Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of May 25

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

With Ubiquity, Sears is Turning Shuttered Stores into Data Centers - Will blinking blue lights of servers soon fill the aisles that previously offered the Blue Light Special? Sears Holdings has formed a new unit to market space from former Sears and Kmart retail stores as a home for data centers, disaster recovery space and wireless towers.

Should Data Centers Be Regulated as Utilities? Industry Experts Weigh In - Is the data center industry a candidate for regulation as a utility, as suggested last week by the New York Times? We reached out to experts who were familiar with both data centers and utilities to get their take.

The Robot-Driven Data Center of Tomorrow - Robotics are beginning to be integrated into data center management, creating the potential for a robot-driven, fully automated "lights out" data center environment. Bill Kleyman explores the possibilities.

Microsoft Will Back Xbox One With 300,000 Servers - With this week's unveiling of the new Xbox One gaming system, Microsoft says it will beef up its Xbox Live platform with 300,000 servers, a huge jump from the 15,000 servers currently supporting the platform.

NSA Utah Data Center Facing Unexpected Energy Taxes - The National Security Agency (NSA) finds itself facing millions of dollars in taxes on the electricity usage in its Utah data center as a result of a new law passed by state legislators, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.