Articles from Om Malik

1. As Facebook grows, so do its data center needs Explore GigaOM (Apr 20 2012) Construction , Cloud Computing I often get asked the question of what Facebook will do with the ginormous amount of money it will raise as part of its forthcoming initial public offering that will value the company in excess of $100 billion? I don’t know how they will put all of it to use, but a nice piece of it will go towards maintaining and building out is backend infrastructure. The company on Thursday announced that its second data center in Forest City, N.C., is now serving live user traffic. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Intel   Google   Facebook

2. The ugly, dog-eat-dog world of data center startups Explore GigaOM (Mar 27 2012) Networking The normally staid and somewhat boring world of networking equipment focused startups is become a hotly contested minefield — thanks to the newest kid on the blog, Insiemi, a company started by Cisco veterans Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, and Luca Cafiero. It is spreading money like an old rich uncle and is trying to acquire as much talent it can scoop up from rivals, who no doubt are hopping mad. The company is building a new very high-speed data center switch along with a software management platform. This is a really hot market — massive data center build outs have already made Arista Networks, a high-speed ethernet switch company co-founded by Andy Bechtolsheim, an IPO candidate for early 2013. In the early-stage startup scene Nicira, a company building a controller for scaled out programmable networks, has been the victim of corporate espionage and other vendors such as Big Switch are gearing up ... (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Cisco   Arista Networks

3. Big data centers in Top 5 US construction projects Explore GigaOM (Mar 5 2012) Construction , Cloud Computing It is pretty clear – we are living in the data age and for that we need big, beefy infrastructure that needs equally big and beefy homes — aka data centers. From Apple to Amazon, everyone is on a data center building binge. Today, thanks to Sean Gourley I learned that the Utah-based NSA Data Center and the Building 2 (second phase) ofFacebook’s Prineville, Oregon data center were two of the five largest construction projects in the United States during 2011, according to Construction.com (see PDF). The NSA Data Center is going to cost $1.1 billion and Facebook’s project is going to cost $200 million, according to the website that sources data from McGraw-Hill Dodge Analytics. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Amazon.com   Facebook

4. IBM launches beefy OpenFlow switch for data centers, cloud Explore GigaOM (Nov 20 2011) Networking Big infrastructure upgrades are pushing demand for hardware for data centers, especially networking switches. IBM is the latest to join the party and has just launched a new switch based on the OpenFlow specifications provided by the Open Networking Foundation. OpenFlow is a network protocol that was developed over the past six years at Stanford University and has since been adopted by many companies. It’s part of the software-defined networking movement we have covered extensively over past few months. IBM showed off the switch in May 2011. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Cisco   IBM

5. Facebook gets a big infrastructure boost for Timeline Explore GigaOM (Sep 22 2011) Cloud Computing Facebook is going to be putting its already immense infrastructure through a stress test like nothing before, according to Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company. Introduced Thursday, Timeline is essentially a new view into your news feed that takes multiple data inputs — from your status updates to the names of the songs you listen to on Spotify — and turns them into a daily journal through a combination of data crunching and new design elements. The automatic sharing that is part of the new Facebook (2011 edition) means that folks are going to share a lot of data with the company. “There will be little bits of data, just a lot of it,” joked Schroepfer. He pointed out that the company has simulated some scenarios and prepared its storage systems to handle more data. “But we don’t know the impact of our new ... (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Facebook

6. Infographic: Virtualization & State of Cloud Computing Explore Structure Blog (Sep 22 2010) Cloud Computing , Servers A survey of data center and IT management professional conducted by Zenoss, an Annapolis, Md.-based data center software and service provider reveals some surprising facts about virtualization and cloud computing. The results were collated from the responses of 204 individuals. Here are the the findings of the survey plus an info graphic outlining the State of the Cloud Computing: (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Amazon.com

7. When It Comes to Social Networks, Infrastructure Wins Explore GigaOM (Jul 22 2010) Facebook is playing host to half-a-billion people. And one of the main (and unsaid) reasons it has been able to get there -- its technical underpinnings. From thousands of servers to its own datacenter, Facebook knowns social web needs big beefy and superfast web infrastructure. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Google

8. Why Intel is a Likely Winner of Tech Recovery Explore GigaOM (Jul 21 2010) Despite lingering fears of a second half economic slowdown, corporate spending on information technology is on an upswing. Forrester Research, in its most recent quarterly update, notes that during 2010, the IT market will grow 7.9 percent worldwide to $2.464 trillion. The U.S. IT market is expected to grow around 9.9 percent to $753 billion, thanks in part to a big upsurge in demand for computer equipment. Europe will grow by about two percent, down from previous forecast of five percent. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Forrester Research   Europe   Intel

9. Akamai Ranks Fastest Cities in the US Explore GigaOM (Apr 18 2010) Led by Berkeley, Calif., at the end of 2009, college towns are among the fastest cities in the U.S., according to Akamai’s latest “The State of the Internet” report. In order to qualify, Akamai put a filter of a minimum of 50,000 unique IP addresses. Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Stanford (California), Durham (North Carolina) and Ithaca (New York) made up the top five cities in the U.S. The U.S. might not rank top in most broadband categories, but it was interesting to note that Berkeley, Chapel Hill and Stanford are the three fastest cities in the world, followed by Masan (South Korea) and Oxford (Great Britain.) (Read Full Article)

