Best of the Data Center Blogs, April 23rd

Here's a roundup of some interesting items we came across in our weekend reading of data center industry blogs:

How to save on water costs in your data center - From KC Mares at Megawatt Consulting: "As we use water to help or entirely cool our data centers, water plays an even greater role in data centers to achieve the greatest efficiency. Hence, water quality, capacity, cost and reliability of service are just as important as any other valuable input into our system of operations, making these factors and the future cost of water even more important into our site selection decisions."

Worried you’ll outgrow the cloud? You’re not alone - From Derrick Harris at GigaOm: "Engineering effort aside, the fact that Netflix has decided it’s worth it to pay the cloud computing premium is the most amazing part. With many companies, the bigger they get, the faster they come down from the clouds. Case in point: Yottaa."

Why Should Investors Care About Amazon's Cloud Services? - DavidLinthicum writes at DailyFinance: "Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his top-level managers are loath to break this business out as a reportable segment, or even discuss sales and margins in an informal manner. So we're left wondering exactly how big AWS really is, and how important the operation is to Amazon's bottom line. Estimates aplenty. So it's up to outsiders, analysts, and market watchers to figure all of this out. That's a crapshoot at best.?"

Supercomputing: From Candlelit Dinners to the House of Lords - From InsideHPC: "Exascale computers will be here by 2019, according to Hans Meuer, chair of the ISC’12 Supercomputing Conference – although it is currently unclear what technologies they will employ. In an invited talk in one of the committee rooms of the House of Lords on 18 April, Professor Meuer gave British Peers, and luminaries of the UK computer community, a tour-de-force presentation on the development of supercomputing from the Cray 1 in the 1970s to the advent of exascale."

The Sad State of Data Center Networking - From ClodToad at Packet Pushers: "Something about next-generation Data Center networking has been bothering me lately. For a while now, there has been this nagging sensation somewhere in the back of my mind telling me that its just not adding up. While I was at Network Field Day 3, I was able to connect some of the dots and form a picture of what it is thats been scratching away in my mind."

Can an Apple datacenter deliver local jobs? - From David Chernicoff at ZDNet's Five Nines blog: "Trading multi-million dollar tax breaks for a small number of low paying jobs doesn’t seem like a good long-term economic plan.Apple’s second large datacenter, being built in Prineville, Oregon, comes with something that major datacenter projects rarely include; an actual numerical guarantee of local jobs. In response to the local community voting to give tax breaks to Apple, the size of which will be based on the total Apple investment in the area, Apple released a statement in which they promised to invest no less than $350 million and hire at least 35 permanent employees."