It's every startup's dream: to be growing faster than Facebook without having to build a Facebook-sized server farm. Pinterest is an online picture pinboard for organising your favourite snaps and sharing them. It was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp in March 2010, and it's growing like crazy with just 12 employees. It raised $74.5m in three rounds of funding in the past year, yet the only thing that Pinterest isn't doing is buying warehouses of servers. Speaking at the AW

UK web hosting provider Rackspace Hosting announced on Monday it has been ranked 12th at this year’sGreat Place to Work awards during a ceremony in the Painted Hall of the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich.

Rackspace UK ranked 12th on the “Large Company list” in its eighth consecutive appearance at the annual awards, held by the Great Place to Work Institute UK.

The company has already been included as part of the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies awards’ “best place to work” in the UK, along with Fortune’s Top 100 US Workplaces list.

Corporate culture continues to have an influence on the company’s overall success, and companies can find it challenging to keep this corporate culture consistent when they expand internationally in light of regional laws and regulations.

Canadian web hosting company BlackSun announced on Monday it has launched its new website for its updated dedicated server offerings.

The new website offers a suite of affordable dedicated servers, aimed at small and medium businesses in the Canadian hosting market. The appeal of these dedicated servers is that it allows businesses to customize the dedicated servers to meet their exact needs.

BlackSun has been busy building out several high-end cloud computing clusters, based on a high performance network with leading edge servers for its own offerings in the last year.

The dedicated server offering is based on the high performance Dell C6100 Cloud Server system, equipped with the latest in enterprise processors and optional SSD local disk technology.

Coolingis the largest single non-IT (overhead) load in a modern datacenter. There are manyinnovative solutions to addressing the power losses in cooling systems. Many of thesemechanical system innovations work well and others have great potential but none areas powerful as simply increasing the server inlet temperatures. Obviously less coolingis cheaper than more. And, the higher the target inlet temperatures, the higher percentageof time that a facility can spend running on outside air (air-sideeconomization)without process-based cooling.   Thedownsides of higher temperatures are 1) high semiconductor leakage losses, 2) higherserver fan speed which increases the losses to air moving, and 3) higher server mortalityrates. I’ve measured the former and, although these losses are inarguably present,these losses are measureable but have a very small impact at even quite high serverinlet temperatures.  The negativeimpact of fan speed increases is real but can be mitigated via different server targettemperatures and more efficient server ...

The recent burgeoning of New York’s Internet industry has forced some entrepreneurs — who, just a few years ago, might have felt they had little choice but to head west to pursue their dreams — to make a difficult choice. New York is now enough of an attractive alternative that a few West Coast-born start-ups are even packing up and moving east.

Much of this change has to do with the way that the technology industry has shifted toward creating consumer products and applications, rather than building the basic framework of computing and the Internet. Many new start-ups benefit from proximity to the media, advertising and fashion industries, New York’s strengths. And as the city’s industry grows, entrepreneurs say, it is offsetting some of the traditional disadvantages of being outside Silicon Valley.

This past week, Google completed its acquisition of the hardware maker Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, which could lead to the search giant’s making its own smartphone. But another software titan might be getting into the hardware game as well: Facebook.

Employees of Facebook and several engineers who have been sought out by recruiters there, as well as people briefed on Facebook’s plans, say the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year. These people spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their employment or relationships with Facebook.

The company has already hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, the employees and those briefed on the plans said.

The Industry Perspectives channel at Data Center Knowledge highlights thought leadership in the data center arena, providing industry professionals with the opportunity to share their insight and expertise. For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of this week’s columns: Integrated Approach to DCIM Yields Best Results – Integration between Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software systems for improved management and operation of data center physical infrastructure results in greater value and benefits to the organization, writes Hugh Lindsay of Schneider Electric. An interconnected network of expert systems enables higher value, greater opportunities for collaboration and vastly improved decision support as compared to either the status quo or a master system to encompass all elements of physical infrastructure management.

For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week. Enjoy! A Glimpse Inside Google’s Data Centers – Last week Google published photos of some of its 900,000 servers. The images show rows of racks, fully packed with servers and bathed in the green light of the LEDs on each server tray. And racks with wheels? How Open Compute is a Win for Rackspace – In the battle for the hyper-scale data center, long-dominant server OEMs like Dell and HP are doing battle with a growing challenge from firms offering custom server designs. If you’re looking for the front lines in this battle, look no farther than companies like Rackspace Hosting.

More than 400 professionals in data enter finance and management gathered this week as the Information Management Network (IMN) held its 2nd Annual Spring Forum on Financing, Investing and Real Estate Development for Data Centers in New York. The event featured lively panel discussions on a wide range of topics, as well as an expo area where delegates could network and do business.

Mid-sized businesses that operate their own data centers, as well as data center operators that provide outsourced services to mid-market companies, tend to focus a lot of attention on PUE, or power usage effectiveness. But there are other ways to keep track of how energy-efficient and “green” a data center is. Developed by The Green Grid consortium for efficient IT, PUE compares power going into a data center to power used to run the center’s information technology. This means the perfectly efficient data center would have a PUE of 1.0 … that is, all the incoming power goes entirely to driving the IT, with no energy wasted through heat, power conversion losses or other inefficiencies.