Facebook’s Explosive Groundbreaking

When Facebook broke ground on its new data center in Prineville, Oregon last Thursday, they did so with the traditional props associated with such photo opportunities – hard hats and shovels bearing the “Facebook” logo. Donning the hard hats, local officials grabbed shovels and each moved a spadeful of loose earth a few feet. But the real fun came later, when the project team used 6,000 pounds of explosives to move a much larger volume of dirt. Facebook director of site operations Tom Furlong got to flip the switch. Here’s the video from the Facebook engineering team.

For more coverage of the Prineville project, see Facebook to Build Its Own Data Centers and It’s Official: Facebook is Oregon’s ‘Company X’. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Go Daddy Donates $500,000 to Haiti Relief

Domain registrar Go Daddy is donating $500,000 to help victims of yesterday’s magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, which has caused catastrophic death and damage. “The moment we saw the news, we knew we had to help,” CEO and Founder Bob Parsons said. “This devastating earthquake killed thousands and thousands of people and conditions for survivors are deplorable. Those of us not affected by this disaster need to step up – we at Go Daddy feel it’s our duty to lead the way.”

Go Daddy, which is also one of the world’s largest web hosting companies, sent a check for $500,000 to Hope for Haiti, an organization focusing on education, nutrition and healthcare. “We’re overwhelmed by Go Daddy’s quick response and generous contribution,” said Hope for Haiti Executive Director Elizabeth Davison. “We plan to use this money to help rebuild the hospital and the orphanage in Port-au-Prince.”

Google has also moved quickly to mobilize resources to funnel resources to the devastated Caribbean nation, posting a Disaster Relief in Haiti page and linking it from the Google.com home page, probably the most visited page on the Web. Google Earth has been updated with post-earthquake satellite images of Haiti, which can provide a glimpse of conditions in specific areas, and is likely to be a key resource for relatives as well as news organizations covering the crisis.

Best of Data Center Knowledge, December 2009

Powerful data centers captured the interest of Data Center Knowledge readers in December, especially John Rath’s review of the specs for the Weta Digital data center powering the graphics rendering for “Avatar” and our profile of the CLUMEQ supercomputer-in-a-silo. Here’s a look at the 10 most popular stories of December 2009, ranked by total page views:

• The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind Avatar (Dec. 22)
• Wild New Design: Data Center in a Silo (Dec. 10)
• Google Patent Reveals Data Center Innovations (Nov. 30)
• A Closer Look at Google’s New Cooling Design (Nov. 30)
• NASA’s Nebula: The Cloud in a Container (Dec. 3)
• Major Data Center Outages of 2009 (Dec. 16)
• 100 Percent Data Loss for Coding Horror Site (Dec. 11)
• The Coolest Data Center Video Tours (Dec. 29)
• Video Tour: Telecity Powergate Data Center (Nov. 26)
• DNS Issues Affect Major Sites (Dec. 23)

You can stay current on the latest data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook.

Best of Data Center Knowledge, November 2009

We’re a little tardy with our review of last month’s most popular story, as we were busy at the Gartner Data Center Conference last week. But there continues to be huge interest in data center power and cooling innovations at Facebook and Google, which accounted for four of our top five stories for the month. Here’s a look at the 10 most popular stories of November 2009, ranked by total page views:

• Facebook Follows Google to Data Center Savings (Nov. 27)
• A Closer Look at Google’s New Cooling Design (Nov. 30)
• WoW’s Back End: 10 Data centers, 75,000 Cores (Nov. 25)
• Google Patent Reveals Data Center Innovations (Nov. 30)
• Inside A Cloud Computing Data Center (Nov. 4)
• Should Servers Come With Batteries? (Nov. 27)
• Power Outage Effects Rackspace Cloud (Nov. 3)
• Facebook Goes Green With New Data Centers (Nov. 5)
• Rackspace: We Have Work to Do (Nov. 4)
• Microsoft’s Windows Azure Cloud Container (Nov. 18)

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

New from DCK: Industry Perspectives

Today we are introducing Industry Perspectives, a new editorial content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. It provides industry professionals with the opportunity to contribute articles sharing their insight and expertise.

This new feature is part of our ongoing effort to make Data Center Knowledge your best independent source for news and information about the data center industry. We are also continuing to expand our daily news reporting and analysis, and have exciting plans for growth in 2010.

