Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of Nov. 24

Cyrus_One_aerial

The 200,000 square foot first phase of the CyrusOne Continuum data center in Chandler is nearing completion on the site of a former alfalfa field. (Photo: CyrusOne)

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

CyrusOne: Birth of a Data Center - A new data center is rising on land that just six months ago was covered with alfalfa fields. “We literally had herds of sheep on the site a week before we broke ground,” says Kevin Timmons, Chief Technical Officer of CyrusOne, which is in the final stages of construction on the first phase of its data center campus at the Continuum business park.

Big Data For CERN Requires a Big Network - The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates over 100 petabytes of data every year at its home near Geneva, Switzerland. Distributing this data to data centers around the world for analysis is important, and requires a big network to transport the big data. CERN’s new data center in Budapest is set to be one of the first beneficiaries of a new terabit network created by GÉANT, a European data network for researchers and scientists.

Microsoft Has Global Ambitions for Off-Grid Data Plants - When you see a pig farm, landfill or water treatment plant, can you envision a data center on that site? Microsoft can, and has major ambitions to tap sources of biogas to create a network of “off the grid” server farms to power its global cloud. Microsoft’s project to convert recycled waste into a data center energy source gets underway with its Data Plant pilot project in Cheyenne, Wyoming. This week Microsoft supplied additional details about the project, and what it may mean for the future of its global infrastructure.

Google Expansion Boosts Iowa Investment Past $1 Billion - With Friday’s announcement of an additional $200 million expansion at its data center in Council Bluffs, Google has now invested more than $1 billion in infrastructure in the state of Iowa.

Retailer Web Sites, Apps Brace for Black Friday - The shopping holiday season is heating up, and we’re about to hit the major black Friday and Cyber Monday peak. Never has uptime been more important and downtime more costly for retailers than during this season.

Stay current on Data Center Knowledge’s data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook or join our LinkedIn Group â€“ Data Center Knowledge.