As the world's largest social network, Facebook accumulates more data in a single day than many good size companies generate in a year. Facebook stores much of the data on its massive Hadoop cluster, which has grown exponentially in recent years.

Seacom has demonstrated new “five times 100Gbit/s-per-wave” fibre technology (500Gbit/s in total) as well as its new fibre connection between Teraco’s Johannesburg data centre and Seacom’s submarine cable landing station in Mtunzini in KwaZulu-Natal. The company says it hopes to use the technology to meet SA’s growing demand for bandwidth while remaining competitively priced.

euNetworks Group has announced it has optimised the important London to Frankfurt low latency route on its dedicated finance network.

The Bunker a provider of Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Colocation, and Outsourced IT from within Europe’s most secure data centres has announced that it has successfully commissioned additional power capacity for its ultra secure data centre in Newbury and added a new data hall within the existing bunker.

Windstream has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PAETEC Holding based in Fairport, New York, in a transaction valued at around US$2.3 billion. The transaction is expected to be accretive to free cash flow per share, excluding merger and integration costs, in the first year following the closing.

Networks, management solutions and IT services provider NTT Communications Corporation has announced that it has expanded the data-transmission capacity of its Global IP Network between Japan and the USA to 500Gb/s.

NTT Com said that its global IP backbones are connected to fixed and mobile telecom companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), data centre operators and content providers, enabling customers to meet the growing need for Internet capacity between Japan and the United States.

Source: TMCnet

UK businesses are wasting about £30.8 million a day by leaving their PC equipment on standby, according to new research from energy company E.ON – which, depressingly, establishes that nothing has changed in five years despite the huge amount of advice and support available.

Sunderland City Council is looking to make services more efficient and effective through a 10 year multi-million pound deal with BT. Under a strategic partnership, the council will have 188 of its sites connected through a corporate network.

The arrangement has come as Sunderland is rolling out a programme of social, economic and physical regeneration, which includes embracing new technologies and applications.

Source: Public Service

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A data centre company is planning to triple its capacity with the help of an investment from the former chairman of Leighs Paints, Now its former chairman Brian Leigh-Bramwell has increased his stake in data centre business M247, which will use his cash injection to fund its expansion plans.

Logicalis, an international provider of integrated information and communications technology solutions and services, has announced that it has opened two Cloud Centers of Excellence based on the HP CloudSystem Matrix – one in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and the other in Irvine, California.

Chinese photovoltaic manufacturer LDK Solar has announced that it will supply Advanced Solar Products, New Jersey, with 58,803 modules for a privately owned, net metered solar project. The project worth 14.1 megawatts has been initiated by the McGraw-Hill Companies in East Windsor, New Jersey.

Atos, an international IT services company, has announced that it has been awarded a new five-year contract with ISS, one of the largest providers of Facility Services. The announcement follows the decision by ISS to move to Atos. Key factors in appointing Atos as its new UK provider were value for money, increased flexibility, improved resilience and a better user experience.

After the March 11th Japanese earthquake and tsunami, Capital Novus' Japan-based data centre in Tokyo has recently been confirmed stable, with little to no damage sustained. Although significant tremors from the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake were felt all throughout the region, the office and its surrounding location remained virtually unaffected.

Interxion, a European provider of premium carrier-neutral colocation data centre services, has announced that it is building its seventh data centre (PAR7) in the Paris metropolitan area. The new facility is being built to meet the demands of customers who will benefit from Interxion's existing connectivity options of more than 70 carriers and the leading Internet exchange in France, France-IX. The first phase, providing over 4,500 sq m of equipped space, is expected to become operational in the second quarter of 2012.

Sensitive data about residents is at risk of being lost or leaked by Barnet Council, according to a damning internal audit report.

Surrey County Council has saved £70m so far by using IT to revolutionise its processes and infrastructure since it was forced to implement cuts as a result of the government's spending review in October. The council has been tasked with saving £270m over the next four years as part of the spending review, and Paul Brocklehurst, head of IT at the local authority, has welcomed the challenge.

