Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, and Switch and Data Facilities Company, a provider of network-neutral data centre and Internet exchange services, have announced that Switch and Data stockholders have voted to approve Switch and Data's merger with and into Sundance Acquisition Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Equinix.

More than 99% of votes were in favour of the merger, and the holders of more than 85% of Switch and Data's outstanding common stock participated in the vote.

Digital Realty Trust has announced the results of its leasing activity for both the fourth quarter and full year 2009. For the full year 2009, lease signings represent over US$472 million in total cash contract value.

murphx has opened the doors to its new purpose-built data centre facility on the South Coast. The move marks the start of a new level of customer service as murphx provides access to highly secure, scalable, high power rack and suite environments as well as direct access to the murphx network for lower latency services and high speed access via its upstream carriers and international peers.

Proposals for a £20million computing centre at Inverness, creating up to 400 jobs, have been submitted to Highland Council planners. Dingwall-based IT services company Alchemy Plus has lodged plans for the environmentally-friendly project on a site at Inverness harbour. If approved, work on the scheme could start by the summer, with the centre opening next year.

MarquisNet, a provider of colocation and disaster-recovery services, will facilitate the network expansion of MessageBroadcast, a Newport Beach, Calif.-based provider of turnkey, multi-channel, interactive message delivery services to world-class enterprises, the companies announced today.

The Victorian Government has revealed that Indian IT services company Infosys has opened a new data centre in the state capital, just as other companies lay out expansion plans for the state.

"We're investing AU$8 million in a data centre to support the growing client demand for our range of cloud services across HR, procurement and other functions," Infosys Australia chief and managing director Jackie Korhonen said in a statement from Victorian ICT Minister John Lenders' office.

Source: ZDNet

The Department for Work and Pensions has formally signed a desktop infrastructure deal with Fujitsu, worth up to £330 million over six years. The deal, billed as the UK’s largest desktop and thin client outsourcing arrangement, will see the supplier replace HP-EDS. It will “significantly reduce” the running costs of the DWP’s 140,000 PCs in 1,000 locations, the department said. Analysts said that the new contract potentially cuts millions of pounds from annual costs.

CyrusOne has announced that Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS), one of the world’s leading oil exploration service companies, will occupy a 10,000 sq ft data hall in CyrusOne’s newest colocated data centre located in West Houston. PGS will colocate high-density, mission-critical data and applications servers to support exploration projects and operations worldwide.

VISI, a leading data centre services and managed hosting provider, has begun its demand-driven expansion on its Saint Paul Data Center. This expansion will allow VISI to meet the needs of recent new customer additions.

VISI currently occupies 11,000 net sq ft of data centre space at 180 East 5th Street in downtown Saint Paul. After the expansion to 18,000 net sq ft, VISI will still have room for over 150 additional cabinets along with space to continue expanding the data centre.

Source: Eon

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has yet to find a location for the main data centre that will house servers used for receiving and processing poll results from automated voting machines. This developed after two telecommunications companies – the Philippine Long Distance Telephone and Globe Telecommunications - disallowed the use of their facilities, citing security reasons and concerns that automated polls will disrupt their operations.

A massive data centre consolidation exercise by the UK government is set to throw up IT services projects for Indian software firms, according to John Suffolk, chief information officer of the UK government. TCS and Wipro are among the firms that are involved in designing the project, which involves consolidating 130 data centres of the UK government to between 9 and 12 centres within seven years. The consolidation would result in savings of £900 million.

Deutsche Post DHL, the world's leading mail and logistics group, has selected T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom's corporate customer unit and a leading provider of information and communications technologies to manage its North American data centre production services based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Chennai-based Sify Technologies Limited expects good growth in its data centre business. It has four data centres of tier-III class located at Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai, where it has two data centres. And now the company is adding a fifth one, which is under construction at Noida and is expected to be fully operational later this year.

Digital Realty Trust has completed a multi-faceted lease agreement with SoftLayer that combines its headquarters and data centres in a Digital Realty Trust property in the Dallas area.

