Top 5 Data Center Stories: Week of April 23

Major Amazon Outage Ripples Across Web - When a busy cloud computing platform crashes, the impact is felt widely. That’s the case with this week's extended outage for Amazon Web Services, which is battling latency issues at one of its northern Virginia data centers. The problems are rippling through to customers, causing downtime for many services that use Amazon’s cloud to run their web services.

Video: Inside Facebook’s Server Room - Facebook Director of Datacenter Engineering Jay Park provides a tour of the company's new Prineville data center, offering a look inside the data halls housing thousands of servers that power Facebook, including a closer look at the custom servers, racks and UPS units the company created for the facility.

Video: Google’s Data Center Security - Google today released a video showcasing the security and data protection practices in its data centers, which includes some interesting footage from the company’s data center in South Carolina. Most of the tour focuses on physical security and access control, including the security gates and biometric tools (iris scanners, in this case).

Cisco Opens Doors on New Texas Data Center - Cisco Systems has officially opened the doors at its new data center in Allen, Texas, which showcases a number of energy efficiency features and is outfitted with Cisco’s latest technologies for building unified infrastructures for cloud computing applications.

Greenpeace Seeks Data Center Energy Disclosure - Greenpeace International this week broadened its focus on the environmental impact of data centers, releasing a report that profiles the energy usage of the facilities powering 10 major Internet services. The group called on the largest players in IT to disclose more information about the energy uses by their data centers.