Nyse Technologies has entered into a strategic agreement with DuPont Fabros Technology to build and operate a SFTI Access Center at their NJ1 data centre facility in Piscataway, NJ.

Microsoft has posted a YouTube video that gives an inside look at the Redmond company's data centres during a time when the software giant and its rivals are ramping up competition for cloud computing customers.

The video, which the seattlepi.com blogged about, offers what Microsoft says is "a deeper look at how Microsoft uses secure, reliable, scalable and efficient best practices to deliver over 200 cloud services to more than a billion customers and 20 million businesses in over 70 countries."

Source: Tech Flash

Geo Networks’ fibre optic network has been chosen by the Convergence Group to link two of the company’s data centres with the BT Tower. The three-year will see video, web and voice traffic carried across Geo’s city sewer network

Geo said the fibre will provide an alternative to the current facility lines available into the BT Tower, eliminating the need to compress or decompress content for “a superior end-user experience”.

Source: Broadcast

Vita Group is one of Australia’s major lifestyle electronics and telecommunications retailers. The company has three main brands – Fone Zone, Next Byte and One Zero – along with a growing number of Telstra Shop locations. John Cole, Group IT Manager at Vita Group, had a challenge on his hands when the company was relocating to new premises to bring together two major operations in Brisbane - its central Support Centre and Sales Centre.

Tier 3, an enterprise cloud platform provider, and Equinix, a global data centre services provider, have announced the Fall 2011 opening of two new Tier 3 data centres residing within Equinix International Business Exchange facilities in Chicago and Ashburn, Va.

Quality Technology Services, one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data centers and managed services, is expanding its Lenexa, Kan., data centre after recently purchasing the previously leased site. The company will upgrade the power, connectivity and space available in the facility through a planned investment of more than US$20 million.

Internet service provider Timico is preparing to expand after obtaining a seven-figure development financing deal with Santander Corporate Banking. Newark-based Timico said it will use the loan to build a new office complex and data centre at Brunel Business Park in the town. Timico said it required the additional space for its expanding work force and growing number of services. The new site includes the construction of two data halls, allowing the company to integrate its existing centres in one location.

China Intelligence Information Systems, who offers virtualization technology application and cloud computing products in the People's Republic of China, have announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Beijing PowerUnique Technologies, has signed a integrated data centre virtualization solution agreement with the People's Republic of China's State Intellectual Property Office. The Customer is a new governmental client that China Intelligence acquired recently.

SIX Telekurs, a provider of financial information, and Transaction Network Services, a provider of data communications and interoperability solutions globally, have expanded their collaboration to source real-time market data from high growth financial centres in Asia.

Communications between market data sources in Asia and SIX Telekurs' regional data centre in Singapore will be hosted by TNS. Significant among the data sources are stock exchanges in Thailand and Taiwan as well as the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges.

Source: Banking Technology News

GTS Central Europe will provide IP VPN services for the Tesco retail chain stores throughout the entire central and eastern European region. Mutual cooperation in the Czech Republic will thereby be expanded to include Hungary, Poland and Slovakia totalling nearly 1,000 stores. In connection with the expanded services provided to Tesco, a continually growing number of stores, branches and warehouses have been added to the regional network and the volume of services has subsequently increased rapidly.

Insurance firm Standard Life increased IT spending in the first half of 2011 and says an ongoing technology-enabled transformation programme is already delivering benefits. Standard Life wants to deliver efficiency savings of £100m by 2012 and IT is playing a big role in the process. The firm said in its half-yearly results that savings of £64m have been achieved already.

The company has spent £80m in its transformation programme, including investment in underlying technology to support growth. This compares with £72m spent during the same period in 2010.

