CoreSite Newsletter Welcome to CoreSite's Q3'2010 newsletter. In this issue, you will find articles on the "dollars and sense" of developing energy efficient data centers, the challenge CIO's face in constantly pushing the innovation envelope, links from CoreSite's listing day ceremony at the New York Stock Exchange, a customer success story from CFN Services, and a CoreSite data center and interconnection summary from around the country. We encourage you to follow CoreSite online via our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages! In the event this newsletter does not display properly in your email, we encourage you to view it online at www.CoreSite.com/Newsletter_Q3_2010.php. |
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From the Desk of the CIO: "Innovation Through Fusion" |
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Innovation Through Fusion Chuck Price | CoreSite | SVP, Information Technology "Innovate or die!" The battle cry of many a CIO attempting to impassion rapid change in organizations aimed at maintaining their market relevance at an accelerating pace in an ever-changing technological landscape. The concepts of innovation have historically assumed many characteristics and perspectives: evolutionary or revolutionary, open or closed, sustaining or disruptive, and distributed or centralized to name just a few. In the last 20 years thought leaders of innovation have given us much to digest on the topic and its implications on creating and destroying value in businesses and markets. Discussions from key thought leaders such as Clayton M. Christensen and Henry Chesbrough, defining the nature of innovation and educating through numerous articles and books from 1995 through 2006, have ranged from the intrinsic value of technology innovation-proper, to how business strategies and business models were enabled by innovations in technology. My experiences have led me to develop my own perspective on innovation, which is likely not nearly as refined as Christensen's or Chesbrough's, but is pragmatic and simply chosen from two basic approaches: evolutionary innovation or innovation through fusion. My ultimate purpose in choosing one or the other of these distinctly different approaches is to maintain my company's leading competitive position in the industries in which we compete. I believe the best way for companies to maintain a competitive lead is through the fusion of multiple technologies, or disciplines, which come together to provide a product or service that is far more difficult for competitors – or potential competitors – to disrupt or leapfrog. My fundamental hypothesis is that, when a company can determine a way to successfully innovate through fusion, that company has developed a far more competitively defensible product or service and will be more likely to maintain its market leadership position, creating longer term value for its shareholders. Let me provide some examples of each. The easiest to understand is evolutionary innovation. Toothpaste is a good example of a product that is typically innovated via an evolutionary approach: let's add sparkles this time; let's make it transparent this time; let's make their teeth glow this time; let's make it with a new flavor this time; etc. This evolutionary approach to product innovation is easier to duplicate by competitors, or to disrupt completely with a low cost of entry. Two Ph.D. chemistry students could figure out a way to, very inexpensively, duplicate and out-evolve Proctor and Gamble. Now, P&G absolutely has the financial ability to evolve faster and at a far greater scale, but the example illustrates that this approach keeps the barrier to competition very low for desiring entrants. This places additional burden on the leader to evolve quickly or risk being overtaken by competitors or worse yet, becoming obsolete altogether. Innovation through fusion is far more interesting and, more importantly, competitively defensible. Consider a company that determines to develop a very small product that may be implanted in a mammal, which has the ability to release different medications from internal reservoirs when it receives encrypted radio waves or electro-magnetic pulses, perhaps via a wand that's waved over the location of implantation. To develop this product the leader with the vision has to engage and "fuse" many different skills and experiences toward this common vision. She has to be the type of leader who can cause these others to "catch" her vision first, and also be able to manage the execution of that vision through research and development. Any other company desiring to compete would have to duplicate that recipe, human and technological! All of these disciplines would have to be identified and engaged (biology, chemistry, mechanical and electrical engineering, computer science, medical science, etc.) before any other company could compete. Certainly innovation through fusion is almost always harder, more expensive and more time consuming and not every product or service is well-suited to this approach to innovation. That said, CIO's are actually in one of the best seats in the house to look cross-functionally and evaluate myriad technologies to consider as "fusion candidates". For CIO's looking to add business value in more competitively sustainable ways, it's well worth the effort and investment to consider how one might employ this approach toward building longer term shareholder value. Hey, maybe I'll even join the bandwagon and coin a new term for this approach: Atomic Innovation! Chuck Chuck Price is CoreSite's senior vice president of information technology. View Mr. Price's full bio here. |
