Data Center Industry Links for May 17th

Perspectives - Computer Room Evaporative Cooling - James Hamilton on EcoCooling: "I’ve been interested by evaporative coolers and their application to data center cooling for years and they are becoming more common in modern data center deployments."

Are the Stars Aligning for an Amazon PaaS Offering? - If AWS really will be simplifying management within the coming weeks, what are the chances it does so via a PaaS offering of sorts? AWS has the tools to build a holistic PaaS offering, the economies of scale to make it profitable, and the SDKs to cater to specific set of developers. Analysis from Derrick Harris at GigaOm.

Don’t Try This at Home - The Dell PowerEdge 1950 server chassis used for The Planet's Server Challenge will never serve again. After being disassembled and speed-assembled by more than 300 people over 800 times at ad:tech, Interop and Web 2.0 Expo SF, the hardware was worn and torn quite a bit. With video from Kevin Hazard at The Planet Blog.

Europe’s volcano risks studied - Forget Iceland. A new study supported by the Willis Research Network (WRN) puts Italy's Mount Vesuvius at the top of the list of Europe’s 10 most dangerous volcanoes. From Continuity Central.

SoftLayer Enables Customers to Leverage Citrix Cloud Solutions - "A key solution is the Citrix Cloud Solution for On-Demand Demos, which enables companies to leverage cloud computing to dynamically create customer training environments to demonstrate how a product functions." From GawkWire.

insideHPC: Wolfgang Gentzsch on ISC and the world of HPC - Getzsch: "I would sum up the climate for 2010 as “evolution everywhere. At one end we have increasing cores on the chip for lower power consumption, and at the other end we see the trend to consider Cloud services even for HPC applications."

Exploring Differentiation Among Cloud Service Providers - Reuven Cohen on VPS & Cloud: "The lack of differentiation among the various VPS hosting firms has meant that the only real way to set your service apart from that of the other guys is based purely on price. ...This means you're now competing based on a low margin, high volume business, not on any real value proposition. Effectively the VPS space has become a race to zero."