: an overhauled verision of MobileMe that provides improved cloud-based synchronization of data and media, along with meaningful storage capacity.

The low-cost iTunes subscription service we’ve been hearing about for years now is the third. Again, this seems a completely plausible use for Apple’s new data center, and as Sacconaghi notes, the time may finally be right for the company to launch it. “In our meeting with Apple executives last month, VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue suggested that the reason that music subscription services had failed to receive traction with consumers was because they were too expensive, highlighting prevailing rates of up to $15/month,” he wrote. “We note that an annual subscription to Napster now costs $8/month, while the paid version – unlimited, higher-quality, ad-free – of music streaming from Pandora costs $3/month.” Add to that Apple’s 2010 acquisition of streaming music outfit Lala and the traction Spotify and Pandora have been gaining in the market recently and this seems a likely scenario as well.

Fourth on Sacconaghi’s list, an aggressively priced video streaming service. Given the popularity of Netflix’s iOS app among iPhone and iPad users, it might make sense for Apple to offer its own competing video subscription service. Or, it could simply acquire Netflix. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have the money to do it–even if Netflix’s market cap is north of $11 billion.

And finally there’s that voice interface and navigation service I mentioned earlier. This one might seem a stretch, but don’t dismiss it out of hand. Last April, Apple acquired Siri, developer of a virtual personal assistant supported by speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search. And in 2009 it purchased PlaceBase, a mapping outfit that specialized in enhancing maps with private and public data sets. Put those two acquisitions together with a massive data center and Sacconaghi’s theory looks at least plausible.

“Apple could offer its own navigation service comparable to Google’s free and very popular voice-based navigation system on Android,” he writes. “The iOS device user-base could then potentially periodically upload anonymous information on routes travelled and speeds encountered, perhaps even in real-time, which would allow Apple to report back traffic conditions to its user-base.”

Sounds like a killer feature for the iPhone 5, doesn’t it?

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple’s N.C. Data Center Intended for iTunes, MobileMe
• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110323/apple-data-center-theories/feed/ 16 http://allthingsd.com/20110321/twitter-brags-of-successful-data-center-migration/ http://allthingsd.com/20110321/twitter-brags-of-successful-data-center-migration/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:30:56 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4481 Twitter, after years of fighting the Fail Whale, has recently made major changes under the hood to ensure its messaging service will stay online. Its engineering and operations teams coordinated a massive effort starting last September to migrate Twitter not once, but twice, shifting 20 TB of tweets and live traffic-serving from a first data center to a second testing center to its third “final nesting ground.”

Over the last couple months in particular, I’ve heard murmurs through the grapevine of Twitter engineers boasting as shifts happened with no disruption to the service.

Twitter VP of Engineering Michael Abbott publicly bragged about the migration today in a blog post, but declined to disclose where the data center musical chairs actually occurred, or why multiple moves were necessary.

Since 2008, the company–which coincidentally is celebrating the five-year anniversary of the first tweet today–2008 had been using NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services, which has a data center in San Jose, Calif., and later expanded to Santa Clara. In July 2010, Twitter said it would move into a custom-built data center in Salt Lake City before the end of that year.

But that didn’t happen, and in December, Twitter reportedly leased data center space in Sacramento.

In a rare sentence that didn’t include a bird metaphor (flocking! nesting! migration!), Abbott described the implications of the data center move in his blog post: “This move gives us the capacity to deliver Tweets with greater reliability and speed, and creates more runway to focus on the most interesting operations and engineering problems.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110321/twitter-brags-of-successful-data-center-migration/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110321/peter-levine-veritas-veteran-and-data-center-guru-joins-andreesen-horowitz/ http://allthingsd.com/20110321/peter-levine-veritas-veteran-and-data-center-guru-joins-andreesen-horowitz/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:32:01 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4190 Venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz said today that it has appointed Peter Levine, a veteran of the enterprise software company Veritas that’s now a part of Symantec, and the former CEO of XenSource, now part of Citrix, as its first venture partner.

