Amazon announced today that any AWS customer can now launch a Redshift cluster from within the AWS management console. Customers can start with a few hundred terabytes, and then scale up to a petabyte or more. Redshift costs under $1,000 per terabyte per year.

“When we set out to build Amazon Redshift, we wanted to leverage the massive scale of AWS to deliver ten times the performance at 1/10 the cost of on-premise data warehouses in use today,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, Amazon Web Services. “With order of magnitude improvements in price/performance, Amazon Redshift makes big data analytics accessible to more people, allowing large organizations to analyze more of their data and smaller ones to afford fast, scalable data warehousing technology. We are delighted by the excitement from our preview customers as they’ve experienced the performance improvement and lower costs that Amazon Redshift delivers.”

During its time in preview, Redshift proved to be popular among various small businesses and large organizations that leveraged the power of Amazon’s servers. Many of the reviews praise the speed and ease of use in using Redshift, while others say it has saved them countless dollars by moving massive datastores off of their own servers and onto Amazon’s.

Those interested in Amazon Redshift, or AWS in general, can hit up the Web site. Just know that Redshift is currently only available on Amazon’s U.S. East servers in Virginia. It will be rolling out to other AWS locations in the coming months.

Intel announced today that its Atom S1200 is the world’s first 6-watt server-class processor. It’s a system on-chip processor that features lower-power levels, error code correction, 64-bit support and virtualization technologies.

“The data center continues to evolve into unique segments and Intel continues to be a leader in these transitions,” said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group at Intel. “We recognized several years ago the need for a new breed of high-density, energy-efficient servers and other datacenter equipment. Today, we are delivering the industry’s only 6-watt SoC that has key datacenter features, continuing our commitment to help lead these segments.”

As for the processor itself, it will feature two physical cores and total of four threads enabled with Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology. It also supports up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM and eight lanes of PCI Express 2.0 devices. As for x86 software, the new processors will continue to support legacy applications that are still used in datacenters today.

The new Atom processors are just the start for low-power servers. Intel is now working on an Atom successor named Avoton that will be available next year. It will feature even further SoC capabilities and use Intel’s 3D Tri-Gate 22nm transistors.

As for those who prefer Intel’s Xeon processors, the company will be out with a new version of its most popular server processor as well. The new Xeons will be based on the company’s Haswell architecture and feature new energy-saving options.

Customers can start ordering the new Atom S1200 processor today starting at $54 in quantities of 1,000. Find more information here.

Google has just unveiled the new “Where the Internet Lives” gallery, which features photos from inside its various data centers.

As of right now, you can see stunning photos from eight different data centers: Berkeley County, SC; Council Bluffs, IA; The Dalles, OR; Douglas County, GA; Hamina, Finland; Lenoir, NC; Mayes County, OK; and St. Ghislain, Belgium.

Here are some of the stunning photos of the tech, people, and places that you interact with on a daily basis – from hundreds of miles away:

“Fourteen years ago, back when Google was a student research project, Larry and Sergey powered their new search engine using a few cheap, off-the-shelf servers stacked in creative ways. We’ve grown a bit since then, and we hope you enjoy this glimpse at what we’ve built,” says Google in a blog post.

Oh, and if you want to take your own virtual tour, Google now offers Street View for one of its data centers in Lenoir, NC. Walk in the front door here to get started.

“So one of the secrets of Google is that rather than employing these mainframe machines, this heavy iron, big iron kind of stuff, if you were to go into a Google data center and look at an example rack, it would look a lot like a PC,” says Cutts. “So there’s commodity PC parts. It’s the sort of thing where you’d recognize a lot of the stuff from having opened up your own computer,and what’s interesting is rather than have like special Googlebot web crawling servers, we tend to say, OK, build a whole bunch of different servers that can be used interchangeably for things like Googlebot, or web serving, or indexing. And then we have this fleet, this armada of machines, and you can deploy it on different types of tasks and different types of processing.”

“So hardware wise, they’re not exactly the same, but they look a lot like regular commodity PCs,” he adds. “And there’s no difference between Googlebot servers versus regular servers at Google. You might have differences in RAM or hard disk, but in general, it’s the same sorts of stuff.”

On the software side, Google of course builds everything itself, as to not have to rely on third-parties. Cutts says there’s a running joke at Google along the lines of “we don’t just build the cars oursevles, and we don’t just build the tires ourselves. We actually vulcanize the rubber on the tires ourselves.”

“We tend to look at everything all the way down to the metal,” Cutts explains. “I mean, if you think about it, there’s data center efficiency. There’s power efficiency on the motherboards. And so if you can sort of keep an eye on everything all the way down, you can make your stuff a lot more efficient, a lot more powerful. You’re not wasting things because you use some outside vendor and it’s black box.”

A couple months ago, Google put out a blog post discussing its data center efficiency, indicating that they are getting even more efficient.

“In the same way that you might examine your electricity bill and then tweak the thermostat, we constantly track our energy consumption and use that data to make improvements to our infrastructure. As a result, our data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center,” wrote Joe Kava, Senior Director, data center construction and operations at Google.

