Crimtrac has called on Canberra Data Centres to provide next-generation, green data centre facilities at its site in the ACT. The agency develops technology that gives 50,000 police officers crime-solving information at their fingertips such as DNA, fingerprint records, the Australian National Child Offender Register and other databases.

Centrelink's data centre future will determine if it becomes the country's first "super agency", processing data on behalf of other agencies such as the tax office. According to Human Services ICT infrastructure deputy secretary John Wadeson, Centrelink only took up 150sq m of space as part of its contract with Canberra Data Centres.

Colleges Northern Ireland has signed a €3.5 million, four-year contract with Calyx to manage and refresh their technology services across 47 college campuses. The IT specialist was selected by CNI, the representative body of the six regional Colleges, to be the single provider to educational facilities.

Services range from centrally hosted applications to on-site systems, all wrapped in a fully managed service. Part of the contract was a hardware refresh and a move to a virtualised server platform in a centralised data centre.

Source: Irish Examiner

Dutch publisher Telegraaf Media Groep said it will consolidate seven of its publications - Telegraaf Media Nederland titles De Telegraaf, Sp!ts, Noordhollands Dagblad, Haarlems Dagblad, IJmuider Courant, Leidsch Dagblad and De Gooi-en Eemlander - with a 408-seat data centre anchored by software from CCI Europe. The data centre will be located in Amsterdam and Alkmaar with disaster recovery failover between the two sites.

Fifa has announced the details for its data farm that will cope with all the extra web traffic during the World Cup. Based in Slough, the data centre will have 75 whopping computers to deal with the estimated 70 million page views an hour that are expected during busy periods.

IBM has announced a 10-year, multi-million dollar agreement with ElectraCard Services (ECS), a provider of software solutions for electronic payment systems, for providing business continuity services. The agreement will facilitate unparalleled operational expertise and solution capability for ECS’s disaster recovery infrastructure, said IBM.

SunGard is nearly doubling the trading venues and markets its customers can access by bringing together its three global network solutions for routing equities, listed derivatives and fixed income orders to form the SunGard Global Network. Currently SunGard offers three distinct connectivity and routing solutions for securities, depending on the region and asset class, including the SunGard Transaction Network and BNet in the US., and GLNet which has a significant footprint in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

BBC Springwatch presenter Kate Humble’s travellers’ website Stuff Your Rucksack has turned to iomart Hosting to cope with its increasing popularity. Think Publishing, the communications agency behind the website, turned to iomart Hosting, one of Europe’s leading providers of managed and cloud hosting services, to ensure the site could handle a sharp increase in visitors after Kate Humble officially launched Stuff Your Rucksack last week.

Telstra is considering pulling a large fleet of servers housed within Sydney's giant Global Switch data centre as it consolidates its data centre footprint. Telstra said that it aims to consolidate its three current data centres (as well as IT systems placed in a half dozen smaller facilities) down to two centralised data centres - one in the Sydney business district of St Leonards and another in Clayton, Melbourne, currently under construction.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- IT consulting firm BroadGroup (www.broad-group.com) announced on Thursday it has released a new report that shows that enterprise adoption of private cloud will accelerate over the next five years, and will boost the opportunity for third party data center outsourcing.

The report follows a previous study BroadGroup released in March that forecasted a 61 percent growth in data center space across seven key Latin American markets by 2014.

Microsoft has announced the establishment of a Software and Service Excellence Center in Taipei, with the centre intended to integrate Microsoft's software technology and know-how in cloud computing data centres with Taiwan-based makers' R&D and manufacturing capabilities in IT and communication hardware.

Paradigm Holdings, a provider of comprehensive information technology and cyber security solutions for Federal Government enterprises, has announced that it has been awarded a prime contract to provide Uninterruptible Power Supply Systems and electrical upgrades by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

DH Capital, an investment banking firm serving the Internet infrastructure and telecommunications industries, has announced an upcoming research and networking event, ‘The Business of Colocation and Hosting 2010: A Bullish Perspective.’ This complementary event in San Francisco, held in partnership with Digital Realty Trust, is designed to inform and educate hosting and colocation executives regarding current market conditions, technology trends and expansion opportunities.

The computer disaster that a consultant warned Dallas County about two years ago arrived Tuesday when a break in a water main disabled its computer systems, crippling operations for almost the entire county government. The 2008 consultant's report warned the county that it needed a backup plan for its computer system in case of a disaster – an off-site location to keep county operations up and running. But no action was taken on that advice.

