Data Center Week in Review: February 5

The Data Center Powering the Super Bowl - As 100,000 fans pour into Cowboys Stadium Sunday for Super Bowl XLV, the fans will have little awareness that there’s a data center serving as the technological nerve center of the stadium. “Everything uses technology, the lighting system, the HVAC system, the point-of-sale system,” said Peter Walsh, the Cowboys’ CIO.

Facebook’s Expansion: How Big, How Fast? - Facebook has been the biggest growth story in the data center industry. But for 2011, the company is focused on building out about 600,000 square feet of new space in its two active data center projects in Prineville and Forest City, North Carolina and populating those facilities with servers.

The Cloud Arms Race: Is it Better to Build or Buy? - Is it better to build or buy? It’s a question confronted by virtually every company with major data center requirements. As cloud computing emerges as a key business battleground, a sophisticated platform and global data center network have become the table stakes. Some companies ready to make big bets on the cloud are finding they’ll need to buy their way in.

Microsoft Eliminates Server Fans - Not all steps that improve the energy efficiency of your data center will boost performance in key metrics for measuring “green” data centers. An example: removing fans from servers, which actually has an adverse effect on Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), the leading metric for data center efficiency.

Amazon S3 Cloud Stores 262 Billion Objects - How big is Amazon’s cloud? It’s huge, and getting huger. Amazon Web Services said this week that its S3 cloud storage service housed 262 billion objects at year-end of 2010, more than doubling in size from 102 billion objects at the close of 2009

Time Warner Cable Buys NaviSite for $230 Million - The cloud computing buyout binge blitz is on. Time Warner Cable will acquire managed hosting and cloud services provider NaviSite for $230 million, marking the second deal in a week in which a major network operator has bought a cloud service provider.