Cabinets filled with servers in a Facebook data center. A story about the company's insights gained during last year's Leap Second bug was the most popular item with DCK readers in August. (Photo: Facebook)
The impact of a "leap second" on servers at Facebook and the number of servers at Rackspace were the most popular stories of the month, followed closely by outages at major hosting companies and how "space weather" effects a data center. Other popular topics this month was our coverage of the possibilities of the future, such as "the new data center operating system" and "fog computing." Here are the most viewed stories on Data Center Knowledge for August 2013, ranked by page views. Enjoy!
- A Storm of Servers: How the Leap Second Led Facebook to Build DCIM Tools - August 6 - Last July 1, the "Leap Second" bug caused many Linux servers to get stuck in a loop, endlessly checking the date and time. At the Internet's busiest data centers, power usage almost instantly spiked by megawatts. Here's a look at Facebook's experience, which has led the company to develop its own DCIM tools.
- Rackspace Adding 50 Servers Per Day - August 12 - The growth is back at Rackspace Hosting. The cloud computing specialist added 4,762 physical servers in the second quarter of 2013, an average of 52 servers per day.
- Major Outage for BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster - August 2 - A Utah data center supporting some of the web hosting industry's best known brands has suffered a networking outage, causing an extended service outage. The problems at a Provo, Utah facility operated by Endurance International Group, have led to downtime for customers of BlueHost, HostGator and HostMonster.
- Space Weather and the Data Center: The Risk from Solar Storms -August 9 - Solar flares are a potential threat to critical infrastructure, according to NASA scientists. who say the sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip, an event that creates an elevated risk of solar activity and "space weather." One concern for data center providers is the potential for solar storms, which can wreak havoc on infrastructure.
- Defining the New Data Center Operating System - August 16 - The abstraction of the hardware layer within the data center means we are able to utilize new types of controls around our data center. New technologies are being deployed within the data center at a very fast pace. We take a look at how the future data center environment will be managed.
- IBM, Google Team on OpenPOWER Consortium - August 7 - In a bid to reinvigorate its POWER processor architecture, IBM this week announced a new development alliance called the OpenPOWER Consortium, with Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan as initial members.
- IO Conducts PUE Faceoff: Modular vs. Raised Floor - August 20 - Which delivers the best energy efficiency: raised-floor space or a modular data center? It's a hard question to answer in a satisfying fashion without comparing apples and oranges. IO has compared the PUE performance of both models within a single facility.
- Strong Growth Continues for Cloud Provider DigitalOcean - August 5 - DigitalOcean launched not too long ago, in 2011. In a short timeframe, the company's growth has sky-rocketed, prompting it to open up additional space with Telx, in the Google-owned 111 8th Avenue building in New York City.
- Welcome to Fog Computing: Extending the Cloud to the Edge- There's a new buzz word in distributed computing - Fog Computing. The idea of fog computing is to distribute data to move it closer to the end-user to eliminate latency and numerous hops, and support mobile computing and data streaming.
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