Boston-based Caisson Data Center Services hopes to install a multimillion-dollar, 117,000 sq ft data centre at a vacant retail location on Route 9 in Natick, Massachusetts, directly across the street from the Natick Collection. The company has received permits to site the data centre on the eight-acre parcel, and is finalizing financing for the project.

Due to consistent performance and an increase in enquiries, this global multi-disciplinary consultancy is looking for a Senior Mechanical Design Engineer to join their London offices.

Working across projects covering all sectors, you will have a proven track record of delivery within Data Centres and Mission Critical Facilities. with a client base spanning 3 continents, they provide a full range of services ranging from Building Services, Energy & Sustainability through to IT Consultancy and Structural Engineering.

Residents cheered last week as councillors threw out a proposal to build on fields in Huddersfield. Planners dramatically rejected the bid to construct nearly 300 homes on Lindley Moor after a stormy four-hour meeting.

But a second proposal to build a data centre on another part of the moor was passed by the slimmest of margins. Kirklees Council’s Huddersfield Planning Sub-committee backed a proposal to set up a data centre – a secure site for businesses to house their computer servers – on nearby Crosland Road.

Source: Huddersfield Daily Examiner

New software from Xsigo Systems is designed to link all the servers in a data center virtually, allowing IT managers to reconfigure virtual machines and other resources without carrying out traditional networking tasks.

The Xsigo Server Fabric extends the company's technology beyond individual racks of servers by allowing its Xsigo I/O Director devices to connect to each other directly without going over a traditional LAN. That means, for example, that adding a new virtual machine doesn't involve using up an IP address or setting up a virtual LAN.

Advanced Micro Devices is looking at the costs of software licensing and taxes as it aims to reduce the number of data centres worldwide, company officials said this week. AMD currently has six data centres and wants to reduce the number to three over the next few years as it looks for ways to cut costs and consolidate servers, said Tom Painter, corporate vice president for global infrastructure services at AMD which is headquaretered in Sunnyvale, California (pictured).

City Telecom has announced that its subsidiary, Hong Kong Media Production Company, has entered into an agreement for lease on a site at the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate, to develop a world-leading, state-of-the-art multimedia production and distribution centre.

TELEHOUSE America, a leading provider of global dedicated data centres, has, announced that AboveNet, a leading provider of high bandwidth connectivity solutions, is the first carrier tenant to reside at TELEHOUSE's new, premium data centre facility at 85 10th Avenue (pictured), in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

AboveNet's expansion into the facility represents TELEHOUSE's on-going commitment to bringing to its customers robust carrier neutral options and reliable solutions that combine high-performance interconnectivity options.

Amazon Web Services learned a lot of lessons from the outage that affected its Dublin data center, and will now work to improve power redundancy, load balancing and the way it communicates when something goes wrong with its cloud, the company said in a summary of the incident. The post mortem delved deeper into what caused the outage, which affected the availability of Amazon's EC2, EBS the RDS database and Amazon's network. The service disruption began Aug. 7, at 10:41 a.m., when Amazon's utility provider suffered a transformer failure.

CSC has unveiled a three-pronged strategy to push its cloud computing wares in Australia, with executives hopeful it can lure nascent player SAP. Aimed at enterprise and government, CSC will be able to tap into its existing base of clients such as Defence, Immigration, AMP and Westpac Group. Customers have the option of utilising CSC's local data centres for either a public or private cloud, or host a private cloud at the premises of their choice.

ScaleMatrix, an established leader in the emerging Cloud and Colocation hosting sectors, has announced the opening of their ground-breaking flagship data centre. This purpose built, 50,000 sq ft. facility will house cutting-edge cloud hosting solutions and high-density, high efficiency colocation space.

PAETEC has announced that it has been awarded a three-year contract by the Defense Information System Agency to provide the U.S. Army Aberdeen Proving Ground with PAETEC's highly dependable fibre infrastructure.

Colocation provider Horizon Data Center Solutions has announced it has completed SSAE 16 Type II audits for its three data centres. The company has two data centres in Dallas and one in Manassas, Virginia. 

