IBM has announced an investment of 8.6m in a new Business Continuity and Recovery Services (BCRS) facility in Ireland, located at the company's campus in Mulhuddart, Co. Dublin. The new facility will be IBM's third such operation in the country. Industry analysts estimate that disaster recovery services are worth 15m per annum in Ireland, and growing.

The company has set-up its third state-of-the-art internet data centre in India at Mumbai. The data centre will offer hosting, colocation, internet, mailing and spam protection and will be its third domestic Internet gateway in India. Hughes Escorts Communications Ltd., HECL is a joint venture between Hughes Network Systems (HNS) and Escorts Ltd. The HECL Data Centres in Gurgaon, Mumbai and Bangalore have been interconnected to each other over HECL's multi-telco backbone to provide back up sites for each other in case of emergency.

Software company Openwave is completing a new £750,000 data centre in Donegall Street, Belfast which is designed to act as a gateway for mobile phone operators around the world. The US based company operates in 13 countries worldwide. The company is reported to have received in the region of £860,000 funding from Invest NI over a three-year period. The new centre has been built to cope with increasing demand for mobile messaging and mobile internet services around the world.

DediPower has upgraded its network capacity with Affiniti, part of Kingston Communications. The direct fibre connection to Kingston's national network provides complete provider redundancy at DediPower's Cadogan House data centre. An initial 100 Megabit capacity has been provisioned providing an increase of 25% to current overall capacity, and can be upgraded to Gigabit speeds at short notice if required. In addition, DediPower customers requiring telecommunications services (such as ISDN and leased lines) now have the option of three providers: BT, Kingston and NTL.

Peak 10, the Southeast's (US) leading data center operator and managed services provider, has announced plans to build a second data center at its headquarters in Charlotte, N.C. As a result of the expansion, Peak 10 will own and operate seven world-class data centers spread throughout the Southeast. The building of Peak 10's second Charlotte data center follows successful expansions in its Raleigh, N.C. and Louisville, Ky. markets earlier this year.