How does Google manage data across the many data centers the company operates? At the Google i/o Developer Conference in May, Google’s Ryan Barrett discusses “multihoming” across multiple data center locations with large scale storage systems. Barrett’s presentation examines different approaches to multi-homing, with a particular focus on how Google engineers the App Engine datastore. This video [...]

Intel has provided some really interesting video tours of its data centers. Last year we highlighted a tour of a former silicon chip fabrication facility that Intel converted into a high-density data center. Today we present a video tour of a two-story “greenfield” (new construction) data center featuring a highly efficient design. Intel data center [...]

On Sept. 9, torrential rains in Istanbul,Turkey flooded much of the city’s Ikitelli section. Among the buildings flooded by the rising waters was a Vodafone data center (see news mentions at Total Telecom and a Turkish news site). The event was captured on the data center’s security cameras, and the video has been posted online. [...]

When a data center loses power, the goal is to get the servers back online as quickly as possible. But you can’t restart all the servers until the cooling is working again. While servers can restart quickly, it often takes much longer to restart chillers, which provide refrigerated water for cooling systems. Chiller vendors and [...]

As Facebook was announcing that it has reached 300 million users last week, network engineer Donn Lee was making the case for faster Ethernet networks – definitely 100-Gigabit Ethernet, and perhaps even Terabit Ethernet. It is “not unreasonable to think Facebook will need its data center backbone fabric to grow to 64 terabits a second [...]