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10. The State of the Internet: Now Bigger, Faster & Mobile Explore GigaOM (Apr 18 2010) Networking The Internet as we know it is not only getting bigger and faster, but it is also becoming more mobile with more and more people accessing Internet-based services from their smartphones. These are some of the key findings of Akamai’s “The State of the Internet” report for the fourth quarter of 2009. The report uses data collected from Akamai’s global content delivery network to draw conclusions that are a good representation of the Internet. A Bigger Internet During the last three months of 2009, nearly 4.7 percent more unique IP addresses were connecting to Akamai’s network. At the end of 2009, there were about 465 million IP addresses from 234 countries vs. 401 million at the end of 2008 and 312 million at the end of 2007. The U.S. and China account for nearly 40 percent of the total 465 million unique IP addresses. What ... (Read Full Article)

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11. No Kidding! Telx, a Data Center Operator, Files for a $100M IPO Explore GigaOM (Mar 19 2010) Cloud Computing The Telx Group, a New York City-based data center operator, has filed for an initial public offering that could see it raise as much as $100 million from the public markets. The last major data center operator to go public was RackSpace, and that was back in 2009. With the demand for data centers and Internet services on an upswing, Telx’s attempt to go public is very timely. The company is well known for owning being a primary lease holder at 60 Hudson Street, an iconic wired carrier hotel in Manhattan where more than 250 networks converge. Owned by private equity firm GI Partners, its other assets include The Planet and EV1 Servers. (Read Full Article)

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12. Cisco vs. the World: Rough Seas Ahead? Explore GigaOM (Nov 8 2009) Cloud Computing , Servers Cisco Systems, the Wall Street darling, might soon find itself in a street brawl with not only former enemies but also allies who are turning on it. The company, which once made its living selling core infrastructure products such as routers and switches, has more recently been chasing new markets such as video conferencing and data center-focused technologies including servers. Sure, over the long term, the upside of these markets is huge, but in the near term these moves could prove to be painful. Why? Because these moves into new markets are pitting the company against one-time supporters. (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Google   Cisco   Hewlett Packard

13. Why The Great Internet Build Out Prompting M&A Explore GigaOM (Oct 22 2009) If you’re a BlackBerry or iPhone user (see: addict), then you are partly responsible for the great Internet buildout. Those cute apps that look up baseball scores or let you log into Facebook eat up enough bandwidth to put the backend infrastructure of phone companies under pressure, forcing them to upgrade their networks with new and fancy gear. I’ve described this as the great Internet buildout and it’s one of the main reasons we’re seeing a wave of mergers and acquisitions in tech land. Equinix, a data center provider, yesterday said it was going to buy competitor Switch and Data for about $689 million in cash and stock. (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Cisco   Facebook

14. Microsoft & T-Mobile: Lost Sidekick Data Almost Restored Explore GigaOM (Oct 15 2009) Old fashioned folks would call it closing the barn after the horse has bolted. Young people are going to call it “whatever.” I just call it – too little, too late. Microsoft says it has restored most if not all of the data for the Sidekick-using customers of T-Mobile. Last Friday a data wipeout left thousands of Sidekick users without any access to their data that was stored in Microsoft’s data centers. In a statement, Roz Ho, Corporate Vice President, Premium Mobile Experiences, Microsoft said that company is about to start restoring people’s personal data starting with personal contact. Why is it too little, too late. There has been an exodus of customers away from the Danger’s Sidekick device and many class action lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft. I believe Microsoft’s $500 million purchase of Danger has gone up in smoke. (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Microsoft Corp

15. The Great Internet Buildout Continues Explore GigaOM (Sep 21 2009) Networking One of the good aspects of returning from a long trip is that you’re forced to catch up on a lot of stuff, which often entails reading emails, web sites and my favorite blogs in a sequential manner. And when you do that, you can sometimes pick up unlikely patterns that help connect the dots. For instance, you can draw a straight line between the popularity of Facebook and a developing boom in Internet infrastructure — like I did once I got done reading. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it has 300 million subscribers. The fantastic growth of the company is mirrored by the rapid advancement of Twitter and many other web services that have spawned ecosystems of their own. While these services get most of the media attention, a much bigger story is what lies beneath — the Internet’s infrastructure and the grid that powers it. (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   The New York Times   Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

16. Twitter Overtakes MySpace in the UK Explore GigaOM (Sep 1 2009) Microblogging Click on the image to get a bigger version of the chart. MySpace, meet the new new MySpace. It’s called Twitter. According to Hitwise, a web traffic intelligence company, Twitter has overtaken MySpace in the UK. In August, Twitter.com became the 27th most-visited web site in the UK, one position ahead of MySpace. The Twitter service [...] (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Data Center Knowledge   NTT

17. Cloud Computing: Washington vs. Washington Explore BusinessWeek (Aug 11 2009) Construction The feds want cloud computing services as part of their tech infrastructure, but Washington State plans to build its own data center When I spoke with U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra last month, he outlined a pragmatic approach to federal technology that involved adopting a hybrid model of data centers and cloud computing solutions. Buying infrastructure as a service instead of banking solely on energy-guzzling data centers is a good way to stretch tax dollars, he argued. Kundra's colleague, Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer of the U.S., shares his approach. (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Microsoft Corp

18. On the Web, Growth Costs Real Money Explore GigaOM (May 26 2009) Twitter, the San Francisco-based micro-messaging startup, has been growing like a weed, thanks to generous plugs on mainstream media. Data collected by comScore shows that the number of unique visitors to Twitter.com grew from 1.6 million in April 2008 to 32.1 million in April 2009. All that growth is sucking up Twitter management’s attention, along [...] (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Sun Microsystems   Facebook

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