Lumison, the Edinburgh-based internet services firm which was acquired by private equity investors in October last year, has bought an English rival for £22 million. The company has acquired Blue Square Data in order to increase its share of the market to provide services like offsite storage and back-up, which its owners believe is set for dramatic growth.

IBM, based on the strength of its mainframe business and the overall health of its x86-based systems, retained the top spot in the server market for both the fourth quarter of 2010 and for the entire year, according to market research firm IDC.

UKGrid, the largest provider of carrier neutral colocation solutions in Northern England, has announced that work is to commence immediately to expand one of its Manchester based data centre facilities, Synergy House.

Technology firm ANS Group is to create 20 jobs across its headquarters in Manchester and office in London. ANS Group, which is listed on the PLUS market for smaller companies, said the move was a response to rapid growth in demand for its services.

The company provides and installs data centres, networks, servers and email systems for public sector bodies and private companies. Customers include the Co-operative Group, Debenhams, BSkyB, Bupa and United Biscuits as well as more than 100 NHS and 40 local government bodies.

Source: Manchester Evening News

A US$5 million data centre that would provide 25 full-time jobs may locate in Cheyenne. Denver-based Thought Equity Motion Inc. plans to open here in four to six months in the Jonah Financial Center on Pershing Boulevard.

Thought Equity Motion, which has 125 employees, already has a data centre in Laramie that opened in 2005. The Cheyenne data centre would be an expansion of the Laramie operation. On Monday, the Cheyenne City Council applied for a Wyoming Business Council grant of US$2,250,000 to assist the data centre with the costs of electric power and broadband Internet.

Data management specialist Onyx has posted its first profit following a record year which saw revenues grow by 30% to £14.7 million. Chief executive Neil Stephenson says he is particularly pleased with the performance as the sales growth has come in a year without acquisitions.

Onyx announced it had bought a data centre on Teesside, which will give it the capacity to add additional data hosting facilities as well as direct internet connection to Europe. Late last year Onyx secured a £250,000 venture capital investment to allow it to further develop its cloud computing presence.

Victorian-based IT services provider ASG Group is ramping up its moves in the data centre space with one centre under construction in Perth and considerations for another in Melbourne or Sydney. The plans come as a result of a A$35 million deal signed in February this year with Western Power. ASG provides mid-range infrastructure, voice over IP (VoIP) and network services to the Western Australian electricity utility. Western Power will also be one of the foundation customers at ASG’s Perth data centre facility which opens in April.

Pakistan Telecommunication Company has announced a net profit of Rs. 1.94 billion for second quarter 2010, showing a 31% decline from Rs. 2.78 billion recorded in the same period last year, said an official. PTCL half yearly net profit for year 2010-11 stood at Rs. 4.02 billion compared to Rs. 5.35 billion for the preceding year.

Juniper Networks reaffirmed its long-term forecast for annual revenue growth of 20% or more as it met with financial analysts following two big product-line introductions. The company remains focused solely on networking and believes it can keep taking market share from competitors by seizing on architectural transitions driven by the explosive growth in data traffic in enterprise and carrier networks, CEO Kevin Johnson said at the annual Juniper Financial Analyst Meeting.

General Electric with the completion of the acquisition of the privately-held Lineage Power Holdings Inc. from The Gores Group, has broadened its expertise in telecommunication and data centre power. Lineage Power is a worldwide provider of high-efficiency power conversion infrastructure technology and provides services for the telecommunications and data centre industries.

Investment banking firm DH Capital has announced it has closed US$35 million financing for web hosting provider Data Based Systems International. DH Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor to DBSi on the transaction.

Midas Medici Group Holdings, a provider of consulting and market data to the utility industry,has announced that it has completed its acquisition of Consonus Technologies, a provider of energy-efficient data centre solutions, pursuant to its definitive merger agreement entered into in May of 2010.

On February 28, 2011 Consonus officially merged with a wholly-owned subsidiary of Midas in an all-stock transaction. Consonus shareholders received an aggregate of 4,963,939 shares of Midas common stock in connection with the merger.

Source: Red Orbit

Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd has announced that a class action has been commenced on behalf of an institutional investor in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of purchasers of Equinix common stock during the period between July 29, 2010 and October 5, 2010, inclusive (the “Class Period”).

The complaint charges Equinix and certain of its officers and directors with violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Equinix is a global network-neutral provider of data centres and Internet exchanges.

Source: Centre Daily

Emerson Network Power has announced that it will design six Internet data centres in India for leading IT solutions and services provider Datacraft. Emerson Network Power will also deliver data centre infrastructure management solutions and cooling and power technologies for the data centres, which encompass a total area of 66,000 sq ft and will enable Datacraft to offer co-location, hosted, and enterprise cloud services to its customers in India.

The data centres will be located in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, and Ludhiana.

