Companies « Data Center Knowledge

Home
Companies

The Washington DC Area Channel is brought to you by Switch and Data

Latisys Acquires Virginia Data Center
March 15th, 2010 : Rich Miller
Managed hosting provider Latisys has acquired Pryme Technologies and its 72,000 square foot data center in Ashburn, Va. and has leased an additional 52,000 square foot in an adjacent building in the Corporate Campus at Ashburn Center. The acquisition and lease were announced by First Potomac Realty Trust which owns the three-building property.

The deals provide Latisys with a footprint in northern Virginia, one of the most active data center markets in the nation. The fast-growing managed hosting provider has existing data centers in Irvine, Denver and Chicago. The Corporate Campus at Ashburn Center is located in a fiber-rich section of Ashburn adjacent to major data center campuses operated by Equinix, DuPont Fabros, MCI and Digital Realty Trust.

”We believe the addition of this campus in Ashburn provides an outstanding east coast presence in a strategic market, while at the same time complimenting our other U.S. markets, allows us broader reach into business and government customers, while positioning Latisys with an important gateway to Europe” said Pete Stevenson, Chief Executive Officer at Latisys. “The expansion reaffirms Latisys’ flexible service delivery approach is resonating with organizations that face demanding IT infrastructure and growth requirements.”
Read More »
The iPad As A Colocation Platform?
February 24th, 2010 : Rich Miller
The iPadColo.net web site. Is the Apple tablet really a colocation platform?

Is the iPad the hot new player in the colocation game? The hype and hope surrounding the new tablet PC from Apple is already so high that the appearance of iPadColo.net attracted attention yesterday. The site offers the iPad as a dedicated server, housed in a “world class data center” with up to 64GB of data and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to be the “envy of your friends.”

The answer to your question, of course, is “No this is not a real site.” It’s a clever bit of viral marketing from MacMiniColo, a Las Vegas colocation company, has been hosting Mac minis since their introduction in January 2005. MacMinicolo houses its servers in a Switch Communications data center. The deception is revealed when visitors reach the iPadColo.net signup page. “You weren’t really going to sign up were you?” it asks. “We think outside of the box here at Macminicolo, but we’re not that crazy.”
Read More »
First Look: Apple’s Massive iDataCenter
February 22nd, 2010 : Rich Miller
How big is Apple’s new iDataCenter in Maiden, North Carolina? It’s plenty big, as illustrated by this aerial video posted to YouTube (apparently taken by an area realtor) of the 500,000 square foot facility. The new $1 billion data center will be nearly five times the size of Apple’s existing 109,000 square foot Newark, Calif. facility, and is seen as a key component of Apple’s cloud computing strategy. The video is brief (about 35 seconds), but provides an interesting perspective on the new facility:

Apple’s data center in Maiden is expected to provide the back-end for a larger move into cloud computing, with most speculation focusing on a shift of iTunes user libraries from user desktops to online storage. For those just joining this story, here’s a summary of our reporting on Apple’s new facility:
Can this video tell us anything interesting about Apple’s data center design and what’s happening inside the facility? Have a look at the video and share your insights and theories in the comments.
Read More »
Twitter Using BitTorrent to Speed Servers
February 10th, 2010 : Rich Miller
Twitter has begun usin file distribution technology from BitTorrent to boost the performance of its back-end infrastructure, which has required constant attention to keep pace with the growth of the popular microblogging service, which has now reached 1 billion tweets per month, according to Pingdom.

“With BitTorrent, Twitter is planning to distribute files faster and more efficiently, saving time and precious resources and improving the scalability of Twitter’s operation,” writes Ernesto at TorrentFreak (via Glyn Moody).

Here’s the full description: “Twitter’s new project, codenamed ‘Murder’, will not use the bandwidth of Twitter users. Instead, it will transform the site’s servers into a large BitTorrent swarm that will distribute file updates using BitTorrent technology. The setup is pretty straightforward. Murder uses a ’seeder’ server where the new files will be distributed to thousands of ‘peer’ servers. Because all servers assist in the deployment of the files, it will only take a fraction of the time it would otherwise take when files are distributed from a central server.”
Read More »
Where Apple’s ‘Secret Cloud’ Will Live
January 19th, 2010 : Rich Miller

TechCrunch has a post this morning from digital music veteran Michael Robertson on Apple’s “Secret Cloud Strategy” and the importance of the software technology that it acquired from Lala. “An upcoming major revision of iTunes will copy each user’s catalog to the net making it available from any browser or net connected ipod/touch/tablet,” Robertson writes, adding that more than 100 million iTunes users will be able to upload their catalogs to the net with a simple “An upgrade is available…” notification dialog box.

