Microsoft’s Quincy Datacenter

Microsoft has agreed to buy a 202-acre plot land in Quincy, Washington for $11 million, one of the largest land deals in the town’s history. The software giant, which already operates a 75-acre data center in the region, plans to establish a new, larger facility that will run on ultra-cheap electricity from hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River.
Microsoft is aggressively expanding its cloud infrastructure in an effort to keep up with the rapid uptake off on-demand IT resources and managed services. Adoption is growing especially fast in the public sector, which is expected to spend $18.48 billion on cloud computing by 2018.

Marketsandmarkets predicts that this market will grow at annual compound growth rate of 45.1 over the next few years thanks to a combination of different factors, notably the pursuit of operational efficiencies and the need to improve inter-departmental communication. There are cultural barriers, but the research firm nonetheless expects demand to surge in North America and the Asia Pacific region.

“The movement into the cloud is an evolutionary approach, which requires a shared vision among government organizations and other lines of businesses,” Marketsandmarkets stated. “Government agencies are readily adopting the cloud strategy, which leads them to pooled visualization from partial virtualization. “

As virtualization takes hold in traditional organizations, practitioners are increasingly embracing new solutions for managing and monitoring their IT environments. Business continuously Zerto is riding this trend with its Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) platform, a disaster recovery product for VMware deployments that was recently updated to provide centralized control over multiple sites. ZVR 3.1 also introduces an automated change journal that scales up and down as needed, a centralized alerting tab and augmented API capabilities.