Top 10 Data Center Stories, October 2014

From Salesforce rolling out its cloud-based big data analytics service to Shutterfly deploying 1,000 cabinets at the SUPERNAP data center in Las Vegas, here are the 10 most read articles on Data Center Knowledge during the month of October. Enjoy!

Salesforce Gets Into Cloud Business Intelligence Market - After about two years of engineering in stealth mode, Salesforce rolled out Wave, its cloud-based big data analytics service. This will be the biggest announcement at the company’s three-day Dreamforce conference kicking off in San Francisco today.

Dell Becomes Bitcoin Mining Data Center Provider - Companies often end up with more data center space than they need, sometimes following a change in strategy, sometimes after an IT refresh, and sometimes for other reasons. Dell has found a creative way to deal with excess capacity at one of its Quincy, Washington, data centers.

Super-Sizing Solar Power for Data Centers - Traveling east from Princeton, drivers can catch a brief glimpse of the panels, which are hidden by a series of high berms. It’s only when you walk around the edge of these grassy mounds of earth that the massive scale of the solar energy generation system is revealed.

Explaining the Uptime Institute’s Tier Classification System - Uptime Institute’s Tier Classification System for data centers is approaching the two decade mark. Since its creation in the mid-1990s, the system has evolved from a shared industry terminology into the global standard for third-party validation of data center critical infrastructure.

Shutterfly Deploys 1,000 Cabinets at Switch SUPERNAP - In one of the largest colocation deals ever, Shutterfly Inc. is deploying 1,000 cabinets at the SUPERNAP data centers in Las Vegas. The photo editing and sharing service has signed a seven-year contract for colocation and conenctivity services with Switch, which operates the huge – and growing – SUPERNAP campus.

How is a Mega Data Center Different from a Massive One? - What is a mega data center and how is it different from a massive or a large one? What is the difference between a small data center and a mini data center, and what does the expression “high density” really mean?

Digital Realty Taking its Medicine - On its earnings call toward the end of the month we will likely hear some details about the properties Digital Realty Trust (NYSE: DLR), one of the world’s largest data center real estate companies, is going to sell.

Cloud Reboot Causes Cold Sweat at Netflix - Another tale has emerged from the great server reboot of 2014 to apply a Xen security patch that affected major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Netflix, an AWS customer, lost 218 database servers during the reboot but managed to stay online.

Is Colo Going the Way of the Shopping Mall? - Colo providers and hosting companies that own and operate their own data centers should think hard about diversifying their revenue streams or sell and get out of the business altogether while the going is good.

EMC Buys OpenStack Cloud Builder Cloudscaling - EMC has acquired Cloudscaling, a company that sets up private OpenStack clouds on hardware of customers’ choice in their own data centers that integrate with the major public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine.

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