Facebook is rethinking how it does networking, as Wired reports, but it's actually rethinking the entire composition of the data center. Its plans will destroy the servers, switches and storage boxes vendors sell today in an effort to operate efficiently at web scale.

As the world we live in continues to develop better technologies and new and exciting ways of communicating, our demand for energy grows. Data centers are the engines that drive our connected world, processing the billions of daily transactions, comments and interactions in our digital society. More data equals more energy – and this is starting to become a big headache from a sustainability perspective.

If a singular data center can consume the equivalent energy of 180,000 homes, exactly how large is the overall impact on our planet, and what is being done about it?

Thanks to the addition of multiple undersea cables, there’s more bandwidth capacity around the world, but prices are still relatively expensive along certain routes such as those in India and Africa. Telegeography updated its global wholesale bandwidth pricing data Wednesday, and discovered that prices for bandwidth capacity along certain routes dropped thanks to new submarine cables, but not as much as one might expect. 

Finally the worlds of big data geeks and clean energy nerds have collided. Researchers have proposed building a "GreenHadoop," that is a version of the MapReduce programming framework that could manage a data center's computing workload to optimize clean energy from a solar system.

There’s nothing wrong with making phone apps or mobile games. But Jamie Goldstein thinks that startups — and their backers — should attack bigger, meatier problems. So, while many people talk up the virtues of lean startups, Goldstein thinks it’s time to focus on companies willing to take big risk — and it is risky to attack big problems. These companies are what Goldstein, a general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, calls Phat startups. 

Here are Goldstein’s Top 10 Phat Startups in no particular order. (Full disclosure: five of the 10 are North Bridge affiliated companies and they’ve been designated with NBVP.)

Huawei, six months after creating its enterprise networking division here in the U.S., is ready to make a big splash at Interop this year. The Chinese networking gear maker is the one thing Cisco’s CEO John Chambers has said he’s worried about, even as the networking world embraces software-defined networks, new protocols such as OpenFlow and even whitebox switch makers. So what does Huawei have that Chambers’ fears? As of today, it has a powerful top of rack switch that will doubtless cost less than Cisco’s gear, and it has a distribution deal with Synnex, a huge contract manufacturers and reseller of IT gear. Basically, Huawei has launched the goods to fight Cisco (and Juniper) in the enterprise networking market and has the means to get it in the hands of customers. Huawei has shaken things up in the carrier equipment market for quite some time ...

The server business last year netted vendors $34.4 billion on sales of 8 billion servers according to IDC, but those numbers don’t show how that business is changing. For that compare the growth in the traditional x86 market that sold those 8 million servers which grew a mere 3.7 percent year over year, to what IDC calls the densely optimized servers used in webscale deployments. That segment grew by 51.5 in units sold, and now represent 3.2 percent of all server revenue and 6.1 percent of all server shipments. While plenty of companies spend money buying gear from IBM, HP and Dell, others are going direct to the companies that build servers for those giants. For companies such as Facebook, Baidu, Zynga, Amazon and Facebook are building at such scale, the idea of wasting a single cent or milliwatt on an unnecessary feature or ...

Young, early-stage green-focused startups are a rare breed these days. The demo day on Wednesday in downtown San Francisco for the green digital-focused accelerator Greenstart (which I called theY-Combinator for greentech a year ago when they launched) was one of the first times in a long time that I’ve seen a grouping of new young green-leaning startups looking for their first round of funding.

At the event at the Greenstart offices, five startups focused on using software to change energy and transportation, showed off their ideas to a packed house of hundreds of investors, potential partners and the media. The startups seemed as excited to present their ideas as the investors were to hear their pitches.

Building sustainable data centers is hard — especially if you’re trying to do it in office space in Houston. Plus, the idea of operating some kind of power-generation plant for offering renewable energy such as solar or biogas is a scary prospect for data center operators. These were among the key takeaways (along with a few less-obvious lessons) from a panel on sustainable data centers at the Open Compute Summit held today in San Antonio, Texas.

At its third summit, the Open Compute Project is adding new partners, showing off cool use cases and adding new technologies. And surprisingly, it's being done in a way that will enable hardware vendors to hold onto some of their margins and still deliver innovations. At the third Open Compute Summit held at the Rackspace HQ in San Antonio, Texas, Frank Frankovsky, founding board member of the Open Compute Project, detailed the new companies joining the efforts. They include HP, AMD, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, DDN, Vantage, ZT Systems, Avnet, Alibaba, Supermicro, and Cloudscaling. HP, Quanta, and Tencent have also joined the OCP Incubation Committee, which reviews proposed projects and decides if they make the grade.

We were wondering where Apple and Bloom Energy were planning on getting all that biogas to run the large fuel cell farm at Apple’s North Carolina data center. According to a filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Apple will get the biogas — which is methane from decomposing organic material — from landfills (hat tip Data Center Knowledge). Apple will actually use “Directed Biogas,” meaning that the biogas from the landfills will be cleaned and injected into the local natural gas pipeline, and the fuel cells won’t be directly running off of the biogas. But Apple’s biogas supplier will inject the equivalent amount of biogas that would be used by the 4.8 MW of fuel cells.

Last month I exclusively reported that Apple was buying fuel cells from Bloom Energy for its data center in Maiden, North Carolina. However at the time neither company would confirm the deal. Well, on Monday morning Bloom Energy has finally confirmed that yes, it is supplying fuel cells for Apple’s data center, reports CNET. Fuel cells take fuel (natural gas or biogas) and combine it with oxygen and other chemicals to create an electrochemical reaction to produce electricity. Each of Bloom Energy’s next-generation fuel cells produces 200 kW of power right at a building.

Greenpeace’s main concern for where Internet companies build their data centers is clean power. That’s why the environmentalists were out protesting at Apple’s store in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday. But data center builders actually think more about the cost of the energy than how clean the source is, and they also think about the potential volatility of the price and supply of that energy.

According to The Data Centre Risk Index from Cushman & Wakefield (hat tip to the Green Data Center Blog) when it comes to energy, data center builders think about cheap energy as a “tier 1″ concern, while clean power access and ability to tap into a reliable, non-volatile source of energy are “tier 2″ concerns. (Tier 1 is more pressing than Ti