Last year, Google bought an old paper mill in Finland. Now the company is in process of converting that paper mill into a major data center. Construction is already well underway, and the data center is expected to go live next spring. It will be Google’s first dedicated data center in the Nordic countries, with several interesting innovations, for example being cooled entirely by sea water.

Swedish magazine Computer Sweden was recently on location in Finland and has published an article (in Swedish) with new information and pictures from the build. We’ve summarized the important parts of that article and also what other information we could find around the Web, mostly from Finnish newspaper articles.

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According to a new data center survey, Windows-based servers are more than twice as common in the enterprise as Linux servers.

The Symantec-sponsored survey included answers from the IT departments of 1,780 enterprises in 26 countries. It included small, medium-sized and large enterprises from a wide variety of industries, with the lower limit being companies with at least 1,000 employees.

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Now that this decade is coming to an end, we thought it would be a good time to list the very worst Internet disasters that happened between 2000 and 2009. And believe us, there have been some really big ones. Some you may remember, and some may be new to you, but they all affected a huge amount of Internet users.

We focused on Internet service disruptions that lasted a significant amount of time and affected many people. Other criteria were that the incident shouldn’t be about any one single service or website and that it should be technical in nature (i.e. the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000 doesn’t count).

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Twice a year, the world’s top 500 supercomputers are announced. The most recent winner is the Jaguar which pretty much wiped the floor with the competition, managing a performance benchmark 69% above the IBM Roadrunner which came in second.

Let’s take a closer look at the Jaguar, the fastest supercomputer in the world today.

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Data Center Knowledge has posted an interesting article about customer poaching in the web hosting industry, especially in combination with downtime incidents, sometimes referred to as “rescue marketing”.

What happens is that when a hosting provider suffers from downtime (which will understandably result in lots of frustrated customers), competing companies will swoop in and try to take advantage of this. In the past this was often accomplished with text ads in search engines, but these days Twitter is becoming an increasingly common way to target customers.

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The iPhone 3.0 update is almost here now. One of the features that we and many others have been looking forward to the most is the new push notification service from Apple. We are also curious about how reliable push notifications will be.

Why do we wonder about reliability? Because push notifications are sent from third-party servers to Apple’s servers, and then on to your iPhone.

In short: Apple becomes a single point of failure since it acts as a go-between for all push notifications.

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The Wolfram Alpha team has revealed some information about its hardware setup on their team blog. If you haven’t heard about Wolfram Alpha, it’s a soon-to-be launched “computational knowledge engine” with an interface similar to a search engine. There’s been a lot of buzz about it, for example on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

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Digg had an outage today that was most likely the result of the ongoing migration of Digg’s servers to a new data center.

That didn’t stop people from wondering what was going on when the site went offline, as you could see for example on Twitter.

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