A press conference in West Des Moines, Iowa, revealed Microsoft has chosen the city to build an estimated 1.7 million square feet data center, dubbed Project Osmium, spanning two counties (160 acres in Warren County and 40 acres in Madison County). more
DeepMind AI reduces energy used for cooling Google data centers by 40%, was announced today in a blog post by Google's Rich Evans, Research Engineer, DeepMind and Jim Gao, Data Center Engineer. more
A new report, released today from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is reporting that electricity consumption by data centers nationwide, after rising rapidly for more than a decade, started to plateau in 2010 and has remained steady since, at just under 2 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. more
Could Brexit spell turbulence for cloud computing? Larry Dignan reporting in ZDNet: "Get ready for the pause in U.K. data center build-outs. The only certainty about the United Kingdom's move to exit the European Union is the cloud computing ecosystem is going to see some turbulence and uncertainty ahead. more
Software-defined networking (SDN) itself represents a deconstructed view of current switching and routing architectures providing the abstractions of control from dataplane. With this newfound control, the industry is leveraging multiple virtualization strategies to build out public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures, delivering multiple new application services to the market. more
Data generation is all the rage these days. But are you utilizing it to maximize your outcomes? You know that data is indispensable for your business to keep up and outpace the competition. And most leading corporations agree, since statistically, the speed that companies are producing and collecting data is only increasing with 40 zettabytes expected to be created by 2020. The majority of these organizations are then tossing all of this data into data lakes without any real structured methods of extracting some value from it. more
Think your organization is exempt from in-house network abuse? Think again. A CFCA Global Fraud Survey of communication service providers found that dealer fraud was one of the top five methods of fraud, costing $US 3.35 billion annually. In this scenario, customer service representatives (CSRs) or administrators with access to account information may upgrade friends or family to a premium service package or even provide free access to services. more
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have been picking up the pace as of late. A high percentage of communication service providers and large data centers have either added these technologies on their roadmaps, or are already doing small-scale Proof-of-Concepts (PoC) in their testbed environments. more
Facebook has announced the construction of a new $220 million (€200 million) data centre in Clonee, County Meath, Ireland. This will be Facebook's sixth data center worldwide and the company's second in Europe, after Luleå in Sweden. more
Databases are the infrastructure of the modern administrative state and data is its lifeblood. When the data is contaminated with errors, federal agencies have difficulty performing even the most basic administrative functions such as managing its inventory of office space and protecting the personally identifiable information (PII) of social security number holders. The federal dissemination of unreliable data doesn't just waste money; it undermines public trust in government and leaves it unmanageable. more
Service providers have traditionally organised their operations around different technology domains. The responsible teams have been staffed with specialists looking after routing, network services, security and various other functional areas. Over time, organizations like this have had the tendency to transform into loosely tied silos with limited interaction between the different teams. more
Data may be moving to the cloud, but understanding the physical geography underlying the cloud is becoming increasingly critical. October's decision by the European Court of Justice, striking down key portions of the Safe Harbor rules that some companies had relied on to legally transfer personal data between Europe and the U.S., was only the latest example of the regulatory uncertainty involved in cross-border data flows. While Internet companies have begun to address challenges at the static geographic points where data is resident, understanding the actual paths that data travels is an important and sometimes overlooked part of the compliance analysis. more
"If the world is to become ever more efficient and reach global climate goals, internet power will need to play its part," warn Nate Springer and Kelly Gallo of Business for Social Responsibility. more
Toward the end of last week, the world waited with bated breath for the outcome of the 21st annual meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The meeting, commonly called COP 21, was held in Le Bourget, Paris, from November 30 to December 12; a bit too soon after the terrorists attacks on Paris earlier in November. COP 21 was important because COP 15 in Copenhagen (2009) failed to arrive at a global consensus... more
Imagine living in a country where it was necessary to register with your community government by providing a copy of one of the following... This may be necessary in perhaps a large number of nations. However, as a United States citizen and resident, I was quite surprised when my local community issued the request. I investigated and found much to my dismay, that my community in fact was required by regulation to survey its residents on a biennial basis. more