Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: August 2015

Lightning in Belgium Disrupts Google Cloud Services
A series of successive lightning strikes in Belgium managed to knock some cloud storage systems offline briefly, causing errors for some users of Google’s cloud infrastructure services.

Chillers and cooling towers of the Google data center campus in St. Ghislain, Belgium (Photo: Google)

How Edge Data Center Providers are Changing the Internet’s Geography
As people watch more and more of their video online versus cable TV or satellite services, and as businesses consume more and more cloud services versus buying hardware boxes and software licenses, the physical nature of internet infrastructure is changing.

Explosion in Downtown Los Angeles Disrupts Data Center Operations
The explosion interrupted connectivity on network infrastructure operated by Level 3, which serves a lot of data center users in the area. Resulting power outage also caused the cooling system at a CoreSite facility to go down, leading for a brief period to above-SLA temperatures on the data center floor.

The moon is seen behind downtown high-rise buildings during the shortest total lunar eclipse of the century before dawn on April 3, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Equinix Cloud Chief Chris Sharp Leaves to Join Digital Realty as CTO
For the past two years, Sharp ran the cloud strategy of Digital’s biggest rival Equinix. Jim Smith, who has been the data center provider’s CTO since its founding more than a decade ago, is leaving the company.

Top US Data Center Markets Absorbed 100 MW in First Half of 2015
Hunger for capacity in primary US data center markets continues, with financial services, healthcare, social media, and other types of tech companies driving demand.

Rackspace to Provide Managed AWS Services Before Year’s End
Rackspace is building a managed services product for Amazon Web Services, its rival in the public cloud market where Rackspace has struggled to grow.

Salesforce Latest Convert to the Web-Scale Data Center Way
The company is going through a “massive transformation” of the way it runs infrastructure, going from lots of specialized custom server specs and manual configuration work to the approach web-scale data center operators like Google and Facebook use, standardizing on bare-bones servers and implementing sophisticated data center automation tools, many of them built in-house.

Pollution in China Makes Free Cooling Difficult for Baidu
China’s notoriously high air pollution levels are a well-documented public-health issue. But pollution also has other less talked about effects. One of them is on the efficiency of data centers in the country.

A Chinese man wears a mask as he waits to cross the road near the CCTV building during heavy smog on November 29, 2014 in Beijing. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Exclusive: RagingWire Takes Its Massive-Scale, Luxury-Amenities Data Center Model to Texas
The company, whose customer list includes Twitter, is preparing to buy a 42-acre tract of land in Garland, a fairly large city immediately to the northeast of Dallas. Garland officials have approved an economic incentive package for the company.

Facebook Takes Over Server Management Software Control from Vendors
Originally developed for Facebook’s data center switches, OpenBMC now also supports the company’s modular System-on-Chip-based server system called Yosemite.

A technician at work in a data hall at Facebook's Altoona, Iowa, data center. (Photo: Facebook/2014 Jacob Sharp Photography)

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