SunGard Availability Services is expanding its data centres in Midtown Atlanta and Smyrna, Georgia. to meet increasing customer demand for colocation and managed services. The SunGard Midtown Atlanta facility is undergoing a large-scale power upgrade designed to support an additional 350 cabinets of IT space for customers. The upgrade includes adding 2.5 megawatts in utility power, doubling facility capacity.

Never did Jerry Yang think the company he started in a trailer while he was a student at Stanford University would open a 180,000 sq ft data centre near Omaha. Thursday, the process of lobbying, negotiating and construction that began in August 2008 came to a close as the founder of Yahoo joined Gov. Dave Heineman and other state and local officials at the unveiling of the company's new data centre in La Vista.

Even before a shovel has struck the ground, a supercomputing facility that will be built west of town is making other companies look this way. Cheyenne is one of three finalists for a US$750 million data centre that would employ 100 - perhaps 150 - people, said Randy Bruns, president of Cheyenne LEADS. He said he doesn't know which company it is, except that it's a Fortune 50 financial firm.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx) is set to start implementing a plan for a next generation data centre to meet its business expansion needs and its markets' long-term development needs. HKEx has received approval from Hong Kong Science & Technology Parks Corporation to acquire an 11,000 sq m site in Hong Kong's Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate for the project. 

CBTS, a national provider of data centres and managed services, has launched its new enterprise network and operations centre in Mason, Ohio, just outside of Cincinnati. The facility - which now monitors and manages over one hundred thousand technology infrastructure devices - has been relocated to a centric location to support the company's existing clientele in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

Accenture has been awarded a five-year contact to provide ITV with core IT service management, infrastructure and application management services. The consulting, technology and outsourcing company will help the broadcaster to change its business so that it is better focussed on the ‘digital home’.

ITV plans to transition its desktop services, help desk, and data centre management to Accenture later this year. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Source: Broadcast

The Bunker Secure Hosting has announced an extension of services with its existing client Moneybookers. Moneybookers, recently recognised by Deloitte as being the fastest growing private-equity backed company in the UK1 and one of Europe’s largest online payment systems, has been a client of The Bunker for the last eight years.

A payment protection insurer that is a subsidiary of the French Credit Agricole Group has signed a deal with Irish tech firm IT Focus to invest 220,000 euro in a disaster recovery and managed-service solution. CACI has 57 people with 11 nationalities working in Dublin. CACI is headquartered Paris and Lille, France, and has three representative offices of the Irish companies in Milan, Frankfurt and Madrid - all of whom are dependent on the Irish IT infrastructure.

HP Enterprise Services has announced a three-year, US$123 million technology services agreement with California's Welfare Client Data Systems Consortium intended to enhance service delivery to the state's welfare clients and improve staff productivity.

IT services provider HCL Technologies has won a five-year IT infrastructure management contract with Swedish home appliance maker Electrolux. Under the contract, HCL will support workplace services for Electrolux including proactive monitoring and management of network, servers, IT security and end user computing environment in 12 countries in the APAC region including Australia.

Macclesfield will become a council hub again when hundreds of workers are transferred to man a £500,000 computer centre. Up to 200 extra staff could arrive at Macclesfield Town Hall after the data centre is installed in April. It will house a Cheshire East Council computer hub which will rapidly speed up how quickly staff can work by storing large back up servers and quantities of online data.

ShareFile has opened a third data centre located in California. By adding this data centre to their list of established fields around the world, ShareFile is able to provide even faster upload and download file transfer speeds for users of their business services in this region.

Carpathia Hosting, a provider of enterprise managed hosting services for government agencies and businesses, has announced it has been selected by SugarSync, to provide a managed hosting solution for the company’s digital sync, backup and sharing service. Carpathia will host and manage one of SugarSync’s private compute and storage clouds, which take advantage of the Citrix NetScaler MPX line of application acceleration, load balancing and web security appliances.