Google has invested US$38.8 million in two North Dakota wind farms, the Internet giant's first direct investment in utility-scale renewable energy generation. Google's investment includes the Ashtabula wind farm in North Dakota. The wind turbines, made by General Electric, generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to serve more than 55,000 homes.

SunGard Availability Services will showcase its new managed services data centre with an Open House on Thursday, May 20, 2010, from 9:00 a.m. to3:00 p.m. The 69,000 square foot Sacramento data centre is the latest facility to be added to SunGard’s more than 35 managed services data centres in North America and Europe.

The facility offers high-density, raised floor space and a full suite of managed services including virtualization for primary and replicated customer applications, data storage and backups, security, monitoring and cloud computing infrastructure.

Bethesda-based cloud computing vendor Virtustream has closed out an equity financing deal worth US$40 million to help expand its business. The company says the latest financing comes from Intel Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners and TD Funds. It caps a round of venture capital financing begun in September led by Columbia Capital and Blue Lagoon Capital.

Telehouse America has announced that its Global Interlink service will be available, beginning June 1st, to customers colocated at 60 Hudson and 111 Eighth Avenue, two of the largest telecommunications hubs in Manhattan.

Companies with equipment housed in either location can now connect via low latency Ethernet between several facilities including all of Telehouse's data centres in the US, UK and France at speeds up to 1 Gbps.

Source: Market Watch

IT services provider Rackspace Hosting has said y its profit for the first quarter rose sharply from last year, driven mainly by a 23.2% increase in revenue. Quarterly earnings matched Street view, while revenues surpassed estimates. First-quarter net income was US$9.81 million, 48.9% higher than $6.59 million in the same quarter last year.

The San Antonio, Texas-based company's net revenue for the quarter was $US178.81 million, higher than US$145.08 million in the prior-year quarter.

Source: Stock Market Review

Cincinnati Bell has little choice but to innovate if it wants to grow. That's because its core markets are either saturated or declining. Fibre optics and commercial data centres will be focus areas of the company in coming years, CEO Jack Cassidy said at Cincinnati Bell’s annual shareholders meeting. The 500,000 sq ft of data centre space that Cincinnati Bell has in Greater Cincinnati account for about 10% of its profits, with growth of about 27% in 2009.

Agencies’ plans for meeting the green government mandates outlined in President Obama’s October executive order aren’t due until June 2, but the Agriculture Department’s chief sustainability officer already has identified one of her top priorities: cutting energy consumption in data centres. Robin Heard, a lifelong conservationist who joined Agriculture in 1976, said she had no idea how much energy is consumed by data centres until she took on her new role as the department’s deputy assistant secretary for administration about a year ago.

Cary data management company Consonus Technologies will become a subsidiary of Midas Medici Holdings, a publicly traded company in New York that's investing in smart grid developments. Consonus, with more than 100 employees in Cary, will continue operating independently under its own name without changes or layoffs, company officials said. Consonus provides data storage and support.

Consonus has about 200 employees and operates three data centres in Salt Lake City.

Source: News Observer

Castle Access and Xertix have announced a joint venture agreement to expand geographic reach internationally, strengthen IT and managed services capabilities, and extend industry leadership for its enterprise data centre, colocation, and mission-critical managed services offerings.

Rackspace Hosting has announced plans to expand in its current data centre facility in the Chicago area. Rackspace will lease approximately 28,200 additional sq ft of raised floor space, consisting of 4.33 megawatts of available critical load, from a subsidiary of DuPont Fabros Technology, an owner, developer, operator and manager of wholesale data centres.

This expansion will bring Rackspace to a total of approximately 65,000 sq ft and 9.9 megawatts of power in the current Elk Grove Village, IL data centre.

Source: Market Watch

With a host of industry awards and landmark projects to its credit, Chicago’s Environmental Systems Design, is one of the country’s leading data centre design and engineering firms. Having completed a DaCEY Award-winning Green Data Center of the Year for Allstate, ESD is currently the lead architect/engineer for a 315,000 sq ft data centre facility on Chicago’s Near South Side.

