Slashdot Mirror
Domain: datacenterknowledge.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to datacenterknowledge.com.
Stories · 284
-
NJ Server Farms Remake the US Financial Markets
1sockchuck writes "The engine of Wall Street has shifted from the stock exchange floor to data centers in New Jersey, where computer-driven trading now accounts for 56 percent of all trading activity, according to the New York Times. 'While this Tron landscape is dominated by the titans of Wall Street, it affects nearly everyone who owns shares of stock or mutual funds, or who has a stake in a pension fund or works for a public company,' the Times writes. 'For better or for worse, part of your wealth, your livelihood, is throbbing through these wires.' There are also photos of the data centers powering the high-speed trading operations, while 60 Minutes has video of a huge new 'liquidity center' run by the NYSE." -
Apple's $1 Billion Data Center Mystery
1sockchuck writes "One of year's most tantalizing technology secrets involves Apple's $1 billion investment in a new data center in North Carolina. Is it the Death Star in Apple's plan for galactic domination? Some Apple watchers predict it will be the hub for a 21st century broadcasting network. Other enthusiasts are doing flyovers to film videos of the 500,000 square foot facility. There's also an unofficial FAQ about the new data center. What is Apple up to with this huge facility?" -
The Year In Downtime
1sockchuck writes "Lightning, floods, car crashes, and coding snafus had starring roles in major Internet outages of 2010. Data Center Knowledge reviews the year's business downtime, including outages for banking and e-commerce sites and several incidents that knocked state government services offline. Meanwhile, Pingdom focuses on downtime for major social media sites and Wikileaks. Then there's the guy who got drunk and shot up a server." -
Twitter Gets Major Funding, Adds New Data Center
1sockchuck writes "Twitter has announced new funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with reports placing the new round at $200 million for a valuation of $3.7 billion. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the microblogging service added more than 100 million new accounts in the past 12 months. That kind of growth requires a lot of servers, so Twitter will open a new data center in Sacramento as it begins to operate its own facilities, following a path forged by Google and Facebook." -
Google Buys Manhattan Office/Telecom Hub
1sockchuck writes "Google will soon own one of the world's choice pieces of Internet real estate. The company has reportedly signed a contract to buy 111 8th Avenue in New York for an estimated $1.9 billion — or about $250 million more than Google spent to buy YouTube. The building serves as Google's main New York sales office, but is also one of the city's main telecom hotels, housing major data center operations for Digital Realty Trust, Equinix, Telx and dozens of network providers. Google currently has about 500,000 square feet of office space at 111 8th Avenue." -
The Problem With the Top500 Supercomputer List
angry tapir writes "The Top500 list of supercomputers is dutifully watched by high-performance computing participants and observers, even as they vocally doubt its fidelity to excellence. Many question the use of a single metric — Linpack — to rank the performance of something as mind-bogglingly complex as a supercomputer. During a panel at the SC2010 conference this week in New Orleans, one high-performance-computing vendor executive joked about stringing together 100,000 Android smartphones to get the largest Linpack number, thereby revealing the 'stupidity' of Linpack. While grumbling about Linpack is nothing new, the discontent was pronounced this year as more systems, such as the Tianhe-1A, used GPUs to boost Linpack ratings, in effect gaming the Top500 list." Fortunately, Sandia National Laboratories is heading an effort to develop a new set of benchmarks. In other supercomputer news, it turns out the Windows-based cluster that lost out to Linux stumbled because of a bug in Microsoft's software package. Several readers have also pointed out that IBM's Blue Gene/Q has taken the top spot in the Green500 for energy efficient supercomputing, while a team of students built the third-place system. -
Rural North Carolina Experiences Data Center Boom
1sockchuck writes "Rural counties in western North Carolina have hit the data center trifecta, landing major projects from Google, Apple and Facebook. These marquee tech companies will invest more than $2 billion in small towns like Forest City, Kings Mountain and Maiden, a town of just 3,300 residents. How did western North Carolina become a tech hub? Aggressive tax incentives and an abundant supply of cheap power, a legacy of the textile mills that once thrived in the region, which narrowly missed winning a $499 million Microsoft data center project that ended up in Virginia." -
New Video of Apple's Enormous iDataCenter
1sockchuck writes "A new aerial video provides a rare look at Apple's new data center in North Carolina, which is expected to begin operations as soon as this week. It reveals the scale of the facility, which at 500,000 square feet will be among the world's largest data centers. The video, shot by a North Carolina real estate agent, also shows additional site preparation work that could support rumors that Apple plans to build another huge data center at the site." This is what drone cameras are for. -
