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Google wants hard drives designed to store your cloud data
Take a look at the hard drive in your desktop PC. It might hold terabytes of data, but the basic 3.5-inch design can be traced back to the early days of computing -- not really relevant in an era when a lot of your content sits in the cloud, is it? Google wants to change that. It's hoping to work with both the tech industry and researchers to design hard drives that are tailor-made for cloud-based storage. It wants to optimize the "collection" of disks instead of focusing on individual drives, and is more concerned about capacity and performance -- the things that matter most in a bustling data center -- over sheer reliability.
Microsoft wants to put data centers at the bottom of the sea
Microsoft is on a mission to put its server farms at the bottom of the ocean. That might sound self-destructive, but there's method in the madness -- such an approach, the company believes, could make data centers faster, greener and easier to set up. In August last year, engineers placed an enormous steel capsule 30 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean. Inside was a single data center rack, enveloped in pressurised nitrogen to keep it cool. The crew couldn't reach it, at least not physically, but it didn't matter -- the setup worked, going so far as to run commercial tasks for Azure.
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Amazon is selling its own processors now, too
Amazon's come a long way since its humble beginnings as an online book store. It sells everything from groceries to its own Kindle and tablet hardware, runs streaming services complete with original shows, and has a huge cloud-computing business among other interests. And now Amazon's started pushing its own line of processors, plunging its finger into yet another pie. You won't find its ARM-based "Alpine" chips among the T-shirts and homeware on Amazon's online store, of course. They are being sold directly to manufacturers and service providers through subsidiary Annapurna Labs, a chip designer Amazon acquired early last year.
Google's turning an old semiconductor plant into a data center
It's a happy holiday season indeed for Clarksville, Tennessee officials. Google vice president for Data Center Operations Joe Kava has confirmed to The Leaf-Chronicle that the company is turning the old 1,300-acre Hemlock Semiconductor site in the city into a $600 million data center. Kava says Google has big plans for this site and wants it to become "one of the world's most efficient and most technically advanced data center campuses." As part of its plans to achieve that goal, the company aims to offset 100 percent of the data center's electricity use with renewable energy.
The biggest data center in Russia will be nuclear powered
According to the news agency Telecom Daily, the Rosenergoatom power company is building what will be the largest data center in Russia -- and they're plopping it right on top of the Kalinin power station. Located about 120 miles northwest of Moscow, the station will provide the 80 MW that engineers estimate will be needed to power the data center's 10,000 or so server racks. The construction is projected to cost $975 million, not including the IT buildout.
Google's codebase is ludicrously huge for good reason
Google's codebase -- the programming instructions that run every one of its services from Gmail to Slides -- span a whopping 2 billion lines of code that stretch across 1 billion files and require 86 terabytes of storage, according to Google engineering manager Rachel Potvin. She recently disclosed those figures at the @Scale engineering conference. She also noted that this massive collection of data is mirrored and continually updated in ten data centers peppered around the globe. "Not only is the size of the repository increasing," Potvin explained during her lecture, "but the rate of change is also increasing. This is an exponential curve."
IBM wants to cool data centers with their own waste heat
Those "do not eat" desiccate packets of silica gel that keep shoe boxes dry could soon help keep data centers cool. IBM has launched the THRIVE project with aims to do just that by creating a heat pump that runs on waste heat.
Google's next data center will be a converted coal plant
Google is constructing another data center in the US, but the location it's settled on might surprise you. Instead of building a site from scratch, the company has decided to redevelop an old coal power plant in Alabama. The Widows Creek factory in Jackson County is scheduled to close in October due to changing regulations about the storage and monitoring of coal ash. It's been generating power since 1952 and Google plans to repurpose some of its infrastructure, such as the electric transmission lines, for its new data center. However, it doesn't want dirty fossil fuels powering its servers. Instead, it'll be working with local authorities to source new renewable energy projects that can feed into the electrical grid. Like its data center in Finland, which was once an old paper mill, it's a creative way to adapt a site that has already benefitted from years of investment.
