Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of October 5th

kyotocooling

Kyoto Cooling, now owned by Cloudsite Development, was on the exhibit floor with its heat wheel – also known as a rotary heat exchanger. It is a refinement of existing approaches that take advantage of outside air to improve cooling efficiency and reduce data center power bills. (Photo by Colleen Miller.)

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

Is The U.S. Power Grid Ready for Worst-Case Scenarios? - Is America ready for a sudden loss of electric power over large portions of the country? How likely are these Doomsday scenarios? And how can the data center industry prepare for the worst-case impacts on power grids? Those questions were explored Sunday in the opening panel of the Data Center World Fall conference, as three experts outlined the threats the U.S. electrical infrastructure may face from seemingly unlikely events.

SoftLayer: An Autonomous Shade of Blue - The acquisition of SoftLayer by IBM was one of the most noteworthy deals of the last year. It was the combination of one of the most successful hosting companies of all time with a true technology giant. SoftLayer’s automation platform will play an important role in IBM’s overall cloud.

Keeping Pace With the Cloud: How Enterprise Data Centers Can Compete - Developers and end users want the speed and convenience of cloud computing. If companies aren’t prepared to deliver cloud-style services from their own data centers, their users will seek them out from public cloud providers. That creates a challenge for data center managers, according to Shannon Poulin, vice president of Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. Poulin was the keynote speaker at the Data Center World Fall conference.

Uptime Certification Funny Business: Design vs. Construction - What does it mean to be Tier-Certified? Misleading language and confusion over what it means to be “Design Certified,” versus “Construction Certified,” means that the customer may not always know what they are getting. Some industry leaders believe the confusion around Uptime Institute Tier Certification has reached the point that it reflects poorly on the entire industry.

Prudential, Digital Realty Deal Could Boost Data Center Investment - Prudential Real Estate Investors (PREI) has teamed with Digital Realty Trust on a $369 million joint venture to operate fully-leased corporate data centers. The deal provides cash for Digital Realty, which is contributing nine facilities. The participation by Prudential is a vote of confidence in data centers as an asset class that is attractive to real estate investors.