Levine is the third partner to join AH in recent months. In January it named HP and Opsware veteran Mark Cranney as a partner for market development. And in March it added IronPort’s Scott Weiss.

“Adding Peter makes us smarter at the firm on a certain class of products where he is much more experienced and goes much more in depth than we do, in areas like virtualization and storage,” AH co-founder Ben Horowitz told me. A key area of expertise is one that Levine developed specifically at Veritas, he said, that of working with manufacturers of infrastructure products. “Veritas was probably the most successful company in the history of enterprise software at the OEM model except for Microsoft,” Horowitz said. “It’s a very complicated thing to do–and a very complicated thing to do correctly–so he brings a specialized skill set to the table.”

Horowitz also said Levine will help AH expand its reach and find deals in places where it hasn’t had a presence before, places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Levine is a lecturer. One example: Bromium, a stealth startup that AH says it is investing in. While Horowitz didn’t disclose the amount the firm is investing, he did describe Bromium as a “security plus virtualization company.”

“It’s the kind of deal we wouldn’t have known about without working with Peter,” Horowitz told me.

“We’re at the second generation of what you can do with virtualization,” Levine told me. “Companies like Citrix and XenSource did a lot of the hard rock-breaking to get chipset support from companies like Intel to support virtualization, and once they did that there was an opportunity to take virtualization to the next level. Bromium is a company that takes advantage of all that.”

Levine is continuing in his role as a vice president of Strategic Development at Citrix and will continue teaching a class on Technology Sales at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Previously, he was senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center and Cloud Division at Citrix, having joined that company in 2007 by way of its $500 million acquisition of XenSource, a provider of open-source virtualization sofware, where he was CEO. XenSource’s customers included Microsoft, Symantec, HP, NEC and Dell.

This will be Levine’s second go in the venture capital ring. He spent three years as a general partner at the Mayfield Fund and in that capacity served on the board of Consera Software, which was purchased by HP. He sat on the advisory board of VMWare and was an investor in Actona, which was ultimately acquired by Cisco Systems.

Levine first rose to prominence as an early employee of Veritas Software, and during his 11-year stint there helped to grow it to 5,000+ and more than $1.5B in annual revenue. His last job at Veritas was executive VP, where he was responsible for worldwide marketing, OEM sales, business development and several product divisions. Before that, he was a software engineer at MIT and worked on Project Athena, an early-1980s research project to build a campus-wide distributed computing network that turned out to be a forerunner of the kind of corporate networks we now use every day.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110321/peter-levine-veritas-veteran-and-data-center-guru-joins-andreesen-horowitz/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110318/seven-questions-for-salesforce-coms-parker-harris/ http://allthingsd.com/20110318/seven-questions-for-salesforce-coms-parker-harris/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:30:47 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4125 Last week I took advantage of the fact that I was in San Francisco for Hewlett-Packard’s big summit meeting, and stopped by the offices of Salesforce.com. There I met up with Parker Harris, executive vice president for technology, and one of the company’s four founders.

There’s so much going on at Salesforce it’s hard to keep track of it all. We talked a bit about Chatter.com and the result of the company’s efforts to promote it during the Super Bowl, and also about the state of mobile devices and where its priorities are. But I started with a question about Japan.

NewEnterprise: Everyone is talking about what’s been happening in Japan. You have a data center under construction there. Has there been any effect on your plans?

Harris: No. The data center is in Tokyo so it’s outside of the area directly impacted by the earthquake. We chose the location not only for the earthquake-proof nature of the building, but also for access to diesel generators, which have proven pretty important given the power situation. There’s been no interruption at all in what we’re doing.

So what are your pain points, what are you dealing with this year? Judging by your growth I’m guessing the list is long.

