How Can Data Centers be a Shield to Stop Breaches?

Story by Chris Tozzi

Key Points:

• Most data breaches don’t happen because of flaws in data centers. Instead, they stem from issues like software vulnerabilities that threat actors exploit to break into systems or attacks launched by malicious insiders who have access to a company’s internal systems.
• Implementing Rigorous Physical Security Controls: Sometimes, the easiest way to steal or destroy data is to break into a data center physically, as opposed to hacking software systems.
• Supporting Air-Gapping Inside Data Centers: Air-gapping is the practice of disconnecting or segmenting workloads from untrusted networks to reduce the risk of network-borne attacks.
• Providing High-Performing Network Infrastructure: Why? Because high-performing networks – which means networks capable of reliably moving large amounts of data in minimal time – make it easier to implement disaster recovery strategies like automated failover from one data center to another in the event of a ransomware attack.
• Providing Managed Backups: Managed backups (or, for that matter, backups of any time) won't stop data breaches. But like automated failover to a backup environment in a different data center, managed backups make it easier for businesses to restore operations quickly in the event of an attack.
• Data centers can't stop data breach attacks, but they can reduce some key types of risks – such as insider threats. They can also enhance your ability to recover quickly in the event of a data breach. To illustrate, we dive deeper into five key capabilities data centers provide to help protect against data breaches in the story above.

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Liquid Cooling Rising in India

Story by Chandana Patnaik

Key Points:

• Traditional air-cooling methods are gradually becoming inadequate to manage the thermal loads of modern, high-density data centers. With rack densities set to grow beyond 100 kW per rack, liquid cooling is the only viable solution for cooling these high-performance servers.
• Liquid cooling enables higher computing densities, optimizing space utilization and costs. By opting for different liquid cooling methods including immersive cooling and?direct-to-chip cooling, organizations can reap benefits in multiple ways.
• When it comes to exploring the potential impact of liquid cooling on data centers, India is an interesting example. The nation’s?estimated data center capacity?of 1,030 MW is projected to exceed 5,000 MW by 2030.
• As data centers continue to grow exponentially and environmental concerns take center stage, the Indian data center liquid cooling market is poised for robust growth, projected to exceed 25% in the coming years and generate over $300 million in revenue by 2030.

How Guarded is Data in the Digital Age?

Story by Nate Nelson

Key Points:

• As companies rush to integrate AI into their business workflows, they occasionally pay insufficient attention to how to secure these tools, and the information they trust them with.
• In a new report, Legit Security researcher Naphtali Deutsch demonstrated as much by scanning the Web for two kinds of?potentially vulnerable open source (OSS) AI services: vector databases — which store data for AI tools — and LLM application builders — specifically, the open source program Flowise .
• "A lot of programmers see these tools on the Internet, then try to set them up in their environment," Deutsch says, but those same programmers are leaving security considerations behind.
• Flowise is a low-code tool for building all kinds of LLM applications. It's backed by Y Combinator, and sports tens of thousands of stars on GitHub . It's no wonder, then, that the majority of Flowise servers are password-protected. A password, however, isn't security enough...

博通 's Potential Gamechanger Could be Expensive

Story by Wylie Wong

Key Points:

• Broadcom has announced its forthcoming next-generation flagship software, VMware Cloud Foundation 9. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is VMware’s private cloud platform that combines virtualized compute, storage, and networking with cloud management services and allows organizations to run and manage their virtualized and containerized workloads.
• New features include a self-service cloud portal for users to provision services and the consolidation of more than a dozen management consoles to two management consoles – one for operations and the other for automation.
• Essentially, VCF 9 aims to allow enterprises to modernize their data center infrastructure and create a seamless cloud experience on-premises. The news marks another step in the company’s strategy to simplify and unify VMware products and make it easier for enterprises to deploy and manage a private cloud in their data centers.
• Forrester analyst Naveen Chhabra told Data Center Knowledge that some VMware customers he’s talked to face a four to seven-times price increase. “I’ve talked to hundreds of VMware customers so far, and they are eager to find viable alternatives that they can depend on at a reasonable price,” he said.

