Facebook To Open $500M Wind-Powered Data Center in Texas

Social networking giant Facebook is developing a 200-megawatt wind-energy project to power its new data center in Fort Worth, Texas. Unveiled on Tuesday, plans for the wind-powered data center are part of the company's long-term goal to eventually meet all of its data center energy needs with renewables.

Facebook already powers two of its existing four global data centers with renewable energy, and plans to achieve a 25-percent renewables goal by the end of this year, according to Vice President of Engineering Jay Parikh. By 2018, the company aims to meet half of its data center energy needs with clean power, he said.

Construction of the new data center has already started, and the facility is expected to come online in late 2016, a Facebook spokesperson told us. While the company isn't disclosing full cost and capacity plans for the data center, the spokesperson said that "we have publicly committed to at least 40 full-time jobs and $500 million in investment."

Efficiency Has Saved '$2B in Costs'

The company has worked with Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power Corp. and Starwood Energy Group to develop a wind farm that will power the facility, West Region Director of Data Center Operations Ken Patchett said in a Facebook blog post. Currently under construction, the wind farm is located on a 17,000-acre site 90 miles from the data center's location.

"We put a lot of effort into choosing where to locate a facility like this," Patchett noted. "There are a lot of things we look for -- everything from a shovel-ready site, to access to renewable energy, to great partnerships with the local community, to a strong pool of local talent for construction and long-term operations staff. We think we've found all that and more in Fort Worth, and we're excited to be getting started."

Data center design efforts focused efficiency, "have helped us save more than $2 billion in infrastructure costs over the last three years," said Tom Furlong, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, in another blog post. Coupled with Facebook's investments in renewables, "the carbon impact of one person's use of Facebook for an entire year is the same as the carbon impact of a medium latte," Furlong said.

Outdoor Air-Cooled, Even in Texas

The Forth Worth data center will be Facebook's fifth. It also operates data centers in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, Calif.; Altoona, Iowa; and Lulea, Sweden. Both the Altoona and Lulea facilities are also powered by renewable energy.

Through its participation in the Open Compute Project, which the company helped launch in 2011, Facebook openly shares its data center designs to "design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing."

Patchett said the Fort Worth data center will "feature the latest in our Open Compute Project hardware designs" -- including Yosemite for compute and fabric, Wedge and 6-pack at the network layer. Yosemite is a system-on-a-chip compute server aimed at improving speed and more efficiently serving Facebook traffic.

The new Fort Worth facility will also be cooled exclusively through the use of outdoor air instead of energy-intensive air conditioners, Patchett noted. "Yes, we can make that work even in the middle of the kinds of summers we have here in Texas," he added.

Read More

Deepening Dependency on Technology Raises Risk of Breakdowns

Modern technology has made it easier for people to do all kinds of things, from banking to shopping to finding a date. So when technology breaks down, people's lives go haywire, too.

Computer outages at United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange and The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday delivered a reminder about our growing dependence on interconnected networks to get through each day.

For the most part, technology has worked smoothly while hatching innovations and conveniences that have made our lives easier and our jobs more productive. Computers, though, could bring more frequent headaches as they link together with billions of other electronic devices and household appliances -- a phenomenon that has become known as the "Internet of things."

This technological daisy chain will increase the complexity of the systems and raise the risks of massive breakdowns, either through an inadvertent glitch or a malicious attack.

"The problem is humans can't keep up with all the technology they have created," said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner. "It's becoming unmanageable by the human brain. Our best hope may be that computers eventually will become smart enough to maintain themselves."

Technology already is controlling critical systems such as airline routes, electricity grids, financial markets, military weapons, commuter trains, street traffic lights and our lines of communications.

Now, computers are taking other aspects of our lives as we depend on smartphones to wake us up in the morning before an app turns on the coffee pot in the kitchen for a caffeine fix that can be enjoyed in a the comfort of a home kept at an ideal temperature by an Internet-connected thermostat designed to learn the occupant's preferences.

Within the next few years, we may even be unlocking our doors with high-tech watches after being chauffeured home in robotic cars.

Technology's relentless march demands better security measures to prevent hackers from breaking into system and more rigid programming standards to reduce the chances of crippling outages, said Lillian Ablon, a technology researcher for the Rand Corp.

"Instead of just letting the technology rush ahead of us and then trying to catch up in terms of privacy and security, we should be baking those things into the systems from the start," she said. "We need to be a little smarter on how we are coding things."

The sequence of Wednesday's outages appears to have been a fluke. Sabotage isn't suspected, FBI Director James Comey said during an appearance before Congress.