The big one is around trust, reliability, availability and scalability as we grow. I would say it’s not the biggest pain point that we have because we’ve been focused on it for so long. We did have a period several years ago when we had a lot of issues. I think a lot of major services go through that: eBay, Google and Twitter are all examples. I think that’s because none of them are the same. They all grow organically as the customers and technology grow. Chatter is a big focus now.

Speaking of Chatter, how did the Super Bowl ad for Chatter.com work out?

The Super Bowl was an interesting challenge because we had to make sure we could handle the load of Super Bowl traffic. We have an interesting relationship with Will.I.Am. He’s a friend of Marc’s. They started in this odd place where he wants to get into technology and wants to expand his brand. And Marc started talking to him about collaboration. And it was kind of a crazy idea. It was kind of a consumer play with the Super Bowl. Chatter.com is kind of a pro-sumer product where we want individuals to use it. We didn’t really think people sitting on the couch drinking beer would use it right away. But we knew it would attract some attention, but the after effect of discussion around the ad, the YouTube video of the making of the ad, and all the talk around it had a good effect. It got me ready to make sure I had a Web site that could handle a lot of traffic. We partnered with Akamai to cache a lot of the static content. We did a lot of testing of the sign-up process during spikes and peak loads.

Did you the see the spike you hoped for?

We saw a huge spike in traffic to the Web site and traffic to the sign-up page through the following week. A lot of it was from phones, from people sitting on the couch. This is part of our transformation to what we call Cloud 2.0 that we’ve been talking about so much. Historically our Web sites didn’t work on mobile devices that well. Our app didn’t work that well. Chatter.com was a case where we did the mobile version first.

What are you working on right now?

With Chatter it’s about adoption, and how do we get people outside your company collaborating with you. We kind of do that now, but there’s stuff we need to do in the product to make it more usable. That would be a big next step for Chatter. In the Service Cloud we want to reinvent the low end. We’re taking Chatter as an influence, and we look at cool little companies like Zendesk, which does a nice job at the low end of the market. We want to reinvent the portal experience with a Chatter influence on the Service Cloud. On the Sales Cloud we want to focus a lot on the sales rep’s experience, and I think mobile is a big factor there. Phones are a big deal, but tablets are an even bigger deal. So we’re doing a lot of design work and experimentation around the tablet experience. And how much do we re-think our experience on the tablet.

I’ve heard some people say that if you want to invest in the future of the iPad and think Apple stock is too expensive, then Salesforce is a good bet because you’re doing so much on that device. Do you think that’s fair?

We’re paying a lot of attention to the iPad. But we’re expanding that to a tablet focus. We definitely think Google’s Android will get a lot of adoption. It’s a fragmented market still but they’ll get there. I think the iPad is still winning in the enterprise. We don’t want to underestimate Android.

What do you think of HP’s WebOS? Léo Apotheker had a lot to say about that yesterday. Do you have any interest there?

We’re not keeping an eye on that right now. We’re looking at Research In Motion’s Playbook and seeing where that goes mainly because we have a ton of people who use the Blackberry in our customer base. It’s still the best email device. I gave mine up for an iPhone, but for cranking through email it’s still better. And because of our close relationship with RIM we’re going to see if there is something we can do with the Playbook. The mobile space is a hard place to make bets. So we’re working hard on our HTML5 strategy so that we can have something that will work that’s cloud based with other devices.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110318/seven-questions-for-salesforce-coms-parker-harris/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110308/rackspace-turns-anso-labs-into-a-cloud-services-business-unit/ http://allthingsd.com/20110308/rackspace-turns-anso-labs-into-a-cloud-services-business-unit/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:15:59 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3814 Rackspace, the Web hosting and cloud-services outfit that many people think is going to be acquired any day now, said today that it’s moving more deeply into the cloud business with its own infrastructure offering built around OpenStack, open-source cloud-computing software.

