The Data Center Cloud Built

This month (February), we focus on data centers built to support the Cloud. As cloud computing becomes the dominant form of IT, it exerts a greater and greater influence on the industry, from infrastructure and business strategy to design and location. Webscale giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have perfected the art and science of cloud data centers. The next wave is bringing the cloud data center to enterprise IT… or the other way around!

Here's a collection of stories that ran on Data Center Knowledge in February, focusing on the data center and the cloud:

Telco Central Offices Get Second Life as Cloud Data Centers - As AT&T and other major telcos, such as Verizon, upend their sprawling network infrastructure to make it more agile through software, most of those facilities will eventually look less like typical central offices and more like cloud data centers.

AT&T switching facility (Photo by John W. Adkisson/Getty Images)

Cloud Underwater? Microsoft Tests Submarine Data Center - Continuing its long tradition of data center experimentation in the name of efficiency, Microsoft announced it has been testing an unusual new data center concept: placing servers underwater out in the ocean.

Project Natick, Microsoft's experimental underwater data center, being deployed off the coast of California (Photo: Microsoft)

Next-Generation Convergence is the Future of Cloud and Data Center - Today, the data center is tasked with supporting more users, who are accessing more applications and resources. All of this translates to creating better data center controls and enabling even greater levels of multi-tenancy.

LinkedIn Designs Own 100G Data Center Switch - Following examples set by other web-scale data center operators, companies like Google and Facebook, the infrastructure engineering team behind the professional social network LinkedIn has designed its own data center networking switch to replace networking technology supplied by the major vendors, saying the off-the-shelf products were inadequate for the company’s needs.

Pigeon, LinkedIn's first-generation 100G data center switch (Image: LinkedIn)

What’s Behind Rackspace’s Private OpenStack Cloud Partnership with Red Hat- OpenStack is hard. It’s hard to take the conglomeration of about 20 open source projects, each at its own stage of maturity, collectively referred to as OpenStack, and turn it into a functioning cloud. This has created a whole services market for companies that can help users stand up their own OpenStack clouds, and Rackspace is going after this market hard.

Red Hat corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina (Photo: Red Hat)