What can the designers of data centres learn from bees? Plenty, says MDES, a data analysis company in the Netherlands. Looking at the ways bees work together in hives, the company has come up with Ozzo – a concept for a renewable energy data centre, which will hopefully be built in the Amsterdam metropolitan area by 2015.

Its design is modelled after bees working in hives, with a network of connected nodes representing different types of data. In developing the plan, designers identified three kinds of data: hot, cold and frozen.

Source: TMCNet

GlassHouse Technologies, a global provider of independent data centre consulting and managed services, has announced it has established a new relationship with MEEZA, a Qatar based Managed IT Services and Solutions provider. In addition to their existing data centre in Qata, MEEZA is in the process of building out 11,000 sq ft of additional data centre space to serve its customers in the Gulf Region.

A new paper by law firm Clifford Chance LLP has highlighted some of the procurement risks associated with the build of new data centres for companies in the financial services or banking sector. Historically, data centre procurement has not enjoyed a high media profile. However, this has now changed with recent headlines revealing significant fines imposed by regulators on financial institutions for failing to maintain adequate data storage and security.

Interxion, a European operator of carrier-neutral data centre services, has announced an agreement with AlgoSpan and ALGO Technologies, to offer low latency connectivity and market data services from Interxion’s City of London data centre with immediate effect.

C7 Data Centers, a national provider of colocation, disaster recovery and virtualization solutions, has announced that AtTask, has completed migration of their production site to a C7 Data Centers SAS 70 Type II facility. This migration ensures the highest levels of reliability and security for AtTask's critical data.

The Australian Securities Exchange, operator of the Australian futures market, and Equinix, a global data centre company have announced that ASX has deployed its new hosting solution within the Equinix Chicago International Business Exchange data centre. This allows ASX to provide its US-based clients direct access to the Sydney Futures Exchange (SFE), a wholly-owned ASX subsidiary, and its suite of liquid and transparent products.

iomart Hosting, one of Europe’s leading providers of managed hosting and cloud computing services, has been signed up by football statistics website 11v11.com, the Association of Football Statisticians’ official website , to provide round-the-clock support in preparation for a surge of interest during the World Cup.

T-Systems is growing in the banking industry. The Deutsche Telekom subsidiary has been awarded the DekaBank contract for the transfer and operation of the information and communications infrastructure. In future, T-Systems will be responsible for voice and data communication, workstation systems and data centre services. The two companies have agreed on a contract term of six years. The volume in euros over the whole term will be in the three-digit millions.

After just over a year at telecoms giant TalkTalk, chief information officer David Cooper is pleased with the work he has done so far under his IT transformation plan, but there are still many challenges ahead. Cooper was hired by the telecom firm's managing director Wendy Becker last summer and tasked with creating an IT strategy for the firm and overseeing the integration of internet provider Tiscali, which TalkTalk acquired in May 2009.

Banco Santander Brasil plans to spend 450 million reais (US$243.5 million) on a technology and research centre in Sao Paulo as Brazil's third-largest private-sector bank expands its business in the country. The bank, controlled by Spain's Santander, said in a securities filing on Thursday that construction of the "large-capacity" data centre should be completed in the first quarter of 2012.

The bank has expanded with six takeovers in Brazil over the past 12 years, including the acquisition of Sao Paulo state bank Banespa in 2000 for 7 billion reais.

Belfast cloud computing company Novosco has been appointed to deploy a Cisco-based virtualised data centre infrastructure at Queen’s University Belfast. The project represents the first major V-Block deployment throughout the Higher Education sector in the UK and Ireland.

Continent 8 Technologies and Telehouse in France have announced the formation of a strategic partnership to deliver hosting services to the online gaming community who want to operate in France. Following on from an extensive assessment of suitable hosting facilities and a competitive commercial model, Continent 8 chose to partner with Telehouse, one of the longest established providers of reliable and secure data centre facilities globally.

Data centre provider Terremark has expanded its cloud-based computing infrastructure service into Brazil. Terremark’s NAP of the Capitol Region centre in Culpeper will play a role in the South American expansion. Since opening in Culpeper in 2008, Terremark has continued to expand local operations as well. A third 50,000 sq ft data centre is under construction, and the company recently bought an additional 27 acres of land for future development.

Amazon.com and Yahoo Japan separately plan to launch cloud computing services for Japanese businesses in anticipation of their growing use thanks to Japan's large-capacity high-speed network.

