Siemens IT Solutions and Services has officially opened its new data centre in Huizingen, near Brussels, offering a hybrid cloud combing private and public cloud infrastructures.

The hybrid approach will permit companies to manage their data and services as exclusively private clouds and utilise cost-efficient computing and storage capacities as shared or public cloud services in a common area together with other users.

Source: Trading Markets

Savvis has announced that it has signed a contract to provide managed services for 70 of All Nippon Airways. corporate Web sites. Under the three year agreement, Savvis will provide an IT infrastructure solution supporting ANA Group's corporate Web sites and intranets spanning 90 domains. ANA will deploy Savvis' managed hosting services, as well as managed security services, which include network intrusion detection, managed firewalls and managed network services.

European carrier-neutral data centres provider Interxion has opened its second Dublin data centre, DUB2, designed to meet the growing demand for energy-efficient, high-power-density colocation infrastructure and outsourced managed services from within Ireland and abroad.

CGI Group, one of the major providers of information technology and business process services, has announced a 3-year agreement with Telekomunikacja Polska Group, Poland's leading telecommunications provider, for application support and services. CGI frameworks will be deployed to help TP Group consolidate its current multi application, multi vendor environment to improve overall time to market and total cost of ownership.

Virginia and its embattled computer-services contractor, Northrop Grumman, have reached terms on a new deal -- one that will extend their contentious relationship until 2019 and cost taxpayers at least an additional US$140 million. In exchange, the state expects Northrop Grumman to improve and expand service for more than 80 government agencies, said Secretary of Technology Jim Duffey, adding the contract revisions are designed to stabilize Virginia's computer bureaucracy.

Peak 10, a managed services company with world-class data centres, has been selected to host the consumer Web sites and client data of marketing firm, RED F. The award-winning firm is recognized for its consumer awareness, strategic thinking and data-driven information.

Main Line Health, a non-profit health system serving portions of Philadelphia and its western suburbs, has awarded a contract to SunGard Availability Services to provide managed services for its primary data centre. SunGard will also deliver remote managed IT services across Main Line Health’s four acute care hospitals - Bryn Mawr, Lankenau, Paoli and Riddle - as well as Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital and 21 other locations.

Nordea, a financial services group in the Nordic region, and IBM have signed a new IT services agreement that runs through 2015.The new agreement succeeds a ten year contract signed in 2003.

The agreement covers - with updates to the original agreement - IT infrastructure and operations services for Nordea in the Nordic countries. This will include mainframes, mid-range servers, PCs, local area network and helpdesk services.

Source: Finextra

Interxion, a European provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centres, has announced its sponsorship of TradeTech Europe, the 10th Equity Trading and Technology Summit, taking place on the 20th - 22nd April 2010 at the Excel Centre, London.

AboveNet, a provider of high bandwidth connectivity solutions, has announced a major new contract with IPR International, which offers comprehensive Managed Electronic Data Protection Service to over 240 clients in 17 countries.

Hitachi Europe and Green Data Systems have agreed to enter into a strategic partnership for the collaboration and deployment of highly energy efficient data centres. As part of this partnership, Green Data Systems a co-founder of Eco2dc, will launch a highly energy efficient data centre based in Deventer, The Netherlands in July 2010.

Trading Technologies International, a provider of order-entry software and solutions for professional derivatives traders, and BM&FBOVESPA, Latin America's largest exchange, have announced they have entered into a partnership to provide direct access to BM&FBOVESPA's new multi-asset class platform via TT's X_TRADER platform.

As part of this partnership, TT will establish a new data centre colocated with BM&FBOVESPA, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for TT's TTNET fully managed hosting solution.

Source: Market Watch

Austrian personnel services provider Trenkwalder Personaldienste selected Telekom Austria to upgrade its ICT systems deployed at the various corporate locations into a uniform application structure. This lead to a main IP telecommunications solution based on Alcatel-Lucent's OmniPCX Enterprise system, in which a Unified Communications solution from MKS was integrated.

At the same time, Telekom Austria took over Trenkwalder Personaldienste's entire blade server housing in the Antonigasse data centre and connected the housing centre via two ISDN multi-access lines.

IT services firm Connxion will pull its racks out of two Sydney data centres and move them to Singapore after acquiring a facility there that was owned by Telstra's former IT services play Kaz. Connxion purchased Kaz Singapore, inheriting the data centre that it will use to consolidate its future operations.

