According to the International Data Corporation's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market decreased 7.2% year over year to US$14.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011. This was the first quarterly decline in factory revenue in two years. Worldwide server shipments increased 2.0% to 2.2 million units in 4Q11 when compared with the year-ago period. For the full year 2011, worldwide server revenue increased 5.8% to US$52.3 billion when compared to 2010, while worldwide unit shipments increased 4.2% to 8.3 million units.

In this article, Jonathan Heap, Managing Director of Expect Solutions examines the issue of Infrastructure Security.

Indian conglomerate Tata Communications Ltd has confirmed speculation that it is considering a possible purchase of Cable & Wireless Worldwide (C&WW) plc. The acquisition, if it were to go ahead, would give Tata a foothold in the UK communications sector, expanding its international fibre optic cable network and giving it a lot of cable within the UK.

Microsoft has published commissioned research from analyst firm IDC indicating that cloud computing will create nearly 14 million new jobs globally by 2015. IDC’s research predicts revenues from cloud innovation could reach US$1.1 trillion per year by 2015, which, combined with cloud efficiencies, will drive significant organizational reinvestment and job growth.

Google is focusing on wind-power purchases to reduce emissions, even as it devotes most of its renewable energy investments to sun-related projects, a trade-off aimed at reining in costs as the company seeks higher returns. Bloomberg reports that Google drew 30 % of the energy it consumed last year from renewable sources, virtually all of it from wind, up from 19% a year earlier. Yet of the US$917 million that the company has invested in renewable-energy projects, about two-thirds—or US$622 million —is channelled toward solar.

Intel has announced the Xeon E5-2600 processors for 2- and 4-socket servers, which is the company's first major chip upgrade for industry standard x86 servers in close to two years.

Fujitsu has announced global availability of the next generation PRIMERGY dual-socket x86 servers, designed to set a new standard in versatility, scalability and cost-efficiency. Meeting a wide range of tomorrow's IT demands while achieving a fast return-on-investment today, the comprehensive new line-up of servers deliver a leap forward in performance and modularity.

IT considerations are not given adequate attention in the due diligence prior to mergers and acquisitions, according to research from Ernst & Young. As a result, said E&Y, deals can lead to problems further down the line. E&Y questioned 220 senior corporate and private equity executives across Europe and found that only half the respondents conducted separate pre-deal IT diligence for their last transaction.

NextiraOne has launched a new data centre offering based on Cisco's latest UCS range of servers, built on Xeon E5-2600 processors. The recently announced servers from Cisco are the B200 M3, C220 M3 and C240 M3, offering up to eight times the memory capacity and four times the I/O compared to previous ICS servers.

NextiraOne will use the new servers to support all of its cloud and virtualisation solutions, including the VDI/VXI offer, combining data, voice and video applications on a single device.

Source: Telecom Paper

The Green Grid has updated its free “cooling maps” to help data centre operators and owners take advantage of free cooling all year round for their facilities, thereby reducing energy costs. The updated free cooling maps now take into account the latest guidelines from ASHRAE (the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air conditioning Engineers), regarding the “Recommended” and “Allowable” temperature and humidity of data centres and IT equipment.

Zorawar Singh, senior vice president and general manager of HP's cloud services department, told The New York Times's Bits blog on Friday that HP is "not just building a cloud for infrastructure". Rather, HP wants to include more business-focused features on a platform filled with third-party apps and services. HP also plans to entice at least developers over to the platform with support and tools for the most common software languages, such as Ruby and Java.

HP Sverige has announced that SKF has renewed its global IT outsourcing contract with HP Enterprise Services for an additional five years. Under the new agreement, HP will transform SKF's applications and infrastructure to improve IT services delivery for 20,000 users in 42 countries.

SKF is a leading global supplier of bearings, seals, mechatronics, lubrication systems and related services. Its customers include OEM and end-users in many industries worldwide.

Cisco has revealed plans to buy NDS, a UK-based pay-TV technology company, for approximately US$5bn. NDS, which is headquartered in Staines, provides broadcasters with secure video delivery, digital rights management and other services. The assets brought in under the deal will let Cisco strengthen its own Videoscape content-delivery platform, the networking giant said in its announcement last Thursday.

Zayo Group and AboveNet, have announced that their boards of directors have approved a definitive agreement under which Zayo will acquire AboveNet for approximately US$2.2 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, each share of AboveNet common stock issued and outstanding immediately prior to the transaction will be entitled to receive US$84.00 per share in cash, representing a 13% premium over AboveNet’s closing price on March 16, 2012 and a 21% premium over the average closing stock price for the past 60 days.

Maverick fuel-cell maker Bloom Energy has turned its focus to data centres, after the appointment of Peter Gross, who joined the company last week as the vice president of Mission Critical Systems. Previously Gross was a co-founder and CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, an engineering firm dedicated to the design and operation of data centres.

Diversified industrial manufacturer Eaton has announced a cooperative agreement with STULZ Air Technology Systems. Through this agreement, Eaton will expand its data centre product portfolio by offering STULZ cooling technologies to its customers. Eaton’s enclosure, containment, and power management systems, paired with in-row and perimeter cooling solutions from STULZ, can enhance energy efficiency and reduce operating expenses in even the most challenging data centre environments.

Despite vendor pledges to support existing or developing industry standards, users are expected to deploy single-vendor data centre and cloud switching fabrics from their primary suppliers.

International Data Corporation has released its “Big Data technology and services forecast” predicting that Big Data market will grow from US$3.2 billion in 2010 to US$16.9 billion in 2015, a compounded annual growth rate of 40% and “growth of individual segments from 27.3% for servers and 34.2% for software to 61.4% for storage”.

Global sales of data centre network equipment grew 9% sequentially in 4Q11, to $2.36 billion, finds market research firm Infonetics Research. In its fourth quarter (4Q11) report, the research firm also finds that from the year-ago fourth quarter, the data centre network equipment market is up a strong 15% and for the full year 2011, data centre gear totalled US$8.4 billion, up 9% from the previous year.

Tata Communications has proposed to divest its international data centre business to a subsidiary to unlock its value and enable it to raise funds without putting a strain on the parent company. TCL has hired several organizations to deal with the matter, including McKinsey and Co. for strategy and business plans, Ernst and Young for structure and taxation issues, Kanga and Co. to assess real estate options, State Bank of India for fairness opinion, and Khaitan and Co. for companies Act-related issues.

Digital Realty Trust is seeking new development sites where it can add inventory to meet existing demand in markets both nationally and in places like Amsterdam and Paris.

GlobeSt.com recently chatted with Michael Foust, CEO of the company about the company, which has been busy lately, and doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon—for 2012, the firm is targeting US$300 million to US$400 million of new acquisitions of income producing properties at an average cap rate range of 8% to 8.5%—ideally with a value-add component.

Most solution providers by now have taken note of the fact that there are lots of changes taking place these days in the data centre. Not only are whole data centres being consolidated, the job functions are evolving thanks to tighter integration across the server, storage and networking components that make up the data centre.

While the topic of free air cooling and the multitude of methods that are being tried to find ways to cool data centre servers at a minimal cost in power and impact on the environment gets the lion’s share of public notice, it’s not the only technique that’s getting examined, especially since it requires a data centre that was designed from the ground up or completely re-engineered in order to make use of environment cooling factors.