Data Centres

Online

Facebook Data Centre Uses As Much Power As The Entire County It’s In

1:00AM February 1, 2012 | Jamie Condliffe

Data centres are power-hungry, and Facebook’s Oregon centre in Crook County is no exception, using 28MW. While that’s fairly standard, it has doubled the power use of the county. More »

Online

Google’s New Data Centre Is An Abandoned Paper Mill In Finland

12:30AM January 31, 2012 | Jamie Condliffe

I don’t know what it is about new data centres, but they all seem to resemble the evil lairs of Bond-movie villains. Google’s latest, based in a disused paper mill in Finland, is no exception. More »

Online

Facebook Data Centre Goes Arctic For Chilling Effect

2:30AM October 28, 2011 | Sam Gibbs - Gizmodo UK

When you think of Facebook you don’t exactly think ‘environmentally friendly’. All those data centres burning through electricity, powering your virtual social lives. Facebook’s first push out of the US might be a tad kinder to the environment, using Arctic cooling. More »

Computing

Why Google Needs To Peep At The World’s Most Efficient Data Centre

10:00PM September 15, 2011 | Andrew Tarantola

114. That’s how many HP EcoPOD server systems it would take to power all of Google. More »

Science

Google Uses More Power Than Salt Lake City

5:20AM September 9, 2011 | Casey Chan

Google just announced that its data centres use 260 million watts to power Google searches, YouTube videos, Gmails, ads and so on and so on. That’s about a quarter of the output of a freaking nuclear power plant. Or more power than Salt Lake City uses. More »

Online

Amazon: The Official Cloud Server Of The US Government

2:55AM August 18, 2011 | Adrian Covert

The US Government is no stranger to Amazon’s data centres: they’ve used them for sites like Recovery.gov and Energy.gov. But after shuttering 40 per cent of their data centres, the Government is looking to Amazon to house data that’s considerably more sensitive. More »

Computing

Google’s Data Centres Use Less Electricity Than You Think

1:11PM August 2, 2011 | Kelly Hodgkins

Google has never been upfront about its electricity usage, but with all those data centres, its power consumption was expected to be enormous. Apparently, these estimates have been way off. More »

Computing

US Government Shutting Down 40% Of Its Data Centres

1:20AM July 21, 2011 | Kwame Opam

Continuing with their spring (summer?) cleaning, the government has elected to shut down 800 of their vast collection of 2000 data centres across the country over the next four years. Officials expect the pruning to save us billions. More »

Online

FBI Raids Data Centre, Seizes Servers, Knocks Big Sites Offline

8:19AM June 22, 2011 | Adrian Covert

For reasons unknown, the FBI raided a data centre and seized several servers, causing known online brands, including Pinboard and those in the Curbed network, to go offline. More »

Software

You Can Finally Check Out Apple’s Data Centre On Google Earth

11:06PM June 1, 2011 | Kat Hannaford

We already knew what Apple’s 46,450sqm iCloud data centre looked like thanks to some sneaky filming, but if you were to type in “6081 Startown Road” to Google Maps, you’d see nothing but green fields. Until now. More »