Terremark Secures GSA Approval

Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) said this week that one of its subsidiaries, Terremark Federal Group, has been awarded a United States General Services Administration (GSA) schedule contract for secure colocation services. The approval from the GSA should position Terremark to expand its government business.

“Being awarded GSA schedule status means we are, in a sense, pre-approved to offer secure colocation services to federal agencies,” said Terremark spokesman Xavier Gonzalez. “The significance from our perspective is that Terremark Federal Group is the only provider of colocation services that meets the government’s stringent SCIF standards for secure facilities.”

Did Google Shelve Its Portable Data Center?

Google (GOOG) made some headlines last month when it was awarded a U.S. patent for a portable data center in a shipping container, prompting discussion of how it might use a “data center in a box,” as well as what the patent might mean for similar products from Sun Microsystems (JAVAD) and Rackable (RACK). Google’s interest in containerized data centers have been the focus of much speculation since PBS columnist Robert X. Cringley wrote about the effort in 2005.

It turns out that one of the inventors listed on the Google patent, William Whitted, has said publicly that the portable data center project has been discontinued. Whitted, who retired from Google in 2005, spoke about the project in a San Francisco Chronicle story in January of this year. Whitted’s comments were part of a much longer profile about Google retirees, and weren’t widely noticed at the time. Here’s what the Chron reported:

“One of the ideas (Whitted) championed was to build portable data centers in cargo containers, a project Google tested in its headquarters parking lot. But managers were too timid to pack in enough servers, so the experiment was not cost-effective and was ultimately canceled, he said.”

We doubt this will end speculation about Google’s portable data centers, but it’s a data point worth noting.

Netcraft: Internet Nears 150 Million Sites

The Netcraft Web Server survey, which has long been one of the leading benchmarks of Internet growth, has reached 150 million sites. Actually, 149,784,002 sites, to be exact. What’s notable about this growth is that it comes barely a year after the Netcraft survey topped 100 million sites for the first time. That increase has been driven by enormous growth at the blogging services tracked by Netcraft, including Blogger and Microsoft Spaces.

If you’re not familiar with Netcraft, you should spend some time exploring their site, as there’s lots of useful data. I worked with Netcraft for three years before switching full-time to Data Center Knowledge in September. I primarily focused on writing research reports and articles for the Netcraft blog, and also worked with technology media. The day the Web Server Survey hit the 100 million site milestone was an interesting one, as I wound up on CNN.

It’s hard to believe that just a year later, the survey is on the cusp of 150 million. These benchmarks always trigger debates about the best way to measure Internet growth, but Netcraft is a popular baseline, as its survey has been conducted every month since August 1995, when there were 18,000 sites and the NCSA web server had a 57 percent share.

Stargate Sets Opening of Chicago Site

Stargate Colocation will officially open its new 86,000 square foot data center in Oak Brook, Illinois with an open house on Dec. 4, the company said this week. The StarGate facility is the latest in a series of data center announcements and openings in the busy Chicago market. The new facility will hold up 2,200 cabinets, with a hot-aisle containment system for temperature control that will allow it to host high-density blade server installations.

Stargate will offer tours of the new data center at 3 pm. You can register online or check out a virtual tour of the facility on the company’s web site at Stargate.com (which is one of the Web’s oldest domains, registered in August 1986).

Digital Realty’s 225 Megawatt Data Center

Earlier this month Digital Realty Trust told securities analysts that its top 15 properties had a total capacity of 733 megawatts of utility power – an average of nearly 49 megawatts per facility. The company provided additional detail in an SEC filing that included its latest investor presentation, itemizing the power capacity for each of those 15 sites. Nearly a third of that power capacity is found at a single data center campus in Northern Virginia.

