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RightScale boosts distribution with Korean partnership.  RightScale announced it has formed a partnership with Korean Internet Neutral eXchange (KINX) to be a RightScale authorized distributor in Korea. The partnership makes KINX a reseller of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform and will allow Korean companies to manage their applications on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds. Customers will also have access to the RightScale MultiCloud Marketplace, which includes pre-built cloud-ready server templates, scripts, and complete architectures published by RightScale, Independent Software Vendors, and Systems Integration partners. “This partnership is an important part of our Asia Pacific strategy,” said Josh Fraser, Senior Vice President of Business Development at RightScale. “KINX’s broad reach in Korea will further extend our business, and give our Korean customers a trusted local partner. We look forward to supporting KINX’s growing cloud services.”

EvoSwitch adds 100GE AMS-IX backbone location. EvoSwitched announced that it  has been added to the list of colocation providers with an AMS-IX Point of Presence (PoP). After becoming an AMS-IX reselling partner in 2010 EvoSwitch will also be the first data center of its kind for which AMS-IX uses a single 100GE backbone connection. AMS-IX launched its 100GE ports last year. The increase in capacity was a step in preparation to the traffic peaks many Internet networks and providers will be facing. “The greater Amsterdam region is growing fast and attracting more and more IP density. This demand is partially created by companies such as EvoSwitch and its customers,” says Job Witteman, CEO of AMS-IX. “It is an impressive step forward to both the region and the collocation market that EvoSwitch’s Green and e-efficient datacenter will roll out a 100GE connection on a full basis, including backbone.” EvoSwitch’s AMS-IX PoP will go live in February 2012

Ciena selected by UK Operator Vaioni.  Ciena Corporation (CIEN) announced that Vaioni, the UK’s largest Ethernet aggregator, is deploying a range of Ciena’s Carrier Ethernet solutions as part of its enhanced Ethernet service offerings to enterprises, carriers and cloud providers across the country. After a detailed analysis and evaluation Vaioni selected Ciena’s Carrier Ethernet Service Delivery Portfolio for all network infrastructure equipment across an aggregated Ethernet fabric in the UK that also spans the globe. Vaioni selected Ciean’s 3916, 3920 and 3930 Service Delivery switches and 5150 Service Aggregation switch. “As our business grows and our customers demand faster and more effective service turn-up than ever before, the low-touch provisioning model of Ciena’s Carrier Ethernet platforms allows us to accelerate deployment times and significantly lower the cost of bringing new customers onto our network,” said Sachin Vaish, managing director at Vaioni.  ”Coupled with the reliability and scalability inherent in Ciena’s portfolio, these benefits are key in enabling us to offer industry-leading Service Level Agreements to our demanding customers and thrive in an increasingly competitive market. We will be the only UK operator to offer a full Carrier Ethernet proposition coupled with complete autonomy from Telecoms Carriers.”

Salesforce.com opens Tokyo data center. Salesforce.com (CRM) and NTT Communications announced today that salesforce.com’s Tokyo data center has gone live. Housed in a NTT  data center, the Tokyo data center will support adoption of salesforce.com’s social enterprise services among the company’s rapidly growing customer base across Japan and Asia Pacific. “Salesforce.com continues to expand its infrastructure to support the adoption of the social enterprise among our rapidly growing global customer base,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “The opening of our Tokyo data center with our trusted partner NTT Communications represents a long-term commitment to our customers across Japan and Asia Pacific.”

Telx selected by Justin.tv.  Telx announced that Justin.tv has selected Telx as its mission-critical infrastructure colocation provider for the launch of TwitchTV, a new online gaming community. Already a customer in the Telx San Francisco C3 Cloud Connection Center, Justin.tv has expanded its vital gaming infrastructure in this key location, leveraging an industry-leading community of telecommunications carriers and ISPs. Justin.tv lets users stream video content live to the Internet from their webcams and mobile phones. “While Justin.tv is powered by several global data centers, Telx’s San Francisco facility is the ‘brains’ of our infrastructure operations,” said Jonathan Shipman, Director of Operations, Justin.tv.  ”Telx has been a vital partner for us as we execute our growth strategy to include the gaming customer base. We have leveraged the large community of network providers Telx offers in this location for three years. When it came time to launch our online gaming community, TwitchTV, we were able to expand our presence with Telx in an organized, cost-effective way.

