Discover Financial Services announced Tuesday that it will add a $76 million data center at its New Albany, Ohio campus.

Business drivers influence design, says Ron Diersen of Infosys Limited. The type of IT infrastructure in today's data center is designed to provide specific business services, which impacts the physical design of the data center.

Design shopping site Fab.com is debuting the next major release of its platform today, Fab 3.0, which is going live on the U.S.-based Fab.com first. The revamp focuses heavily on improved “social shopping” features, and will soon arrive in Fab’s mobile applications before rolling out to Fab’s European properties later this year.

The update offers over 100 enhancements, both big and small, but the most notable changes involve the redesigned navigation, a new feature the company calls “smile pages,” and a major update to Fab’s Live Feed which adds Facebook integration and a number of filtering options, while doing away with Google+ in favor of Pinterest.

When you log into the Fab 3.0 site, you’ll now land on a new page called “Featured Today,” which reflects the most popular sales and categories on the site that day. This is the page that appears whenever you click the “Fab.” logo from any other section of the site going forward.

The new top navigation is noticeably less cluttered than before, too, as Fab has now ditched ”Stores” and “Sales” from here. Instead, there’s now an increased focus on social shopping features (the “Live Feed”) and the newly added “Search” option, which offers searching by price, category and even color. Sub-navigation directs users to favorite sections like “Art,” “Home,” “Kids,” etc., and to the right, a “live ticker” displays constantly updated trending items.

But the removal of “sales” is telling for a service which some still think of as being in the “flash sales” genre – Fab is telling the world that it’s just not that kind of site. There will still be sales, however, they’re just not the reason Fab wants customers to shop there.

“From the beginning, we never really thought of Fab as a flash sales site, we thought of ourselves as design,” explains CEO Jason Goldberg. “People appreciate Fab for discovery, or for finding products they didn’t know existed, or for delighting them, and price is not a big deal. We don’t want people to think ‘sale, sale, sale,’” he says.

As for the discovery features on Fab, they’re getting a big boost today with the updated Live Feed section. This Pinterest-like part to the Fab experience was initially rolled out in December as a part of the Fab 2.0 launch as a way to show a live, dynamic feed of what Fab’s members are buying, favoriting and sharing. As a result of the feed’s introduction just five months ago, 15% of visits to this section now result in a purchase, says Goldberg.

The most important change here is Facebook integration. Members will now be able to filter the feed to see just what their Facebook friends are buying, favoriting and sharing. It’s an obvious next step for the company, which has already worked closely with the social network on things like Facebook Timeline integration, Open Graph (implicit sharing) integration, and most recently, adoption of Facebook’s new “actions.”

The social shopping angle does well for Fab, which already saw anywhere from 15% to 30% of its traffic come from Facebook any given day, plus around 2% from Twitter, and another 2% from Pinterest. And that’s before today’s introduction of the new Pinterest “Pin it” buttons which were added in favor of Google+ (now dropped).

Google+ traffic was practically non-existent on Fab. To give you an idea of context, here are some sites that sent more traffic to Fab than Google+ did: W00t, Bing, Coolmaterial.com, Svpply, TechCrunch, NYT and Goldberg’s blog.

Also new to the Live Feed section is a filter by category, color or price option, which just generally improves the browsing experience, as well as support for buying items directly from the feed itself.

The final change is the introduction of “Smile pages,” which is just another way to feature popular items on the site, by pulling trending items onto what you can think of as “best of Fab” pages.

“How do you help people dig into a site, discover and browse?” Goldberg says of how Fab has approached these new changes. “It’s like the anti-Amazon. Amazon is the best place in the world if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but you don’t browse Amazon. Fab is like going shopping with your friends, or maybe you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you want the fun of discovering stuff,” he says.

The update should be live now on Fab.com.

About 1,700 data center professionals and vendors gathered this week for the seventh annual Uptime Institute Symposium at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif. For highlights, see our special photo feature.

