It seems like forever since I have had a chance to blog! Needless to say, we've been absolutely swamped with business growth and pushing innovation as far as we can take it!

One year ago this month we tried an innovative modular RFP process which opened up the design of the new eBay Phoenix Data Center to the industry. As I write this blog, we are knee deep in the commissioning of this ground breaking design dubbed Project Mercury. The challenge we put out through Data Center Pulse has yielded one of our most innovative designs to date. The goal was to unleash the creative minds in the design and consulting arena by outlining the business and technical challenges then letting them tackle the "how". I am proud to announce that the process works. It works very well! The collaborative, partnership nature of this project has made it one of the best I have ever worked on. Barriers were shattered, competitors became partners, and the impossible became possible while the project rapidly evolved and our design requirements were exceeded. But I digress! This blog entry is not to announce the details of Project Mercury (more on that in Oct/Nov as we open it up). This blog is a heads up to the industry that eBay will be kicking off round two of the Modular RFP process! But this time, we're taking it to the next level - Salt Lake City, Phase II!

The process will begin August 19, 2011! Let the design competition begin! Stay tuned to the Data Center Pulse YouTube channel and the modular RFP page for more information. For more information, please email modular@ebay.com.

Project Mercury is born...

Today, we are pleased to announce that EDI, along with their partners AHA Consulting Engineers and Winterstreet Architects, have been selected as the winner of the Modular Data Center RFP - now dubbed as Project Mercury.

This has been an extremely interesting process for us with an unexpected result. EDI, a small company that we had never even heard of before, was able to meet all of the challenging requirements we had proposed to the industry through the Modular RFP process in a cost effective, simple design. In addition, a very compelling ultra dense product named "eHive" emerged from Skanska, one of the RFP finalists. It has not been released publicly yet (stay tuned for follow up). While Skanska was not selected for the RFP, their modular product was innovative enough to warrant further consideration in this data center deployment. All in all, the open RFP process did exactly what we had hoped. It enabled design engineers the opportunity to shed the traditional barriers, consider the difficult challenges and start with a clean slate. The outcome was new and compelling solutions as well as new innovative products driven by the free cooling, density and flexibility requirements.