Chlorine leak injures five at Apple data center
It hasn't been the best week for Apple. After a small fire broke out at its Arizona facility, it's now dealing with a chlorine leak at its data center in North Carolina. Catawba County Emergency Services swept in with a HazMat team yesterday and five employees were taken to a local hospital for treatment. Apple admits the workers could have been exposed to fumes after the chemical, used to clean its cooling systems, was spilled inside the building. All of the employees have since been discharged from the hospital and Apple says they should be able to return to work today. "The spill was quickly contained and poses no threat to anyone else at the facility," an Apple spokesperson told WSOC-TV.
Microsoft pours money into undersea data cables
For many internet giants, undersea fiber optic cables are a lifeline. In some cases, it's the difference between delivering fast services overseas and watching people give up in frustration. Microsoft knows this all too well, it seems, as it just poured money into three subsea fiber projects (Aqua Comms, Hibernia and New Cross Pacific Cable Network) that should speed up connections to Asia-Pacific and Europe. The Redmond crew sees this as a small investment that could pay off big in the future. As it explains, online products like the Azure computing platform and Office 365 are booming -- it only makes sense to have those moneymakers running as smoothly as possible. This isn't really an altruistic gesture, then, but it could go a long way toward improving your internet access as a whole. [Image credit: US Pacific Fleet, Flickr]
Apple salvages its US job plans by turning a factory into a data center
Apple has long had dreams of bringing more manufacturing to the US, but the reality has been harsh at times -- the Arizona sapphire plant it helped build went down the tubes last year after its key partner, GT Advanced, went bankrupt. However, the tech giant has at least managed to salvage something out of this messy situation. Apple tells Bloomberg that it's converting the failed factory into a solar-powered "command center" for its worldwide networks. The effort will see it pour $2 billion into the facility (one of Apple's biggest investments yet, the company claims) and create 150 direct jobs, not to mention 300 to 500 related positions in construction and support. It's not clear when the data center will be ready, but GT has control of the place until the end of 2015.
8TB hard drives have arrived
We're sorry to break the bad news, but that 5TB hard drive you bought last week? Yeah, it's already obsolete. Seagate has started shipping the first-ever 8TB desktop hard disk, doubling the 4TB capacities that seemed huge just a couple of years ago. If it's any consolation, though, this machinery isn't ready to go inside your hot gaming PC. Right now, all those terabytes are destined for data centers where capacity trumps every other concern; Seagate isn't mentioning prices, but enterprise-class storage is rarely cheap. You may want to set aside some money all the same. These extra-roomy drives have a tendency to filter down to the mainstream pretty quickly, so you may soon have more free disk space than you know what to do with... at least, for a little while.
Google uses self-aware datacenters to cut the cost of searching
Google spits out about 4 million search results per minute (among many other duties), which consumes a lot of energy. According to a recent blog, it cut its electrical bills significantly by applying the same kind of machine learning used in speech recognition and other consumer applications. A data center engineer on a 20 percent project plotted environmental factors like outside air temperature, IT load and other server-related factors. He then developed a neural network that could see the "underlying story" in the data, predicting loads 99.6 percent of the time. With a bit more work, Mountain View managed to eke out significant savings by varying cooling and other factors. It also published a white paper to share the info with other data centers and prove once again that humans are redundant.
