Experts debate Apple’s plans for huge NC data center – Ars Technica

However, hosting all of that content in one location–especially in one that isn’t well situated to connect to multiple network backbones–suggests that the data center isn’t likely to be used for that purpose. At least, that’s the opinion Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge. In an interview with Cult of Mac, Miller said that the plans indicate that the data center will be about 500,000 square feet–five times the size of Apple’s current data center in Newark, CA, and one of the largest in the world. “Most new stand-alone enterprise data centers are in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 square feet,” Miller told Cult of Mac. “So this would qualify as a big-ass data center.”

A Contrarian Viewpoint on SSDs – EDN

Consequently said Peglar, there are many types of I/O operations thrown at hard disks, and therefore at SSDs. There is unstructured data with random writes, which is a bad fit for SSD storage except for certain small, tagged files (such as operating system images and boot-from-flash files that are paged into DRAM). Structured data in tables is an excellent fit for SSDs, he said, except for large, growing table spaces.

Green challenge for techies: Power down PCs at night – Network World

Next Thursday — Aug. 27 — is Power IT Down Day, an awareness-raising event sponsored by Citrix, HP, Intel and Microsoft to encourage employees to hit their power strips as they head out the door for the evening.

Computer Scientists Scale ‘Layer 2’ Data Center Networks To 100,000 Ports And Beyond – Science Daily

Today’s data centers are often run on layer 3 networks, but this demands huge numbers of person-hours to set up and maintain the networks. Layer 3 networks also prohibit straightforward implementation of virtual machine migration– limiting flexibility and efforts to reduce energy and cost in the data center.

“Our goal is to allow data center operators to manage their network as a single fabric,” said Vahdat, who directs the Center for Network Systems at UC San Diego. “We are working toward a network that administrators can think of as one massive 100,000-port switch seamlessly serving over one million virtual endpoints.”

Securing Virtual Environments in the Face of Audits – eWeek

“Virtualization makes it a lot easier to spin up new servers, and quite often change-management procedures relied on the fact that it was complicated to get a new server on the network,” said Gartner analyst John Pescatore. “[There are] a lot of unpatched and misconfigured server clones showing up.”

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