As cloud computing adoption climbs, hosting providers are inking deals with security vendors to provide security-as-a-service options to customers. But will enterprise IT managers buy into these often novel forms of security woven into a cloud computing environment? There's definitely some resistance as IT and security managers struggle to sort out risk factors and compliance issues.

Many IT leaders intend to make high-tech purchases and technology projects a priority in the coming months as plans that had been put on hold during the downturn are prepped for takeoff in 2010.

Specialist data centre news leaders iXNewsSearch and Datacentres.com have announced that they have merged to form the leading global online news portal for the data centre industry.

3Com has announced four new products and solutions from its TippingPoint and H3C portfolios to extend the Secure Network Fabric to data centres and virtual networks, according to a statement. The Secure Network Fabric integrates 3Com's TippingPoint intrusion prevention system (IPS) technology and H3C enterprise network and security solutions to reduce network security risks, management complexity and infrastructure costs in modern data centres, it added.

Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson and the global leader in enabling Business-Critical Continuity, and Freescale Semiconductor, a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors, have announced a collaborative effort to deploy Freescale multicore QorIQ processors on modular single-board computers based on the COM Express small form factor.

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?”

British consulting firm BroadGroup expects data center operators in Latin America's seven main markets to expand their facilities by an average of 61% by 2014, the consultancy said in a statement.

SunGard Availability Services’ new SecurDisk backup and recovery solution, powered by EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems, provides organisations with on-site operational restart capabilities and rapid, off-site recovery that seamlessly integrates with a customer’s existing backup software.

Sales of computer data-storage equipment dipped less than 1% in the fourth quarter, industry tracker IDC has said, as the market continued to rebound from lows seen earlier in the year. Global external disk storage revenue in the October-December period totalled US$5.29 billion. That compares with US$5.33 billion in the year ago period. For the year, the market fell 10.2% to US$18.1 billion.

"Although 2009 might have gotten off to a rough start, it ended on a strong note," said IDC analyst Liz Conner in a release.

Source: Reuters

IT consulting firm BroadGroup (www.broad-group.com) announced on Monday it has released a new report that forecasts a 61 percent growth in data center space across seven key Latin American markets by 2014.

This increase in demand for data center space will lead to a space shortage following significant enterprise outsourcing.

Entitled "Data Centers Latin America – Competition, Demand Drivers and Growth", the report is the first to assess the Latin America marketplace for data centers.

The data centre is receiving more public scrutiny than ever before, with IT managers facing a range of challenges from making systems run more efficiently to protecting computers from cyber terrorism, says AFCOM chief executive Jill Eckhaus.

Telecom company Tata Communications has announced record growth for business volumes despite the recession and continued investments in global infrastructure, services and emerging market initiatives.

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Major industry leaders in the European data centre sector will meet at the sixth annual conference taking place April 22-23 at Sophia Antipolis near Nice, France. The high level content and debate will set the agenda on exploiting Green technologies over the coming year (www.datacentres.com/dce).

Data centres can go green without installing hardware, according to Sentilla which announced a meter-free monitoring capability recently.

AboveNet, a provider of high-bandwidth connectivity solutions, announced results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2009. Revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009 was US$94.3 million, an increase of 5%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2008. Excluding contract termination revenue from the 2008 and 2009 fourth quarters, revenue would have been US$81.1 million and US$93.4 million, respectively, an increase of 15.2%.

Global Crossing, a global IP solutions provider, has announced it is significantly expanding capacity on its Mid-Atlantic Crossing, South American Crossing and Pan American Crossing undersea fibre-optic cable systems to meet rapidly growing demand for Internet Protocol and Ethernet transport among its enterprise, carrier and service provider customers. These overbuilds will enhance connectivity between Latin America, North America and Europe and will be rolled out over the next six months, with some segments ready for service as early as May 2010.

Capgemini Group - together with Sogeti – has announced the launch of a new suite of services that will help clients realise the business benefits of cloud computing and services.

NaviSite, a provider of cloud enabled enterprise-hosting and application-management services, has reported financial results for the second quarter fiscal year 2010, which ended on January 31, 2010.

On the eve of the first F1 practice session of the year, the Renault F1 Team have announced a major sponsorship deal with technology company Hewlett-Packard. The new agreement means the R30 cars will run with significant HP branding adorning the bodywork.

The team will also obtain access to HP technology in order to further develop simulation technologies on the back of HP High Performance Computing servers. Additionally HP will help the team to reduce its carbon footprint, by implementing 'greener' data centres, and utilising low-energy-consumption workstations.

Cisco Systems may soon be entering the containerised data centre business, Cisco executives have said. If and when Cisco launches an official product, the company will join several vendors, including IBM, SGI (formerly Rackable), and Sun, that have begun in the last few years to sell containerised data centres, which pack servers, storage, and networking equipment into standard shipping containers.

Datacenter demand in Asia has held up in the face of the economic slowdown, with cloud computing a strategic driver for datacenter development over the next few years, according to industry observers.

Adrian Dominic Ho, program manager for telecom, managed services, networking and outsourcing at IDC Asia-Pacific, said in an e-mail interview that demand for hosting services has remained fairly strong even during the downturn. "Here in Singapore, almost all the data centers are full and operating close to full capacity," he noted.

The Bloom box is a fuel cell that generates and delivers local electricity about twice as efficiently as the grid. It uses natural gas or bio-fuels to create electricity. Energy created by the Bloom box reduces carbon emissions in half or is completely carbon neutral with bio-fuels. Pairing the Bloom box with Alternative Energy sources creates predictable, viable and clean reliable energy.

