Minnesota Public Radio|American Public Media has announcedthe selection of VISI as its new managed hosting and data centre provider.  Brad Rosenberger, manager of IT Infrastructure at Minnesota Public Radio, said, “We needed a hosting provider with a top tier facility in the Twin Cities to ensure the best availability for our web and IT services. Now, more than ever, our listeners rely on MPR for our in-depth online reporting, in addition to our radio broadcasts.”

Amor Group, the fast-growing Scottish IT firm, has unveiled a £2.3 million deal with British Waterways Scotland, the body that runs the Union and Forth & Clyde canals and the Falkirk Wheel boat lift, pictured left. The Inchinnan-based company will design a computer system for the canal operator, which is being split up from its partner organisations in England and Wales and so needs stand-alone IT infrastructure.

Internap Network Services, a provider of intelligent IT Infrastructure services, has announced that it has acquired Voxel Holdings, a provider of scalable hosting and cloud services for the enterprise, in an all cash transaction valued at approximately US$30 million, plus an additional potential US$5 million in cash tied to the delivery of specific objectives during the next two years. Headquartered in New York City, with a global presence extending into North America, Europe and Asia, Voxel serves more than 1,000 customers and has approximately 50 employees.

Hillingdon Council is completing the move to so-called cloud computing, in a partnership with internet giant Google that will save £3million over four years. 

Acision has announced new data centres, based on cloud computing technologies, to enable the firm to offer more on-demand messaging services across the globe. Europe is among the first regions to get the “advanced data centres,” which will aim to provide scalable resources for its Acision Cloud Service Store, regardless of your location.

China Intelligence Information Systems, who offers virtualization technology application and cloud computing related consulting service, products, solutions and implementation service in the People's Republic of China, has announced that the Company has signed contracts with a total value at approximately US$1 million with State Grid Corporation of China.

The US Army chose option number three for its regional data centres. After deliberating on how to create a network of data centres across the country for more than three years, the Army decided to buy private cloud services from vendors, instead of doing it themselves or buying from other the Defense Information Systems Agency. The service hired eight contractors to provide enterprise cloud computing services under a five-year US$250 million contract.

A new study conducted by market research and consulting firm Infonetics Research indicates that in the next few years, telcos, cable operators, data centre specialists and colocation providers are planning to expand. Infonetics surveyed 19 major providers that have data centres with 100 or more servers for the report, Data Center Deployment Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey. Combined, the respondents represent 20% of the world’s carrier revenue and 20% of the world’s telecom capex and hail from North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific.

Sentry42 has announced that it will partner with EBRC, the Luxembourg based data centre operator, in order to be a able to provide geographically diverse  disaster recovery positions to its customers. 

QTS (Quality Technology Services), one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data centre facilities and managed services, has announced that private cloud provider eApps is expanding its presence into the QTS Richmond Data Center (pictured). eApps has been hosting its cloud computing customers in QTS' Suwanee Data Center, expanding its footprint in that facility three times in 2011.

Non-profit IT service provider Eduserv has announced the launch of its Education Cloud, giving universities and colleges in the UK access to storage and processing power on demand. The Education Cloud enables higher education institutions to increase and decrease capacity throughout the academic year, to deal with peaks and troughs in demand. It features compute and storage offerings under both VMware vCloud and OpenStack, and supports virtual machines running Windows and Linux.

Oracle's second annual Datacentre Index highlights that companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa are having to rethink their datacentre strategies in 2012 due to the challenge posed by big data. Of the 949 managers in large organisations across the region surveyed, 44% of respondents indicated that they only used in-house datacentres, down from 60% from the first index, which was carried out 10 months ago.

Venyu has announced that the Dallas Cowboys have implemented a new cloud-based, IT disaster recovery solution for reliable backup of all business data as well as crucial game and training video footage. The NFL team selected RestartIT as an effortless and accurate approach to data backup and recovery that uses industry-leading deduplication and cloud storage technology to store its digital files, and quickly retrieve them if the primary storage servers are offline due to manmade or natural disasters.

Bermuda's largest real estate management company, Bermuda Realty Company Limited (trading as Coldwell Banker Bermuda Realty) has adopted a Private Cloud computing solution from QuoVadis Services' offshore data centre as the backbone of its computing needs.

