After a delay to find the money, the second data centre in Northlake is now under construction. "In the end it took us a year longer than we thought it would," said Phil Horstmann, CEO of Ascent Corporation in St. Louis. "It was challenging." Ascent gained its financing from a consortium of a "few high net worth individuals and a few private equity offices," Horstmann said.

Lee Technologies, a provider of complete data centre solutions and resources, has announced the completion of a multimillion-dollar data centre expansion project in Charlotte, North Carolina, for Hosted Solutions, a provider of enterprise-class managed hosting solutions.

The expansion doubles the critical load capacity of the Charlotte Metro data centre and adds 6,000 sq ft of additional space, making it one of the largest, uniquely streamlined facilities of its kind in the south-eastern region of the US.

Source: Business Wire

Microsoft is the company that wants to put a massive data storage centre in North Carolina, a state government official has confirmed. The source didn’t say specifically where in the state the Redmond, Wash., computer software and service giant wants to locate the centre, but did say that Microsoft’s plans are tied to legislation pending in the General Assembly.

Local sources with knowledge of the project, code-named Deacon, say it is a data storage centre possibly slated for the NC Industrial Center.

Source: Burlington Times News

FiberLight has announced it has expanded its presence in the heart of downtown Atlanta as well as suburban growth areas in Fulton, Gwinnett and Cobb counties. FiberLight, one of the nation's leading providers of mission-critical, high-performance fiber optic network solutions, is enhancing its presence in the Atlanta region in response to a growing demand from large enterprise companies, city governments and carriers for a secure and redundant fibre optic network offering.

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced via its annual report it will build out its second data centre in the coming year to support Wikipedia and its other sites. The organization says its number one priority is in "ensuring high site availability" for Wikipedia. In its annual report, Wikimedia said this: "Our projects are vulnerable to primary data centre failure. We will build out a second data centre to enable safe failover in the case of disaster. We will also increase uptime by improving site monitoring, capacity planning and operations response."

BlueBridge Networks, a provider of business continuity services, have announced that they have been selected to provide data centre services for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District's core high density computing operations.

Data centre operator provider RackForce has announced it had completed its multi-million dollar power and cooling addition to its Tier III equivalent, 30,000 sq ft GigaCenter in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. RackForce decided to upgrade the data centre after seeing strong demand for cloud computing and disaster recovery services.

The GigaCenter, which opened one year ago, uses British Columbia's abundant supply of clean, renewable hydroelectric power.

Source: The WHIR

Following the general trend towards data centre services, Dell has announced plans to acquire automation and virtualization software vendor Scalent. Though Dell would not disclose the deal’s terms, the company expects to complete the acquisition within its fiscal Q2, and is already moving to integrate Scalent’s enhanced virtualization capabilities to its Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) system for the data centre.

Cequel Data Centers has announced the acquisition of Colo4Dallas, a provider of carrier-neutral colocation services, with highly redundant power supplies, environmental controls, and other critical infrastructure support at a 68,000 sq ft, state-of-the-art data centre in Dallas.

A retrofitted, 25-year-old building near downtown Akron will soon handle all text messages and mobile data for AT&T's customers from Ohio to the East Coast. AT&T officials have announced they chose Akron to house their ninth mobility centre in the country - an investment of US$120 million in high-tech equipment.

The announcement was made in the former Ohio Bell Data Center off Opportunity Parkway near downtown. The facility first opened in 1985 and handled service orders and prepared customer bills.

Source: Ohio.com

Ontario's main beer retailer, The Beer Store, is outsourcing its information technology support work and transferring nearly 15 employees to CGI Group. The agreement also encompasses infrastructure services for Brewers Distributor, a wholesale distributor of beer and the collector of returnable, refillable and recyclable beer containers in Western Canada, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.

The Department of Treasury has played a central role in working to pull the American economy out of the recession, perhaps most prominently by managing the bank bailout, the US$700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The Department's CIO, Michael Duffy, has overseen the IT-related aspects of TARP while at the same time serving as a leader of a government-wide data centre consolidation initiative and continuing work on major projects like replacing the Internal Revenue Service master taxpayer database.

Source: Information Week

Ascent Data has been selected by Peoples Natural Gas Company to host their IT development environment. Peoples made their decision after conducting a thorough evaluation of SAS 70 Type II data centres in the Pittsburgh area.

CSC said that the US Navy awarded the company a contract to provide IT support services during the company's fiscal 2010 fourth quarter that ended April 2, 2010. The contract has a one-year base period and four one-year options, bringing the estimated total contract value to US$220 million.

