Azul Systems, a provider of server appliances for business critical Java applications, has announced record first quarter bookings and revenue for its fiscal year 2011 ending April 30, 2010, with revenue up 64% over the prior quarter. Customers purchasing Azul appliances and services in the quarter included Farmers Insurance, Success Factors, Saks.com, TD Securities, Juniper Networks, Global Collect and many other Global 2000 companies.

Savvis has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Fusepoint, a portfolio company of M/C Venture Partners. Fusepoint is a leading independent provider of managed IT and colocation services to enterprises in Canada.Under the agreement, Savvis will acquire Fusepoint for US$124.5 million in cash, subject to a working capital adjustment. For the first quarter of 2010, Fusepoint's annualized revenue was US$47.4 million.

US Cellular is putting US$4.1 million into an expansion of the data centre at its facility near the Lovell Road-Cornerstone Drive intersection, and next year the wireless giant plans to spend another US$10 million to US$12 million on an addition for the building. Both moves are aimed at beefing up the infrastructure that makes those nifty smart-phone applications possible and that supports other back-end operations.

Digital Realty Trust has announced that it plans to sell 4,250,000 shares of its common stock in an underwritten public offering. Digital Realty Trust also plans to grant the underwriters an option to purchase up to an additional 637,500 shares of common stock to cover over-allotments, if any. All of the shares will be offered by Digital Realty Trust and will be issued under Digital Realty Trust's currently effective shelf registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Telstra has rolled out a new content delivery network across its Next IP network, and plans to extend its content distribution using a dozen small data centres spread throughout Australia's major cities. The telco also announced plans to spend A$14 million building out twelve "network media centres" - small data centres housed within telephone exchanges -- across Australia's major cities over the next three to five years.

The CIO of the Army has imposed a moratorium on server purchases across Army operations. The move is aimed at stopping the proliferation of single-purpose servers as the Army begins consolidating data centres and creating compute clouds in select data centres. A memo announcing the moratorium was issued last month by Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army's CIO. "We want to review all server purchases" before they're made, said Michael Krieger, deputy CIO of the Army, in an interview with InformationWeek.

Manx Telecom has been bought by CPS Partners, a specialist international telecommunications management company, and HgCapital, a leading European private equity investor which invests mainly in the telecoms, media, technology, healthcare, industrial, and services sectors. The acquisition, which is valued at £158.5 million, is expected to be completed by the end of June 2010, subject to clearance by Isle of Man Government regulators.

iTnews caught up with Telstra's acting chief information officer Ashley Lazaro to discuss the carrier's data consolidation and cloud computing plans.

Source: iTnews

Here for full interview
 

Provisioning and paying for electricity consumption accounts for so much of the cost of running computer equipment that a new Christchurch data centre company has decided to charge customers solely on the basis of how much power they use.

Telenor has entered into an agreement with EDB to purchase IT operating services with an estimated value of NOK2.1 billion for the period 1 May 2010 to 31 December 2015. The services supplied through this contract relate to Telenor's activities in Norway.

Telx, an interconnection and colocation provider in the strategic markets of North America, recently collaborated with Neutral Tandem to develop Telx Ethernet Exchange. Neutral Tandem is a provider of tandem interconnection services to companies in the fields of wireless, wireline, cable and broadband telephony.

Mumbai-headquartered Patni Computer Systems is set to host all its IT infrastructure needs on the cloud. It has put nearly 80% of all its infrastructure needs on a private cloud (only the voice operations such as call centres have data centres, since they are governed by other licenses), and been able to reduce its capex spend by nearly 30%, besides saving another 30% by way of lower power consumption.

Analysts at UBS are giving a boost to a couple specialty REITs today, saying Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros are acting more like growth stocks versus REITs. The firm upgraded both stocks to Buy today.

According to analyst Robert Salisbury, strong secular tailwinds and improving cyclical dynamics have bolstered earnings momentum for the two data centre owners. The firm sees 18% upside in Digital Realty, and raised their price target by US$8 to US$67. The firm sees 24% upside in DuPont Fabros and raised their price target by US$4 to US$29.

Dubai eGovernment is in discussions to offer public cloud services to small and medium businesses to help them cut costs on initial deployment of the technology. For an SMB to conduct business on the private cloud is an expensive proposition. The company will have to invest in building up its data centre and implementing the software required for starting up business on the cloud.

The first data centre to be solely powered by renewable energy has begun operations in south Wales. Run by Next Generation Data (NGD), the site has become the UK’s largest purchaser of independently generated electricity and the green energy will be responsible for powering the 750,000 sq ft site.

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.

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.

