Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of Dec. 7

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Storage archives for backup tapes within Google's fast-growing data center operation in Council Bluffs, Iowa. (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.

Study: Data Center Downtime Costs $7,900 Per Minute - Unplanned data center outages are expensive, and the cost of downtime is rising, according to a new study. The average cost per minute of unplanned downtime is now $7,900, up a staggering 41 percent from $5,600 per minute in 2010, according to a survey from the Ponemon Institute, which was sponsored by Emerson Network Power.

In Iowa, A Field Becomes a Billion-Dollar Google Server Farm - It’s not exactly “Field of Dreams.” But a field in Iowa provides evidence of how the data center revolution can transform a piece of empty land into a key Internet traffic hub in a matter of months. Google plans to spend more than $1.5 billion to build Internet infrastructure in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Microsoft Invests $230 Million to Expand Dublin Data Center - Microsoft has announced a major expansion of its data center in Dublin, Ireland, which serves as the primary delivery hub for its cloud computing services for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). The company will invest €170m million ($230 million US) in the expansion, bringing its total investment in its Dublin facility to $806 million (€594 million).

Bitcoin Mining Arms Race Boosting Interest in Liquid Cooling - There’s a computing arms race going on in the world of Bitcoin. Interest in the digital crypto-currency is driving the development of specialized hardware chips, which are selling out almost as fast as they can be built. This is boosting interest in data centers using immersion cooling, in which high-density hardware is dunked into fluids similar to mineral oil.

PayPal and Groupon Go All In With Node.js - Discoveries about the advantages of Node over, say, Java or Ruby on Rails have only made developers more eager to use it at work. That’s certainly been the case at PayPal.

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