A free service that syncs data across multiple devices, SugarSync, has announced that it raised US$15 million in a Series D round of funding. This round was led by Coral Group with participation from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Sigma Partners, Hatteras Venture Partners and Hercules. SugarSync has now reached US$50 million in funding. The new funds will be used to double the staff sometime this year and SugarSync is also planning to add another data centre.

Meritex has announced five new leases and tenant expansions totalling 173,000 sq ft of space at Meritex Lenexa Executive Park.

EasyVista has, opened four new data centres to add to its 6 existing facilities across Europe and North America.  Cédric Cibot–Voisin, Country Manager France at EasyVista  said "In the United States and Europe, we won the majority of our new contracts in 2011 in SaaS. In France, VINCI Energies, Taores (EIG Mutual General), the Auchan Group, or Ineo-GDF-Suez are among our recent new customers and the SaaS trend is confirmed in 2012.

Alder Hey Children's and Liverpool Women's NHS foundation trusts are planning what could be the first major IT outsourcing contract among health service trusts. The two trusts, which already share IT services and a chief information officer, have advertised for a supplier to provide ICT to support patient care, and provide technology for the new Children's Health Park hospital, due to open in 2014.

In the summer of 2008, Savvis opened its first data centre in Singapore. Nearly four years later, The IT infrastructure services provider is set to invest S$100 million in the new 53,000-sq ft facility, located in in Jurong East, 17 kilometres west of Savvis’ existing data centre.

Construction of the new data centre, dubbed SG2, is set to start later this month with completion set for September 2012.

ING is offering its brokerage, cash management, custodian and other investor services, at least at first in Russia, via BT's Radianz Cloud community, which serves a variety of industries.

German data centres and colocation services provider IP Exchange will open a new data centre in Munich in March. In co-operation with German IT services provider and QSC subsidiary Info AG, this will be used to provide a full range of data centre services. The new data centre will offer 5,000 sq m of space.

Source: Telecom Paper

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A new company has taken over plans for a £12 million data centre in Dumfriesshire. Scotia Global is proposing to develop a farmland site near Ecclefechan. Internet Villages International Ltd had previously planned to set up a data centre at Johnstonebank Farm. But it backed away after Lloyds Banking Group withdrew funding support.

Westerville has opened the doors to its US$7 million community data centre.

The project, called WeConnect, located at 35 Collegeview Road, spans 16,000 sq ft. The data centre provides area businesses with access to the city’s 66-mile fibre-optic network, cloud computing and secured data storage. Prices depend on the services and range between US$100 and US$100,000 a month. It took three years to complete the project, city officials said. To help with the US$7 million cost, Franklin County allocated a US$5.75 million stimulus bond to the city that isn’t taxable.

Growth in demand by Technology, Media and Telecoms (TMT) companies has led to the sector accounting for more than half (54% ) of all data centre take-up across Europe over the last 12 months, according to new research from global property adviser CBRE.

Microsoft has published commissioned research from analyst firm IDC indicating that cloud computing will create nearly 14 million new jobs globally by 2015. IDC’s research predicts revenues from cloud innovation could reach US$1.1 trillion per year by 2015, which, combined with cloud efficiencies, will drive significant organizational reinvestment and job growth.

Digital Realty Trust, a leading global data centre solution provider, has released the results of a study of Asia Pacific data centre trends based on a detailed survey of senior decision makers at large corporations in Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong who are responsible for shaping their companies' data centre strategies. The research was conducted for Digital Realty by the research firm Campos Research & Analysis.

CoreSpace, a dedicated server and colocation data service provider has annocued it has bought a Dallas data centre and in addition will be relocating its headquarters to Dallas from Las Vegas.

The data centre provider has bought a 30,000-sq ft building at 7505 John Carpenter Freeway, near the intersection of State Highway 183 and Mockingbird Lane in Dallas. The financial details of the transaction were undisclosed.