Egypt's Raya Holding has agreed to build New York-based technology firm GPX Global Systems' second data centre in Egypt, the two firms have announced.

The centre, to be built on Cairo's outskirts, will provide services such as data recovery for local and multinational companies and will cost from 150 million to 200 million Egyptian pounds (US$27-36 million), GPX's President Nick Tanzi said.

Source: Reuters

Through to source
 

BendBroadband has announced plans to build and operate a private data centre in NE Bend. Company officials said the facility, known as the BendBroadband Vault, will offer collocation services using a fibre network and energy-efficient power systems.

The 30,000 sq ft facility will be built in three phases. St. Charles Health Systems will be an anchor tenant in the new facility.

Source: My Central Oregon

Here for full article

Cloud Linux, a software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, has announced that Hosting Metro, a hosting provider with data centres in the US and Canada, will integrate CloudLinux into its standard Linux Operating Systems to its customers.

The Scott Data Center, located on 68th and Pine Streets, serves as a data housing facility for enterprise-level companies, as well as small and mid-sized companies. One of the largest multi-tenant data centre facilities in the Omaha area is about to wire up more space here in the Metro.

The Scott Data Center, located at the Scott Technology Center, has announced the addition of 4,500 sq ft of colocation space in order to meet the demands of technology-based companies. This space will include 150 more cabinets for data storage.

Source: Silicon Prairie

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego and CLUMEQ, a Canadian High Performance Computing consortium led by McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, have been awarded grants from Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network and the Canada-California Strategic Innovation Partnership to design an ultra-efficient data centre as part of a program to promote 'green' IT initiatives.

Quest Construction Engineering, a Miami based Florida Construction Company, has completed building a new "Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Service" wing for the ColoHouse Miami Data Center.

Geo, a provider of high performance networks for demanding data users, hjas announced the expansion of their UK network and the addition of three new sites, to support a strategic push into the media sector.

Yesterday, a 10 year legal marathon drew to a close, as HP agreed to settle its dispute with broadcaster BSkyB, for the sum of £318 million. The case dealt with a failed CRM implementation by EDS, now part of HP. It attracted attention, not just because of the length of the case, but the damages being claimed by BSkyB – over £700 million – and accusations, upheld in court, that EDS’ principal salesman had lied about the project delivery.

China's cloud storage services market will double each year over the next five years, according to Springboard Research's latest findings. The analyst firm said in a report Thursday cloud storage services in China will grow from US$6.05 million in 2009 to US$208.54 million in 2014. This represents a five-year compound annual growth rate of 103 percent.

NaviSite reported net income available to common shareholders for the third quarter of US$17.3 million compared to a net loss of US$3.2 million in the year-ago quarter. Net loss from continuing operations in the third quarter was US$0.7 million as compared to a loss of US$1.8 million in the comparable period in fiscal year 2009.

Revenues for the quarter increased 1.5% to US$31.4 million from US$31.0 million in the prior-year quarter. Excluding the revenue from the non-renewal of the Los Angeles data centre revenue increased 4% over the prior year.

A major sale of property by Intel to a newly formed real estate trust means millions of dollars of investment in Silicon Valley’s surging data centre industry. Chris Sumter, who is handling sales and marketing for the buyer, said the new owners plan to construct 221,000 sq ft of data storage space on the Walsh Avenue site.

Hitachi, a sprawling conglomerate which makes everything from nuclear power plants to rice cookers, also said it wants to buy an IT company or business that generates about $3 billion in annual sales as part of its plans to double overseas sales in six years. Possible targets include existing data canters, said Junzo Nakajima, head of Hitachi’s IT division, which is aiming to offer comprehensive IT services in the hope that this becomes a major business for the company. Nakajima said Hitachi could spend hundreds of billions of yen on the acquisition, but he declined to be more specific.

The Singapore Exchange and HCL Technologies have signed a S$110 million, IT outsourcing agreement. This is part of the Exchange's allocated S$250 million for its recently announced Reach initiative. Under the five-year agreement, HCL will provide SGX with management services and infrastructure support, including the Exchange's Reach initiative. With Reach, SGX aims to create the world's fastest trading engine and connect key global financial hubs to Singapore.

Taxpayers are paying up to £6 billion a year more than necessary for IT outsourcing services, says Compass, a consultancy that benchmarks the cost of IT in major government departments. Compass Management Consulting has analysed the cost of IT outsourcing contracts within central government over the past five years. It says it reached the £6bn figure after comparing the prices paid by government departments for their outsourced contracts with the market prices paid by the private sector for a comparable bundle of services.

