Weekend Reading: Best of the Blogs

Tax Break May Boost Colo, Wholesale Markets - Will a tax break boost colo and data center sales in late 2011? Jim Kerrigan of Grubb & Ellis says the Reid-McConnell Tax Relief Act could have that effect. The act provides for 100 percent bonus depreciation on deduction allowances for investments in new business equipment placed in service between Sept. 8, 2010, and Dec. 31, 2011. "I can tell you that a number of companies are already locking into contracts for space to take advantage of the act," Kerrigan writes at the G&E Data Center Practice blog. "Based on the demand activity that we are seeing throughout the US, it may cause companies that were planning on relocating in 2012 to take space in 2011, thereby absorbing supply at a much quicker pace than anticipated."

Outages, complexity, and the stronger cloud - James Urquhart has a really worthwhile reflection on the Amazon outage and the complexity of clouds: "For almost four years now, I've believed that cloud computing is evolving into a complex adaptive system. Individual services and infrastructure elements within a cloud provider's portfolio are acting as 'agents' that have various feedback mechanisms with various other services and infrastructure. A change in any one element triggers automation that likely changes the condition of other elements in the system."

Technical Response to Facebook’s Open Compute Project - The Uptime Institute praises some components of the Open Compute Project, but finds flaws in other areas. "For a site considering sustainability and overall corporate social responsibility, my grade for the cooling choice is a D," said Uptime Institute consultant Keith Klesner.

TOP500 Predict Site Offers Prizes for Your Insight - The semi-annual TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers has always been the source of much speculation, analysis, and punditry. Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC looks at Top500Predict, a service that suppports virtual wagering on the outcome of the Top 500.

Top 10 Things Data Centers Forget About PUE - From Julius Neudorfer: "In light of the reaction to Facebook’s recent announcement of its new Prineville, Ore., data center, with its 1.07 power usage effectiveness (PUE) claim, I thought we should all take a deep breath and see what is sometimes 'overlooked' in many data centers' PUE calculations."