“The deal has major benefits for both parties,” said Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice president Europe for SunGard Availability Services. “SunGard gains access to a new geographic market and proven cloud computing expertise, while Hosting 365 extends its product range with our own managed IT services, business continuity and disaster recovery solutions.”

SunGard has been in expansion mode in recent months. The company is building a 69,000 square foot data center in Sacramento, and last month announced a major expansion of its facilities in the Atlanta market.

Hosting 365 has been providing hosted services since 2001 and operates two data centers in the Dublin area. It has been an innovator in automating customer services and has a cloud computing offering.

“Much of our success so far can be put down to our commitment to serve our customers’ changing business and technology needs,” said Ed Byrne, general manager, Hosting 365. “The addition of SunGard’s world-class range of availability solutions will help ensure that we can continue to reinforce our leadership position in Ireland and can help our customers be even more resilient as their businesses change and grow.”

SunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to more than 10,000 customers in North America and Europe. The company operates more than 5 million square feet of data center and operations space.

This will be the second expansion for TelecityGroup’s Frankfurt facility in less than a year, as it added 1.5MW of power capacity last autumn. The company said it continues to see growing demand in Frankfurt, where Equinix also recently announced an expansionand Savvis has outlined plans for a new facility.

“Germany is a major Internet market, with extremely high broadband penetration and bandwidth usage,” said Martin Essig, Managing Director TelecityGroup Germany. “The Internet has expanded into every facet of our business and personal lives – from hosting virtual meetings to watching a favourite TV show – and this increase in online services is driving demand for high-quality carrier neutral data centre capacity.”

Headquartered in London, TelecityGroupoperates 23 network independent data centres across seven European countries, including Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Manchester, Milan, Paris and Stockholm. Telecity Group plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE: TCY).

When it comes to data center tours, we’re sometimes wary of animations with cool depictions of data centers, if only because it’s easier to create a cool animation than it is to build a data center facility. So here’ s a companion video of the grand opening ceremony for the Condorcet data center – so you can see some footage of real-world equipment (and some laser effects).

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

• Interxion and euNetworks partner.  European data center operator Interxion and euNetworks announced a non-exclusive partnership to provide traders with turnkey pan-European colocation and low-latency access to key liquidity venues.  euNetworks is a provider of mission-critical, high performance data services such as euTrade, a next-generation pan-European trading solution.  “Both firms share a deep understanding of the needs and demands of the capital markets sector, and we believe our joint offering will be of interest to a range of performance-driven traders looking for guaranteed low-latency access to European liquidity,” said euNetworks CEO Brady Rafuse.
• SunGard CEO Resigns: SunGard announced Monday that Eric Berg has resigned as chief executive officer of SunGard Availability Services, a position he held since October 2007. The company has initiated an executive search and until a successor is identified, Cristóbal Conde, SunGard’s president and chief executive officer, will also act as interim chief executive officer of SunGard Availability Services.
• The Planet Upgrades Network: The Planet this week outlined plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities. The company plans capital investments in network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for its Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. The Planet operates seven data centers — two in Houston and five in Dallas — with 179,000 square feet of raised floor. “Our network and data centers are core to the value we provide customers, and over the past three years, we’ve made significant investments to improve speed, reduce latency and ultimately provide the best customer experience,” said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Doug Erwin.
• Nasuni cloud storage gateway. 2009 startup Nasuni unveiled its gateway to cloud storage, the Nasuni Filer.  The filer runs on VMware and is a virtual NAS (Network Attached Storage) file server that leverages cloud resources to simplify file storage and protection.  Claiming ‘unlimited cloud capacity’ Nasuni’s Storage-as-a-service technology lets companies pay for only what they need, when they need it.  The virtual NAS includes advanced caching, snapshot and deduplication technologies to simplify file access, storage and protection.  “We want to knock down the barriers that are keeping ordinary business users away from taking advantage of cloud storage,” said CEO and co-founder Andres Rodriguez.  Partners listed on the Nasuni web site include Amazon, Iron Mountain and Nirvanix.  The free download now in a beta period offers free cloud storage.
• New Riverbed Steelhead appliance. Riverbed Technology (RVBD) announced the Riverbed Steelhead 7050 model wide area network (WAN) optimization appliance. The new appliance combines new levels of bandwidth and TCP session scalability with solid-state drives (SSD) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE). The Steelhead 7050 achieves higher throughput for read, write and search performance through 28 solid state drives that maintain 100% of the persistent data store. It can also support up to four 10 GbE SR cards and is equipped to handle up to 100,000 connections. “We are committed to breaking down performance barriers within enterprises’ current network infrastructure and keeping it reliable, inexpensive and simple,” said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. The Steelhead 7050 model appliances are expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2010.

Equinix now operates four data centers in Frankfurt, all of which are directly linked by redundant dark fiber, enabling all Frankfurt-based customers to interconnect as if they were in the same physical location.

“Equinix is seeing strong demand for colocation and interconnection services in Frankfurt, with significant growth coming from the city’s financial services industry,” said Eric Schwartz, president of Equinix in Europe. “Equinix’s Frankfurt IBX data centers are already a key destination for financial services firms wishing to improve their trading operations by directly connecting with their trading partners and utilizing low-latency links to other financial markets around the world. The new FR4 center, together with the planned expansion of FR2, will provide the capacity to grow this community even further.”

