Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of July 28

london-canarywharf

The view of London from Canary Wharf in the Docklands, home to the data centers and network facilities that will support the 2012 Olympics. (Photo by Robert Scoble via Google Plus)

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

The Olympian Infrastructure Challenge - The 2012 Summer Olympics in London will be the most connected Games in history. As the athletes of the world gather to test their skills, tens of millions of sports fans will test the capacity of the city’s telecom and data center infrastructure. Will the broadband, Internet and wireless systems be able to handle the demand? Here’s an overview of key systems and their readiness for the Olympics, which commence with Friday’s opening ceremonies.

VMware Buys Nicira in $1.2 Billion Embrace of SDN - VMware will buy Nicira, a leading player in software defined networking (SDN) for $1.26 billion in a bold move to boost its position in data center networking. Nicira’s software platform manages a network abstraction layer, which lets users create virtual networks that operate independently of the underlying physical network hardware.

Fed Data Center Consolidation Flawed, Says GAO - The federal government’s data center consolidation effort is being hampered by a lack of information from many agencies, according to the General Accounting Office, which has issued a report calling for stricter oversight of the effort.

In New Jersey, Data Center Modules Bloom Along the Turnpike - One year after opening the world’s largest modular data center in a massive printing plant, IO held an open house this week to show off its progress. In a large hall filled with data center modules housing customer servers, IO executives said the New Jersey facility is the first step in a global expansion of the company’s vision for a new way to deploy data center space.

Windows Azure Hit by Cloud Outage in Europe - Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform experienced a significant service outage in western Europe Thursday.Azure compute services are largely unavailable for customers in the region. Microsoft services for West Europe are supported by a data center in Amsterdam, with a major facility in Dublin delivering Azure services for North Europe.>