Here are the Top Data Center Stories of 2016

Here are the 10 most widely read and shared stories we covered on Data Center Knowledge this year:

Netflix Shuts Down Final Bits of Own Data Center Infrastructure

It’s done and dusted. Since someday in January, (almost) everything Netflix does runs on Amazon Web Services, from streaming video to managing its employee and customer data. That month, whatever little bits of Netflix that were still running somewhere in a non-Amazon data center were shut down, Yuri Izrailevsky, the company’s VP of cloud and platform engineering, wrote in a blog post.

That is everything except the company's caching servers, which, according to a source involved in Netflix infrastructure operations, still run in numerous colocation data centers around the world.

Inside a Verizon data center. (Photo: Verizon)

Verizon Shuts Down Public Cloud, Gives Two Months to Move Data

Verizon Communications, which several years ago had huge public cloud ambitions, has shut down its public cloud service, which attempted to compete head to head with giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The company notified its cloud customers of the plan in February, giving them two months to move their data or lose it forever.

Verizon's NAP of the Americas in downtown Miami (Photo: Verizon)

Equinix Agrees to Buy Verizon Data Centers for $3.6B

Equinix didn’t buy all data centers Verizon was hoping to sell, cherry-picking sites that were a good strategic fit. The telco has been looking to divest more than 50 facilities, including assets in Europe and Asia, but Equinix was only interested in North and South American markets.

Facebook data center under construction in Fort Worth, Texas (Photo: Facebook)

What Facebook Has Learned from Regularly Shutting Down Entire Data Centers

Jay Parikh, who oversees engineering and infrastructure at Facebook, believes a company has to have a set of leaders who push their teams outside of their comfort zone so they can learn something new. An important quality of such leaders is willingness to embrace failure.

Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Here’s How Much Energy All US Data Centers Consume

It’s no secret that data centers, the massive but bland, unremarkable-looking buildings housing the powerful engines that pump blood through the arteries of global economy, consume a huge amount of energy. But while our reliance on this infrastructure and its ability to scale capacity grows at a maddening pace, it turns out that on the whole, the data center industry’s ability to improve energy efficiency as it scales is extraordinary.

Pigeon, LinkedIn's first-generation 100G data center switch (Image: LinkedIn)

LinkedIn Designs Own 100G Data Center Switch

Following examples set by other web-scale data center operators, companies like Google and Facebook, the infrastructure engineering team behind the professional social network LinkedIn has designed its own data center networking switch to replace networking technology supplied by the major vendors, saying the off-the-shelf products were inadequate for the company’s needs.

Microsoft data center modules, called "ITPACs," deployed in Boydton, Virginia

Microsoft Moves Away from Data Center Containers

Google has taken the container route for building out data center capacity in the past but eventually decided against it. Now, Microsoft has also found that containers just aren’t the best way for it to scale.

Cooling pumps at the French telco Illiad's data center outside of Paris. The data center relies primarily on mechanical cooling but does use free cooling about 30 percent of the year (Photo: Yevgeniy Sverdlik)

ASHRAE Strikes PUE from Data Center Efficiency Standard

The data center industry spoke, and ASHRAE listened. The society moved away from its proposal to use PUE to set data center efficiency standards in its latest data center efficiency standard document.

The cloud pavilion of Amazon Web Services at the 2016 CeBIT tech fair in Hanover, Germany (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning

The world’s top cloud providers made $11.2 billion in revenue selling raw compute and storage power as virtual services last year, but, according to a market analyst report published this year, it’s only the beginning.

Network cables run along a ceiling in a server room in New York City. (Photo by Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images)

Google and Level 3 Interconnect Network Backbones

Level 3 operates one of the world’s largest internet backbones, but Google has also built out a formidable global backbone to deliver its services. Google’s backbone interconnects its massive data centers around the world and delivers traffic from those data centers to its 70-plus edge locations, where the content is cached for delivery to end users.

Now, the two have agreed to help each other deliver traffic more efficiently under a bit-mile deal, with no money changing hands. The agreement also means the two operators’ networks will interconnect in more locations than currently, improving overall performance of the internet.

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