NSW has hit the reset button on its data centre reform plan, which aims to consolidate 130 facilities into two environmentally friendly hubs by March next year. To meet that deadline, a shortlist of suppliers and request for tender should have been released by March this year. It is now unclear whether the project will eventuate after officials went back to the drawing board, tossing aside the original business case approved by cabinet last year.

The data centre Ethernet switch market, including general purpose, purpose-built, and blade switches, increased 16 percent to US$1.16 billion in 1Q10, on the heels of a very strong fourth quarter. This is according to market research firm Infonetics Research's first quarter of 2010 Data Center Network Equipment market share and forecast report.

Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst, enterprise voice and data, said: “We saw a 30% sequential jump in purpose-built switch sales in the first quarter of 2010, with Cisco a driving market force with their Nexus switch line."

Q9 Networks has announced details of its sixth data centre in the Greater Toronto Area. Q9 will invest US$125 million in the new 6,500 cabinet equivalent, 240,000 sq ft facility. This announcement represents Q9's largest-ever investment in new data centre capacity serving the GTA. The first phase of capacity will be available to customers in January 2011.

Telekom subsidiary T-Systems is building a new data centre near Magdeburg. With approximately 24,000 sq m planned space for information technology, it will be the largest high-security data centre of any IT service provider in Germany by 2015.

In an apparent bid to accelerate setting up of new power projects in the state, the Uttar Pradesh government has given industry status to power sector, an official has said. A proposal in this regard was approved during a meeting of the state Energy Task Force (ETF). The industry status will allow power producing companies in Uttar Pradesh to avail all concessions extended to entrepreneurs in other sectors.

Computer hosting and network services provider Savvis has said it has completed its acquisition of Canadian tech company Fusepoint for US$121 million in cash.

Fusepoint, which counts venture-capital firm M/C Venture Partners among its investors, manages information technology and has three data centres in Canada and more than 330 customers.

Source: Business Week

Here for full article
 

Clearview has announced it received its second round of funding from Rock Financial Partners. Clearview has also secured a US$1 million line of credit for general corporate purposes. The funding came as a result of Clearview's recent success with its existing data centres in Dallas and Waco, Texas. The company has completely sold out the space in both its Downtown Dallas facility and recently expanded North Dallas centre.

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.

Two Men And A Truck, the largest franchised moving company in the US has chosen managed colocation with Online Tech, a managed data centre operator. The company plans to leverage technology to increase the number of franchises and improve its franchises’ productivity.

The Metropolitan Police Service has extended its contract until December 2015 with its prime information and communications technology partner, Capgemini UK. The new deal maintains focus on value for money, ensuring the MPS and the public receive the best ICT services at the best price. The contract is expected to provide an estimated £43 million savings in supporting the day-to-day work of London’s 55,000 police officers, staff and community support officers.

Life Technologies needed to consolidate its various regional communications networks and software platforms, and improve its application performance. To accomplish this, the global provider of biotechnology research tools chose Verizon Business to deploy an integrated managed IT and networking solution, which will also position the company for continued rapid growth.

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.

Data centre operator Tieto has announced it will soon open a new data centre in Moscow that will provide cloud and SaaS services to customers. The new data centre will open June 30th, bringing to Moscow for the first time cloud, SaaS and capacity services.

Tieto's services are based on technologies such as partitioning and virtualization. The company offers a range of services including solutions for processing and storage capacity using market leading technologies, services for application operations as well as connectivity, security, back-up and restoring.

Colocation and data centre operator The Colocation Company has opened a new colocation data centre in Christchurch, New Zealand that uses hydro energy and free cooling tactics. The data centre is a new initiative launched by New Zealand Prime Minister John Key that is hoping to draw in regional SME customers with its combination of open access policies and flexible power options.

ARM has announced EuroCloud, a European Commission-funded project designed to investigate the use of its multi-core processors in data centres in order to improve energy efficiency. The chip maker explained that it will partner with Nokia, IMEC, EPFL and the University of Cyprus to analyse the value proposition of coupling low-power processing with 3D chip packaging systems.

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.

Telecoms operating in Rwanda have urged the government to stop competing with them in providing telecom services. The government is investing in the national fibre optic cable of 2,300 kilometres across the country. The cable shall connect over 230 institutions in all 30 Districts and all Rwandan boarders with the main cities.

In addition, the government is building a National Data Centre staged to store public data. Private operators will also use the centre to store their data on commercial agreement.

Source: All Africa

Bhopal will soon boast of India’s first risk-averse data centre which can even withstand an earthquake of seven on the Richter scale for two minutes and remain intact from a nuclear attack. Sprawling over 80,000 sq ft in a prime locality, the data centre has a bunker area of concrete wall and a gigantic structure for data centre on 4,000 sq ft.