Paul Schlattman is the V.P. of ESD’s Mission Critical Facilities Group. We asked him to give us the lowdown on design trends for these high-powered facilities.

SunGard Availability Services is opening a new workforce continuity facility in Federal Way, Washington, to provide customers with disaster recovery and testing services. The facility is available to organisations in need of an alternative workspace, telecommunications capabilities and IT resources to support their workforce and recover business processes after a disaster, and during a recovery test.

Equinix has announced the expansion of its NY4 International Business Exchange data centre. The US$80 million third phase provides approximately 1,250 cabinet equivalents, enabling Equinix to better service the largest metropolitan area in the United States--a region that includes leading financial firms and some of the largest media and enterprise companies in the world. The NY4 IBX data centre located 11 miles from downtown Manhattan and is one of Equinix's eight IBX data centres in the area.

Anthony Bolner, senior vice president of Stream Data Centers discusses the company’s data centre in Richardson, as well as the rising growth of North Texas's data centre services market.

Information technology and business processing services provider CGI Group and Stanley, a provider of IT services to US defense, intelligence and federal civilian government agencies, have entered into a definitive merger agreement, whereby Montreal, Canada-based CGI would acquire Stanley through a cash tender offer of US$37.50 per share, CGI said Friday. The offer represents an enterprise value of about US$1.07 billion, and expands CGI's business in the US.

Colo5, a provider of broadband services and data centre colocation services in Jacksonville, Florida, announced the activation of a custom-built, dedicated, private fibre optic ring throughout metro Jacksonville. The OC-192 connection is a robust fibre optic network transmission line that is an ideal source for those customers who seek redundant, self-healing local access at a substantially reduced cost.

Infineta Systems has announced the results of an enterprise survey focusing on the traffic characteristics and growth for data-centre-to-data centre interconnects. The survey of 106 US IT decision-makers responsible for data centre network or storage operations revealed that data centre-to-data centre traffic is exploding. For 68% of respondents, traffic volume will double or triple over the next 2-4 years.

BlueBridge Networks, a provider of business continuity services, has announced that it has acquired the former Nationwide Insurance data centre located in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. This data centre acquisition is instrumental to the company's growth strategy of continuing to make significant investments in infrastructure and services offerings aimed at enhancing their data centre and business continuity solutions.

UK2 Group has logged exceptional growth courtesy of the March launch of www.100TB.com, its new hosting service. 100TB leverages the automated infrastructure services and recently expanded network of SoftLayer Technologies, the innovative on-demand data centre services provider.

Peak 10, a managed services company with world-class data centres, has announced it will be providing data centre and hosting services to Camstar Systems, a software solutions company that advance product quality in the manufacturing industry and enable its customers to deliver the highest quality products on time, the first time, every time.

PEER 1 Hosting has announced that the company's new, US$40 million data centre located in Toronto, Ontario is officially up and running. The 40,000 sq ft flagship data centre is also the first PEER 1 Hosting data centre to offer all three hosting solutions - colocation, managed hosting and dedicated hosting - under one roof.

Avaya Government Solutions has won a major re-compete contract from the United States Air Force to provide information assurance, network assessment and network engineering support for the Scope Enterprise Design Guidance and Evaluation Project. Scope EDGE helps ensure the continued security and operation of U.S. Air Force network resources around the world. The new contract, covering a one year term with provisions for four, one-year extension options, is valued at approximately $64 million.

The US Environmental Protection Agency is expected to make an announcement on establishing final standards for its Energy Star certification for data centres. The green organization is currently holding meetings with various storage firms and looking for feedback so that it can move forward with draft standards for enterprise storage systems.

In February, the EPA announced it had nearly completed the process of creating an Energy Star rating for data centres.

Source: The WHIR

DuPont Fabros Technology has said it launched a sale of 11 million shares to raise money for data centres in California and Virginia. The company said it expected to give underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to another 1.65 million shares to cover overallotments.

