The Top 10 Data Center Stories of 2015

The data center industry never stands still. Innovation is our focus here at Data Center Frontier, so it’s not surprising that many of our most popular stories of 2015 involved new approaches to challenges in storage, cooling and data center design. The other major theme was scale, and the continued super-sizing of cloud campuses housing multiple data centers. Here’s a look at our reader’s choices for the Top 10 Data Center Stories of 2015 at Data Center Frontier, ranked by page views.

• Inside Facebook’s Blu-Ray Cold Storage Center: The Blu-Ray disks you use to watch movies can now store your Facebook photos and status updates. We take a look inside Facebook’s cold storage data center.
• Inside Amazon’s Cloud Computing Infrastructure: The AWS cloud platform has become critical to many of its more than 1 million customers. We look at how Amazon builds its data centers, and the scale and design of its infrastructure.
• Immersion Cooling at Scale: BitFury Pushes Density to 250kW Per Rack: Bitcoin specialist BitFury will use immersion cooling to manage power densities of 250kW per enclosure. It’s the largest implementation yet of immersion cooling, which houses servers in enclosures filled with fluid, and pushes the boundaries of rack densities.
• The Immersion Supercomputer: Extreme Efficiency, Needs No Water: A supercomputer immersed it in tanks of liquid coolant? This sci-fi scenario has created a real-world scientific computing powerhouse.
• The Top 10 Cloud Campuses: These huge campuses are where the cloud lives – the physical manifestation of the Internet, where the Titans of the Internet concentrate massive amounts of computing power in data center hubs.
• Carrier Hotels Are Sexy Again: Meet-me rooms are gaining investment, with Netrality, Infomart and Telx reinforcing the enduring value proposition of wired real estate in major cities.
• Switch Confirms Plans for Massive Michigan Data Center: The company will build a huge SUPERNAP data center complex in Grand Rapids, Michigan after the passage of tax incentives that were crucial to the deal.
• Has the Floating Data Center Finally Arrived? Nautilus Data Technologies says it has developed a floating data center that can dramatically slash the cost of cooling servers. Is the market ready for the data barge?
• What RagingWire’s 1 Million SF Data Center Tells Us About The Cloud: The announcement of a 1 million square foot data center project near Dallas reinforces a trend we’ve been highlighting here at Data Center Frontier – the super-sizing of the data center campus.
• Server Farms Write Large: Super-Sizing the Cloud Campus: Internet titans are concentrating massive amounts of computing power in regional cloud campuses housing multiple data centers. We bring you inside a Facebook data center campus.

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