Source: Dallas Business Journal

Telecommunications operator Dial Telecom, a leading Czech telecommunications service provider has put into operation new technical facilities located in the CE Colo data centre in Prague. CE Colo is one of the foremost data centre service providers in the Central and Eastern European region. Dial Telecom thus expands the space it uses at the CE Colo data centre by over 40 m2 and 60kW. Valuation of the facilities is in the range of several million crowns.

Following the award of Tier III certification by the Uptime Institute to its first Moscow data centre, DataSpace, a developer and operator of business-critical colocation facilities for enterprises and managed IT service providers, has announced working with the HP team to develop a network of six Tier III facilities in or near Moscow, including two more on its expansive urban campus.

The UK's Department of Health and IT services giant CSC have reached a new agreement over the troubled electronic health records contract which means the latter's Lorenzo system still may be used, as long as NHS Trusts want it.  The DoH said the agreement involves a "hugely improved settlement for the NHS", which means that local Trusts greater choice over whether they want to use CSC's Lorenzo electronic health records software, in line with the government's decentralised NHS IT strategy.

Telx has announced that Black Lotus has leveraged Telx’s C³ Cloud Connection Center in Los Angeles, Calif. to strengthen its Distributed Denial of Services  protection and mitigation solutions. By tapping into Telx’s carrier-neutral community of telecommunications service providers via the Telx Connect Portfolio, Black Lotus can select its preferred carriers to quickly and effectively trace the source of network traffic that is often the cause of DDoS attacks.

National healthcare IT solutions and data centre service provider, CoreLink Data Centers, has announced the addition of HealthCare Strategies to its client roster. The Columbia, Md.-based healthcare management company provides sponsoring companies and their employees services that leverage clinical data-based analytics, predictive modelling and patient-focused processes to deliver the highest quality medical care, while substantially lowering employers' health benefit costs.

Care Factor is building a S$30-million facility in the Edmonton area, but the Calgary-based company is keeping its exact location a secret.

The firm is opening a 37,000-sq ft facility that is expected to open in August, bringing more competition to a growing local data-centre market already served by companies such as Primus and Atco I-Tek. It will be big enough to accommodate up to 80 private data-centre suites and an initial 400 “racks” — cabinets used to house computer servers.

Source: Edmonton Journal

Meeza, the leading IT services and solutions provider in Qatar, said it has launched two new hi-tech data centres, M-Vault 2 and M-Vault-3,  that will enthuse the ICT sector in Qatar and the region. "Today marks a new milestone for Meeza, as we deliver two additional Tier III data centres," remarked deputy CEO, Ghada P. El-Rassi.

The number of enterprises turning to cloud computing to revamp existing business models will more than double in the next three years, as business leaders move to capitalize on the rapid availability of data and the growing popularity of social media, according to a new study released today by IBM. To better understand the shift in how organizations use cloud today and how they plan to employ it in the future IBM, in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit, surveyed more than 500 business and technology executives worldwide.

QTS (Quality Technology Services), one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data center facilities and managed services, has announced that it has been selected by Freightquote.com, the nation's largest online freight broker, to handle the company's growing data centre service requirements.  Freightquote.com is currently a customer in QTS' Overland Park Data Center and the new agreement both extends and expands the relationship.  Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Nokia Siemens Networks will partly outsource R&D, maintenance and technical support for its mobile network subscriber data management and operations support system activities in Finland to local IT services company Tieto, subject to approval by the Finnish Competition Authority.

NSN said around 240 employees working mainly in R&D at Espoo and Tampere would be transferred to Tieto.

Source: Global Telecoms Business

Today sees the launch of Pulsant, a powerful and leading supplier of Cloud and Managed Hosting services to the UK mid-market. Formed by the combination and integration of Lumison, DediPower and Bluesquare Data, Pulsant is a £30 million turnover company which is poised for rapid growth fuelled by a £6 million 2012 investment plan that includes new staff, additional facilities and services as well as targeted sales initiatives.

Dell plans to build a new data centre at its largest plant in Halle an der Saale (Saxony-Anhalt) in Germany for IT outsourcing and cloud services. It is scheduled to launch in the second half of 2012.

The new facility is in addition to facility opened in Frankfurt and will offer companies the opportunity to test the most suitable IT solutions for their requirements.

