Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: February 2017

Here are the top stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge in February:

Data Centers Scrambling to Fill IT Skills Gap - According to a study by TEKsystems, 81 percent of IT leaders say it’s difficult to find quality candidates, and almost half don’t expect to fill an IT position within the anticipated time frame.

How to Get a Data Center Job at Google - If you haven’t worked on Google’s data center team in the past, you won’t have the exact expertise you’ll need when you join, so, although expertise is important when applying for Google data center jobs, what’s more important is a sharp and flexible mind.

Data Center Market Kicks Off 2017 With Flood of Acquisitions - Large telecom portfolio deals, enterprise data center outsourcing, and private equity exits, including Vantage Data Centers (potentially) and Cologix, all suggest that 2017 activity will set new records.

No Shortage of Twitter Snark as AWS Outage Disrupts the Internet - The long list of companies affected by the AWS outage includes Adobe, Atlassian, Business Insider, Docker, Expedia, GitLab, Coursera, Medium, Quora, Slack, Twilio, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission, among many others.

By @qetzalcoatl

How to Get a Data Center Job at Facebook - The social network is continuing to grow quickly, and every new Facebook data center means lots of Facebook data center jobs.

An employee walks past servers in the Facebook data center in Forest City, North Carolina. (Photo by Rainier Ehrhardt/Getty Images)

LinkedIn Vacates Lots of Space at Equinix Data Centers - The social network company has been revamping its data center strategy, switching to an infrastructure that is more like other hyperscale cloud platforms, such as the ones operated by Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn’s new parent company, Microsoft. A part of this shift appears to be consolidating much of its retail colocation footprint into few large wholesale facilities.

Infomart's Portland data center in Hillsboro, Oregon, housing one of the latest LinkedIn server farms (Photo: Infomart Data Centers)

A Cloud for the Artificial Mind: This Data Center is Designed for Deep Learning - The explosion of deep learning software development is driving a growing need for specialized computing infrastructure, geared for the types of workloads required to train neural nets.

South Korean professional Go player Lee Se-Dol puts his first stone against Google's Artificial Intelligence program, AlphaGo, in March 2016 in Seoul. He lost the five-match series. (Photo by Google via Getty Images)

Google Ramped Up Data Center Spend in 2016 - Google’s capital expenditures were up in 2016, reflecting more investment in data center construction than the year before, while 2017 is poised to see another spike in infrastructure spend.

Will the Submarine Cable Boom Drive More Revenue to Colos? - While it’s difficult to show correlation between the rapid increase in the number of submarine cables under construction and elevated data center leasing demand using hard numbers, it’s logical that the exponential increase in data flowing through new and existing cables will benefit data center providers with facilities located where they land.

Court Throws Out Facebook’s Motion to Dismiss Data Center Design Lawsuit - BladeRoom, one of the two companies that filed the complaint, claims Facebook and Emerson Electric (whose data center subsidiary Emerson Network Power has since been spun out and renamed as Vertiv), lured it and Bripco (the other plaintiff), into disclosing their designs and methods and then turned around and used them to build a data center in Sweden on their own.

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