Twitter Postpones ‘Critical’ Maintenance

Sometimes the best laid plans of network engineers are overtaken by an international crisis. The microblogging service Twitter said late today that it would postpone scheduled maintenance downtime to keep the service available during the tumultuous political events in Iran. The move followed a day-long protest by some Twitter users, who said Twitter had become a critical communications tool for the Iranian opposition.

“A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter,” co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog. “In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).”

This is yet another reminder of the critical importance of uptime, and how the universe of sites and services that “can’t go down” continues to expand. It’s a trend that places further focus on the data centers supporting these sites.

Roundup: Capstar, BT, CBS, Fiber Media

Here’s a roundup of several announcements from the past week about data center projects that are reporting milestones:

• Capstar Commercial Real Estate’s plans for a huge data center in Mesquite, Texas cotinues to move ahead. Last week the Dallas News featured the project, which will redevelop a 700,000 square foot former AT&T site. The 90-acre site has its own power substation, and is expected to ultimately have a power capacity of 100 megawatts, according to Capstar.
•  BT Radianz has opened a second New York data center for hosting low latency financial trading applications, according to Wall Street & Technology.  The new facility in the East Village will accommodate growth on BT’s Radianz Ultra Access platform.
• CBS has finalized a deal for 5,000 square feet of space in one of four New York area data centers operated by Fiber Media, the company said last week. CBS will house production, storage and data management functions in the new space.  Fiber Media has data centers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Westchester, Cleveland and Miami. 

Roundup: Limelight, Building 43, Lexent-Atlantic

Here’s a roundup of data center industry news:

• Shares of content delivery network operator Limelight Networks surged 14 percent Thursday, gaining 71 cents to $5.70. There was no news to account for the movement. “We don’t have a specific idea about the rally right now,” the company told Tech Trader Daily. Hmmmm…
• Rackspace took the wraps off Building 43, the hosting community site featuring widely-followed blogger Robert Scoble. The new site’s launch-day linkage grabber is a video interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
• Atlantic Metro Communications and Lexent Metro Connect have completed a redundant dark fiber network into Yankee Stadium, the companies said this week. The new network connects the stadium to over 90 New York area carrier hotels and major enterprise buildings. This network is already in use and is currently available for service providers and broadcasters to lease and deliver the latest communications services to Yankee fans, such as streaming video to and from the Stadium. Atlantic Metro provided Lexent with the design specifications and Lexent built the network, while both companies worked together with hardware vendors to ensure the dark fiber network would meet requirements for high-definition streaming video.

Hosted Solutions Launches Cloud Platform

Can cloud computing help regional providers compete for customers on a national basis? That’s among the ambitions for Hosted Solutions, which today is introducing the Stratus Trusted Cloud, a cloud platform with a “four nines” service level agreement (SLA) designed to attract enterprise production systems.

Hosted Solutions started life as a local provider focused on the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, with headquarters in Cary and a data center in Raleigh. The company expanded into Boston in 2006, and was acquired by ABRY Partners last year. The new ownership has helped Hosted Solutions expand or upgrade its five data centers, setting the stage for today’s announcement of a cloud computing service.

“We believe this is a product that helps us expand beyond the typical data center managed hosting offering,” said Kip Turco, the Chief Operating Officer for Hosted Solutions, who said he expected the Stratus Trusted Cloud to expand the company’s customer footprint. “This makes it much easier for us to sell at a national level.”

The Stratus Trusted Cloud features a “massively scalable, multi-tenant infrastructure … with built-in high availability and automated resource balancing,” the company says. The platform will be supported by Cisco’s new Nexus switches as well as hardware and software from VMware, Sun, EMC, F5 and Juniper.

Funding Deals for Active Power, Cloudera

Several companies in the data center sector announced funding yesterday:

• Active Power, Inc. (ACPW) said it entered into an agreement for a $3 million private placement, selling 6 million shares of common stock at $0.50 per share. The financing closed on May 29. The company said it intends to use the net proceeds for working capital and general corporate purposes. Active Power shares closed at 53 cents yesterday.
• Cloudera raised $6 million in Series B funding, bringing the total raised by the company to $11 million. The funding was led by Greylock Partners, with participation from Accel Partners. Cloudera helps companies adopt Hadoop, an open source platform for large-scale computing that integrates elements of Google’s infrastructure management software. See GigaOm for more on the company’s plans.