The company said it intended to used the proceeds plus borrowing from its revolving credit facility and cash to finish the first phase of a data centre in Santa Clara, California, and another in Ashburn, Virginia.

Source: Business Week

Safety National, one of the nation's leading providers of excess workers' compensation coverage, has selected SunGard Availability Services to help minimise data loss and IT downtime that impact business operations and compliance processes. SunGard is helping Safety National accelerate business recovery time by increasing backup process efficiency, and improving the speed and reliability of disaster recovery.

Cincinnati Bell and ABRY Partners have entered into a definitive agreement for Cincinnati Bell to acquire data centre operator CyrusOne in a cash transaction valued at approximately US$525 million. CyrusOne is a premier provider of colocation and data centre services to Fortune 500 companies, and the largest privately held data centre operator based in the state of Texas. CyrusOne will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cincinnati Bell, retaining its brand and executive management team.

The federal government is aiming through its government-wide data centre consolidation effort to increase server virtualization four-fold or more, double or triple the number of virtual machines per host, increase server utilization several times over, and make significant gains in energy efficiency.

The products from Polatis have been selected by Terremark Worldwide. for its fibre management applications in selected data centres. The solution utilises Polatis’ ultra low-loss Series 2000 optical matrix switching platforms, based on its patented DirectLight beam steering technology.

CoreSite Realty, a real-estate investment trust focused on data centres, planned to raise up to US$230 million in an initial public offering of common stock, according to a filing with the regulator. Pricing terms of the offering were not disclosed. The company intends to list its common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "COR".

Savvis, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, has announced that UBS Investment Bank's equities electronic trading infrastructure and the firm's Alternative Trading System, UBS ATS, are now hosted by Savvis in its premier financial data centre complex.

UBS ATS, the firm's non-displayed crossing pool that enables client orders to interact with all of UBS's U.S. equities liquidity and its institutional agency algorithmic trading flow, is now also located in the Savvis financial data centre complex in Weehawken, NJ.

The US Department of Energy today announced up to US$20 million for research, development, and demonstration of cutting-edge geothermal technologies that could reduce US demand for fossil fuels and significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions.

San Jose, California-based Infineta Systems emerged from a stealth mode of operating this week to announce it has raised its first round of institutional funding at US$15 million. The funding came entirely from Alloy Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners, a San Mateo, California-based venture firm that had incubated Infineta beginning in 2008.

Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to invest US$64.4 million to expand engineering lab space at its Fort Collins plant. Documents that Fort Collins City Council members will view describe how HP would spend US$34.4 million for new construction on the easternmost portion of its Harmony Road campus and another US$30 million equipping the space. City councillors will decide whether to provide a US$1.6 million incentive package for the project.

Cox Business and Phoenix NAP, a new, next generation data centre and network access point, have announced that they have come together to deepen security, redundancy and data centre accessibility for small and medium-sized businesses across the state.

"Cox Business is significantly expanding our fibre infrastructure in Arizona. Our alliance with the Phoenix NAP enterprise will provide a new layer of connectivity and security options for growing businesses in our competitive market," said Hyman Sukiennik, vice president of Cox Business.

Source: PR Newswire

Colocation provider, CoreLink Data Centers, is now providing Continuity Focus with innovative colocation solutions. CoreLink’s services include high performing network and IP offerings, performance and availability, transparency, 100% uptime service level agreement and flexible contrac tterms.

State officials say they will for now tough it out with IBM Corp. on a troubled data centre consolidation project. But IBM, the lead contractor on the US$863 million project, could end up as a smaller player in the effort to merge the data centres of 28 state agencies into two upgraded and streamlined facilities.

Stream Data Centers’ new data facility in far West San Antonio has been officially designated an energy-efficient building. Stream Data Centers is owned by Dallas real estate firm Stream Realty Partners LP, a full-service real estate investment, development and services company.

