President Barack Obama's 2011 budget proposal flattens federal IT spending and orders federal departments to consolidate and centralise IT operations. This budget is unsparing in its criticisms and says federal IT departments have a history of not delivering productivity and performance gains "that are found when IT is deployed effectively in the private sector."

Digital Realty Trust has announced the results of its leasing activity for both the fourth quarter and full year 2009. For the full year 2009, lease signings represent over US$472 million in total cash contract value.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has issued an executive order calling for a drastic reduction in the state's data centre footprint and energy consumption and requiring all state agencies to appoint CIOs and information security officers.

The state aims to reduce its data centre space by 50% by July 2011 and to cut energy usage from IT operations 30% by July 2012. Among systems to be consolidated under the order are networks, e-mail, and anti-spam and encryption services. The state plans to standardise PCs and security services across the agencies and departments.

US technology services provider Computer Sciences Corp reported a quarterly profit ahead of analysts' projections as it benefited from demand in outsourcing amid signs that technology spending was rebounding with the improving economy.

The company, which provides technology and outsourcing services to companies and government agencies, reaffirmed its outlook for fiscal year 2010. Net income for the third quarter ended Jan. 1 rose to US$216 million, from US$163 million, a year earlier. Revenue was flat at US$3.95 billion.

Source: Reuters

By this summer, your data centres may be able to earn an Energy Star certification, if the final stages of work underway at the US Environmental Protection Agency conclude as planned. At the recent Green Grid's data centre conference in San Jose, Energy Star manager Alexandra Sullivan told attendees that the certification could be ready as early as June. Once the certification is launched, companies will be able to take an online test to rank how efficient their facilities are.

With the extensive power and water needs for operating and cooling data centres, the ability to quantify and monitor efficiency can be extremely beneficial. Effective means of measuring and improving efficiency can offer data centre owners and operators tremendous returns, both financially and in terms of environmental impact. 

Qwest Communications has announced the opening of its 17th data centre nationwide and third centre in the Washington, D.C., metro area, in response to continued customer demand for hosting and cloud-based infrastructure services. The new Qwest-owned and operated CyberCenter currently is supporting one federal government customer.

CoreLink Data Centers, a provider of high quality, Tier 3 Data Centres, with colocation facilities in Phoenix, Seattle and Las Vegas, has announced, that it has added a Chicago data centre location in the suburb of Mt. Prospect. CoreLink has entered into a long term lease for an 81,600 sq ft stand-alone building which is currently configured with 10,000 sq ft of raised floor.

Boosted by gains in its managed hosting and cloud computing business, Rackspace Hosting said that profits for the fourth quarter surged 32% - from US$6.8 million to US$9 million - as the company topped Wall Street estimates.

CyrusOne has announced that Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS), one of the world’s leading oil exploration service companies, will occupy a 10,000 sq ft data hall in CyrusOne’s newest colocated data centre located in West Houston. PGS will colocate high-density, mission-critical data and applications servers to support exploration projects and operations worldwide.

Staples, the Framingham, Mass.-based retailer with 1,872 stores in North America, is expanding its IT services capabilities in a move that will take it right inside the data centre.

They have set up a new unit, Staples Technology Solutions, "which Staples officials said they're aiming for all sizes of clients with consulting services, data centre services such as disaster recovery and data centre media management. The company also has printer management services and has built its own software for managing operations.

VISI, a leading data centre services and managed hosting provider, has begun its demand-driven expansion on its Saint Paul Data Center. This expansion will allow VISI to meet the needs of recent new customer additions.

VISI currently occupies 11,000 net sq ft of data centre space at 180 East 5th Street in downtown Saint Paul. After the expansion to 18,000 net sq ft, VISI will still have room for over 150 additional cabinets along with space to continue expanding the data centre.

Source: Eon

Facebook's announcement that it would build a custom data centre in Prineville, Ore., met praise for its creation of jobs and environmentally friendly construction plans. But the company received some heat when word came out that the data centre would be partially powered by coal, the top cause of global warming. Change.org started a petition to "keep Facebook off coal," and a Facebook group has formed called "Tell Facebook to use clean energy for its data centre."

Atrato, a provider of high performance autonomic tiered storage for data-intensive applications such as virtual environments, virtual desktops, business and scientific analytics, data warehousing, and Web 2.0 applications, has announced that the US Department of Energy has deployed sixteen Atrato Velocity1000 systems in its Golden Field Office, to support implementation of its newly virtualised data centre.

Digital Realty Trust has completed a multi-faceted lease agreement with SoftLayer that combines its headquarters and data centres in a Digital Realty Trust property in the Dallas area.