Roundup: CRG West, iland, Telx, C7, HostMySite

It’s already been a really busy week for data center industry news announcements. Here’s a roundup:

• CRG West said the company’s Boston and Chicago data centers have completed SAS 70 Type II certification. “As many industries move toward heightened regulatory environments, having a provider with a SAS 70 Type I or Type II certification is a meaningful way to validate the overall credibility of an outsourced data center provider,” said Billie Haggard, CRG West Vice President of Data Centers.
• Hosted VMware specialist iland Internet Solutions announced an agreement to deploy Vizioncore’s vReplicator virtualization solution in iland’s virtual data centers, providing ‘best in class’ replication solutions for iland customers.
• HostMySite said it has successfully completed a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance audit by Trustwave. “Being PCI compliant provides assurance to HostMySite customers that the industry standards for security, confidentiality and protection of cardholder data are upheld,” said Joel Daly, COO at HostMySite.
• C7 Data Centers and Quest said they would partner to offer one another’s customers colocation and business continuity space in multiple geographic markets. These co-marketing agreements make it easier for a provider to offer disaster recovery space outside of its core geographic markets.
• IntelePeer Inc. announced a partnership with Telx which will allow IntelePeer to offer its ReachSuite hosted voice and rich media applications to Telx customers.

Hosted Solutions Upgrades Boston Facility

Hosted Solutions has completed more than $6 million in upgrades to its Boston data center, with improvements in power, cooling, back-up power and security. With the upgrades, Hosted Solutions has begun offering a suite of managed services including application management, managed replication, disaster recovery, load balancing and advanced monitoring.

“We have seen tremendous momentum with our customer growth throughout New England,” said Mike Lee, Regional Manager for Hosted Solutions. “Given current market conditions, companies today require a trusted partner who can provide them with services across all areas of IT, rather than simply providing data center space or point solutions. Increasingly, companies recognize both the immediate and ongoing value of having a trusted partner provide them with the full range of outsourced technology services.

Roundup: Fortrust, CoreXChange, i/o Data Centers

Here’s a roundup of some announcements late last week from the data center industry.

• Colorado-based colocation provider FORTRUST has announced a partnership with E-Oasis to provide a relocation services to customers. Migration services can be a selling point for companies considering relocating their infrastructure from an in-house data center or another service provider. “Moving IT infrastructure from one data center to another can be an extremely complex and time consuming operation,” said Rob McClary, vice president of FORTRUST. “A data center move, if not planned and executed correctly, can lead to unnecessary downtime, escalating costs, and potential business interruptions. We want to be able to provide our customers the resources they need to mitigate downtime and manage costs when moving into our world-class data center here in Denver.” E-Oasis moves data centers, deploys VMware, and provides network services.
• i/o Data Centers has announced the completion of a fiber expansion with AGL into its new 530,000 square foot Phoenix ONE data center campus. “We’re pleased with AGL Networks’ decision to extend their dark fiber network into our Phoenix ONE data center,” said Matt Calhoun, chief technology officer, i/o Data Centers. “This additional capacity will offer our existing and future clients greater diversity, flexibility and lower cost connectivity options. We are glad to have AGL supplement our world class network story.” i/o Data Centers provides data center and colocation services for several of the largest Web properties and enterprises world-wide.
• CoreXchange, the premier Dallas-based managed network services provider, announced that it has expanded its network presence through the Equinix Dallas International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in the Dallas Infomart. The expansion gives CoreXchange’s bandwidth and colocation customers increased reach through the Equinixecosystem of top networks, carriers, and ISPs. “With this expansion into Equinix, CoreXchange has designed and implemented one of the IT industry’s most reliable Internet infrastructures,” said Chris Turbeville, VP of Networking for CoreXchange. “The Equinix Dallas IBX gives us increased peering with scalable access for high-performance transit and other enterprise network services.”