Greenpeace praises Apple for helping to foster a 'green Internet': News from April 3, 2014
For a number of years, it seemed that Greenpeace was all too eager to take shots at Apple. These days, the environmental organization can't help but heap praise upon Apple for its increased attention to renewable energy and its otherwise increasing focus on becoming more environmentally friendly. In a report issued earlier this week, Greenpeace labeled Apple "the most innovative and most aggressive" company in Silicon Valley when it comes to powering its data centers with renewable energy. A number of leading brands, most notably Apple and Facebook, have made significant improvements in their energy transparency, discarding the previous dogma within the sector of withholding energy data due to competitiveness concerns. ... Apple is the most improved company since our last full report, and has shown itself to be the most innovative and most aggressive in pursuing its commitment to be 100% renewably powered. As noted earlier this morning, Apple has announced the dates for the World Wide Developer Conference, to be held June 2 - 6, 2014 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Unlike past years, when the ticket sales have been an open rush, the company is providing tickets via a lottery that developers can enter today through April 7. Tickets become available for sale on April 25 to those who "win" the lottery. Reuters is reporting that Apple and other major US companies have formed a lobbying group to push back on changes to the patent system that some members of Congress have proposed. The companies, including DuPont, Ford Motor Co., General Electric, IBM Corp, Microsoft Corp, and Pfizer in addition to Apple, formed the Partnership for American Innovation to ask Congress to move carefully on legislation meant to deal with patent trolls. There's concern from the companies that steps taken to stop patent trolls could also hurt innovative companies.
NVIDIA unveils Tesla K40 accelerator, teams with IBM on GPU-based supercomputing
NVIDIA's Tesla GPUs are already mainstays in supercomputers that need specialized processing power, and they're becoming even more important now that the company is launching its first Tesla built for large-scale projects. The new K40 accelerator only has 192 more processing cores than its K20x ancestor (2,880, like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti), but it crunches analytics and science numbers up to 40 percent faster. A jump to 12GB of RAM, meanwhile, helps it handle data sets that are twice as big as before. The K40 is already available in servers from NVIDIA's partners, and the University of Texas at Austin plans to use it in Maverick, a remote visualization supercomputer that should be up and running by January. As part of the K40 rollout, NVIDIA has also revealed a partnership with IBM that should bring GPU-boosted supercomputing to enterprise-grade data centers. The two plan on bringing Tesla GPU support to IBM's Power8-based servers, including both apps and development tools. It's not clear when the deal will bear fruit, but don't be surprised if it turbocharges a corporate mainframe near you.
Apple environmental head Lisa Jackson talks about making Apple more environmentally friendly
With Tim Cook at the helm, Apple has continuously demonstrated an increasing focus on ensuring that its operations are as environmentally sound as possible. A perfect example of Apple's commitment to clean up its act (pun partially intended) is its recent hire of Lisa Jackson as VP of Environmental Initiatives. Previously, Jackson served as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. News that Jackson would be joining the mix at Apple was first revealed by none other than Tim Cook who let the cat out of the bag during this year's All Things D Conference. When you get larger, you get more attention. It comes with the territory. We're doing incredible work in the environment for example. We've been focused on that for a long time ... eliminated toxins from all of our products, running data centers on 100 percent renewable energy, largest solar farm of any non-utility. Lisa Jackson is joining Apple ... she recently left the EPA and will be coordinating efforts across the company. She'll be reporting to me. Hardly a nominal position, Jackson means business and has every intention of increasing the green factor at Apple. Earlier this week, Jackson spoke at VERGE, a conference focused on increasing sustainability through technology. Gigaom has a great recap of her speech, and lest anyone think that Jackson will quietly toe the party line, think again. This quote, relayed by Gigaom, should put those types of reservations to rest. "Tim Cook didn't hire Lisa Jackson to be quiet and keep the status quo," Jackson said. "We understand our responsibility and we do care." The typically secretive company is eager to share its environmental initiatives. At the same time, Jackson clearly felt comfortable talking about the inherent challenges of her position and discussing just what she's focusing on at Apple. Jackson talked about the challenges of pushing and developing sustainability projects within Apple. One of them is the challenge of collecting solid data and being able to measure projects and their success rates. This includes Apple's method to calculate the energy use and carbon footprint of its operation and products, the manufacturing of its devices and the supply chain and customers' use of the products. Jackson pointed to the life cycle analysis that Steve Jobs publicized back in 2009 in an effort to change the company's image, as an example of Apple's attention to creating sustainability metrics and data. Jackson leads a team of 17 people and one of her group's tasks is to recruit employees who are willing to help with the company's sustainability projects. There is a group of such employees who called themselves Apple Earth, and Jackson said she joined that group on her second day at the company. "People are busy with their primary work, so it's about finding champions in areas where people are interested in," said Jackson. At one point, Jackson joked that the best way to ensure something at Apple gets done faster is to tell an engineer that it can't be done. If you want more details on the content of Jackson's speech, GreenBiz also has a nice recap over here. Even better, if you're eager to hear every detail from Jackson's 29-minute talk, the full video can be viewed below.
