Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of July 3rd

For your weekend reading, we present a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week.

Google Replaces MapReduce With New Hyper-Scale Cloud Analytics System - Google has abandoned MapReduce, the system for running data analytics jobs spread across many servers the company developed and later open sourced, in favor of a new cloud analytics system it has built called Cloud Dataflow.

Some Data Center Downtime Causes are Unpredictable: 10 Strangest Ones - Every once in a while, utility power goes out and the backup systems fail, or a technician makes a mistake, and the data center goes down. While outages have become less frequent, as the industry’s practices continuously improve, things still occasionally go wrong. But sometimes there are also instances when something strange and completely unexpected causes the dreaded unplanned data center downtime.

Microsoft Kicks Off $350M Data Center Expansion in Virginia - Microsoft is planning to invest about $350 million in expanding its data center site in Boydton, Virginia – a tiny town with about 400 residents at the state’s southern edge.

Microsoft General Counsel Calls for NSA Surveillance Reform - Microsoft’s top lawyer has written a blog post calling on the U.S. government to do more to repair the damage of the Snowden disclosures about the National Security Agency’s far-reaching electronic surveillance practices, including a concrete response to the issue of hacking into data centers that belong to U.S. companies and telecommunications networks that connect them.

Microsoft Azure Cloud's Brazil South Region Goes Live - Microsoft Azure cloud’s Brazil South region is now generally available. Public preview of the region was available several weeks ago, following roll-outs of new data center locations in China and Japan.