Amazon has established a local unit to start a Japanese-language service for leasing data centre capacity. In a related move, the leading US virtual mall operator is believed to be moving toward opening a data centre in Tokyo as early as this year.

Demonstrating its continued leadership in enterprise-class cloud solutions, CSC has announced the opening of seven cloud-enabled data centres in the US, UK, Luxembourg and Australia to serve clients across the globe.

The CSC cloud-enabled data centres feature fully virtualised cloud fabric and multiple grades of services for any size organization interested in public, private or hybrid cloud solutions. The data centres are located in Chantilly, Virginia, Newark, Delaware, Chicago, Illinois, Sydney, Australia, Copenhagen, Denmark, Luxembourg, and the New Kent Complex, UK.

UKSolutions, the UK’s largest privately owned data centre provider, has announced an agreement with Worcestershire-based IT support and solutions provider OGL Computer, to use its hosted data centre as a key feature of its new Offsite Recovery disaster recovery solution, which the company is adding to its existing portfolio of IT solutions.

Teraco Data Environments has announced that Broadband Infraco will offer Tier 1 backbone services from within two of its national facilities, establishing a presence for South Africa¹s largest long haul carrier in the Teraco ‘meet me’ rooms. Broadband Infraco is a state-owned telecommunications service provider, which will formally launch its services to the wholesale market later this year.

Broadband Infraco has already started testing its new nodes in Teraco’s Cape Town and Johannesburg data centres, and will start provisioning services towards the end of June.

Terremark Worldwide has struck a deal with Verizon Communications for the phone company to purchase colocation services. Verizon will use 25,000 sq ft of space at Terremark's NAP of the Capital Region in Culpepper, Virginia and at the NAP of the Americas in Miami. Verizon turned to Terremark in order to better service its growing demand from federal customers, Terremark stated.

PARADE Magazine, the most widely read magazine in America with a circulation of 32.2 million, has selected The New York Internet Company, a mission-critical data services service provider, to manage the digital expansion of its content.

Steadfast Networks, a leading Chicago based dedicated server hosting provider, has announced the opening of its newest data centre in Manhattan, New York. With its recent acquisition of The New York NOC hosting company, Steadfast Networks is opening the Manhattan data centre to provide highly flexible and affordable colocation and dedicated server services to Manhattan and surrounding areas.

Cleveland Police Authority has become the first customer of Steria's shared services offering that is targeted at UK police forces. The authority is spending £175m over the next decade on shared services and expects £50m in savings in that time.

Telvent has announced its agreement with Larsen and Toubro to partner on a turnkey contract for Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution to implement baseline data and IT applications for energy accounting, auditing and IT-based consumer service centres for 95 towns in India.

With Telvent Smart Grid Solution, Maharashtra is able to effectively measure the aggregate technical and commercial losses and increase reliability and quality of electric supply to its customers, as well as enhance the operation of the distribution network.

Source: Market Watch

Macquarie Telecom has signed a three year outsourcing deal with Queensland construction and project management group, Matrix, to manage and host the company’s full corporate IT suite and provide fully redundant internet and voice services underpinned by a full SAN storage and managed back-up capability.

Matrix’s IT infrastructure will be managed by Macquarie Telecom in its ISO and ASIO T4 certified data centre, the Intellicentre.

Source: IT Wire

Finland-based IT consultancy Tieto Oyj has said it will provide IT operating services to the Finnish state treasury and the related state IT service centre until 2016 in a deal, worth some €20 million. The contract also covers an operating service development plan for the whole period.

Tieto will be responsible for the functionality of operating services of the authority's IT systems and the required infrastructure such as data centres, servers, applications and office LAN.

Source: Trading Markets

Behind the fence at Terremark, high-tech expansion continues in Culpeper in spite of the down economy. Since beginning operations two years ago, the Miami-based company says growth at the Culpeper campus, officially dubbed the NAP of the Capitol Region, has continued to exceed expectations.

Phoenix NAP, a next generation data centre and network access point, has announced it is open and operating. Construction initially began in June of 2009, and during the past year, the building has been developed into a premier Phoenix colocation facility.

eHosting DataFort, a managed IT and advisory services provider and a member of TECOM Investments, has announced it will partner with Double-Take Software, a provider of data recovery solutions, to deliver a presentation on the risks businesses face in the absence of disaster recovery planning and ways to mitigate them at IDC's IT Managers Forum in Dubai.

