Best of the Data Center Blogs for July 8th

Here’s a roundup of some interesting items we came across this week in our reading of data center industry blogs for July 8th:

The Architecture Twitter Uses to Deal with 150M Active Users - High Scalability provides a deep dive into Twitter's architecture: "Everybody has this idea that Twitter is easy. With a little architectural hand waving we have a scalable Twitter, just that simple. Well, it’s not that simple as Raffi Krikorian, VP of Engineering at Twitter, describes in his superb and very detailed presentation on Timelines at Scale. If you want to know how Twitter works - then start here."

Data Centers as Global Growth Enablers - At SwitchScribe, Mark Thiele looks at data centers' role in the global economy: "Data Centers are rapidly taking over the role of manufacturing, communication, trading and shipping hubs. The work now being done in data centers would formerly have required a printing press, manufacturing line, travel agents, bank tellers, traders, railroads, highways, ships and seaports."

Netflix Provides a Brief History of Their Streaming Technology - Via Dan Rayburn: "At the Streaming Media East show in May, David Ronca, Manager of Encoding Tools at Netflix, walked through the technical history of the Netflix streaming service, looking at some of the key engineering decisions, codec and packaging, and a few key hacks."

10 Things You Didn't Know About Equinix - Consider yourself a data center guru? Think you know everything there is to know about data centers? Test your data center knowledge with these 10 things we bet you didn’t know about Equinix."

Hot or Cold Air Containment? - The Schneider Electric blog visits an oft-discussed choice: "It’s well known by now that air containment systems can eliminate hot spots and provide energy savings over traditional, uncontained data center designs. But which is best for an existing facility – hot air or cold air containment? This question has raised a lot of discussions among manufacturers, consultants and end users." Schneider has a white paper offering a detailed overview.