Year in Review: The 10 Most Popular Data Center Stories of 2014

From Google abandoning MapReduce to Facebook switching off its data center, here's a look back at the 10 most popular articles on Data Center Knowledge during 2014. Enjoy!

Google Dumps MapReduce in Favor of New Hyper-Scale Analytics System - Google has abandoned MapReduce, the system for running data analytics jobs spread across many servers the company developed and later open sourced, in favor of a new cloud analytics system it has built called Cloud Dataflow.

The Home Data Center: Man Cave for the Internet Age - In the ultimate manifestation of the “server hugger” who wants to be close to their equipment, a number of hobbyists and IT professionals have set up data centers in their home, creating server rooms in garages, basements and home offices.

Enterprise server and storage equipment fills a basement space in this home data center in Canada. (Photo: VE2CUY Project).

GE Claims Breakthrough in Fuel-Cell Tech, Launches Fuel-Cell Subsidiary - General Electric unveiled a fuel-cell subsidiary called GE Fuel Cells and said it was building a new fuel-cell manufacturing plant in upstate New York. Fuel cells use natural gas or biogas to generate electricity and have seen some adoption in the data center space.

Microsoft Joins Open Compute Project, Shares its Server Designs - In a dramatic move that illustrates how cloud computing has altered the data center landscape, Microsoft is opening up the server and rack designs that power its vast online platforms and sharing them with the world.

Google Using Machine Learning to Boost Data Center Efficiency - Google is using machine learning and artificial intelligence to wring even more efficiency out of its mighty data centers.

Mining Experiment: Running 600 Servers for a Year Yields 0.4 Bitcoin - Can data centers tap unused server capacity to mine for Bitcoins? The question occurred to the team at the online backup service iDrive, which performs most of its customer backup jobs overnight, leaving its 3,000 quad-core servers idle for much of the day. So the company ran a test with 600 servers to see whether Bitcoin mining could become a secondary revenue stream.

Tokyo’s Tsubame-KFC Remains World’s Most Energy Efficient Supercomputer - After the most powerful supercomputers in the world were pronounced last week at the International Supercomputing Conference, the Green500 published its semi-annual list of the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers, with Tokyo’s Tsubame-KFC immersion-cooled system remaining at the number-one spot.

The Tsubame KFC system at Tokyo Institute of Technology immerses its servers and GPUs in cooling fluid. The system topped this year's Green 500 list of the most efficient supercomputers. (Photo: NVIDIA)

Facebook Turned Off Entire Data Center to Test Resiliency - A few months ago, Facebook added a whole new dimension to the idea of an infrastructure stress test. The company shut down one of its data centers in its entirety to see how the safeguards it had put in place for such incidents performed in action.

Bitcoin Miners Building 10 Megawatt Data Center in Sweden - Facebook has new neighbors in Sweden, and they’re building Bitcoin’s version of the Death Star – a 10 megawatt data center filled with high-powered computers mining for cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin Hardware Player BitFury Enters Cloud Mining With 20MW Data Center - BitFury, a major Bitcoin hardware vendor, has entered the hosting and cloud mining business. Fueled by $20 million in recent venture funding, the company is rolling out a global data center network, anchored by a new 20 megawatt facility in the Republic of Georgia. The announcement is bound to fuel the company’s status as a contender to be the first major Bitcoin IPO.

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