The move comes hot on the heels of Rackspace’s acquisition of OpenStack specialist Anso Labs, which NewEnterprise reported exclusively last month. Rackspace is calling the new unit Rackspace Cloud Builders, and will offer training and certification, deployment and support to companies that want to build and maintain their own cloud running OpenStack. Jesse Andrews, co-founder of Anso Labs, has the title of director of development in the new business unit.

Rackspace is just one of a batch of companies backing the OpenStack movement; Dell and Citrix are also big supporters. Dell has created an OpenStack installer that can be used to get the software up on a set of servers, and once field tests are completed, it’s expected to be offered to the open-source community.

The news here is for companies that have been looking on jealously at all those taking advantage of the public cloud, but that for whatever reason aren’t willing or able to do so themselves. OpenStack offers a way to easily build a private cloud that, depending on its structure, offers at least some of the advantages, like ease of of setup, without some of the perceived drawbacks, like a loss of control over data.

Meanwhile, the speculation around Rackspace and whether or not it’s going to be acquired continues unabated. Its shares have improved by nearly 20 percent since the first of year. It’s certainly not behaving like a company that expects to be acquired. Earlier this week it disclosed in an SEC filing a new 15-year lease on more than 21,000 square feet of data center space capable of maintaining a maximum critical load of nearly four megawatts of power, ready for occupancy by February. Combining that with the cancellation of a lease on a smaller facility, the deal is worth $88 million. Maybe when CEO Lanham Napier said the company is not for sale, he really meant it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110308/rackspace-turns-anso-labs-into-a-cloud-services-business-unit/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110307/ibm-builds-38-million-data-center-in-singapore/ http://allthingsd.com/20110307/ibm-builds-38-million-data-center-in-singapore/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2011 19:35:54 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3783 Amazon isn’t the only outfit expanding its cloud services footprint in Asia. IBM said today it will spend $38 million to build a new Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Data Center in Singapore. The new data center will enhance a network of similar centers in Germany, Canada and the U.S. and 13 cloud labs, more than half of which are already in Asia.

Last week IBM’s CFO Mark Loughridge, speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference, said about 30 percent of IBM’s revenue will come from growth markets by 2015. Emerging markets accounted for 21 percent of IBM’s sales at the end of 2010, up from only 11 percent in 2000. You may also remember that when I spoke to IBM’s head of cloud computing Ric Telford earlier this year, he said that Big Blue would be adding to its fleet of data centers. The new center will ramp up in April, first offering IBM’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that’s aimed at supporting an environment development and test activities.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110307/ibm-builds-38-million-data-center-in-singapore/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110223/apples-n-c-data-center-intended-for-itunes-mobileme/ http://allthingsd.com/20110223/apples-n-c-data-center-intended-for-itunes-mobileme/#comments Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:05:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=58268 Apple’s finally getting ready to light up its North Carolina data center. Asked about the facility during the company’s shareholder meeting today, COO Tim Cook said it’s on track to open this spring, according to reports. And it’s intended to support MobileMe and iTunes, though it’s unclear in what capacity. Certainly that long-rumored cloud-based version of iTunes is one possibility. As I wrote last fall:

Were Apple to create the cloud-based version of iTunes that’s long been rumored–one from which users’ entire iTunes libraries could be streamed–and were it to bolster MobileMe’s iDisk and Gallery services with more robust storage, even the 64GB Air might seem an attractive option to the high-end user. And Apple’s new N.C. data center, which is nearly five times the size of the one it operates in Newark, Calif., may well make both those things possible.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110223/apples-n-c-data-center-intended-for-itunes-mobileme/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20110124/seven-questions-for-ric-telford-ibm%e2%80%99s-vp-of-cloud-services/ http://allthingsd.com/20110124/seven-questions-for-ric-telford-ibm%e2%80%99s-vp-of-cloud-services/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:45:15 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2177 It wasn’t so long ago that the primary appeal of cloud computing was cost-savings. Companies struggling to slash their operational costs moved their data and applications out of their own back offices and handed them off to cloud providers. Now the question about the cloud is turning in a new direction. CIOs who last year asked, “How much can I save?” are now asking, “What more can I do with it?”