A five-year, £30 million outsourcing deal has been signed by telecoms firm BT and UK financial services provider Standard Life. The idea is to raise the overall level of service that Standard Life customers receive and allow the company to access a wide range of professional services through BT's management of its communications infrastructure.

IT services firm Interactive has scaled back plans to build out co-location data centre space in Melbourne, redirecting a planned A$50 million investment into managed services and office space. Managing director Christopher Ride said the change was sparked by the impending entry of a host of large co-lo players in Melbourne - including NextDC, Metronode and Digital Realty - and faster-than-expected adoption of IT managed services.

Systems Made Simple has been awarded a US$715 million contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to work on managing VA data centres.

Local web hosting outfit, Anchor, has “gone Hollywood” and set up a point of presence in Los Angeles. The PoP is aimed at providing Australian technology and e-retail companies with an affordable and high performance hosting service that will enable them to reach new customers in the U.S.

NextiraOne has launched a new data centre offering based on Cisco's latest UCS range of servers, built on Xeon E5-2600 processors. The recently announced servers from Cisco are the B200 M3, C220 M3 and C240 M3, offering up to eight times the memory capacity and four times the I/O compared to previous ICS servers.

NextiraOne will use the new servers to support all of its cloud and virtualisation solutions, including the VDI/VXI offer, combining data, voice and video applications on a single device.

Source: Telecom Paper

Pivot3, a US-based leading provider of unified storage and compute appliances, has announced a strategic partnership with UK-based next generation data centre provider Data City Exchange for the deployment of VMware View-based virtual desktop infrastructure and storage services targeted at the mid-market in the UK and Ireland.

Daimler has signed a major infrastructure services deal with HP that will support key systems at the luxury car maker. The deal aims to cut costs and will support Daimler's data centres and help manage the firm's financial services, sales and dealer organisations in Germany. The company is consolidating and standardising its global IT system with the goal of reducing the number of existing systems.

Digital Realty Trust, a leading global provider of data centre solutions, has signed a new 840 kW lease with Source Managed Services Limited (Source) , a data centre co-location and managed services provider, for its Redhill facility in suburban London. The lease is scheduled to commence on 1 June 2012.

Recruitment and human resources consultancy Randstad will move to Telstra's infrastructure-as-a-service offering over the next three years, with a view to outsourcing all communications and infrastructure work for its Asia Pacific offices to the telco. The company’s Sydney data centre currently provides the backbone for its operations, including a Citrix-based thin client environment that caters for 1000 employees in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

Hewlett-Packard has announced that the Royal Automobile Club of Cataluña (RACC) has signed a five-year agreement for HP Enterprise Services to manage its applications. Under the terms of the agreement, HP will help the RACC improve efficiency and productivity by transforming the way the organization delivers, manages and measures its IT applications.

HP was selected for its high level of service and quality, which reflects the RACC’s commitment to excellence in the services provided to its members.

Phoenix NAP has announced that it has chosen Interxion, Europe's leading data centre and colocation provider, for a new Phoenix NAP European node in Amsterdam. The node should be completed during the second quarter of 2012. Phoenix NAP cited the data centre’s geographical location, number of carriers and competitive pricing in its decision in selecting Interxion.

Bank of America has abandoned plans to build a corporate data centre at the Center Valley Club in Pennsylvania. Sierra Management closed the golf course in October after Bank of America began looking at the property as the possible site of a nearly 1 million-sq ft corporate data centre, a massive complex that could have housed acres of computer servers.

Digital Realty Trust, a leading global data centre solutions provider, has released key findings from its annual study of the North American data centre market. The research was conducted by Campos Research & Analysis, which surveyed senior decision makers at large corporations in North America who are responsible for shaping their companies' data centre strategies.

BT has announced that it has been selected by The Farrer Park Company, a group of private medical and hospitality specialists, to be their IT partner for Connexion at Farrer Park, Singapore's first integrated healthcare and hospitality complex comprising a specialist medical centre, a private tertiary hospital, and a luxury hotel with state-of-the-art conference and wellness facilities.

