miller60 - Slashdot User

+ - Fidelity Now Selling Mutual Funds, Data Centers-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Monday June 03, 2013 @04:33PM

miller60 writes "Mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments has developed its own factory-built data centers and will begin selling them to other companies. The company liked the benefits of modular data center design, including faster deployment and the ability to adapt to new technology, but was unsatisfied with the leading offerings, so it built its own. After using the design in its own facilities, Fidelity is commercializing its pre-fab units as Centercore. Fidelity's move follows the recent decision by another giant US brand, the retailer Sears Holdings, to enter the data center real estate market."
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Journal: Roblimo: good, bad, or indifferent? 0

Journal by Slartibartfast on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @04:06PM

So, here I bless you with my third journal entry; puts me at an average of one every three years. Alert the media.

+ - Sears is Turning Shuttered Stores Into Data Centers-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Thursday May 23, 2013 @09:51AM

miller60 writes "Servers may soon fill the aisles where shoppers once roamed. Sears Holdings is seeking to convert former Sears and Kmart stores into Internet data hubs. Some stand-alone stores and distribution centers may be repurposed as data centers, while mall-based stores can be converted into disaster recovery sites, the company says, offering access to stores and eateries for displaced workers who may be on site for weeks. Then there's the wireless tower opportunity. Seventy percent of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Sears or Kmart store, and these rooftops can be leased to fill gaps in cell coverage. It's not the first effort to convert stores into IT infrastructure, as Rackspace is headquartered in an old mall, and companies have built data centers in malls in Indiana and Maryland. But Sears, which operates 25 million square feet of real estate, hopes to make this strategy work at scale."
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+ - 'Data Center in a Box' Brings Colo to the Customer-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:03AM

miller60 writes "What if your company could have a data center delivered to its doorstep in less than 120 days? That's what IO has done for LexisNexis, using modular data centers to create a Tier III data center just minutes from the company's global headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. LexisNexis, which provides database and disaster recovery services for law firms, is the prototype customer for the on-site offering from IO, whose "data center in a box" offering is being adopted by Goldman Sachs and the Securities & Exchange Commission, which will use modules to house its EDGAR database. The concept has come a long way since Sun introduced the Blackbox container in 2006."
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+ - Data Centers Springing Up in Old Chip Fabs-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Thursday February 14, 2013 @04:57PM

miller60 writes "A growing number of former semiconductor fabs are becoming server farms. A data center company will convert a former fab near Dallas into a massive data center that will offer between 700,000 and 1.4 million square feet of server space. The company, QTS, followed a similar path with a huge former Qimonda facility in Richmond. In Silicon Valley, Facebook's servers live in an old Seagate plant converted by Fortune Data Centers. Up in Oregon, a former Hynix chip plant is becoming a data center. These facilities offer several attributes that make them good covnersion prospects: lots of existing power and cooling capacity, with raised floor already available in many faciltiies. Data center companies says this existing infrastructure saves them money, leaving less to retrofit."
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+ - Mars Astronauts will drink a lot of pee-> 0

Submitted by Andy Prough on Thursday February 14, 2013 @04:56PM

Andy Prough writes "Thanks to ambitions of humans going to Mars one day, technology that turns wastewater into drinking water is improving. Conserving water all the way to Mars and back will be vital, and so NASA is working overtime to make pee-drinking far more efficient. NASA's “first generation forward osmosis secondary treatment system” is being tested at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and pee-drinking technology is currently in use onboard the Space Station and at NASA’s Sustainability Base in Silicon Valley. The systems recover more than 95% of water from wastewater, which includes other water sources such as laundry water.

Don't be surprised to see Wall Street investing in pee soon. Not only is pee being churned into a tasty beverage to parch an interplanetary thirst, but yesterday one company announced that they are developing a pee-powered fuel cell for our soldiers to charge their smartphones on the battlefield."
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+ - Titan is New Champ in Supercomputing's Top500-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Monday November 12, 2012 @01:37PM

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."
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+ - New York Data Centers Battle Floods, Utility Outages-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Tuesday October 30, 2012 @01:13PM

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."
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+ - Open Compute Hardware Adapted for Colo Centers-> 0

Submitted by 1sockchuck on Thursday October 25, 2012 @08:58AM

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."
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+ - The space jump -- in Lego!-> 0

Submitted by

mykepredko

on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @11:36AM

mykepredko writes "All this chatter about Felix Baumgartner and his remarkable space jump, but where's the love for this brave little Lego man. Just because he's physically incapable of suffering from ebullism, going into a flat spin, or bleeding out through his eyes doesn't make this guy's faithful recreation of the space jump any less remarkable. Two fearless pioneers — one, a person; the other, plastic — plummeting from amazing heights. In the case of the Lego Man, that means about 365 feet, according to the video's "Scale 1:350" note."
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+ - Rack Falls Down, Goes Boom - From 18 Stories-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @10:52AM

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."
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+ - Newspaper Publisher Enters the Data Center Business-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Monday September 17, 2012 @08:55AM

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."
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+ - Go Daddy: Network Issues, Not Hacks or DDoS, Caused Downtime-> 1

Submitted by miller60 on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @11:58AM

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."
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+ - Server Farms Step Up Efforts to Reduce Water Waste-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Tuesday August 14, 2012 @11:29AM

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."
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+ - Power Outage Causes Downtime for Salesforce.com -> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Tuesday July 10, 2012 @03:27PM

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."
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