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The Telegraph reports on Facebook's
Facebook to build server farm on edge of Arctic Circle
Facebook is to build a multi-million 'mini town' on the edge of the Arctic circle to house all its computer servers, which would us as much electricity as a town of 50,000 people.
Luleå is situated at the northern tip of the Baltic Sea, just over 62 miles South of the Arctic Circle Photo: AlamyThe enormous server farm facility in Luleå, northern Sweden, to be announced officially on Thursday morning, is the first time that the social networking giant has chosen to locate a server farm outside the US.
Charlotte Observer reports on Apple getting a permit for a Solar Farm in Maiden, NC.
Apple plans solar farm at data center site
By Dianne Straley
CorrespondentPosted: Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2011MAIDEN Apple has quietly begun work on a solar farm that apparently could help power its sprawling data center in southern Catawba County.
Permits issued by Catawba County show that the Cupertino, Calif., company has been approved to reshape the slope of some of the 171 acres of vacant land it owns on Startown Road, opposite the data center, in preparation of building a solar farm.
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The engineering plans show how the company will keep soil that it moves around the site from washing into creeks and other areas. The permit has no detail about the solar farm itself, including its size. A Charlotte firm is listed on the erosion control permit as the contractor.
The plans say the site will have multiple gravel roads for access to its solar panels.
The plans are called "Project Dolphin Solar Farm A Expanded." Project Dolphin was the code name given Apple's plans to build a $1-billion data center in Maiden.
Zynga has an engineering post where they introduce their private cloud. This post is a bit old, but it provides good details on why Zynga chose to move out of AWS for its own private cloud.
Now, Zynga still does use AWS, but they are thinking from a business/financial perspective. Zynga has a hybrid cloud infrastructure, both public and private.
While our private cloud infrastructure has been growing quickly, Zynga also uses the AWS public cloud to fuel our rapid growth. Our use of AWS, while very important to our business, comes with an operating expense. Essentially, we have been trading monthly operating expenses against longer-term amortized capital expense. Yet, sometimes the pace of our growth forces us to make that tradeoff.
For example, when CityVille rapidly grew to millions of users in just six weeks, we had to grow our server infrastructure at a pace that kept up with and sometimes even outpaced this demand. In a strict capital expense model, we would have exceeded the supply chain of our equipment suppliers – the process of physically getting the number of servers ordered, shipped, delivered and implemented just takes too long. So, we traded the cost of operating expense in AWS for capital expense.
Zynga's cloud is compatible with AWS.
The zCloud is our private cloud that looks, feels, and operates in a similar fashion to the way that we use Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), our public cloud provider. As infrastructure that is private to Zynga, the ZCloud physically resides in our current datacenters and will expand as we grow our infrastructure over time.
Zynga has learned from its AWS operations and builds its own cloud with its own hardware.
While similar in functionality to AWS, our private zCloud is designed specifically for social games in terms of availability, network connectivity, server processing power and storage throughput. We have achieved these improvements by providing redundant power to each rack, state-of-the-art servers with high memory capacity, a fully non-blocking network infrastructure, the use of inline hardware-based load balancers and local disk storage.
One of the guys I always enjoy a chat with is Jones Lang LaSalle's Michael Siteman. I just got off the the phone to discuss public vs. private cloud ideas. Then I read this post on Gartner's recommendation that Private Clouds are a last resort.
Gartner: Private clouds are a last resort
Thorough analysis required to identify cloud computing benefits
By Neal Weinberg, Network World
October 19, 2011 10:00 AM ET
- 1 Comment
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Enterprises should consider public cloud services first and turn to private clouds only if the public cloud fails to meet their needs.
That was the advice delivered by analyst Daryl Plummer during Gartner's IT Symposium Tuesday. Plummer says that there are many potential benefits to deploying cloud services, including agility, reduced cost, reduced complexity, increased focus, increased innovation and being able to leverage the knowledge and skills of people outside the company.
Rob Enderle writes in disagreement with this recommendation.
At the same time, this week, Gartner took a position that was the polar opposite of the CIOs at these two events and argued that the private cloud was the last resort. This is just wrong. I’m guessing the company missed a meeting because this sentiment is shared by neither the CIOs nor vendors presenting at these events. The attendees are arguing that the private cloud may be their most important tool. What is also interesting is that were Gartner right, it would be a going-out-of-business scenario for them because public cloud services are being presented much like outsourcing and they do represent a very real threat to IT and it is IT that generally funds Gartner’s services.
The observation that Michael and I discussed is enterprises are studying the public clouds to learn how to build and operate cloud environments. Companies can then make a knowledgeable decision on whether they should buy cloud services or make their own, private cloud.
Just because you see enterprises playing in the public could doesn't mean they are going to deploy there.
And, part of the learning is what are top causes of cloud outages. Check out these top 10.
WSJ reports on the IEA's observation that coal use is rising.
Rising Use of Coal Prompts Warning
MORE IN MARKETS »By JAMES HERRON
PARIS—The world is headed for a "dire future" where high energy prices drag on economic growth and global temperatures rise dangerously, unless significant innovations are made to lower the cost of clean energy and carbon-capture technology, the International Energy Agency said.
Senior officials from the agency painted the gloomy picture of the world's current trajectory at a two-day meeting with international energy ministers and business leaders in Paris.
Participants concluded that growth in energy demand will be met largely by coal—and that the only hope of keeping global temperatures at safe levels would be in the creation of cheaper technologies to capture carbon dioxide.
"Unless much stronger action is taken," the IEA said in a statement Wednesday, "energy related CO2 emissions would rise to a level consistent with a long-term global temperature increase of more than 3.5 [degrees] Celsius, with dangerous consequences for the global environment and human welfare." Such an increase would be equivalent to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
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Current clean-energy technologies can't meet carbon-reduction targets, so in the nearer term improving energy efficiency is the most important action to take, the IEA said in the statement.
In addition, growing dependence on fossil fuels will damage economies, the IEA said. "Persistently high levels of spending on energy imports would impose a drag on economic growth in many countries," the agency warned. "The risk of serious energy-supply disruptions would continue to mount."