The launch of Industry Perspectives is a reflection of the growing effort to share best practices in the data center industry. This is an increasingly important discussion, and with DCK’s reach (more than 125,000 data center professionals read our site each month), we believe we can help extend the conversation to a wider audience. 

To help organize our content, we have introduced a new home page design for Data Center Knowledge that provides separate sections for our news coverage and the Industry Perspectives channels.    

It’s important to note that Industry Perspectives is an editorial product, and not an advertising program. The quality of a contributed article is the most important factor in whether it is published. To learn more, see our guidelines and criteria for Indutry Perspectives.

The Internet, From Sea to Shining Sea

Writing about data centers, it’s easy to equate the Internet with huge cold rooms packed with servers. The December issue of Wired offers a different perspective in a visual tour of points on the Internet’s path across North America. This includes prominent carrier hotels (yep, 60 Hudson Street) and data centers (Terremark’s NAP of the Capital Region) but also the right-of-ways and cable landings that support the digital economy (link via Ilissa Miller).

Roundup: SAS 70 for i/o, Hurricane, Medina Profile

Here’s a roundup of news headlines from the data center industry:

• i/o Data Centers SAS 70 Certification: Wholesale colocation provider i/o Data Centers has achieved SAS 70 Type II certification at its data centers in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona the company said this week. The audit, conducted by Deloitte & Touche, confirms that i/o Data Centers’ controls have been suitably designed and tested to meet the needs of its clients. “Having an independent audit affirm the reliability of our data center operations is important for our customers and gives them the peace of mind that their data center adheres to strict quality and operational standards,” said Bill Slessman, chief operating officer for i/o Data Centers.
• Hurricane Electric Opens Data Center Expansion: Colocation specialist Hurricane Electric this week announced the build-out of the third phase of its 208,000 square-foot data center in Fremont, Calif. The 24,000 square foot expansion of the former Apple manufacturing facility earned a “substantial incentive” from Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) for its use of efficient technology, including Eaton Corporation’s 9395 UPS system, which operates at 99% efficiency in Energy Saver Mode, and McQuay’s Maverick II Rooftop HVAC System featuring variable-frequency drives (VFDs), powered exhaust, and a 100% economizer mode. “Our energy efficient infrastructure reduces our carbon footprint,” said Benny Ng, Hurricane Electric’s Director of Infrastructure. “But it also reduces our energy bills, making our services more cost-competitive.”

Best of Data Center Knowledge, October 2009

The growing demand for infrastructure for major web operations was the prevailing theme in October at Data Center Knowledge, as our most popular articles looked at the scope of current and future web operations at Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Here’s a look at the 10 most popular stories of October 2009, ranked by total page views:

• Facebook Now Has 30,000 Servers (Oct. 13)
• Google Envisions 10 Million Servers (Oct. 20)
• Raise the Temperature, Fight The Fans (Oct. 21)
• Peering Disputes Migrate to IPv6 (Oct. 22)
• Inside Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center (Oct. 1)
• Microsoft Unveils Its Container-Powered Cloud (Sept. 30)
• The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability (Oct. 12)
• T-Mobile: Microsoft Lost All the Sidekick Backups (Oct. 10)
• Amazon Offers MySQL in the Cloud (Oct. 27)
• Report: EC2 Running 40,000 Servers (Oct. 1)

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

Stay Current on Data Center News

We’ve had a lot of new visitors to Data Center Knowledge this week to check out Facebook Now has 30,000 Servers and The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability. If you’ve just discovered us, DCK provides daily coverage of data centers, web hosting and cloud computing. You can stay current on our latest headlines by subscribing to our daily e-mail updates or by RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, where we provide real-time updates on the latest data center news. Here are some other resources that might be of interest:

• We’ve been writing about the data center industry non-stop since 2005, and our archives include more than 3,750 articles about virtually every facet of the industry. You can use our search box, located at the top of the right-hand column, to research recent activity by keyword, geographic market or company.
• If you’re interested in publicly held companies in this sector, check out our Data Center Investor channel for performance updates on data center stocks. For tracking individual stocks, you can use the “Companies” link in our navigation bar, or just type the company’s ticker symbol into our search box.
• If cool videos of data center tours are what you seek, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.
• Also of possible interest: the DCK White Paper Library, Data Center Jobs Board, and our listing of Data Center Conferences.