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DuPont Fabros Pays $58 Million for AOL Center
DuPont Fabros, the Washington, D.C.-based technology real estate specialist, has paid $58 million to acquire a 230,000 square foot northern Virginia data center built by America Online, the Washington Post reports. DuPont Fabros, which recently sold five data centers to Digital Realty Trust for $92 million, expects to have a tenant for the facility by the fall.
The Post also reports that Fortress Technologies (formerly DataCentersNow) has leased its Manassas site, which has been vacant since 2001.
July 28, 2005
Alienware Enters Rackmount Server Market
Ars Technica reports that Alienware, best known for making high-end gaming PCs, is entering the market for rackmount servers. Its product line has been dubbed Hivemind Rack Servers.
Posted by Rich Miller 
July 28, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
Digital Realty Stock Sales Raises $167.8 Million
Digital Realty Trust, Inc. said this week that it raised $167.8 million in a secondary stock sale that included shares of both common and preferred stock. The company's shares were trading at $18.69 this afternoon, continuing an upward climb from about $14 a share three months ago. DRT's 33 enterprise data center properties span approximately 7.8 million net rentable square feet, excluding space held for redevelopment.
Posted by Rich Miller July 28, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
July 13, 2005
Equinix Exchanges to Offer 10 Gigabit Ethernet
Equinix, Inc. will roll out 10 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities on the company’s Equinix Exchange service in Washington D.C., Silicon Valley, Chicago and New York by the end of 2005, the company said yesterday. The 10 Gigabit Ethernet enhancement enables networks, content companies, and content delivery networks using the service to increase their network data exchange capacity by a factor of ten.
The upgrade comes in response to strong demand for network and content peering service at Equinix, which has seen annual revenue grew by more than 50 percent in 2004. The initial customers migrating to the new service will be Limelight Networks, Time Warner Telecom, and nLayer. Equinix Exchange provides a central switching fabric for ISP and content peering, reducing transit costs by allowing Equinix customers to connect directly to each other, eliminating intermediate network backbones.
Posted by Rich Miller July 13, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
July 12, 2005
Vericenter Hosting NASA Shuttle Site
Houston managed hosting frim Vericenter is using tomorrow's launch of the Space Shuttle discovery as an opportunity to crow a little bit about providing NASA's data center infrastructure. VeriCenter manages 50 NASA servers and 2 million NASA Web pages in its seven U.S. data centers, including content for NASA Headquarters, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Marshall Space Flight Center. For last week's web coverage of the Deep Impact encounter with a comet, NASA's site successfully handled 8 million visitors and more than 1 billion hits to NASA Web sites in a 24-hour period.
"With NASA facing unprecedented demand for Web site access, VeriCenter has employed a utility computing strategy to handle spikes in Web traffic and to ensure that millions of space buffs can follow these historic events," said Gray Hall, president and CEO of VeriCenter.
Posted by Rich Miller July 12, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
IBM Unveils Chilled Water Cooling Plans
IBM has unveiled its plans for an eServer Rear Door Heat eXchanger - already being dubbed "Cool Blue" - that will use chilled water to cool high-density cabinets using water from a data center's air conditioning system.
As blade servers become more commonplace and enterprises look to consolidate their data center operations, IT managers are getting used to the idea of having water and servers in physical proximity. While water-chilled systems were common in the mainframe era, most modern data centers have been designed to keep water off the raised floor area, opting for halon fire suppression systems instead of sprinklers.
Posted by Rich Miller July 12, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
July 07, 2005
Telehouse, CIBER Form Alliance
Colocation pioneer Telehouse said today that it will partner with CIBER, Inc., which will lease space in Telehouse's Staten Island data center facility and provide its expertise in application development and maintenance, server and database management and help desk support.
"Working with CIBER immediately makes us an even more diverse company," said Atsushi Iizuka, Vice President of Sales and Marketing of Telehouse. "We see activity in the IT marketplace significantly escalating. CIBER's global reach in the corporate and government sectors and its extensive selection of world-class services mmediately helps us meet that demand. Our clients instantly benefit from CIBER and Telehouse working together."
"Telehouse is a world-class data center facility with most impressive security and support services," said Mark Perlstein, Vice President and Area Director, CIBER IT Operations for New Jersey and NYC. "Locating at Telehouse and partnering with them enables us to offer our clients the benefits of one of the country's most secure locations. This positions us to maintain our business growth pattern and expand into new opportunities offered to us via Telehouse."
Posted by Rich Miller July 07, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
The Death Star of Data Centers
Information Week looks at LucasFilm's $350 million technology center, which it describes as a "development epicenter for movies, special effects, and digital gaming." The facilities at the Skywalker Ranch involve some heavy duty hardware and bandwidth:
Industrial Light & Magic's new office space claims to have the largest state-of-the-art high-performance data center in the industry, with 600 miles of cable that connect visual-effects artists' desktops via a 1-Gbit network to a 10-Gbit backbone network linked to the data center, 10 times more bandwidth than the former offices. At the former studio in San Rafael, Calif., artists had 100 Mbps to the desktop and 1-Gbit backbone. A new 13,500-square-foot data center will manage Industrial Light & Magic's digital images around the clock, using more than 3,500 high-end Advanced Micro Devices Inc. computer processors.Read the story for more.
Posted by Rich Miller July 07, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
Feds To Consolidate 22 Medicare Data Centers
The government's Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is planning to consolidate 22 data center sites into four enterprise facilities, and is seeking proposals for the project, according to GCN, which covers the government computing sector. The consolidation of large and far-flung networks is a major trend, enabled by advances in equipment miniaturization (especially blade servers) and data center design. Expect to see more of these kind of stories in months to come.
Posted by Rich Miller July 07, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
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