Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of May 11

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

Open Compute Will Begin Building Network Switches - In a move that will likely accelerate the shakeup in the networking sector, the Open Compute Project said this week that it will expand its “open source hardware” initiative to include network switches. The announcement is the largest step yet in extending the open source hardware movement to networking, a sector which has been dominated by a handful of large vendors offering routers and switches managed by proprietary software.

Twitter Plans Major Data Center Expansion - Twitter has begun a major expansion of its data center infrastructure, adding space on both coasts in anticipation of huge growth for the microblogging service. Industry sources say Twitter is leasing a huge chunk of additional space in Sacramento, where it will expand its presence at the RagingWire data center campus.

Equinix Unveils New 'Crown Jewel' for Ashburn Campus - Equinix keeps growing in northern Virginia, expanding the largest Internet exchange in North America with the largest facility yet on an already immense campus. The new DC11 facility will support growing network traffic in Ashburn, which shows no signs of slowing as the integral East Coast network hub.

Iron Mountain is Taking the Data Center Underground - After several years of quietly developing space in its massive underground facility in Pennsylvania, Iron Mountain is entering the data center business in a bigger way. The company has announced plans to build and lease data centers, offering both colocation services and wholesale suites to enterprise and government customers.

Telx CEO Eric Shepcaro Passes Away - Eric Shepcaro, the Chief Executive Officer of Telx, passed away Saturday after an illness. Shepcaro led the company through a period of tremendous growth, during which it became a national provider of interconnection and colocation services, with operations in major Internet gateways in markets around the U.S.