AoTerra, a German company that’s shattering records for crowdfunding in that country, is a cloud provider with a difference. Its servers heat the air and water in buildings, saving everyone money and making the OpenStack-based AoCloud very green indeed. Read more »
The UK-sited data center, which should help settle the compliance worries of many of Salesforce’s European customers, will be completed in 2014. The firm is also running a €5 million Innovation Challenge for EU startups. Read more »
After doing something similar in Belgium, Google is using its seawater-cooled data center in Hamina, southeastern Finland, as a way to solidify its presence among local startups. Read more »
As the web giants, co-lo providers and cloud companies add millions of square feet of data center space we need to start getting more sophisticated in how we view these rooms full of servers. Read more »
You might think that after two 100-year storms in two years, New York businesses would want to put new data center capacity far, far away. But new research says you would be wrong. Read more »
Mega data centers’ innovations in serviceability, automatically detecting and recovering from failures, procurement practices, and so forth will become standard practice in all modern data centers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
One in 20 of the web’s top million sites are hosted out of Houston, the Texas city more famous for big oil and big hair than big data center space. Why? Read more »
Europe needs to do more to reduce wasteful energy consumption, and its policy makers are looking at how to green its data centers to help them achieve a 2020 energy efficiency goal. Read more »
Google’ vice president of data centers, Joe Kava, outlines how the search giant’s pursuit of data center designs corresponds nicely to the company’s ten governing rules. Well, almost. Read more »
Backblaze pioneered the concept of open source storage hardware in 2009, and its designs have caught on. Hundreds of institutions — including Netflix and Shutterfly — use the designs, which have just entered their third generation. Read more »
The EU security agency ENISA has released a report on the cloud’s increasingly critical nature. Yes, it highlights the risks associated with the shift to the cloud, but also some notable security benefits. Read more »
The ‘Fund a Feature’ program aims to let corporate users accelerate the development of specific features while still feeding the result back to the open-source project’s community. Read more »
Facebook is looking at almost all options to address the storage needs of its myriad applications that all have different requirements around performance, scalability and efficiency. Flash can be too fast and hard drives to slow, but Facebook wants something just right. Read more »
The threat of software-defined networking has prompted Juniper to revamp its business model — switching from a hardware-based model to one more familiar in enterprise software. It has also unveiled an SDN strategy that preserves the importance of specialty hardware at the lowest level of the network. Read more »
The “mobile first” philosophy is under way today. That means a new generation of mobile-centric data centers will arise over the next three years, with chips, servers, and power architectures customized for mobile workloads. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
After raising $6.6 million in October, Pica8 is launching its combination of OpenFlow-based hardware and the software to control massively scaled-out data centers. The company is hoping that buyers will rip out old gear and replace it with its commodity switches and software. Read more »
Data centers are the manufacturing floor of the web and cloud computing, so it makes sense that the amount of data center capacity added in the last two years as been measured in millions of square feet. But where it’s added is changing. Read more »
Microsoft will soon start construction on an experimental micro data center at a waste water treatment plant in Wyoming. The concept could help Microsoft scale up clean power for its data centers. Read more »
Facebook’s North Carolina data center has a PUE of 1.07, lower than the PUE in Prineville, Ore. — a more temperate climate. Facebook has posted a blog with the details of how the N.C. facility has done without A/C even on a 100-degree day last summer Read more »
Big Switch Networks has come a long way since it launched in June of 2011, and two big announcements today showcasing its ecosystem and its newly launched products are signs that its going on the offensive in the software-defined networking space. Read more »
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group recently shipped its 1 millionth server just five years after coming into existence. It’s proof of how important webscale buyers have become to the server market, as well as how different their demand are than those of traditional IT buyers. Read more »
Hurricane Sandy’s impact made itself felt on major media properties including the Huffington Post, Gawker, and Buzzfeed. All of those sites reported outages around 7 p.m. EDT. Read more »
Calxeda, a company making dense, low-power servers using the same ARM chip architecture found in cell phones, has raised $55 million to take on Intel as well as the myriad other vendors that want to take ARM’s low power chips and cram them into servers, Read more »
Much of the data center industry is upset about a recen report exposing some wasteful energy practices. However, eBay’s Dean Nelson says the data center industry isn’t perfect and it’s up to companies like his to lead the charge on bringing everyone else up to speed. Read more »
For the first time Google has purchased wind power to directly power a data center in Oklahoma. Previously Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into clean power projects, but had yet to power its data centers directly with clean power. Read more »
The New York Times article on data center power consumption got a few things wrong but a couple things really right. Read more »
New guidelines for the design of wider data center racks are available for discussion, according to the Open Compute Project. In theory, racks designed using the Open Rack 1.0 specification will allow more flexible, energy-efficient design of data center resources. Read more »
Here’s our daily pick of stories about Apple from around the web that you shouldn’t miss. Today’s installment: How to become Apple’s landlord, rumors of a new data center in Hong Kong, super awkward Apple Store opening in Sweden, details on the A6 chip, and more. Read more »
Hosting giant GoDaddy has completed its investigation of Monday’s outage and deemed it was not the result of a DDoS attack as originally rumored, but rather the result of network failures within GoDaddy’s system. The outage crippled hundreds of thousands of web sites. Read more »
Mellanox, a maker of Infiniband interconnects and switches, has doubled its sales in the last two quarters. What is behind its recent success and what does that say about Mellanox, Infiniband and the current state of scale out data center networking? Read more »
Etsy shared the details of its hardware architecture on Friday, showing the world a whole lot of Supermicro servers running everything from web servers to Hadoop. At this point, software is the name of the game at webscale, so hardware openness is just welcome community service. Read more »
Here’s our daily pick of stories about Apple from around the web that you shouldn’t miss. Today’s installment: why Apple can’t disrupt cable today the way it did the music industry, where the Apple-Google spat is heading, an SMS security concern, plans for Oregon data center. Read more »
Most companies in the market for a new data center deal in total secrecy with agents and data center providers under NDA. Cloud backup player Backblaze is turning that model on its head by publishing the RFP it’s using for its new data center. Read more »
Here’s our daily pick of stories about Apple from around the web that you shouldn’t miss. Today’s installment: Sharp’s president hints at coming iPhone, why annoyance at Apple’s new round of ads isn’t new, the Mac’s growth trajectory, and pics of Apple mysterious new NC facility. Read more »
The Rackspace Cloud is now based fully on the open source OpenStack platform. I recently spoke with CEO Lanham Napier, who discussed how his company doesn’t necessarily see Amazon Web Services as a direct competitor, and how OpenStack is changing his company’s entire business. Read more »
Aryaka, a startup offering cloud-based wide area network optimization raised $25 million in Series C funding. The round was led by InterWest Partners and brings Aryaka’s funding to $54 million. As the reliance on clouds and remote working grows, Aryaka is poised to succeed. Read more »
One day, one tank of gas, and three data centers – those were the terms of a road trip that only a geek would dream up. My destination: a new cluster of cutting-edge, massive data centers north of Charlotte, North Carolina. Read more »
The proposed data center will be located east of Sparks, Nev. If approved, it could be up and running before the end of 2012. Apple says it is looking for a “30-year relationship” with Northern Nevada. Read more »
Facebook is boosting its edge network with its own servers to speed the delivery of its photos according to Frank Frankovsky, a VP at the social networking company. Frankovsky outed his plans onstage at the structure 2012 event and explained how he hopes to scale. Read more »
If you ever wanted to take a stroll through the computing industry’s past, it’s not necessary to go all the way to Mountain View, Calif., to visit the Computer History Museum. Just step inside a data center. Read more »
