Articles from Business Technology Leadership

Temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona - one of the most arid places in the US - routinely exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). That's about the opposite of the typical cool-weather environments companies often choose to build data centers. But in about two weeks, eBay will formally open its latest data center there, a facility the company hopes will be used for as long as 20 years. "Who would want to build a data centre in Phoenix?" asked Mike Lewis, director of eBay's Mission Critical Engineering. "Yes, it's hot." EBay already has a facility next to the latest data center, which was a project "Mercury," said Lewis, who spoke at the DatacenterDynamics conference in London on Wednesday. It started with a two-floor warehouse that was intended to store and test equipment for the existing Tier 4 data centre next door. But that facility was filling up, "so we decided ... (Read Full Article)

Like the unfortunate person who continually diets but only seems to gain more weight, power hungry datacentres, despite adopting virtualisation and power management techniques, only seem to be consuming more energy than ever, to judge from some of the talks at the Uptime Symposium 2010, held this week in New York. "There is a freight train coming that most people do not see, and it is that you are going to run out of power and you will not be able to keep your data centre cool enough," Rob Bernard, the chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, told attendees at the conference. (Read Full Article)