Best of the Data Center Blogs, April 9th

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

Amazon S3 Hosts 905 Billion Objects - Jeff Barr provides another eye-popping update on the growth of Amazon Web Services: "At the end of the first quarter of 2012, there were 905 billion objects in Amazon S3. We routinely handle 650,000 requests per second for those objects with occasional peaks substantially above that number."

Optical Delusions and Illusions - Rob Powell from Telecom Ramblings responds to another Wall Sreet Journal story warning of overbuilt infrastructure: "Nobody is out there building gobs of fiber and hoping they will come, at least in the US. Those days really are over. The industry is building out fiber based on customer demand, meaning actual revenues and a return on investment. The business case for building that fiber does not come from traffic growth guesswork for the next decade, it comes from sites that need the bandwidth now and can’t get it from copper and will sign a contract to get it."

Follow the Green Brick Road to Exascale - On the ISC blog, Beth Sharp and Tom Wilkie discuss energy efficiency in the HPC sector: " it is on the road to exascale that the price of energy will dominate the future of HPC. And again, this is where energy efficiency will turn out to be a benefit rather than a cost to the community." Efficiency is highlighted in several keynotes at the upcoming ISC supercomputing conference.

Sausages, Elephants and Data Centres - Phillip from AdInfa looks at power monitoring: "Relatively few data centres have implemented any automated energy monitoring solutions so far. But energy bills represent the biggest operational cost for data centres. There is general acceptance that something can and must be done about reducing energy consumption or, at least, slowing up its growth. So why the relatively low uptake levels of solutions?"