The European Commission-funded project wants data center designers and operators to test prototypes of tools that should, from 2014, make it easier to build data centers that are as energy-efficient as possible. Read more »
An article from Data Center Knowledge points to things robots can do to increase efficiency in data centers. But hurdles lie ahead, and data centers will still need administrators, the article suggests. Read more »
Northern New Jersey is a hotbed for data centers, with New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq data located there. And there’s considerable demand for rented space nearby, meaning Equinix and the like are keeping busy. Read more »
Twitter will expand its data center footprint in Sacramento, Data Center Knowledge reports. The move would help the social network support traffic spikes and a continually growing user base. Read more »
Facebook confirmed a data center in Altoona, Iowa, the same day Google said it would also expand its data center operations in the state. As Facebook pushes transparency, it’s also pushing the notoriously secretive Google. Read more »
Google spent $1.2 billion on property and equipment in the first quarter of 2013, nearly doubling last year’s first quarter. Read more »
Following on previous quarterly disclosures on energy and water efficiency, Facebook is unveiling dashboards showing its data centers’ near-real-time performance. Read more »
Although there has been a focus on energy efficiency in commercial buildings for some years, the BEMS market can still be considered nascent. The landscape of new entrants, new technologies, and new methodologies is expanding rapidly, and even well-established market leaders are finding new ways to present and market their businesses. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The desire to implement private cloud infrastructure is among the top priorities for large companies in North America that expect to expand data centers this year or next year. Read more »
A company wants to build a data center inside a 19th century gasometer — a building for storing gases — in Stockholm. It’s the latest bizarre location for construction of a data center. 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 »
With Facebook’s appointment of Mike Schroepfer as its new chief technology officer, the company is putting in place a person who has overseen an infrastructure strategy that has made an industry take notice. Read more »
The software-defined networking arena is full of new ideas and well-funded startups. This GigaOM Research podcast discusses SDN use cases, its impact on traditional networking, and companies to watch. Read more »
eBay has released a trove of information about the efficiency of its data centers, and plans to do so quarterly as part of a mission to continuously track computing resources and tie them to bigger business goals. Read more »
More connections among clusters of customer data allow for faster replicating across multiple data centers in the latest version of Riak’s open-source NoSQL distributed database. Read more »
Free from the scrutiny of public markets, Dell should let its freak flag fly and take some real risks to distinguish itself from the server-vendor pack. I think that means doubling down on next-generation software and server design. Read more »
Following the opening of data centers, communities in Oregon, Washington and Virginia have made new policies, built many new homes and prompted environmental activism. Read more »
A transmitter for an Open Compute server’s debug port won the Open Compute Project’s first hackathon. Read more »
Congress may gear up to do something about IT waste and data center consolidation as called for by a 2010 report, based on a hearing held this week. Read more »
Google spent more than a billion dollars on infrastructure in the fourth quarter, representing the company’s second-biggest quarterly expenditure ever. As it competes against Facebook, Apple, Yelp and Amazon, the company can’t afford to stop building data centers now. Read more »
The fourth quarter in cleantech saw attention paid to two prominent, publicly traded companies: EV maker Tesla and newly minted public listing SolarCity. It remains a transitional period for the sector as investment declines, with a shift toward those companies able to scale with little additional capital. Read more »
China’s big four internet companies are big — huge, in fact — but they’re not yet technological innovators like their American counterparts. However, scalability is an an issue that knows no borders, which has spurred some cross-continental cooperation. Will it also inspire a Chinese tech awakening? Read more »
Startups and enterprises alike face barriers when it comes to cloud adoption. This includes security, speed of access to cloud resources, and runaway network costs. However, multiple solutions for direct access are being provided to address this issue for companies big and small. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
This shift in WAN requirements is placing increased cost and performance pressure on traditional WAN solutions, which either pose the exorbitant costs of private WAN services or are burdened by the unreliability of the public internet. WAN optimization and virtualization can address and improve this in enterprises. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Many factors have driven the recent high demand for IT products and services. However, relentless global economic weakness and uncertainty have resulted in a deterioration of worldwide IT spending through the third quarter and will continue to be an anchor in the fourth quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Data centers up and down the eastern seaboard went into emergency mode to keep up and running as Hurricane Sandy churned northwards. But the key to survivabilty is not last-minute prep but long-running practices. Read more »
Data Centers have come under attack as terminally wasteful and “dirty” enterprises that offer little in the way of jobs. Joe Weinman, senior VP at Telx, disputes that, and says in fact they indirectly employee countless thousands across many industries. Read more »
When companies such as Google and Facebook design their own servers, switches and data centers, it’s more a business decision than it is a test of their hardware-hacking skills. Custom gear means lower power bills, better performance and the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen situations. Read more »
Many cloud providers say they are open, or based on open-source technology, but in order to be truly open a service has to be backed by a community of users who contribute to making the technology better, says the founder of OpenNebula Read more »
Europe’s Helix Nebula project is addressing the technical, legal, and procedural issues that today make it difficult to seamlessly move jobs from one cloud to another at scale. Lessons learned from it could provide a window through which we can see Europe’s cloud provision taking shape. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
IO Data Centers has raised $90 million for its suite of offerings that rethink the way data centers are built and managed. Its IO.Anywhere units are fully contained data centers in a small package, and its OS software can manage a data center from a smartphone. Read more »
It’s not home to Google, Amazon or Facebook, but from plucky entrepreneurs to the world’s most-advanced computing systems, Europe has a lot more to offer the world of cloud computing and web infrastructure than might meet the eye. Here are seven reasons why it matters. Read more »
Facebook knows something about big data — it collects more data and has built more tools than almost anybody else. Here, Facebook’s Jay Parikh and Accel Partners’ Ping Li talk about what lessons big data startups can take from Facebook to build businesses that can succeed. Read more »
A handful of Intel servers just emerged from a yearlong bath in an oil-based coolant, and the results were remarkable. The servers ran at a PUE just above 1.0, and showed no ill effects from the oil. Is oil immersion coming to a rack near you? Read more »
Developers of renewable-energy projects frequently spend more time obtaining permits than the actual projects. Such delays — often unanticipated — pose serious financial risks. But several key steps will help developers navigate successfully through the thicket of nonuniform regulations, jurisdictions, and lawsuits that await them. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Data centers consume around 1.5 percent of total electricity demand, a figure that’s expected to increase significantly. To cut power and costs tech titans like Google, Apple, and Facebook are cutting electricity use by greening their data centers. But do energy-efficiency gains justify huge capital outlays? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
While computing in the cloud can cost less than running servers in your enterprise data center, the question of how much less isn’t an easy one to answer. The cloud will get cheaper in the future, but not before these challenges are addressed and overcome. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Companies doing business on the web and in the cloud must spend a lot on infrastructure to stay running and to support new services. Here’s what Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Zynga spent in the recent quarter, and what it might mean. Read more »
If Twitter wants to remain opaque about its practices, that’s fine — but it shouldn’t expect any slack from upset users or investors. Blaming a two-hour outage on an “infrastructural double-whammy” after remaining mum on even where its data centers are located doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Read more »
