The Top 10 Data Center Stories for January 2020

Feb. 7, 2020
The data center industry is off to the races of 2020 at a fast clip, with top news in January featuring NTT, Equinix, DataBank, T5 Data Centers and DCF’s Eight Trends That Will Shape 2020.

February is here after an unusually warm January across the States. And it seems — according to Punxsutawney Phil, anyway — spring might be on its way early this year. Whatever the weather, the data center industry is off to the races in  2020 at a fast clip, with top news in January featuring NTT Global Data Centers, Equinix, DataBank, T5 Data Centers and more.

Here are January’s  top data center articles at Data Center Frontier, ranked by page views:

The Eight Trends That Will Shape the Data Center Industry in 2020: What’s ahead for the data center industry? We’ve identified eight themes that will shape the data center business in 2020. The big theme: data, data everywhere.

NTT Global Data Centers Debuts, Plans $7 Billion Expansion: NTT Global Data Centers plans to spend $7 billion on building new data centers, including new campuses in Hillsboro, Oregon and the Phoenix market.

Equinix Will Acquire Packet in Major Push into Edge Computing: Equinix will buy Packet in a major push into edge computing. The acquisition will allow Equinix to accelerate its interconnected edge services and add a “bare metal” cloud offering.

Will Robots Usher in the Lights-Out Data Center?: Are we on the verge of a new frontier in data center automation? Here’s a deep dive into the history of robotics in the data center, some implementations, and how they may help shape the data centers of the future.

Colony Capital Invests in DataBank, Has Big Plans in Digital Infrastructure: Colony Capital intends to be an active investor in the data center sector in 2020 and beyond. Its recent $185 million investment in DataBank provides insights to Colony’s strategy to expand aggressively into digital infrastructure.

T5 Data Centers Acquires Property for Chicago Expansion: T5 Data Centers is expanding its operations in the Greater Chicago market with the purchase of a 164,000-square-foot data center shell in the Elk Grove Technology Park.

Scorecard: Looking Back at DCF’s 2019 Predictions: Last January we identified eight themes that we believed would shape the data center business in 2019. How did we do? Let’s take a look and see how we did, ranking whether each prediction was a Hit, Miss or Too Early.

Rolling Zettabytes: Quantifying the Data Impact of Connected Cars: Autonomous cars could generate up to 5 TB of data an hour. Edge Computing World provided a closer look at how self-driving cars and the edge network will work together, and the scenarios that will will require data and storage.

Vapor IO: We’re Funded to Deploy 36 Edge Sites in Next 2 Years: Vapor IO has completed a $90 million funding that will accelerate the build-out of its micro-modular edge data centers to an additional 16 cities in 2020. The company also said Cloudflare will be a customer in all of its sites.

Growth of TikTok Boosts Data Center Appetite for ByteDance: The owner of the short-form video service TikTok leased 9 megawatts of data center space in Ashburn in 2019, highlighting how new online services can quickly become major consumers of cloud capacity.

Voices of the Industry

Data Center Frontier readers heard from experts at EdgeConneX, CoreSite, and Vertiv in January:

Edge Computing Trends for 2020 & the Next Decade: Phillip Marangella, CMO for EdgeConneX, explores how edge data centers can help us rearchitect the internet in a way that will support the flood of data and massive traffic flows generated by emerging technologies like AI, cloud gaming, VR/AR and multi-cloud deployments, and more.

De-Constructed: Building and Maintaining World-Class Data Centers: The demand for data center facilities has been high over the last several years. That demand, and continued growth in the industry, by all indications, will continue for some time. Rob Dean, the VP of Design and Construction at CoreSite, who has been working on construction projects for nearly 15 years, walks readers through the process of building and maintaining a data center in today’s market.

Hybrid Computing, Race to Deploy Among 2020 Data Center Trends to Watch: John Hewitt, President, the Americas at Vertiv, explores 2020 data center trends to keep top of mind in the new year, including hybrid computing and an increased focus on speed of facility deployment.

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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