In this episode of White Space, we look back at the news of the week with a special guest Adrian Barker, general manager for EMEA at RF Code and specialist in sensors and data.

We start with a long-awaited report on data center energy efficiency in the US – contrary to what you might expect, data center energy consumption as a fraction of the country’s total energy consumption is not actually going through the roof.

It is rising, but slowly, and if everybody switches to the cloud, the inherent efficiency gains might cause this number to actually go down.

Meanwhile AWS has arrived to India, with a new infrastructure region now served from data centers in Mumbai. It will be interesting to watch their uptime statistics, considering the country’s notoriously unreliable power grid.

AWS also said its data center in the UK is still going to be built, irrespective of whether the country remains a part of the EU. However, some of its customers are not so sure they will need rack space in the UK, saying they could take their data to Ireland instead.

Also last week, the government of Rio de Janeiro was forced to shut down the Santos Dumont, Brazil’s most powerful supercomputer, since it has no budget to pay for electricity.

And HPE has launched its Converged IoT Systems, hybrids of servers and IoT gateways designed to carry out some of the data processing at the point of origin before passing the information on to a data center.

Russia has passed a number of increasingly strict laws to deal with terrorism which will require ISPs and mobile network operators to store customer data for months, sometimes even years – and we’re not just talking metadata. Some Internet companies have already expressed concerns that they will simply not have enough storage to comply.

We finish with the news about a submarine cable called FASTER, the highest-capacity submarine cable ever built.