Tag: datacenter

Microsoft’s ‘Project Mountain’ puts $700 million into data center powering Xbox One and Office 365 cloud

Microsoft really, really doesn’t want your Xbox One’s online services going offline. In a near $700 million investment ($677.6 million), the company’s opening a new data center in Iowa specifically aimed at powering Xbox Live and Office 365. Microsoft’s Christian Belady told Iowa’s Des Moines Register that the data center “supports the growing demand for Microsoft’s cloud services” — a much lauded function of both the Xbox One and Office 365 . Alongside the $700 million investment, the company’s getting a $6 million tax rebate from the state to move in, effective for five years. As for Microsoft’s cloud, we’ll assuredly hear more about it — for both Xbox One and Office 365 — this week at Build . Filed under: Gaming , Internet , Software , Microsoft Comments Via: NeoGAF Source: Des Moines Register

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Microsoft’s ‘Project Mountain’ puts $700 million into data center powering Xbox One and Office 365 cloud

Google buys Swedish wind farm’s entire output to power Finnish data center

Google has just secured the services of an entire 72MW wind farm in Maevaara, Sweden for the next ten years to keep its Finnish data center humming, according to the official blog. It brokered the deal through German insurer Allianz, which purchased the farm and will begin selling all the electricity it produces to Mountain View by 2015. The move is part of Google’s quest to remain carbon neutral, and is along similar lines to a recent deal which saw the search giant purchase 48MW of energy from a wind farm in Oklahoma. The news follows Apple’s announcement that it gets 75 percent of its power from renewable sources — showing the arch-foes can at least agree on something . Filed under: Misc , Internet , Google Comments Source: Google

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Google buys Swedish wind farm’s entire output to power Finnish data center

Facebook’s Open Compute Project splits up monolithic servers with help from Intel, more

As much as it’s important to have every component of a PC stuck together in a laptop, that same monolithic strategy is a major liability for server clusters: if one part breaks or grows obsolete, it can drag down everything else. Facebook and its Open Compute Project partners have just unveiled plans to loosen things up at the datacenter. A prototype, Atom -based rackmount server from Quanta Computer uses 100Gbps silicon photonics from Intel to connect parts at full speed, anywhere on the rack. Facebook has also garnered support for a new system-on-chip connection standard, rather affectionately named Group Hug, that would let owners swap in new mini systems from any vendor through PCI Express cards. The combined effect doesn’t just simplify repairs and upgrades — it lets companies build the exact servers they need without having to scrap other crucial elements in the process. There’s no definite timeframe for when we’ll see modular servers put to work, but the hope is that a cluster’s foundations will stay relevant for years instead of months. Continue reading Facebook’s Open Compute Project splits up monolithic servers with help from Intel, more Filed under: Intel , Facebook Comments Source: Open Compute Project

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Facebook’s Open Compute Project splits up monolithic servers with help from Intel, more