The Top 10 Data Center Stories of 2021

It’s been an extraordinary year for the data center industry, featuring huge mergers and continued growth for cloud computing. But as cloud platforms become more essential to our everyday lives, outages that take Internet services offline have become big news.

That’s reflected in the most widely-read stories of the year at Data Center Frontier, which were topped by high-profile outages for Facebook and OVH. The Facebook outage was notable for its breadth, impacting billions of users across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. The downtime at OVH was caused by a fire that destroyed one data center and left another unusable. Both incidents, along with a high-impact December outage for Amazon Web Services, serve to underscore the need to remain vigilant about uptime.

Scale and innovation played featured roles in many of the other stories that gained a large audience among our readers. Here are the 10 most popular stories on Data Center Frontier in 2021, ranked by page views:

Facebook: We Disconnected Our Data Centers From the Internet: A detailed look inside Facebook’s October 4 outage, in which a configuration error broke its connection to a key network backbone, disconnecting all of its data centers from the Internet and leaving its DNS servers unreachable.

OVH Data Center in France Destroyed by Fire, All Staff Safe: In an extraordinary incident, a fire destroyed one data center and damaged another at an OVH campus in Strasbourg, France.

The Eight Trends That Will Shape the Data Center Industry in 2021: Our annual industry forecast is always one of the best-read articles here at Data Center Frontier. How did we do? Watch next week for our recap and scorecard.

SpaceX Gets Connected: Satellite Broadband Meets the Data Center: SpaceX, Amazon, OneWeb and Telesat all plan to offer low-latency broadband via constellations of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites. DCF contributor Doug Mohney provides an overview of the LEO broadband players, strategies and what these services will mean for the data center industry.

Data Center Gone Wild: Zillow Listing Captures Internet’s Imagination: In July, house shoppers browsing Zillow seeking homes in the Dallas area are encountering an unusual opportunity: A former data center being offered for sale as the “ultimate safe house.”

AWS Has Spent $35 Billion on its Northern Virginia Data Centers: Amazon’s extraordinary investment in the region illustrates the enormous impact data centers can have on regional economies. This was one of several popular stories documenting the epic scale of cloud growth.

Microsoft Tests Immersion Cooling Tech from Bitcoin Mining for its Cloud Servers: As powerful new AI hardware presents cooling challenges, Microsoft sees dunking its servers in coolant as a promising technology for future data centers.

Equinix is Exiting Some Leased Data Centers in Major Markets: When the largest player in colocation shared plans to exit leased data center space in four major markets across the U.S., the industry took notice. The company plans to migrate customers to newer Equinix facilities in the same markets

Facebook Has 47 Data Centers Under Construction: This was the headline on Meta’s update on its data center journey on the 10th anniversary of opening its first data center. The company’s construction effort reflecte the extraordinary scope of the ongoing expansion of world’s digital infrastructure.

Equinix Introduces Factory-Built Data Center Design for Edge Computing: Equinix has introduced a new data center design for edge computing, which uses factory-built modules to add capacity in smaller increments. The new design is being deployed for the first time in a new facility in Bordeaux, France.

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