MindTree has partnered with The Carlyle Group, one of the world's largest private equity firms to provide IT infrastructure management and support services for the latter's global data centres.

MindTree will monitor and manage all of Carlyle's IT production servers hosted at Carlyle's data centres in the US, UK and Hong Kong, as well as its disaster recovery data centre in Virginia. MindTree will also monitor and manage the file servers located in Carlyle offices throughout the world, as well as other classes of hardware and applications.

Chloride North America, a subsidiary of UK-based Chloride, launched its new MOD10 Series, a true online three-phase UPS system featuring a modular, vertically-scalable rack-mounted design that allows growing organizations to cost-effectively meet their evolving power protection needs in incremental steps without interruption to the critical load.

Engineered to provide cost-effective redundancy, the MOD10 provides highly-adaptable backup power that lowers total cost of system ownership, reduces required floor space, and helps sustain vital network uptime.

AT&T has announced that it has reached an agreement with industry-leading game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment for a new multimillion dollar multi-year, multi-services contract. Under the terms of the contract, AT&T and Blizzard expand their 10-year relationship, with AT&T serving as a provider of hosting services for Blizzard in North America in addition to providing voice and data services for Global Call Center Support and Content Distribution Network services.

Latisys, a leading provider of colocation, managed hosting, managed services and disaster recovery solutions, has announced it has been awarded a US$3.4 million contract by State of Illinois Department of Central Management Services to provide data centre colocation services that include multi-site failover redundancy, multi-layered security and rich network connectivity.

VISI will celebrate the grand opening of its newest data centre with an open house and ribbon-cutting ceremony on Friday, May 21, 2010 from noon to 6 p.m. at VISI’s Eden Prairie headquarters.

The VISI data centre is being built to Tier III specifications and will feature 18,000 sq ft of raised floor when completely built out, which will make this one of the largest data centres in the state. The Eden Prairie data centre will significantly expand the ability to meet the demand generated from VISI’s colocation, managed hosting, and cloud computing services.

State IT managers in Oregon have failed to adequately prepare for a natural disaster and critical state services could be at risk. That's the conclusion of a new audit of Oregon's State Data Center. The Salem facility serves as the computer brains for 11 state agencies. Auditors found that while the centre has conducted limited disaster tests, the Data Center lacks a comprehensive recovery plan. Will Garber, deputy director of the Secretary of State's Audits Division, says the Data Center hasn't made disaster planning a high enough priority.

Microsoft is proceeding with an expansion of its massive Quincy data centre, a company spokesman has said. The new construction follows the enactment in March of a new state law reinstating a sales tax exemption for new data centres.

Balfour Beatty Construction was selected to provide preconstruction services and manage construction of the new headquarters for NPR, the internationally acclaimed producer and distributor of non-commercial news, talk, and entertainment programming. Located in a business improvement district of Washington, DC, the headquarters will transform a historic warehouse into a sustainable 330,000 sq ft office building to meet the needs of the multimedia organization.

Guilford County got the best of both worlds Thursday. American Express has decided to locate a US$400 million data services centre in the eastern part of the county and agreed to do so without requesting any local financial incentives. “I would say congratulations to all of us. This is a big deal. A big deal,” said Pat Danahy, president and CEO of the Greensboro Partnership. The company already has a large call center at 7701 Airport Center Drive. That operation opened in 1985 and employs about 2,000 people.

Most companies shouldn’t be investing in processors, servers and the space to hold them, said Cincinnati Bell CEO Jack Cassidy. He’s investing for them. With the US$525 million acquisition of Houston-based CyrusOne this month, Cassidy and Cincinnati Bell are making a big play in the data centre business, which can allow firms to save money by outsourcing much of their computing. Cassidy sees the sector as his company’s main opportunity for growth: The wireless phone market is considered fully penetrated, and the landline phone market is declining.

Data centre operator FiberMedia has opened a facility in Secaucus, the latest computer centre built in North Jersey as Wall Street becomes more high tech. Michael Roark, FiberMedia's president and chief executive officer, said the NYSE Euronext's data centre in Mahwah made the decision to expand in Secaucus easier.

