Sunday, July 15, 2012

Data centers, new Twitter, and the Olympics ? Weekend must-read articles #23

Data centers

This week we bring you a lively mix of topics, all interesting and engaging in their own ways. There?s something about squirrels and mega data centers, Digg.com and Twitter gets mentions, and some really good reading about the technology of the London Olympics.

Every week we bring you a collection?of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

This week?s suggested reading

Surviving Electric Squirrels and UPS Failures : Data Center Knowledge

Folks who?ve worked in the data center industry for a while tend to have their squirrel stories. Mike Christian, who runs business continuity for Yahoo, shared his recently during a keynote at the O?Reilly Velocity conference in a presentation titled ?Frying Squirrels and Unspun Gyros,? which examined the many ways that data centers can fail. ?A frying squirrel took out half of our Santa Clara data center two years back,? Christian said, noting squirrels? propensity to interact with electrical equipment, with unfortunate results. If you enter ?squirrel outage? in either Google News or Google web search, you?ll find a lengthy record of both recent and historic incidents of squirrels causing local power outages.

4-part series on the mega data centers in North Carolina : GigaOM

Apple, Google, Facebook and other Internet giants have chosen a several hundred-mile stretch of land north of Charlotte, North Carolina to build their mega east coast data centers. These are some of the largest data centers in the world for some of the most powerful Internet and tech companies on the planet. Why here? Will this continue in the future? And what?s been the affect on the local communities? Check out the 4-part series I published this week on North Carolina?s mega data center cluster, the resources that go into these things, and why one, in particular, is betting on clean power.

7 Ways Digg Dug Its Own Grave: PCworld

Once a high-flying web property, Digg was sold Thursday for a paltry $500,000. The sale to Betaworks, maker of an iOS news aggregator app and an URL clipper, Bit.ly, was a fraction of the $45 million lavished on the venture by Silicon Valley money lenders since its founding in 2004. Why did Digg fall on hard times? Here are seven reasons.

Also read The ?digg this? button was already almost extinct

Are you ready for a new Twitter?

Many people will criticize me, my proposal, my past failures, my motivations. Fair enough. But I care too much, and think this is too important to run the risk of not trying. I knowingly risk a huge public failure because I truly, sincerely believe in this project. You, the people that read my blog, tweet my posts, and comment on Hacker News have fired me up so much about this proposed service that I have had trouble sleeping. Thank you for inspiring me. I know in my gut this proposal can and should succeed, but I need your help. Please help me manifest the service that we wish existed.

Also read What Twitter could have been.

Uptime Institute 2012 data center industry survey

Uptime Institute conducted its second annual data center industry survey in March and April 2012, collecting data on Digital Infrastructure deployment trends, procurement plans, measurement and standards practices, and other topics that impact the mission-critical data center industry. The Institute?s invitation to the industry at large was met by 2,000 stakeholders, including vendors, consultants, and users. This paper primarily focuses on the 1,100 owners and operators from around the world.

The worst security snafus of 2012 ? so far: Networkworld

Could things really be this bad? From the embarrassing hack of a conversation between the FBI and Scotland Yard to a plethora of data breaches, security snafus have ruled the first half of 2012. Here?s a look at some of the worst snafus month-by-month.

London 2012 Olympics: How athletes use technology to win medals: Guardian

Ever since the first ancient Greek chipped away at a lump of stone to give it the smooth, aerodynamic properties of a discus, sportsmen and engineers have been looking at ways to enhance performance ? while some of those denied medals have been crying foul. A new report from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers suggests that technological innovation is now an integral part of sport at the highest level, and that Olympic competition is not just about who is fastest ? but whose kit is smartest.

London 2012 Olympics website uses open source for winning results: Computerworld UK

The London 2012 Olympics begin in a matter of weeks. I bumped into Russ Ede, who is responsible for the London 2012 Olympics website, and he shared some amazing information about what it takes to create a website that can stand up to the most widely watched sports event in the world.

How Bleacher Report is preparing for Olympic-sized web traffic: VecntureBeat

Bleacher Report is the third-most visited sports website in the U.S., behind massive brands ESPN and Yahoo Sports (both backed by huge corporations). You don?t get to millions of monthly visitors and peak traffic of 80,000 page requests a minute by ignoring scalability. But the soon-to-be-live 2012 London Olympics promises to triple the independent site?s pageviews.

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