Small Startup Prevails In Server Cooling 'Chill Off'
miller60 writes "A small startup has shown exceptional energy efficiency in a data center 'chill off' comparing server cooling technologies. Clustered Systems posted the best numbers in the 18-month vendor evaluation sponsored by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. The Menlo Park, Calif. company built a prototype server that uses no fans and cools processors with a cold plate with tubing filled with liquid coolant. The testing accidentally highlighted the opportunity for additional energy savings, when the Clustered Systems unit continued to operate during a cooling failure that raised the chiller plant water temperature from 44 to 78 degrees F." -
Feds Discover 1,000 More Government Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "The US government has 2,094 data centers, nearly 1,000 more than previous estimates, according to an updated inventory by federal agencies. The finding underscores the scope of the challenge facing the Obama administration as it seeks to streamline the government's IT infrastructure in a massive data center consolidation." -
Florida Town Builds Data Center In Water Tank
miller60 writes "The Florida town of Altamonte Springs has converted an old water storage tank into a new data center. The decommissioned tank previously held up to 770,000 gallons of water, but its 18-inch-thick walls provided a hurricane-proof home for the town's IT gear, which had to be relocated three times in 2004 to ride out major storms. The Altamonte Springs facility is the latest example of data centers in strange places, including chapels, shopping malls, cargo ships, old particle accelerators and caves." -
Inside Facebook's Infrastructure
miller60 writes "Facebook served up 690 billion page views to its 540 million users in August, according to data from Google's DoubleClick. How does it manage that massive amount of traffic? Data Center Knowledge has put together a guide to the infrastructure powering Facebook, with details on the size and location of its data centers, its use of open source software, and its dispute with Greenpeace over energy sourcing for its newest server farm. There are also links to technical presentations by Facebook staff, including a 2009 technical presentation on memcached by CEO Mark Zuckerberg." -
State of Virginia Technology Centers Down
bswooden writes "Some rather important departments (DMV, Social Services, Taxation) in the state of Virginia are currently without access to documents and information as a technology meltdown has caused much of their infrastructure to be offline for over 24 hours now. State CIO Sam Nixon said, 'A failure occurred in one memory card in what is known as a "storage area network," or SAN, at Virginia's Information Technologies Agency (VITA) suburban Richmond computing center, one of several data storage systems across Virginia.' How does the IT for some of the largest departments in a state come to a screeching halt over a single memory card? Oh, and also, the state is paying Northrup Grumman $2.4 billion over 10 years to manage the state's IT infrastructure." Reader miller60 adds, "Virginia's IT systems drew scrutiny last fall when state agencies reported rolling outages due to the lack of network redundancy." -
Servers Ahoy — Startup To Build Floating Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "Startup International Data Security says it is moving ahead with plans to build data centers on cargo ships docked in the San Francisco Bay. IDS first announced its plans in 2008, but they were postponed by the credit crunch. The company says it has now lined up funding and an anchor tenant for a proof-of-concept 'dataship' that will hold 500 racks of servers in its cargo holds. IDS isn't alone in contemplating ship-board server farms, as Google has applied for a patent for a 'water-based data center.'" -
Data Centers Prepare for a Renewable Future
miller60 writes "A small but growing number of data centers are generating renewable energy at their facility, despite challenges with cost and scalability. In a special report, Data Center Knowledge looks at data centers implementing on-site solar power, wind energy, geothermal cooling and recycling waste heat from their hot aisles. Even as some projects choose to go green, other data center operators insist that improved power efficiency offers a far better return and carbon impact than pursuing on-site renewables." -
Data Centers Prepare for a Renewable Future
miller60 writes "A small but growing number of data centers are generating renewable energy at their facility, despite challenges with cost and scalability. In a special report, Data Center Knowledge looks at data centers implementing on-site solar power, wind energy, geothermal cooling and recycling waste heat from their hot aisles. Even as some projects choose to go green, other data center operators insist that improved power efficiency offers a far better return and carbon impact than pursuing on-site renewables." -
IBM Supercomputer Cooled With Hot Water
1sockchuck writes "IBM has deployed an innovative supercomputer cooled by hot water in a Zurich computer lab. The Aquasar supercomputer employs a chip-level liquid cooling system that can use water at temperatures as high as 60 degrees C (140 degrees F), and as a result consumes up to 40 percent less energy than a comparable system using room-level air-cooling. The system also uses waste heat to provide warmth to buildings, reducing Aquasar's carbon footprint even further." -
