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.”

Latisys acquired Pryme, which had an existing lease for all 71,192 square feet of space in Building C of the complex. Latisys assumed Pryme’s lease and also leased an additional 51,905 square feet in Building B, apparently for development as a data center property. The two leases will each expire in May 2021.

Latisys was founded in 2007 as Managed Data Holdings (MDH) with backing from Catalyst Investors and Great Hill Partners. It has moved quickly to build a footprint in the managed hosting sector, acquiring three providers and quickly expanding its data center capacity. Here’s a recap:

• October 2007: Buys managed hosting Intelenet in Irivine, Calif and adds 12,000 square feet of new space.
• January 2008: Acquires Denver colocation and managed hosting company Data393 and accelerates a planned 10,000 square foot expansion.
• August 2008: Purchases Stargate in the Chicago market and starts an expansion project.
• March 2009: Rebrands as Latisys.

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.”

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:

• Is an iTunes “Reboot” Driving the iDataCenter Project?
• The iDataCenter and the Cloud
• Maiden iDataCenter Will be 500,000 Square Feet
• It’s Official: Apple Data Center to North Carolina
• The Apple-Google Data Center Corridor
• Apple iDataCenter set for Maiden
• Apple Moving Quickly on NC Project

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.

“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.”

The TorrentFreak story described the project as being in the development stage. But Twitter staff have since confirmed that it is live, and the Murder code is available on GitHub. “Murder is already in production and has been for several months,” Twitter engineer Ryan King shared in our comments. “We use it to deploy all our code.”

Murder “allows for scaleable and fast deploys in environments of hundreds to tens of thousands of servers where centralized distribution systems wouldn’t otherwise function,” according to the GitHub description from Twitter’s Larry Gadea. It’s based on the BitTornado client, and requires one server to act as a tracker, and another to seed the files to the servers that will share them, distributing the load across tens of thousands of servers.  

BitTorrent Inc., the company formed to commercialize the open source peer-to-peer software, expressed interest in helping other large Internet platforms explore the potential for BitTorrent to boost back-end file transfer.

Read more at TorrentFreak. For additional background reading, here’s some of our previous reporting on the the evolution of Twitter’s infrastructure:

• Using Metrics to Vanquish the Fail Whale
• Twitter’s Growth Drives NTT Expansion
• How Much of Twitter’s $100 Million is for Servers?
• Twitter in Combat Mode as Attacks Continue

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.

• Is an iTunes “Reboot” Driving the iDataCenter Project?
• The iDataCenter and the Cloud
• Maiden iDataCenter Will be 500,000 Square Feet
• It’s Official: Apple Data Center to North Carolina
• The Apple-Google Data Center Corridor
• Apple iDataCenter set for Maiden
• Apple Moving Quickly on NC Project

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.

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.

“The shift to cloud-based music won’t be instant, and may never be total,” notes an analysis at GigaOm. “But a smartly integrated way of giving consumers access to their existing MP3 libraries side-by-side with a new streaming option is very attractive. Lala knew this, and Apple can deliver it.”

Is Video Part of the Story? 
Wired believes video looms large in Apple’s ambitions. “All these recent developments point to a significant new strategic market for Apple: personal broadcasting, or sharing personal experiences,” writes Brian Chen. “YouTube and Flip are already big players in this young space, and the logical competitive move for Apple is to make personal media deliverable and accessible anytime, anywhere.”

This shift in the iTunes model would mean a change in Apple’s data storage requirements – hence the huge scaling up of its data center platform. A de-duplicated iTunes storage hub serving music from a central repository might not require much additional space.

Apple Set to Scale Up
But video is a different matter. Users of YouTube upload 20 hours of video content every minute. That may be why Apple hired Olivier Sanche to run its data center operations. Olivier previously ran the data center infrastructure at eBay, one of the leading examples of massive scalability.

If Apple is really planning a push into online video, we’ll hear about more huge data center projects soon. Here’s why: A centrally hosted iTunes would create the potential for the Mother of All Downtime Events - a data center outage that leaves the world’s iTunes users unable to access their music.

In terms of actual impact, an online music outage would rank low on most industry lists of worst-case data center failure scenarios. But an iTunes data center crash would be a huge public relations nightmare, generating a tidal wave of digital complaining via blogs and tweets.

A single point of failure will not suffice. If the speculation about Apple’s cloud ambitions are correct, there are more huge data centers to come.

• 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.

• Deutsche Telekom Buys Strato: Deutsche Telekom has acquired German web hosting provider Strato from Freenet, the companies said on Friday. Deutsche Telekom reportedly paid $409 million for Strato, which hosts 4 million domains, “This step boosts our position on the highly interesting market for hosting solutions,” said Niek Jan van Damme, Member of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom for fixed-network and mobile business in Germany. “Strato complements our activities in the hosting area perfectly and will make a positive contribution to net profit and free cash flow from the very first day of consolidation,” said van Damme.
• Social Networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. Several news stories shed light on popular Web 2.0 sites last week.  Bloomberg estimates that common stock valuation for Facebook jumped 42% in the past four months to $9.5 billion.  The valuation comes after increased trading activity on stock service sites that allow current and former employees to sell shares of stock. Twitter COO Dick Costolo spoke at a conference last week and said that Twitter is getting more than $4 million a year in revenue from companies that use Twitter data.  Costolo also said that “you will see an advertising strategy from us in the very near future.” Cnet News reports that MySpace has aquired social-networking music site Imeem. Sources with knowledge of the deal say it is worth $8 million.
• Meanwhile, original web power-house company AOL has cut local headcount in northern Virginia by 2,400.

