Superstorm Sandy made itself felt big time in data centers in New York, New Jersey and surrounding areas last week, sparking concerns about the impact of climate change on data center deployment plans and the power grid.
Not that they’re saying anything publicly but the companies that run the data centers in and around the New York financial services hub have to be wondering how to deal with such storms going forward.
Scratch a cloud, you’ll find data centers
Recent research from IDC shows that the total number of data centers will fall to 2.89 million in the US in 2016 from 2.94 million this year. (IDC includses internal server rooms and closets in its count.) One reason is that companies will not build as many small data centers in house and will shift more work to the cloud computing typicaly handled by the mega data centers built by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. That means while the number of data centers — including company server rooms nad closets is falling– total data center space will actually grow to 700 million square feet in 2016 from 611.4 million square feet, this year.
Cedexis offers load-balancing to AWS shops
A cottage industry is growing up around helping customers use their Amazon Web Services most efficiently. Cedexis last week announced an extension to its OpenMix software-as-a-Service that it said will help Amazon EC2 customers route their traffic around multiple AWS regions.
The Multi Region Load Balancer (MRLB) service uses real-time information about latency and throughput to redirect traffic, as needed according to the company. The service is available o the Amazon Marketplace . Cedexis Multi Region Load Balancer can help companies assure better performance even during weather-related emergencies by shifting workloads around trouble spots. Problems in one of the availability zones in Amazon’s US-East data center complex in Ashburn, Virg. caused problems for Amazon customers like Reddit a few weeks ago. In theory, tools like this one from Cedexis could more proactively spot trouble zones and move work around to avert outages.
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