Internap opens Dallas Fort Worth data center.  Internap Network Services (INAP) announced the official opening of its new data center in the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) market, located in Plano, Texas. The DFW facility offers 55,000 square feet of floor space and will provide access to Internap’s platform of IT Infrastructure services, including managed hosting and colocation, as well as its global, route-optimized Performance IP service. An exclusive open house and networking event at the facility will be held on December 15th for facility tours.  A virtual tour of the facility can be viewed here.  “The new Internap DFW facility has been designed from the ground up to serve the advanced IT Infrastructure demands of enterprises in the DFW area and beyond – from its flexible, high-performance platform that can scale on demand with customers’ business needs to cutting-edge power and cooling capabilities,” said Mike Higgins, senior vice president of data center services at Internap. “With this opening, Internap also continues to deliver on our strategy to build a geographically diverse footprint of premium, company-owned data centers in key markets.”

Peak 10 selected by iPractice Group.  Peak 10 announced today that it is delivering cloud and managed services to Nashville-based healthcare technology company iPractice Group. iPractice will utilize Peak 10′s cloud solutions and managed services to deliver its all-inclusive IT services for independent medical practices. “We chose Peak 10 because the company has a great reputation in the market, offers unparalleled expertise and was able to provide us with a comprehensive portfolio of services,” said Jason Morgan, iPractice Group’s chief operating officer. “Peak 10’s interconnected network of data centers and its numerous compliance certifications will be a valuable enhancement to our IT infrastructure.”

In late September of this year Google announced a major expansion of its infrastructure in Asia with an investment of $100 million to build new data centers in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The announcement for the Hong Kong data center came as Google held a groundbreaking ceremony for the 2.7 hectare site of the planned facility. The $300 million investment encompasses land, construction and technical equipment. It will be located in the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate in Kowloon. Google expects to hire 25 full-time staff.

Despite the political challenges in Southeast Asia, Google says it is seeing significant growth and locating these data centers in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong is an important next stage for the company’s investment in the region.

“We’re working as quickly as we can to get this facility operational so we can keep up with rapid growth in capacity demand across the region,” said Simon Chang, head of Google’s hardware operations in Asia. “Currently, we are targeting early 2013 to start bringing the facility online.”

Google has been developing plans and scouting locaitons for building data centers in Asia for some time now, as it has been talking with various government officials and buying undersea cable infrastructure.

Sanofi joins Platform Equinix.  Equinix (EQIX) announced that Sanofi, a global and diversified healthcare leader, has consolidated its data center operations in Asia-Pacific from six data centers into just one Equinix data center. Sanofi will use the Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data center to support business operations from a private cloud in order to provide a stable operating environment with higher levels of collaboration and performance. The 10GB dark fiber connectivity and high power density of up to 8kVA allows Sanofi to deploy a full range of software and business critical applications to its offices from a single location within Asia-Pacific. “We are pleased to have Sanofi join Platform Equinix and help the company to accelerate business collaboration while maintaining a competitive edge in the healthcare industry,” said Samuel Lee, president, Equinix Asia-Pacific..” This clearly demonstrates our capabilities to provide a high level of professional service and connectivity to customers across a wide range of industry verticals. Sanofi can further benefit with access to Equinix Marketplace, which allows businesses to create custom profiles, search for and discover new service providers and partners.”

Power Assure receives $1 million investment.  Power Assure announced that Dominion Energy Technologies, Inc., has invested $1 million in the company, joining ABB Technology Ventures, Good Energies, Point Judith Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson as investors in Power Assure. Dominion’s investment completes a $14.5 million round of series B financing, and brings the grand total of funds raised to $29.75 million. The additional funding will be used to expand Power Assure’s sales and marketing for continued growth of its data center infrastructure and energy management solutions. Dominion is the primary electric utility in northern Virginia, where data centers are major consumers of electricity. “Not only is Dominion one of the largest power companies in the country, they are also leading in the area of smart grid innovation,” said Brad Wurtz, president and CEO, Power Assure.  ”In order to help our customers connect to the smart grid and take advantage of the many revenue-generating services offered by the Independent System Operator’s (ISO’s), we have found a partner who can bring the skills and resources needed to execute quickly. Dominion has shown a determination to stay on the cutting edge.”

