The Victorian WorkCover authority (WorkSafe Victoria) and the Transport Accident Commission (TAC) have gone to tender to look for service providers able to provide a range of managed IT services. The successful bidder will be required to deliver a full scope of services including data centre, mid-range, network, end user and transition provisions.

To help companies make decisions regarding the physical requirements for virtualizing IT loads, APC has developed a free to use online tool, available from the company’s Data Centre Efficiency Portal.

The calculator can be used at an early stage of planning for informed decision-making and to experiment with different scenarios and approaches. In line with the recommendations in the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres Efficiency, the tool encompasses both IT and physical infrastructure considerations.

Source: Sourcewire

Punjab is all set to establish a world class State Data Centre with the Department of Information Technology having assigned the turn key project of civil construction of first phase of 25,000 sq ft covered area at Mohali to Punjab State Small Industries and Export Corporation (PSIEC).

Long lead times cost time and money, but at Welwyn DC new tenants can start fitting out immediately and be fully operational in six months. Over 8,000 m2 of shell space is available now, with the opportunity to take the space in a variety of configurations from a powered shell to fully-fitted data halls. The space is available either as a whole or in part to a minimum net data hall size of circa 1,000 m2. Additional office space and meeting rooms are provided on-site together with car parking.

The Columbia City Council last night took a major step toward future economic development by approving incentives to entice high-tech industries to set up shop in Columbia. The two approved agenda items will work hand in hand to provide businesses such as data centres with development agreements offering large amounts of cheap power as well as reimbursing those companies up to half of the costs of building the necessary on-site infrastructure to receive it.

In this article, OnePartner, a US Tier III commercial data centre operator, provides a list of the "10 Places You Don't Want A Data Center".

“This list provides context for one of the most important decisions an organization will make,” begins Tom Deaderick, OnePartner director. “Since we opened the facility in 2008, a lot of people have asked us to share our site selection criteria. How did we decide to build America’s first commercial Tier III data centre amidst the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia?”

Affiliated Computer Services has unveiled a new state-of-the-art flagship data centre that could serve as an industry model by simultaneously cutting carbon emissions and reducing energy costs. The new £2 million 4,500 sq ft facility located in Telford combines best-of-breed technology with the highest calibre green credentials.

Level 3 Communications has announced a multi-year contract with the US Department of State to provide metro network services. Level 3 will deliver services under the Washington Interagency Telecommunications Services contract that negotiates telecommunications services on behalf of all federal agencies operating within the National Capital Region.

In the years to come, Microsoft's data centres may not be huge buildings tightly packed with server racks, but rather rows of small, stand-alone IT units spread across acres and acres of cool, cheap land. Microsoft data centre general manager Kevin Timmons has outlined some prototype work his unit is doing to design its next generation of data centres, in collaboration with Microsoft Research.

ControlCircle recently introduced Max2Go - a mobile application that gives CTOs complete management control of their global data centre operations from a handheld device. At present, Max2Go is available to ControlCircle customers and partners on BlackBerry.

Max2Go sits on a handheld smartphone and provides monitoring of a business’ global data centres. It will report the status on power, connectivity, bandwidth and critical systems directly to an engineer’s, customer’s or user’s mobile in real-time.

Source: TMC Net

A new industry group is trying to apply open-source principles to the design and construction of data centres, which it says could accelerate the use of new technologies and increase competition in the industry. The Open Source Data Center Initiative, will act as a repository and test bed for mechanical and engineering advances in data centre design, which it hopes will be submitted by small engineering firms, graduate students doing research with federal grant money, and others.

NASA has recently announced via one of its websites that it is restrategizing its plans to acquire an enterprise data centre.

NASA decided to postpone the acquisition after realizing that the NASA Enterprise Data Center program did not adhere to its enterprise needs. The agency's needs shifted after recent leadership changes and new requirements from the Office of Management and Budget were introduced in relation to cloud computing, greening information technology, virtualization, and federal data center leadership.
 

Source: The WHIR

NASA has recently announced via one of its websites that it is restrategizing its plans to acquire an enterprise data centre.

