Data Center

3D-printed architecture has gone from strength to strength over the past few years and the latest notable advance comes from Germany, where an ambitious new data center is under construction that's hailed as Europe's largest 3D-printed building.

Future data centers might switch to a storage medium that nature has been using for billions of years – DNA. In a major step towards making that a reality, scientists have created a new system of reading and organizing files using microcapsules.

Liquid cooling is one of the most effective ways to keep computers from overheating. Microsoft has now put a unique spin on the technique, demonstrating a system to cool its cloud servers by dunking the computers into a tank full of boiling liquid.

Magnetic tape may seem an antiquated data storage technology, but its density and capacity is still hard to beat for big data centers. Now, IBM and Fujifilm have created a prototype high-density tape cartridge with a record-breaking 580 TB capacity.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have made magnetic tape using a new material, which allows higher storage density and more protection against interference, as well as a new way to write to the tape using high frequency millimeter waves.

Data centers require heavy-duty cooling and maintenance. Microsoft has now finished a two-year test of an unconventional solution – dropping a data center to the bottom of the sea – and found that it was more reliable than land-based facilities.

​Just over a year after launching a 14 TB hard drive for cloud and data centers, Western Digital has added another terabyte of storage space without increasing the physical dimensions for the new Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD.​

Intel has unveiled what it calls the world’s densest solid state drive (SSD), packing 32 TB into a device the size of an old 12-inch ruler. The development should help data centers get more bang for their buck, cutting the cost of cooling and making more efficient use of the physical space.

Water-cooling systems have long been used in computers, but how do you scale that up for huge data centers? According to Microsoft, you drop the data center to the bottom of the ocean. As Phase 2 of Project Natick, the company has just deployed a data center in the frigid waters off Scotland.

​Earlier this year, Western Digital's HGST business arm announced a 12 TB hard drive aimed at businesses and data centers. Now the company has managed to add another 2 terabytes of storage space into a single drive unit for the launch of the Ultrastar Hs14 enterprise-class HDD.​

A breakthrough in the field of molecular data storage was recently revealed proving that high volumes of data can effectively be stored in individual molecules. This research could lead to new, high-density data storage systems that potentially hold more than 25 terabytes​ of data per square inch.

Data centers chew through a huge amount of power, thanks largely to the cooling. To help fight that on both fronts, the world’s largest data center is set to be built in Norway, making use of the chilly Arctic climate to keep the servers cool while drawing all of its power from renewable sources.