China United Network Communications Group, also known as China Unicom, parent company of the nation's second-largest telecom operator, will invest 2 billion yuan (US$313 million) to set up a telecommunications data centre and a call centre in Northwest China's Shaanxi province.  The facilities will be China Unicom's biggest such centers in Northwest China, according to the company.

Following Xerox’s recent announcement that it ha secured, s US$848 million deal with the state of Texas for the consolidation of its data centres, French IT services company Capgemini North America, announced it has signed a multi-million dollar infrastructure services deal with the Texas Department of Information Resources.

BT, one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services, has announced a new data centre in Frankfurt am Main, which will be one of the most energy-efficient of its kind in Germany. With this move, BT will more than double its IT services capacity for corporate clients in Germany, responding to its customers’ requirements for increased hosted and managed IT services and cloud-based applications.

OpenRegistry, manager of the .sx extension and the new `top level' domain extensions, has chosen the LCL data centre, the Belgian Alliance Member of International Data Centre Group, for the management of these new domain names.  OpenRegistry has chosen the LCL data centre, because it is duly fitted with the necessary equipment and offers sufficient space for accommodating future extensions.

A lack of capacity and power issues is keeping data centre operators and managers awake at night, according to the latest annual data centre trends survey. The survey, which was undertaken by nlyte Software, a data centre performance specialist, also revealed that many organisations remain blissfully aware of the arrival of the CRC carbon tax.

Schoolchildren in Northern Ireland are set to be the newest users of cloud services. The province is set to implement a new cloud-based managed service across 1,200 schools in the region, claiming that it to be the first cloud environment for education in Europe.

IceWEB, a leading provider of Unified Data Storage appliances for cloud and virtual environments, announced that its government channel group has received a major order from Frederick County, Maryland for IceWEB 6000 Unified Data Storage Systems for highly redundant tier 1 primary and secondary storage across multiple locations for high availability, disaster recovery and continuity of operations.

As part of FireHost's global expansion, which saw the secure cloud host launch operations in Europe earlier this year, the company is now offering services at a state-of-the-art data centre in Phoenix, Arizona. The Phoenix facility mirrors the innovative, secure cloud hosting environments FireHost has established in Dallas and London, and will allow customers an additional option in choosing where their servers reside.

Carter Validus Mission Critical REIT has announced that it has acquired the Northwoods Data Center, located in Norcross, Georgia, for a purchase price of US$5,300,000, plus closing costs. The property is located about 20 miles from downtown Atlanta and has approximately 33,000 sq ft

Lockheed Martin UK has been selected by the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom to provide G-Cloud IT services across the full complement of Government departments and organizations.

BT has announced a contract with NATO’s Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A), which is responsible for delivering technology in support of NATO’s global operations. The contract provides NATO with a communications network, connecting more than 70 locations, spread across the NATO nations and the Balkans. The five-year agreement is valued at €47 million.

Following last year’s announcement from Dell that it planned to invest over US$1 billion to build new data centres and develop sets of products in areas such as virtualisation and cloud computing, Amit Midha, Dell's president for Asia Pacific and Japan has said that the company is planning to set up more than 20 data centres in response to demand form customers.

Internap Network Services, a provider of intelligent IT Infrastructure services, has announced that it has been selected as the official supplier of web hosting and content delivery network services to Sahara Force India, the fast-rising Formula One racing team, based in Silverstone, United Kingdom.

C4L has announced that it is helping Natural Enterprise, a not-for-profit organisation, provide and guarantee high-speed internet to rural areas on the Isle of Wight as part of the Yarmouth Broadband project. Beginning with the town of Yarmouth, C4L is providing Natural Enterprise with a 100Mbps wireless connection between the Yarmouth Exchange and C4L’s own connection to the UK network in Bournemouth..

The National Security Agency is putting the finishing touches to a huge data centre that will be used to store the personal phone calls, emails and Google searches of people on the agency's watch list. The facility will have 100,000 sq ft of IT space split across four 25,000 sq ft data halls.