Cutts says Google uses a lot of Linux-based machines and Linux-based servers.

“We’ve got a lot of Linux kernel hackers,” he says. “And we tend to have software that we’ve built pretty much from the ground up to do all the different specialized tasks. So even to the point of our web servers. We don’t use Apache. We don’t use IIS. We use something called GWS, which stands for the Google Web Server.”

“So by having our own binaries that we’ve built from our own stuff and building that stack all the way up, it really unlocks a lot of efficiency,” he adds. “It makes sure that there’s nothing that you can’t go in and tweak to get performance gains or to fix if you find bugs.”

If you’re interested in how Google really works, you should watch this video too:

Google says the average search query travels as much as 1,500 miles.

In their efforts to compete, AOL shut down 9,484 servers throughout last year. Many contestants moved information to cloud solutions, switched to more efficient servers, and sent outdated equipment to the scrap and recycling piles. Overall though, it was the decommission of over a quarter of their servers that won AOL the prize.

They saved $1.65 million in energy costs, $2.2 million in operating system licensing, $62,000 in maintenance costs, and generated over a million in scrap and recycling returns. Overall, they saved about $5 million.

Take a look at the Video AOL put together to celebrate their win:

The Uptime Institute commented on the power and value of the contest:

“Decommissioning a single 1U rack server can result in $500 per year in energy savings, an additional $500 in operating system licenses, and $1,500 in hardware maintenance costs. That’s not chump change.”

The contest ended on February 1st this year, but it took time to review the evidence and announce the results.

Jeb took to the Mojang blog today to announce the impending release of version 1.2.5 of Minecraft. To get the news out of the way first, the new version of Minecraft will be launching via the in-game client on April 4. Being the awesome people that they are though, Mojang has made the new version of Minecraft available now to modders and anybody else who wants to manually download it. Why? New versions of Minecraft, or any game with a modding community, tend to screw up preexisting mods and server configurations. Case in point: I have a friend who runs Counter-Strike servers and new updates from Valve create chaos for him.

For those who don’t care about that modding/server stuff and just want to see what new changes are coming to MInecraft, Mojang has you covered as well. The main reason for the new version comes a “severe crash bug in the world generator,” but the new version also includes a variety of other fixes and adjustments.

Added shift clicking support in furnaces
Added method to easily acquire blocks you have selected in the world in Creative mode using the ‘pick block’ key
Made the Direct Connect dialog remember the last IP for the current session
Fixed issues detected certain links in chat
Fixed wild ocelots behaving like tamed cats
Fixed various chat crashes
Made cats less eager to sit on things
Made cats less patient
Fixed world generation failing under certain circumstances
Fixed issues turning off sound under certain circumstances
Removed all ghost entities under the command of Lord Herobrine
Fixed crash when pasting certain characters in chat
Fixed slash ‘/’ key not behaving correctly in certain environments
Fixed command matching being too greedy (for example: typing ‘/stophammertime’ no longer stops your server)
Fixed not being able to click coloured links
Fixed potential issue with village door detection (which could cause too many villagers)
Made using a stack of bowls on Mooshrooms not consume the whole stack of bowls
Made punching a TNT block with flint and steel in hand destroy and drop a TNT block (right-clicking will activate the TNT)

In other super cool news, Mojang also announced that they are creating a modding API. They will be designing it in the open and taking as much feedback from the fans as possible. They say the API was inspired by previous work from their Bukkit colleagues, but will be built from scratch instead of relying on old code.

Between a speedy new release to fix bugs, a modding API and giving modders early access to prevent problems; Mojang really is one of the most fan friendly developers out there. Like you needed me to tell you that though.

Brad Anderson, President of Enterprise Solutions Group at Dell comments on the new additions to their lineup:

“Dell designed the new PowerEdge servers with input gathered from more than 7,700 customer interactions in 17 countries across four continents,”

“Our customers told us that they need end-to-end solutions to handle the complex workload problems they face every day. As such, we built our new generation of servers, systems management and workload solutions to address the needs of business end users who require maximum performance to run mission-critical applications and IT departments which demand more efficient, secure and reliable operations.”

Here’s a list of models that incorporate the latest and greatest technology from Dell for enterprise customers:

Rack Servers:

* PowerEdge R820,
* PowerEdgeR720,
* PowerEdgeR720xd
* PowerEdgeR620

Blade Servers:

* M620

Tower Servers:

* T620
* C6220

Here’s what Dell promises in the way of efficiency with their new servers:

* Reclaim time with agent-free monitoring of over 400 sensors, including memory, RAID, storage and network devices, in multivendor operating system and hypervisor environments without installing software agents or drivers, which can save up to $2.5 million in server maintenance.

* Dell and partners Microsoft, VMware and BMC have integrated iDRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller 2.0 with their systems management frameworks to provide mutual customers the benefits of automated one-to-many embedded management features while preserving their existing IT investments and processes.

Next here’s a list of innovations that they claim help them achieve optimized efficiency:

* Increase performance per watt up to 101 times over Dell servers ten years ago, enabling large data centers to save up to $1.8 million per year on server power alone.

