Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of Jan. 23

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An aerial view of one of Apple’s two major solar panel arrays in Maiden, North Carolina, which supply electricity to help support the power requirements for a nearby Apple data center. (Photo: Apple)

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

Squeezing More Efficiency Out of Microsoft's Cloud - Squeezing more efficiency and density out of bleeding-edge facilities is the next phase in the data center arms race. It’s a process that Microsoft has undertaken with its Dublin data center, and other leading players will be pursuing as they seek to get more mileage out of new server farms that came online in the huge construction boom from 2007 to 2010.

Apple Hits 100% Renewable Energy in its Data Centers - In the wake of pressure from the environmental group Greenpeace, Apple said Thursday that it has achieved 100 percent renewable energy at all of its data centers, including facilities in North Carolina, Oregon, California and Nevada.

Bringing Colo to the Customer: Modular Gets Local - Colo has come to the customer. In a business park just minutes from its global headquarters, LexisNexis is housing racks of IT gear inside factory-built data center modules from IO. It’s an example of a new paradigm for enterprise data centers, in which pre-fabricated designs can create resilient Tier III facilities within 120 days at any location a customer chooses.

Sabey Opens High-Rise Manhattan Data Tower - Some New Yorkers who look upon the huge Verizon high-rise at 375 Pearl Street have trouble seeing past its foreboding stone facade. The team at Sabey Data Centers saw it as a blank canvas: an opportunity to remake 1 million square feet of Manhattan real estate as a high-tech data hub.

Old Gas Tower to Become Futuristic Data Center - In one of the more interesting retrofit projects we’ve seen, a Swedish ISP is planning to convert a huge former natural gas holding tank into a five-story data center. The developer is Bahnhof, which has gained notice for its unusual data center designs, including the “James Bond Villain” data center in a former nuclear bunker and a modular unit designed to look like a space station.