"We're continuing our momentum as we grow the business and enhance our IaaS offering for commercial and US Federal Government customers," said David MacGrandle, COO of Horizon. "Our customers trust us with important data and mission critical applications. They need clear confidence in the credibility of our corporate controls."

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that it has successfully passed the external audit for ISO 27001 certification for its six International Business Exchange data centres in Switzerland.

A £66 million IT improvement programme at the Highland Council run by IT services giant Fujitsu has been beset by glitches, leaving many users with unworkable IT systems. The project is supposed to deliver new desktops and laptops to schools and council workers by the end of November 2011, along with a new telephone system and an updated data centre. However, scores of school workers, returning after the summer break, have reported problems logging in, accessing printers and obtaining data.

Immedion, a South Carolina-based dedicated data centre and managed services provider is building its third data centre in Charleston, SC with plans to open in late spring. The third site further expands Immedion’s data centre redundancy and disaster recovery offerings and allows Immedion to better serve the managed hosting needs of the southeast region. “Locating our third data centre in Charleston will better enable us to meet the growing tech needs of the coastal region” comments Immedion CEO, Frank Mobley.

Austrian systems integrator and ICT services provider Kapsch BusinessCom - headquarterd in Vienna (pictured) - has won two major outsourcing contracts. Firstly, the company has recently begun implementing new ICT infrastructure at a total of nine ELIN – the building project and municipal infrastructure company - locations throughout Austria.

Vodafone Germany is looking to persuade up to four million of its broadband DSL subscribers to migrate to LTE. Vodafone Germany CEO Friedrich Joussen said that Vodafone is currently being charged €500 million a year by Telekom Deutschland for using its fixed network, and that LTE offers adequate bandwidth to replace DSL as a broadband technology.

Peak 10, a managed services and cloud provider with world-class data centres, has announced it is delivering data centre solutions to Rise Health, a healthcare services company that works to enhance the quality of patient treatment, improve practice efficiency and stay up-to-date on innovations of primary care. The Peak 10 Jacksonville campus will be hosting Rise Health’s production environment, specifically its Web-based application, which allows it to serve physicians across the country.

The largest electricity distributor in Victoria Powercor-CitiPower has signed a new five year, A$25 million contract with CSC – which will maen the two companies relationship will stretch to 17 years. This follows on from its last A$17.8 million five year deal  signed in 2006.

Chi-East, the independent, pan-Asian trading venue, and Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, have announced that Chi-East has chosen Equinix’s Singapore 2 (SG2) International Business Exchange as its primary data centre. Chi-East, which commenced operations in the fourth quarter of 2010, is the world’s first exchange-backed, non-displayed trading platform1 for securities listed in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore.

KDDI America and sister company, TELEHOUSE America, have announced that KDDI America, a provider of international IT and telecommunication services, will extend its fibre-based services into the new TELEHOUSE New York Chelsea data centre facility. Located at 85 10th Avenue in Manhattan, TELEHOUSE Chelsea Center offers both carriers and end-user clients secure colocation in which to establish their IT networks and infrastructures.

Phoenix NAP, a premier infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, has announced that iMemories, the premier Web destination for digitizing, storing and sharing personal videos and photos, has selected the Phoenix NAP facility (pictured) to support its increasingly growing demands and technology infrastructure needs.

World Wide Technology, a market-leading systems integrator that provides innovative technology and supply chain solutions, has announced the launch of its FAST Mobile Data Center (MDC). Engineered for extreme portability, these self-contained units feature integrated computing, storage, networking, power and cooling that offer a powerful, low-cost alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar data centres. 

The Department of Defence is the latest agency to bypass the Government's mandatory data centre panels, awarding a A$40 million migration services contract to Accenture this month. Accenture is not one of the members of the panel, managed by the Department of Finance and Regulation's Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO). It is not clear whether Accenture bid for inclusion to the panel, which was established in April 2011.