* New all-in-one appliances built on PowerEdge 12th generation servers. Dell vStart for Dell Private Cloud, including Dell VIS Creator software, enables IT and business end users to accelerate application and IT service delivery. The Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance, which is based on the new Dell PowerEdge servers, will be the first data warehouse appliance available on Microsoft SQL Server 2012, and will help mid-market and departmental users easily organize, access and analyze data, enabling them to make more informed decisions.

Here’s some commentary on Dell’s new servers from Matt Eastwood, VP & GM of Intel’s Datacenter Infrastructure Group:

“Today’s IT organizations are balancing pressures to become more energy efficient and stretch existing manpower further, while supporting ever increasing amounts of data. Customers are looking to make server hardware investments that deliver the best of management and performance. The 12th Generation PowerEdge servers build on Dell’s early lead in introducing embedded systems management into x86 servers with new features designed to streamline and automate data center operations.”

So if you’re looking to upgrade your technology infrastructure, you should check these new machines out. They could help you stretch your budget a little further and possibly expand your data management capabilities. A little investigation could help you identify unforeseen values.

The Mojang blog announced on Tuesday that the team has hired on the four main developers of bukkit to help improve the official Minecraft server. For those who haven’t heard of bukkit, it’s a “community-based Minecraft server implementation.”

The four people who were hired are Warren Loo, Erik Broes, Nathan Adams and Nathan Gilbert. They were hired to build a new server API that will support client-side modding. They hope to make it compatible for current bukkit users to convert to the new system, but they can’t promise backwards compatibility. They are going to make bukkit compatible with Minecraft version 1.2 though so no worries for the immediate future.

They chose bukkit over the other teams in the modding community because of their extensive experience in server modding. The hope is that Minecraft multiplayer will improve with these new hires.

It seems that the team hasn’t left Bukkit completely yet. They are talking about new updates being made to Bukkit on Twitter so both bukkit and Minecraft should see many updates for the foreseeable future.

Among the sites/services affected are Foursquare, Quora, Reddit, and Hootsuite (ht: The Next Web).

The issues appear to be coming out of Virginia. Amazon is providing updates on its Amazon Webservices Service Health Dashboard. All of the issues come from that location. One sequence of udpates attached to Amazon Cloudwatch reads:

2:26 AM PDT We are working on restoring connectivity to a small number of EC2, EBS, and RDS resources in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. While we restore connectivity, CloudWatch metrics for those resources will be delayed.

4:47 AM PDT CloudWatch metrics are delayed for some EBS and RDS resources in the US-EAST-1 region. The delays began at 12:55AM PDT. We have isolated the impact to a single availability zone, and are working towards a full resolution.

Another on Amazon Relational Database Service says:

1:48 AM PDT We are currently investigating connectivity and latency issues with RDS database instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

5:06 AM PDT IO latency issues have recovered in one of the two impacted Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. We continue to make progress on restoring access and resolving IO latency issues for remaining affected RDS database instances.

On AWS CloudFormation, it says:

3:29 AM PDT We are experiencing delays in creating and deleting stacks that include EBS, EC2 and RDS resources in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Existing stacks are not impacted.

5:10 AM PDT CloudFormation stack creation and deletion is delayed for stacks containing EC2, EBS and RDS resources in the US-EAST-1 region. The delays began at 12:55AM PDT. We have isolated the impact to a single availability zone, and are working towards a resolution.

Finally, on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, it says:

3:16 AM PDT We can confirm increased error rates impacting Elastic Beanstalk APIs and console, and we continue to work towards resolution.

4:18 AM PDT We continue to see increased error rates impacting Elastic Beanstalk APIs and console, and we are working towards resolution.

The rest of the list comes with the “service is operating normally” status.

Foursquare and Reddit seem to be back on track, but Quora and Hootsuite are still down at the time of this writing.

I wonder how much money is being lost based on Amazon’s server issues.

Rackspace considers the move a way to better position itself in Silicon Valley, as Cloudkick was originally funded by Y Combinator, and its headquarters is in San Francisco, "making Cloudkick’s headquarters the latest outpost for delivering Fanatical Support and innovation in cloud computing," a representative for Rackspace tells WebProNews.

"Cloudkick serves more than 1,500 businesses from Fortune 500 enterprises to nimble startups — and has seen more than 1 million servers pass through its tools," she says. "Through this acquisition, Rackspace will deliver even better support through superior management tools that will be available directly to customers and also to the Rackers who serve them."

"Until now, the cloud has been about automating hardware and making it more agile and efficient," explains Rackspace Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman. "But as cloud computing has made it easier to launch servers, companies launch a lot more of them, and use many of them inefficiently — and even lose track of some.  Cloudkick brings order to that chaos and sprawl. It takes cloud computing to a new level: into automation of the work of system administrators. In addition to providing robust cloud health information, Cloudkick enables automation around deployment and scaling.  It makes cloud computing more powerful, with less expense."

Cloudkick, which launched two years ago has been working with Mozilla, Vimeo, ProPublica and National Instruments, and is a member of the OpenStack community, the open source cloud project founded by Rackspace itself. 

Financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed.