AboveNet, a provider of high bandwidth connectivity solutions, has announced that it is now connected to the new Opus-3 data centre in Dallas. The facility's customers will have access to AboveNet's optical network with connections to key business hubs in Dallas and its expansive U.S. metro footprint.

The Opus-3 data centre, located in historical Deep Ellum in downtown Dallas, caters to the small business customer. AboveNet has the ability to provide the high bandwidth services for growth-oriented businesses.

Source: Market Watch

In their report about the future of data centres, Jones Lang LaSalle predicts an even stronger demand in the next year. According to JLL’s mid-2011 US Data Center overview, most of the major cities have a lack of supply to fill upcoming needs in this sector.

Energy storage company Beacon Power, which received US$56 million from the federal program since 2009, has reportedly filed for bankruptcy protection. Beacon Power, makers of flywheel technology to store and supply energy to the grid, will continue to maintain operations and plans to first pay off loans to the government. This is in contrast to fellow DOE loan guarantee Solyndra, whose solar manufacturing facilities were abruptly shut down several weeks ago.

The promise of lucrative tax breaks helped persuade Facebook to build a data centre in one of Oregon’s most economically depressed counties. Now, the state and the company are in a dispute over how much Facebook may owe in property taxes, and the social networking giant fears it could be taxed on intangible assets like the value of its powerful brand.

Data centre specialist Ahead has announced a US$5 million expansion of its multi-site in-house cloud lab to educate clients on the virtualisation, storage, cloud and network technologies shaping the next-generation data centre. The new hybrid-cloud lab in Ahead’s Chicago headquarters features a multi-vendor infrastructure that makes it possible to compare competing technologies side by side as well as demonstrate the precise combination of solutions appropriate to a client’s needs.

Data centre developer and landlord DuPont Fabros Technology saw earnings and revenue rise last quarter as it brought two new data centres online, increasing lease income. The D.C.-based company had US$73.8 million in third quarter revenue, up 22% from the same quarter a year ago. Net income was US$13.9 million compared to US$10.8 million.

Hibernia Atlantic, the transatlantic high bandwidth connectivity provider, has announced that OnLive has selected their network to deliver bandwidth intensive gaming applications from the US to the UK in a secure way.

Cequel Data Centers has announced the acquisition of Perimeter Technology, a provider of colocation, managed and professional IT services in Oklahoma.

Presidio and INX have announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement, whereby Presidio will acquire all of the outstanding common stock of INX. The proposed transaction will create one of the largest national advanced IT solution providers.

PAETEC has announced third quarter 2011 financial and operating results. Financial results for third quarter 2011 included the following: Revenue of US$536.3 million; Adjusted EBITDA of US$102.3 million; Net loss of US$17.1 million.

Energy efficient data centre operator WindData announced it plans to invest US$210 million in a 600,000 sq ft, five-building data centre in Pflugerville, Texas following the approval by the Pflugerville Development Community Development.

BT has launched a regional data centre in the Colombian capital of Bogota. Overall investment in the project reached US$10 million. The 1,000 sq m facility will support BT's expansion in Colombia and across the continent.

BT plans to deploy three new "centres of excellence" to support its client requirements in the region. The new centres of excellence will be located in Rio de Janeiro (satellite technologies, products and services), Bogota (security and data centre services) and Mexico City (IP telephony and contact centres

Personal VPN provider Golden Frog will host its new “Dump Truck” online storage service out of the new Texas 1 data centre facility of hosting provider Data Foundry the companies have said. More than just an ordinary colocation customer, Golden Frog shares some ownership with Data Foundry, and began as an effort to effectively employ some of the excess network resources operated by the group. The Dump Truck storage may have come from a similar effort to employ excess resources.

Investing in companies that handle big data has piqued Accel Partners' interest in the past and the venture firm announced Tuesday that it was creating a US$100 million big data fund for promising start-ups. Accel's Big Data Fund will inject needed capital into companies ranging from next generation storage and data management platforms to a wide range of revolutionary software applications.

Accel Partners will manage its Big Data Fund across global offices in U.S., London, China and India.

Source: Vator

DataPoint, a provider of colocation, managed services and connectivity, has announced they have commenced building their second state of the art data centre at their Tide Point campus. Construction is fully underway to make this state of the art facility available to customers in January 2012. The new 10,000 sq. ft. facility will be contiguous to their current data centre and is a seven month, multi-million dollar project. DataPoint currently operates in six cities including Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Columbus, and Boston.