UK managed hosting and cloud computing company iomart Hosting is providing the technical support for one of the music industry’s most valuable resources – the software tools that analyse the online buzz and data generated by recording artists across the globe.

Bank Austria officials have rejected claims by Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache that customers’ data were at risk after it relocated its data centre to Italy. BA said "Customers’ data continue to underlie the Austrian bank secrecy rules. Last year’s relocation of the Bank Austria customers’ data centre to Verona took place in full compliance with the Austrian bank secrecy law and data protection rules."

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 been awarded contracts for US$27.0 million in new business through the first week of April 2010.

The UK government's plan to put its IT infrastructure in the cloud is heavily reliant on the supplier community providing working examples and pilots. IT services firm Capgemini, which is running a pilot of a full potential G-cloud, has outlined to Computer Weekly how it might look from within.

With more Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) embracing the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, DediPower Managed Hosting aims to help them deploy their software solutions to more customers, with better reliability and performance than using on-premise or traditional colocation deployments.

By partnering with DediPower, ISVs have access to robust, scalable infrastructure which not only ensures the success of their software solutions but also enable ISVs to provide stronger service level agreement to their end users - a critical component of online service-based delivery.

First came the software-as-a-service innovation, where you paid as you used. Then enterprise resource planning went on-hire. Now, it's the turn of data centres. "We are testing a facility in which customers can meet their specific data centre needs in a prepaid format. We expect to launch it by next month," said Jayabalan Subramanian, chief technology officer of NetMagic Solutions, which is planning to launch such a service.

Colocation provider C4L has announced that Globe7 have chosen their new Bournemouth data centre for their colocation needs. Globe7’s top ranked websites including Bharatstudent.com, Ziddu.com and Globe7.com provide file sharing, free hosting solutions and VoIP services to their customers. Having been formed in 2007, they have grown rapidly and have taken 10 racks at C4L’s Bournemouth data centre.

IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), an operators of regulated global futures exchanges, clearing houses and over-the-counter (OTC) markets, has signed a new agreement with AT&T for the provisioning of hosting services delivered through AT&T's internet data centres located around the world. The new agreement extends and expands ICE's eight-year relationship with AT&T.

The Channel Island’s largest dedicated data centre is open in Guernsey on time and in budget. Wave Telecom is an important strategic growth area for the Jersey Telecom Group, and having committed to fixed and mobile telecommunications across the Bailiwick of Guernsey, it has now expanded into new and innovative markets, including data hosting.

Five candidates have been selected on a secret shortlist of suppliers for NSW's data centre reform project but internal bickering threatens to derail the entire plan. The delays mean NSW is likely to miss a July deadline to deliver A$565 million in IT cost savings from People First. NSW Commerce Minister John Robertson has kept quiet on the reasons behind the data centre program roadblock but ruled out federal government processes such as the Henry tax review and health reform as possible reasons.

Thomson Reuters has launched a global, high-speed network for financial firms to access real-time data as well as share information with each other directly. The company's new network, called Elektron, includes hosting centres in New York, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Singapore, with more to come in Hong Kong, India and Brazil later in the year, all connected by a fibre optic ring. The company is operating the system in partnership with data centre company Savvis.

The Bunker, provider of Ultra Secure Data Centre and Managed Services has announced that IT solutions provider Proxar has chosen the Bunker to provide secure colocation and data centre services from within its MOD level ultra secure facilities.

GSS America, a publicly traded company in India with global presence and specialising in providing Managed IT Services, has been awarded a US$5 Million (approx), contract to provide an end to end E Governance & E Procurement Solution to the Government of Bangladesh under the auspices of the Central Procurement Technical Unit of Bangladesh.

Enterprise storage service provider Zetta has announced the opening of a new data service facility on the East Coast. The new service facility is located in the greater New York City area. This will be the first East Coast data centre for Zetta, which also operates two facilities on the West Coast.

Zetta has continued its partnership with Equinix as a colocation provider for this new facility.

Source: Market Watch

tw telecom, a provider of managed voice, Internet and data networking solutions, has announced that it has been selected by CVI Melles Griot, an optical and laser technology company, to provide a suite of managed data and voice services, including colocation and IP VPN.

Financial details were not available.

Source: Trading Markets

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IT services company, OneNeck, has announced it has entered into a five-year IT managed services contract with Naumann/Hobbs Material Handling. Under the terms of the contract, OneNeck will provide application administration, network management, operating systems administration, server management, and 24/7 support for their several locations in the United States and Mexico.

