Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of May 28

Chiller-less Data Center is Google’s Top Performer - When Google built a data center without any chillers, it was entering uncharted territory. Google expected to reduce its energy bill without the risk of hot weather interrupting its chiller-less operations. How did it work out? The Belgium facility has become Google’s best performing data center on the leading energy efficiency metric, with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.09 for the first quarter of 2011,

Microsoft: The Cloud is the ‘Utility of the Future’ - As the director of Datacenter Research at Microsoft, Christian Belady is pondering the next phase of change in data center design. “Cloud computing is the utility of the future,” says Belady. “I look at it as a way to distribute energy. At the end of the day, data is energy.”

Facebook May Get New Neighbors in Prineville - Officials in Prineville, Oregon say they are in discussion with two additional companies about building data centers in the town, where Facebook just opened its first company-built data center. Local officials said that interest in Facebook’s facility had attracted interest from other companies seeking to leverage the town’s ideal environment for using fresh air to cool servers.

Will the Banking Industry Go Modular? - Is the financial industry ready to go modular? At first glance, banks may not seem like ideal candidates for modular data centers, which deploy IT capacity in factory-built enclosures. But some of the nation’s largest financial institutions are taking a close look at modular designs

How Equinix Decides When to Build - Building a new data center requires extensive capital – often $100 million or more – and getting the timing right is crucial. In a recent earnings call, Equinix CEO Steve Smith described the process the colocation provider employs to evaluate new builds