Source: EFY Times

China will install CPUs developed by government-backed research institutions into a test supercomputer by the end of 2011. The Loongson microchips will underpin the Dawning 6000 high-performance computing system, which is scheduled to be available for tasks as early as the summer of 2011. "Our information industry was using foreign technology," Hu Weiwu, the chip's chief designer, said in the article. "However, just like a country's industry cannot always depend on foreign steel and oil, China's information industry needs its own CPU."

The NSW government's data centre reform program has suffered another blow, with a second candidate withdrawing from the tender process. A consortium led by financial player Gresham is the latest to pull out. The group includes Telstra, Technical Real Estate, Hurley Palmer Flatt and AGL. The ambitious but oft-delayed project was meant to consolidate 130 state government data centres into two facilities, with the departments of education and health as anchor tenants.

Zayo, a provider of fibre-based bandwidth infrastructure and network-neutral colocation services, has announced the expansion of its fibre network in the Dallas metro area bringing 5 major carrier hotel and data centre facilities onto their network and extending their footprint to 8 new Local Switching Offices.

A proposal to create a US$1 billion business park on the city’s south side, which would house five to 10 data centres of Fortune 500 companies and even a trash-burning power plant, has received initial support from the Colorado Springs City Council.

The Vineyards Data Center would be developed on a 105-acre parcel that’s the former home of the old Vineyard Golf Course and the Pikes Peak Vineyards winery, southeast of Interstate 25 and Circle Drive and east of the Colorado Springs World Arena.

Source: The Gazette

Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan has laid out a post-financial crisis earnings goal for the nation's biggest bank, but acknowledged it may take two or three years to reach the target.At the Charlotte bank's first investor conference since 2007, Moynihan said the bank could one day make US$35 billion to US$40 billion in pre-tax income. That would be a big improvement over last year's US$1.3 billion pre-tax loss and higher than the $31 billion mark reached in 2006.

Hewlett Packard will commence construction of a NZ$60 million, 500 sq m data centre at Tuakau, in the Counties-Manukau region south of Auckland, “within the next two months”, HP enterprise services country manager Gavin Greaves says.

Plans to develop a data centre park comprising up to six such centres were outlined yesterday. These centres, to house computer systems and telecommunications equipment, among other things, will collectively take up 12ha of land and create some 1.3 million sq ft of space for the hardware.

Digital Realty Trust, a global wholesale data centre provider, has announced the closing on March 8, 2011 of an underwritten registered public offering of US$400 million aggregate principal amount of 5.250% notes due 2021 issued by the Company's operating partnership subsidiary, Digital Realty Trust, L.P.

CoreSite Realty Corporation, a national provider of powerful, network-rich data centres, has announced financial results for the fourth quarter 2010.

Officials in Morgan County, Indiana have established an incentive program in the hopes of attracting investment from data centres. Companies would be eligible for the tax exemption program if they invest at least US$10 million in the county and have wages higher than the county average. The companies would be place facilities in the county dedicated to computer networking or data storage.

Melbourne-based data centre operator, NextDC, has continued its expansion plans with a non-binding agreement to acquire a new data centre site called S2 in North Sydney.

S2 will provide colocation services to customers and will be between 3000 and 5000 square metres including office and plant space. The contract with the other party, which was not named, was to be signed on 21 March. Completion of the acquisition was expected by April 2011.

Source: Computer World

Yahoo has revealed plans to invest US$500 million in expanding its data centre infrastructure. Yahoo says it plans to build in 2012 and beyond. The planned expansion includes existing data centres in Buffalo, Omaha and Washington state and new facilities in Singapore and Switzerland.

“We are in essence rewiring the entire infrastructure of Yahoo,” Scott Noteboom, the head of data centre operations at Yahoo said. “We’ve gained approval to invest half a billion dollars to build new data centres. We’ll be migrating the entire footprint of Yahoo to these more efficient facilities.”

iomart Group has announced the completion of the second phase of an expansion programme at its Spectrum House, Maidenhead data centre. The programme, another sign of strong customer demand for both the Group's cloud computing and managed hosting services, provides iomart with a further 650 sq m of new data centre space, or 300 high density racks, and increases the facility's total data centre area to more than 1300 sq m.

Sentrum a specialist in data centre solutions, has released new research findings which indicate that the level of economic upheaval in the data centre sector may finally be subsiding. In its fourth report, entitled ‘The Data Centre Gamble’, Sentrum once again investigates attitudes towards outsourcing and has identified that 75% of large UK organisations outsource at least some of their data centre requirements. The figure, at an original high of 85% in 2009, had dropped back to just 67% in 2010.

The Belgian bank and insurance group KBC has turned to T-Systems for the task of connecting its central European locations. And T-Systems, a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary, has responded to the task by providing KBC Global Services, KBC Bank's IT-services provider, with a high speed network for several years. The infrastructure and services for the network are being provided by T-Systems, in cooperation with Deutsche Telekom's international locations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary.