Radware announces fabric for ITaaS economy.  Radware (RDWR) announced the next phase of its Virtual Application Delivery Infrastructure (VADI) strategy featuring new application delivery controller (ADC) platforms, enhanced data center management and orchestration interoperability, complete support for leading hypervisors, and new AppShape technology to provide the industry’s first application delivery fabric. By implementing Radware ADC Fabric within virtual data centers and replacing traditional ADCs with vADC instances, IT managers can now assign a vADC instance per application, department or customer, essentially creating a fully virtualized application silo. Radware also announced AppShape, a new ADC Service for simplifying and optimizing application deployment with a holistic view from the application perspective. ”Radware recognizes not only the technological, but also the economic demands placed on enterprise and carrier data centers today,” said Avi Chesla, chief technology officer, Radware. “Through our VADI strategy, we now introduce a new application delivery abstraction layer technology which allows organizations to shape our application delivery tools to meet exactly their business needs, removing traditional complexities of ADC administration associated with networking, computing resources, high availability, security and more – letting companies to really focus only on their business’ application.

Savvis completes SSAE 16.  Savvis, a CenturyLink company announced that it has completed its annual Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) No. 16 and International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE) 3402 combined examination. The SSAE 16 Type II SOC 1 report encompasses selected Savvis systems and the suitability of the design and operating effectiveness of applicable controls. ”Completing the SSAE 16 requirements reflects our commitment to our clients and international security and control standards,” said Jeff Von Deylen, senior vice president, global operations and client services for Savvis. “This reinforces to our clients that we have the highest standards of processes, controls and procedures in place and can safely manage their IT needs.”

“We are very pleased to partner with NAB on this strategically important facility,” said Michael Foust, Chief Executive Officer for Digital Realty. “It represents both our long term customer commitment as well as our long term investment strategy in the Australian data centre market.”

“Melbourne, like Sydney, has a limited supply of resilient, scalable data centre space available to meet customer demand for these highly reliable, flexible and secure facilities,” said Kris Kumar, Regional Head, Asia Pacific, for Digital Realty Trust. “This project for NAB will be one of two Digital Realty Tier 3 certified data centres built in Australia, as defined by the Uptime Institute. The second Tier 3 certified facility will be our data centre at our Erskine Park development site in Sydney.”

Digital Realty (DLR) paid AU 4.1 million ($4.3 million US) to acquire 162 and 163 Radnor Drive, a 30,250 square meter development site. It was the second acquisition in Australia for the real estate investment trust, which bought a development site in Sydney in July. The company had no Asia-Pacific data centers until last November, when it purchased a facility in Singapore. It has already leased more than 70,000 square feet of space, including a data center for Adobe Systems (ADBE).

VCE Teams with SAP.  VCE announced Monday that it has become a SAP global technology partner, through which it will cooperate with SAP AG to help customers deploy the latest virtualization and cloud technologies to simplify and automate their mission-critical applications. Running on VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platforms VCE will work closely with SAP to provide services and support for customer SAP applications. “SAP and VCE are working together to help our mutual customers optimize their SAP solutions on the VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platform to transform business processes,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, Business Development and Strategic Alliances at SAP.  “This global technology partnership provides a framework for a variety of collaborative efforts designed to bring together the cloud and virtualization technologies enabled by VCE converged infrastructure with SAP software and applications to help customers be more efficient and lower costs.”

