Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of April 20, 2013

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A vending machine for cables and adaptors? That's what you'll find at the new CyrusOne data center in Dallas. It's part of a focus on worker-friendly design. (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!

The Rise of the Worker-Friendly Data Center - Spiral slides, climbing walls and fitness machines? Data centers are designed primarily to house thousands of servers, but the nondescript concrete bunker of the past is giving way to campuses optimized for humans, complete with comfortable offices, conference rooms, theaters and gaming areas.

Google Expands in North Carolina, Will Boost Renewables - Google today announced a major expansion of its data center campus in Lenoir, North Carolina, saying it will spend $600 million to build new server farms and populate them with IT equipment. The search giant also said it will use its purchasing power to jump-start a renewable energy program for Duke Energy, the utility that provides electricity to the Lenoir facility.

Facebook Unveils Live Dashboard for PUE, Water Use - The era of real-time data has arrived for the data center industry’s leading energy efficiency metric. Facebook has launched a public dashboard that provides up to the minute data on the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of its first two company-built data centers in Oregon and North Carolina. The social network is also providing data on its use of water, a topic of growing interest in data center design and operations.

DataBank Grows Beyond its Dallas Digital Fortress - After filling 130,000 square feet of data center space in the former Federal Reserve building in downtown Dallas, DataBank is extending its model - first in the Dallas metroplex, and then in other second-tier markets around the U.S.

IT Woes Ground American Airlines Flights - An outage in a key reservations system grounded all flights at American Airlines on Tuesday. The technology problems, which left passengers and gate agents unable to manage bookings or print boarding passes, caused backups at airports in many areas of the country.