Construction of Ethiopia’s first Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Park, under the supervision of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MoCIT), has begun. During the first phase, an IT business incubation building, administration and data centres, as well as an MoCIT building is being constructed at an estimated cost of one billion Birr, on 70 hectares of the total 200 hectares allotted for the park, located in an area known as Yerer in Bole Sub City on the outskirts of the capital.

Geo Networks, a provider of high-performance fibre networks, has celebrated its 5th successive year without a cable cut on its national network. Correspondingly, customer survey results revealed 100 per cent satisfaction with both security and reliability of Geo’s network infrastructure. Over two thirds of customers also found Geo’s lead time better than that of its closest competitors.
 

Equinix has announced that it is constructing a fourth International Business Exchange data centre in the Paris metropolitan area. The new data centre (PA4), scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2012, will further extend Platform Equinix in Europe to meet strong demand for premium interconnection and colocation services in Paris and across the region.

Qtel has inked a 10-year strategic partnership deal with Barwa for provision of modern telecommunication services to its real estate developments in Qatar.

The agreement sets out the terms and conditions applicable to the delivery of telecommunications services on estates being developed by Barwa, including the provision of fixed and mobile telecommunications infrastructure and services, the installation of copper cable, fibre cabling and active and passive equipment required to manage, operate and maintain their communications network.

Source: Gulf Times

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley says the commercial internet provider NWT Enterprises plans to create dozens, if not hundreds of jobs at the former Sacred Heart Hospital campus in Cumberland.

O'Malley announced the company's purchase of the complex. He says Cumberland-based NWT plans to establish a data centre on the site and lease space on the campus to other information technology companies. O'Malley says NWT anticipates creating 40 to 60 jobs initially, with perhaps 400 to 500 jobs over the next five years.
 

Source: Business Week
 

The market for data centres-in-a-box previously championed by vendors as the next big thing is slowly dying in favour of more conventional data centre deployments, according to Gartner. "The belief was that there's a huge market, and that many [users] will start using these containers. What we have found is that the market is nowhere near as big as the vendors thought it was going to be, because of fundamental problems with [the containerised] design," said Rakesh Kumar, vice president of Gartner Research.

Interxion, a provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centre services, has become the first data centre operator to launch a comprehensive carbon offsetting partnership with Swiss non-profit foundation myclimate. The new programme provides Interxion Switzerland customers with 100% carbon-neutral colocation services by offsetting any unavoidable CO2 emissions via a range of climate protection projects in Europe and the developing world.

Level 3 Communications, a provider of fibre-based communications services, has announced it enabled two national intercity communications backbones in southern Europe. The backbones are designed to offer increased connectivity and scalability of services in France and Spain.

Emirates Telecommunications Corporation, or etisalat, the UAE's largest telecom operator, will invest US$15 billion (Dh55.17 billion) in the enhancement and development of its network in the UAE and beyond over the next five years, its chairman has announced at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit 2011.

FiberMedia, a leading New Jersey and New York data centre operator announces the unveiling of two state-of-the-art data centre facilities; Secaucus, NJ and Chappaqua, NY. The significant enhancements to these facilities bring FiberMedia’s total data centre footprint in the New York Metro area to over 130,000 sq ft across five strategically placed facilities.

QTS, provider of data centres and managed services, has announced an expansion plan to upgrade the power, raised-floor space and the connectivity to QTS's Jersey City Data Center.

With the first phase available in late Q2 2011, the new upgrade will result in over 5.0 MW of power and over 50,000 sq ft of raised floor available to customers in the facility. This expansion creates a significant increase in both raised floor space and power density in the data centre, where QTS offers all three of its core products; custom data centre, colocation and cloud services.

Chicago has quietly become one of the nation’s top sites for a silent but critical component of Internet and cloud computing - data centres - and one reason is the region’s relative scarcity of natural disasters such as the Japanese earthquake.

Fujitsu New Zealand has had NZ$80 million in funding for two new datacentres, in Auckland and Wellington, approved by its parent through Fujitsu Australia, managing director Stuart Stitt confirms. “We’ve got the budget, but we haven’t hit the go button yet,” he says.

IBM has partnered with Cable & Wireless Worldwide to work on a cloud based data and communications solution to support the UK's smart energy meter roll out. The UK Smart Energy Cloud is designed to monitor and analyze power usage in UK homes, the government plans to have 50 million smart meters rolled out by 2020.

The companies said that the platform will be able to gather information from any smart meter in the UK many times a day and store the information on a UK based data centre.

Source: IT ProPortal

The data centres of the UK's companies will become more virtualised in the upcoming years, one expert has suggested. This is because virtualisation will allow organisations to improve their performance and could enable maintenance work to be more efficient, a specialist from Network Communications News has said.