Often they’ll turn to public cloud providers like Amazon or Google or Microsoft. Those are the three names that usually get mentioned in the same breath whenever enterprise cloud services come up. But what about IT giant IBM? It turns out it’s a significant player in the cloud game, offering both public and private cloud services. Last week I sat down with Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of Cloud Services to talk about how Big Blue’s cloud business is going and what its priorities are in the year just started.

NewEnterprise: Ric, let’s start at the top. Tell me how IBM sees the cloud business right now?

Telford: Initially the cloud is all about doing more with less. Suddenly you could deliver the same IT services for less. Fast-forward to today, and it’s not all about saving money. People are realizing they can do things they never could before with the cloud. I was recently met with a small aircraft engineering company, and the guy running it described how he competes with much larger companies for defense contracts. It used to be that doing all the modeling and simulations he needed required buying hardware and software and running it all on premise. Now he can go out to the cloud, pay for what he uses and be done with it. He can now compete for contracts he wouldn’t have been able to go after before. And we’re seeing a lot of examples like that in industry after industry.

Someone said to me the other day that the cloud is going to have to have all the parts of the mainframe. Do you agree with that?

There’s a lot of parallels between the cloud and the mainframe. IBM’s view is that we have a single-reference architecture. It’s the same whether we’re delivering the service or if we build it for you. We did a deal recently with France Telecom where they are going to be a cloud services provider to their clients. They already have the network connections. But they’re not a cloud company. So they’re using IBM’s cloud architecture to give them all the pieces in one easy-to-consume bite. So we have that architecture and we use the same blueprint in all the various permutations of the cloud. For some people it’s confusing, but for us it’s all the same whether you want to have it inside your firewall or outside.

Which do your customers tend to prefer–a private cloud or a public cloud?

We do surveys every year and right now we’re seeing about a two-to-one preference for private versus public. About 60 to 70 percent of respondents say they’re working on a private cloud, and about 30 to 40 say they’re working on the public cloud. To us it’s all the same. We offer a core set of services from the IBM cloud–development, test, compute, storage, collaborations, desktop. But we can also build the same thing inside your firewall.

How big is your public cloud business?

I can’t give you a revenue figure because different business units take advantage of it to deliver different things. We just opened up a delivery center in Research Triangle Park. It’s probably one of the most advanced data centers in the world. And now we’re rolling out a model that we are cloning around the world. We just opened one in Germany and another in Canada. And then we’ll just keep adding them. We manage about eight million square feet of data centers around the world.

How does a company typically get started with the cloud?

Usually I suggest they start with their develop-and-test operations. It’s usually not mission-critical, and there’s usually a lot of hardware that’s not being used. Usually that’s the group that buys hardware long before it’s needed and it ends up sitting idle 90 percent of the time. At IBM we put our whole research division on the cloud because they were the worst hardware hoarders, putting servers under desks and whatnot. They knew that if they needed a new server it would take weeks to get it. Now they go out to the research and compute cloud, and the services they need are usually ready to use in minutes or at most an hour. It just makes a huge difference in people’s ability to get going.

So what you are your priorities for this year?

One of the big things we started seeing last year was an uptake of cloud delivery in industry-specific ways. We’re working not just on the generic things like email and collaboration, but on the specific applications that are used in various industries. Health care, banking and government are a few that have complicated regulatory needs that vary state by state and country by country, and we have the deep understanding required to work with them. We also built a private cloud to help the 29 countries involved in NATO share data on logistics and troop deployments. We also have an initiative with the consumer electronics industry. Utilities is another, and it gets tied in with our Smarter Planet initiatives.

Will IBM be making deals in the cloud this year?

