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Facebook has announced it will build a new energy-efficient data centre in Odense, Denmark, marking a continued expansion for tech firms choosing to store their data in the Nordic regions.

According to a report from Reuters, Niall McEntegart, Facebook director of data centre operations, told local authorities that the Odense data centre will be “one of the most advanced, energy-efficient data centres in the world.” The social giant acquired a 0.5 square kilometre plot of land in the Danish city last year.

The expansion marks the third data centre from the company outside the US, with facilities already in Lulea, Sweden, and Clonee in Ireland. Writing at the time of the Clonee launch this time last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that the facility will be cooled with outdoor air with an indirect air cooling process to filter the salt from the Irish Sea air. It is a similar process to the one which Rackspace unveiled in 2015 for its data centre in West Crawley, and again signifies the advantages of the natural temperatures in the area.

The data centre facilities in Lulea are well documented, with Facebook being the most prominent customer of The Node Pole. Swedish data centre providers also enjoy significant electricity cuts as of January 1 after parliamentary legislation was secured in November last year. The rates were down to 0.005 krona, or 0.00054 US dollars per kWh, as of January 1 2017 at a 97% cut.

Speaking to this publication in 2015, Anne Graf, then investment and development director of The Node Pole, explained the importance of the Swedish premiership recognising the potential of the data centre industry in the region. “Facebook has been hugely important, not only for the Node Pole but also for the region, both in terms of jobs created and bringing this industry to the attention of Sweden,” she said.

Danish energy minister Lars Lilleholt said in a statement that Denmark has “one of the world’s greatest energy systems, with large quantities of green energy, high security of supply, good fibre connections and competitive power prices.”

Web Real-Time Communication APIs have quickly revolutionized what browsers are capable of. In addition to video and audio streams, we can now bi-directionally send arbitrary data over WebRTC’s PeerConnection Data Channels. With the advent of Progressive Web Apps and new hardware APIs such as WebBluetooh and WebUSB, we can finally enable users to stitch together the Internet of Things directly from their browsers while communicating privately and securely in a decentralized way.

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DevOps is all the rage these days and with good reason as it promises to reduce the time-to-market for new applications. It also promises to improve change management, allowing teams to deploy changes to their applications quickly and efficiently. However, DevOps isn’t something you buy, install, or implement; rather it is the symptom of an appropriate organizational system. In his session at DevOps Summit, Mark Thiele, EVP, Data Center Technologies at SUPERNAP International, discussed how to get to the right organizational model that will allow DevOps practices to flourish.

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Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker. Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of being reserved to the largest, most complex application stacks.

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Hardware virtualization and cloud computing allowed us to increase resource utilization and increase our flexibility to respond to business demand. Docker Containers are the next quantum leap – Are they?! Databases always represented an additional set of challenges unique to running workloads requiring a maximum of I/O, network, CPU resources combined with data locality.

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The speed of software changes in growing and large scale rapid-paced DevOps environments presents a challenge for continuous testing. Many organizations struggle to get this right. Practices that work for small scale continuous testing may not be sufficient as the requirements grow.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Marc Hornbeek, Sr. Solutions Architect of DevOps continuous test solutions at Spirent Communications, explained the best practices of continuous testing at high scale, which is relevant to small scale DevOps, and if there is an expectation of growth as the number of build targets, test topologies and delivery topologies that need to be orchestrated rapidly grow.

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(c)iStock.com/DanielBendjy

IBM has secured a major cloud customer win in the form of the US Army with a potential $62 million (£50.3m) contract over five years, the company has announced.

The deal, which is designed for the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, is for the Army Private Cloud Enterprise (APCE) program and comes under the Army Private Cloud 2 (APC2) contract, which is an ‘indefinite delivery’ deal which started on December 31 last year and expires exactly five years later.

Alongside building the infrastructure, the deal will also see infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings provided by IBM. The Armonk giant expects the Army to migrate up to 35 of its current applications to the private cloud in the coming 12 months.

“With this project, we’re beginning to bring the IT infrastructure of the US Army into the 21st century,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Ferrell, US Army CIO in a statement. “Cloud computing is a game-changing architecture that provides improved performance with high efficiency, all in a secure environment.”

“Clients today are increasingly looking at the cloud as a pathway to innovation,” said Sam Gordy, IBM US federal general manager. “This IBM Cloud solution will provide the Army with greater flexibility and will go a long way toward mitigating, and, in some cases eliminating, the security challenges inherent with multiple ingress and egress points.”

IBM’s classification of impact level 5 (IL-5) from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) enables this project to go ahead. The Army expects IBM to achieve DISA IL-6 certification in the coming year; the IL-6 is the highest possible level of security and enables IBM to work with classified information up to ‘secret’.

This move marks a significant change from just four years ago; back in April 2013, a report from the Inspector General of the United States Department of Defense argued that the Army’s previous CIO – Ferrell was nominated for the role in December of that year – was unaware of more than 14,000 mobile devices used throughout the organisation.

The deal will cost $62m ‘if the Army exercises all options’, IBM added.

(c)iStock.com/DanielBendjy

IBM has secured a major cloud customer win in the form of the US Army with a potential $62 million (£50.3m) contract over five years, the company has announced.

The deal, which is designed for the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, is for the Army Private Cloud Enterprise (APCE) program and comes under the Army Private Cloud 2 (APC2) contract, which is an ‘indefinite delivery’ deal which started on December 31 last year and expires exactly five years later.

Alongside building the infrastructure, the deal will also see infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings provided by IBM. The Armonk giant expects the Army to migrate up to 35 of its current applications to the private cloud in the coming 12 months.

“With this project, we’re beginning to bring the IT infrastructure of the US Army into the 21st century,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Ferrell, US Army CIO in a statement. “Cloud computing is a game-changing architecture that provides improved performance with high efficiency, all in a secure environment.”

“Clients today are increasingly looking at the cloud as a pathway to innovation,” said Sam Gordy, IBM US federal general manager. “This IBM Cloud solution will provide the Army with greater flexibility and will go a long way toward mitigating, and, in some cases eliminating, the security challenges inherent with multiple ingress and egress points.”

IBM’s classification of impact level 5 (IL-5) from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) enables this project to go ahead. The Army expects IBM to achieve DISA IL-6 certification in the coming year; the IL-6 is the highest possible level of security and enables IBM to work with classified information up to ‘secret’.

This move marks a significant change from just four years ago; back in April 2013, a report from the Inspector General of the United States Department of Defense argued that the Army’s previous CIO – Ferrell was nominated for the role in December of that year – was unaware of more than 14,000 mobile devices used throughout the organisation.

The deal will cost $62m ‘if the Army exercises all options’, IBM added.