Category: Cloud Computing

Just thirty years ago, innovation in almost any category was measured in years, but today it’s measured in weeks or months. If you were to focus on information technology specifically you could even argue that change can occur in days — and that cycle will continue to accelerate.

But adapting and innovating in IT requires that you have a platform strategy that allows for heterogeneous adoption of technology at each layer of infrastructure. You also need simplified, cost-effective, real-time access to a wide range of partners and solution providers, otherwise known as your technology ecosystem. This group of providers will be a veritable marketplace of vendors that are proprietary and open source, but whom together create a combination of technologies and services that allow the buyer to mix and match for any solution requirement.

Facebook’s $1 Billion Data Center Network – Facebook has invested more than $1 billion in the infrastructure that powers its social network, which now serves more than 845 million users a month around the globe. SeaMicro Servers Get Brawny With Xeon Chips – SeaMicro has adapted its many-core server design to work with Intel Xeon processors, significantly expanding the type of workloads that can run on the company’s low-energy servers. Amazon: 762 Billion Objects Stored on S3 Cloud – How fast is Amazon Web Services growing? The number of objects stored on the company’s S3 cloud storage service tripled in the 12-month period between the final quarters of 2010 and 2011. S3 now stores an amazing 762 billion objects. By any measure, that’s extraordinary growth. SuperNAP Featured on CBS Evening News – The massive SuperNAP data center was in the spotlight last Thursday evening when it was featured in a ...

Data center operator Q9 Networks announced on Thursday it has been selected by NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology unit of NYSE Euronext, to host a secure financial transaction infrastructure access center.

The agreement will extend the SFTI backbone into Q9′s Toronto data center, enabling Canadian customers to directly access services over the global capital markets network.

Developed in 2002 for the financial services community, SFTI is built to facilitate large quantities of electronic quotes, trades and market data traffic while ensuring reliable, ultra-low latency access to NYSE Euronext’s markets and other global trading venues and firms, including more than 1,300 market participants.

Kent Christensen is virtualization practice manager for Datalink, where consults with both Fortune 500 and mid-tier customers on storage consolidation, virtualization, cloud strategies and technologies. He blogs about theses issues.

Cloud computing is gaining popularity. Yet, we know that only about 25% of IT teams are actively involved in cloud computing within their organization. Why the disconnect? Many IT people tell me they are interested, but just don’t have time to explore what cloud computing could mean to their IT organization.

The best advice I can give them comes from American Revolutionary Thomas Paine, himself:

“Lead, follow or get out of the way.”

Now’s the time to move forward with plans for your own internal, private cloud. If you don’t, you may find yourself — and your IT organization — left behind.

Facebook has invested more than $1 billion in the infrastructure that powers its social network, which now serves more than 845 million users a month around the globe. The company spent $606 million on servers, storage, network gear and data centers in 2011, and expects to spend another $500 million this year, Facebook revealed Wednesday in its filing for an initial public stock offering.

The company’s massive armada of servers and storage must work together seamlessly to deliver each Facebook page, the company said. “Loading a user’s home page typically requires accessing hundreds of servers, processing tens of thousands of individual pieces of data, and delivering the information selected in less than one second,” the company said.

Cisco (CSCO) announced it has updated its switching portfolio with 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) and 40 GE capabilities, the next speed limits for networking. These new capabilities provide a holistic architectural approach across campus, data center and service provider environments.

; London 3 becomes first data center in Europe to be recognized for site management using the standard 2 February 2012 by Penny Jones - DatacenterDynamics Print Colt's Guy Ruddock Colt has become the first data center operator in Europe to receive the Uptime Institute’s Management & Operations certification for a data center, which covers third-party assurance for site management. Colt had to undergo extensive a

To a run a site as massive as Facebook inherently requires a massive infrastructure of data centers. The Web site’s IPO filing on Wednesday sheds some light on just how much it costs to maintain and construct such facilities.

According to the document, Facebook had $500 million in “non-cancelable contractual commitments as of December 31, 2011, primarily related to equipment and supplies for our data center operations, and to a lesser extent, construction of our data center sites.”

