A recent downgrading by Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, reduced South Africa's incumbent, Telkom, rating from neutral to underperform and follows on from the sale of its stake in Vodacom, and halting of many of its capital expenditure projects, while its Nigerian subsidiary, Multi-Links, expends cash.

The Orissa state IT department has floated tenders for setting up a state level Centralised Data Centre. This project also taken up under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) of the Government of India will be implemented at an investment of Rs 75 crore and the amount is entirely funded by the Centre. The state of the art data centre will maintain data of all the departments of the state government.

A new tier III, 6,000 square ft. internet data centre has been launched by Tata Communications in Kolkata targeting the eastern Indian market which the company believes is relatively untapped. Although no investment level has been revealed, the move is part of the company's USD 2 billion investment plan over the next 3 years. The company has already acquired an anchor tenant for the new facility. Tata now operates 12 data centres across India, and a further facility is planned for Ambattor (Chennai).

Salesforce.com which has an APAC customer of more than 5,000 customers (out of 59,300 total) has launched is data centre facility at an undisclosed location. The company already operates some 1,000 servers in data centres operated by Equinix in the US. The company's customers in the Asia-Pacific region include Acer, Amcor, Challenger Financial Services, Crocs, Ricoh, VSNL and Telecom New Zealand.

Philippines based Eastern Communications plans to build its second data centre this year, targeting corporate clients and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The company will invest P100 million for a facility that will be operational by December. Financing will be through internal funds or equity from its parent company Eastern Telecommunications Philippines, Inc. The company is considering building the facility in sister company Alphaland's Southgate Mall in Makati.

German business ISP Ecotel has won a data centre extension deal from European ticketing services provider CTS Eventim. Under the agreement, Ecotel continues to host Eventim's online ticketing platform in its own data centre using the newest rack technology. Ecotel has been CTS Eventim's managed hosting service provider since 2002.

Energy and cogeneration investor Alea Management based in Boston, MA, is negotiating with landowners to secure a site for a 75,000 sq ft data centre in the Menomonee River Valley in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. By building the facility near the Menomonee Valley power plant, the company is hoping to lower its operating costs by taking advantage of low-cost power. Alea is implementing the project through its affiliate Source IT Energy.

CyrusOne primarily offers high-density data centres in the Southwestern United States. The company presently supports server installations that utilize up to 1,000 watts of power per square foot and now operates seven facilities in Texas with a total of 480,000 square feet. Three facilities are in Houston, three in Dallas and one in Austin. The company has announced a new third data centre facility of 94,000 sq.ft. in West Houston located along the North West Beltway, between I-10 and 290.

BT is about to launch a virtualized infrastructure service called BT Virtual Data Centre, which will form the basis of its cloud-computing strategy. VDC involves the virtualisation of servers, storage, networks and security delivered to customers via an online portal as cloud-based services. BT's Global Services division announced the customer rollout of VDC, which will initially target multinational corporate customers and the public sector.

Driving timely communications via the internet, Elstree School is staying connected in the school and extended community. Elstree, a leading boy's preparatory school founded in 1848, is not new to evolution and has been online for the past 10 years. To continue its evolution and drive their online presence forward, Elstree has turned to DediPower, a leading UK provider of managed hosting and data centre solutions, to underpin the site and provide the school with managed hosting solutions.

Interxion, a leading European operator of carrier-neutral data centres, today announced its financial results for the first half of 2009.

2009 Highlights to date:

Revenue increased by 29% to 82.9 million (H1 2008: 64.4 million)
Adjusted EBITDA increased by 34% to 29.8 million (H1 2008: 22.2 million)
Adjusted EBITDA margins increased to 36.0% (H1 2008: 34.4%)
Net profits increased by 49% to 14.1 million (H1 2008: 9.5 million)

Infortrend, the networked storage expert, (Public TPE: 2495) ahs announced that the first two 8G Fibre Channel (FC) storage solutions, the F20 (Fibre-to-SATA solution) and F60 (Fibre-to-SAS solution), have been added into its enterprise-class storage series, the ESVA (Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture) product family.

