Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of July 21st

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Apple is planning a 21,000 square foot expansion of its 500,000 square foot data center in North Carolina (Source: Apple)

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

Is Apple Going Modular at its North Carolina iDataCenter? - It looks like the next phase of Apple’s mighty iDataCenter in North Carolina may feature small modular data centers that can deploy server capacity in increments. That would represent a shift from the first phase of the project, a 500,000 square foot building that is one of the largest structures in the data center industry. Apple has filed plans with Catawaba County to construct a 21,000 square foot “tactical MDC” on a concrete pad at the company’s campus in Maiden, N.C.

Data Center Fire Disrupts Key Services in Calgary - The city of Calgary is recovering from the impact of a data center fire that crippled city services and delayed hundreds of surgeries at local hospitals. The explosion and fire last Wednesday in a Shaw Communications facility knocked out both the primary and backup systems that supported key public services for local government and medial institutions.

Windows Azure: Our Cloud Stores 4 Trillion Objects - The Windows Azure Storage cloud operated by Microsoft houses 4 trillion objects, according to a post on the Windows Azure Storage blog. That’s a big number. The new data suggests that Microsoft’s storage cloud houses four times as many objects as Amazon S3, the storage cloud for Amazon Web Services, which topped 1 trillion objects last month.

OpenStack Cloud Gets ARMed for Efficiency - Cloud users test-driving the OpenStack platform can now launch servers using low-power ARM chips. Today a group of OpenStack contributors announced that the project’s TryStack sandbox will offer HP Redstone servers that feature Calxeda chips using ARM processors, which are widely used to power mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.

IPv4 Addresses Now Driving Hosting Deals - There’s a new metric in web hosting acquisitions: whether a seller has a supply of unused IPv4 addresses. Investment bankers working on hosting deals say the scarcity of IPv4 addresses is becoming a factor in some transactions.>