Understanding Data Center Compliance

Story by Chris Tozzi

Key Points:

• Data centers aren't always at the center of discussions about compliance because none of the major compliance frameworks include specific rules targeted at data centers – which is unsurprising given that compliance standards don't typically focus on specific technologies or technical domains.
• On the contrary, the way a business designs, operates and audits its data centers can be absolutely critical to its ability to meet the various compliance mandates it faces – such as HIPAA, PCI DSS and GDPR, to name just a few.
• Data centers are only one component of compliance operations for most businesses. But they're often a critical one, given the foundational role that data centers play in hosting workloads.
• There is no simple checklist a business can follow to guarantee that its data centers comply with whichever compliance rules it needs to meet. There are, however, several steps that companies – and data center operators – can take to support data center compliance. In the article above, we take a look at the main ones.

Major Moves Inside the Industry

Story by James Walker

The Data Center Knowledge News Roundup brings you the latest news and developments across the data center industry – from investments and mergers to security threats and industry trends.

Key Points:

• Green initiatives dominated data center industry headlines this week, led by Meta ’s announcement that it had?signed an agreement with geothermal energy company?Sage Geosystems?to power its data center growth and expand the tech company’s renewable energy use.?
• The deal will provide Meta’s operations with up to 150 MW of new geothermal?power. Although the location has not yet been confirmed, the first phase of the project is expected to be operational and online in 2027.?
• Elsewhere,?Google?has been?refused permission to build a data center just outside Dublin?for failing to meet some of Ireland’s sustainability requirements.?The tech giant’s plan to?develop?a 780,000 sq ft data storage facility was rejected by South Dublin County Council.?
• Following another successful Data Center World ?conference and exhibition in April,? AFCOM ?has issued a call for speakers for next year’s event.?“The mission of our program is to help tech professionals plan, manage, and optimize a data center. We are looking for speakers that can deliver engaging topics or case studies related to data center IT infrastructure and mission-critical facilities,”?said Tara Gibb , senior director of Data Center World.?
• Data Center World 2025?will take place in Washington, DC, on April 14-17, offering panel discussions and case studies focused on emerging IT and data center technologies, the latest construction, colocation and cloud trends, and power sourcing and sustainability.?
• The final week of August saw a raft of new data center announcements in the US. In Arizona,?Tract?has?acquired a 2,069-acre parcel of land in Buckeye?that will house “one of the largest data center parks in the US” with up to 20 million sq ft of space across 40 facilities.?

Chip Watch: Commentary of the Week

Story by Sean M. Kerner

Key Points:

• The acquisition, announced on Monday (August 19), will combine AMD ’s high-performance Instinct AI accelerators, EPYC CPUs, and networking products with ZT Systems ' experience in designing and deploying data center AI compute and storage infrastructure at scale.
• “ZT adds world-class systems design and rack-scale solutions expertise that will significantly strengthen our data center AI systems and customer enablement capabilities,” Dr. Lisa Su , AMD Chair and CEO, said in a statement this week.
• Industry experts suggest that the acquisition will not only position AMD as a stronger competitor to 英伟达 but also help it further distance itself from rival 英特尔 , which has struggled financially.
• “The incumbent data center CPU vendors, Intel and AMD, are facing more competition than ever as large cloud service providers develop and deploy their own Arm-based CPUs,” Vlad Galabov , research director at Omdia ’s cloud and data center practice, told Data Center Knowledge.
• “AMD is saying they will divest of the broader business not related to AMD, so we don’t know how that will work out, whether they sell it off or something else,” Ben Bajarin , CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strategies, Inc. told Data Center Knowledge. “But if ZT systems under AMD continues to build systems for Intel, Nvidia, etc., it could raise antitrust issues,”

Latest Major Tech Layoff Announcements

Original Story by Jessica C. Davis, Updated by Brandon Taylor

Key Points:

• As COVID drove everyone online, tech companies hired like crazy. Now we are hitting the COVID tech bust as tech giants shed jobs by the thousands.
• Updated August 28, 2024 with layoff announcements from Brave , Scale AI , 苹果 , IBM , and Tome Biosciences .
• Check back regularly for updates to InformationWeek's IT job layoffs tracker.

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