The Open Compute Project is a coup by the buyers of servers to take control of their hardware destiny, but wisely it’s also leaving the vendors enough room to make a business for themselves. The nature of IT is changing. Here’s how companies adapt. Read more »
At its third summit, the Open Compute Project is adding new partners, showing off cool use cases and adding new technologies. And surprisingly, it’s being done in a way that will enable hardware vendors to hold onto some of their margins and still deliver innovations. Read more »
Greenpeace’s main concern for where Internet companies build their data centers is clean power. But data center builders actually think more about the cost of the energy than how clean the source is, and they also think about the volatility of the price and supply. Read more »
What will Facebook do with the ginormous amount of money it will raise as part of its forthcoming IPO? No one knows – except a big piece of it will go towards building its backend infrastructure that can manage a billion users and all those Facebook connections. Read more »
The networking world is changing in three fundamental ways, and all of them threaten Cisco. Cisco is responding to the threats with Insieme in the data center and a service-provider strategy. This story lays it all out for you. Read more »
In a webscale data center, peak efficiency feels like a blast furnace. I stepped into the hot aisle of Dell Modular Data Center and 1,920 servers blasted 115-degree air right in my face. If eBay’s Dean Nelson has his way, that was just the beginning. Read more »
Google is a champ when it comes to its infrastructure, and a blog shows the search giant is running its data centers at a PUE of 1.14. Compared to Facebook, it has room for improvement, but what about when ranked against Apple, Amazon and Microsoft? Read more »
From Apple to Amazon, everyone is on a data center building binge. Utah-based NSA Data Center and the Building 2 (second phase) of Facebook’s Prineville, Oregon data center were two of the five largest construction projects in the United States during 2011, according to Construction.com. Read more »
For ad-supported web platforms such as Facebook, every dollar spent on infrastructure means even more money brought in by advertising — the culprit of many privacy issues. That has big implications for a company’s bottom line. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook, the social networking giant that’s already made big waves with its open-source server plans, is now taking on storage in a very big way, according to a published report. The hardware will help Facebook keep up with the exploding demand of its 840 million users. Read more »
Apple discloses in an environmental report that it plans a 20 MW solar farm and 5 MW fuel cell project for its data center in North Carolina. Those are sizable clean energy projects. Read more »
With its newest facility, Vantage Data Centers wants to prove that a low-power data center in Silicon Valley is not an oxymoron. Vantage’s new Santa Clara, Calif., V2 data center claims an impressive 1.12 PUE (power use efficiency) energy rating. Read more »
Arden Realty sells expensive data center to Griffin Capital. The sole tenant, AT&T, gets to continue to enjoy the benefits of leasing the facility in favor of owning it, avoiding the risks of data center ownership such as high taxes, carbon reporting issues and data privacy ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
For the most part, cloud-related laws on the books or in the works right now are almost entirely about data, and data has “gravity.” The more important it is, the more likely services and applications are going to move to the data, rather than vice versa. Read more »
Will an idea to build a data center park powered by onsite clean energy and paired with a microgrid in Colorado, represent the future of data centers? Read more »
Less than three years in, that’s a very big number, especially since data center buyers tend to be a conservative bunch. Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems definitely has legs, but it still hasn’t cracked the top five server vendors. Rival HP still holds the top slot. Read more »
People think of data centers as a big, clunky category, but in the cloud computing era it shouldn’t be a surprise that the sector has been hot, with more hotness to come. As more cloud services come online, demand for webscale data centers will keep growing. Read more »
Keeping a data center online is a highly complex and often underestimated task, but one that provides the bedrock of any public cloud availability. Patrick Baillie of CloudSigma explains why he thinks public IaaS cloud service providers shouldn’t run their own data centers. Read more »
Much has been written about the U.S. government’s plan to shutter 1,200 data centers. There’s been considerably less chatter about the fact that some of the remaining, revamped federal data centers are now leasing out excess capacity to other government agencies. Read more »
Schneider Electric filled in some checkboxes in its overall data center infrastructure management (DCIM) stack with the acquisition of Viridity’s EnergyCenter technology. EnergyCenter will bring Schneider a fuller picture of the energy cost and resource utilization of information technology gear. Read more »
