Microsoft expands further on its already massive Boydton, Virginia data centre-- the company will add two additional facilities to the campus, with a combination of regular data centres and custom-designed modules. 

Kicked off in 2010 before a 2011 expansion, the data centre cost Microsoft around $1 billion in total. 

According to Microsoft the expanded facilities will power its growing cloud operations and "showcase state-of-the-art designs developed from our latest technology and infrastructure research that continues to minimize water, energy Read more...

IHS iSuppli reports global 2013 microserver shipments will grow by 230% in comparison to 2012 thanks to booming demand from mobile and cloud computing services. 

The microserver segment covers general-purpose machines housing single or multiple low-power microprocessors usually consuming less than 45W per motherboard.

According to the analyst microserver shipments will reach 291000 units this year, up from 88000 units in 2012 and just 19000 in 2011, before growing to around 12 million by end 2016 with a CAGR of 130%, the fastest server growth rate for the period.  Read more...

Cisco refreshes its data centre and cloud networking equipment lineup with a focus on 40-Gigabit ethernet, cloud-to-cloud management, opensource networking and software-defined networking (SDN). 

Part of the company's Unified Data Centre strategy, new products include additions to the Nexus 6000 switch series-- the Nexus 6004 (fits 96 40Gbps ethernet ports or 384 10GbE ports into a single 4U solution) and the Nexus 6001 (fits 48 10GbE and 4 40GbE in 1U), both with ethernet and fibre channel over enternet (FCoE) traffic support. 

The Nexus 7000 data centre core switch gets an addition with the Network Analysis Module (NAM) services blade, available in either hardware or virtualised (vNAM) versions.  Read more...

NCS launches the Bunker XRV-5241-- a rugged 1U short-depth server fitting in tight spaces designed for military and industrial deployments such as civilian first responders and outdoor construction. 

It meets all military performance specifications, including MIL-STD-810G, MIL-S-901D and MIL-STD-167 environmental, shorck and vibration requirements. 

Inside are dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processors, up to 256GB of DDR3-1600MHz RAM (in up to x8 DIMM slots), x4 2.5-inch hot-swappable HDDs, dual ethernet ports and multiple PCI-E 3.0 expansion capabilities.  Read more...