PEER 1 Hosting, a global online IT hosting provider, and Magento, the open source eCommerce platform provider, have announced a new partnership. The alliance will enable merchants using Magento's feature-rich eCommerce platform to deploy sites via PEER 1 Hosting to optimize their web presence and performance.

As a global web business hosting provider, PEER 1 Hosting offers managed hosting supported by a 100% uptime guarantee, plus high-speed network connectivity through its 10GB SuperNetworkTM, 17 data centres and 21 POPs around the world.

Chi-X Global Technlogy, Chi-X Global’s technology services unit that offers high performance trading technology and services for exchanges and market participants, said that to support UBS Investment Bank’s Direct Execution ultra-low latency market access and colocation services in the area, the investment bank will connect to Chi-Tech’s MarketPrizm pan-Europe trading infrastructure.

SunGard Financial Systems plans to consolidate its technology infrastructure into five data centres from 25 through a series of virtualisation initiatives. The vendor says its financial systems business is on track to achieve more than US$5 million in savings over the next five years as a result of the project, which kicked off in 2009.

Terracon, a dynamic and growing employee-owned firm of consulting engineers and scientists that provide geotechnical, environmental and construction materials services to clients at local, regional and national levels, headquartered in Olathe, KS, has selected CoSentry to provide colocation and data centre services. Utilising CoSentry's Kansas City Data Center and its managed services capabilities, Terracon is able build a redundant data centre operation to ensure continuity of operations in the event of any type of disaster or disruption.

Change is the motto of Transport for London's (TfL) new chief information officer Ian Campbell as he prepares his team in the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games. In his first interview since joining TfL, Campbell tells Computer Weekly about his vision for TfL's 500-strong IT department, which is supported by a service budget of about £100 million for 2010-11.

Omnitech InfoSolutions, a small-sized IT company, is on an expansion spree. It is in the process of doubling its capacity in IT-managed services by opening more service centres in India and abroad. The Mumbai-based company is eyeing overseas acquisition to increase its reach in Europe. Given this, the company is expected to grow its revenue and profits in double digits in future.

General Dynamics Information Technology's VIPS business sector has been awarded a task order to support the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The task order has an initial value of US$16 million with a maximum value of US$84 million for five years if all options are exercised.

Cloud infrastructure and hosting company Savvis has announced plans to expand its data centre in Slough in the UK to meet growing European demand for its service. The company said that the expansion is also in anticipation of its launch of the Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Data Centre in Europe later this year.

The £20 million expansion will add 20,000 sq ft to the data centre, giving Savvis a total of 43,000 sq ft saleable data centre floor space at the Slough facility. The development is expected to be completed in September this year.

ANS Group has won a major contract to engage with Tameside Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to implement its state-of-the-art converged IT infrastructure at its hospital site. The implementation is part of the hospital's ‘Health Investment in Tameside' project that will see the largest ever investment and most extensive site improvement of the Trust.

Having already a well-established network presence in the Asia-Pacific market, Verizon Business now wants to tap into the potentially lucrative cloud and data centre opportunity by building a second data centre in Hong Kong.

Located in the iTech Tower in Tsuen Wan, the new 3,000 sq m data centre will include reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer technology and provide interconnections with the four main local carriers as well as with Verizon's global network.

Source: Fierce Telecom

Komatsu Australia has announced it had consolidated its telecommunications services with Telstra including the migration to a new Managed ICT “Infrastructure as a Service” to support the company’s growing construction and mining equipment business.

 Lerwick is set to be the location for the UK’s most northerly cloud computing data centre as developer Alchemy Plus announced plans for a 10,000 ft2 facility powered entirely by renewable energy. The Shetland climate is one of the coolest and most stable in the UK and the data centre facility will have one of the smallest ‘energy footprints’ in the world. It is proposed that excess heat generated by the 4 Megawatt data centre be fed in to Lerwick’s district heating scheme to allow it to expand and satisfy a backlog of demand.

FiberLight, an optical networking provider, was able to accomplish the impossible when it turned up a 10Gig Ethernet network with dedicated IP Services in less than a week for Horizon Data Center Solutions, a fast growing facilities-based colocation and IT service company headquartered in Dallas.

The new infrastructure will enable Horizon’s clients to efficiently connect to their Tier IIIb, SAS 70 II data centres from any location and will provide a 5 9’s fully redundant network architecture to ensure optimum uptime.

Source: Host Review