IT managed service provider, Harbour MSP, is developing a three-tier data centre in Melbourne. The site covers 1,000 sq m and will provide about 500 racks of space, which will range from 3kw racks to high-density 30kw racks containing in-row cooling. The data centre is being built in conjunction with E3 Networks and Frontline Systems.

Chief Executive Officer of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, Tomas Lamanauskas sees the opening of the BVI´s first data centre as an important element in the infrastructure of the Territory since telecommunications are the roads to ensure information can move. The new data centre ICT Management Services was opened on Monday evening,

Independent computer room and data centre specialist, Migration Solutions, has been appointed by a new, undisclosed, entrant to the market who has recently acquired a 60,000 sq ft data centre in Norwich. The data centre, which previously belonged to a major insurance player, is a purpose built facility and Migration Solutions has been awarded the contract for its refurbishment which has an initial value of approximately £12 million.

State officials say Microsoft plans to “immediately” begin construction of a new data centre in West Des Moines, although the project has been scaled down from initial plans. Governor Culver says the company promises to employ 25 people at the facility when it’s up and running next spring and those workers will be be paid more than US$30 an hour on average.

The Federal Government's peak IT strategy group has released a long-awaited request for tender document in draft form that will guide companies on how to put themselves forward to supply data centre services across the public sector in Canberra. The draft RFT has been released by the Australian Government Information Management Office through its blog hosted on the government's new GovSpace site.

Power company Duke Energy said that it has taken on a partner to help expand its fibre optic network in the Southeast. Duke, based in Charlotte, said an affiliate of Alinda Capital Partners, an independent private investment firm, will buy a 50% ownership of DukeNet Communications for US$137 million. Duke will continue to own the other half.

DukeNet controls about 5,300 miles of fibre optic network. It offers services including data centre connectivity, cellular backhaul bandwidth and Ethernet services.

Source: Canadian Business

Technology giant IBM’s hardware division, it appears, is back in business, with some help from India. The 2010 first quarter earnings reveal IBM’s hardware and software businesses are growing faster than its services business, which nevertheless remains its largest division, contributing 62.3% to the quarter’s revenue. However, year-on-year, technology services was up by 5.8%, while growth in business services declined.

IT spending in the Middle East is set to increase by as much as 11% this year, following a contraction in outlay last year, IDC reveals. Last year saw IT spending in the region dip by around 2% overall, although in specific areas, the drop was a lot more severe.

2010 brings great opportunities and challenges to IT organizations in Indonesia. Technology refresh, aggressive development of telecom and Internet infrastructure, with aggressive deployment of “eEverything” is shaking the ICT industry. Even the most steadfast division-level IT managers are beginning to recognize the futility in trying to maintain their own closet “data centre” in a world of virtualization, cloud computing, and drive to increase both data centre economics and data security.

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."

NextiraOne, a communications services company, has signed a contract with EXATEL, a telecommunications operator in Poland, for the modernisation of its IP MPLS network. The agreement covers the building of a modern SuperCore platform allowing all services offered by Exatel on the IP MPLS frame network to be migrated to 40 Gb/s lines in Poland and a 10 Gb/s connection to Frankfurt, based on Cisco technology solutions.

SafeData, a provider of hosted backup, recovery, and high availability solutions for i/OS, AIX, and Windows, has been acquired by Data Storage Corp. (DSC), the companies announced yesterday. DSC says it has aggressive plans to bring its current offerings--including online backup and recovery, digital archiving, and e-discovery--to the System i world, as a result of SafeData's knowledge and experience with the IBM i platform.

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 Missouri House of Representatives passed a bill that gives tax incentives for new data centres. The state is trying to lure large corporations to Missouri by giving them tax breaks for new data centres. Proponents say Columbia is a potential target for some companies.

"There's a couple of different data companies looking a build a new structure and they're looking at Missouri, particularly Columbia," Rep. Stephen Webber D-Columbia said. If a new facility is built in Columbia, it will most likely be at Ewing Industrial Park.

Source: KOMU

Digital Realty Trust, a leading wholesale data centre provider, plans to increase the number of staff at its European headquarters in Blanchardstown, Dublin, by 15% in the next year. Bernard Geoghegan, the firm's Senior VP of international operations, notes: "Our head office operations and activities in Dublin have gone from strength to strength since our establishment in 2006."

DRT owns three data centres in the greater Dublin area. It provides solutions from data centre design and construction to comprehensive data centre management programmes.

HM Revenue & Customs has frozen spending on IT, according to a report from the National Audit Office. The report looks at the efficiency of the collection of national insurance and found that improvements to some of the systems are not going to be possible in the coming financial year.