Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of April 20, 2012

godaddy-racks-470

Racks of servers inside the Go Daddy data center in Phoenix. (Photo: Rich Miller)

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

Apple: Greenpeace's Cloud Math is Busted - Apple says it will use 20 megawatts of power at full capacity in its North Carolina data center, about one-fifth the amount estimated by Greenpeace in a report that is sharply critical of Apple and other data center operators for relying upon “dirty” energy sources to power their cloud computing operations. Apple’s statement raises questions about the credibility of the estimates in the Greenpeace report, and illustrates the difficulty of seeking to estimate data center power usage – a detail that many companies are unwilling to disclose on their own.

How Go Daddy Keeps 52 Million Domains Running - Go Daddy is best known for selling domains, but is also one of the world’s largest providers of web hosting services, as well as the security certificates that enable e-commerce on millions of web sites. To keep those services online and running smoothly, Go Daddy operates a global network of data centers and points of presence (PoPs).

Facebook's North Carolina Data Center Goes Live - Facebook’s new data center in Forest City, North Carolina is online and has begun serving live traffic, the company said Thursday. The new server farm will provide Facebook with additional IT capacity to support its growing audience of more than 850 million users.

Microsoft Data Plants Will Tap Landfills, Sewage for Power- Microsoft is planning a waste-powered data center that will be built on the site of a water treatment plant or landfill, the company said Wednesday. The project will be the first step towards Microsoft’s goal of deploying “data plants” where modular data centers will be powered by renewable energy.

Compass Brings Wholesale Model to New Markets - Compass Datacenters, a new company based in Dallas, is planning to bring turn-key data centers to second-tier markets where demand is growing, but hasn’t yet reached the scale of historic data center strongholds like Silicon Valley or northern Virginia. The company says it is optimizing its data center design to fit the demand profile of smaller markets, while deploying its development capital in an efficient manner.