NASA decided to postpone the acquisition after realizing that the NASA Enterprise Data Center program did not adhere to its enterprise needs. The agency's needs shifted after recent leadership changes and new requirements from the Office of Management and Budget were introduced in relation to cloud computing, greening information technology, virtualization, and federal data center leadership.
 

Source: The WHIR

Interxion, a leading European operator of carrier-neutral data centres, has announced that Bezeq International, Israel’s leading Internet and international telecommunications provider, has expanded its colocation requirements, taking space in Interxion’s FRA 5 data centre. The new agreement, which significantly expands the long-standing relationship between the companies, has been made in response to growing demand from Bezeq International’s customers for its growing range of international hosting and data services.

IT services provider Wipro Infotech has announced that it has won a turnkey project from the Financial Intelligence Unit – India, Ministry of Finance, Government of India.

HP has announced that Sahara Petrochemicals, a Saudi based industrial development company specialising in petrochemical, chemicals and related products, has selected HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers solutions to automate and optimise its data cntre processes. The new implementation is part of Sahara’s technology overhaul to support and meet its growth objectives. The HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure deployed at Sahara will allow it to consolidate its server, storage, network, power and management capabilities into a ‘data centre in a box’.

Vitelity, a VoIP network provider, has selected XO Communications to provide dedicated long-haul network connectivity between Denver and Los Angeles. The 10 Gbps backbone will be the Denver-based company's first long-haul route to Los Angeles. Vitelity also is upgrading its Denver metro network service with XO, moving to a 10 Gbps backbone.

Colocation provider nGenX and Norlight recently announced it has opened three data centres in Indianapolis, Lafayette, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky. This expands the company's data centre footprint from two to five data centres in the Midwest.

nGenX uses its two existing SAS 70, Type II certified data centres in Evansville, Indiana and Brookfield, Wisconsin to host its cloud computing and colocation services. All five nGenX data centres are equipped with Ethernet connectivity for high-availability and disaster recovery.

Source: The WHIR

Scottish and Southern Energy Telecommunications have entered into an agreement with Scottish Enterprise to acquire the ATLAS Connect fibre telecommunications network. The ATLAS network spans six business parks across Scotland and will be integrated into SSET's existing national network.

Deciding how to invest in your data centre infrastructure to produce the highest return on investment, increase the ability of the facility to respond to IT growth demands and reduce carbon footprint, can be made a lot easier using free resources available from APC by Schneider Electric’s website.

India IT services provider Mahindra Satyam has announced that it has signed a new, four-year offshore contract with KMD, a Denmark based IT company. KMD, which specialises in the public sector, signed a renewed contract with Mahindra Satyam for the next four years, worth approximately US$48 million ending in December 2013.

Thomson Reuters is extending a management pact with a London market data consultancy for the supervision of the software used in data centres it is setting up worldwide. CJC will help manage the software behind Thomson Reuters’ hosting services in New York, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Singapore and Tokyo. The data centres allow trades to get direct connections and high-speed execution of orders at venues around the globe.

Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers in a new underground data centre in Helsinki will be captured and pumped to heat hundreds of homes and businesses throughout the city. Like many European cities, Helsinki already uses district heating so that its residents don't risk freezing to death in its minus 30 Centigrade winters.

Location: Russia

Salary: £70k-£75k b Travel b Accom b Bonus

As the Senior M&E Mechanical and Electrical Quantity Surveyor you will have enough demonstrable experience to undertake all building services duties for new fit out, refurbishment and new build projects on commercial and historical buildings. You will need to be technically skilled in M&E Quantity Surveying duties as well as being a good communicator with client facing skills.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced the connection of its International Business Exchange data centres, located in Zwolle and Enschede to the Amsterdam-based Netherlands Internet Exchange.

Intel has introduced the Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series. The new processors deliver two new security features -- Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions, and Intel Trusted Execution Technology -- that enable faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions and virtualised environments, providing data centres with a stronger foundation for cloud security.