South Africa based Teraco Data Environments (Pty) Limited, founded in 2007, and a carrier neutral colocation facility, has augmented its operating capital with a further R50-million (USD 6 million) in a successful Series-B round of financing, consisting of equity and loans. This follows on the conclusion of a Series-A financing round of R45-million in 2008. Series-A investors participated in this second round with one new investor, Guy Willner, co-founder and CEO of IXEurope (now Equinix Europe) who recently joined Teraco?s board.

LeaseWeb, one of the largest website hosting providers in Europe based in Amsterdam, has appointed Thorsten Einig (39) as its new Hosting Product Development Manager. Einig previously worked for hosting provider 1&1 Internet. He is to focus on streamlining and expanding LeaseWeb's product portfolio, including enlarging its range of virtualization products.

Terremark Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:TMRK), a leading global provider of managed IT infrastructure services, has reported its results for the quarter ended June 30, 2009. Terremark's results for the quarter were at the high-end of previously announced guidance with total revenues of $65.8 million and EBITDA, as adjusted, of $16.7 million.

Server Technology, an industry leader for Cabinet Power Distribution Unit (CDU) and Power Management and Monitoring Solutions, has announced the availability of a comprehensive portfolio of service products designed to support the efforts of Data Center Managers.

ElasticHosts, the UK based cloud provider, has announced the launch of its cloud server solutions, which provide ultra-flexible and easy-to-use server capacity for scalable web hosting and on-demand burst computing. Customers benefit from a user-friendly interface that can be managed from any desktop and allows them to create virtual servers instantly and resize their capacity immediately.

Attenda Limited, the Always On Managed Services company, has announced that it has launched a CarbonNeutral hosting programme, to enable clients to offset the carbon emissions of their infrastructure within the Attenda data centre.

Nominum, a leader in intelligent network naming and addressing solutions, has announced delivery of the third generation of its Trusted Response and Universal Enforcement (TRUE) ArchitectureTM, which allows service providers to provide instant and automatic protection to end users against a wide range of Internet threats as soon as they are discovered. These threats include botnets, phishing, illegal content, and many other forms of malware.

We've read about recent attacks on Twitter to get at the Georgian blogger Cyxymu, which also affected Facebook, LiveJournal and parts of Google. There has been much misguided comment about the risks to the Internet of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and the difficulty of defending against such attacks. Much of the commentary has been about the impossibility of the saervers to handle the traffic.

BTI Systems, a global supplier of Intelligent Service Edge solutions for the delivery of high-bandwidth, multi-protocol services, has announced that the BTI 7000 Series has additional client services modules, verified by Brocade Communications Systems Inc., as compatible with Brocade-based Storage Area Networking (SAN) infrastructure.

LeaseWeb, one of the largest hosting providers in Europe based in Amsterdam, plans to increase its market share for website hosting in Turkey. LeaseWeb recruited 29-year old Emrah Aydin as their new business development manager to handle this job.

Emrah Aydin, 29, will be a strong addition to LeaseWeb's international business development team for its intensive marketing campaign in Turkey. Mr Aydin previously worked as a regional sales manager for Emerson Network Power in Poland.

3PAR (NYSE: PAR), a leading global provider of utility storage, announced today the appointment of Vaughan Woods as Regional Director of Asia Pacific Sales. In this role, Woods oversees 3PAR's Asia Pacific Sales organisation and is responsible for overall sales execution and customer satisfaction in the APAC region. Woods joined 3PAR to lead the company's efforts to grow its revenues, customer base, and sales organisation in APAC. He reports to 3PAR's Regional Vice President of International Sales, Tim Pitcher.

DE-CIX, the central, international Internet exchange in Frankfurt am Main, has expanded its infrastructure at Interxion, a leading European operator of carrier-neutral data centres, by extending its Internet exchange infrastructure into Interxion's latest Frankfurt data centre, Frankfurt5. For the exchange DE-CIX, this means that they now have five infrastructure locations distributed across the city of Frankfurt.