Wednesday, June 15th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	How Much Water Do Apple Data Centers Use? Apple will fund construction of a wastewater treatment facility in Prineville, Oregon, where its data center campus is the single biggest consumer of water, Oregon Live reported. Data centers use enormous amounts of water to cool IT equipment they house, and reducing water use by data center cooling systems has been growing in importance. Numerous data center operators have been designing their cooling systems in a way that enables them to use recycled municipal water. The issue of data center water usage gained more attention last year as a result of the drought in California, which is continuing despite a relatively wet winter season. In its most recent Environmental Responsibility Report, Apple provided some details on water use by the data centers it owns and the company’s efforts to reduce it. The report doesn’t provide the full picture, since the company leases space from data center providers in addition to the facilities it owns and operates. The four data center sites Apple owns, however, support “the vast majority” of its online services: Maiden, North Carolina; Newark, California; Reno, Nevada; and Prineville. See also: California Officials Greenlight Water-Saving Data Center Cooling Tech In fiscal year 2013, Apple data centers for the first time consumed more energy than each of the two other major elements of the company’s operations: corporate offices and retail stores. The following year, data centers outstripped retail in terms of water consumption. Apple’s corporate offices have always consumed more water than either of the two other categories (a lot more), but water consumption by the company’s data centers has been growing much faster than corporate, due to the amount of data center expansion Apple – like other internet and cloud services giants – has been doing in recent years. Apple data centers used a little over 50 million gallons of water in fiscal 2012, compared to nearly 225 million gallons consumed by the company’s corporate offices. But while corporate water use increased by one-third between 2012 and 2015, data center water consumption more than tripled within the same time frame: Source: Apple’s Environmental Responsibility Report, 2016 Together, Apple stores, data centers, and corporate offices used 573 million gallons of water in fiscal 2015. Its data centers consumed about 160 million gallons. As it expands employee headcount in its offices and capacity of its data center infrastructure, Apple says it makes efforts to reduce the impact its operations have on local water supplies in its numerous locations. In data centers, those efforts have until now come down to innovative cooling-system design, focused on reusing water and maximizing the use of outside air instead of chilled water. One example is Apple’s biggest data center campus, in Maiden, which has a cooling system that recirculates water 35 times, reducing its water consumption by 20 percent, according to Apple. See also: Apple Creates Energy Company to Sell Renewable Energy it Generates Building the wastewater treatment plant in Prineville is a first for the company. The nearly 340,000-square foot Apple data center complex in Prineville consumed 27 million gallons of water in 2015, Oregon Live reported, citing estimates made by the city. That number was higher than day-to-day data center operations would require because of construction the company is doing on the site. Because the magnitude of the impact of water use varies greatly from location to location, the company analyzes water consumption by each of its facilities in the context of the location it’s in and the nature of the local water supply. From Apple’s 2016 Environmental Responsibility Report: “The profile of water use at our data centers, corporate offices, manufacturing sites, and retail stores differs significantly depending on the climate and nature of activities. We have begun to map those operations against indicators of water risk, which include water scarcity, business risk, and habitat and livelihood impact to the basins in which we operate. This analysis will help prioritize our conservation efforts across our operations.” (Comment on this)
5:53p	Hackers Found Selling Access to 70,000 Company Servers (Bloomberg) — Cyber-security firm Kaspersky Lab says it has uncovered an online marketplace where criminals from all over the world sell access to more than 70,000 hacked corporate and government servers for as little as $6 each. Kaspersky discovered the forum after a tip from a European internet service provider. The market, called xDedic, is operated by hackers, who are probably Russian speaking, that have ditched their traditional business model of just selling passwords and have graduated instead to earning a commission from each transaction on their black market. “It’s a marketplace similar to EBay where people can trade information about cracked servers,” said Costin Raiu, head of global research at Kaspersky Lab. “The forum owners verify the quality of the hacked data and charge a commission of 5 percent for transactions.” See also: Number of DDoS Related Data Center Outages Rising An aerospace company from the US, oil firms from China and the United Arab Emirates, a chemical company from Singapore and banks from several different countries are among companies whose servers were compromised by xDedic, Kaspersky said, declining to disclose any names. As businesses ranging from banks to retailers go digital, hacking is getting more advanced and is often instrumental to traditional crime. Markets offering criminals both the tools to hack into networks and the spoils of successful attacks such as credit card data are growing in size and complexity. U.S. authorities worked with counterparts from more than a dozen other countries in 2015 to dismantle a sophisticated computer forum known as Darkode, described as an online, invitation-only market for cyber-criminals to buy and sell products for infecting electronic devices. See also: Considerations When Creating a Secure Cloud Environment Cybercrime services allow even low-skilled criminals to use acquired malicious software to attack their targets, Kaspersky said. People who bought access to servers on xDedic used the information for denial-of-service attack on businesses or to steal credit-card details from servers connected to systems such as computer terminals in shops, according to Raiu. Some have used compromised servers to mine bitcoins, he said. The marketplace is available on the internet, requiring users to register and deposit $10 in bitcoins. “It wasn’t only government networks, but also corporations, banks, research institutions, telecommunication companies, to name a few,” Raiu said. (Comment on this)
6:23p	Inside Finger Lakes’ Nuclear Bunker Data Center (VIDEO) Finger Lakes Technologies Group, a family-owned telecom and hosted service provider in upstate New York that also provides co-location and data storage services to its customers. It houses its customers’ hundreds of petabytes of data and thousands of physical documents inside the four-foot thick concrete walls of its 64 above-ground nuclear missile storage bunkers. For the past 10 years, Finger Lakes Technologies Group has owned and operated the Q area of the Seneca Army Depot in Romulus, New York, an 800-acre section of a Cold War-era munitions storage and disposal facility. The base, which was built in 1941 and subsequently sold to the Seneca County Industrial Development Agency in 2000, is a sprawling 10,500-acre plot of land dotted with aging industrial buildings interspersed between stark fields where rare white deer breed. Although the US military moved out of the area in 1995, FLTG has given the base a new lease on life by turning it into an ultra-secure and discreet location for its customers’ most critical enterprise data. Here’s a video tour of the facility by our sister site, The Var Guy: More about FLTG at The Var Guy (Comment on this)
11:20p	Cavium to Buy Data Center Chip Maker QLogic for $1.36B (Bloomberg) — Cavium, a maker of chips used in computer networks, said it will buy QLogic in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $1.36 billion, aiming to provide a broader set of components for data center equipment makers. Cavium will pay $15.50 a share for QLogic, consisting of $11 in cash and 0.098 of a share of Cavium stock, the San Jose, California-based company said Wednesday in a statement. The total valuation includes QLogic’s $355 million in cash. The two companies boards have approved the transaction, according to the statement. The combined company will be able to offer a more diverse set of components to makers of machinery used in data centers, Cavium said. Chipmakers and component vendors are increasingly getting together to try to build scale that will help them deal with rising costs of new product development and a narrowing customer base. In its most recent fiscal year, Aliso Viejo, California-based QLogic had $458.9 million in revenue compared with $412.7 million at its new owner. Cavium is predicting QLogic will add as much as 70 cents a share to its earnings in calendar year 2017 with $45 million in costs saved in that time frame. Cavium is paying for the acquisition with $220 million in cash on hand, $650 million of loans, $100 million in a short-term bridge loan and $400 million of new shares. (Comment on this)

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