Hibernia Atlantic has announced it has been selected by Tinet, formerly the carrier arm of Tiscali Group, to deliver multiple 10 Gbps wavelengths of capacity to and from Toronto, New York, Dublin, London, Frankfurt and other major metro areas on Hibernia’s private network.

International network, colocation and hosting services provider Linxtelecom has announced the purchase of 100% of the shares of ‘Warsaw DC Sp Z o.o’.

More than 30,000 homes and businesses in Glasgow and Edinburgh now have access to super-fast broadband, BT has announced. The upgrading of Halfway and Western exchange areas in Glasgow and Dean exchange in Edinburgh has now been largely completed. The three Scottish exchanges are at the forefront of BT’s £1.5 billion investment in super-fast fibre-based broadband in the UK.

The Department of Homeland Security conscripted Navy facilities at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi as home for the new primary data centre in the DHS' major data centre consolidation effort, and in a new report, DHS auditors have expressed concern that problems with that agreement could disrupt the multi-year project.

The South African Post Office is awaiting ministerial approval to issue tenders worth a total of R250 million to begin the second phase of its IT upgrade plan, said group CFO Nick Buick.

Brocade has announced that the Milan Internet Exchange, the largest Internet Exchange Point in Italy, has adopted Brocade switches to address demand for higher connectivity speeds. MIX installed Brocade BigIron RX switches to meet these requirements. In addition to have market-leading performance, with wire-speed capabilities and ultra low latency, Brocade's Ethernet switches and routers consume much less power and require less cooling than competing solutions, all of which were critical to MIX in making its decision.

UK firms are not investing enough in their network, risking downtime and performance issues, Computacenter has claimed. The corporate VAR giant surveyed more than 150 IT decision makers across UK enterprises, and discovered that 74% of respondents felt the network was central to their IT strategy, but 33% did not consider it before making a technology purchase, thus compromising performance and security.Despite this, 76% believed taking no action with their network will impact business performance.

CyberlinkASP has announced the expansion of the company's Dallas InfoMart data centre facilities. The additional space marks a milestone in CyberlinkASP's growth and development. "While other firms across the industry throttle back and maintain the status quo, Cyberlink is poised and positioned to capitalize on this unique and challenging economic environment," said Stephen Phillips, President of CyberlinkASP.

Cyberlink has increased its customer count, added staff and continues to demonstrate steady and stable growth throughout 2009 and into Q1 20.

German industrial conglomerate Siemens has announced it will eliminate 4,200 jobs worldwide in its information technology services unit, as part of a reorganization of the business towards the "promising" solutions areas. The IT business currently employs 35,000 globally. By 2011, about 4,200 of those jobs will be cut. Roughly 2,000 of the job losses will be in Germany, mostly at major company locations such as Munich, Paderborn and the Nuremberg/Erlangen metropolitan area.

Insurance market Lloyd’s of London will be relying on virtualisation technology and grid computing to deal with new regulatory requirements for the sector and the resulting increase in data processing. The requirements, dubbed Solvency II, are due imminently and will introduce comprehensive risk management procedures that set capital levels and implement ways of identifying, measuring and managing risk. This is a major event from an IT standpoint, and it has prompted a new set of technical requirements for insurance firms such as Lloyd’s.

Mankato-based Enventis, a subsidiary of HickoryTech, began installing an integrated MPLS network for Minneapolis-based Hawkins, with operations in 10 states. Hawkins said it chose Enventis for its MPLS network, which provided increased bandwidth, dedicated Internet services, and data centre colocation services. Hawkins, a growing chemical manufacturer, needed greater bandwidth and an upgraded network for 19 of its locations.

PCCW Global has opened a new point-of-presence (PoP) at Telekom Malaysia Bhd's data centre to provide a portfolio of integrated global communications solutions for customers with presence in Malaysia.

Last year, PCCW Global launched the Intra Asia Cable System, the region's first direct, point-to-point and express optical fibre submarine cable system interconnecting key PoPs in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore with branch extensions to the Philippines and Vietnam.

Source: Bernama

TPI, the largest sourcing data and advisory firm in the world, has released research predicting that the number of outsourcing contracts awarded globally will rise in 2010 as organisations look for new ways to optimize critical business operations in an improving economy.

Apparent Networks has issued a new Performance Advisory detailing an outage in Terremark's vCloud Express services. Apparent Networks' Cloud Performance Center confirmed that a connectivity loss caused the outage, which took place in Terremark's Miami data centre. Businesses utilising Terremark's vCloud Express services from this data centre were affected.

Thanks to x86 server virtualization and its follow-on technologies, the state-of-the-art enterprise data centre looks vastly different than it did even a year ago. And moving from old school to next-generation isn't just about hardware and software – it's a call for a new way of thinking about the data centre, as well.

Corporate America has made some painful adjustments over the past year, but for data centre managers, the pressure to contain costs has always been unrelenting - it's impossible to maintain a low profile when your area of responsibility consumes the bulk of the IT budget. This year in particular, though, we're really feeling the heat, and not just from overloaded racks. Just 30% of the 370 respondents to the latest InformationWeek Analytics data centre survey say they'll see larger budgets for 2010 compared with 2009, yet half expect resource demands to increase.

The Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series has come up with two new security features, ie. Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions and Intel Trusted Execution Technology which will enable faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions as well as virtualized environments. In this way, data centres will tend to have a stronger foundation for cloud security.

NEC India, a retail specialty technology provider, is setting up a cloud computing infrastructure in its Bangalore office. Confirming the development, David Arambhan, head retail solutions, India and Middle East said, “Our upcoming cloud computing initiative will help retailers, in both organised and unorganised sector, to adapt technologies for conducting their business operations through our cloud computing offerings.” The service will be available from April, 2010.

eHosting DataFort, the managed IT services provider, has announced a unique partnership with Double-Take Software to offer a comprehensive packaged solution for data and server protection in a hosted data centre across the GCC region.

A volcano that has been dormant for almost 200 years has erupted in Iceland. Authorities evacuated hundreds of people after a volcano erupted beside a glacier in southern Iceland, Iceland's civil protection agency said on Sunday, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The last time the volcano erupted was in the 1820s.

VISI, the Eden Prairie-based managed hosting and cloud infrastructure provider, has been acquired by a Chicago-based public corporation for US$17.8 million. Telephone and Data Systems acquired VISI through its Wisconsin subsidiary TDS Telecommunications Corp. It was an all-cash transaction, said VISI CEO Mike Sowada.

The Southeast Asian and Australasian power distribution unit (PDU) market displayed resistance toward the economic turmoil in 2009. The market is expected to continue its upward growth trajectory, fuelled by evolving PDU technology that coincides with the "Go Green" approach. This will enable enhanced efficiency in the long run. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Southeast Asian and Australasian Power Distribution Unit Market, finds that the market earned revenues of over US$24.5 million in 2009 and estimates this to reach US$35.0 million in 2016.

Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end connectivity solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has announced that the company has opened a subsidiary in the United Kingdom, Mellanox Technologies UK Limited, and has expanded its sales and technical staff in Europe. These moves follow the continued growth in demand for the Company's end-to-end connectivity products and advanced technology from leading European supercomputing centres, cloud computing providers, and enterprise customers.

The National Australia Bank is laying claim to the title of first organisation in the country to use tri-generation (trigen) power in its data centre. An ambitious project was launched in 2008 to supply power and cooling to its primary Melbourne data centre on site using trigen and remove half of its energy dependency from the grid.

nlyte Software, a provider of data centre performance management solutions, has released the results of its recent research that surveyed 200 UK CIOs on the importance of better managing and optimising the data centre infrastructure .

Wikipedia was offline Wednesday afternoon after an overheating problem at the online encyclopaedia’s European data centre. Wikipedia's technical blog said the site's servers shut themselves down to avoid damage from the heat. Administrators tried to shift traffic to a cluster of servers in Florida, but "it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally," according to the blog.

Wikipedia was back online as of about 4:30 p.m. ET.

