FACT: Information Week has a solid story today, “Inside Microsoft’s $550 Million Mega Data Centers,” with a tour of the new San Antonio data center under construction. It’s of the “Quincy-class” (our term in homage to Navy lingo, meaning big, but not the biggest of aircraft carriers; that would be the Chicago-class data center, see below). The reporter writes: “By September, it’ll be the newest star in Microsoft’s rapidly expanding collection of massive data centers, powering Microsoft’s forays into cloud computing like Live Mesh and Exchange Online, among plenty of other as-yet-unannounced services.”
ANALYSIS: I get asked about “the new way to build data centers” more often than any other question but one by government technology professionals. The most popular question, and it’s related, is about cloud computing. They both came up today during a meeting with one of the National Labs.
Filed under: Technology | Tagged: Chicago, cloud, cloud computing, cluster computing, computer, data center, data centers, Dryad, Google, grid, grid computing, high-performance computing, HPC, IT, Live Labs, MapReduce, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, Quincy, San Antonio, tech, Technology, web | 3 Comments »
else’s compute capacity, web apps, services, storage, etc. Some others, however, as Amazon and others roll out their branded ability to do that reach, are beginning to call these “clouds” — I prefer to think about them as distinct platforms enabling cloud computing, but that’s starting to become a hazy definition. 
given the attention and reposting/rehosting it has already received, the glare of publicity can only serve to prod better security practices. 
Shepherd's Pi 