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Facebook developer George Lee threw down the guantlet at F8 today by saying that he wants each of its 800 million users to have a relationship with at least one developer and that relationship should be focused on content.

"Every single user who is on Facebook should have some relationship with some developer that creates distribution," said Lee.

HP introduced a new modular data center at HP Discover this week that resembles a double wide mobile home with a cooling system that the company says has 95% better efficiency than the monolithic data centers built over the past 20 years.

The cooling system for the HP EcoPOD is designed to adapt to IT loads and outside conditions. For the most part, it uses air it pulls into the EcoPOD.

Something is just not right with the universe when data centers make people breathless. I had thought it might end after all the delight that came with the super big fans and chassis love that marked Facebook's "Open Compute," media blitz. Facebook data center party in Prineville, OR - woohoo!

Now comes the latest from rural North Carolina, all summed up quite well by long time Fortune editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who looks at Fox News wonderful speculation about the "more than iTunes," data center.

We're live blogging the Facebook event to unveil its open compute initiative. The event is detailing Facebook's new data center in Prineville, Oregon.

Let's get started.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is opening a new data center in Tokyo, its fifth overall and second in Asia.

The new AWS data center is noteworthy as we are seeing a number of new initiatives to open data centers in countries around the world that provide an infrastructure with the capability to scale up and down. Korea Telecomm recently worked with Cloudscaling to develop a multi-tenant infrastructure. And at the Parallels Summit last week, I met people who are developing data centers in Cameroon, Spain and other parts of the world that have multi-tenant architectures.

A group of companies have formed an alliance to encourage cloud computing by making the data center radically different than it is today.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) consists of about 70 companies that want data centers to be more efficient, simpler and open. The goal is to develop industry standards developed by a cross section of vendors with usage models that cover the details of running what they see as the modern data center.

It's always a question when alliances come upon the scene. They tend to come and go, often existing to serve as marketing platforms for vendors more than anything else.

Utah-based C7 Data Center announced today that it has opened a new 65,000 square foot facility in south Salt Lake County. The new data center, boasting 40,000 square foot of available space, is open and ready for immediate occupancy. According to C7, "several large companies" have signed multi-year agreements to move in, including an undisclosed "anchor tenant."

And while C7 hasn't disclosed the name of this tenant, local media are speculating that it's Twitter, following the Salt Lake Tribune's report in July that the company had partnered with Twitter to build its new data center.

Apple is building a massive data center in North Carolina for its iTunes Cloud. But, recently they faced a problem. To really get onto the cloud, Apple needed more land.

In particular a one-acre parcel owned by Donnie and Kathy Full in the rural town of Maiden.

According to Bloomberg, Apple made an offer to the Fullbrights for the land they purchased once upon a time for $6,000. But Donnie and Kathie said no thanks. Apple made a second offer. They again politely declined.

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) relocated its data centers to North Carolina. Instead of relocating 250 servers, they leveraged the opportunity to create a virtual infrastructure.

"Rather than physically transport all those servers down to Durham and then rebuild the infrastructure, we decided to create a virtual infrastructure in the new location," says Ranny Dey, director of IT operations at AICPA.

Emerging from stealth today, Cirtas Systems unveils its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers, aiming make cloud storage work like an onsite enterprise storage array.

Cirtas has secured strategic alliances with leading cloud storage providers, including Amazon - a Series A investor in the startup. Deployed in the data center, Cirtas's Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller looks like local storage, but bridges the local to the cloud. It is, according to Josh Goldstein, Cirtas Systems' Vice President, "the best of both worlds."