Nearly 40 international airlines operating to and from Australia have signed a two-year contract extension through 2016 with Unisys Australia to continue providing an advanced baggage reconciliation system at seven Australian international airports at Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Cairns, Perth, Adelaide and the Gold Coast.  The contract extension is worth more than AU$11million.

To meet continuing strong customer demand for its IT infrastructure solutions in Latin America, Terremark, a Verizon Company, has announced the latest expansion of its São Paulo, Brazil data centre, the Network Access Point (NAP) do Brasil. As part of the expansion, Terremark took over operation of the entire 185,000-sq ft data centre facility, adding 15,000sq ft of raised floor space to its current operations. This expansion makes the NAP do Brasil – which is capable of housing approximately 100,000 servers – one of the largest multi-tenant data centres in the region.

Delta Dental of Michigan recently opened its renovated and expanded corporate headquarters in the Lansing-area community of Okemos. Construction began in 2008 and was completed last month.

The US$91 million project included the construction of a new 90,000 sq ft office building as well as the renovation of Delta Dental's original headquarters. In addition, a new 22,500 sq ft data centre was built at the east end of the property.

Source: Canadian Business

One new indicator of corporate spending on information technology in the US has delivered a surprising 6% rise in the second quarter, and not the 3% slippage that the researchers had expect. The study, by Maven Wave Partners, also noted a 9.1% increase in spending on the IT work force, which it saw as the driver of the 6% overall tech spending number.

Maven Wave said it had anticipated the smaller 3% rise in Q2 because a Q1 surge of 14% had led them to believe that companies would be cutting back purchases to absorb what they had brought in earlier in the year.

Source: CIO

More than half of Irish businesses have confessed to being confused about the term ‘cloud computing'. According to a survey of 200 Irish businesses in July of this year, 54% said they were confused, while 68% cited security concerns over the new computing model.

Plans for a new US$500 million office and data centre building for the Social Security Administration have moved a step closer. Rick Boyle, vice president of Natelli Communities in Gaithersburg, developer of the Urbana Corporate Center, has confirmed that the SSA bought the land in Urban, Frederick County.

According to the local Board of Commissioners, the SSA selected the Urbana Corporate Center location in Frederick after evaluating more than 150 sites.

The government has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft Corporation to set up a Microsoft Innovation Centre in Malta focused on cloud computing. Microsoft and its partners are making a seed investment of over €3 million.

There are reports that Microsoft, the Global Software and IT company, is planning to expand is Dublin data centre. The centre, located at Grange Castle in Dublin, opened two years and represented an investment of US$500 million. The reports suggest that the company now plans to increase the capacity of the centre by over 30% by building a 120,000 sq ft data centre alongside the existing 303,000 sq ft facility (pictured).

Carpathia Hosting, the leading provider of enterprise managed hosting services for government agencies and businesses, has announced that award-winning digital music service, Spotify chose Carpathia for colocation and managed hosting for the launch of its service in the US.

Netmagic Solutions has, announced the launch of its world class data centre totalling some 40,000 sq ft in Delhi NCR at Noida expanding its data centre footprint in India.

eHosting DataFort, the region’s leading managed IT Services provider and a member of TECOM Investments, is providing a secure hosting environment for the newly launched Arabic website of the business publication, Forbes Middle East. The US-based Forbes magazine provides regional content from the website: www.forbesmiddleeast.com

Thorntons, the chocolate manufacturer and retailer, has revealed that its IT and other outsourcing activities should help deliver an annual cost saving of £2 million. The company signed a six-year deal with HP Enterprise Services for IT services in September last year. HP provides end-to-end management and support for IT, networking and applications for the company under the multi-million pound deal.

RTS Realtime Systems Group, a leading global trading solutions provider, has announced that Equinix has been chosen as the provider of its newest low latency global data centre in Germany, extending its reach on Platform Equinix.

The RTS data centre, which offers hosting and co-location services, will be located at Equinix's FR2 International Business Exchange in Frankfurt, enabling RTS to continue to offer low latency sensitive clients the fastest access to Eurex and Xetra markets.

Source: PR Newswire

For Ontario’s IT chief, the lack of Canadian-built data centres is the only thing standing in the way of increased provincial adoption of cloud services. David Nicholl, corporate chief information officer at the Government of Ontario, said after building its new Guelph, Ont.-based data centre earlier this year, the province began testing a private cloud solution with a set of hosted Microsoft services. his includes hosted versions of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Forefront Identity Manager, Windows 7 and Office 2010.

Cloud and Managed Hosting expert, DediPower has been chosen by Airas Intersoft, the first company to offer web-architected options based on proven life and pensions administration software, to support the growth of its business in developing the fast-maturing overseas markets.

The London boroughs of Lewisham and Bromley have combined forces to use the same provider for data centre and desktop services operated through a contract with Logicalis. The two councils have their own individual contracts with Logicalis, but now share a common specification and performance regime, resulting in a standard set of requirements for primary services and network support. Logicalis said this offers economies of scale resulting in significant savings for both authorities.

Windstream Hosted Solutions, a premier provider of enterprise-class managed hosting solutions, has announced that Plus Three has chosen to colocate the production infrastructure for its “always on” fundraising and member management systems at Windstream’s SAS-70, Type II data centre in Raleigh.

Paragon Development Systems (PDS), the  Oconomowoc, Wisconsin headquartered IT company (pictured), is set to announce that they are to build a new “cloud extension centre” which is designed to help its customers use their private cloud networks more efficiently, Craig Schiefelbein, founder and chief executive officer of the company said to local media sources.

The firm, which has about 300 employees and more than US$177 million of annual revenue, is et to be built in Milwaukee County could employ 50 new staff.

iomart Hosting, the iomart Group's cloud computing and managed hosting subsidiary, has taken Nova International, organiser of the world’s biggest half marathon the Great North Run, into the cloud.

Notting Hill Housing Trust has contracted Advanced 365 to deliver a private cloud managed IT service for four years with the option of extending it for a further two years. This outsourced IT service contract at £7.43m, will be key to supporting NHHT’s growth plans and flexible working environment. It will also enable improved communications between NHHT and its tenants. The outsourced IT service is being delivered in a phased approach with the final phase due for completion 31 March 2012.

EchoStar Corporation, along with its subsidiary Hughes, has announced its new Hughes Cloud Services & Hosting solution for businesses. The turnkey offering brings the company's decades of experience managing huge data streams and broadband services to cloud computing across the entire business spectrum.

CyrusOne, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cincinnati Bell and pre-eminent enterprise data center colocation solutions provider, has purchased a 40-acre parcel of land to build a 1-million-sq ft data center in Chandler, Ariz., near Phoenix.

Textura Corporation, the leading provider of collaboration solutions for the construction industry, announces the successful relocation of the company's primary data centre to Latisys-Chicago in Oakbrook, Illinois pictured).  This Tier III data centre offers world-class physical security, power availability, infrastructure flexibility and growth capacity. 

A fashion brand that specialises in creating cut-price versions of clothes worn by celebrities has recruited IT business Melbourne to back its online début. Based in Manchester, AX Paris is stocked in more than 230 retailers throughout the UK including New Look, Debenhams and House of Fraser, and is focusing on expansion within the European market this year.The female clothing brand looked to independent server hosting provider Melbourne to launch its first online shop, which has been more than four months in development.

The Bunker, providers of ultra secure managed hosting, cloud computing, colocation, and outsourced IT from within Europe’s most secure data centres, is pleased to announce that Mind Candy, creators of the Moshi Monsters game has selected The Bunker as its hosting partner to support its continuing growth. Over the last 3 years, 50 million users have already signed-up to Moshi Monsters, with new users signing up at a rate of 1 per second, making Moshi Monsters the fastest-growing kids' entertainment brand in the world.

Savvis, a CenturyLink company has announced its schedule of North American data centre expansions and grand openings for the second half of 2011.

TELEHOUSE America, a leading provider of global dedicated data centres, has, announced that Optical Communications Group, a facilities-based provider of technologically advanced, high bandwidth fibre optic transmission capacity for communications carriers, expands its fibre network into the new TELEHOUSE New York Chelsea data centre facility (pictured).

Peak 10, a managed services and cloud provider with world-class data centres, has announced it is extending its relationship with Xceleration, an industry-leading provider of incentive, recognition and loyalty solutions. With this new commitment, Xceleration will continue its mission to enhance application performance, availability and scalability from its own private cloud environment.

The CEO of US internet giant SoftLayer is visiting Sydney and Melbourne this week in a bid to determine which city will host the company's next data centre. SoftLayer is one of America's largest and fastest-growing web hosts. It is considered to be at the forefront of cloud computing, despite the model accounting for only ten percent of revenue.

BT has revealed the latest locations of its ongoing fibre deployment, that will serve an extra 1 million homes. BT Openreach has revealed that an extra one million homes and businesses in the UK are to be connected to its ongoing fibre deployment across the country.

CGI Group, a leading provider of information technology and business process services, has announced that Wake County, NC will transition operation of its enterprise resource planning system to CGI’s AMS Advantage cloud, operating in CGI’s secure data centre. The contract is valued at US$30.5 million for 12 years. 

Hewlett Packard has scrapped plans to build a NZ$60 million data centre at Tuakau, in the Counties-Manukau region and plans to review locations for a new site. The company announced plans for a 500 sq m data centre in March and claimed that construction would start this year, and fully operational by early 2012.

EMC – headquartered in Hopkinson, Massachusetts - have announced its new 450,000 sq ft Center of Excellence in Durham, North Carolina (pictured), which will deliver on and demonstrate the promise of cloud computing and IT as a Service for EMC and its customers. 

Deutsche Telekom's IT unit T-Systems is bullish about the cloud services opportunity, but does not want its customers' information being compromised by the U.S. government accessing their information. With security being top of mind for businesses considering cloud services, Reinhard Clemens, T-Systems' CEO, said in a recent conference in Bonn, Germany that it wants to be able to shield their German customers from U.S. government access that's allowed through the Patriot Act.

In keeping with broader Defense Department data centre consolidation plans, the Army just announced its own major steps forward in reducing its vast quantities of servers and data centres. The Army IT Agency says it has eliminated more than 30, 000 sq ft of data centre flooring under Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative efforts. The agency says it also has reduced user-software license cost by 10 percent, increased processor performance by 40%  through mainframe efficiencies and increased server virtualization capacity by 30% , according.

By 2021, three-quarters of Singapore companies say they will outsource the majority of their IT infrastructure, of which half will move their infrastructure to the cloud. The top three cost savings, they say, will come from reducing IT infrastructure costs, implementing a cloud and virtualisation strategy as well as standardising their IT infrastructure. Conducted by Vanson Bourne, a research firm, the survey polled 480 IT decision makers in Singapore, Germany, France, United States and United Kingdom. The study was commissioned by Savvis, a cloud infrastructure and hosted IT provider.

Tata Consultancy Services, a leading IT services, consulting and business solutions firm announced that Deutsche Bank has selected the company as a strategic partner for their Production Management Transformation Initiative, within their Capital Markets Business Unit.

Warwickshire County Council is piloting a G-Cloud e-mail service with Google, in a scheme expected to save £250,000. The council is working with the Cabinet Office to pilot the project, which is expected to be rolled out across public sector organisations. Warwickshire CC hopes to save around £250,000 per year under the programme due to greater flexibility of working and reduced costs of licences for e-mail. Savings will increase long-term as the current e-mail solution is phased out and the e-mail infrastructure operates entirely from the cloud, said the council.

Linode has announced a broad expansion of its cloud hosting services for customers in the Asia Pacific region with the opening of a new facility in Tokyo, Japan. Any company with customers or business in the Pacific region can now leverage the Linode suite of services to build and run their applications in the cloud. The newly launched Tokyo facility is the first Asia Pacific location for Linode, and is available now.

Pittsburgh-based pair Networks is building an ultra-efficient data center in the desert near Las Vegas that the website-hosting company says will be one of the greenest facilities of its kind in the world. But pair Network's commitment to recycled building materials and solar panels isn't just about being Earth-friendly. The 15-year-old South Side firm also wants to set itself apart as a quality company committed to the future in an industry that's full of low-cost providers that sometimes leave their customers hanging.

AMS-IX, IX Reach and UK Grid have announced details of a collaboration to enable customers in the North of England to connect directly to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange AMS-IX from UK Grid’s carrier neutral data centre, Manchester One @ Synergy House.

The rapid spread of cloud computing has enabled enterprises to outsource many information technology capabilities, including and especially data centres, leading to savings on manpower, money, and energy. According to a recent report from Pike Research, the energy-efficiency benefits of cloud computing are substantial, and growth in the market will have important implications for both energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

To meet growing demand for high-density colocation and cloud services in the Southern California market, Latisys, a leading national provider of IT outsourcing solutions from colocation to cloud, has announced it has commissioned the first 22,000 sq ft and 10 MW of power in its 93,000 sq ft data centre in Irvine, CA (pictured). The new facility will be on display and available for data centre tours at Latisys' Grand Opening event September 22, 2011.

Digital Realty Trust, a global provider of data centre solutions, has completed the expansion to its existing 293,000 sq ft data centre facility at 2121 S. Price Road in Chandler, Arizona. The expansion, which began in the first quarter of 2011, has added approximately 226,000 rentable sq ft of data centre space and 13 megawatts of additional power to meet customer demand in the Phoenix market.

ATM and Linxdatacenter have signed a partnership agreement to start selling each others’ colocation services in Central and Eastern Europe. The total area of technical facilities at ATM and Linxdatacenter comprises of 6 data centres in CEE (in Warsaw, Katowice, Moscow, Tallinn, and Sankt Petersburg) with currently more than 23,000 sq m, 50 MW of available power featuring redundancy and emergency power systems.

NTT Singapore has announced that it has successfully attained the status of Network Service Provider in collaboration with Singapore Exchange. Leveraging on the NSP, NTT Singapore will be able to offer customers collocated in SGX; access to other global / regional stock exchanges and their home markets using NTT Com Low-Latency Service.

Peak 10, a managed services and cloud provider with world-class data centres, has announced it has broken ground on its third data centre facility in Nashville, Tenn. The addition of the 15,000 sq ft facility brings Peak 10 Nashville’s total data centre footprint to more than 40,000 sq ft of raised floor space. This expansion comes on the heels of Peak 10 announcing an added 3,000 sq ft of premium data centre space contiguous to its Nashville 2 facility in Franklin, Tenn.

EMC Corporation has announced that the British Isle of Man Government's Information Systems Division has implemented a cloud-based technology infrastructure for more efficient, flexible and reliable delivery of its public services, using EMC VPLEX technology and EMC Unified Storage with solid-state flash drives.

PAETEC has announced that it has been awarded a five-year contract by the U.S. Army to provide network services, including voice, data, and secure Internet access services to Fort Detrick located near Frederick, Maryland. Fort Detrick serves as the home base for the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, which researches and develops medical solutions to protect military service members from biological threats.

Midas Medici, an innovative green IT company in the fields of virtualization, cloud computing and data management, has announced that its CIMCORP brand has won a US$3 million contract from CEMIG one of the largest electric energy utilities in Brazil, to upgrade its IT infrastructure and data centre solutions. This project represents a strategic upgrade to CEMIG's virtualization and cloud-based capabilities throughout its operations in Brazil, and is one of the reasons CIMCORP was chosen to be the project lead.

Pacnet, Asia’s leading business telecommunications service provider, has announced the launch of Pacnet Virtual Private Server, its first Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution in its growing portfolio of cloud computing solutions.

As part of its focus on delivering secure IT infrastructure solutions to enterprises and government agencies across the globe, Terremark, a Verizon Company, has announced the opening of the Network Access Point (NAP) of Amsterdam (pictured). The NAP of Amsterdam joins Terremark's network of more than 10 top-tier data centres across Europe that serve as the foundation for the secure, enterprise-class services the company offers to customers throughout the world.

Technology services firm Fujitsu New Zealand has reported a 40% boost to post-tax profit and says its data centre plans are still alive. Hewlett-Packard announced this month it had axed plans to spend NZ$60 million on a data centre in the Waikato town of Tuakau after speculation about the project's future.

There’s a new player inn the Las Vegas data centre market. Cobalt Data Centers launched in July, has acquired 2.4 acres in Las Vegas and plans invest US$60 million to build a colocation centre on the property. The Cobalt Sahara Data Center will be a 60,000 sq ft facility on East Sahara Road, thee company said.

Concerns over power shortages led to Verizon Business dismissing London as the site for its flagship data entre.  Verizon Business was worried about the availability of power because of the Olympic Games to be hosted in London next year. The company chose Amsterdam instead (see - Terremark opens NAP of Amsterdam)

The Australian Bureau of Statistics could pull its eCensus system from IBM's data centre and take it in-house as it tries to maximise the nation's digital population data collection. The eCensus system, which was jointly developed by IBM and the ABS, is run from IBM's data centre at Baulkham Hills, in Sydney's northwest.