Facebook Usage Hits 16 Billion Minutes a Day
1sockchuck writes "Facebook's 400 million users spend more than 16 billion minutes on the site every day, and view 1 million photos every second. That's prompted massive growth in the social network's infrastructure, which now encompasses more than 60,000 servers. Facebook's Tom Cook discussed how the company's operations team manages that growth in a presentation last week at the O"Reilly Velocity conference (video). The next day at Structure 2010, Facebook Vice President of Operations Jonathan Heiliger said server and chip makers have 'come a long way' in supporting cloud platforms since he bashed them last year." -
Google Shares Insights On Accelerating Web Sites
miller60 writes "The average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load and includes 320 KB of content, according to Google executive Urs Holzle. In his keynote at the O'Reilly Velocity conference on web performance, Holzle said that competition from Chrome has made Internet Explorer and Firefox faster. He also cited the potential for refinements to TCP, DNS, and SSL/TLS to make the web a much faster place, and cited compressing headers as a powerful performance booster. Holzle also noted that Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly." -
SeaMicro Unveils 512 Atom-Based Server
1sockchuck writes "Stealthy startup SeaMicro has unveiled its new low-power server, which incorporates 512 Intel Atom CPUs, a load balancer and interconnection fabric into a 10u server. SeaMicro, which received a $9.3 million government grant from DOE to develop its technology, says its server uses less than 2 kilowatts of energy — suggesting that a single rack with four SeaMicro units and 2,048 CPUs could draw just 8 kilowatts of power. Check out the technical overview, plus additional coverage from Wired, GigaOm and VentureBeat." -
Water Main Break Floods Dallas Data Center
miller60 writes "IT systems in Dallas County were offline for three days last week after a water main break flooded the basement of the Dallas County Records Building, which houses the UPS systems and other electrical equipment supporting a data center in the building. The county does not have a backup data center, despite warnings that it faced the risk of service disruption without one." -
Data Center Building Boom In Silicon Valley
1sockchuck writes "Data center developers are building like mad in Silicon Valley, with seven active projects in Santa Clara alone. The building boom includes the resumption of several stalled projects that prompted concerns of a shortage of wholesale data center space in the Valley. The flurry of construction activity is different from the overbuilding during the dot-com boom, which was characterized by too much funding and too few customers. This time, industry experts say, the end of a funding drought has created a situation in which construction is struggling to stay ahead of demand from companies like Facebook — which just scarfed up an entire new data center in Santa Clara." -
Data Center Building Boom In Silicon Valley
1sockchuck writes "Data center developers are building like mad in Silicon Valley, with seven active projects in Santa Clara alone. The building boom includes the resumption of several stalled projects that prompted concerns of a shortage of wholesale data center space in the Valley. The flurry of construction activity is different from the overbuilding during the dot-com boom, which was characterized by too much funding and too few customers. This time, industry experts say, the end of a funding drought has created a situation in which construction is struggling to stay ahead of demand from companies like Facebook — which just scarfed up an entire new data center in Santa Clara." -
Opera Plans Containerized Data Center In Iceland
1sockchuck writes "Iceland's supply of renewable power has gained a high-profile international data center customer. Web browser developer Opera Software was announced today as the first customer of the Thor Data Center, which will house Opera's servers in data center containers that can use fresh air cooling, rather than chillers (a strategy also used by Google). The Thor Data Center is located in Hafnarfjorour, to the west of Iceland's ash-spewing volcano. Iceland's data center operators insist their location represents no operational risk from volcanic activity." -
Opera Plans Containerized Data Center In Iceland
1sockchuck writes "Iceland's supply of renewable power has gained a high-profile international data center customer. Web browser developer Opera Software was announced today as the first customer of the Thor Data Center, which will house Opera's servers in data center containers that can use fresh air cooling, rather than chillers (a strategy also used by Google). The Thor Data Center is located in Hafnarfjorour, to the west of Iceland's ash-spewing volcano. Iceland's data center operators insist their location represents no operational risk from volcanic activity." -
Car Hits Utility Pole, Takes Out EC2 Datacenter
1sockchuck writes "An Amazon cloud computing data center lost power Tuesday when a vehicle struck a nearby utility pole. When utility power was lost, a transfer switch in the data center failed to properly manage the shift to backup power. Amazon said a "small number" of EC2 customers lost service for about an hour, but the downtime followed three power outages last week at data centers supporting EC2 customers. Tuesday's incident is reminiscent of a 2007 outage at a Dallas data center when a truck crash took out a power transformer." -
