Best of Data Center Knowledge, November 2008

There was a diverse mix of data center news in November, as no single subject or company dominated our monthly list of the 10 most popular stories at Data Center Knowledge. The most viewed and discussed story was our feature on the heat wheel and “Kyoto Cooling.” Here’s a look at the 10 most popular stories of November 2008, ranked by total page views:

• Heat Wheel Could Cut Data Center Cooling Bills (Nov. 14)
• Nuke Site Converted Into Data Center (Nov. 12)
• Amazon Building Large Data Center in Oregon (Nov. 7)
• Political Sites Scale Up For Election Night Traffic (Nov. 4)
• Facebook: $1 Million A Month in Power Costs (Oct. 31)
• Design Your Own Virtual Supercomputer (Nov. 11)
• Where Amazon’s Data Centers Are Located (Nov. 18)
• Worker Killed in Accident at UK Data Center Site (Nov. 6 )
• Sprint, Cogent Resume Peering, Keep Arguing (Nov. 2)
• UPS Failure Triggered Friendster Outage (Nov. 17)

You can stay current on the latest data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed, daily e-mail updates and our Data Center Insider newsletter.

DCK and the Power of Social Media

After decades of interviewing newsmakers, in recent years I’ve found the tables turned and have frequently served as a source for journalists and bloggers seeking to explain the world of data centers to their readers. I recently was interviewed by marketing expert Beth Harte about the process of running an online news site, and how it differs from my experience as a print journalist. The interview is now online at Beth’s blog, The Harte of Marketing, for anyone interested in my ramblings about social media and our newsgathering process here at DCK. A brief excerpt:

The extraordinary advantage of blogs is that they are changing the whole environment in real time. Information, news and opinion online are a big change from the newspaper newsroom and it’s a change for the better. Tracking all of this allows me to take in a whole lot of information in a shorter amount of time. This makes it easy for me to present it to my readers.

If you’re involved in social media, you can check out my profiles at Twitter, LinkedIn and Digg and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube. We also have a page that tracks Data Center Knowledge in the Media, as some of the coverage we’ve contributed to may be of interest to our readers in the industry.

2,500 Articles In Our News Archive

On Friday I posted the 2,500th article since Data Center Knowledge was launched in mid-2005. And boy, are my arms tired! Seriously, we’ve been keeping pretty busy bringing you the very latest news about the data center industry. There’s much more to come, as we continue to expand our coverage to keep pace with the data center’s central role in the Internet economy.    

A word about our news archive: These 2,500 articles provide a pretty thorough record of the data center industry over the past three years. It’s all accessible through our search box at the top of our right-hand column. If you need to research a company, trend or market, you’ll likely find a reference in our archives.

Best of Data Center Knowledge, October 2008

The battle for the cloud supremacy between Google and Microsoft was a hot topic in October, as our coverage of those two companies dominated our monthly list of the 10 most popular stories at Data Center Knowledge. Our coverage of Google’s new data center in Goose Creek, South Carolina received the most page views of the six Google-related stories in the top 10. Also of interest last month: Microsoft’s energy efficiency initiatives and the peering dispute between Cogent and Sprint. Here are the 10 most popular stories of October 2008, ranked by total page views:

• A Look at Google’s Newest Data Center (Oct. 22)
• Are Containers Helping Google’s Low PUE? (Oct. 6)
• Google: ‘The World’s Most Efficient Data Centers’ (Oct. 1)
• Microsoft PUE of 1.22 for Data Center Containers (Oct. 20)
• Google: Raise Your Data Center Temperature (Oct. 14)
• Google Discloses Energy Usage Data (Cont.) (Oct. 1)
• Peering DIspute Between Cogent, Sprint (Oct. 31)
• Google Opens South Carolina Data Center (Oct. 8th )
• Router Failure at TBS Cited in ALCS Outage (Oct. 18)
• Microsoft’s ‘Cloud Operating System’ (Oct. 2)

You can stay current on the latest data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed, daily e-mail updates and our Data Center Insider newsletter.

Managing Election Day Traffic

Interest in the U.S. elections is high, and all indications are that Tuesday will be a extraordinarily busy day for many web sites, as Internet users track the results and analysis.

Is your web site, hosting provider or data center doing anything special to prepare your infrastructure for Election Day traffic?  If so, please email us and let us know about it. Please use the subject line “Election Day” and include some details that would be of interest to our readers, as well as a contact where we can follow up if we need additional information.