Source: CNN

Schroff UK has introduced a low cost modular solution for retrofitting cold aisles into data centres. The company says that extrusions can be fitted across the top of tall rack cabinets along an aisle, secured to them with infinitely adjustable brackets. After infill prices and a laminated glass roof is fitted, automatic or manual sliding doors can then be installed at each end of the aisle.

Cold aisles can help IT professionals by reducing energy consumption and improving performance while this solution can also be used to create a hot aisle.

This article outlines UK Government department policies on IT spending in respect of the recent budget.

Neotel is stepping up its expansion programme, with a project that will see it deploying fibre-optic infrastructure to 300 buildings, including shopping centres and office blocks, this year. At the same time, it plans to expand its Johannesburg data centre because of soaring demand from the corporate sector. The first phase of the Midrand facility, consisting of about 1,000 sq m, is already sold out.

United Parcel Service will make about US$1 billion in technology investments this year to improve the efficiency of its operations, with the goal of cutting billions more from its costs over the long term, company executives have said. One of its main goals is to improve the speed and efficiency of its delivery operations. To achieve that, UPS is equipping its vans with sensors that allow it to collect data about things like fuel consumption, chosen routes and how much time its engines spend idling,.

For all the talk about openness and interoperability in cloud computing, both public-cloud and private-cloud providers still operate very much in their own silos. Amazon, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft are all doing wonderful things — but they’re doing so largely within their own environments.

Data centre specialists Node4 have announced expansion of their Wakefield data entre with plans to open a new hall. Since the launch of the Wakefield site in July 2009, rack space has almost sold out in the first two halls due to accelerated demand for hosting facilities, combined with Node4’s outstanding commitment to customer service.

The third hall will continue the high specifications set previously at the Wakefield data centre with NbN and Nb1 cooling environments, as well as a power backup infrastructure.

Source: Dedicated Server

It gets cold in Green Bay, WI - very cold. Yet until recently all that natural cooling was wasted at Associated Bank. So when the time came to expand the data centre and upgrade the cooling systems Associated Bank installed a glycol-based "free cooling" system at its two data centres. Glycol is akin to the antifreeze in a car. During the winter, pumps move the glycol around, allowing the outside air to cool the liquid, which in turn cools the data centre. The compressor, a costly energy drain, stays off.

With power bills set to blow through the roof, data centre managers are faced with a tough dilemma. Raising the ambient temperature within their computer rooms can cut down air conditioning costs and open up greater windows of time for 'free cooling' techniques, but servers and other computing equipment are known to suffer performance issues outside of the range of temperatures recommended by the hardware vendors.

The value added services of Ufone are still affected all over the country and would take time to be fully resumed as fire broke out in one of the Ufone data centres. However, the SMS services and voice message service have been made fully operational, while the Blackberry service has also been restored, the official spokesperson of Ufone Moazzam Ali Khan told The Nation.

CyrusOne held its Grand Open House event earlier this month for its new 92,000 sq ft data centre within Beltway 8 Corporate Centre, Houston, Texas. Built from the ground-up in six months, the state-of-the art, colocation, data centre facility has been operational since December 2009 with on-going customer installations.

BT is set to tap into the growing demand for virtual services by offering a virtual offering that will compete head-on with the traditional data centre. The new service, Virtual Data Centre, has been piloted by ten UK companies and six in the rest of Europe, said Craig Parker, head of global IT services for BT. He added that there was no minimum recommended size for the service, although he expected that the initial customers would be larger enterprises.

The Australian Crime Commission has called for tender bids to supply voice and data network services. The ACC is looking to build a secondary data network to add resilience to its Sydney and Canberra data centres and fail-over redundancy over the primary network. It also seeks to simplify and consolidate its fixed-line telco services under the contract.

The deployment must be completed before 30 June, and include free upgrades after that date. The tender closes 19 April.

Source: Computerworld

Work continues on the new Apple data centre in Maiden, North Carolina, but the company is starting the hiring process for the new facility. Apple has posted ten jobs for the data centre. Once operational, the new Apple data centre is expected to employ at least 50 full time employees. The positions posted now are for service technicians, manager, coordinator, mechanical technicians, electrical technicians and maintenance technician for the data centre.