As he announced record earnings powered by his company’s cloud computing business, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella captured the wave of change sweeping the global IT landscape.
“What we are witnessing is the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry,” Nadella said. “We are building Azure as the world’s computer to support organizations growing cloud needs.”
The extraordinary growth of Microsoft and rival cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services and Google has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As infrastructure developers race to keep pace with cloud demand, business from these “hyperscale” customers is driving record growth for the data center industry.
Data Center Leasing Approached 700 Megawatts in 2020
A look inside a 6 megawatt data hall in the QTS Data Centers campus near Richmond, Virginia. (Photo: Rich Miller)
It was a blockbuster year for the data center industry in 2020, as customers leased a record of nearly 700 megawatts of IT capacity from multi-tenant service providers, according to a new report.
That total was more than twice the previous record from 2018, as the COVID-19 pandemic created extraordinary demand for data center space as the world shifted to digital operations for work, school and play. The report was the latest in a series of year-end updates on the wholesale data center from North American Data Centers.
Nashville Explosion: AT&T Repairs Damage to its Building and Network
AT&T deploys a temporary cell tower in Nashville, with the company s iconic office tower visible at left. A Christmas Day explosion damaged the company s central office on Second Avenue, causing widespread network outages. (Image: AT&T)
AT&T is working to repair key infrastructure after a Christmas day explosion damaged its regional telecom hub in Nashville, disrupting telecom services across much of the Southeast. Police say the “intentional” detonation of a recreational vehicle killed the bomber, but have not yet determined a motive for the incident.
The blast knocked out the primary power connections for the AT&T central office at 185 Second Avenue, and caused flooding that knocked out the building’s emergency backup generators. The resulting outage interrupted 911 services in Tennessee and Kentucky, and caused mobile network outages across the region.
Google Looks to Batteries as Replacement for Diesel Generators
The blinking lights of racks of Google servers glow in a darkened data hall in St. Ghislain, Belgium. (Image: Google)
Google will use large batteries to replace the diesel generators at one of its data centers in Belgium, describing the project as a first step towards using cleaner technologies to provide backup power for its millions of servers around the world.
“Our project in Belgium is a first step that we hope will lay the groundwork for a big vision: a world in which backup systems at data centers go from climate change problems to critical components in carbon-free energy systems,” said Joe Kava, Vice President for Data Centers at Google. “We’re aiming to demonstrate that a better, cleaner solution has advanced far enough to keep the internet up and running.”