Mexico’s Alestra uses VCE Foundation.  At Cisco Live! Mexico IT and telecom company Alestra announced it will offer cloud services to Mexican customers based on VBlock Infrastructure Platforms, which integrate best-of-breed technology from Cisco, EMC and VMware into a highly automated and standardized IT infrastructure. The cloud computing capabilities will allow Alestra to expand its value-added services portfolio, to include an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solution for virtual computing, storage  and disaster recovery capabilities through its Enterprise C-Computing service. ”Cisco has been providing technology for Alestra since its first MPLS and IP network  deployment, and now Cisco is able to support it to enhance its  portfolio with a new line of business at the same time we still supporting its network to ensure reliability, capacity, flexibility and resilience to Alestra end customers,” said Alejandro Ceballos, from Cisco Mexico. “The  VBlock platform will help Alestra accelerate its ability to realize the benefits of pervasive virtualization and private cloud infrastructure.” Alestra’s infrastructure includes two VBlock interconnected platforms, one  to be deployed in  Monterrey and one  in Guadalajara.

Juniper selected by WI-Manx.  Juniper Networks (JNPR) announced that Wi-Manx, an Isle of Man communications and IT solution provider, has selected Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches and MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers as the backbone for its new state-of-the-art data center and IPv6 Network. ”This data center is critical to our strategy of building on international success and becoming a truly global player in the data center market, enabling us to offer the very latest technology at a competitive rate,” said Joe Hughes, chief technical officer, Wi-Manx. From the new data center, Wi-Manx will launch a comprehensive range of hosting services including dedicated servers, co-location solutions, virtual servers, cloud hosting, complex hosting, domain-name and e-mail services.

Alcatel-Lucent and China Unicom partner.  Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and China Unicom, one of the country’s major communications service providers, have announced plans to launch one of the largest fiber broadband access networks to date in China. The Alcatel-Lucent Gigabit Passive Optical Networking (GPON) platform will be used to ensure future capacity and speed demands are met. With this deployment, China Unicom will be able to offer subscribers speeds of up to 100 Megabits-per-second, all with guaranteed quality of service levels providing great flexibility to a wide range of consumer and business services including IPTV, video on demand, and voice over IP (VoIP). “This project represents another major milestone in the rapid expansion of broadband in China. It also demonstrates our strong and growing leadership position in the FTTx market as we help accelerate availability of superfast broadband throughout China,” said Rajeev Singh-Molares, President, Asia-Pacific at Alcatel-Lucent.

This new facility is being built in response to increasing demand envisioned in the Tokyo area and will offer NTT Com’s cloud services to customers in Japan and worldwide through virtualized networks using the OpenFlow standard to enable flexible management of system configurations.

Engineered to Survive Major Earthquakes

Mindful of the huge earthquake and tsunami that his Japan this year,  NTT has engineered the facility with high-level defenses against natural disasters. That includes a seismic-isolation architecture capable of reducing high magnitude earthquakes to one-fifth their maximum force for minimized structural effect. The site is 10 km from Tokyo Bay and 1.5 km from the closest river. Flood-prevention measures protect against rainstorms, tsunami and storm surge.

A 1.2 PUE rating will be achieved by using a water-cooled air conditioner with high energy efficiency, giving the facility Japan’s highest level of power usage effectiveness.

Linkage to NTT Com’s Arcstar Universal One will provide access to cloud services without connection charges and link users to data centers in Tokyo and overseas for flexible system expansion.  When combined with a virtualized network, cloud resources can be extended beyond the data center and data can be transferred easily and on demand to remote locations in case of disaster.

Visit the NTT Com site for the full press release.

Digital Realty (DLR) paid AU 4.1 million ($4.3 million US) to acquire 162 and 163 Radnor Drive, a 30,250 square meter development site. It was the second acquisition in Australia for the real estate investment trust, which bought a development site in Sydney in July. The company had no Asia-Pacific data centers until last November, when it purchased a facility in Singapore. It has already leased more than 70,000 square feet of space, including a data center for Adobe Systems (ADBE).

“As one of Australia’s largest metro areas, Melbourne is the logical market for us to expand our footprint in the region,” said Michael Foust, Chief Executive Officer for Digital Realty Trust. “Like Sydney, Melbourne has a limited supply of data centre space available to meet customer demand for highly reliable, flexible and secure facilities.”

