Hurricane Florence has now landed on US soil, bringing 100 MPH winds, torrential rain, and claiming at least four lives. Many residents have fled, though some can’t – because they are keeping the area’s data centers up and running during the carnage. The Carolinas, on America's east coast, are studded with data centers full of …

AnalysisGitHub invited a handful of journalists to its San Francisco headquarters to explain how the social code hosting biz is evolving from a website into a platform. The event was hosted by Sam Lambert, whose title – head of platform – removes any doubt about how things will turn out. Founded in 2008, GitHub became a platform …

Black HatData centers are vital in this cloudy world – yet little-understood management chips potentially give hackers easy access to their servers in ways sysadmins may not have imagined. The components in question are known as baseband management controllers (BMCs). They are discrete microcontrollers popped into boxes by the likes of …

Amid forecasts of heat and fears of water shortage in Ireland on Monday, Microsoft was about to confront a drought of a different kind: an Azure service outage. The disruption, which lasted from 1744 UTC on Tuesday, June 19 to 0430 UTC on Wednesday, June 20, downed a slew of services, as we previously reported. What was not …

ExclusiveA crippling data center power failure knackered SourceForge's equipment yesterday and earlier today, knocking the site offline. The code repository for free and open-source software projects crashed yesterday morning (around 0645 Pacific Time) after unspecified "issues" hit its hosting provider's power distribution unit, …

The growth in cloud computing services is creating a financial windfall for perhaps an unlikely source: backup battery vendors. As the demand for larger and more reliable cloud data centers has grown, hosting companies are increasingly building up their stock of backup power supplies, and as a result, uninterruptible power …

"In our country," Alice told the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, "you'd generally get to somewhere else – if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" the Queen replies. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get …

Docker on Wednesday plans offer the open source community a "boring infrastructure" component that nonetheless should excite those focused on software-based containers and benefit the blissfully unaware masses. The container software maker intends to release the source code of containerd, a core container runtime, so that it …

InterviewJonathan "Jono" Guthrie, senior software engineer for PerfectlySoft, dropped by The Register's office in San Francisco to discuss the merits of the Swift programming language. The Apple-created Swift has attracted significant attention from developers since the iPhone maker released it as an open source project last year, but …

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Mirantis have laid off roughly 200 OpenStack developers in recent weeks, calling into question the appeal of OpenStack, the open source project for cloud computing infrastructure. HPE spokesperson Meghan Fintland in an email confirmed the layoffs, noting HPE does not provide details about the …

Mesosphere will open-source new features in its container and cluster management fabric as a leg-up to startups - "Y-Combinator" types. Ben Hindman, Mesos’s creator, told The Reg that DC/OS 1.9, due by year’s end, would be “almost completely” open - with version 1.10 next year 80 per cent so. “Every single review cycle we are …

When Facebook in January became the latest big-tech name to join Ireland’s roll call of data centre operators, its chief broke out the green flag – renewables. At the announcement in County Meath, company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg boasted the planned new facility would be “one of the most advanced and energy efficient …

Britain outclasses anywhere in the EU for attracting inward investment, partly because it is in the EU, and Brexit will leave some of those tens of billions looking for a new target. Since Ireland already does well in this, Brexit could turn out rather well for the emerald isle. On the surface, a UK exit from the EU could mean …

As we all know, the cloud isn't an amorphous, non-geographical blob of computing. Which is a good thing, because there are plenty of legal implications around where your data lives and where it moves both to and from. The point is, of course, that as the cloud isn't just a cloud, your choice of provider is largely dependent on …

This Damn War“What’s the smallest fire I could start to be noticed, but not so big that I risk burning down the building?” is one of the stranger thoughts to have entered my head, in many years of working in IT. No, I'm not a closet pyromaniac, so why was I entertaining such thoughts? I had found myself stuck in a data centre on a Sunday …

Dotted around the near-Arctic are several data centres, each taking advantage of the cold air in that region. We know that low temperatures are great for cooling, but it isn’t the only reason that operators chose those locations. Facebook opened its data centre in Luleå, northern Sweden in 2011. Google rolled out its Hamina …

Sysadmin BlogIt is commonly held that if an article asks a question in the title or lede, you can safely answer no and avoid reading the body of the article itself. While not always true, the aphorism is accurate enough to be considered reliable. With that in mind, I have been asking myself, "is VMware the focal point of power in IT that …

Cisco Partner SummitThe emergence of containers will spark a renaissance for on-premises data centers, thus luring many businesses away from public cloud services, Cisco CTO Zorawar Biri Singh reckons. Speaking at the Cisco Partner Summit in San Diego, Singh said he believes as much as 30 per cent of public cloud workloads will be going offline …