As per the agreement, CSC will provide a range of IT support, including network operations, real-time processing, enterprise data centre, system development and maintenance, and hardware and software integration.

Source: CBR

The company has a purchased a four-acre piece of land that is adjacent to its existing Columbia data centre on Maguire Boulevard, the company said. Plans are underway to expand the current facility that houses the Carfax database and more than 150 employees.

Carfax, a company that provides detailed reports about used cars, was founded in Columbia in 1986.

Source: Columbia Missourian

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HP Enterprise Services has won a deal for the continued support of their information technology systems. This contract is worth up to US$3.4 billion if all the options of the contract are exercised. Pentagon's daily contract digest stated that the initial award was US$26 million for work to be performed in Herndon, Virginia.

HP's new contract will be working on the world's largest internal computer network; the Navy / Marine Corps Intranet. This intranet serves more than 700,000 sailors, Marines and civilians in the United States and Japan.

Lawmakers gave their final approval to incentives bills designed to attract businesses to North Carolina, including data centres considering sites in Alamance and Cleveland counties. In addition to breaks that data centres would receive on building supplies, they would also receive breaks on taxes paid on electricity.

A data centre code-named “Deacon” is believed to be considering a site in Mebane and a site in Cleveland County. While state officials won’t reveal the company name, published reports have said that software giant Microsoft is looking at the sites.

ColoHouse, a Miami colocation and data centre provider, has opened its new "Business Continuity Wing" and is now offering its new "Business Continuity Workforce Recovery" service to its customers. Conveniently located in downtown Miami, ColoHouse offers guaranteed or on-demand per seat packages providing secure office space for displaced employees during disaster events.

XO Communications has expanded its metro network presence in the Seattle metropolitan market. Officials with XO Communications said that the initiative demonstrates the company’s strategy to expand its presence in existing markets in order to serve more enterprise customers with its IP-based communications and managed network solutions and exceptional customer experience.

The proposed American Express data centre cleared one of its first hurdles with the Greensboro Zoning Commission. The Commission unanimously agreed to support rezoning 145 acres of agricultural land in eastern Guilford County to corporate park zoning. The change would allow the property to be used for the second of two data centre buildings that the company plans to build as part of the project.

AccelOps, the integrated data centre and cloud service monitoring provider, has announced that California Casualty Management Company has selected AccelOps' integrated platform to automate network, security and compliance operations while also advancing its monitoring capabilities and service oriented management practices.

In the process, California Casualty will be able to consolidate a variety of IT tools, including Computer Associates' eHealth and Spectrum network management systems as well as Cisco MARS Security Information Event Management.

Fortress International Group, a provider of consulting and engineering, construction management and 24/7/365 site services for mission-critical facilities, has announced that it has closed approximately US$44 million in new contracts for the six months ended June 30, 2010, an increase of nearly 300% compared with US$15 million in new contracts for the comparable period in 2009.

Digital Realty Trust, the world's largest wholesale data centre provider, has announced that it completed the acquisition of a five-property data centre portfolio comprises approximately 919,000 sq ft located in California, Arizona and Virginia, referred to as the Rockwood Capital/365 Main Portfolio.

Carpathia Hosting, a provider of enterprise managed hosting services for government agencies and enterprises, has announced that Ethical Advocate, one of the country’s leading companies providing comprehensive ethics and compliance solutions, has chosen Carpathia for Federal Information Security Management Act compliant hosting solutions.

QTS, one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data centre facilities, has announced that it has been chosen by Akshay Software International, a global SWIFT Service Bureau and SWIFT Regional Partner, to provide colocation services in the company's Miami data centre.

"Our relationship with QTS and use of their high-quality data centre services enhances Akshay's capabilities, and results in our being able to deliver greater satisfaction to our clients," said B.V. Venkat, Director of Akshay's US operations.

Source: Market Wire

VertexHost, a professional Internet solutions provider specialising in MySQL optimised hosting services, has chosen VegasNAP, Las Vegas’ Premier data centre, for expansion of its hosting services.

With this commitment, VertexHost will be able to extend its multiple-tiered services with VegasNAP’s 14,000 sq ft facility that includes a 6,500 sq ft conditioned data centre, 24/7 onsite technical support, fully supplied technical stations, highest quality UPS and standby generator systems and top-grade security systems.