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The "Dollars and Sense" of Building Energy-Efficient Data Centers Billie Haggard | CoreSite | SVP, Data Centers In June of this year, CoreSite completed a 50,000 square-foot private data center in Santa Clara, California. In doing so, we added one of the most energy-efficient data centers in our portfolio whose characteristics include a projected annualized P.U.E. of 1.3, a $750,000 rebate from Silicon Valley Power for innovations and efficiencies in design, and a projected LEED Gold designation. Based on independent consulting engineers, the efficiencies of 2901 Coronado will save more than $750,000 in annual electricity expenses and nearly 10 million kilowatt hours per year. The dilemma for any data center provider or IT manager is efficiently building to the reliability levels of a Tier III or Tier IV data center - delivering redundant UPS units and mechanical systems while keeping P.U.E. as low as effectively possible. CoreSite's Santa Clara data center is designed to meet this objective by using air-side economization, ultrasonic humidification, variable speed drives on air handling units and pump packages, and modular, efficient UPS units. However, engineering designs are not the only contributor to superior data center efficiency. It takes commitment from the customers as well, to implement and support easy data center enhancements such as cold or hot aisle containment systems, blanking panels, and directed ducting to ensure the cooling systems are as effective and efficient as possible. We are encouraged by our customers' support of chilled water inlet temperatures as high as 76F, an expanded operating band for humidification of 20-80%, and their trust in our commitment to improving efficiency without reducing reliability. CoreSite has and will continue to allocate significant resources to the reduction of our operating costs. P.U.E. optimization projects are under way across the country, including lighting and ballast change-outs, addition of zoned lighting, replacing older HVAC units with variable speed units, UPS replacement, and the installation of air and water-side economization equipment. We utilize a sophisticated building management and monitoring system that provides key metrics to allow our in-house facilities support staff to trend and predict overall operation of our systems to ensure we are driving P.U.E. to the lowest possible levels. All future buildings and upgrades will be completed with the goal of driving down energy consumption. We have also made considerable investments in systems to monitor, control and report on energy consumption. Our branch circuit monitoring systems (BCMs) allow for real-time monitoring of customer power usage as well as other electrical monitoring points to automatically calculate P.U.E. This allows customers to share in the benefits of energy-efficient initiatives, by paying for only what they use. Usage-based power pricing is a significant incentive for customers to push for IT improvements on their end such as reducing inefficiencies in server operation. At the end of the day, when both the provider and the end user focus on building and maintaining a P.U.E.-optimized data center environment, it is a win-win for everyone. This is why I love to say, "Energy efficiency makes more than just sense...it makes dollars AND sense." If you are in the midst of planning or executing a data center optimization project or new-build or have any ideas that CoreSite should consider in the future, please email me at Billie.Haggard@CoreSite.com. Billie Haggard is CoreSite's senior vice president of data centers. Read his full bio here. |
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CoreSite Goes Public - Highlights From Listing Day at The NYSE Mark Jobson | CoreSite | Marketing Director On September 23rd, CoreSite completed our Initial Public Offering, trading for the first time under the symbol "COR" on the New York Stock Exchange. In commemoration of this event, CoreSite executives gathered at the New York Stock Exchange for breakfast with exchange executives, the ceremonial ringing of the opening bell, media interviews and more. CoreSite would like to thank the many people and organizations whose contributions helped us to become an industry leader in data centers, colocation and peering. This includes our dedicated and hard-working employees, vendors and partners, and most importantly, our 600+ customers. Below, please find some highlights from the Listing Day activities. Video Coverage: Tom Ray | President & CEO | Interview with CNBC Senior Leadership Team Rings Opening Bell at NYSE Tom Ray | President & CEO | Interview with The Deal Photos: Senior Leadership Team On The Podium (Close-up) Senior Leadership Team On The Podium CoreSite Banner on NYSE Facade CoreSite Executives on Trading Floor Awaiting Commencement Mark Jobson is Marketing Director for CoreSite. |