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.

Oregon business registration records indicate that Vitesse LLC was registered Oct 21 and shares a San Francisco address with the law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofksy & Walker. Attorneys with Paul, Hastings have data center site acquisition experience, including past engagements with large financial companies and Internet companies.

The proposed facility would be located near the Prineville Airport in an enterprise zone, which allows the city to waive property taxes for eligible projects. Tomorrow the Prineville City Council is scheduled to consider selling a 1-acre piece of property to Vitesse for $50,000, annex two adjacent properties to the city and approve a 15-year property tax exemption for the company that would operate the data center.

Oregon’s Lure for Data Centers
The project is the latest indicator of the growing appeal of the northwest as a destination for companies seeking the lowest operating costs for their data centers. The region’s abundant supply of affordable hydro power is a major factor in its appeal, as are tax incentives like the tax exemption being discussed in Prineville.

Who is the mystery user? The existing Google and Amazon projects in Oregon would seem to rule them out. But one possibility is Yahoo, which has publicly discussed the possibility of shifting some of its data center development to Oregon in the wake of a tax dispute with officials in Washington state, where the company built a large data center in Quincy.

Washington Repeals Tax Break
In late 2007 Washington State ruled that data centers aren’t manufacturers and were no longer covered by a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises, and thus must pay a 7.9 percent tax on data center construction and equipment. This prompted protests from Microsoft and Yahoo, who said they had relied upon the tax break in their decision to build facilities in Quincy.

In a letter to legislators, Yahoo co-founder David Filo said the withdrawal of the sales tax incentive “swings the decision strongly in favor of freezing construction in Washington, and building instead in Oregon (which has no sales tax), as some of our competitors are already doing.”

Microsoft subsequently migrated its Windows Azure cloud computing infrastructure from its data center in Quincy to another Microsoft facility in San Antonio.

Photo of Prineville, Oregon from wka via Flickr.

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.

Multiple companies have already begun taking advantage of the hybrid cloud, including BrandPort, Belk, Rollover Systems, VMware, Knowledge Point 360, Cleveland Cavaliers, Baylor School and NRCCUA. Companies can use the hybrid version of the Stratus Trusted Cloud to take advantage of rapid and elastic deployment and usage, with the ability to add or subtract resources depending on changing requirements.

“We’ve seen tremendous interest in the hybrid approach,”” said Christopher “Kip” Turco, Hosted Solutions’ Chief Operating Officer. “Many customers want to take advantage of the benefits of cloud, but they are not ready to move their entire environment to the cloud. The Stratus hybrid option enables them to do just that – leveraging the benefits of cloud without reconfiguring their entire environment.”

• CSC and SOASTA announce integration. Cloud testing company SOASTA and IT Services company CSC announced Tuesday that SOASTA CloudTest will be integrated into CSC’s Trusted Cloud Services and testing and development methodology.  The SOASTA CloudTest solution provides load and performance testing solutions for web applications and services.  The CSC Trusted Cloud Services offering delivers ‘Testing as a Service’ (TaaS).  “It has been cost-prohibitive to simulate real world traffic using traditional testing methods,” said Gartner VP Ben Pring. “With cloud-based testing, enterprises of all sizes can now affordably test to identify performance issues and validate website reliability.”  SOASTA will be at the SYS-CON Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara November 2-4.
• Cisco introduces borderless networks architecture. On Tuesday Cisco announced the second generation of its Integrated Services Router (ISR) and a five phase plan to help deliver services and applications seamlessly, reliably and securely.  The ISR G2 combines routing, switching, wireless and security technologies into a tightly integrated networking infrastructure and offers as much as five times the performance of the previous generation.  The Cisco ISR router has sold more than 7 million units since its introduction in 2004.  The ISR G2 is a full portfolio of routers including 3900, 2900, and 1900 series.  Cisco is also introducing a new platform for its Aggregation Services Router via the ASR 1002-F.  Cisco held a Borderless Networks Experience event Tuesday to showcase new innovations for video, service delivery business growth, and more.
• Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. Gartner, Inc. analysts identified the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic in 2010.  A strategic technology is defined as “one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.”  2010 technologies include cloud computing, advanced analytics, client computing, IT for Green, Reshaping the Data Center, social computing, security – activity monitoring, flash memory, virtualization for availability and mobile applications.  In reshaping the data center Gartner notes that “costs are actually lower if enterprises adopt a pod-based approach to data center construction and expansion”.