Source: W3

I/o Data Centers hopes to leapfrog the competition by developing what it claims will be a new, more integrated type of containerised data centre, the company has said.

Sylectus, a rovider of advanced software technology for moving freight and managing business online, has chosen to cross international borders for their SaaS server colocation needs with Online Tech, a premier Michigan colocation and managed server company.

Global Crossing, the telecommunications company that quickly rose to prominence and then fell to bankruptcy, is hoping to dramatically expand its US government business, particularly in the burgeoning cybersecurity field. John A. Sutton, named general manager of the company's public sector last month, comes to Global Crossing from Fairfax-based contractor ManTech International, where he was a senior vice president focused on cyber and technology work for defense and intelligence agencies.

Puppet Labs has raised a US$5 million second round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which brings the total funding for the open source configuration-management software provider to more than US$7 million. Existing investors True Ventures and Radar Partners, which participated in the Series A round, also contributed to this round. The company also announced the latest version of the Puppet software — version 2.6.

The Utah state government has fulfilled a summer 2010 deadline for consolidating its data centres. The new environment will allow the state to advance its government cloud.

The data centre consolidation reduced the number of data centres in use by 26 Utah agencies from 35 to two: the state's primary data centre in Salt Lake City and a failover site off of the Wasatch Range earthquake zone. From the planning phase to project completion, the consolidation took 18 months -- an aggressive time frame, state Chief Technology Officer Dave Fletcher told Government Technology.

Telecommunications provider US Signal says it has completed a major expansion of its fibre-optic network in Ohio, an effort that includes operations in Columbus.

The company’s expansion included the addition of 1,000 miles to its fibre-optic network in the state along with facilities in Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland. The company announced in September that expansion plans also included data centres in Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati.

Source: Columbus Business Journal

Venture capital flowed freely into the cloud in the second quarter, as local companies that specialize in cloud computing services raked in the largest chunk of the region’s investment dollars in defiance of broader VC woes.

Three companies that offer cloud services took in US$64 million of the at least US$131 million in VC dollars going to Washington-area companies in the quarter, according to data compiled by the Washington Business Journal.

Source: Washington Business Journal

The Department of E-Government has awarded a contract to Belfast-headquartered Lagan Technologies, to implement a pilot programme utilising cloud-based enterprise case management software for Government. The Bermuda Government said the programme would go live later in the summer.

Peak 10. a managed services company with world-class data centres, has announced it has renewed its long-time relationship with KapStone Paper and Packaging Corporation, a business that specializes in the paper, packaging, forest products and related industries.

KapStone, a Peak 10 customer since 2007, utilises fully-managed hosting services out of facilities on Peak 10’s Raleigh and Charlotte campuses, which acts as the central hubs for its entire business operations.

Source: dBusiness News

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan's Stratecast division, The US Data Center Market 2010, finds that the third-party data centre market size exceeded 108 million sq ft in 2009 and is expected to reach 177 million sq ft in 2010.

The commercial data centre market is undergoing significant growth and change, fuelled by a confluence of factors, including demand for computing and storage resources, powerful next-generation computing equipment, accessibility by remote users, and power and cooling issues.

Source: Newswire Today

Twitter is to move into its own, custom-built data centre later this year, in an attempt to improve reliability. The announcement comes a day after Twitter suffered an outage that prevented users from logging in or posting updates to its service. After a fairly good start to the year, Twitter has suffered several outages since June, partly due to traffic spikes during the World Cup but also for other reasons.

Amdocs has announced the largest Australian-owned online advertising and digital mapping business, Sensis, is using Amdocs to support and develop its customer relationship management, production and provisioning platform and other associated IT managed services.

The new agreement will include application support, data centre services and additional managed services in Sensis. This new contract expands the relationship between Amdocs and Sensis, and follows more than 20 years of engagement between the two companies.

Source: Sacramento Bee

For the third quarter of fiscal 2010, F5 Networks has announced revenue of US$230.5 million, up 11.8% from US$206.1 million in the prior quarter and 45.7% from US$158.2 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2009.

GAAP net income was US$40.5 million, compared to $33.1 million in the prior quarter and $22.8 million in the third quarter a year ago.

Source: Market Watch

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Biotronic NeuroNetwork, one of the largest providers of neurophysiological intraoperative monitoring services in the US, has selected to outsource colocation services with Online Tech, Michigan’s largest managed data centre operator.

As a growing company, Biotronic soon realized that their corporate headquarters did not provide enough space nor had the appropriate environment for their data center. Instead of upgrading their data centre, they found it more cost effective to outsource their IT infrastructure to a managed data centre.

