Skyway Recommended September 10th to 16th

Each Monday we’ll pass on links to articles we thought were well worth reading from the previous week, kind of a Digg-lite for those who live where we do (British Columbia, Canada), work like we do (high speed business internet), and think like we do (internet trends, internet privacy, cutting-edge technology, etc.). If you don’t want to wait ’til Monday, we usually tweet and link to these as we come across them…

GigaOm: Intel immerses its servers in oil — and they like it!

A handful of Intel servers just emerged from a yearlong bath in an oil-based coolant, and the results were remarkable. The servers ran at a PUE just above 1.0, and showed no ill effects from the oil. Is oil immersion coming to a rack near you? Read More…

Wired: Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

Photos of the mystery computing device appeared on the web in late February. Taken with a smartphone, they were a bit washed out and a little blurry in places, but you could easily read the name printed on the long, thin piece of hardware. “Pluto Switch,” the label said. Read More…

Wired: Intel Confirms Decline of Server Giants HP, Dell, and IBM

In 2008, says Intel bigwig Diane Bryant, three familiar names bought far more server chips than any other company on earth. That year, she remembers, HP, Dell, and IBM accounted for 75 percent of the revenue Intel raked in from the sale of processors destined for the beefy computer servers that drive the internet and so much of the software used inside the world’s businesses. But just four years later, Bryant says, the landscape has completely changed. Today, she explains,eight server makers account for 75 percent of Intel’s server chip revenues, and at least one of those eight doesn’t even sell servers. It only makes servers for itself. “Google is something like number five on that list,” Bryant told us on Monday evening, during a dinner with reporters in downtown San Francisco. Read More…

GigaOM:  How Disney built a big data platform on a startup budget

The big data world is full of small, scrappy startups using their ingenuity to build complex systems out of open source software, but the Walt Disney Company is not one of them. Here’s what goes into building a big data platform in a Fortune 100 company. Read More…