IBM will make a few billion in acquisitions. Cloud is one of the four key growth areas we’re focused on. The others are Smarter Planet, analytics and the growth markets. We’ve said that in those four growth initiatives we’re going for $20 billion in additional revenue by 2014. Four initiatives, five years and $20 billion dollars. That’s certainly not all going to happen organically.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110124/seven-questions-for-ric-telford-ibm%e2%80%99s-vp-of-cloud-services/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20110121/facebook-data-center-is-boon-for-oregon-town/ http://allthingsd.com/20110121/facebook-data-center-is-boon-for-oregon-town/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2011 13:00:37 +0000 John Letzing http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35406 Facebook Inc. is contemplating the expansion of a data-center project in Prineville, Ore., that already covers an area equivalent to five football fields, underlining the social-networking service’s need to accommodate a rapidly growing number of users.
Meanwhile, Facebook is seeking to build bonds with the surrounding community. It’s an effort that’s had the company throwing a barbecue for locals, providing free dental care for area children and donating uniforms for high school sports teams.

Facebook’s Prineville project demonstrates ways the seven-year-old company is growing up, taking on significant additional costs, and making an effort to form bonds with a growing network of constituents. It’s a process that companies of all stripes, from manufacturers to miners, have had to navigate.

The Prineville data center, which is filling up with server computers required to run Facebook’s service for its more than 500 million users, is owned and operated by the company.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110121/facebook-data-center-is-boon-for-oregon-town/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:04:34 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2383 Wikipedia now seems like an enduring institution on the Web, but the site was only founded 10 years ago, tomorrow.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says it is just recently that the site has gotten itself on sustainable financial footing, and has become widely accepted as a useful, quality resource.

We stopped by the nonprofit’s San Francisco headquarters, which is located amidst a sea of tech companies in the city’s SOMA district, on the eve of the big anniversary, which Wikipedia is celebrating with a set of relatively mellow user meet-ups around the world.

Gardner spoke about the evolution of Wikimedia as an organization, and set out its goals for the coming years. We videoed the part of the interview where she sets the scene for the 10th anniversary.

Wikipedia is coming off a successful grassroots fundraiser, where it was able to raise $16 million from users, in part due to founder Jimmy Wales’s face greeting users every time they visited the site until the end of the campaign. That’s double the amount raised in a similar campaign the year before.

And over the last 18 months, Wikimedia orchestrated a wide-scale community discussion of its strategy, aided by collaboration expert Eugene Eric Kim, which resulted in a set of goals to take the organization and its many volunteers forward.

Wikipedia now has cumulative 380 million edits, resulting in 17.8 million articles in 250 languages by eight million user accounts, of which about 100,000 edit at least five times per month. It has 52 people in its San Francisco headquarters, which Gardner took over in 2007.

The nonprofit’s three-part mandate is to increase Wikipedia participation, quality and reach. Its big focus for the coming year will be reach, according to Gardner, specifically targeting poorer areas of the world where Wikipedia has so far proved to be less popular.

The idea, said Gardner, is that if people in these places have the tools and exposure to contribute to Wikipedia, the resulting content will be better representative of the world, as well as more comprehensive.

“You can’t blame editors for not being representative,” said Gardner. “The way to solve this is not to make them feel bad.”

A major implementation of the initiative will be opening a Wikimedia office in India in the next couple of months. Gardner had just recently returned from a trip to India when we spoke.

Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s product team is also working to redo its registration and discussion tools, and future projects include a better system for understanding user reputations.

The company has also started a campus ambassador program at colleges, which Gardner said is promising in part due to the folks who have turned out so far. Unlike with Wikipedia, where 87 percent of contributors are men, the campus ambassador volunteers were 50 percent women.

Another college effort is a program with 25 public policy classes to improve the Wikipedia pages on a particular subject matter.

And on the infrastructure front, Wikimedia is finally moving its data center out of the hurricane zone in Florida to a dedicated space in Virginia. The nonprofit is also looking to cache the site from more locations (it currently does so in Amsterdam) so it can be more quickly accessible in more parts of the world.

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