Data Center

Apple has broken ground on a $68-million, 338,000-foot data storage complex in Prineville, Ore., across the highway from where Facebook opened its corporate data center last year, according to local reports. The center will be twice the size of a Costco store, the Oregonian reports. The $68-million price tag covers the cost of the facility and two "data halls" inside, according to plans filed with the city and Crook County last year. Apple has plans for a second data center of similar size at the site.

Each day seems to bring another development that emphasizes the staggering impact that the shift to mobile is having on traditional computing leaders.  Earlier this week, it was rumored that Dell, which has struggled to transform itself away from its dependence on PC sales, might go private.  On Thursday, it was Intel Corp.'s earnings report . While beating analyst expectations, the chip giant still saw revenue and profit fall as its...

An Israeli real estate firm has purchased a 288,000-square-foot Hawthorne data center leased to AT&T Corp. The sale marks the first Southern California investment for Red Sea Group, whose U.S. operations are based in Dallas. Red Sea is believed to have paid more than $43 million for the former Northrop Grumman Corp. facility built in 1963 at 2301 W. 120th St. Tel Aviv-based Red Sea purchased the property from Seattle's Sabey Corp.

Apple has broken ground on a $68-million, 338,000-foot data storage complex in Prineville, Ore., across the highway from where Facebook opened its corporate data center last year, according to local reports. The center will be twice the size of a Costco store, the Oregonian reports. The $68-million price tag covers the cost of the facility and two "data halls" inside, according to plans filed with the city and Crook County last year. Apple has plans for a second data center of similar size at the site.

Digital Insight Corp., an Internet banking services company, plans to duplicate its Calabasas data center later this year. The company said the second data processing center, in Herndon, Va., will ensure zero downtime in the event of equipment failure or other circumstances. As planned, either center will be able to meet processing needs at full capacity and accommodate expected growth.

Across the road from a rural cemetery, near pastures where deer roam, stands a $50-million, space-age complex of glass and steel where scientists are tracking radiation from the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center, the only government-run facility for processing information from Landsat satellites, is an anomaly in this quiet town of 963 people in southeastern South Dakota.

MedPartners Inc. said Thursday it plans to open a data center with 300 technology workers in Anaheim. The bulk of these employees will move from the company's regional headquarters in Long Beach and about eight other Southern California locations. Company officials also said they are planning to hire some additional workers. The Birmingham, Ala.

Rob Newbill wanted to help schools out of a bind. So he dropped off a heap of three-ring binders at San Fernando Elementary School on Friday, thousands of them that made a pile 40 feet long, 4 feet high and 4 feet deep. In a scene reminiscent of a stampede in a toy store, each of the school's 1,100 students got to pick out one binder. Beginning at 8:30 a.m. with teacher Madeline Johnson's third graders, one class at a time was allowed to pick through the pile for about five minutes.

Many will welcome the new millennium with champagne, kisses and colorful renditions of "Auld Lang Syne," but not Steve Clark. Instead, the 45-year-old data center guru from Washington Mutual Inc. will spend his New Year's Eve in a nondescript two-story Chatsworth office building with about a dozen technicians and lots of data-crunching hardware.

For the first time, Google has invited the world to explore its secretive data centers. The Internet giant Wednesday took several steps to show users how its data centers work, including putting out a YouTube video, which you can see above. Among the video's highlights, at the 1:15 mark you can see how Google destroys its hard drives after they break so no one can steal the data. Recently, Google and others in the tech sphere have come under criticism for their energy-hogging data centers.

A federal domestic security effort to help state and local law enforcement catch terrorists by setting up more than 70 information-sharing centers around the country has threatened civil liberties while doing little to combat terrorism, a two-year examination by a Senate subcommittee found. The so-called fusion centers were created in 2003 after the Sept. 11 commission concluded that federal, state and local law enforcement agencies needed to collaborate more in counter-terrorism efforts.

Yahoo has warned Facebook that the social networking giant may be infringing on 16 more of its patents. Yahoo sent a letter to Facebook last month alleging that the patents “may be relevant” to technology Facebook uses in its servers and data centers, Facebook disclosed in a regulatory filing Thursday. Facebook has data centers in Oregon and North Carolina. It developed its own servers to power those data centers. Facebook said Yahoo had not threatened a lawsuit but had said "it may do so in the future.

The largest industrial property transaction of 2011 in Orange County closed at the end of the year with the $47-million sale of Irvine Crossings, a real estate brokerage said. Palo Alto-based real estate investment company Menlo Equities bought the 420,000-square-foot industrial warehouse and data center on 21.7 acres from a limited liability corporation, brokerage Voit Real Estate Services said. Irvine Crossings at 17871 Von Karman Ave. and 17836 Gillette Ave. is 100% occupied by tenants Savvis and 3PL Global.

Larry Ellison just paid $1.5 billion to secure a place in the cloud. Ellison's Oracle Corp. on Monday unveiled a deal to acquire RightNow Technologies Inc., expanding its cloud-computing arsenal three weeks after rival Salesforce.com sought to minimize the tech giant's efforts in the major corporate IT trend. Shares of RightNow soared $6.98, or 19.4%, to $42.94 after Oracle announced the pact with the Bozeman, Mont., company for $43 a share. Oracle shares gained 75 cents, or 2.3%, to close at $32.87.

While most of Southern California's office rental market remains as anemic as the economy, one niche is experiencing robust growth: heavily secured offices where businesses house their all-important computer servers. Nearly all of us send and receive signals through data centers every day. Simple tasks like browsing a website, paying a restaurant bill with a credit card or making a phone call may require their services. In Los Angeles County, there are only about a dozen of these specialized buildings that protect the precious data of banks, oil companies, stores and all manner of other firms.

The largest industrial property transaction of 2011 in Orange County closed at the end of the year with the $47-million sale of Irvine Crossings, a real estate brokerage said. Palo Alto-based real estate investment company Menlo Equities bought the 420,000-square-foot industrial warehouse and data center on 21.7 acres from a limited liability corporation, brokerage Voit Real Estate Services said. Irvine Crossings at 17871 Von Karman Ave. and 17836 Gillette Ave. is 100% occupied by tenants Savvis and 3PL Global.

A blistering summer melted Arctic sea ice to near-record lows, a trajectory that scientists say could reduce ice coverage in the polar region to its lowest since satellite measurements were first taken in 1979. That's the grim assessment delivered Thursday by the National Climatic Data Center, which also calculated that global temperatures last month made it the eighth-warmest August on record, part of a general warming trend. The ice melt in August was the second-most extensive, and with a few more weeks left of melting, it's possible that the record lows of 2007 could be matched, according to Jake Crouch, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

As hackers continue their rampage against the world's largest banks, defense contractors and technology companies, executives and government officials are confronting a sobering truth: The bad guys are winning. The seemingly unending string of high-profile attacks, most recently against Citigroup Inc. and Sony Corp., have shown that nearly every organization is vulnerable to a growing contingent of well-trained and agile attackers who are finding security holes faster than they can be plugged.