California firm to purchase 63 acres for massive data center in central Washington

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Quincy, Washington — an agricultural town near the Columbia River in central Washington — continues to attract technology companies in search of cheap power for massive data centers. The latest to arrive is Vantage Data Centers, a Santa Clara, California firm which announced this week that is has entered into a contract to purchase up… Read More…

Savvis expands data center in Seattle: Benaroya lands Marvell

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After getting gobbled up by CenturyLink, data center giant Savvis is expanding its operations in the Seattle area. The company is opening a new 27,150 feet data center in Tukwila, one of many regions where the company is expanding. (Among the clients at the new data center is Bellevue-based drugstore.com, which was acquired earlier this… Read More…

Lawmaker hopes for ‘teachable moment’ after state data center outage costs $500,000

Reuven Carlyle: A vocal critic of the state's data center operations

This is not what the state needed. After much criticism about the construction of the state’s new data center in Olympia, word comes that a power surge at the existing facility that recently took down many state government Web sites and email systems will cost taxpayers $500,000 in overtime, repairs and equipment, according to an… Read More…

Sabey, Dell push ahead with massive data centers in Quincy

intergate-quincy

The tiny town of Quincy, Washington continues to transform from agriculture to data centers.  And two large facilities, housing the computer servers that power much of the Internet economy, continue to move forward. Sabey, the Seattle real estate development firm, and Dell, the giant computer manufacturer, have both won approval from the Washington Department of… Read More…

How the cool night air of the desert led Facebook to Prineville, Oregon

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For the longest time, I assumed that Facebook chose Prineville, Oregon for its new data center because of hydroelectric power. After all, Google, Microsoft, Dell, Intuit and others established massive data centers in the region because of cheap electricity derived from the Columbia River. But The Economist interestingly points out that Prineville — located in… Read More…

Data centers aren’t sucking as much electricity as predicted

Server room (NeoSpire photo)

Massive data centers — many of which dot the Columbia River basin in Washington and Oregon — have historically been described as electricity-sucking power hogs.  But a new report from a Stanford University professor shows that electricity used to power data centers actually slowed significantly between 2005 and 2010. “This slowing was the result of… Read More…

Facebook to expand data center operations in central Oregon

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Yesterday, we told you about Facebook’s desires to find more office space in downtown Seattle. But that’s not the social networking giant’s only expansion effort in the Pacific Northwest. The company also just announced that it plans to begin construction this October on the second phase of a new data center campus in Prineville, Oregon…. Read More…

Microsoft data center GM leaves, reportedly for Apple

Kevin Timmons

The general manager in charge of Microsoft’s data center operations, Kevin Timmons, has left the company for a job at Apple, according to reports by Data Center Knowledge and the Green Data Center Blog. Timmons joined Microsoft two years ago from Yahoo. His hiring by Apple underscores the rising importance of data centers to the… Read More…

Facebook shakes things up, shares data center secrets

Facebook 'Open Compute' triplet server racks

Facebook today took the unusual step of starting to share with the world the techniques it has developed to make its data center in Prineville, Ore., dramatically more power-efficient and cost effective to operate. The company explains its mission on its new Open Compute Project site. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, said during an event… Read More…