GalaxyVisions and its subsidiary ColoGuard have reduced usage of mechanical air conditioning at their shared Brooklyn data center by 75% since implementation of airside economization at the facility two years ago.

GalaxyVisions VP of operations Ruben Magurdumov said deployment of an airside economizer at the company’s facility in the New York City borough gave the company substantial efficiency advantages, even with this winter’s unusually warm weather.

Several leading data center providers reported this week that they have competed audits of their facilities: DuPont Fabros Technology – Wholesale data center developer DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) today announced that the control procedures for its data centers that required the certification have been found to be suitable in design and operating effectively according to Service Organization Control Reports (“SOC1″). IO – Modular data center specialist IO said the company has completed a SSAE 16 Type 2 audit covering three operational data centers – IO New Jersey, IO Phoenix and IO Scottsdale.

Energy costs are the fastest-rising cost element in the data center. Based on current trends, the EPA estimates that energy consumed by data centers will continue to grow by 12 percent per year. Power and thermal energy consumption balanced with energy savings is one of the major responsibilities of facility and IT managers. Intel Data Center Manager group has observed how the data center is now a source for CIOs and their technical teams to add to the bottom line through increased power and cooling efficiency.

 

Leading data centers are ramping up to real-time power and thermal management. There is a growing recognition of the ROI benefit through monitoring usage by device. This provides real-time energy consumption data in relation to the actual workload for individual servers and groups of servers. Collecting data of the actual power and thermal trends over days, weeks and years provides ROI benefit through the ...

While much data center news broke in January, one story on a unique data center design – camouflaging a data center as a residence – clearly led the pack of the best-read items on Data Center Knowledge. There was also interest in stories on the federal government’s plans to close data centers, Facebook’s spending on its facility in Oregon, and a guest column on audit standards confusion in the industry. Here’s a look at the 10 most popular stories on Data Center Knowledge during January 2012, ranked by total page views:

• A Data Center That Mimics A Mansion – January 20
• Feds Now Plan to Close 1,200 Data Centers – January 4
• Facebook Has Spent $210 Million on Oregon Data Center – January 30
• AICPA Fumbles Audit Standards at the 5-Yard Line – January 19
• Google Spent $951 Million on Data Centers in Q4 – January 23
• The Coming Colo Crunch – January 18 ...

The concept of introducing virtualization into corporate data centers has moved well past the trial phase over the past few years into one of wide acceptance today. The latest virtualization technologies deliver on the promise of increased efficiency, reduced expenses and a smaller overall footprint.

But when it comes to a truly virtualized data center, server virtualization, which enables several applications to run independently on a single physical server, is only half of the solution.

Storage Demands Continue

CIOs today continue to struggle keeping up with the demands for more storage capacity as data continues to grow exponentially. That, in turn, has led them to add storage systems ad-hoc, responding to the needs of a specific deployment, a particular business function, or a geographic area. As such, many organizations have created a complex, inflexible storage infrastructure that has become both difficult and costly to manage.

Chances are the Internet has changed something about your life. How you shop. How you stay in touch with school buddies or look for a job.

But has it made you greener? And will using the Internet more change your wear and tear on the planet?

The short answer is that the Internet could save energy, if not necessarily Mother Earth.

The more interesting answer comes in a longer conversation short on absolutes and peppered with unintended consequences.

In Kansas City, perhaps as much as anywhere in America, that discussion could become ever more profound. If Google Inc. succeeds with plans to blanket the market in lightning-fast Internet hookups - its service will make its debut in some neighborhoods this year - the change could be transformational.

We'll have access at home to Internet fast enough to download the city library's entire collection every minute. Speeds like that, Google hopes ...

 We've all seen the recent headlines publicizing the Army's push to significantly scale back its operations.

That push reaches far beyond its ground forces to include a fleet of data centers that must shrink from about 200 to 20. The military arm's top IT brass wants the Army to meet this consolidation target ahead of its original deadline of fiscal year 2014.

Keeping in line with this timeline, the Army recently awarded its first cloud computing contract to several contractors to help create its own private cloud, including MicroTech, Lockheed Martin Corp. and IBM.