8×8, provider of business communications solutions, has announced it acquired Central Host, a Los Gatos, California-based company providing managed hosting services and cloud-based computing solutions. The company’s cloud-based services support a wide variety of hosted applications and services via high-quality data centre space on the west and east coasts, 24×7 operations staff, server resources and systems management experts. They currently operate three data centres in Silicon Valley and one in New York City.

Digital Realty Trust, the world's largest wholesale data centre provider, has signed a new 15-year lease agreement with an affiliate of Terremark Worldwide to house Terremark's NAP of Amsterdam in a new build-to-suit project to be developed by Digital Realty Trust. Digital Realty Trust also announced that it has entered into a definitive purchase and sale agreement to acquire the site where the new facility is to be constructed.

Building on the momentum of its converged infrastructure strategy, HP has announced industry firsts in server, storage, network and power management technologies that enable clients to shift millions of dollars in operational costs to activities that drive business innovation.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that CFN Services, a managed telecom infrastructure services company, is now connected to Equinix’s International Business Exchange data centres in Chicago, Frankfurt, London, New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle and Toronto as part of the CFN Services global low latency network.

Hibernia Atlantic, the only diverse transAtlantic high bandwidth connectivity provider, has announces that Deutsche Börse Systems, the IT subsidiary of Deutsche Börse, has selected Hibernia’s secure Global Financial Network (GFN) for high performance, protected connectivity between Frankfurt and Chicago.

Extreme Networks has announced that the Austrian Ministry of the Interior has selected its high performance data centre, edge and aggregation network solutions to migrate the local networks and data centres of the security administration department for eight federal states and for the capital, Vienna.

Intelligent Decisions, has announced that it has successfully completed an end-to-end data centre relocation project for the Patient Advocate Foundation. This relocation effort included the complete de-installation and re-installation of all IT infrastructure components from the Newport News, Virginia data centre to the new Hampton, Virginia headquarters location.

Dimension Data is to expand its data centre, cloud computing and infrastructure-as-service capabilities by taking a majority stake in IT and telecommunications services provider, Netforce, and merging Netforce's operations with those of its own cloud computing provider, BlueFire. According to Dimension Data, both Sydney-based companies offer complementary hosted and managed IT services, primarily to the Australian and New Zealand mid-market. Dimension Data acquired a majority shareholding in BlueFire in October 2008.

Colo5, a leading independent data centre operator headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, announced it will provide comprehensive colocation and network services to Acosta Sales & Marketing.

Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, Acosta is the US and Canada's leading sales, service, and marketing agency to consumer product goods companies. Acosta will be relocating its entire core network infrastructure from its current headquarters location to Colo5's main Jacksonville data centre, which will serve as Acosta's primary network services hub.

Greater flexibility, a variety of clients and the impact of the Gershon report have allowed the Canberra Data Centre to provide data facilities for 16 different government agencies.

Managing director of the centre, Greg Boorer in this interview spoke about developments the centre has made since it was opened in 2008. "It's a brand new data centre and one of its attractions is we've never been saddled with old architecture we needed to squeeze more life out of. We were able to start with a blank canvas and it achieved best practice from day one.

Brocade have announced a set of innovative HP-branded Brocade 8 Gbps Fibre Channel data centre and server connectivity products and a virtualization solution bundle. The new offerings extend the Brocade storage area network (SAN) and server connectivity portfolio delivered by HP.

i/o Data Centers, a provider of enterprise colocation and data centre solutions, has announced the addition of TeliaSonera International Carrier, a leading global provider of IP, capacity and voice services, to its growing list of carriers available to its data centre customers.

Web hosting provider Rebel Networks has announced it has added a new data centre in Dallas. The new facility will provide a range of services, including shared hosting, semi- and fully- managed dedicated hosting, colocation and virtual servers. Rebel Networks says the new data centre is part of its cloud computing strategy that has been in the works for sometimes.

Savvis has announced it will provide strategic elements of the hosting infrastructure for Thomson Reuters Elektron. Elektron is a global, ultra-high speed real-time data network and hosting environment that enables financial firms to access and share information faster and more cost effectively.

Cisco has shared its plans to grow and strengthen its market in the data centre space. In addition, Cisco has adopted a simplified approach with the Unified Computing System and its 'fabric-based computing' approach.

