Items tagged with data center
Facebook on Wednesday announced plans to build a new data center in Fort Worth, Texas. This will be the social network's fifth data center, with the other four located in Altoona, Iowa; Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden. It will be one of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world, as it will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy. To help make that possible, Facebook is constructing a 200-megawatt wind energy plant on 17,000 acres located about 90 miles away in Clay County. That's overshooting Facebook's needs, so spare energy will go into the local grid via Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power Corporation, and Starwood Energy Group....
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Google is coming back to the United States to build its next data center and the company has its sights on a coal plant in Alabama for the location. The data center (which is Google’s 14th, globally, in case you’re counting) will transform the aging Willow Creek power plant into a glistening installation that relies heavily (and eventually, completely) on renewable energy. Construction will begin early in 2016. The plant is expected to bring at least 100 new jobs to the area.Image credit: GoogleAs poetic as it might seem to put an environmentally-friendly data center on the site of a coal-burning power plant, it was the infrastructure that interested Google. “At Windows Creek, we can use the...
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As part of its commitment to achieving 100 percent renewable energy usage for its global footprint, Amazon this week announced that it has partnered with Community Energy to build and operate an 80 megawatt solar farm in Accomack County, Virginia. They'll call it Amazon Solar Farm U.S. East and expect it to generate around 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power each year beginning in October 2016. That's enough energy to power around 15,000 U.S. homes in a year. Amazon said it will be the largest solar farm in Virginia, but rather than use the energy it harnesses to power households, it will all go into the electrical grids that supply both current and future Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud...
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Microsoft is known for being a lot of things, but "open" is something that's found at the bottom of most hypothetical lists. However, the company has been willing to make some exceptions to that rule when either internal or both internal and external benefits can be seen, and we're seeing a new example of that with the company's latest move of joining the Open Compute Project. The OCP was founded in 2011 by Facebook with the intent of building a pool of great minds (and companies as a whole) to share their data center and server designs. The goal is to increase efficiency and support the kind of accelerating scaling-up requirements we're witnessing. Any company that partakes in this project benefits...
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Intel announced a pair of new products today designed to boost data center efficiency, shrink footprints, and allow for faster deployments. The first are new microservers based on the C2000 (codename: Avoton) Atom architecture. We've discussed the Bay Trail Atom core several times and Intel's plans for the technology in the mobile space, but moving the hardware into data centers is a key component of Intel's microserver strategy. Based on what we know of Bay Trail/Avoton, we expect it will offer significantly improved performance over existing S1200 Atom servers, thanks to multiple microarchitechtural improvements and the integration of a quad-core processor rather than dual-core + Hyper-Threading....
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VMworld 2013 kicked off yesterday in San Francisco, and some big names in big data are taking the opportunity to announce new products. Today, Kingston is touting its new SSDNow E50 SSDs, which are meant to be a more affordable alternative to the SSDNow E100 line. The SATA 3.0 solid-state drives come in 100GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. In general, the E50 drives are only a little slower than the E100s. For example, the 100GB models have random 4k read/write speeds of 27,000/82,000 IOPS (for the E50) and 55,000/83,000 IOPS (for the E100). The SSDNow E50 drives have DuraWrite write-reduction technology for longevity and RAISE, which reduces uncorrectable errors. If you’re at VMworld, you...
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Intel unveiled a number of new data center initiatives this week as part of its broad product strategy to redefine some of its market goals. In the past, Intel's efforts in this area have boiled down to giving customers more of what they wanted, where "more" was defined as higher clock speeds or more processing cores. That's not to imply that Intel didn't do a great deal of work on software optimization, compiler tools, or CPU fabric design -- it absolutely did -- but the pitches used to be simpler, and more hardware-focused. That's changing slowly, thanks to the growing difficulty of improving microprocessors at a rapid pace (on the one hand) and the popularity of low-power solutions on the...
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Microsoft is taking the retail release of its upcoming Xbox One console seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it's committed to investing $677.7 million in a data center in Iowa, according to the Des Moines Register. Dubbed "Project Mountain," the investment will help beef up Microsoft's cloud infrastructure to support products like Xbox Live and Office 365. "We are proud to watch tech leaders like Microsoft choose to make significant investments in Iowa,”" said Governor Terry Branstad. "Microsoft’s continued expansion at its West Des Moines location is a vote of confidence that our state is providing the kind of business-friendly environment that can help global companies succeed."...
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Desktops and data centers are two very different beasts, and what's true of one might not be true of the other. For example, even though solid state drive (SSD) pricing has fallen dramatically in past year, it's still cheaper to equip a desktop or laptop system with a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD). The same isn't necessarily true when it comes to data centers, and if you ask IBM, the company will tell you that flash-based storage makes more economical sense at this point. How can that be? Part of the reason is because flash storage doesn't contain any moving parts, thereby making it a more reliable and durable solution, IBM says. Flash storage is also more energy efficient and doesn't require...
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Like many companies, Google goes to great lengths to protect its data centers and the information that resides within them. To help maintain security, Google allows only a small number of employees access to its server floor and other areas of its data centers. While you won't be able to take an in-person tour of a Google data center anytime soon, Google has provided a really cool glimpse into its data centers around the world with beautiful pictures as well as a Street View tour of the North Carolina location. In all, Google operates 13 data centers throughout the world. Not only does Google have rows and rows of servers, but the company also strives to be energy efficient. Here, you can see...
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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) kicked off the weekend by wrapping up its acquisition of server startup SeaMicro for a cool $334 million. It didn't take long to draw up the paperwork and work through the legalities of the more than quarter-of-a-billion dollar buyout, which was first announced less than four weeks ago. "Our unique fabric technology is truly one of the crown jewels of the cloud," said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager, Global Business Units, AMD. "The combination of this innovative technology with our processor design expertise greatly enhances our ability to attack the fastest growing portion of the server market with industry-leading low-power, low-cost, high-bandwidth...
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Zoho, a provider of online business, productivity, and collaboration applications, experienced a brief power outage Friday, taking its products and services offline for several hours. According to Zoho’s blog, the outage began at 8:25am PST, and even when power was restored by 9:15am, the company had a lot of work to do to get its service back up and running. Various applications were restored throughout the day, beginning with its Accounts service at 10:55am, and by 6:12pm, all of Zoho’s services and applications were back up and running. Sample shot of Zoho Docs Apparently, the cause of the downtime was a power outage in California at Equinix, a colocation provider. Zoho described...
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Google has kept information on its energy use a secret for years, but now the search giant is going public with the details. In a couple of blog posts, Google talks about its energy approach and links to a new “The Big Picture” page where you can learn all about it. The biggest claim the company makes is that it has zero carbon footprint, which is no small feat for a tech giant like Google whose entire company is based on online tools and services. How is this possible? Google says it uses half the electricity of a typical data center, although most of those savings come from the actual facilities and not so much the servers themselves. Additionally, 30% of the energy the company...
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Data centers have a tendency to get hot under the collar, and businesses spend big bucks keeping all that hardware running cool. They'll be happy to know that Dell's new integrated data center solution has not only been validated to operate within the highest current temperature and humidity guidelines issued by ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, in case you were curious), but it's warrantied as such, too. According to Dell, servers, storage, and networking equipment of the Dell Dell Fresh Air cooling solution are capable of short-term, excursion-based operation in temperatures up to 113F (45C), which is the highest temperature warrantied in mainstream...
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