Space for Six Turn-Key PODs

The Melbourne-area property is located within the Paramount Industrial Park development, approximately 19 kilometers west of the Melbourne central business district, close to the Western Freeway and Western Ring Road. The first project, 162 Radnor Drive, is capable of supporting the development of four 1.440 megawatt Turn-Key Datacentre PODs. The second project, 163 Radnor Drive, is capable of supporting the development of two 1.44 megawatt Turn-Key Datacentre PODs.

The Turn-key Datacenter program offers customers finished ”plug and play” raised-floor data center space, which shifts the data center development costs from the tenant to the landlord, and allows for much quicker deployment than if the customer built a new facility on its own.

“We have been actively engaged in discussions with a number of serious prospects in Melbourne prior to completing this acquisition,” said Kris Kumar, Regional Head, Asia Pacific, Digital Realty Trust. “At the same time, we have been building out our operating platform in Australia with the addition of several new local team members. With our Australian staff in place, we will be able to deliver secure, reliable and cost effective data centre solutions to customers that are expanding their IT operations in the region. Consistent with our typical development timeline, we expect a twelve month construction period to complete the first building’s shell and core and the first two 1440 kW Turn-Key Datacentre PODs.”

Switch Datacenter Opens Amsterdam facility.  Switch Datacenter Group announced that it has finalized the first phase of its innovative purpose-built data center in Amsterdam. The almost 90,000 square foot data center will be carrier neutral, is equipped with an ultra-efficient cooling infrastructure, and will aim for a PUE between 1.2 and 1.3.  Located in South East Amsterdam the data center will take advantage of 40 different carrier networks for offering customer connectivity options. The first phase will have full N+1 redundant power and cooling, offers up to 7.4kW per rack and has ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certifications pending. NOTE: Switch Datacenter is based in the Netherland and not related to Switch Communications, the Las Vegas provider that operates the SuperNAP.

Big Switch Networks Beta release.  Open Flow company Big Switch Networks announced that their OpenFlow-based Controller has gone into Beta. ”This is a big milestone for us,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO of Big Switch Networks. “We’ve been in alpha since January and have proven the OpenFlow basics in our alpha customers’ production networks. We are excited to take the next step as we put our network virtualization architecture into beta.” With a Controller users or applications can take control of different parts of the same network, creating a multi-tenancy model for managing enterprise networks. Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others have backed the OpenFlow standard.

AboveNet connects to Latisys Ashburn.  AboveNet (ABVT) announced it has connected its fiber optic network to the new Latisys Ashburn Colocation Campus in Virginia. Latisys data center customers can now leverage AboveNet’s high performance solutions for diverse, scalable network connectivity. A complete AboveNet portfolio of products will be delivered at Latisys, including metro Ethernet, WDM, Long Haul, and IP transit services. The Latisys Ashburn Facility represents an AboveNet IP POP (point-of-presence) which enables AboveNet to deliver Tier 1 IP service to Latisys client base at affordable rates. “AboveNet has established itself as one of the most reliable, scalable and diverse high bandwidth connectivity providers in the Metro DC region, and their diverse solutions portfolio will meet the mission critical needs of our customers,” said David Haskell, Regional Sales Director, Latisys-Ashburn. “AboveNet has built or is currently building private fiber into all Latisys’ North America facilities, and today’s announcement extends the strong relationship the two firms have established.”

Juniper selected by Harris Farm Markets. Juniper Networks (JNPR) announced that Harris Farm Markets, Australia’s first fruit and vegetable supermarket chain, is driving operational efficiency and stepping up its customer service with the deployment of an integrated Juniper-based networking solution for its stores and warehouses. The company deployed SRX Series Services Gateways to integrate routing, switching and advanced security, with Juniper Networks AX411 Wireless Access Points and CX111 Cellular Broadband Data Bridges. ”The Juniper SRX Series consolidates enterprise-grade routing, switching and security on a single device, which reduced our capital cost. The Junos software delivers a level of functionality well in excess of what we had originally envisioned, whilst allowing us to simplify network management, which in turn reduces our operational costs,” said Ian Lapid, IT Manager, Harris Farm Markets.