Car Hits Utility Pole, Takes Out EC2 Datacenter
1sockchuck writes "An Amazon cloud computing data center lost power Tuesday when a vehicle struck a nearby utility pole. When utility power was lost, a transfer switch in the data center failed to properly manage the shift to backup power. Amazon said a "small number" of EC2 customers lost service for about an hour, but the downtime followed three power outages last week at data centers supporting EC2 customers. Tuesday's incident is reminiscent of a 2007 outage at a Dallas data center when a truck crash took out a power transformer." -
Liquid Blade Brings Immersion Cooling To Blade Servers
1sockchuck writes "In the past year we've seen several new cooling systems that submerge rack-mount servers. Now liquid immersion cooling is coming to blade servers. Liquid-cooled PC specialist Hardcore Computer has entered the data center market with Liquid Blade, which features two Intel 5600 Xeon processors with an S5500HV server board in a chassis filled with dielectric fluid. Hardcore, which is marketing the product for render farms, says it eliminates the need for rack-level fans and room-level air conditioning. In recent months Iceotope and Green Revolution Cooling have each introduced liquid cooling for rack-mount servers." -
"Digital Universe" Enters the Zettabyte Era
miller60 writes "In 2010 the volume of digital information created and duplicated in a year will reach 1.2 zettabytes, according to new data from IDC and EMC. The annual Digital Universe report is an effort to visualize the enormous amount of data being generated by our increasingly digital lives. The report's big numbers — a zettabyte is roughly a million petabytes — pose interesting questions about how the IT community will store and manage this firehose of data. Perhaps the biggest challenge isn't how much data we're creating — it's all the copies of it. Seventy-five percent of all the data in the Digital Universe is a copy, according to IDC. See additional analysis from TG Daily, The Guardian, and Search Storage." -
Hot Aisle Or Cold Aisle For Containment?
1sockchuck writes "Separating the hot and cold air in a data center is one of the keys to improving energy efficiency. But containment systems don't have to be fancy or expensive, as Google showed in a presentation Thursday, which discussed the use of clear vinyl curtains in isolating hot and cold aisles. Containment systems have been in use at least since 2004, but there's an ongoing debate about whether it is best to contain the hot aisle or cold aisle. Leading vendors are split as well, as APC advances hot aisle containment while Emerson/Liebert champions a cold aisle approach. What say Slashdot readers? Do you use containment in your data center? If so, do you contain the hot aisle or cold aisle?" -
Hot Aisle Or Cold Aisle For Containment?
1sockchuck writes "Separating the hot and cold air in a data center is one of the keys to improving energy efficiency. But containment systems don't have to be fancy or expensive, as Google showed in a presentation Thursday, which discussed the use of clear vinyl curtains in isolating hot and cold aisles. Containment systems have been in use at least since 2004, but there's an ongoing debate about whether it is best to contain the hot aisle or cold aisle. Leading vendors are split as well, as APC advances hot aisle containment while Emerson/Liebert champions a cold aisle approach. What say Slashdot readers? Do you use containment in your data center? If so, do you contain the hot aisle or cold aisle?" -
Crunch Time For IRS Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "It's crunch time for the Internal Revenue Service. As the IRS processes the annual crescendo of returns around today's tax deadline, the state of the agency's infrastructure depends upon who you ask. IT executives at the IRS say it has made huge strides in modernizing its data centers, which processed 139 million returns and issued $298 billion in refunds in 2009. Independent tests say the IRS web site is the fastest US government site, and one of the fastest on the web. But a key government watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, says the modernization effort hasn't moved quickly enough, and continues to fault the IRS for security weaknesses." -
The World's Largest Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "It seems data centers are getting bigger all the time. Who has the world's largest server farm? Data Center Knowledge has put together a list of 10 huge data centers, all between 400,000 and 1.1 million square feet. The story highlights the trend toward ever-bigger data centers, such as the Vegas SuperNAP and Microsoft's container data center, as well as established behemoths like the NAP of the Americas in Miami and Lakeside Technology Center in Chicago." -
Wall St. Trading Servers To Power Off-Hour Clouds?
miller60 writes "As cloud computing gains traction, some Wall Street firms running armadas of servers to power high-frequency trading operations are contemplating leasing out their excess computing capacity after the trading day ends at 4 p.m. 'Once 4:30 rolls around, we don't need those machines,' said one CTO of a market data firm. 'There may be an opportunity there.' A similar revelation led to the creation of the cloud computing operation at Amazon.com, which built its infrastructure to handle peak Christmas-season loads that lasted just a few weeks each year." -
Want a Body Piercing With That Server?