The open source infrastructure management tool Chef has now been downloaded more than 1 million times, Chef’s parent company Opscode said today. Opscode will release a number of new features today at its first ChefCon user conference.

With Square yet to reveal when or where it might offer its mobile payment service in Europe, and PayPal apparently still only talking with would-be partners, the door is wide open for more local players to jump in and pick up some market share. Sweden’s iZettle, which often gets compared to Square, is now doing just that: today it is launching its iOS, dongle-based mobile payment service to the UK, four months after its pan-nordic live launch, and as it is preparing to launch an Android version of its product later this year.

iZettle kicking off its service by giving away 3,000 card readers to small businesses and sole traders in the country as part of its invitation-only beta, which it is running in cooperation with MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club. In its still brief life, it has seen some decent traction in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where it now has 50,000 active merchants on its network.

iZettle is filling a practical need in the current market. The initial aim of the service, according to Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO, is to target not those merchants that already take card payments, but those who have never signed on to using anything other than checks, cash and invoices to accept payments. There are roughly 20 million small businesses in Europe that fall into this category, he says, with the “uncarded” ranging from sole traders like carpenters to small independent cafes. “We’re not trying to go after those with existing infrastructure because switching costs are too high,” he says.

De Geer will not yet reveal the total number or value of transactions or how many consumers that have used the service to date, except to say that the company is building out its infrastructure to keep up with the demand and has grown by 10 percent in recent months. What’s interesting is that, for now at least, the service seems to be attracting high-value transactions: De Geer says the average value of a transaction is €60 ($76), compared to between €10 and €15 for the average NFC transaction in the Nordic region. (In comparison, he notes that Square transacts between $8-10 per day on any given reader, but that’s an average number and it has picked up a huge number of merchants now.)

The iZettle service works similar to PayPal’s Here and Square, in that a merchant plugs a card-reading dongle into an iOS device to process a card payment using an app downloaded to the device. Instead of reading the magnetic strip on the back of the card, iZettle reads the chip — these are now near-ubiquitous in Europe and tend to be more secure. Like other card payment services, you sign on the device screen to complete a payment, and the funds are deposited in a merchant account the next day.

Similar to other payment services iZettle works on a commission basis — in its case a percentage on each transaction, with that percentage varying by country. It actually dropped a transaction fee it used to take only days ago — perhaps a sign of how the area is heating up and so offering more competitive offerings is essential.

For now, the service is only on iOS but De Geer says that Android is coming soon, “this year for sure.” He says that the delay was due to (surprise!) fragmentation across too many versions of the platform, and too many devices. But the evolution to Ice Cream Sandwich — the latest OS — is definitely making things more standardized, he notes.

One expansion that is not coming soon is to the U.S. Not only do companies like Square and Here have a lot of early business sewn up, but he also notes that “The U.S. is not too interesting for us given that they use the mag stripe and we focus on chip-and-PIN services.”

More interesting, he says, are markets like Asia and Latin America, where there is good chip-card penetration but card payment facilities are still relatively low among smaller businesses. Still, the next launches are likely to be in Europe, with Germany, France, Italy and Spain all on De Geer’s roadmap, with “one or two of those” expected to come online this summer. To date, iZettle has received venture funding of $16.4 million from Index, Creandum and others to fund that expansion.

Interested companies can either register a request through iZettle’s web site, or via its iTunes app, and the first 3,000 will get a free card reader to get started.

Intel (INTC) announced an expansion of its Xeon processor portfolio with new products designed to address a broad and emerging set of server requirements and provide IT managers with additional choice and flexibility. 28 processors announced Intel introduced 28 processors across three product...

Insurance provider Unum will lease wholesale data center space from T5 Data Centers at its T5@Atlanta wholesale data center located in Alpharetta, Ga.

While western Oregon has been a hotbed of data center activity, developer Mission West Properties has decided to look east with a data center development in Ontario, Oregon, close to the border of Idaho.

Today Emerson Network Power released its Trellis software, the company’s big bet on data center infrastructure management (DCIM). The global availability of the first four software applications for Trellis culminates a two-year development period.