There was not a tweet nor a peep from Twitter on Thursday about its new data centre to be built in Utah. But the lack of information on location and jobs didn’t keep state officials from hailing the decision. The social networking phenomenon clamped a lid on information about its new data centre in the Salt Lake City area. The center was announced Wednesday in a blog posting by an engineering executive at the San Francisco-based company that enables people to send out 140-character messages to a network of subscribers.

Commercial Network Services has announced the arrival of Australia's leading FOREX broker to the CNS San Diego data centre. Go Markets has added a new server in the CNS San Diego data centre to their global MT4 network.

The new server will result in better performance for traders all over North America and most especially those hosted on a Trader's VPS in the CNS-SDCA data centre, who will enjoy < 1ms latency to the new server from their MT4 client terminals.

Source: Earth Times

Telx, an interconnection and colocation provider in strategic North American markets, has announced that it has been selected as a colocation provider by DediPower, a UK-based managed hosting and on-demand data centre company.

Telx's secure, connection-rich colocation facility at 60 Hudson Street in New York City is now DediPower's primary Point of Presence within the US, enabling secure, reliable delivery of on-demand cloud application and managed hosting services, including its recently-launched Public Cloud offering, to customers in three continents.

Science Applications International Corporation has announced it has been awarded a subcontract by Primus Solutions to support the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center with IT services. The five-year subcontract is valued at more than US$80 million. Work will be performed at the GSFC in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Under the subcontract, SAIC will provide IT services including enhanced help desk and data centre support, as well as support for financial management systems, application development and database administration.

SoftLayer Technologies, the innovative on-demand data centre services provider, has announced solid financial and operational growth through the first half of 2010.

SoftLayer provides highly automated, on-demand data centre and IT services that allow businesses to more efficiently utilize their resources and decrease their capital expenditures. The company earned US$60 million in revenue for January 1 through June 30, leading to 21 months of GAAP profitability and sequential growth.

Source: Centre Daily

With the blighted economy, which is showing decreasing potential for a fast recovery and which may be signalling another upcoming downturn, jobs are becoming scarce, and many state and local governments are struggling to meet their budgets in the face of plummeting tax revenue. In response, some state governments have implemented tax incentives as a means of enticing companies to build data centres within their borders, thereby bringing into those states both new jobs and needed tax revenue. California, however, may be doing precisely the opposite.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced the opening of DC6, its sixth International Business Exchange data centre in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The new IBX data centre offers 1,750 cabinets to the telecommunications, enterprise, cloud and IT, and content companies that are either headquartered or have a significant presence in the area.

tw telecom, a provider of managed voice, Internet and data networking solutions for businesses in the US, has announced that national emergency alert notification provider FirstCall Network, has selected the company to provide advanced voice, data and colocation services.

Summit County and Akron are selling property to an Iowa company that wants to build a US$20 million electronic data storage facility in a blighted section of the city. The County Council and City Council approved the property sales this week. The county will sell 5.4 acres for US$167,000. The city will sell 12.5 acres for US$312,500.

Involta of Cedar Rapids plans to buy the 18 acres off Sweitzer Avenue just southeast of downtown. The company has proposed a 20,000 sq ft data centre that would employ about 60 people at the site of the former Brown-Graves Lumber Co.

Level 3 Communications has announced that it has signed an agreement with Experior Networks, a communications and networking solutions company, to provide Experior with transport and high-speed Internet protocol (HSIP) services for rural enterprises, public institutions, broadcasters and service providers in Mohave County, Ariz.

Faced with a power shortage in its existing data centre, Purdue University turned to a containerized data centre, Hewlett-Packard's Performance-Optimized Data Centre, or POD, to get a massive compute cluster online in short order. Like other containerized data centres, HP's POD comes preconfigured with all the necessary racks, cabling, power and cooling needed to stand up new data centre capacity quickly, and at a fraction of the cost of building out a new facility, which some analysts estimate at US$25 million for every 1 megawatt of capacity.

Vycon, a designer and manufacturer of environmentally friendly, high-speed energy storage flywheel systems, has announced that it has just completed a 7MW shipment of its VDC-XE clean energy storage systems to a northeast Fortune 500 company that specializes in large data storage applications and services for companies around the world.

Vycon’s VDC-XE flywheel systems used with uninterruptible power systems will protect the data centre’s myriad of storage servers against damaging and costly power interruptions.