Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of March 17th

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A slide of a data center from a presentation at the Amazon Technology Open House. (Source: James Hamilton)

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

Estimate: Amazon Cloud Backed by 450,000 Servers - How many servers does it take to power Amazon’s huge cloud computing operation? Like many large Internet companies, Amazon doesn’t disclose details of its infrastructure, including how many servers it uses. But a researcher estimates that Amazon Web Services is using at least 454,400 servers in seven data center hubs around the globe.

Can Data Centers Can Make the Grid Greener? - Can the combined purchasing power of the data center industry make renewable energy more accessible? Joe Kava believes that it can. Kava, who heads that data center team at Google, said Tuesday that the company’s power purchasing agreements will add more than 200 megawatts of wind power to the local utility grids that support its data centers.

Google Recycling Water for Atlanta Data Center - A Google data center near Atlanta is recycling waste water to cool the thousands of servers housed in the facility, and then purifying the excess water so it can be released into the Chattahoochee River. The project to use “grey water” in Atlanta is part of Google’s broader program to reduce the impact of its data centers on the environment and local community.

Cloud Growth Spurs Demand for Data Centers - The growth of cloud computing is prompting increased demand for data center space in North America, according to a survey commissioned by Digital Realty. The growing interest in cloud adoption, along with the resumption of planned expansions that were deferred due to the economy, suggests robust growth ahead for the U.S. data center industry.

OpenStack Gains Global Traction - The OpenStack community is growing exponentially around the world, with more than 2,600 developers contributing to the open source platform for public and private clouds.

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