Peak 10, a managed services and cloud provider with world-class data centres, has announced y it is delivering data centre solutions to James River Equipment Companies, the John Deere, construction and forestry dealership that provides parts, services and sales to customers in the Midwest and south-eastern United States.

InfoZen, a provider of IT services, technology and solutions for the public sector, has announced that it won a new five-year prime contract valued at US$90 million from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the principal investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

Wal-Mart, which announced in July that it would build a 210,000 sq ft corporate data centre in northern Colorado Springs, has finalized its purchase of the site — paying about US$5.3 million for the land.

Colt, Europe's leading information delivery platform, has announced that Verne Global, a data centre developer and operator, has selected Colt's Modular Data Centre (pictured) for its dual-sourced renewable energy facility in Iceland. This is the world's first mission critical data centre with zero-emissions to be manufactured and constructed in less than four months.

Tufts' new Boston data centre promises to increase the speed and reliability of the Tufts network thanks to updated technology and additional servers. The leased space in the Markley Group's Boston Data Center, which became functional this summer, will house technology responsible for improving the efficiency of the Tufts network, according to Philip Pascale, associate director of network services for University Information Technology (UIT).

Cloud and hybrid hosting provider Voxel has announced it will expand its Asian hosting capacity with the acquisition of an 1,800 sq ft private data centre suite from global telecommunications provider KDDI, located near Singapore's Changi Airport (pictured).

HP has announced that Airbus, one of the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers, has doubled its usable supercomputing power with containerized HP Performance Optimized Datacenters. In the final phase of a four-year high-performance computing deployment, Airbus has taken delivery of two HP PODs, making this the world’s largest industrial HPC system and one of the first confirmed commercial HPC container contracts. This deployment is the 29th biggest computer in the world according to the official TOP500 Supercomputer list published on June 20.

Charles River Development a front- and middle-office investment software solutions provider, has announced that Folketrygdfondet, which manages the Government Pension Fund Norway and Government Bond Fund on behalf of The Norwegian Ministry of Finance, has selected Charles River’s fully-outsourced application management and hosting solution for the Charles River Investment Management System.

Alcatel-Lucent has announced it has been selected by Olympus KeyMed, an international leader in the manufacture and supply of specialized medical, imaging and industrial equipment, to deliver a range of communications solutions from its broad enterprise portfolio designed to improve service to its customers and create more efficient communications and collaboration throughout the company.

Savvis, a CenturyLink Company, has announced its cloud partnership agreement with Virgin Media Business.

Through the agreement, Virgin Media Business will use Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Data Centre, an enterprise-class cloud computing solution. Combined with Virgin Media Business' nationwide fibre-optic network and philosophy of giving clients simple advice and superior support in the way that works best for them, the service will enable U.K. organisations to free themselves of traditional IT infrastructure constraints.

PCCW Solutions has been awarded a HK$362 million contract by the Social Welfare Department to provide an integrated total solution for the Computerised Social Security System II.

If everything goes well, Manesar in Haryana would be the data centre for Union government’s ambitious project — Aadhaar card or UID card. Already, Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation has allotted five acres of land for the project. Very soon the foundation stone would be laid for the data centre, said Keshni Anand Arora, deputy director general, regional office, Chandigarh.

Google is back in Pryor — and it’s ‘Google speed’ ahead. The company announced plans to build a US00 million data centre at Mid-America Industrial Park in 2007. The project was stalled for a time but has since resumed.

Networking VAR Redstone has landed a bumper £21.9 million banking deal equivalent to almost a third of its annual revenues. The London-listed reseller has been tasked with designing and delivering a new four-hall data centre for an unnamed "leading UK bank", with which it enjoys a long-standing relationship. Redstone chairman Ian Smith recently indicated that the VAR  would focus on growing its business in the City following a series of financial services win.

BHF-BANK, one of Germany's most prestigious private banks, is outsourcing part of its IT system management to Atos. The international IT services provider will take over responsibility for the bank's workplace computers, file and e-mail services as well as its telecommunications and network technology. BHF-Bank employees responsible for these services will transfer to Atos.