Software is dandy. But as we’ve previously noted, that kind of storage requires a ginormous data center – which Apple is already busy building in Maiden, North Carolina. For those just joining this story, here’s a summary of our reporting on Apple’s move into the clouds.
Will Apple have anything to say about its cloud computing ambitions in its hotly-anticipated product announcement Jan. 27 in San Francisco? Who knows. Speculation is already out of control, with most of the focus on the expected rollout of a tablet computer. But Apple’s plans for its huge new data center won’t remain secret forever.

Cloud background from SoraZG via Flickr.
Read More »
Is iTunes ‘Reboot’ Driving iDataCenter Project?
December 11th, 2009 : Rich Miller
What would it mean if Apple wanted to take all the songs in all the iTunes libraries sitting on all the hard drives of its users and host them in the cloud? It would probably require Apple to build an enormous data center to house the operation. There are widespread reports that Apple is contemplating such a shift.

As it happens, Apple is also building a major new data center in Maiden, North Carolina that will span 500,000 square feet. The enormity of the new facility - which will be nearly five times the size of the company’s 109,000 square foot Newark, Calif. data center – has raised questions about Apple’s ambitions. Why would it need all that data center space?

A Shift to the Cloud?
I discussed this question in an August interview with Leander Kahney at the Cult of Mac blog. A recap: The most interesting question is whether Apple needs a much larger facility to support growth in its existing services, or is scaling up capacity for future offerings. One of the leading theories about the size of the NC project is that Apple is planning future cloud computing services that will require lots of data center storage.

This fits neatly with Apple’s purchase last week of the streaming music service LaLa. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is planning to “reboot” its iTunes service as a browser-based service that would allow users to stream their music from anywhere.
Read More »
Roundup: Force 10 Networks, Avocent, Facebook
November 23rd, 2009 : John Rath
Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:
- Force 10 demonstrates at Interop. Force 10 Networks partnered with AFORE Solutions and Sun Microsystems at INTEROP in New York last week to demonstrate data center virutalization products and cloud computing initiatives focused on driving greater network agility. The 3 vendors demonstrated virtualized resource allocation for cloud-oriented applications as well as the AFORE ASE3300 Virutalization Extension Platform. The ASE3300 and Force 10 switch and router solutions combine to enable a multi-site, virtual data center enabling migration to cloud computing environments.
- Avocent upgrades data center management software. Announced at Interop last week, Avocent is upgrading its MergePoint Infrastructure Explorer to include several new management capabilities. The company said these enhancements will provide a unique view into capacity planning, bringing additional return on investment and total cost of ownership benefits. Avocent CTO Ben Grimes said that the software will allow “customers to know where their assets are, as well as plan for different ‘what if’ scenarios, and manage their data centers to reduce risk - all while bringing improved ROI and total cost of ownership benefits to customers.” New features include rack timeline and an enhanced change management and capacity search capabilities.
Read More »
Company X Plans Oregon Data Center
November 23rd, 2009 : Rich Miller
The city of Prineville, Oregon is negotiating with a large, secretive company that wants to build a data center in its enterprise zone.

A “well-funded, well-known company” is negotiating to build a large data center in central Oregon, and the secrecy surrounding the negotiations has folks in the town of Prineville wondering who it might be. Officials in Prineville have been negotiating with Vitesse LLC, a company performing site selection for the unnamed end user that would build operate the data center, according to local media reports.

The site is several hours from an existing Google data center in The Dalles and a Boardman site where Amazon is said to be resuming construction on a major data center project. Like those projects, the process in Prineville has been cloaked in secrecy.

Google-Style Secrecy
“The only thing I could tell you is this is not unlike what the city of The Dalles went through when Google sited their data center in their community,” Prineville City Manager Steve Forester told the Bend Bulletin. “A very similar process. They had a code name for an LLC that did their preliminary work with the city and the county, and it turned out to be Google. And up in Moses Lake, Washington — where they have several of these things — same pattern.” Local economic development officials told the paper that a non-disclosure agreement prevents them from discussing the project.
Read More »
Hosted Solutions Goes Hybrid, Links Clouds
November 17th, 2009 : Rich Miller
Managed hosting provider Hosted Solutions today expanded its Stratus Trusted Cloud offering, adding a hybrid option for companies that want to blend public and private cloud offerings. Stratus was introduced earlier this year, and can be used as either a multi-tenant infrastructure platform and a private/dedicated cloud.

The Stratus hybrid cloud option allows customers to cross-connect their existing back-end resources such as databases and other supporting applications to the Stratus Trusted Cloud, where they can host front-end computing power and other resources like network, firewall, load balancing and web servers. Customers can also cross connect Stratus cloud computing resources directly into their environment to handle overflow situations such as seasonal spikes that require excess compute capacity.
Read More »

Recent
Popular
Microsoft
Google

ARCHIVED ARTICLES

get your job site
at simplyhired.com