39890781
submission
miller60 writes:
The new Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is out, and the new champion is Titan, the new and improved system that previously ruled the Top500 as Jaguar. Oak Ridge Labs' Titan knocked Livermore Labs' Sequoia system out of the top spot, with a Linpack benchmark of more than 17 petaflops a second. Check out the full list, or an illustrated guide to the top 10.
39428061
submission
miller60 writes:
At least three data center buildings in lower Manhattan are struggling with power problems amid widespread flooding and utility outages caused by Hurricane Sandy. Flooded basements at two sites took out diesel fuel pumps, leaving them unable to refuel generators on higher levels. One of these was Datagram, which knocked out Buzzfeed and the Gawker network of sites. At 111 8th Avenue, some tenants lost power when Equinix briefly experienced generator problems.
39230373
submission
1sockchuck writes:
Facebook has now adapted its Open Compute servers to work in leased data center space a step that could make the highly-efficient "open hardware" designs accessible to a broader range of users. The Open Compute Project was launched last year to bring standards and repeatable designs to IT infrastructure, and has been gaining traction as more hardware vendors join the effort. Facebook's move to open its designs has been a welcome departure from the historic secrecy surrounding data center design and operations. But energy-saving customizations that work in Facebook's data centers present challenges in multi-tenant facilities. To make it work, Facebook hacked a rack and gave up some energy savings by using standard 208V power.
38341789
submission
miller60 writes:
In the name of failover science, Symantec dropped a rack of expensive IT gear off the roof of an 18-story building in San Jose. This experiment confirmed the results of 2007 research by HP, which blew up racks of IT gear to see whether auto-failover features would work. Perhaps some IT staff simply long to see their servers explode or fly through the air.
37656147
submission
miller60 writes:
Want some servers with your news? While some newspaper companies are struggling with the digital transition, a Missouri publisher is getting into the data center business. The News-Press & Gazette will invest $20 million in Online Tech, a data center service provider. The News-Press, a 100-year old family-owned company, runs newspapers and TV stations in secondary markets. "The News-Press has seen that journalism is more and more becoming digital, and at the heart of everything that's digital is data centers," said Mike Klein, CEO of Online Tech.
37433971
submission
miller60 writes:
GoDaddy says yesterday's downtime was caused by internal network problems that corrupted data in router tables. "The service outage was not caused by external influences,” said Scott Wagner, Go Daddy’s Interim CEO. “It was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)." The outage lasted for at least 6 hours, and affected web sites and email for customers of the huge domain registrar.
36320845
submission
miller60 writes:
How much water does your data center use? Is it more or less than last year? The largest data centers are working to slash their water use, and the industry has developed metrics and best practices in hopes of reducing the impact of server farms on local potable water supplies and sewer capacity. Facebook sees data center design as the key to reduced water impact, and last week published data on its water use and efficiency, Google and Microsoft have focused their efforts on using recycled "gray water" in their cooling systems, rather than potable water.
35108465
submission
miller60 writes:
It's already been a tough summer for uptime. Salesforce.com experienced a lengthy service outage this morning, attributed to a power outage at an Equinix data center in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, a UPS failure knocked out power at a Level 3 facility in London. The outages come less than two weeks after major downtime for some cloud computing customers of Amazon Web Services. So far 2012 is looking like a replay of the summer of 2009, when major data centers suffered a series of power failures in late June and early July.
34607037
submission
miller60 writes:
Just a year after open sourcing the plans for its custom servers, Facebook is updating its hardware designs to adapt them for its Open Rack enclosure standard. That's led to changes in the form factor for servers and a new power system with "outboard" power supplies that are housed on a power shelf at the base of the rack rather than the servers. Facebook's hardware designers provide hands-on video overviews of the storage prototype, as well as changes to their racks and servers. Facebook has also overhauled its network topology to run its entire network at 10 gigabits per second.
34355129
submission
miller60 writes:
A defective generator cooling fan wound up triggering a lengthy outage last week that affected customers of Amazon Web Servvices, including sites like Pinterest, Quora and HootSuite. The issues began when an Amazon data center in Virginia lost utility power. The backup generators started as designed, but the bad fan caused one unit to overheat and shut down. The system was then supposed to switch to a seperate power distribution circuit, but an improperly set breaker caused that process to fail as well.
34247133
submission
miller60 writes:
A Brazilian man has created a Lego data center that recreates all the major features of an IT facility, assembled from 5,772 pieces, 28 figures, and 1 meter of fiber optic cable. The builder, Tanaka, has uploaded details to the Lego Digital Designer Gallery so others can build and adapt their own.
34033409
submission
miller60 writes:
Calling your product the "Big Brain Computer" is a heady claim. It helps if you have Dr. Stephen Hawking say that the product can help unlock the secrets of the universe. SGI says its UV2 can scale to 4,096 cores and 64 terabytes of memory, with a peak I/O rate of four terabytes per second and runs off-the-shelf Linux software. Hawking says the UV2 "will ensure that UK researchers remain at the forefront of fundamental and observational cosmology.”
33508067
submission
miller60 writes:
Researchers at Rutgers have created a "green" version of Hadoop to manage a solar-powered micro data center. The rooftop system, comprised of two racks of Atom servers and a small solar array, is called Parasol. The software projects, described in the team's research papers, represent an academic effort to accomplish the same goals as the HP research effort to create a net-zero data center. The Rugers team also plans to develop a solar-aware version of the OpenNebula cloud software that will allow users to shift virtual machines across solar-powered data centers to "follow the sun" to energy savings.
