TDS' Team showed off its new Fitchburg data centre to news media and business representatives. The 15,000 sq ft structure doubles the space available at the high-security facility at 5515 Nobel Drive and cost about US$15 million to build. Tri-North Builders was the general contractor.

A 40-acre facility surrounded by 8-foot walls topped with barbed wire could be coming soon to the woods south of Valley Road, just a few miles west of Two Harbors, according to I.T. Netcom President Shannon Kimball. After an extensive two-month feasibility study funded by Lake County and business development groups, Kimball says his team has located a “prime location” to build a data centre that could take advantage of the county’s high-speed fibre internet project and cool temperatures to keep storage costs down.

Since the completion of the Wells Fargo-Wachovia merger in February of this year, server virtualization and data centre efficiency have replaced integration issues as top IT priorities for the San Francisco bank. In the past few years the US$1.3 trillion-asset bank, under the leadership of Jim Borendame, executive vice president and head of compute platform services, has deployed server consolidation and virtualization, de-duplication, and desktop and power management to reduce energy use, while also reducing the number of satellite data centre locations.

Level 3 Communications has announced that it is launching Level 3 Dynamic Enterprise Computing, a new data centre service in Latin America. The new service is a managed hosting solution that offers customers the flexibility to define their computing needs and pay according to resource usage, while guaranteeing resource availability.

Alpheus Communications, a provider of Texas metro-regional fibre and networking solutions, will invest more than US$10 million this year to expand its workforce and fibre network to support its new market of selling high-bandwidth services directly to Texas businesses. The Houston-based company expects its workforce to grow by more than 30% this year as customer service, sales and technical staff are added to support Alpheus’ growth plans.

More major data centres are on the horizon for the Reno-Sparks area, and the next announcement to follow last week’s news from Apple is expected soon.

The Homeland Security Department is making progress in instituting a suite of IT services built on cloud technology and enterprise infrastructure, designed to save money and cut down on duplicative systems.

Uniserve Communications has announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Belhara Security Systems, to provide Virtual Desktop Appliances to smaller municipal governments and private institutions throughout Canada, using Belhara's security technologies along with its alliance partners and Uniserve's Cloud Computing capability.

Curaçao Technology Exchange, in collaboration with VCE and Zuora, have established a strategic alliance. Targeted for September 2012, CTEX, which is building the region’s most advanced Tier-IV designed data centres, will launch a unique portfolio of ‘infrastructure as a service’, ‘backup as a service’ and ‘software as a service’ offerings to the Caribbean and Latin America markets.

Brazilian Telecommunications firm Telebrás has signed an agreement to build a new R$60m (approximately US$ 29.57m) datacentre facility in the north-eastern coastline city of Praia do Futuro, Fortaleza. It will be the first international facility using wind and solar resources for clean energy. It will also be linked by four of a planned five fibre optic submarine cables, connecting Brazil with the United States, Europe, Mercosur and sub-Saharan Africa.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, and BATS Global Markets, have announced that Equinix will offer its customers connectivity to BATS’ secondary data centre facility in Chicago.

Latisys, a leading national provider of outsourced IT solutions delivered on a high density, high security platform – from colocation to cloud – has announced an IT infrastructure services agreement with Stearns Lending, a leading privately held nationwide lending institution encompassing Correspondent, Wholesale and Retail business channels.

EMC has announced that the State of Michigan's IT organization is using EMC storage, software and professional services to further transform how IT services are delivered to agencies and residents.

Phoenix NAP a full service data centre, premier infrastructure-as-a-Service provider and primary network access point, has announced that CourseAssign, an e-Learning platform, has selected the data centre for its hosting needs. The company cited its desire to support a fellow local business, Phoenix NAP's outstanding customer service and cost-effective pricing as significant motivating factors in choosing the world-class facility.

NJVC has announced that the company has embarked on a new data centre hosting strategy: a multi-pronged approach that involves highly secure facilities for managed and cloud hosting services in geographically diverse locations across the United States. NJVC will use time-tested, real-world infrastructure and rapid provisioning tactics that will protect its customers' business-critical data from weather-related outages like those that impacted many companies recently during the powerful storms that swept throughout the Mid-Atlantic region.

AIS (American Internet Services), a leading provider of enterprise-class data centre, cloud and connectivity services, has announced SaveDaily, the leading provider of low cost mutual fund investing platforms used by financial institutions, has decided to expand its presence at the AIS Lightwave Data Center to accommodate their rapid growth and desire for a tech refresh.

SaveDaily chose AIS because of the quality of its enterprise-class Lightwave Data Center, its faster network and its ability to provide unsurpassed uptime.

