The City of Greater Sudbury is planning to build a multimillion-dollar Regional Data Centre "to meet the growing, secure data management needs of a wide range of Northern Ontario clients." The city is partnering with Sudbury Regional Hospital to develop the project concept -- a large and secure data storage centre that would provide a wealth of economic opportunities for the city, according a staff report.

Apple is likely employing specialized hardware at its newest data centre, a third-party announcement suggests. While refusing to name their client directly, two firms -- Instor and Electrorack -- say they have finished a project involving custom enclosures at a large data centre in North Carolina. Apple only recently established a facility in the vicinity of Maiden in Catawba County.

China is building a city-sized cloud computing and office complex that will include a mega data centre, one of the projects fuelling that country's double-digit growth in IT spending. The entire complex will cover some 6.2 million sq ft, with the initial data centre space accounting for approximately 646,000 sq ft, according to IBM, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to build it.

Networking rivals HP and Cisco have abandoned their common ground in data centre switching, with HP accusing Cisco of diverting an IEEE standard and Cisco insisting that customers drove the change.

Portugal Telecom has chosen Covilha as the headquarters of its biggest data centre in Portugal. The 45,000 sq m centre will support storage and cloud services for business and consumer customers.

Powered by an adjacent wind farm, the data centre will offer capacity for around 50,000 servers. It is expected to enter service in the second half of 2012, doubling the capacity of data centres in Portugal.

Source: Telecom Paper

TD Bank Group plans to open a new C$85-million technology and operations centre in south-Barrie on land it acquired almost two years ago. Construction would begin next month on the one-storey, 180,000 sq ft building and be completed by late 2012.

Vantage Data Centers, an innovative wholesale data-centre operator, has announced that it has completed construction of the first of three buildings located at its campus in Santa Clara, Calif. The company has leased wholesale operating data centre capacity to leading global Internet and semiconductor companies based in the Silicon Valley.

North Tyneside Council has approved planning consent for a second state of the art green facility at the Cobalt Data Centre Campus near Newcastle. Developed by Highbridge properties and designed by award winning architects Woods Bagot, the 3,360 sq m speculative DC2 building will include four autonomous modular data halls comprising two 960 sq m halls and two 720 sq m halls.

CyrusOne, a data centre colocation provider, has earned an LEED@ Silver Certification established by the US Green Building Council (USGBC) and verified by the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) for the environmentally friendly design of its West Houston Data Centre, located along the North West Beltway between Interstate I-10 and Highway 290.

ASHRAE continues to widen the temperature and humidity ranges for servers through a soon-to-be-published third edition of the datacom book, “Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments.”

The approach used by TC 9.9 for the first edition through to the present was to assemble a team of thermal engineers from the major commercial IT manufacturers to develop requirements. The first edition created a recommended temperature upper limit of 77 F (25 C), promoting the use of higher temperatures and endorsed by all of the IT manufacturers.

Source: Green Building Pro

Eaton-Williams, a member of CES Group, has signed a marketing and distribution agreement with Alessa Industries for Eaton-Williams’ data centre cooling systems to Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Under the agreement, Alessa Industries will supply a wide range of Eaton-Williams’ cooling products, including server cabinets, rear door heat exchangers, and heavy duty computer room floor grills, in addition to a number of close control air handling units.

FedEx this week unveiled the green features of its data center in Colorado Springs, which the company says will land a PUE of 1.28. Although Phase 1 of the facility was finished in 2008, the company recently added another 26,000 sq ft to the now - 166,000 sq ft data centre, and has applied for LEED certification.

With the Enterprise Data Center-West now open for business, FedEx will begin migrating its computing processes from Tennessee to Colorado Springs to consolidate its infrastructure.

Source: Greener Computing

Interxion, a European provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centre services, has completed the second of three phased expansions to its ZUR1 data centre in Zurich-Glattbrugg, in response to consistent growth in customer demand. 640m2 of new data centre space was created in the expansion, which increases total data centre space to over 4000m2.

The National Roads Authority has withdrawn objections to plans for one of the world’s largest data centres at Newtownmountkennedy in Co Wicklow. The authority’s decision to drop objections to the proposed €1 billion development came after a strong local campaign that included assurances from Wicklow County Council on improvements to a junction on the N11.

Juniper Networks, the second- largest maker of networking gear, introduced the first in a new family of data-centre products, stepping up competition with larger rival Cisco Systems. The initial component will connect servers to a network and will cost US$34,000, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said. It’s part of a project that Juniper has poured more than US$100 million into in the past three years.

Approval has been given for a huge data storage facility which could create dozens of jobs. Construction of the Lloyds TSB data centre on the outskirts of Darlington could also involve between 600 and 1,000 workers. Members of Darlington Borough Council's planning committee heard that if the data centre is constructed at the site at Whessoe Grange Farm it could establish the town as a leading area in the field of data storage and create a number of secondary employment opportunities.

The Scott Data Center is logged in and prepared to begin construction on an expansion and renovation plan that will make the Omaha centre one of the most powerful and energy-efficient operations of its type in the Midlands.