Switch Communications Group, operator of a big data centre in Las Vegas, has sued a Canadian man in what it calls a trademark dispute. Switch charged in the suit that Dorian Banks in Vancouver, British Columbia, infringed on Switch’s trademarks when Banks registered the switch.net Internet domain name last month. Switch Communications Group said in the lawsuit it operates the "world’s most powerful data center and technology ecosystems" and has a website at switchnap.com.

Primus Telecommunications Canada has announced that construction has begun on a new high density data centre facility in Markham to meet the spiking demand among GTA businesses for mission critical and business continuity solutions.

EcomNets has announced the Cloud Computing platform launch of our Danville Green data centre. At more than 20,000 sq ft this facility significantly expands their ability to meet the demand generated from our managed hosting, managed storage, virtual data room, cloud scanning, and disaster recovery solutions.

EcomNets’ data centres represent the infrastructure foundation of the company’s cloud hosting solutions and demonstrate how EcomNets is positioning itself to compete and succeed with an eye toward energy efficiency.

Source: PR Web

Telecom firm Zayo Group has announced it is expanding its fibre network to Birmingham, AL as part of an agreement to deliver services for a large wholesale customer. As a result of this expansion, Zayo will add an initial market presence in the state of Alabama.

The fastest magento hosting provider in the US, MageMojo has announced that is has completed it's expansion into a new Equinix data centre in Pittsburgh, PA. This move has greatly expanded MageMojo's network and has quadrupled it's power and rack capacity to make room for their rapid growth.

Phoenix NAP, a full service data centre, premier inrastructure-as-a-Service provider and primary network access point, has announced that Environmental Science Associates, an environmental science and planning firm, has selected the Phoenix NAP facility for its colocation hosting and IT infrastructure needs. In making the decision to establish servers in Phoenix NAP, ESA cited the facility’s flexibility, swift response, room for growth and engagement with companies of all sizes as significant motivating factors.

SunGard Availability Services has announced a partnership with the University of Texas at Austin to create a Cloud Computing Research Center.  Through the partnership, SunGard and UT Austin will jointly identify relevant and unsolved research problems in the cloud-computing field, pursue targeted research initiatives to solve those problems and commercialize as appropriate the resulting research.

Columbus Networks and TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company and an industry pioneer in undersea communications technology, have announced they will partner to deploy a 40G upgrade in the CFX-1 undersea cable system. The upgrade will allow for an increase in the final design capacity in the CFX-1 system to 2.5Tbps per fiber pair and make the system among the first in the Caribbean to offer 40G service. The project is scheduled for completion in November 2011.

Level 3 Communications has announced it has expanded its network capacity and suite of services in Mexico to address growing broadband demand and to better serve global enterprises and carriers doing business in Mexico. Through its locally licensed affiliate in Mexico, Level 3 now offers the following services: EtherSphere Wide Area Network transport services, Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network, Wavelength Services, Private Line, Dedicated Internet Access and High Speed IP service, and Ethernet local access service.

Chicago data centre service provider, CoreLink Data Centers, announced an agreement to support Santa Barbara, Calif.-based InTouch Health's cloud-based network infrastructure, which enables physicians to remotely consult with patients across the continuum of homes, clinics, ambulances, procedure rooms, ICUs and patient wards.

Weidenhammer, an IT services provider headquartered in Reading, PA, purchased 4664 Campus Drive in Kalamazoo, MI, an office building in Western Michigan University's Business Technology and Research Park, for US$1.3 million.

The company will relocate its local operations to the building, occupying approximately 3,500 sq ft initially. The remainder of the building is leased to five other IT companies. Weidenhammer plans to build a data centre focused on cloud computing in the space.

Source: Costar

Wyoming-based Green House Data has announced that it will begin work next year on a US$35 million wind-powered data centre in southeast Cheyenne.

QTS (Quality Technology Services), a US provider of data centre facilities and managed services, has announced a series of energy efficiency investments and successes, including achieving Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold Certification for its Atlanta Metro facility - the world's second largest data centre. Developed by the US Green Building Council, LEED is an internationally-recognized green building certification system. 

CSC has announced that the Naval Supply Fleet Logistics Center Norfolk has awarded the company an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract to provide operations, maintenance and management support to the Outside the Continental United States Navy Enterprise Network.

Five 9s Digital, a Charlotte, North Carolina company that owns and operates data centres in North Carolina and other US locations, plans to build a 138,000 sq ft data centre in Eagan, Minnesota.

Five 9s Digital has identified a site on Yankee Doodle Road, west of Pilot Knob Road, for a centre that will be called "The Connexion."   