IBM's worldwide server revenue jumped a healthy 24.5% in the second quarter, putting it neck and neck with Hewlett-Packard for the top spot, according to IDC.

A simple change allowing hard drives to spin at a slower rate could allow many data centres to significantly reduce their power consumption, according to a Facebook engineer. Writing on the blog of the Open Compute Project, an initiative created by Facebook in April to share custom data centre designs for improving efficiency, engineer Eran Tal noted that many data centres have tens or hundreds of thousands of “cold” hard drives, which contain data that must be retained but is rarely accessed.

Staff were evacuated at several data centres following Tuesday's earthquake but operations at most facilities appear to have been unaffected, according to Twitter posts and other sources. The earthquake was cantered in Virginia and hit just before 2pm local time with a magnitude of 5.8.That's not particularly big by global standards, but it was enough to shake buildings and send people pouring into the streets in Boston, New York City and Washington, DC, according to news reports. It was the biggest earthquake to hit Virginia since 1897, according to the US Geological survey.

zColo, a network neutral provider of colocation and interconnection services, announced it will begin offering its services in Pittsburgh, PA, growing its footprint to 11 colocation facilities nationally.

BT has announced the opening of an international network traffic routing facility at Melkbosstrand in the Western Cape, further strengthening its position as a leading provider of networked IT services to multinational companies in South Africa and globally. The facility, part of BT’s continuous drive to enhance network offerings around the world, will enable BT to gain better control of its South African infrastructure and improve services to enterprises with a presence in South Africa.

Archive and storage specialists Proact have been commissioned to assist Malmö University with the renovation of its IT infrastructure with a new storage platform. The deal is initially worth SEK 2 million and will help to create a secure, modern IT environment offering major savings for the university in terms of both time and cost.

Navy CIO Terry Halvorsen plans to trim IT budgets via cloud computing, data centre and app consolidation, thin clients, enterprise licensing, and rigorous spending controls. The Department of the Navy, on a mission to cut 25% from its business IT budget over the next five years, is implementing strict IT spending oversight rules, investing in thin clients, pushing hard on data centre and app consolidation, and working on department-wide enterprise technology licenses, Navy CIO Terry Halvorsen has said.

Chicago data centre and managed service provider, CoreLink Data Centers, has announced that, as part of its ongoing commitment to provide clients with secure IT infrastructure protection and guaranteed delivery of power and network availability, it has expanded its existing vendor relationship with Schneider Electric. CoreLink selected APC by Schneider Electric's Symmetra Megawatt UPS for use at its Chicago data centre, as well as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Seattle data centres.

Tata Communications has announced the integration of its India infra­structure into its Next Generation Ethernet network architecture. The integration is taking place across 11 Indian cities, covering New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Gurgaon, Pune, Hyderabad, Kochi, Noida, Ahmedabad and Kolkata.

Level 3 Communications,  a provider of fiber-based communications services, has included the TELEHOUSE America’s state-of-the-art Chelsea data centre facility in New York in its high capacity network.

The TELEHOUSENew York Chelsea data centre is a state-of-the-art facility that offers 60,000 sq ft of colocation space, accessible to authorized client personnel on a 24/7 basis, along with the full scope of TELEHOUSE’s IT support services ranging from “remote- hands” to the full “Manage-E” family of IT services.

Source: TMCNet

Accenture and Telstra have announced a new Product Innovation Lab in Melbourne to develop cloud computing solutions for customers in Australia and New Zealand. The Lab supports the Accenture and Telstra cloud computing alliance, and will be hosted in a Telstra facility. 

Plans by Datacom to build a new data centre in Wellington are well advanced, says CEO Greg Davidson. However, he is not disclosing any details until a decision is made on the Government’s planned infrastructure-as-a-service contract. Datacom is on a shortlist of three vendors to provide data centre services. The others are IBM and Revera. The Department of Internal Affairs has indicated that two will be chosen.