In this era of cheap-and-reliable renta-data centers run by Amazon, Rackspace, and others, does it make sense for a company to build a new data center on it’s own? Unsurprisingly, Amazon’s own James Hamilton doesn’t think so. More surprisingly, other IT pros agree. Read more »
According to data released today as part of Cisco’s Global Cloud Index, traffic over data center networks will reach 4.8 zettabytes a year by 2015, and cloud computing will account for one-third of it, or 1.6 zettabytes. That’s more than all the Internet will handle. Read more »
Facebook unveiled its green data center in Oregon this Spring, but now the social network giant has achieved another milestone: it’s been granted a LEED gold certification for the Oregon data center, which uses 52 percent less energy to operate than a standard data center. Read more »
Data center operator Telx will break ground soon on a 215,000-square-foot data center next to an existing facility in Clifton, N.J. The network-rich Clifton Cloud Connection Center will target customers that want to build hybrid cloud computing solutions. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is making available a new US West region located in Oregon, which it is positioning as a lower-cost alternative to the company’s existing Northern California region. AWS says services in the Oregon region costs about 10 percent less than in Northern California. Read more »
Luxtera has developed an optical chip for the data center market that can achieve speeds of more than 100 gigabits per second. That’s the same speed delivered by long-haul networks under the sea, but now harnessed to move big data and deliver cloud computing. Read more »
In the drive to produce servers based on lower-power chips that reduce operating costs and conserve energy, the $13 billion Cambridge, England–based ARM is seen as the great hope. Read more »
In addition to the apparent acquisition of Yahoo’s former head of Global Data Center Infrastructure, Apple’s recent staff shifts apparently also include the departure of one of Siri’s co-founders. Don’t worry, though, the iPhone 4S’s personal assistant remains in good hands. Read more »
Equinix says its new online marketplace will help its data center customers partner with other companies using the same facilities. That could help companies expand more easily both in terms of geography and in the types of services they offer. Read more »
Both mobile and high performance computing are placing huge power efficiency and performance demands on chips, but the real $64,000 question is how long until such extreme computing use cases hit the server mainstream. Asked another way, how long till Amazon adopts ARM-based servers? Read more »
Building at scale doesn’t just require new tools, it requires a new mindset, said Google’s CIO Ben Fried, who spoke at the Surge conference in Baltimore today. That mindset is more general than specialized, and requires a developer to admit that some things aren’t solvable. Read more »
Colt, the British data center specialist, is building what it and Verne Global call the world’s first “zero emissions” data center slated to come online in four months. Located on a NATO base in Iceland, it will run solely on geothermal and hydroelectric power. Read more »
OpSource Inc.’s brand spanking new Silicon Valley data center should cut latency times and boost network performance for the cloud provider’s enterprise and service provider customers on the West Coast and provide co-location options for enterprises wanting redundancy. Read more »
Want to know how your packets from Rhode Island make it over to India? Or what about your VoIP calls from Hong Kong to Honolulu? Now there’s a map for that online, thanks to the folks at Telegeography showing where various undersea cables are. Read more »
Earlier this year, rumors swirled about whether Twitter had actually moved into a new Utah data center, or if it was forced to move its operations to a different facility. Now there are reports that Twitter is leasing more data center space, this time in Atlanta. Read more »
When you’re running a large web infrastructure, automation is critical to ensure that administrators aren’t spending their every waking seconds putting dealing with downed servers. Google, Yahoo and other pioneers had to figure out how to automate failover in their data centers. Now it’s Facebook’s turn. Read more »
Cisco said its sales would grow by 5 to 7 percent through 2014, cutting its revenue growth in half, and signaling the end of its massive restructuring effort at an analyst day Tuesday. The move sent the stock up, but Cisco isn’t out of the woods. Read more »
Broadcom, a chipmaker known for wireless chips for cell phones and home networks, today said it will buy NetLogic, which provides silicon for networking gear. An emphasis on real-time data has pressured networking inside and outside the data center, and Broadcom wants to capitalize on that. Read more »
Dome9, a stealth company that aims to create the equivalent of a firewall for public and private clouds, launched the company and its product Monday. The company, which was founded last year, is just one of several cloud security companies coming out of stealth mode. Read more »