Facebook unveiled its green data centre and energy efficient servers in Oregon this Spring, but now the social network giant has achieved another milestone: it’s been granted a LEED gold certification for the Oregon data center, which uses 52 percent less energy to operate than a standard data centre.

Fidessa group, provider of high-performance trading, investment management and information solutions for the world's financial community, has announced the expansion of its Latin American operations with a new headquarters in the region, new staff and data centres that provide resilient, redundant hosting.

This move continues Fidessa's global growth as the preferred supplier to both the buy-side and sell-side, and builds on the recent expansion of its Asia Pacific business with the opening of its Australian office in Sydney last month.

The Two Harbors Economic Development Authority voted to approve an agreement with ITnetcom to conduct a feasibility study on the area for a data centre.

Granite Networks is building a C$15-million data centre in Kanata to begin offering next-generation cloud computing services to consumers.

The facility will be located near the corner of Eagleson and Hazeldean roads at a site formerly occupied by Abbott Laboratories. It will be 28,000 sq ft in size and will employ 30 people. Staff levels at the facility could expand up to 70.

Source: Ottawa Citizen

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Englewood-based Latisys will announce plans to build a new data centre in the Denver Tech Center, a US$50 million project that is expected to create dozens of direct and indirect jobs. The 82,000-sq ft facility will be the company's second data centre on its 6.5-acre DTC campus and eighth nationwide. "We'll end up creating, out of the gate, construction jobs that will probably number ... 50 to 80," said Latisys chief executive Pete Stevenson. "When the centre is completed and open, we'll probably add between 15 to 20 people."

FiberLight, one of the nation’s leading providers of mission critical, high performance fibre optic networks, has announced it will pave the way for North Georgia Networks to reach the world along 108 miles of FiberLight’s privately owned high speed, fibre optic backbone.

Salt Lake City-based C7 Data Centers has signed a dark fibber deal with Boise, idaho-based Syringa Networks, the two have said.

According to the two firms, the deal gives C7's customers access to dark fibre from Syringa Networks, which provides high speed fibre optic services in the region. Financial details of the deal between the firm were not disclosed. Syringa Networks launched its dark fibre services in Utah last month.

Source: Tech Rockies

Blackboard has announced the official opening of a new data centre in Calgary, Alberta to support growing interest from Canadian institutions for an in-region facility to host and manage their learning environments. The centre, which began production earlier this year, already hosts systems for several Canadian higher education institutions including Dalhousie University, the University of Ottawa and George Brown College.

Google is in the process of adding a new building at its data centre in The Dalles, but the company has apparently decided to limit its long-term growth at its campus by passing up an option to buy 80 acres next to its existing 37-acre site.

In a round of series B financing, Dominion Energy Technologies has invested US$1 million in Power Assure, adding to the funds already invested by companies like ABB Technology Ventures, Good Energies, Point Judith Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.  Power Assure has raised a total of US$29.75 million with the goal of integrating data centres into the smart grid.

Minkels, European producer of integrated data centre solutions for monitoring, cooling, power distribution and housing, has opened a sales agency in the United States. Besides production facilities in Veghel, the Netherlands, Minkels also has offices in Belgium, the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland, as well as a sales agency in Germany.

A subsidiary of Carter Validus Mission Critical REIT, has agreed to buy 100% of the sellers interests in the 338,000 sq ft data centre and parking facilities located at 180 Peachtree in Atlanta, GA for US$94.75 million plus closing costs.

The data and office centre space at 180 Peachtree Street, known as an old Macy's department store building, is currently fully leased to six tenants. The seller of the space is Peachtree/Carnegie. The closing of this transaction is expected to occur in January 2012.

Source: City Biz

CIO Susan Lawrence has been tasked by the Army's top official, Secretary of the Army John McHugh, with contributing to the military's cost-cutting objectives. She plans to invest near term to save long term, with a goal of "returning" US$1.5 billion to the Army budget by fiscal 2015. Appointed CIO in March, Lt. Gen. Lawrence will get there by consolidating systems and increasing the Army's use of shared services and commercial technologies.

LG Electronics USA has announced that it would use 2007 emissions levels as the baseline for the 50% reduction, which would largely revolve around its energy use. Its operations consume roughly 19.4 million kilowatt hours each year.

Unite Private Networks has expanded its Colorado Front Range presence by completing an intercity fibre network that connects UPN's local networks in Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. UPN also plans to extend the intercity network north to Longmont during 2012.