But advocates of DC power continue to make the case for direct current distribution in data centers. The recent Data Center Efficiency Summit featured a case study showing gains over AC systems, and discussion of whether global efforts to establish a standard for 380 volt systems might build momentum for DC power.
via New Study Reinforces Case for DC Power Savings » Data Center Knowledge.
“Maintenance is a very lucrative business,” said Fairfax, who said guidance from equipment vendors sometimes slip into FUD (fear, uncertainty doubt) rather than sound methodology. “They want to keep selling their maintenance plans. To overcome this preventive maintenance threat, we must attack false learning. More is not always better.”
via Is Maintenance Making Your Facility Less Reliable? » Data Center Knowledge.
File this under don’t fix what ain’t broke.
By December 16 of this year, IBM says it plans to support Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition running in a zBX chassis on its HX5 blades.
via Windows on Mainframes Due December 16 — Enterprise Systems.
Rackspace “Cloud Files™” is among the most popular and simplest cloud storage solution offered today. Cloud Files™ enables its users to have the ability to store unlimited files and media for content delivery at blazing fast speeds on its Limelight CDN Content Delivery Network. Some of the advantages of Rackspace CloudFiles™ include:
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Another shoutout to Rackspace….
Hosting provider Rackspace, which currently owns the OpenStack trademark and copyrights, plans to transfer ownership of these resources to the not-for-profit foundation once it is operational.
Much like how the Linux Foundation provides a supporting structure for the largely independent development of the Linux kernel, so too will the OpenStack Foundation provide the support structure for the third-party development of OpenStack, the founders said.
The cluster, announced publicly this week, was created for an unnamed “Top 5 Pharma” customer, and ran for about seven hours at the end of July at a peak cost of $1,279 per hour, including the fees to Amazon and Cycle Computing. The details are impressive: 3,809 compute instances, each with eight cores and 7GB of RAM, for a total of 30,472 cores, 26.7TB of RAM and 2PB (petabytes) of disk space. Security was ensured with HTTPS, SSH and 256-bit AES encryption, and the cluster ran across data centers in three Amazon regions in the United States and Europe. The cluster was dubbed “Nekomata.”
via $1,279-per-hour, 30,000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud.
Hewlett-Packard, Dell and companies that sell the computers off the shelf are losing sales in a key market because Facebook and larger rival Google Inc. (GOOG) are leading a switch among Internet companies to do-it-yourself servers. These customized machines now account for 20 percent of the U.S. market for servers, which generated $31.9 billion globally in last year, said Jeffrey Hewitt, an analyst at Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner Inc.
via Dell Loses Orders as Facebook Do-It-Yourself Servers Gain: Tech – Bloomberg.
This article describes five classes of fabric architectures based on how they use management, control and data (forwarding) plane. Throughout the article we’ll use the generic term switch to describe a forwarding device that can forward either Ethernet frames (layer 2 switch) or IP datagrams (layer 3 switch).
via Data Center Fabric Architectures – Internetworking Expert Hints.