Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of April 13

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View of sunset over the exterior of Google's data center in St. Ghislain, Belgium. (Photo: Connie Zhou for Google)

For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week. Enjoy!

Google Invests $390 Million to Expand Belgium Facility Data Center Knowledge - Google continues to make big infrastructure investments, in this case in a key facility powering European services. The company is investing 300 million Euros ($390 million in U.S. dollars) to expand its data center in Belgium. Its the latest in a series of expansion announcements for Google, which sees its data centers as the technology engine powering its online search and advertising platform.

HP Project Moonshot: Low-Power Chips To Increase Density - HP is now selling its first Project Moonshot systems. The Moonshot 1500 is using a low-power processor–specifically Intel’s Atom 1260 processor found in cell phones–that uses less energy, less space and reduces complexity and cost.

Intel Continues to Rethink the Rack of the Future - Intel is continuing to advance its vision for new data center designs that rethink the traditional placement of components within the server and rack. After unveiling a prototype at the Open Compute Summit in January, Intel today offered details on a similar initiative by China’s largest Internet companies, and promised to release reference designs to help OEMs and end users deploy these designs.

Inside Microsoft's European Cloud Hub - If there’s a poster child for Ireland’s ideal climate for free cooling, it would be the huge data center in Dublin that powers Microsoft’s online services in Europe. Our photo feature, Inside Microsoft’s European Cloud Hub, examines how Microsoft has optimized its data center design to make efficient use of fresh air, and follows the path of the air through the giant facility.

CoreSite Leases Entire Data Center in Santa Clara - It’s not every day you see a company lease an entire data center building in one shot. But that’s what CoreSite Realty has accomplished with its newest project in Silicon Valley, where it is nearing completion on a 101,250 square foot build-to-suit project that has been pre-leased by a single large customer.

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