Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of Feb. 2

Digital_Realty_Skid-Install

Employees of Digital Realty deliver a pre-fabricated electrical room on a skid to a data center site. The company has updated its POD architecture to make more effective use of these type of components. (Photo: Digital Realty Trust).

The ground hog has seen his shadow! That means that we continue providing the latest data center news, whatever the weather. For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week. Enjoy!

Microsoft To Build Two More Data Centers in Virginia - Microsoft Corp. will invest an additional $348 million to expand its modular data center site in southern Virginia, the company said today. The company will build two additional facilities on its data center campus to increase capacity to serve its growing customer base. The expansion boosts Microsoft’s investment in its Virginia data center campus to $997 million.

Digital Realty Powers Up its POD Architecture - Digital Realty Trust has updated a key building block in its data center construction process to provide tenants with more power to support their IT infrastructure. Digital Realty, the world’s largest landlord of data center properties, has introduced the next next generation of the POD Architecture for its data center halls.

Eurora Sets Supercomputing Energy Efficiency Record - NVIDIA (NVDA) announced that its Tesla GPU accelerators have helped the new Eurora supercomputer set a new record for data center energy efficiency. The supercomputer was deployed this week at the Cineca facility in Bologna, Italy and reached 3,150 megaflops per watt of sustained performance – a mark 26 percent higher than the top system on the most recent Green500 list of the world’s most efficient supercomputers.

Rackspace Accelerates OpenStack Enterprise Push - Rackspace Hosting wants to make it easier to deploy and run clouds, and has been partnering with leading hardware and software providers to create three new Private Cloud Open Reference Architectures. Reference architectures and test criteria for OpenStack solutions help to ensure consistent performance, supportability and compatibility.

Cisco Unifies Wired & Wireless Access In New Catalyst Switch - This week Cisco (CSCO) announced new solutions under the Cisco Unified Access umbrella that simplify network design by converging wired and wireless networks. The technologies come together in the new Cisco Catalyst 3850 Switch, which offers integrated wired and wireless LAN controller functionality. The new products address an evolving environment in which employees may access corporate networks from a variety of devices, locations and networks.