Facebook regularly reviews whether to continue using its own data centres or hand off its processing to a cloud service provider, and its operations remain on home-grown infrastructure. "We look at, probably once or twice a year, does it make sense for us to build more infrastructure in the cloud, and on someone else's backbone, and less for ourselves?" said Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook. "We've determined, for two reasons, that it doesn't, each time we've done this analysis.

ASG Group has announced a new five-year deal with Vodafone Hutchison Australia for the provision of corporate IT services, including end-user computing services, IT services management, corporate servers and applications management.

"We feel that this deal is great for us in terms of our expansion into the commercial sector," ASG's chief officer for sales and strategic operations Murray Rosa said. Rosa was not able to comment on the exact cost of the five-year deal, instead saying that it is "a multimillion-dollar deal with VHA that we are very excited about".

IBM has entered into a five-year services agreement with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, to transform the organisation's IT environment into a more responsive, competitive and flexible IT delivery model. IBM said that its plan to optimise the technology environment for BCBSMA includes end-user technical support for employees and management of the organisation's data centre operations and applications portfolio to enhance the organisation's IT operational processes.

The 6th Data Centres Europe Awards took place in Sophia Antipolis on Thursday 24th June at a Gala Dinner attended by executives from more than thirty countries.

ERGOS Technology has announced that it has teamed with Dallas-based CoreXchange to provide a comprehensive suite of data centre and managed services solutions for companies in the energy industry.

Infrastructure for Qatar's Energy City, a US$2.6 billion property development aimed at attracting international energy companies, will be completed this year, the project's chief executive officer announced.

First tenants will move in at the end of 2011, with the project to be completed in full in 2012, Hesham Al-Emadi told Reuters. The group signed an agreement with Qtel earlier this year to build the data centre serving more than 90 buildings, Al-Emadi said.

Source: Reuters

Sydney-based ISP Comcen - with a nationwide customer base - has acquired Australis - a regional ISP serving the Gippsland region, and says it is looking for more acquisitions. In addition to Internet access, Comcen offers mobile broadband by reselling Optus services, colocation, web hosting, VoIP and business services such as 13/1300 numbers. McArthur said; "We believe there is a good opportunity to offer voice services to Australis customers."

Colocation America, has announced its global communications network with its greatest quality connectivity yet. Colocation America routes the majority of its national and international communications through its One Wilshire (Los Angeles) and 60 Hudson (New York City) data centres, preeminent hubs for international communication.

A Manchester-based data centre provider is to invest £2 million in expanding its overall site capacity. UK Grid, which also has a centre in London, has already started to expand its Science Park in Manchester. The firm is currently installing an extra 170 racks of data storage space as part of the first phase of its expansion plans.

The Bunker, provider of Ultra Secure Data Centre and Managed Services has announced that Vaultium, an online information and document management software company for businesses has selected The Bunker for ultra secure colocation and dual site resilience. Vaultium, established in 2002, provides secure, easy to use, highly scalable long-term information and document management ‘vaults’.

Steadfast Networks, a Chicago based data centre and dedicated server hosting provider, has announced the opening of its new Chicago data centre, located at 725 S. Wells St.

The new Steadfast Networks data centre will accommodate the expanding demand for Chicago colocation services and Chicago web hosting services in a state-of-the-art data facility. The initial phase includes 6,000 sq. ft. of raised floor data centre space and 750kW of power and is the first phase of a 4.5MW build-out at the location.

Source: PR Web

AboveNet, a provider of high bandwidth connectivity solutions, announced that it has linked its network to the Northern Virginia data centre of Power Loft, a leader in an energy-efficient "green" design.

Located at Innovation Park in Manassas, Virginia, the "Power Loft @ Innovation" data centre serves the fast-growing Prince William County technology and business corridor. Power Loft customers now can use AboveNet's high bandwidth connectivity solutions for all critical business data applications.

Source: Market Watch

onShore Networks have announced it has completed construction of its new data centre facility in downtown Chicago. The data centre is centrally located at 216 W. Jackson Boulevard. The new facility greatly expands onShore Networks' footprint for colocation space. The facility measures 3,000 sq ft and was built with all the amenities onShore Networks' colocation customers require.

Eircom has won the lucrative contract to install the communications facilities at the new Aviva Stadium in Dublin 4. The infrastructure inclues the latest fibre internet and voice services. The three-year contract is the largest communications contract signed by the Aviva stadium to date. The value of Eircom’s deal with the Aviva Stadium was not disclosed.