Category: Servers

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 ...

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

SeaMicro, the startup that has built a business in the low-power microserver market, said it has now integrated Intel’s workhorse Xeon chip inside its boxes. SeaMicro, which crams hundreds of Intel’s low-power Atom-based chips inside its specialty servers for smaller workloads, has gradually proven to Intel and the rest of the market how strong the demand is for low-power architectures. Intel eventually designed a specialty Atom chip just for SeaMicro that gave it the capabilities that data center customers were looking for. Today it goes further.

There has always been a strong case for making data centers more efficient. Not only are these buildings energy guzzlers but they also end up consuming a lot of space and other resources. Today’s data centers account for 1.5% of the world's power consumption. That is equivalent to the power produced by about 50 power stations. The energy costs of these data centers is estimated at nothing less than a staggering $20 billion.

Data centers are environmental monsters as well. In the last year, they spat out close to 210 million metric tons of CO2 into the environment. Little wonder then that the need for efficiency within data centers is being felt stronger than ever. Couple that with a concern for the environment and amalgamate it with the strong undercurrent of the green phenomenon that the IT industry globally has awakened to and you have a win-win ...

As businesses have come to rely more upon electronic equipment such as servers and telecom switches, the problem of keeping heat-sensitive IT equipment cool in heated buildings during the winter months has become critical.  Standard central air conditioners may provide adequate cooling during warm months, but as the buildings HVAC system switches to heating rather than cooling, equipment can suffer from overheating.  This can lead to costly damage and system downtime.  The traditional solution of precision cooling systems is normally effective, but does suffer from some drawbacks.

As data center infrastructure management (DCIM) continues to gain traction and funding, an unexpected name is building a key role in this emerging business: Intel Corp. While known primarily for processors, Intel’s innovation extends to middleware like Data Center Manager, which captures real-time information on servers’ energy use and temperature and packages it in a data feed.

Rittal made a number of announcements this week, including a cabinet that can be bolted on to an outside wall to make use of free air cooling. The cabinet specialist said its latest Modular Safe offering Extend is designed for medium-sized users. It makes use of horizontal air flow with separate cold and hot sides with cooled air from outside directed in from of the IT system. “The cooling unit is installed between the side panel of the Modular Safe and the outer wall on the site,” Rittal said.

Data center hardware manufacturer Fujitsu issued a press release this week saying that the scale-out potential demonstrated in a recent test of its PRIMERGY CX1000 Cloud eXtension server rack illustrated the possible web-hosting and telecommunications application of the technology. According to Fujitsu, capacity tests carried out by Open-Xchange, developer of a communications software platform that is very popular among web hosting providers, demonstrated that up to 1.5 million concurrent users could be supported on a single 19-inch PRIMERGY CX1000 server rack.

In New York City today, when the weather was just starting to get a little muggy but the air conditioning was cranking so high in the Helen Mills Theater that you could just about hang sides of beef on the stage, IBM announced a new initiative, dubbed Project Big Green, under which it will sell technology and services to help the world's data centers consume less power as they support expanding IT workloads. While IBM as well as other server and storage array makers have been conscious of power and cooling issues surrounding IT gear since there were data centers, the issue has come to a head in recent years as dense X64 servers and myriad pieces of networking equipment have stormed the data centers of the world and taken over. When blade servers entered the market seven years ago, they were the straw that broke the air conditioner ...

The days of IT managers being able to take power for granted in the data center are rapidly coming to an end. Beginning in 2012, the way organizations -- enterprises, government agencies and service providers alike -- all analyze and utilize energy in their data centers will witness some major changes. Already, a growing number of organizations are starting to grapple with increased power demands in the face of constrained capacity. The reason underlying the need to make these changes is rather simple: Most data centers were designed for high performance and high availability, with little or no attention paid to power.

A world leader in cooling and heating system innovation, Star replaced an existing R22 refrigeration plant with a highly energy efficient, low maintenance solution. Star has provided the banking client with a state-of-the-art data centre cooling system designed for a low carbon, cost saving operation. Operating as a data centre since 1990 in a confidential location, the building features two main data halls each with independant power and cooling infrastructure. Earlier this year IT and computer server systems in one of the data halls were being replaced as part of a major refurbishment programme. The existing plant had a total cooling capacity of 2,700kW and operated on R22, an ozone-depleting HCFC refrigerant currently being phased out by EU regulations. The new cooling system features four 1,100kW chillers operating on synthetic refrigerant R134a.

In two years, Cisco Systems' entry into the blade server arena has won it a 12.2 percent share of the x86 server market. This week Cisco (CSCO) announced that it has surpassed 10,000 customers worldwide for its Unified Computing System (UCS).