Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of June 11

Steve Jobs Provides A Look Inside the iDataCenter - Apple today offered a glimpse of its new data center as it announced its much-anticipated iCloud cloud computing service, which will allow iTunes users to store music, photos and documents in Apple’s data centers. The free iCloud service will launch this fall, and will synch digital content across all users devices, including iPhones, iPads, Macs and PCs.

A Look Inside Amazon’s Data Centers - Amazon Web Services doesn’t say much about the data centers powering its cloud computing platform. But this week the company held a technology open house in Seattle, where AWS Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton discussed the company’s infrastructure. The presentation (PDF) included an image of a modular data center design used by Amazon, which is the first official acknowledgement that the company uses modular infrastructure.

Sabey Acquires Huge Verizon Building in NYC: Seattle-based developer Sabey Data Center Properties has entered the New York data center market, acquiring the majority interest in 375 Pearl Street for $120 million, the company said today. Sabey will partner with New York developer Young Woo on the deal to buy the 1 million square foot former Verizon central office building, which will be managed by Sabey and called Intergate. Manhattan.

HP Unveils Updated EcoPOD Modular Design: HP has unveiled an updated version of its modular Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD), expanding its capacity with a “double-wide” design that joins two 40-foot containers. The new EcoPOD also adds the ability to use outside air in its cooling system, an important capability in the increasingly competitive market for modular data centers.

eHarmony Switches from Cloud to Atom Servers - Are low-power Atom servers more efficient than cloud computing platforms in crunching large datasets? That’s the case for eHarmony, which is now using servers from SeaMicro to power the data analysis for its singles matching service. The dating site had previously used the Amazon cloud computing platform to perform nightly data-crunching using Apache Hadoop.