British satellite Internet company OneWeb has filed for bankruptcy in the US after attempts to secure funding for a commercial launch were checked by the coronavirus fears.

The firm, which had already secured billions in funding from investors such as Softbank, Qualcomm and the Government of Rwanda, was hoping to take its space-bound internet service commercial before the end of next year.

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Tech trade body techUK has released a new update detailing how it is working with the UK government to support the nation's data centre sector in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. 

Following lockdown measures brought into place in this week, UK data centre operators were concerned about ensuring continuity of service and access to facilities.

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Global spend on data centre hardware and software totalled $152 billion last year, according to new research from IT market watchers Synergy Research.

The figure, which represents a two percent rise from 2018, combines worldwide spending on public cloud and private cloud/traditional data centre hardware and software.

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IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are joining forces with the White House, the US Department of Energy, and other US federal agencies to deliver supercomputing power and public cloud resources to scientists and researchers working to address the novel coronavirus global pandemic.

As part of the newly-announced Covid-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium, the companies are making 330 petaflops of performance available to researchers attempting to understand the virus and form treatments that can be used for potential vaccines.

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Microsoft has said its cloud platform Azure will begin prioritising emergency personnel and organisations working on the frontline of coronavirus efforts.

In a blog post, the tech giant said first responders, health and emergency management services, and critical government functions would be prioritised if its cloud infrastructure encountered capacity constraints.

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Work has begun on a 30-tonne wave machine which is scheduled to be deployed in Orkney this autumn. The 20-metre-long Blue Star wave energy converter from AJS Production Ltd is being designed by Edinburgh start-up Mocean Energy. The half-scale device will undergo a number of sea trials before generating its first power later in the year.

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An industry expert has suggested that gamers should only play during the evening  Video gamers have been urged to play at “reasonable times” to avoid putting extra strain on internet networks during the coronavirus outbreak. Social distancing measures to curb the spread of the virus has led to large numbers of people working from home... Read More

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The techUK Data Centres Council is working with DCMS to ensure UK data centre employees are included in a list of critical infrastructure workers that would be exempt from lockdown measures that limited free movement in London.

If data centre employees are not included in the final list of critical infrastructure workers -- due for publication in a matter of days -- or at least designated as key workers, data centres without remote operating capabilities could be forced to house and feed business-critical staff onsite.

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Google revealed a set of wheels supporting one of its data centre racks buckled, precipitating a chain of events that resulted in some CPUs overheating, disrupting Search, Gmail, and other services for some users.

The unusual episode was discovered after a site reliability engineer on the company's traffic and load balancing was alerted that Google services being supported by its edge network were producing an abnormally high number of errors.

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There is a constant stream of innovation happening in storage technology, and the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market is leading the way. According to this report, the HCI market is expected to be worth $17.1 billion by 2023. This projected growth could be put down to the myriad of advantages that HCI offers, including single-pane-of-glass management, reduced rackspace and power which means greener data centres, and improved disaster recovery capabilities to list a few.

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The novel coronavirus pandemic is sweeping the globe and once bustling industrial economies are grinding to a halt. 

Companies and their employees are being forced to rapidly adapt to a new way of working, civil liberties are being withdrawn to ease pressure on already-squeezed health services, and emergency services on the frontline of the pandemic are making unthinkable sacrifices to attend the infected.

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As the electric and digital worlds converge, talent acquisition and team management are among the biggest challenges faced by data centre and technology businesses today.

According to the Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, “The single highest cause of stress is being short of staff”, and this has become a major issue. The survey found that the UK's tech industry is experiencing the highest skills shortage for more than a decade, with almost two thirds of CIOs (64%) reporting a shortfall of talent.

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Underpinning today’s data revolution are data architectures which define how data is stored, arranged, managed and used.

With the rise of data-intensive applications such as AI and analytics and the deluge of unstructured data brought about by IoT, there is a growing need for more efficient and flexible data architectures so that organisations can keep data centre costs low and increase speed, agility and time-to-value for data initiatives.

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Those in the data centre industry today know that we are living in exciting times. Just 5-10 years ago, we were using buzz words like Internet of Things, machine learning, 5G,  hyperscale, cloud computing, edge computing, etc.

These things are now very real and are forming the catalyst of the data centre boom we are currently experiencing. The world has caught on to the use of technology in virtually every aspect of our lives from teacherless classrooms using extended reality (XR) to autonomous driving; from the fully automated and connected home to advances in medical technological applications.

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Corporate IT infrastructure has never been so complex. There are a host of different options open to organisations, from running on public cloud and on-premise data centres, to SaaS cloud native capabilities and serverless infrastructure. Applications are running across an ever-wider range of technologies and geographies, making it increasingly difficult to monitor and troubleshoot when something goes wrong. Unsurprisingly, companies often struggle with a messy array of different tools and technologies based in these different locations.

Application visibility is one particularly notable pain point. An estimated 80 percent of enterprises have gaps in monitoring their cloud or are totally blind to it. In these scenarios, customer experience (CX) is often hit hard. If an organisation lacks real-time visibility over application performance, the risk increases of gaps emerging between its internal view and actual user perception of how the app is performing.

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Often, we struggle to discuss the edge - one of the IT world’s hottest trends - because it’s difficult to objectively define it. “The edge means something different to every person,” says Mark Howell, of the Ford Motor Company. Howell oversees the construction of every new IT facility the veteran automaker builds and is the lead for EMEA region design, planning and engineering.

From his perspective, the edge is effectively distributed technology, and need not encompass servers, storage and switches. By that token, Ford’s first edge site wasn’t a micro data centre, but the first remote offices and factories that Henry Ford built all those years ago. The company’s Paris office opened in 1908, the Kansas City assembly plant opened in 1911. By the end of the 1920’s Ford had more than 20 overseas assembly plants.

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With data demands reaching new levels in 2020, the role of the data centre is set to take centre stage for IT leaders. Against a backdrop of constant disruption and increasingly ambitious enterprise and cloud strategies, how do you ensure that your data centre is futureproofed, so that you stay ahead of the game, rather than react to it?

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In the far north of Sweden, scientists have built a facility to explore the future of data centres. “We have projects that are looking at innovative control of data centres…projects that would support zero touch data centres…we have started some projects that develop real life demonstrations of the reuse of heat for district heating.” Jon Summers, Scientific Lead at the ICE data centre lab at RISE, the Swedish research programme behind the facility, tells us about some of the innovative work being carried out there.

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