Frontier Spotlight: The Top Data Center Stories for December 2017

Jan. 16, 2018
The top data center stories for December 2017 centered around mergers and acquisitions that mean big shifts in the colocation industry. Read on to see what your peers were reading as 2017 wrapped up, and find all of the most popular stories on Data Center Frontier during December in one place.

The top data center stories for December 2017 on Data Center Frontier focused on what was a huge trend last year in the colocation market — big mergers and acquisitions. In fact, the top two most popular stories in December centered around big growth from Iron Mountain. Facebook, Sabey Data Centers, Verne Global and more showed up in the most-read headlines, as well.

Find out what data center experts were reading and writing about as 2017 came to a close. Here’s a look at the top data center stories for December 2017 at Data Center Frontier, ranked by page views:

Modular data centers fill a portion of an IO data center. Iron Mountain has agreed to acquire IO for $1.3 billion, the companies said today. (Photo: IO)

Iron Mountain Acquires IO Data Centers for $1.3 Billion :Iron Mountain is acquiring IO Data Centers in a $1.3 billion deal that will add four data centers to its growing footprint. The deal continues the rapid consolidation in the data center industry.

With Flurry of Deals, Iron Mountain Accelerates its Growth: Iron Mountain closed 2017 with a flurry, announcing three acquisitions and opening a new data center campus. Iron Mountain’s Mark Kidd talks about what’s next.

Data Center Sale-Leaseback Deals On the Rise; Expect More in 2018: 2018 is shaping up as a big year for sale-leaseback deals, due to the increased number of properties available and more service providers embracing the strategy as an attractive way to expand into new markets.

Data Center M&A Scorecard: The Deals That Are Shaping the Cloud:2017 was a landmark year for consolidation in the data center industry, including the megamerger between Digital Realty and DFT. Here’s a recap of the biggest deals from last year.

A Vision for the Edge: Vapor IO Refines Network, Data Center Designs : Vapor IO has unveiled its vision for edge computing, powered by a platform using cloud concepts to create a high availability colocation network across clusters of compute nodes.

How the Rise of AI is Shaping the Data Center Industry : The rapid growth of AI is contributing to the building of new services, as well as enhancing products already on the market. And this trend has direct design implications for data centers. Find out how the expanding AI industry could change the face of colocation.

Sabey Data Centers Set to Expand in Ashburn, Quincy : Sabey Data Centers has arranged $250 million in financing to expand its data center campuses in Ashburn, Virginia and Quincy, Washington.

Iceland’s Verne Global Launches HPC-as-a-Service: Verne Global introduced hpcDIRECT, a new HPC-as-a-service platform offering cloud hosting tailored for resource-intensive technical workloads.

Facebook Unveils Major Data Center Campus Expansion in Prineville: Facebook will build two new data centers as it expands its campus in Prineville, Oregon, where the company built its very first data center back in 2011.

Construction on Facebook’s data center campus in Prineville, Oregon in July 2016. (Photo: Rich Miller)

ROOT Data Center Will Use AI to Monitor its Generators: ROOT Data Center announced that it is teaming with LitBit to use artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor its backup generators, marking the first use of AI to reduce the risk of data center outages.

Voices of the Industry

Data Center Frontier readers were also apt to review industry expert insight through the site’s columns that explore some of the most talked-about topics in the data center industry.

Data Center Frontier’s Voices of the Industry columns also raked in page views this past December. Top-read columns included insight on applying open source strategies to the data center, as well as data center and colocation projections for the rest of 2018.

Here’s a look at the most popular Voices of the Industry posts from December 2017:
2018 Data Center & Colocation Projections : In 2018, colo providers will try their best to innovate to integrate with customers’ cloud environments and delivery models. In this week’s Voices of the Industry, Mark Jobson, Director of Product Marketing for Iron Mountain’s data center business unit, discusses 2018 data center and colocation projections, and what the next year may hold for the two industries.

Caveat Emptor: Let The Buyer Beware When Buying Renewable Energy : For the data center industry, when it comes to renewable energy we need to follow the principle we learned in our Intro to Economics class – caveat emptor or “let the buyer beware.” In this week’s Voices of the Industry, Phillip Sandino, Vice President of Data Center Operations at RagingWire Data Centers, examines how data centers can improve their renewable energy usage.

[clickToTweet tweet=”In 2018, colo providers will try to innovate to integrate with customers’ cloud environments and delivery models.” quote=”In 2018, colo providers will try to innovate to integrate with customers’ cloud environments and delivery models.”]

Applying Open Source Strategies to the Data Center : The beauty of open source is in the ecosystem of experts, specialists, and innovators who are sharing knowledge with each other, forging different routes to solve the same problem. In this edition of Voices of the Industry, Aligned Energy’s Kirk Offel, explores the importance of vendors’ participation in data center design, build, and operation and the power of the ecosystem to reduce cost, increase speed, and make the data center more adaptive.

Keep pace with the fact-moving world of data centers and cloud computing by following us on Twitter and Facebook, connecting with Data Center Frontier editor Rich Miller on LinkedIn, and signing up for our weekly newspaper using the form below. 

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