NEXTDC has commited to build what will be Australia’s largest privately-owned rooftop photovoltaic solar system at its Port Melbourne data centre called "M1".The company will spend approximately A$1.2 million to install up to 400kW of solar panels to generate around 550 MWh of electricity per annum. A system of this size will offset over 670 tonnes of CO2 per annum. This equates to taking around 200 cars off the road, or powering NABERS 4 star office space for over 890 people. 

Tieto launches its strategy for 2012–2016 with the objective of becoming the preferred partner in business and IT transformation based on its strong position in the Nordic countries.

A colocation provider is offering short-term hosting deals at its Hertfordshire data centre to firms expecting disruption from the London Olympics this summer. Vtesse is offering colocation services and office space on six-month contracts.

Qtel’s global data centre has announced a new agreement with al khaliji, enabling the bank to meet the enhanced business requirements of its growing customer base and continue to expand the range of modern services it provides.

The increase in capacity for the bank’s IT infrastructure at the Qtel Data Centre will allow for higher levels of resilience and efficiency, providing the group with a fully functional disaster recovery site, in addition to increased data storage space in the secure data centre.

Source: Gulf Times

DocuTAP, an electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management solution provider based in Sioux Falls, SD, has selected CoSentry to provide private, secure data centre services. These new services will assure privacy, compliance and superior uptime performance, even in adverse conditions.

Symantec has doubled the capacity of its Symantec cloud services in Australia by signing a three-year, multi-million dollar deal to colocate servers and associated equipment in a Fujitsu data centre in Sydney, Australia.  This investment will enable Symantec to meet growing business demand for secure, reliable and high-performance cloud services including email, endpoint, web and instant messaging security as well as backup and archiving solutions.

LeaseWeb has launched the next step in the on-going evolution of cloud hosting. To lay a firm foundation for further development of the product line, LeaseWeb has built a high-performance platform for their Express Cloud product. It can accommodate large numbers of customers, while offering a robust foundation for advanced Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) applications.

Geo Networks, a provider of dedicated fibre networks, has announced a ten year deal with data centre specialist Virtus, providing connectivity to its new Enfield-based data centre.

Level 3 Communications has announced that it is broadening its global data centre capabilities by adding high-density enterprise-ready space to its San Francisco facility. This additional data centre space will accommodate enterprise growth that requires an efficient, scalable, enterprise-ready facility to support their business applications.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that ABN AMRO Clearing, a global securities services provider which covers 85 exchanges worldwide and clears more than 16 million trades per day, has extended its data centre network in Hong Kong, Sydney, Tokyo and Singapore to support its trading customers across Asia-Pacific. This will provide AAC’s customers with faster on-boarding and regional market entry, with multi-asset class and multi-venue connectivity.

Colt, Europe’s leading information delivery platform, has announced that luxury car manufacturer, Jaguar Land Rover has selected Colt’s data centre for its Solihull advanced manufacturing plant in the UK. Jaguar Land Rover will migrate its existing on-site IT facilities to a new purpose-built data centre at the plant, featuring a data centre from Colt.

C7 Data Centers has announced it has signed an agreement to provide extensive data centre services to DataTree. This multi-year colocation service contract includes office space, cabinets, power and bandwidth in C7’s new Bluffdale facility.

Atos, an international IT services company, has announced that it has signed a 10 year contract worth in excess of £100 million with EDF Energy to provide data centre services for its UK business. The new Atos solution will consolidate EDF Energy’s data centre infrastructure to cut costs by 20% over the life of the contract.

SunGard Availability Services has revealed that for the second year running that office disruptions such as power and communication failures are the main cause for invoking business continuity plans, with incidents rising by 6% in 2011. The biggest single cause of business disruption was once again power failure, which rose by 33% in the past year.

Following many months of negotiation Green Mountain Data Centre have signed a hosting agreement with a major Nordic IT Company. The 21000 sq m colocation data centre is now being fitted out in multimillion dollar investment in a former high security underground NATO facility. Investment is privately funded by the Smedvig family.

Data centre services provider, Phoenix NAP has announced that NIC, an IT support services provider, has selected the data centre for its IT needs. The IT solutions company cited Phoenix NAP's ideal location away from disaster prone areas, redundant systems, 24x7 NOC services, security certifications and cost effective pricing structure as motivating factors in choosing Phoenix NAP.