Rackwise, a leading developer of data centre infrastructure management software and service solutions expects to report record bookings and revenue for the second quarter 2012 ended June 30, 2012.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology unit of NYSE Euronext will build and operate a SFTI Access Center at the Equinix NY5 data centre in Secaucus, New Jersey. The new access point will provide mutual customers within the facility direct connectivity to SFTI and access to a range of financial markets, market data and post-trade services.

M5 Hosting, a worldwide leader in customized, high performance Linux and BSD dedicated server hosting solutions, has announced it has acquired dark fibre to boost connectivity between its two San Diego data centres.

Zayo Group has announced its plans to build a high bandwidth network in Albuquerque, New Mexico including fibre optic cable stretching from the South Valley to the foot of the Sandia Mountains.

Salesforce.com suffered a service outage late in the day Tuesday as its data centre provider in Silicon Valley attempted to replace electrical equipment. Salesforce.com servers lost power and its technology team was not able to troubleshoot problems until power was restored. "The root cause was a power failure in our West Coast data centre. Our data centre maintenance was designed to be non-impacting" with regard to CRM services as the equipment was being replaced. But "there was an unexpected failure during the transfer of electrical load.

Greenpeace used to give Apple an “F” on its data centre design. But the environmentally minded not-for-profit has now revised its opinion of the massive computing facilities that run online services like iTunes and iCloud. Greenpeace now gives Apple a “D.”

NYI, New York's premier data centre provider, has been chosen to provide infrastructure support for Viggle, an app-driven loyalty program for television owned by Viggle, that gives people real rewards for checking into the television shows they’re watching.

NYI specializes in colocation, dedicated servers, managed services, cloud computing, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. For the launch of Viggle in January 2012, NYI created a flexible, customized solution that fit their technology and business needs.

From renewing drivers’ licences and registering land transfers to police search warrants and school transcripts, many basic services Albertans rely on daily will remain dark through the weekend, the Alberta government confirmed. As other institutions churned back to life after Wednesday’s outage at Shaw Communications headquarters - the city’s 311 line, Shaw phone and Internet service, even CHQR Radio in time for the Stampeders game - Service Alberta Minister Manmeet Bhullar said his department was in disaster recovery mode.

When the Government Employees Health Association overhauled its data centre to build a fabric infrastructure, the process was "really straightforward," unlike that of many IT projects, says Brenden Bryan, senior manager of enterprise architecture. "We haven't had any gotchas or heartburn, with me looking back and saying, 'I wish I made that decision differently.' "

The Defense Department’s growing demand for data centre services could stagnate federal efforts to curb energy costs through data centre consolidation, according to a new report. The administration’s consolidation initiative could reduce energy use short term, but “in the face of what is likely to be continuously increasing demand for data centre services, gains from consolidation and improved efficiency are expected to plateau, with energy use resuming an upward trajectory,” according to a Congressional Research Service report about DoD data centre consolidation efforts.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built a much bigger data centre than it needed, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office, which noted NGA had not used an entire floor of of a four-story technology centre it intended for data storage.

Dell is rolling out a new, enterprise-grade mobile data centre for military and government operations, including those in remote locations. The Dell Tactical Mobile Data Center is an air-deployable and customizable solution designed to be able to set up an IT infrastructure anywhere quickly to power operations. Upon departure, Dell touts that these systems leave behind a "minimal footprint" for quicker movements when installing and uninstalling these machines.

Network services provider Sidera Networks says it has completed a major upgrade to its Xtreme Ultra Low Latency Network that will lower transmission latency between financial data centres and exchanges in the New York/New Jersey Metro area. As part of the upgrade, Sidera Networks now offers connections to NYSE Euronext’s Mahway, NJ, data centre. 

The latency reductions cover connections to the following data centres:

 •1400 Federal Boulevard, Carteret, NJ

 •755 Secaucus Road, NJ

 •300 Boulevard East, Weehawken, NJ

An Austin company that announced plans last fall to build a big data centre in Pflugerville is now looking for a new site. WindData said it is no longer considering its proposed 50-acre site in Pflugerville "due to complications uncovered in our due diligence process." The former site was near Meister and Schultz lanes in North Pflugerville.

Agencies largely complied with a September 2011 deadline to report on their data centre consolidation plans but 21 of the 24 agencies covered by the requirement had not actually completed a full data centre inventory, a government watchdog has reported. Only one of the agencies had completed its consolidation plan to specifications required by the Office of Management and Budget, according to the Government Accountability Office report. The government plans to shutter 40% of its roughly 3,100 data centres by 2015, leading to a cost  savings of about US$5 billion.

