What to Read at DCK: Week of July 24th

Twitter Picks Utah for New Data Center - Twitter will build its first custom data center in the Salt Lake City market, which will allow the microblogging service to better manage its growth and "unique power and cooling needs," the company said Wednesday.

The Technology Inside Apple’s New iDataCenter - What Internet magic lurks inside Apple’s massive new data center in North Carolina? Job postings provide some broad details about the hardware and software that will be powering the new iDataCenter.

Google Boosts Data Center Spending - Google (GOOG) is building again. After several years of muted investment in its infrastructure, Google reported capital expenditures of $476 million in the second quarter of 2010, more than doubling its spending from the previous quarter.

SoftLayer Opens New Headquarters - IT infrastructure provider SoftLayer Technologies has moved into its new corporate headquarters, and is now the sole occupant of a three-building complex in North Dallas.

Rackspace Backs the Open Source Cloud - Rackspace said late Sunday that it was donating the code for its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers offerings to OpenStack, a new open source cloud platform that will also incorporate code from the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform.

The Data Center at the South Pole - What’s it like to operate a data center at the South Pole? The Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory maintains a small data center in Antarctica, where it harvests neutrinos for scientific research.

Data Centers: For When The Cloud is Not Enough - Cloud computing has been a godsend to start-ups, allowing new companies to quickly scale applications without huge up-front investments in hardware and specialized facilities. But once a company grows past a certain point, a custom-built data center offers the best performance and cost-effectiveness.