Items tagged with data center
Chalk up another Apple confirmation. Not only did we find out that March 2nd would be the day that Apple would reveal the iPad 2, and now the company is revealing that the North Carolina data center they invested in last year will be for iTunes and MobileMe. The news was confirmed during a Q&A session at a shareholder meeting, with the data center expected to become fully operational later in the spring. Very few details beyond that were available, but at least shareholders now know that Steve Jobs didn't invest in this just to store his own personal movie library. Adding more capacity for iTunes and MobileMe could mean big, big things for the future. Already, rumors have been swirling that...
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It's clear that Apple believes in the cloud. Their iTunes media portal has grown to heights that were unimaginable just years back, and with Apple TV, iTunes and the upcoming Mac App Store, it's clear that Apple will need lots of storage for apps and lots of bandwidth for serving them. Apple has become a content delivery company over the years, and that's probably what encouraged them to purchase land in Maiden, North Carolina in order to build a $1 billion data center. But is a 500,000 square foot data center really enough for Apple? The company just announced last week that they would be expanding their app store to the Mac desktop and notebook platform, OS X. At first, Snow Leopard users will...
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Through a project known as Aquasar, IBM researchers are working on new technologies that could drastically reduce the power consumption and carbon footprint of data centers. Aquasar involves a water-cooled supercomputer that uses 40% less energy than comparable systems that use today's air-conditioned methods.In addition to saving energy, Aquasar takes the waste heat it pulls from servers and uses the heat to help warm nearby offices. By combining these energy savings, a company's carbon footprint can be reduced by as much as 85%. The Aquasar project began one year ago as part of IBM's First-Of-A-Kind (FOAK) program. Recently, IBM delivered its first-of-a-kind hot water-cooled supercomputer to...
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You've probably turned your nose up just after reading the headline. We can't blame you. We're doing the same. And in fact, we probably would have brushed this off as a hoax if it weren't coming straight from HP's own farm of press releases, so it's pretty much impossible to deny the legitimacy. HP Labs, the company's primary research arm, has just made public this week research that shows how "the manure output of cows and the heat output of data centers can be combined to create an economically and environmentally sustainable operation." Shocking? Yes. Gross? Yes. Reasonable? Definitely. The paper describes how 10000 dairy cows could fulfill the power requirements of a 1-megawatt (MW) data...
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For years now, data centers have been consuming more energy than companies would care to admit. Thankfully, the "green push" has convinced a number of higher-profile firms to re-evaluate their power plans and establish new methods of energizing their servers. IBM is a huge proponent of energy efficient server farms, and it seems as if Yahoo! is hoping to one-up even it in an effort to create one of the greenest data centers on the planet.Parking a new center near the raging waters of Niagara Falls in New York gives Yahoo! a distinct advantage: it has loads of consistant green power just across the street. Working in tandem with officials in Buffalo, NY, Yahoo! is hoping to make its future NY-based...
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Earlier this month Google sponsored a conference on data center efficiency where they showed by example how to achieve the most processing power while consuming the least amount of electricity. This is quite an about-face for Google as previously they have been notoriously secretive about their data centers and server infrastructure. Since its inception Google has chosen to forego purchasing servers from Dell, IBM, and HP like other data centers usually do and instead has employed the use of custom built servers. All of the servers at Google data centers have been designed internally to their custom specifications and assembled by Google employees. Google's newfound willingness to share their...
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In the last few years Virtualization has gone from a buzzword to a platform of choice in the world of Information Technology. Consumers already reap its benefits on a day to day basis as Banks, Internet Service Providers, online merchants, and many other companies have adopted the technology all the while transparent to the end user. The reasons why virtualization is attractive to companies are many but, to put it succinctly, it all boils down to efficiency which then translates to lower cost and higher availability.Just as the mighty transistor has shrunken down to sub-micron sizes over the years, so goes the data center. Less server sprawl does indeed equal more efficiency when virtualization...
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Underneath Stockholm, deep in the bedrock exists a data center better than any high tech lair Hollywood could probably dream up. Bahnhof, one of Sweden's largest ISP's has created a bunker of high tech goodness that is surely to astound. The facility is called Pionen and once you get past the 16 inch thick entrance doors into the once nuclear bunker now converted to a data center, the spectacular sights that await are simply breathtaking. Replete with waterfalls, greenhouses, German submarine backup engines, and simulated daylight this facility has the added benefit of being able to withstand an almost direct hit by a hydrogen bomb.The space Pionen now occupies was originally built during the...
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The inconvenient truth about data centers is that they consume lots of power. In addition to running a building-full of systems and storage devices 24/7, power is also consumed for networking equipment, cooling, battery backups, and even to support more modest human needs, such as lights and coffee makers. Both economically and socially, the United States is growing more conscientious of the need for power conservation. That's where programs like Energy Star take an active role. You've probably seen Energy Star stickers on air conditioners and refrigerators. "Energy Star is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy helping us all save...
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The Data Center, HotHardware's new community for IT professionals, is sponsored by Dell's Future of Storage. This article is part of our ongoing series of topics and discussions related to IT, Enterprise Storage and related storage technologies. There's no question, the 2008 Olympics, to be held in Beijing China, are serious business. An of course, serious business needs serious compute, communications and storage power. For this year's Summer Olympic games, China certainly isn't messing around. In fact, the old American proverb, "go big or go home" seems to fit aptly. Digital Beijing - The 2008 Olypmics Data CenterSource: Studio Pei-ZhuDigital Beijing...
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Intel Simplifies Data Center Connectivity with Industry-First FCoE Adapters STORAGE NETWORKING WORLD, Orlando, Fla., April 8, 2008 – Intel Corporation today announced Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support on its family of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) server adapters. The company has developed an initiator that will be bundled with Intel 10GbE server adapters for PCI Express* to enable FCoE functionality. Intel also introduced the Intel® 10 Gigabit AF DA Dual Port Server Adapter, a low-cost FCoE-capable copper adapter with an energy-efficient, low-profile design for rack installations in the data center. Intel's family of 10GbE server adapters is the industry's first to support Fibre...
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Study Commissioned by AMD Reveals Scope of Annual U.S. Data Center Energy Consumption: 45 Billion kWh, at Cost of Nearly 3 Billion Dollars - AMD Calls for Increased Collaboration between Technology Industry and Government Officials to Track and Reduce Energy Consumption - NEW YORK - Feb. 15, 2007 - In a keynote address at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York today, Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division, AMD (NYSE: AMD), revealed findings from a study that comprehensively calculated, for the first time, the energy consumed by national and global data centers annually. Addressing the need for thorough, credible estimates on data center power use, the...
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