When Steve Jobs flashed inside images of Apple’s new cloud data center during his WWDC keynote on Monday, he ignited a mini firestorm of speculation about just kind hardware is filling its immense surface area. Everyone seems to agree that HP and Teradata were big winners. Read more »
Apple officially launched its much-hyped iCloud suite of services at its Worldwide Developer Conference today, and although the capabilities are sure to be the talk of the town, it’s Apple’s cloud infrastructure that makes it all work. Steve Jobs said as much during his WWDC keynote. Read more »
After years of hype, the IT industry finally had a rude awakening this spring that reminded us that cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: Everything fails sooner or later. Here’s how to build around that. Read more »
While Google has been at the forefront of cutting-edge green data center technology, with experimental projects like its seawater-cooled data center, Google’s big message at its second data center efficiency summit: There’s no magic involved with greener data centers. Read more »
A wireless standard called 6LoWPAN is looking like a dark horse for helping wirelessly connect devices — from lightbulbs, to appliances — in the smart energy home and could be a good candidate to connect an end-to-end smart grid network. Read more »
Mark down yet another clean power project that Google plans to back. This morning, Google announced that it’s providing $55 million for part of the construction of a 1.5 GW wind farm being built by Terra-Gen Power in Southern California’s Mojave Desert. Read more »
Looks like Google is becoming almost as open as Facebook when it comes to revealing the strategies and innovations it has developed around energy-efficient data centers. Here are a half-dozen videos Google released Tuesday morning on their strategies. Read more »
Server vendor and services provider Fujitsu is bringing its global cloud computing platform to North America beginning May 31. The offering will be an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud complete with computing, storage and networking delivered via a self-service portal. Read more »
Google plans to start serving live traffic with its 100-percent seawater-cooled data center in the fall of this year, according to Google’s Joe Kava. Google will be hosting its second Data Center Efficiency Summit in Zurich, Switzerland on Tuesday. Read more »
Yesterday, Cisco and NetApp announced more than 150 customers have adopted their joint FlexPod converged infrastructure architecture, a sign that might point to a falling out between Cisco and its VCE partners, EMC and VMware. Rumor has it Cisco isn’t happy with that arrangement. Read more »
Rumor has it Apple is in talks with Nuance to strike a deal allowing Apple to use Nuance’s speech recognition software. One of the uses mentioned was the possibility of using the software in the new NC data center, but I don’t think it’s likely that the […] Read more »
Compute giant Hewlett-Packard has teamed up with Nvidia to make a server containing up to eight graphics processors designed for the high performance computing market. The two have built the world’s “Greenest Production Supercomputer” together, and the machine using Nvidia’s latest GPUs offers more performance. Read more »
According to a post today on the Facebook Engineering blog, the social networking leader undertook an effort called “Project Triforce,” which involved provisioning a replica production region from an existing cluster, to ensure the site could run smoothly across three regions without falling on its face. Read more »
Cisco is having a rough time — announcing a restructuring, layoffs and lowering its revenue forecast — but the server market is a bright spot for the networking giant. Yesterday, Cisco said it’s set to hit a run rate of $900 million in its server business. Read more »
Swiss power gear company ABB has made another investment in tech that can make data centers more energy-efficient: ABB has acquired controlling interest in Validus DC Systems, a company that makes power systems for data centers that utilize direct current (DC). Read more »
The CEO of Vigilent (formerly called Federspiel Controls) Mark Housley, says there’s been so little technology introduced into cooling systems for data centers “it’s almost criminal.” Vigilent provides smart software via a wireless sensor network to manage and optimize these cooling systems. Read more »
Facebook’s new data center in Oregon has gotten its fair share of attention for Facebook’s decision to open up the energy efficient design. But here’s another reason to recognize the data center: Facebook has installed a smart lighting system courtesy of startup Redwood Systems. Read more »
Data centers and IT equipment are just starting to become increasingly energy-efficient, and there are a variety of metrics, standards and certifications that have emerged. Here are seven you should know. Read more »
Startup Power Assure has new software to align data center cooling and servers power use — along with a new metric for measuring server energy needs that could become a new standard for the industry. Underwriters Laboratories is on board with the metric as are industry players. Read more »
Intel has managed to keep pushing Moore’s Law by developing a 3-D transistor that allows the chipmaker to deliver ever smaller chips that will be more powerful, yet consume less energy. The new chip moves Intel ahead of the industry and positions it competitively against ARM. Read more »
