Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:
HP selected by U.S. Special Operations. HP (HPQ) announced it has been awarded a four-year, $68.1 million data center services contract by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). The agreement calls for HP to support special operations warfighters in accomplishing their world-wide missions. This will be achieved via data center management support services, and supporting server and storage computing environments. “The volume of stored information in the world has doubled in the last few years,” said Dennis Stolkey, senior vice president and general manager, U.S. Public Sector, HP Enterprise Services. “HP leads the industry in data center consolidation and transformation, enabling greater efficiencies and more secure information sharing.” HP also recently announced that Coca-Cola FEMSA, S.A.B. de C.V., the largest Coca Cola bottler in the world, has signed a five-year technology outsourcing services contract to build and manage an HP Converged Infrastructure. HP will help Coca-Cola FEMSA consolidate 348 locations to a single data center in Mexico and migrate business-critical SAP applications and server monitoring and management to HP Best Shore locations in Brazil and Argentina.
Arista launches 7050 Series. Arista Networks introduced the Arista 7050 Series, a 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switching system that delivers 1.28 Terabits of switching performance at under 2 watts per 10GbE interface. Dynamically allocated deep packet buffers and support for Data Center Bridging make the Arista 7050 Series an ideal choice for interconnecting storage devices and big data applications such as Hadoop. "The new 7050 Series delivers the lowest power draw per port of any 10GbE switch, uses the latest in silicon technologies, delivering the highest-density with twice the routing scale of competing products, in our one rack unit networking platform," said Jeff Hirschman vice president of hardware engineering and manufacturing at Arista. "With the 7050, our customers can continue to meet and exceed the demands of 10GbE data centers, dense virtualization, and big data warehousing deployments." The first Arista switch to utilize the Broadcom Trident+ switching silicon, the 7050-64 starts at $29,995 and is available immediately.
Verizon deploys 100G on U.S. backbone. Verizon (VZ) announced plans to deploy 100G (gigabits per second) technology on selected segments of its U.S. backbone network by the end of the second quarter of 2011, bringing customers the benefit of greatly increased speed and performance for everything from cloud-based enterprise applications to video streaming. The network segments include Chicago to New York, Sacramento to Los Angeles and Minneapolis to Kansas City. Similar to their European deployment earlier this year Verizon will be utilize Juniper routers and Ciena's 100G coherent optical transport solution. "Advancing to 100G is a significant step in strengthening our global IP network to handle the bandwidth demands of our customers - whether it's large enterprises or the average consumer. Besides greater scalability and network efficiencies, we also expect 100G deployment to improve latency on a route-by-route basis," said Ihab Tarazi, vice president of network planning at Verizon.