AboveNet, a provider of high bandwidth connectivity solutions, has launched one of the industry's fastest, low latency end-to-end transatlantic connections between London and New York:

Trading firms and marketplace operators are wasting money on the big “monolithic” data centres they’re building, as electronic networks proliferate, market data explodes and volumes surge? That’s the contention of Ronald H. Bowman Jr., author of “The Green Guide to Power: Thinking Outside the Grid” and “Business Continuity Planning for Data Centers and Systems: A Strategic Implementation Guide.”

SunGard has reported that revenue for the full-year 2009 was US$5.51 billion, down 2% from 2008. Adjusted EBITDA was US$1.50 billion, down 7% from 2008. Adjusted income from operations was US$1.16 billion, down 5% from 2008.

SunGard reported a loss from operations of US$576 million for the full-year 2009, compared to income from operations of US$470 million for the full-year 2008. The reported loss from operations in 2009 includes a noncash write-down of goodwill in SunGard’s Availability Services business of US$1.13 billion.

Source: Business Wire

Extreme Networks has released two new data centre class switches, as part off its drive to provide infrastructure for virtualized data centres. The two new switches, the BlackDiamond 8900-xl modules and Summit X480 stackable switches, are intended to provide the scalability and performance required to meet rapidly expanding demand for network bandwidth and resources.

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.

IBM has announced plans to go online with its commercial cloud service for software development and testing. IBM, which already delivers a test and development cloud, is now allowing enterprise and government clients to test and develop on an IBM Cloud. Following a successful beta program, IBM is working with partners in cloud management, cloud security and software development and testing support to provide businesses with a unique mix of flexibility, scalability, enterprise-grade security and control for development and test on the IBM Cloud.

Google and a group of telecommunications companies are about ready to turn on a fast Internet cable running under the Pacific Ocean from the US to Japan, increasing bandwidth by about 20% and giving Google its own connection to Asia. The Unity Consortium, which consists of Google, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel, has nearly completed the testing of the US$300 million project. Internet users in Asia will start seeing faster Internet speeds over the next several months from the new cable, which has the potential to create a 7.68Tbps connection under the Pacific.

The worldwide enterprise switch market is beginning to pull clear of the recession, staging a recovery in the fourth quarter of 2009 despite an overall yearly decline of 14.9%, according to a report by analyst firm Canalys. During the fourth quarter of 2009 sales grew 15.5% against Q3 sales, contributing to overall sales figures for the year of us$21.7 billion.

The year had mixed fortunes for the leading switch companies. Market leader Cisco saw its market share decline by 4.7% to 68.1% in 2009, while HP increased its position by 3.2% to 8%.

Source:V3

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.

When IT managers talk shop, the conversation usually focuses on servers, storage, virtualization, I/O speeds and other such topics. But all of that would be for naught without the physical cables that tie everything together in a data centre. Cabling is often taken for granted by everyone except the network administrator and IT manager.

Trading firms stocked with the fastest computers money can buy have started bumping into an older and more basic problem: They're running out of power. In the never-ending race to increase speed, trading companies have invested in the newest and fastest servers and paid to rent space in data centres located near the stock exchanges' computers to get their orders executed as rapidly as possible. Those data centres used to run out of space, as companies jostled to cram big servers onto their racks.

According to BroadGroup Consulting, data centre containerisation is becoming more mainstream and generally accepted in the industry due to its space savings, rapid deployment and lower capital costs. Critical backup power systems manufacturer Active Power continues to benefit from this positive trend as it generates traction with its PowerHouse solution, a containerised power and cooling infrastructure optimised for the needs of this data centre application.

Faced with shrinking operational budgets and increased data demands, more companies are turning to Managed Private Cloud as a means of balancing post-recession finances and gaining competitive edge. To help them, managed cloud hosting specialists, DediPower, is offering UK companies a fast-track to achieving real enterprise ready Private Cloud Hosting.

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

In what is being described by Dell as a timely attempt to benefit from the customers’ inclination towards development of private cloud computing platforms inside their corporate data centres, the company, has, introduced a collection of hardware software and services that support cloud computing infrastructures.

The long-awaited demerger of Cable & Wireless took effect on Friday, with investors sending the respective companies to the top of FTSE 100 risers' and fallers' charts. The Worldwide division, the corporate telecoms services division, climbed 20.45p, or 27 per cent, to 95.45p on its debut. But Cable & Wireless Communications, which operates a string of 38 telecoms businesses stretching from Montserrat to Macau, was the largest faller in the FTSE 100 after opening 0.75p lower at 58p.

CSF Group, the Malaysian data centre company, launched this week on AIM, giving the company a market capitalisation of GBP88m and making it the largest new listing on the exchange by an Asian company in more than a year. Raising more than GBP28m (USD42m) in a new share issue  which will be used by the company to build a new data centre facility and expand the business throughout South-east Asia.

IT executives are growing overly comfortable with PUE at a time when a growing chorus of voices are warning against its enshrinement as the standard for energy use. At the moment, the EPA is firmly in PUE's corner. The agency is on the verge of releasing a Portfolio Manager tool that will be used to gauge individual data centres' qualifications under the Energy Star program.

Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end connectivity solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, announced that technology will fuel a new breed of next-gen data centres. Specifically, its ConnectX-2 family of adapters leverages TSMC’s PowerTrim service to achieve best in class power performance of 4.5W for dual 10GbE ports.

Greenpeace is calling on technology giants like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to power their data centres with renewable energy sources. Their electricity often comes from utility companies which generate power from burning coal, says the group. Greenpeace estimates that data centres will use 1,963 billion kilowatt hours of electricity by 2020. That is more than the power currently consumed by France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined, says the campaigner.

Adobe Systems has announced the opening of the first of three new data centres for Adobe Business Catalyst service, its platform of hosted services for professional Web designers delivering powerful online businesses without having to do back-end coding. The North American data centre is now accepting new customers, with data centres in Europe and Asia Pacific expected to open within the next two months.