A day after Twitter experienced its “CNN moment,” John Adams , the messaging service’s operations engineer, posted a nice slide show on how the company has scaled and the tools it uses. Entitled, “Talk Cloudy to Me” the slide show reviews old insights and offers new ones. Read more »
Kaminario, which provides high-performance storage, has raised a $15 million C round of financing. As SSD startups hit maturity and the market for using solid state drives in data centers for high-performance and energy efficient storage heats up, when will we see the inevitable consolidation? Read more »
Facebook’s unveiling of its energy-efficient data center in Oregon is being widely hailed as ground-breaking. But to me, Facebook’s touting of one specific efficiency metric shows just how a single snapshot of an energy-efficient data center can sometimes be misleading. Read more »
Two research groups in the last few weeks have shown off 100 terabit per second speeds delivered over fiber connections. The advancement in speeds is both unexpected and necessary as we rely on broadband as the interconnect for our increasingly digital lives. Read more »
Facebook didn’t exactly meet Greenpeace’s Earth Day challenge, which called for the social network giant to pledge to cut out coal as an energy source for its data centers. But Facebook did respond in a letter, in which the company said it would do more. Read more »
Greenpeace’s got a lot of press last week for its A-to-F grades for the green data center efforts of Facebook, Google, IBM and other IT giants of the world. But what’s behind the grades? Read more »
While Michael Dell is bummed he didn’t see the tablet revolution coming, he’s also not sweating it much, apparently. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of Dell Inc. says the company’s main focus remains the enterprise market. Read more »
In an afternoon chat today at Green:Net, Google Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl explained that the future of data center efficiency will not come from improved data center designs themselves, but from more-efficient hardware and cleaner sources of energy. Read more »
Apple is ready to launch an online music storage service that will let iTunes customers stream their songs from a remote server wherever they have Internet access, according to a new report from Reuters. Sources claim Apple’s service will beat Google’s similar offering to market. Read more »
Apple came in at the bottom of a new report from Greenpeace detailing the energy choices made by major IT companies like Amazon, Google Facebook and more. Apple fared so poorly mostly because of its brand new data center in North Carolina. Read more »
A group of the Internet’s most recognized brands — from Facebook to Apple to Twitter to Amazon — have received failing grades when it comes to using clean power for their web services, according to a new report unveiled by Greenpeace on Thursday at our Green:Net event. Read more »
There’s a significant opportunity for companies that are looking to connect the often siloed systems that manage the energy used to run servers as well as the gear used to cool, ventilate, back up and convert power for data centers. Read more »
Turns out Facebook has been eying clean power after all for its new data center. Well, a very small amount of solar compared to the sizable power needs of its data center. According to Data Center Knowledge, Facebook has built a 100 kW solar panel array. Read more »
Cisco today took the covers off a new Allen, Texas, data center that will serve as the foundation for Cisco’s private cloud computing effort, which it calls Cisco Elastic IT Services. The new data center is designed for maximum efficiency and to withstand tornado winds. Read more »
After years of debate over the role of open source in cloud computing, the possibility of a top-to-bottom, open-source, infrastructure stack now looks very real, with much of the designs and code needed to build a cloud from the ground up available free of charge. Read more »
Data centers are becoming greener across the board, and the latest proof of this came from Facebook. Here’s a list of 10 innovations from entrepreneurs and engineers that are leading to more energy efficient, and less carbon intensive, data centers. Learn more at Green:Net 2011! Read more »
Last week, Facebook opened to the world the details of its energy efficient data center in Prineville, Ore., complete with custom-built servers, power delivery and backup, and cooling system. What’s the mix-and-match potential? Read more »
Facebook’s Open Compute Project has been characterized as revolutionary, a giant push that will propel server design into the future now, but what if it isn’t actually all that meaningful? What if it’s just a cool, but niche project that won’t catch on outside Facebook? Read more »
Do you have any idea what your incessant status updates require Facebook to do on the back end? Supporting 100 million photo uploads each day and as many as 18,000 comments requires the social network to perform 24 billion calculations a second at peak times. Read more »
Facebook has shared the details of its server and data center design, taking its commitment to openness to a new level for the industry by sharing its infrastructure secrets like it has shared its software code.And that data center? It has a PUE of 1.07. Read more »
