Top 10 Data Center Stories – June 2014

Here are 10 of the most popular stories on Data Center Knowledge for the month of June:

Google Dumps MapReduce in Favor of New Hyper-Scale Analytics System - Google has abandoned MapReduce, the system for running data analytics jobs spread across many servers the company developed and later open sourced, in favor of a new cloud analytics system it has built called Cloud Dataflow.

Ten of the Strangest Data Center Outages - While outages have become less frequent, as the industry’s practices continuously improve, things still occasionally go wrong. But sometimes there are also instances when something strange and completely unexpected causes the dreaded unplanned data center downtime.

Facebook Testing Broadcom’s Open Compute Switches in Production - Facebook’s wish to disaggregate networking hardware from networking software has now been granted.

Rackspace Intros Dedicated Servers That Behave Just Like Cloud VMs - Seeking to make cloud infrastructure performance more predictable for its customers, Rackspace is launching a new “bare-metal” server offering, giving users the ability to spin up and down dedicated servers just like they spin up and down virtual machines in its OpenStack cloud.

Microsoft Kicks Off $350M Data Center Expansion in Virginia - Microsoft is planning to invest about $350 million in expanding its data center site in Boydton, Virginia – a tiny town with about 400 residents at the state’s southern edge.

Facebook Breaks the Network Switch Up Into Modules - After it customized servers and storage to optimize for its applications and to enable its developers to roll out new software features at lightning speeds, networking switches were the remaining component of Facebook’s infrastructure that was a “black box,” with tightly coupled vendor-designed proprietary software and hardware.

Artificial Intelligence: A New Frontier in Data Center Innovation - Google made headlines when it revealed that it is using machine learning to optimize its data center performance. But the search giant isn’t the first company to harness artificial intelligence to fine-tune its server infrastructure. In fact, Google’s effort is only the latest in a series of initiatives to create an electronic “data center brain” that can analyze IT infrastructure.

GoDaddy’s IPO Filing Reveals Nine Data Centers, Sophisticated Technology Stack - As it often happens when companies go public, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents GoDaddy filed in conjunction with the IPO shed some light on its data center infrastructure, which is massive.

Microsoft Calls on U.S. to Address ‘Technology Trust Deficit’ - Microsoft’s top lawyer has written a blog post calling on the U.S. government to do more to repair the damage of the Snowden disclosures about the National Security Agency’s far-reaching electronic surveillance practices, including a concrete response to the issue of hacking into data centers that belong to U.S. companies and telecommunications networks that connect them.

Microsoft Azure Cloud’s Brazil South Region Goes Live - Microsoft Azure cloud’s Brazil South region is now generally available. Public preview of the region was available several weeks ago, following roll-outs of new data center locations in China and Japan.

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