Primus Business Services, a division of Primus Telecommunications Canada, has announced Canada's first Tier III design and construction certified data centre – based in Markham - will open its doors on August 1. After rigorous evaluation and stress testing, the GTA facility with its 30,000 sq ft of raised flooring and 1,000 cabinet capacity is the only multi-tenant data centre in Canada to be awarded Uptime Institute's Tier III Certification for Design and Construction.

A Texas commercial real estate firm has acquired a Phoenix data centre building used by Sprint Nextel Corp. and is looking at other possible high-tech real estate acquisitions in the Valley.

NetApp, one of the largest providers of data storage and management, will expand its Wake County operations creating 460 new jobs over four years and will invest more than US$75 million into a new R & D facility.

The California-based Fortune 500 company plans to invest more than $75 million to expand its RTP research-and-development operations, where it now employs 1,450 workers  

Source: News Observer

Equinix, an operator of data centres for companies such as AT&T and Amazon.com, is the latest technology business to consider changing its corporate status to cut hundreds of millions of tax dollars.

INOC, the Independent Network Operations Consortium, based in downtown Albany, has completed its US$1 million upgrade of its data center located at 80 State St. INOC provides Internet connections and data services as well as web hosting.

“We more than tripled our storage capacity,” said INOC President Jim Becker, referring to the upgrade of the 4,000-sq ftdata center. The upgrade included consolidating dozens of individual servers to a more advanced platform.

Birch Communications, a leading IP-based telecommunications and managed services provider to small- and medium-sized businesses, has announced that it has completed a refinancing of its Senior and Subordinated Credit Facilities. The new US$90 million facility consists of a US$40 million senior term loan, a senior revolving credit facility with a US$35 million capacity, and a US$15 million tranche of subordinated debt.

IO, the leading provider of next-generation modular data centre technology and services, has announced the company has been awarded a contract by BEX Express, a managed services provider for small and medium-sized companies.

IO will provide BEX Express with Data Center as a Service delivered out of the IO Phoenix data centre. This approach supplies BEX Express a high-performance, cost-effective solution - without having to invest resources in building and maintaining its own data centre.

DuPont Fabros Technology has reported results for the quarter ended June 30, 2012. All per share results are reported on a fully diluted basis. For the quarter ended June 30, 2012, the company reported earnings of US$0.11 per share compared to US$0.20 per share for the second quarter of 2011. The decrease of US$0.09 in earnings per share is primarily due to lower capitalized interest and higher preferred dividends. Revenues increased 17%, or US$11.9 million, to US$82.7 million for the second quarter of 2012 over the second quarter of 2011.

The New York Genome Center and Edward J. Minskoff Equities have announced the execution of a 20-year lease for 170,000 sq ft to be located on seven floors at 101 Avenue of the Americas office building. The facility build-out, expected to be completed by mid-2013, will include sequencing, bioinformatics, and research labs, an Innovation Center to advance new technologies, and computing infrastructure to handle the processing and storage of massive amounts of new data.

Savvis, a CenturyLink company and global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, has announced that Posadas, Mexico's leading hotel operator, has selected Savvis as its IT infrastructure outsourcing provider.

The Pflugerville City Council unanimously approved modifying a development agreement that calls for the city to build Pfluger Farm Lane as part of a new data center project planned near Stone Hill Town Center. The road will extend from Pflugerville Parkway to Town Center Drive through the 350-acre tract of land owned by Terrell Timmermann, making the land accessible for future development. Timmermann will receive US$2 million in tax rebates if he brings US$25 million of office and retail development to the tract, according to Pflugerville Community Development Corp.

CoreSite Realty Corporation, a national provider of powerful, network-rich data centres, has announced financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2012.

A proposed south side business park to house high-tech data centres has hit a snag when the Colorado Springs Urban Renewal Authority delayed a vote on a funding plan that would pay for utilities, roads and other improvements at the site.

Harley-Davidson Inc. sold its data centre in Franklin for US$8 million to NTT Worldwide Telecommunications Corp., a Japanese company with offices in Colorado. 

Tiverity, an Atlanta based IT Service Provider and Cisco Premier Partner, recently signed a multi-year agreement to support NanoLumens' communications technology infrastructure. NanoLumens, a Norcross, Georgia based maker of large, lightweight, flexible and fixed digital displays, is one of the fastest growing innovative technology companies based in the Atlanta area.

CenturyLink has announced that it has extended its fibre network in Charlotte, North Carolina into five data centre facilities, providing Charlotte businesses, as well as businesses nationwide, with reliable, high-speed access to cloud-based services.