Roundup: IBM, Microsoft, Akamai, Cloudy links

Here’s a roundup of interesting links from the last few days about data centers and cloud computing:

• IBM plans to open a new data center in Scotland intended for medium-size businesses, the company said Friday. 
• Responding to news reports, Microsoft said Friday that it is reviewing its hiring plans amid the economic uncertainty, but denied a report that it has instituted a companywide hiring freeze.  
• Dan Rayburn drills a little deeper into Akamai’s pricing for content delivery services, and wodners why the company is quoting one price for streaming delivery and another price for HTTP based video delivery. Akamai’s pricing was an issue cited in several analyst downgrades last week.
• James Urquhart has a thoughtful post that looks at the future of cloud computing now the buzz is starting to recede, giving way to practical questions about lock-in and the uility of clouds for the enterprise.
• More specifically, Bob Warfield responds to Richard Stallman’s widely-noted critique of cloud computing. Is “virtual hardware” the key to thinking about the cloud? 

Best of Data Center Knowledge, Sept. 2008

What were the hot stories last month on Data Center Knowledge? Offbeat experiments testing data center environmental conditions were the hot topic in September, including Intel’s work with air-side economizers and ”Microsoft’s data center in a tent,” as well as Google’s data center barges. The article receiving the most page views was . Here are the 10 most popular stories of September 2008, ranked by total page views:

• New From Microsoft: Data Centers in Tents (Sept. 22)
• Google Planning Offshore Data Barges (Sept. 6)
• Data Centers Key to Lehman Sale to Barclays (Sept. 17)
• One Data Center to Rule Them All (Sept. 08)
• Intel: Servers Do Fine With Outside Air (Sept. 18)
• Pew Data Shows Solid Uptake for Cloud Apps (Sept. 12)
• Microsoft To Use Solar Panels in New Data Center (Sept. 24)
• Cisco Unveils Virtual Switch for VMware (Sept. 16)
• Major Flywheel Deal for Active Power (Sept. 18)
• Data Center Tour: Intel’s High-Density Retrofit (Sept. 26)

You can stay current on the latest data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed, daily e-mail updates and our Data Center Insider newsletter.

Financial Bailout Fails in the House

The $700 billion financial bailout bill has just failed in the House, being voted down 227-206. House Republicans voted 2-1 against the bill. The Dow has been fluctuating, but has been off as much as 705 points. 

UPDATE: There will be no revote today. The House is breaking for the Rosh Hashanah holiday, which begins at sundown.

Let’s Play ‘Name That Data Center’

I can’t resist a blog post titled “Secret Data Center?” Professional photographer Gregg Reiss has posted photos from inside a major data center operated by one of his clients, a company that Reiss says “most likely created the Internet Data Center.” He writes:

It’s hiding in plain sight, or is it? We were asked to go behind the scenes of the Midwest’s largest data center and capture images for their upcoming announcement marketing materials. It’s actually 3 data centers in 1, with lots of room for expansion. Generators, chillers, miles of cables and zillions of servers.

In posting the shots on the “secret” facility on the Internet, Glenn seems confident that folks won’t be able to identify his client from the photos.

Is he right? Let’s find out. If you can identify this facility, or think you know who the owner is, share in our comments. Some potentially useful background information: Reiss is based in Kansas City, and his company’s client list includes Sprint, IBM and DST Systems (it couldn’t be that easy, could it?). And the data center operator has “zillions of servers.”

UPDATE: The data center in question belongs to 1&1 Internet, as noted by Chris in the comments. Thanks for all who ventured a guess!

Petascale Data Centers

Cory Doctorow has written an article for Nature about petsacale data centers that provides a look inside three European facilities: The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire in the UK, the XS4ALL data center in Amsterdam that hosts a mirror of the Internet Archive, and the computing center at CERN near Geneva that supports the Lareg Hadron Collider (which is in the news today).

An excerpt: “This was one of the coolest writing assignments I’ve ever been on, pure sysadmin porn. It was worth doing just to see the the giant, Vader-cube tape-robots at CERN (pictured at left). At this scale, memory has costs. It costs money — 168 million Swiss francs (US$150 million) for data management at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva. And it also has costs that are more physical. Every watt that you put into retrieving data and calculating with them comes out in heat, whether it be on a desktop or in a data centre; in the United States, the energy used by computers has more than doubled since 2000. Once you’re conducting petacalculations on petabytes, you’re into petaheat territory. Two floors of the Sanger data centre are devoted to cooling. The top one houses the current cooling system. The one below sits waiting for the day that the centre needs to double its cooling capacity. Both are sheathed in dramatic blue glass; the scientists call the building the Ice Cube. 

The Nature feature is lengthy, but Cory has posted a summary at Boing Boing and also posted a photoset at Flickr.