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Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of July 14th
EvoSwitch Communications officer Mark Karsh uses his tricorder to check the ship’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is still lower than 1.2. (Photo:EvoSwitch)

Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of July 14th

The Week in Review: Major outage for Salesforce.com, Greenpeace's odd math on Apple's energy use, EvoSwitch gets its Trek on, developing a Big Data strategy, and squirrels as a downtime driver.

The team from Amsterdam data center provider EvoSwitch adopted a Star Trek theme to celebrate the company’s fifth anniversary.

For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week. Enjoy!

Major Outage for Salesforce.com - Salesforce.com experienced a significant outage this week, leaving many customers unable to access the company’s services. The downtime was triggered by a power outage at an Equinix data center in Silicon Valley.

Greenpeace vs. Apple Feud Fueled by Strange Math - Greenpeace has issued a “regrading” of its report card on Apple’s data center energy that gives the company Cs and Ds – as opposed to the Ds and Fs in an April report. But the environmental group continues to use an estimate of Apple’s power use in its North Carolina data center that is four times higher than Apple’s numbers. The report raises new questions about the credibility of Greenpeace’s estimates.

Where No Data Center Has Gone Before - The team from Amsterdam data center provider EvoSwitch adopted a Star Trek theme to celebrate the company’s fifth anniversary. “It’s been five years since we embarked on our mission to be the most sustainable, carbon-neutral datacenter in the Netherlands,” said EvoSwitch managing director Eric Boonstra in his Captain’s Log.

Surviving Electric Squirrels and UPS Failures - Folks who’ve worked in the data center industry for a while tend to have their squirrel stories. Mike Christian, who runs business continuity for Yahoo, shared his recently during a keynote at the O’Reilly Velocity conference in a presentation titled “Frying Squirrels and Unspun Gyros,” which examined the many ways that data centers can fail.

Big Data - What’s the Big Deal? - How big does your organization's Big Data strategy need to be? A discussion with Jerry Gentry and John Burke of Nemertes Research.