Skip navigation

Best of the Data Center Blogs, May 7th

This week's notable analysis and commentary on the data center realm from Pingdom, Rob Powell at Telecom Ramblings, Dan Rayburn, Marc Hamilton of HP, and Schneider Electric.

Here’s a roundup of some interesting items we came across in our weekend reading of data center industry blogs:

The booming growth of Internet’s DNS infrastructure - Pingdom has an info-packed overview of the evolving DNS infrastructure: "The number of Internet users has doubled in the past five years. To handle this enormous influx of users, Internet’s infrastructure needs to grow as well. The Domain Name System (DNS), a critical part of that infrastructure, has more than met the challenge. Five years ago there were 123 DNS root server sites (the “backend” of DNS) spread out on the Internet. Today there are more than twice as many, over 300. Five years ago, 46 countries had root servers. Today, 76 have them."

What's Limelight Up to? - Rob Powell at Telecom Ramblings looks at recent moves by Limelight Networks. "Apparently the CDN and value added services provider has been cutting back on its peering with ISPs, offering a paid peering replacement to puzzled former peers. I think it’s a logical consequence of their de-emphasizing of the commoditized side of the CDN business. They aren’t trying to generate more money by charging for access to their CDN on both ends — the paid peering offers notwithstanding — because the economics don’t work that way. Networks make peering decisions economically, and what this means is that Limelight’s footprint is too extensive for its business model."

EdgeCast Says CDN Federation Taking Hold - Dan Rayburn has an update on content delivery federation: "Lately, there has been a lot of debate in the CDN industry as to whether or not a federated CDN model will take hold amongst independent operators. Today, EdgeCast announced that multiple operators and service providers are already exchanging production traffic, via a federated model, using their OpenCDN platform. For those not familiar with the term, federated CDN is used to describe the idea of carriers and telcos getting together to connect their CDNs with one another, thereby creating a 'federation' of content delivery networks."

The Worldwide Quest for Energy Efficient Supercomputing - At the ISC blog, Marc Hamilton of HP writes about efficiency metrics and high-performance computing: "At the data center level, the focus for much of the last decade has been on decreasing Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), getting as close as possible to an ideal '1' PUE. Solutions such as HP’s EcoPOD and state-of-the-art data centers like ESIF already can operate at PUEs of 1.1 or lower, well below the 2010 average of 2. As a result, further efforts to approach a 'perfect' PUE of 1.0 through incremental advances in power distribution and cooling will have increasingly diminishing returns. Thus isn’t it time to stop focusing on the 'right side' of the PUE decimal point and shift the focus from energy efficiency to sustainability?"

The Rise of The Vertical Cloud - Reuven Cohen at Elastc Vapor looks at the Zynga.com cloud for third-party developers: "It's another great example of a trend in the cloud computing sector of 'Vertically focused' cloud products and services. In the early days, there was this mentality of just build it and they would come. Problem was that for most, they never really came. Instead you had a handful of very large players and everyone else fighting over the table scraps. What those who survived learned, is that in order to be successful it isn't about being the best funded or even the best performing, but instead it is about being the most focused on the needs of a particular customer vertical."

Slash Infrastructure Costs by Right-sizing - The Schneider Electric data center blog discusses how modular power capacity can reduce costs: "Over-sizing is the number one cause of inefficiency and therefore a higher than necessary total cost of ownership. There are several things you can do to avoid these cost issues and by far, right-sizing is the most cost impacting tactic."