The company's 10-year lease for 32,610 sq ft took effect in March, said Daniel Ackerman, senior director of leasing at Lincoln Equities Group in Rutherford. The 84,000 sq Ft facility is owned by Willett Cos. of Rye, N.Y.

Harris Corporation has announced its decision to create the nation’s first cyber integration centre, which will provide managed hosting services in a trusted environment for federal and commercial clients. The new Harris Cyber Integration Center will be located on the outer cusp of the Washington Metropolitan area, according to Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, vice president and general manager for Cyber Integrated Solutions.

LightBound has started construction of state of the art Tier IV data centre. The new 47,000 sq ft facility located at 650West Henry Street will have the latest power, cooling and communications technologies for state of the art cloud computing and colocation facilities.

Telx, a leading interconnection and colocation provider in strategic North American markets, has announced that Peerless Network has selected Telx as its colocation provider to enter the Phoenix, Arizona and Charlotte, North Carolina markets. Selecting Telx's strategic data centre locations in these two key cities supports Peerless Network's strategy to expand services quickly and affordably, and will give the company the ability to easily reach new customers and expand services with existing ones.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that Zetta, a provider of on-demand enterprise storage solutions, is using Equinix’s Silicon Valley International Business Exchange) data centre to ensure secure, uninterrupted service to its customers. Zetta chose Equinix to support the successful launch of its on-demand enterprise storage solutions in 2009 based on Equinix’s ability to deliver reliable service, network-neutral connectivity and the opportunity for cost-effective expansion.

Seattle colocation provider, CoreLink Data Centers, has, announced that it has added a second data centre to the Seattle market. CoreLink has entered into a long term lease for a 39,000 sq ft facility which is currently configured with 13,000 sq ft of raised floor.. The site is in Tukwila, WA and is located adjacent to CoreLink’s existing Seattle colocation facility (SEA01) which is presently 90% occupied.

CME Group has said that it hired Craig Mohan to lead development of the exchange's colocation and data centre business, as the derivatives-exchange operator ramps up to begin offering new services for computer-driven traders early next year.

Mohan, who joins CME from hedge fund firm Citadel Investment Group, will plan strategy as CME prepares to roll out colocation capabilities and broaden its data centre services in early 2012. Rival IntercontinentalExchange Inc. (ICE) also sited its main data centre in Chicago.

Source: Easy Bourse

Level 3 Communications has announced that the company has established a multi-service relationship with GlobeNet, an international provider of submarine cable transmission capacity, to enable Level 3 and GlobeNet to offer transport and high-speed Internet services to satisfy the growth in communications demand in South America.

Data Foundry, a provider of wholesale and retail data centre outsourcing, colocation and disaster recovery services, has announced plans for a new 250,000 sq ft master-planned greenfield data centre development in Austin. Construction on the first phase of the US$150,000,000 data centre will begin in July, with a projected completion date in Q2 2011. The new facility will become the only purpose-built, carrier-neutral data centre in the central Texas region.

Officials decided this week to delay plans to move the county's computer data centre into a facility used by Wayne County. The Macomb County Board of Commissioners' technology committee postponed the move Monday after questions were raised about the project's cost.

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle will receive US$10.1 million in federal stimulus money for a new research data centre.

The centre will receive a US$9.6 million grant to build a 2,300 sq ft data centre that will reportedly increase the centre’s data storage capacity by 50%. It will also receive a US$500,000 grant to buy a high-performance computer cluster used to increase processing power and memory capacity.

Source: Puget Sound Business Journal

Construction is beginning on a 30,000 sq ft Operations Center that will control the pricing of HOT Lanes currently being constructed on the Capital Beltway. Virginia has entered into a public-private partnership with companies Transurban and Fluor to widen a 14-mile stretch of the Capital Beltway with designated toll lanes. Pricing of the lanes will be dictated by current traffic conditions.