But a domino effect may have contributed to The Wall Street Journal's outage. Comey believes the newspaper's website buckled after the New York Stock Exchange's problems caused alarmed investors looking for information to swamp the Journal's website.

The length of Wednesday's outages also is disconcerting, Gartner's Litan said.

It took the New York Stock Exchange more than three-and-half hours to resume trading, slowing Wall Street's usually furious pace. A "router issue" at United Airlines grounded its planes for nearly two hours, leading to 800 flight delays and 60 cancellations.

"Everyone needs to assume technology is going to go down sometimes, but you should be resilient enough to quickly recover from the outage within a half hour, if not a few minutes," Litan said.

Wednesday's breakdowns were minor inconveniences compared with what might happen if better security measures aren't imposed to keep out intruders bent on wreaking havoc, said Jeff Williams, chief technology officer for Contrast Security.

Too often, the technology industry's focus is on creating something cool and worrying about security later, Williams said. He said the lackadaisical attitude breeds a mindset like this: "Oh, we'll just put your blender on the Internet, there are no security issues there. And hackers figure out a way to turn on your blender in the middle of the night and set your house on fire."

Computers may get smarter through a combination of better programming, machine learning and more sophisticated chips. If computers can reach the still far-off goal of becoming artificially intelligent, they could be better equipped to prevent problems and fend off unauthorized users. Self-reliant and self-aware computers would still confront humans with a scary question, Litan said: "Are the computers going to be nice to us or are they going to take us out?"

Read More

Heroin Use and Addiction Are Surging in the U.S., CDC Report Says

Heroin use surged over the past decade, and the wave of addiction and overdose is closely related to the nation's ongoing prescription drug epidemic, federal health officials said Tuesday.

A new report says that 2.6 out of every 1,000 U.S. residents 12 and older used heroin in the years 2011 to 2013. That's a 63% increase in the rate of heroin use since the years 2002 to 2004.

The rate of heroin abuse or dependence climbed 90% over the same period, according to the study by researchers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Deaths caused by heroin overdoses nearly quadrupled between 2002 and 2013, claiming 8,257 lives in 2013.

In all, more than half a million people used heroin in 2013, up nearly 150% since 2007, the report said.

Heroin use remained highest for the historically hardest-hit group: poor young men living in cities. But increases were spread across all demographic groups, including women and people with private insurance and high incomes -- groups associated with the parallel rise in prescription drug use over the past decade.

The findings appear in a Vital Signs report published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

"As a doctor who started my career taking care of patients with HIV and other complications from injection drugs, it's heartbreaking to see injection drug use making a comeback in the U.S.," said Dr. Tom Frieden (seen here), director of the CDC.

All but 4% of the people who used heroin in the past year also used another drug, such as cocaine, marijuana or alcohol, according to the report. Indeed, 61% of heroin users used at least three different drugs.

The authors of the new study highlighted a "particularly strong" relationship between the use of prescription painkillers and heroin. People who are addicted to narcotic painkillers are 40 times more likely to misuse heroin, according to the study.

Once reserved for cancer and end-of-life pain, these narcotics now are widely prescribed for conditions ranging from dental work to chronic back pain.

"We are priming people to addiction to heroin with overuse of prescription opiates," Frieden said at a news conference Tuesday. "More people are primed for heroin addiction because they are addicted to prescription opiates, which are, after all, essentially the same chemical with the same impact on the brain."

Frieden said the increase in heroin use was contributing to other health problems, including rising rates of new HIV infections, cases of newborns addicted to opiates and car accidents. He called for reforms in the way opioid painkillers are prescribed, a crackdown on the flow of cheap heroin and more treatment for those who are addicted.

Read More

WHO WE ARE?

Established in 1995, Tec-today Limited is an agile, customer-focused provider of end-to-end next generation IT solutions and services. We are involved in Sales, Services, Maintenance and Consulting, specialising in the infrastructure, networking and communications environments.With deep expertise across a broad range of technologies, Tec-today delivers innovative IT solutions and managed services that can assist you to accelerate the strategic value and impact of information throughout your organisation.We work closely with many NGO’s, Small, medium and large private and public sector organisations – with customers coming from the telecommunications, media, retail, transport, public, financial services and professional services sectors.
Tec-today has established strong industry ties, with the highest level of accreditation achieved with HP, Microsoft, Dell,IBM and Cisco as well as links with complementary vendors and ISV’s. It means we are vendor-neutral and unbiased in our deliver of IT solutions – so you always get exactly what your business needs.Our commitment is to explore the limits and unleash the full functionality of your IT systems, and will provide the highest level of ongoing support, maintenance, training and consultancy services in a personalised and professional manner at all times.

Read More