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Customer Success Stories: CFN Services Grows Their Financial Network With CoreSite Judy Misbin-May | CFN Services | Vice President of Marketing The Company CFN Services leverages FiberSource®, a global knowledge-based platform that identifies all available dark and lit fiber, collocation, towers, structures and lit buildings; providing network design, planning, deployment, and managed services offerings. For more information http://www.cfnservices.com The Data Center Need A component of the CFN High Performance Global Exchange is the ability for market data providers to have a single source solution for low latency global delivery of their news feeds. Specifically, this data center selection process was the expansion of the CFN High Performance Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure initiative. The Decision In our research, it quickly became evident that CoreSite's data center at 1275 K Street in the heart of Washington, DC - a prime lock box data location, had unmatched proximity to data sources such as the U.S. Departments of Treasury, Commerce, Labor and others. The colocation facility was located within a mile of each data source, providing an ideal environment to build a market data ecosystem. In touring the data center, it was clear that CoreSite met and surpassed our needs from a reliability and security standpoint, with staff who were extremely attentive and knowledgeable. The data centers in Northern Virginia or Ashburn were simply too far away to even be in the discussion when your customers are looking for latency competitive advantages in microseconds, let alone milliseconds. The Results An example of their service quality is their Remote Hands service offering. We submitted a request about a non-emergency data center issue at 4:00pm and expected a call back the next day as it was nearing the completion of normal business hours. A member of the CoreSite Operations team called us back promptly and within minutes the issue was resolved before the day was over. The service has been excellent. Their data centers are reliable. Their sales team is knowledgeable and professional. Their administrative corporate service is superb. CoreSite really is a strong partner of CFN Services and we look forward to growing with them for many years to come. CFN Services Info Judy Misbin-May is Vice President of Marketing and Will Tirado is Vice President of Engineering for CFN Services. Contact CFN Sales at Sales@cfnservices.com or contact Judy directly at Judy.May@cfnservices.com. |
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| CoreSite Peering Update Dominic Tobin | CoreSite | SVP, Operations Increase in Sustained Any2 Traffic We would like to thank all of our new Any2 customers and members who recently upgraded their ports, including: +AARNet PTY Limited For a full list of Any2 peering participants, please click here. NetIron MLX-32 Install Project Status: +Chassis has been installed Please direct any inquiries regarding Any2 or the MLX installation to Jerome Favis at Jerome.Favis@CoreSite.com. Dominic Tobin is senior vice president of operations at CoreSite. View Mr. Tobin's full biography here. |
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CoreSite News Update Mark Jobson | CoreSite | Marketing Director Q3'2010 News and Press Releases Sept 22, 2010: CoreSite Realty Corporation Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering - Click here for the official release Sept 22, 2010: CoreSite Realty Corporation Announces Public Offering of Common Shares - Click here for the official release Aug 16, 2010: David Dunn, CoreSite's SVP of Strategy and Marketing, to speak at 451 Group's Cloud & Hosting Transformation event in Las Vegas on Tuesday 9/14 - Click here for the event home page Aug 10, 2010: CoreSite Establishes Low Latency Economic & Government News Data Center Ecosystem - Click here for the official release July 6, 2010: CoreSite senior vice president of strategy and marketing David Dunn's article on data center Energy Star ratings featured in DataCenterKnowledge.com's "Industry Perspectives." - Click here for the full article If you would like to schedule an interview with a CoreSite executive or have an inquiry regarding a recent press release, please email Mark.Jobson@CoreSite.com for general press matters or InvestorRelations@CoreSite.com for financial releases. No CoreSite press release shall constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities, in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Mark Jobson is marketing director at CoreSite. |
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