8 Data Centers For Cloud’s Toughest Jobs

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Keith Dawson.

Companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook don’t just innovate with products: Just look at their data centers. The designs and operations playbooks of these new centers aim to lower costs, increase reliability and maintainability, and improve agility, while reducing energy use and carbon footprint.

As big data and cloud computing push the limits of traditional data centers, new trends in data center innovation have followed. Google started the ball rolling when it scaled up its search operations starting in the late 1990s. By 2001, Google, still three years away from its IPO, was building its own servers from piece-parts, seeking not only economy but also reliability and ease of maintenance. Prior to 2003, Google was investigating putting large numbers of servers in a shipping container. That year it applied for a patent on the idea of the modular, drop-in-place data center…

Back then, Google was saying very little about its data center operations. A favorite Silicon Valley guessing game was to speculate on how many servers the company ran. The search giant was gradually forced into more transparency by the rapid rise of Facebook, which discussed its operations in detail…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/8-data-centers-for-clouds-toughest-jobs/d/d-id/1114199

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