Unisys Corporation has announced that it has received a contract to provide cloud-based IT services to the California State University, the largest public university in the United States and a long-time Unisys client. The contract has an initial four-year term, extending the current contract for IT services through April 2016. It also includes a one-year renewal option.

Level 3 has announced it has been retained by Avianca to enhance the airline's voice and data communications capabilities as it experiences rapid growth. Avianca now has more than 2,300 employees, 400 of whom are based in Sao Paulo. The airline flies to 22 destinations in Brazil, and serves more than 3 million passengers worldwide each year.

 Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that tw telecom, a leading provider of managed services, including business ethernet, converged and IPVPN services to enterprises and carriers throughout the U.S. and globally, has expanded its presence in Platform Equinix to support growing customer demand for its carrier ethernet services, and to securely reach cloud service providers and enterprise customers operating in Equinix data centres across the U.S.

Ermestel, a Spanish company specialising in data centre infrastructure, has become the new official IT supplier of the HRT Formula One team.  Ermestel’s deal with HRT, which will run for the next three years, will see the firm manage the entire IT infrastructure of the Spanish team whilst also supplying the team with a disaster recovery system.

The UK Olympic Park Legacy Company has announced a shortlist of three organisations that are in the running to become the long-term tenant of the Press and Broadcast Centres, follwoing the Olympic Games in London.  UK Fashion Hub, Oxylane Group and iCITY all share the Legacy Company’s vision to create a thriving commercial district on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park that will generate several thousand job and training opportunities in the process.

Omaha-based CoSentry is investing roughlyUS$30 million to build and outfit a 60,000-sq ft data centre in Lenexa. The centre also will have call centre and technical help desk space to support the company’s managed services, colocation and cloud computing offerings. In all, it is expected to bring 60 new jobs to the area.

Joyent has netted US$85 million in new venture funding to fuel a global expansion of its cloud services. Most of the new money comes from Weather Invest II Group and Accelero Capital but Telefonica Digital is also investing. Existing Joyent backers include Intel Capital, Epic Ventures, Liberty Global, Greycroft Partners and El Dorado Ventures.

Cloud hosting company FireHost has announced the expansion of its operations into Europe, with news that its hosting services are now available at data centres in London and Amsterdam. 

Founded in 2006, the US-based company has previously provided its services to European customers via its US data centres in Texas and Arizona, but it has seen demand grow from Europe-based businesses. And along with increasing requirements to store data within the European Union, this has underpinned FireHost’s latest expansion.

Source: Next Web

GoGrid, a leading cloud infrastructure company has announced that it has established its EMEA Headquarters, GoGrid AMS BV, and a new data centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, to provide fully integrated, on-demand cloud infrastructure services around the globe.

Amazon has made its first move into the private datacentre with a product that provides a backup service from on-premise IT to the Amazon Web Services cloud.

London colocation provider, London Data Exchange has announced the launch of their new trademarked cloud colocation service ‘DCaaS’ – Data Centre as a Service. 

Zen Internet, one of the UK's leading independent Internet Service Providers, has announced it is investing £4 million in a new purpose built data centre at its North West headquarters in Rochdale. The contract for the design and build of the new data centre has been awarded to the UK's leading communications infrastructure specialist, Sudlows.

Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, has announced it has signed a four-year agreement with Travix, the largest Dutch online travel company and daughter company of BCD Holdings NV, to provide content distribution services and IT solutions worldwide. With this agreement, Travix is seeking to strengthen its current business and expand its activities in the remaining parts of Europe, the Americas and Asia.

The Department of Defence has revealed the migration of its primary data centre to Sydney's Global Switch will take eight months longer than anticipated. A Defence spokesman said the deadline for migration into Global Switch had slipped from March to November this year. The migration is a key part of its 2009 Strategic Reform Program to consolidate data centres and its IT environment in a bid to deliver A$1.9 billion in savings over the next decade.

The US technology giant Adobe is to establish its new cloud computing operations for the EU in Ireland. The chief technology officer for Adobe, Kevin Lynch, told RTÉ News that its new Creative Cloud data centre would be established in Dublin later this year.

Virtualization savings are real – and are expected to grow – but government agencies need to overcome funding uncertainties and other significant barriers to achieve their virtualization goals, according to a study by MeriTalk underwritten by Microsoft and NetApp. The new report, “Virtualization Vacuum: The 2012 Government Virtualization Study,” explores the current and future state of play in government server and desktop virtualization initiatives, including key differences between Federal and state/local markets.