1sockchuck writes "The web hosting business is known for promotional gimmicks. But here's an unusual one: ServerBeach UK is offering a free body piercing with every new server ordered on April 1st. 'We were tired of the typical boring giveaways that have been done to death' said ServerBeach's Dominic Monkhouse. The stunt revives memories of earlier guerrilla marketing efforts by web hosts, like the 'human billboard' who was paid $7,000 to tattoo a hosting company's logo on the back of his head." -
Slimming Down a Supercomputer
1sockchuck writes "Happy Feet animator Dr. D Studios has packed a large amount of supercomputing power into a smaller package in its new render farm in Sydney, Australia. The digital production shop has consolidated the 150 blade chassis used in the 2007 dancing penguin feature into just 24 chassis, entirely housed in a hot-aisle containment pod. The Dr. D render farm has moved from its previous home at Equinix to the E3 Pegasus data center in Sydney. ITNews has a video and photos of the E3 facility." -
Startup's Submerged Servers Could Cut Cooling Costs
1sockchuck writes "Are data center operators ready to abandon hot and cold aisles and submerge their servers? An Austin startup says its liquid cooling enclosure can cool high-density server installations for a fraction of the cost of air cooling in traditional data centers. Submersion cooling using mineral oil isn't new, dating back to the use of Fluorinert in the Cray 2. The new startup, Green Revolution Cooling, says its first installation will be at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (also home to the Ranger supercomputer). The company launched at SC09 along with a competing liquid cooling play, the Iceotope cooling bags." -
When the Power Goes Out At Google
1sockchuck writes "What happens when the power goes out in one of Google's mighty data centers? The company has issued an incident report on a Feb. 24 outage for Google App Engine, which went offline when an entire data center lost power. The post-mortem outlines what went wrong and why, lessons learned and steps taken, which include additional training and documentation for staff and new datastore configurations for App Engine. Google is earning strong reviews for its openness, which is being hailed as an excellent model for industry outage reports. At the other end of the spectrum is Australian host Datacom, where executives are denying that a Melbourne data center experienced water damage during weekend flooding, forcing tech media to document the outage via photos, user stories and emails from the NOC." -
US Government Begins Largest IT Consolidation in History
miller60 writes "Saying 1,100 data centers is too many, the federal government has begun what looms as the largest IT consolidation in history. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has directed federal agencies to inventory their assets by April 30 and prepare a plan to reduce the number of servers and data centers, with a focus on slashing energy costs (full memo). Kundra says some applications may be shifted to cloud computing platforms customized for government use." -
Iceland's Data Center Push Finally Gets Traction
miller60 writes "Iceland is poised for the completion of its first major international data center project, after years of marketing itself as a potential data center mecca. Iceland offers an ample supply of geothermal energy and an ideal environment for fresh air cooling, but its ambitions were slowed by the global financial collapse. But now the huge UK charity Wellcome Trust has provided funding to complete a new data center in a former NATO facility in Keflavik." -
Amazon EC2 May Be Experiencing Growing Pains
1sockchuck writes "Some developers using Amazon EC2 are wondering aloud whether the popularity of the cloud computing service is beginning to affect its performance. Amazon this week denied speculation that it was experiencing capacity problems after a veteran developer reported performance issues and suggested that EC2 might be oversubscribed. Meanwhile, a cloud monitoring service published charts showing increased latency on EC2 in recent weeks. The reports follow an incident over the holidays in which a DDoS on a DNS provider slowed Amazon's retail and cloud operations." -
Quebec Data Center Built In a Silo
1sockchuck writes "A supercomputing center in Quebec has transformed a huge concrete silo into the CLUMEQ Colossus, a data center filled with HPC clusters. The silo, which is 65 feet high with two-foot thick concrete walls, previously housed a Van de Graaf accelerator dating to the 1960s. It was redesigned to house three floors of server cabinets, arranged so cold air can flow from the outside of the facility through the racks and return via an interior 'hot core.' The construction and operation of the unique facility (PDF) are detailed in a presentation from CLUMEQ." -
NASA Nebula, Cloud Computing In a Container