SunGard Availability Services is expanding its data centres in Midtown Atlanta and Smyrna, Georgia. to meet increasing customer demand for colocation and managed services. The SunGard Midtown Atlanta facility is undergoing a large-scale power upgrade designed to support an additional 350 cabinets of IT space for customers. The upgrade includes adding 2.5 megawatts in utility power, doubling facility capacity.

Never did Jerry Yang think the company he started in a trailer while he was a student at Stanford University would open a 180,000 sq ft data centre near Omaha. Thursday, the process of lobbying, negotiating and construction that began in August 2008 came to a close as the founder of Yahoo joined Gov. Dave Heineman and other state and local officials at the unveiling of the company's new data centre in La Vista.

After changing cooling systems at its data centres in Ashwaubenon and Stevens Point, Associated Bank expects to save US$115,000 a year in energy costs. The data centres house the bank's primary computing equipment and must be kept at consistently cool temperatures around the clock. With a standard cooling unit, compressors need to run continuously.

Even before a shovel has struck the ground, a supercomputing facility that will be built west of town is making other companies look this way. Cheyenne is one of three finalists for a US$750 million data centre that would employ 100 - perhaps 150 - people, said Randy Bruns, president of Cheyenne LEADS. He said he doesn't know which company it is, except that it's a Fortune 50 financial firm.

NaviSite, the cloud-enabled, enterprise-class hosting, managed applications and services company, has announced the sale of its Lawson / Kronos Application Services business to Velocity Technology Solutions for US$56 million in cash. All current NaviSite Lawson / Kronos customers will be transferred to Velocity as part of the transaction. Velocity will also assume NaviSite’s lease of the Minneapolis data centre where the services are hosted, managed, and supported. The transaction is effective immediately.

CoSentry has completed the installation of an Eaton PowerWare 9395 UPS.  The 500 kVA unit is the first large-scale deployment of this high efficiency, inherently redundant UPS technology in the state of South Dakota, according to Gary Johnson of Northern Power Technologies, the South Dakota Eaton Representative. 

CBTS, a national provider of data centres and managed services, has launched its new enterprise network and operations centre in Mason, Ohio, just outside of Cincinnati. The facility - which now monitors and manages over one hundred thousand technology infrastructure devices - has been relocated to a centric location to support the company's existing clientele in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

Telx, the leading interconnection and colocation provider in strategic North American markets, has announced that Lexent Metro Connect, a leading provider of dark fibre networks in the New York Metropolitan area, has expanded its presence to meet the continued growth of its client base colocating within Telx facilities.

C7 Data Centers, a national provider of colocation, disaster recovery and virtualisation solutions, announced that Educators Mutual Insurance Association has signed a multi-year agreement as a new data centre customer.

A new report by international consulting firm BroadGroup forecasts space growth averaging 61% across 7 key markets by 2014. Yet this is still likely to leave a space shortage following significant enterprise outsourcing. In a new report, Data Centres Latin America – Competition, Demand Drivers and Growth, BroadGroup forecasts sustained sector growth across the region.

Primus Business Services, a division of Primus Telecommunications Canada, a leading national full-service communications provider, announced it has completed the expansion of its second Ottawa data centre. Originally opened in 2007, the expansion triples the amount of raised floor available for customers to over 9,000 sq ft. This brings the total combined data centre space of Primus facilities in the Ottawa market to approximately 30,000 gross sq ft or 15,000 sq ft net.

ShareFile has opened a third data centre located in California. By adding this data centre to their list of established fields around the world, ShareFile is able to provide even faster upload and download file transfer speeds for users of their business services in this region.

Carpathia Hosting, a provider of enterprise managed hosting services for government agencies and businesses, has announced it has been selected by SugarSync, to provide a managed hosting solution for the company’s digital sync, backup and sharing service. Carpathia will host and manage one of SugarSync’s private compute and storage clouds, which take advantage of the Citrix NetScaler MPX line of application acceleration, load balancing and web security appliances.

Voonami has unveiled a huge computing facility in West Valley City, Utah, on touting it as the greenest in the state and on par with Google's most efficient centres. Providing the chill is a giant evaporative cooler, similar to swamp coolers that have been in use in dry climates since the beginning of the 20th century. The cooler, along with other engineering innovations, are expected to trim energy costs by 80% over a typical giant data centre, said Voonami president Ben Bush.

Juniper Networks has announced that John C. Lincoln Health Network is building an end-to-end integrated network infrastructure that includes Juniper's switching, security technologies and network management solution in order to support its new data centre that connects more than 3,500 employees and a medical staff of more than 1,100 physicians in Phoenix.