Digital Realty (DLR) says its project on Devin Shafron Road in Ashburn has 225 megawatts of power capacity. The project, originally known as the Loudoun Exchange, currently has three buildings with a total square footage of 432,000 square feet. Digital Realty bought the site in March for $62.5 million. Forty percent of the existing space is leased by tenants including Amazon (AMZN), and the remainder is being developed over time. A Dominion Power substation is located adjacent to the property. The site plan by the original developer, Genisus, included plans for a second phase of three additional buildings totaling 318,000 square feet.

Intuit Buys Homestead for $170 Million

Remember Homestead? In the dot-com era it offered free ad-supported web sites, and along with competitors GeoCities and Angelfire provided starter sites for many webmasters in training. Homestead has since switched to paid hosting and focused on leveraging its user-friendly web-based sitebuilder tools. Today Homestead was acquired by Intuit (INTU) for $170 million.

Intuit’s aim is to use Homestead’s software to help its customers build e-commerce stores, a competitive market in which Yahoo Small Business (YHOO) is the market leader and Go Daddy and Network Solutions are growing fast. Intuit has the advantage of a large base of existing small business customers using its Quicken and QuickBooks financial software.

“This acquisition supports our growth strategy in small business by addressing an underserved need, and continues Intuit’s move beyond financial management solutions into helping small businesses solve other important problems,” said Brad Smith, senior vice president of Intuit’s small business group. “Homestead helps us solve one of small businesses’ highest priorities

Report: Dataside in Acquisition Talks

Fast-growing Dallas colocation specialist Dataside is in talks to be acquired, according to a report in the Dallas Business Journal (summary only). Dataside President and CEO Jim deVenny confirmed that the company is in negotiations with potential suitors, but didn’t name the potential acquirer(s). The report said the deal price may be in the $100 million range.

“There has been a great deal of activity and interest in Dataside,” deVenny said. “We are in serious discussions with some people as we speak.” Dataside is working with Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin, a large investment bank with a Dallas office.

Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia

Microsoft is discussing plans to build a data center in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Siberia. The facility will be able to hold 10,000 servers, according to Birger Steen, the head of Microsoft’s Russian and CIS business unit. The discussions were outlined in a press briefing Friday and reported by Russian news outlets Kommersant and Cnews.

The project appears to be smaller in scope than recently announced Microsoft data center projects in Dublin, Ireland and the Chicago area, and no budget was announced (although some Russian media sources cited the $500 million number for the other projects). No specific site has been selected yet, but Microsoft is said to be considering locations in between Irkutsk and Angarsk, two cities north of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia.

UPDATE: We have received an additional statement from Microsoft: “The Memorandum of Understanding signed with the Irkutsk regional government aimed to expand IT use in the government sector and launch several training programs locally,” said Evgeny Danilov, Microsoft Russia PR director. “A data center was one of the topics of negotiation with the Irkutsk regional administration, where the parties agreed to continue discussions later. Though Microsoft Russia is working on potential data centre construction in Russia, we are still far from final site selection.”

HSBC Postpones NY Data Center Project

HSBC has postponed a huge data center project in upstate New York, citing the “business climate.” The decision by HSBC is the first sign that recent losses in the subprime mortgage market may prompt major financial companies to reassess the pace of their data center construction spending.

HSBC (HBC) left open the possibility that it may eventually build a data center in Niagara County, and local officials are hoping the decision is based on site location issues, rather than a wholesale decision to curtail the project. In May HSBC confirmed its plans to build a $139 million data center, to be followed by ongoing spending of $55 million a year over 15 years for a total investment of nearly $1 billion.

But early this month the bank decided not to buy the land it had targeted for the development in the small farm town of Cambria (pop. 5,000). After several weeks of rumors, HSBC issued a statement last week to local media.

“Given the current overall business climate, we are not proceeding at the original development pace we had planned for our data center in Niagara County, New York,” said the statement from HSBC spokesperson Francine Minadeo. “We remain in the planning phase and will take appropriate steps to update local officials and surrounding communities as is necessary and appropriate.”