1sockchuck writes "NASA has built its Nebula cloud computing platform inside a data center container so it can add capacity quickly, bringing extra containers online in 120 days. Nebula will provide on-demand computing power for NASA researchers managing large data sets and image repositories. 'Nebula has been designed to automatically increase the computing power and storage available to science- and data-oriented web applications as demand rises,' explains NASA's Chris Kemp. NASA has created the project using open source components and will release Nebula back to the open source community. 'Hopefully we can provide a good example of a successful large-scale open source project in the government and pave the way for similar projects in other agencies,' the Nebula team writes on its blog." -
Google Patent Reveals New Data Center Innovations
miller60 writes "'Google is seeking to patent a system that provides precision cooling inside racks of servers, automatically adjusting to temperature changes while reducing the energy required to run chillers.' The cooling design uses an adjustable piping system featuring 'air wands' that provide small amounts of cold air to components within a server tray. The cooling design, which could help Google reduce the power bill for its servers, reinforces Google's focus on data center innovation as a competitive advantage. Check out the patent application and a diagram of the system." -
Google Patent Reveals New Data Center Innovations
miller60 writes "'Google is seeking to patent a system that provides precision cooling inside racks of servers, automatically adjusting to temperature changes while reducing the energy required to run chillers.' The cooling design uses an adjustable piping system featuring 'air wands' that provide small amounts of cold air to components within a server tray. The cooling design, which could help Google reduce the power bill for its servers, reinforces Google's focus on data center innovation as a competitive advantage. Check out the patent application and a diagram of the system." -
Facebook Putting Batteries On-Board Its Servers
1sockchuck writes "The data center of the future may have no central UPS units, and be filled with servers with on-board batteries. Facebook says it will adopt a new power distribution design that shifts the UPS and battery backup functions from the data center into the cabinet by adding a 12-volt battery to each server power supply, an approach pioneered by Google. Facebook says the move will slash its power bill and save millions in capital expenses on UPS systems and PDUs. Facebook acknowledged that these types of custom designs are limited to large companies, but called on server vendors and data center builders to adapt their offerings to make them available to smaller companies." -
Facebook Putting Batteries On-Board Its Servers
1sockchuck writes "The data center of the future may have no central UPS units, and be filled with servers with on-board batteries. Facebook says it will adopt a new power distribution design that shifts the UPS and battery backup functions from the data center into the cabinet by adding a 12-volt battery to each server power supply, an approach pioneered by Google. Facebook says the move will slash its power bill and save millions in capital expenses on UPS systems and PDUs. Facebook acknowledged that these types of custom designs are limited to large companies, but called on server vendors and data center builders to adapt their offerings to make them available to smaller companies." -
Amazon Cloud Adds Hosted MySQL
1sockchuck writes "Amazon Web Services has added a relational database service to host MySQL databases in the cloud, and is also dropping prices on its Amazon EC2 compute service by as much as 15 percent. Amazon says the new service lets users focus on development rather than maintenance, but it will probably be bad news for startups offering database services built atop Amazon's cloud. Cloud Avenue warns that Amazon RDS should serve as 'a warning bell for the companies that build their entire business on Amazon ecosystem. ... They are just one announcement away from complete destruction.' Data Center Knowledge has a roundup of analysis and commentary on Amazon RDS and its impact on the cloud ecosystem." -
Peering Disputes Migrate To IPv6
1sockchuck writes "As more networks prepare for the transition to IPv6, we're seeing the first peering disputes (sometimes known as 'Internet partitions') involving IPv6 connectivity. The dispute involves Cogent, which has previously been involved in high-profile IPv4 peering spats with Sprint, Level 3 and Telia. Hurricane Electric, which has been an early adopter on IPv6, says Cogent won't peer with it over IPv6. Hurricane has extended an olive branch by baking a cake bearing a message of outreach for Cogent." -
The Risks and Rewards of Warmer Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "The risks and rewards of raising the temperature in the data center were debated last week in several new studies based on real-world testing in Silicon Valley facilities. The verdict: companies can indeed save big money on power costs by running warmer. Cisco Systems expects to save $2 million a year by raising the temperature in its San Jose research labs. But nudge the thermostat too high, and the energy savings can evaporate in a flurry of server fan activity. The new studies added some practical guidance on a trend that has become a hot topic as companies focus on rising power bills in the data center."
