Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: August

Here are the 10 most popular stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge in August:

HIPAA Breach Case Results in Record $5.5M Penalty - Advocate Health Care Network has agreed to pay a record $5.5 million to settle claims that it violated the security rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), resulting in data breaches that compromised the records of roughly 4 million people.

Delta Data Center Outage Grounds Hundreds of Flights - According to the most recent survey, the average cost of a single data center outage in 2015 was $740,000. The most expensive reported outage last year was about $2.4 million.

Travelers wait in line at the Delta check-in counter at LaGuardia Airport , August 8, 2016 in the Queens borough of New York City. Delta flights around the globe were grounded and delayed on Monday morning due to a system outage. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Spirit of Competition: Nutanix Certifies Cisco UCS Hardware - It’s the kind of arm’s-length handshaking announcement that would merit a relatively small point size for its headline, were it not for the fact that Cisco and Nutanix are clear competitors in the emerging hyperconvergence space.

Rendering of a data center filled with Nutanix appliances (Source: Nutanix video)

Google Gives Facebook’s Open Rack a 48V Makeover - While data center racks designed by Facebook and Google share many common principles – a shared power source for multiple servers in the rack is one example – two aspects have been radically different: server input voltage and physical depth of the rack. Facebook’s racks are 800 mm deep, while Google’s are 660 mm; Facebook’s input voltage is 12V, while Google’s is 48V.

What Facebook Has Learned from Regularly Shutting Down Entire Data Centers - The idea to do these kinds of stress tests was born after Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on internet infrastructure on the East Coast in 2012.

Entrance to a hot aisle in a data hall at Facebook's Altoona, Iowa, data center. (Photo: @2014 Jacob Sharp Photography)

What is the Data Center Cost of 1kW of IT Capacity? - It’s no secret that bigger data centers benefit from economies of scale. It costs less to provide X amount of data center capacity in a massive warehouse-scale facility than it does in a small data center.

How Renewable Energy is Changing the Data Center Market - While good publicity and the promise of energy cost savings sometime down the line are good enough reasons for a company like Google to commit tens of millions of dollars to renewable energy purchase contracts for its data centers, companies that provide various data center services to many users are working with a very different set of considerations.

(Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Intel Rolls Out First Silicon Photonics Products for Data Center Networks - Silicon photonics, a technology that’s reportedly been in development for about 16 years, is finally here as a product, and if it wasn’t for the world’s hunger for cloud services (and cloud service providers’ eagerness to provide them), the technology could have remained an interesting science project for many more years to come.

The Intel Silicon Photonics 100G PSM4 Optical Transceiver (Photo: Intel)

CenturyLink Data Center Team Keeps Eye on the Ball Despite Uncertain Future - While it may be interesting to ponder what will happen to CenturyLink’s data center colocation business once the company finalizes whatever ends up being the outcome of the “strategic review” it announced last year, David Meredith, who oversees that business, has work to do.

Inside a CenturyLink data center. (Photo: CenturyLink)

One Data Center Standard to Rule Them All? - This group says it is going to solve the problem of too many data center standards, by creating just one more.