Sean Brady, co-founder of Cushman & Wakefield of New Jersey’s Data Centre Advisory Group, brought his background and the group’s expertise to a data centre presentation sponsored by Jefferies & Company. The presentation focused on the 10 largest metro data canter markets in the U.S.: New York (including New Jersey), San Francisco, Northern Virginia, Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Phoenix and Boston.

Rolls Royce, the manufacturer of luxury cars and airplane engines, is the latest in a long line of firms to see the benefits of outsourcing its IT operations. The firm, which is considered to epitomise classic British style despite it now being German owned, has agreed a three contract with specialist outsourcers Capgemini.

Internet Initiative Japan and its 100% owned subsidiary, IIJ America have announced to jointly provide Cloud computing service "IIJ GIO US ervice" in the United States of America. IIJ GIO US Service will provide a high quality and flexible server environment in the United States. Depending on the usage needs, users can choose Cloud server type from two categories: virtual and physical.

Green House Data has expanded its sustainable cloud infrastructure to the West Coast city of Beaverton, OR, offering a geographically segregated secondary cloud location. The cloud hosting and colocation provider’s Oregon facility has all the same reliability standards and efficiency features to meet its green business model, including renewable energy powered and high cooling efficiency.

The Government needs to focus on the networking within the data centre if it hopes to provide good broadband speeds to the rest of the country, according to Marcus Jewell, manager of Brocade in the UK, who claims there is a risk of “putting the cart before the horse” if both MPs and ISPs don’t look deeper into the network when debating broadband infrastructure across the nation.

Responding to increasing enterprise demand for managed and cloud infrastructure services, Latisys, a national provider of IT outsourcing solutions – from colocation to cloud – has announced the company is adding 72,000 sq ft of highly secure, high density, carrier grade IT infrastructure space along with significant power upgrades. Latisys’ total data centre footprint exceeds 500,000 sq ft across seven data centres in four major markets.

New survey results from Crossbeam identify network security as the number one reason IT organizations are stalled in their efforts to transition to cost- and energy-efficient Next Generation Data Centres (NGDCs). The survey polled 529 IT professionals within large global enterprises and service provider organizations to understand how far along they are in transitioning traditional data centres to the NGDC model.

Global telecoms giant BT is expanding its Dublin data centre as part of a multi-million euro investment that will see the addition of 5,500 sq ft of data centre, including 300 new racks and one megawatt of power. The investment aims to meet growing demand by organisations in Ireland for traditional data centre services such as colocation as well as fully managed physical, virtualised and cloud based services.

Managed services provider Brennan IT has inked a deal to use the Sydney and US data centres of Equinix as it eyes expansion into global markets. Brennan IT’s two home-grown data centres in Sydney and Queensland’s Fortitude Valley will remain operational, a company spokesman said, but purchasing dedicated space at Equinix’s Sydney facility proved a better option than building a third data centre to meet future capacity demands.

Oxford Networks has announced it has launched a commercial data services centre and has acquired a small Falmouth tech company to provide the expertise needed to run it. Oxford said it acquired Norton Lamb & Co., a 10-person information technology consulting firm, for an undisclosed price.

Oxford University has opened a dedicated cybersecurity research centre to work with the industry on fixing the types of security problems that companies deal with. The Cyber Research Centre will support research into anticipating, deterring, detecting, resisting and tolerating cybersecurity attacks, along with predicting cyber risks and to help people, companies, governments recover from attacks.

In Pennsylvania, The Board of Trustees have recently approved plans to build a combined data centre for the University and health system. The new 16,500 sq ft facility will be housed in the former DuPont Marshall Research Lab, a 25-acre property located at the South Bank on 34th Street and Grays Ferry Avenue.

Global information and communications technology leader Huawei has opened an Enterprise Solutions Showcase Center in Singapore. The centre, located at an office near the Changi Airport, is the first for Huawei in the South Pacific. It showcases an array of enterprise solutions, including cloud computing data centre and cloud application solutions.