Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of Dec. 15

google-networking

Rows of networking equipment inside a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Monday's Gmail outage was attributed to a software update that caused performance problems for network load balancers. (Photo for Google by Connie Zhou)

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

Why Does Gmail Go Down? - Even the most sophisticated Internet infrastructures encounter unexpected problems. And so it is with Google, which had an outage this week. There have been a number of Gmail outages over the years, usually involving software updates or networking issues. Or in some cases, a software update causing a networking issues. Which is what this turned out to be?

U.S. Defense Department to Cool Servers With Hot Water - The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) will soon begin cooling its servers with hot water. The DoD said this week that it will convert one of its data centers to use a liquid cooling system from Asetek Inc. The move could clear the way for broader use of liquid cooling in high-density server deployments at the DoD, which says it will carefully track the efficiency and cost savings from the project.

Intel Unveils Low-Power Atom Chips for Servers - Intel’s first Atom server-class processor has arrived, and some major hosting companies say they’re ready to start filling their racks with servers using the low-power chips. Intel’s announcement is the latest milestone in the ongoing push to reduce energy usage in data centers, which has prompted server vendors to adapt low-power smartphone chips for the server market, including both Intel’s Atom and chips from ARM that are widely used in iPhones and iPads.

IBM Lights Up Silicon Nanophotonics for Big Data - IBM announced a major advance in the ability to use light instead of electrical signals to transmit information for future computing. Referred to as Silicon Nanophotonics, the technology allows the integration of different optical components side by side with electrical circuits on a single silicon chip, using sub-100 nanometer semiconductor technology.

Big Leases for Dupont Fabros in Santa Clara,Chicago - Wholesale data center provider Dupont Fabros announced this week that it has closed significant leases in multiple locations. After a few recent deals, the Chicago CH1 Data Center is now 100 percent leased, and in Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara SC1 Data Center is 75 percent leased.