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The Yahoo Factor
The past few months haven’t been easy ones for Yahoo, with the contentious exit of CEO Carol Bartz followed rumors that the company might be sold. We’ve always maintained that Yahoo’s data center strategy has been one of the company’s major success stories. The Yahoo team has been overhauling the company’s infrastructure to run its IT infrastructure more efficiently, saving many millions of dollars in the process.
The influence of the data center team assembled by Yahoo has spread across the industry, as I was reminded when I encountered this photo from the 2006 groundbreaking for the Yahoo data center in Quincy, Washington. Wielding the shovels in the photo above are purple-clad Yahoo team members (from left) Kevin Timmons, Lars Rabbe, Scott Noteboom and Tom Furlong. Timmons now directs the data center effort for CyrusOne, Rabbe is presently the CIO of Skype, Furlong is Director of Site Operations for Facebook, and Noteboom now works for Apple’s data center operations.
Yahoo has had its struggles lately, but this photo provides a reminder of its role in seeding innovation in the industry, both within Yahoo and in the data center operations of some of its competitors.
About Rich Miller
Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.
Lee Stoller
Posted November 16th, 2011Yahoo future is unlimited.
Yahoo patents are worth billions. They should license or take % of ownership in companies that are infringing upon their license. There are a whole lot of companies that are infringing upon their license.
If they sell Yahoo it should be worth $50 billion plus.
Scott Noteboom
Posted November 16th, 2011What a motley group of goons… haha. Thanks, Rich– i actually didnt have this pic. Good memories, working with great guys… Cheers, -scott
Nathan peterson
Posted November 16th, 2011Great more licensing lawsuits for companies that were able to innovate at one time but fell by the wayside to the corporate penny pincher’s and greed expecting to live forever because they once had a great product but failed to keep innovating. Get it right, the money isn’t in lawsuits its in innovation.
Thanks for reposting this Rich. It brought wonderful memories of my time with Yahoo developing data centers around the globe and working with some great folks.
KC Mares
RESOURCE LINKS:
Building A Cloud-Savvy Model for TCO and ROI
How Storage is Shaping The Cloud Data Center
Bringing Colo to the Customer: Modular Gets Local
Microsoft’s $1 Billion Data Center
November 16th, 2011