eBay's new Utah data center goes green so you never have to stop bidding
Big data is big money, so when the power goes out and data centers go offline, companies like eBay stand to hemorrhage revenue. Which is why the mega auction e-tailer's been hard at work setting up a "greener" data center in South Jordan, Utah to avoid costly and unpredictable blackouts. The now operational site incorporates thirty fuel cells developed by Bloom Energy, a company with roots in NASA's Mars program, that turn natural gas into electricity via an electro-chemical process. What's more, eBay, using recovered energy generation technology provided by Ormat, is also attempting to offset its carbon footprint by harvesting the "heat waste" generated from natural gas pipelines and turning that into energy for its Utah site. Barring any unforeseen power failures, the company's green data center won't ever have to rely on the local grid. And that independence should ensure eBay users keep bidding and buying and filling the company's coffers.
Apple wants to buy more land for Oregon data center
Apple is considering purchasing another 96 acres of land in Prineville, Ore., in hopes of expanding its data centers even further, The Oregonian reports. The assistant planning director for Crook County confirmed to the paper that a company code-named "Project Pillar" has expressed interest in buying the land -- and The Oregonian believes that "Project Pillar" is indeed Apple: The property awaiting transfer is covered by the same tax break agreement that Apple now operates under. And [Phil] Stenbeck said Pillar previously went by the code name Maverick -- that's the name Apple used last year when it paid US$5.6 million to buy 160 acres of Crook County land for its first Prineville data center... This time last year, Apple began construction of a 338,000-square-foot data center on the bluffs above Prineville, just down the highway from a similar facility owned by Facebook. Plans filed with Prineville show Apple contemplates a second data center of the same size -- 65 percent larger than the biggest Costco -- on the property it already owns. If Apple were to acquire the property, it would no doubt be used for data centers to power its ever-expanding selection of cloud services, including the iTunes Store, the company's App Stores, its mapping services and iCloud.
Microsoft's 'Project Mountain' puts $700 million into data center powering Xbox One and Office 365 cloud
Microsoft really, really doesn't want your Xbox One's online services going offline. In a near $700 million investment ($677.6 million), the company's opening a new data center in Iowa specifically aimed at powering Xbox Live and Office 365. Microsoft's Christian Belady told Iowa's Des Moines Register that the data center "supports the growing demand for Microsoft's cloud services" -- a much lauded function of both the Xbox One and Office 365. Alongside the $700 million investment, the company's getting a $6 million tax rebate from the state to move in, effective for five years. As for Microsoft's cloud, we'll assuredly hear more about it -- for both Xbox One and Office 365 -- this week at Build.
Facebook opens first European data center, uses company-designed servers
Facebook's first European data center in Luleå, Sweden (near the Arctic Circle) is now online, and thus far it's the only facility that's exclusively using servers the company itself designed. Similar to the social network's North Carolina complex that served as testing ground for its outdoor air-cooling configuration, the Swedish facility takes advantage of the region's frigid winds. Excess heat produced by the machines is then routed to offices to keep employees warm in the chilly region. The firm claims the 900,000-square-foot center is powered entirely by hydroelectric energy -- a source so reliable that Facebook saw it fit to scale down the number of backup generators by more than 70 percent. With an average power usage efficiency (PUE) of 1.07, the servers should consume 1.07 watts of energy for each watt they need to function pointing to minimal energy loss. Now that the Luleå installation is complete and operational, the company can focus on building its $1.5 billion megastructure (its biggest data center yet) in Altoona, Iowa. [Image credit: Facebook]