Tianjin Binhai Energy and Development will raise 827-927 million yuan for cloud computing development through a private placement of 82 million shares at 11.3 yuan per share.

Tianjin Cloud Cube specializes on the development, manufacture and sales of cloud computing container data centres. 500 million of total funds to be raised will be used on fully acquisition of Tianjin Cloud Cube Technology. The rest will be injected to a cloud computing base under construction by Tianjin Cloud Cube.

Source: Capital Vue

Carbon emissions, environmental concerns, and continuous growth in demand have made energy reduction a No. 1 priority for government agencies and utilities leading them, to launch incentive programs to meet energy reduction goals. Many of these agencies and utilities provide funding to data centres that meet these energy efficiency goals.

Interxion, a European provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centre services, today announced its results for the three months and year ended 31 December 2010.

Highlights included: Revenue for the year increased by 21% to €208.4 million; Net profit for 2010 was €14.7 million; €260 million bond issuance; Cash balance at Dec. 31, 2010 of €99.1 million and Successful IPO in January 2011 generating €138.6 million net proceeds to the company

At a FICCI-Dell interactive meeting with Michael Dell, Mr. Sam Pitroda, Adviser to India's Prime Minister on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovation, said that India was starting to build four IT data centres at Poona, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar and Delhi. The government has also agreed to set up a data centre in each state capital, he said.

Source: Oriss Daily

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The European Commission is preparing a plan to slash its sprawling IT estate after an audit revealed it spends €500m a year on 2,000 IT systems that often do the same thing for different departments. The outline rationalisation plan would put the European Commission on a cost-cutting path similar to that being pursued by IT administrators in Whitehall. But outline plans for the EC play down the potential for open standards and open source software as a source of savings.

SAIC which provides engineering and technology services to government agencies, said Wednesday that its fourth-quarter net income rose more than 7%, thanks in part to a lower tax rate.

SAIC said its net income for the quarter that ended Jan. 31 was US$132 million, that’s compared with US$123 million, a year earlier. The recent per-share figures were helped by the company's share repurchases, which meant it had 7% fewer shares outstanding than a year earlier.

Source: Business Week

Voxel, a leading provider of hybrid cloud hosting and managed services, has announced it has completed a "Series A" US$5.5 million capital raise led by Seaport Capital, a private equity firm focused on growth and buyout opportunities in the communications, information technology and business services sectors.

The New York City government is eyeing sites in New Jersey to potentially house a data centre, in another sign of continued demand for "server farms" this side of the Hudson River.

Vocus Communications is to acquire long established Perth data centre operator Perth iX for A$6.275m in cash. Vocus said Perth iX was "widely regard as Perth's premier CBD co-location facility has a strong brand in the Perth market" and would provide Vocus with a data centre in one of Australia's fastest growing markets. The 536 sq m facility has 86 customers, a significant number of these being carriers and ISPs, according to Vocus.

Perth iX is built on the ground floor of the Quadrant a few metres from St Georges Terrace in the heart of Perth's CBD.

Source: IT Wire

The European Commission has cleared under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of Siemens IT Solutions and Services of Germany, which is a part of the Siemens group, by French IT service provider Atos Origin.

Cisco Systems has said it plans to buy privately held software company newScale Inc, in a deal that would ramp up its cloud computing services. Financial terms of the deal were undisclosed. Cisco said the deal would be completed in the second half of its fiscal year 2011.

NewScale, which makes portals for cloud computing, has more than 2 million users worldwide, including 20% of the Fortune 50 companies, according to its website. Some of newScale’s customers are AT&T, American Express and Siemens.

Source: Live Mint

Quality Technology Services, one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data centres and managed services, has announced that investments from ING Capital and Caterpillar Financial Services have increased the capacity of the company's revolving credit by US$45 million. Established in September 2010, the revolving credit facility, now totalling US$170 million, is secured by the QTS Atlanta Metro Data Center asset, which is the second largest data centre in the world.

Suncorp would unhesitatingly adopt Microsoft's cloud services if the software giant had a data centre in Australia, according to a company senior executive.The financial services firm would readily host Exchange and Office in Microsoft's cloud if such a facility existed, says Jeff Smith, chief executive of Suncorp business services.

Tulip Telecom has received interest mostly from foreign firms for a stake in its wholly owned data centre unit. "I'd say that almost 70%-80% are foreign companies, ...[they] are much more aggressive and they bring a lot of value to these kind of [businesses]," Hardeep Singh Bedi, Tulip's chairman said.

The company plans to raise US$60 million by selling up to 30% stake in Tulip Data Center Services Pvt. Ltd. The New Delhi-based company has appointed Nomura as the banker for the deal, which is to help fund expanding the high-margin data services business.