GM Opens New Data Center Modeled on Google, Facebook

Less than one year after General Motors Corp. CIO Randy Mott announced that the automaker would stop outsourcing its IT work to other companies, GM today launched a new $130 million data center of its own.

The company is betting that a thoroughly modernized approach to IT — consciously modeled in many ways on advances made by Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. — will help accelerate the turnaround led by chief executive Dan Akerson. The company’s new data center has been designed to be easier to maintain and expand, and less expensive to cool than older, conventional data centers. It also supports a mixture of conventional and experimental technologies that the company hopes will measurably improve its capacity to innovate by doubling the number of IT projects it is able to undertake. But those capabilities will not transform the company unless the rest of the company undergoes an accompanying cultural shift, one that Mr. Mott says has “just begun.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Must-Reads from other Websites

Panos Mourdoukoutas

Why Apple Should Buy China’s Xiaomi

Paul Graham

What I Didn’t Say

Benjamin Bratton

We Need to Talk About TED

Mat Honan

I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass

Chris Ware

All Together Now

Corey S. Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The Sculpture on the Moon

About Voices

Along with original content and posts from across the Dow Jones network, this section of AllThingsD includes Must-Reads From Other Websites — pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Six posts from external sites are included here each weekday, but we only run the headlines. We link to the original sites for the rest. These posts are explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that the content comes from other websites, and for clarity’s sake, all outside posts run against a pink background.

We also solicit original full-length posts and accept some unsolicited submissions.

Read more »