The phase I opening of the $30 million FR4 center, which is located in the southwestern region of Frankfurt, comprises 1,700 cabinet equivalents and 6,000 gross square meters (65,000 gross square feet) of data center space. The data center is being built out in multiple phases and, when complete, will total 12,000 square meters (130,000 square feet), with capacity for approximately 3,300 cabinet equivalents.

Elsewhere, in the north of the city, the planned $18 million expansion of the FR2 IBX will add 2,500 square meters (27,000 square feet) of data center space, with capacity for approximately 660 cabinets. The FR2 IBX expansion will be completed in phases, between April and September 2010.

Equinix has also opened its new Dusseldorf-2 (DU2) IBX data center, adding 560 cabinets and 2,700 square meters (29,000 square feet) of gross data center space in Dusseldorf. Located southeast of the city, the new center will be tethered to Equinix’s original Dusseldorf IBX data center (DU1) through dark fiber links, enabling existing DU1 customers to seamlessly grow their data center operations.

“Demand for premier data center services continues to outpace supply across all major European metro regions,” said Schwartz. “Equinix is focused on closing this gap between demand and supply and is committed to expanding its capacity, by both building new data centers and systematically upgrading existing ones.”

An exterior view of the Next Generation Data Ltd. facility in Newport, Wales.

A huge new data center in Wales has unveiled its first two tenants. Next Generation Data Ltd said Friday that BT and Logica will occupy two large data halls at its NGD Europe facility, which at 75,000 square meters (750,000 square feet) is one of the world’s largest data centers. Build outs for both clients were completed in less than 16 weeks, despite challenging weather conditions during late December and early January.

“Making these halls ready in record time for BT and Logica was largely down to excellent planning and project management by our resident and highly experienced operations team, the calibre and professionalism of our chosen infrastructure partners and sheer hard work by all concerned,” said Simon Taylor, Chairman of Next Generation Data.

BT is deploying hundreds of server racks at NGD Europe to deliver increased capacity for IT and communications services for its business customers in the UK and globally, while Logica is using the facility to help manage the IT requirements of its government clients.

“We are already preparing two further custom halls for client occupation very soon,” Taylor added. “Demand for space at NGD Europe is growing fast from corporate, government and cloud computing organisations which are fast realizing that our out-of-town facility offers them much more scale, power, resilience, connectivity and security at far less cost compared to the traditional data centre locations in London and the South East.”

Next Generation Data announced in November that it had secured “significant” debt financing from a unit of the Royal Bank of Scotland to complete tenant space in the huge data center in Newport in the south of Wales. The huge facility was previously used as an LG semiconductor plant, but has been empty since it was completed in 1998. NGD is converting the site into a three-story data center facility that will feature more than 375,000 square feet of technical space, enough capacity for more than 17,000 cabinets of servers and storage.

The exterior of an Interxion data center in Copenhagen.

European data center specialist Interxion has raised €200 million (about $278 million U.S.) through a sale of notes, the company said Tuesday. The senior secured notes will be guaranteed by its wholly-owned subsidiaries, and the company plans to use the funds to “repay existing indebtedness and for general corporate purposes.”

Interxion didn’t indicate whether the funding would support additional data center space. But the company has been actively expanding its data center footprint over the past two years, adding space in Zurich, Paris, Frankfurt and Dublin in 2009.

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Interxion serves its customers from 26 carrier-neutral data centers located in 13 cities and 11 European countries. The company offers colocation, wholesale data center services and managed hosting, giving customers a broad set of choices. Its competitors include Telecity and Equinix (IXEurope) on the colocation front and Digital Realty Trust, Global Switch and e-Shelter in the wholesale space.

While London is the key market for several of its competitors, Interxion has five facilities each in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, and four data centers in Paris.

Cloud management Start-up Cloudkick launches. San Francisco start-up Cloudkick announced its cloud server management and monitoring services coming out of beta. Cloudkick is trying to leverage the trend towards monitoring as a service by creating a unified dashboard that helps end users monitor the workings of a variety of cloud services. The service currently works with EC2, Rackspace, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, Rimuhosting and VPS.net. Cloudkick recently posted charts showing periodic ping latency between EC2 nodes in an embattled debate over cloud capacity issues.

Tieto builds new data centre in Finland. Helsinki based IT services company Tieto announced they are building a new, energy efficient data centre in Espoo, Finland.  The 1,000 square meter (10,764 square feet) data centre consists of two 500 square meter modules and will double the area of Tieto’s data centers located in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The EUR $18 million project began this month and is expected to begin operations near the end of the year. ”Modern data centre technology will enable full-scale production of the growing cloud computing services and the energy-saving virtualization of servers. Through new data centres, Tieto can also respond to the future growth of the market and IT outsourcing in particular,” says Ari Karppinen, Tieto’s Country head of Finland.

IBM Upgrades Tennis Australia. Australian IT news site reports on an IT infrastructure upgrade for the Australian Open, led by IBM. The Tennis Australia (TA) infrastructure powers massive data capture and distribution systems for the two week event where staffing changes from 300 to about 2000.  The infrastructure is being hosted by IBM in a U.S. data center that is also used for supporting Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.  To handle the large amount of data being captured TA purchased an IBM XIV Storage System with a 42 terabyte capacity. “Video analysis is one of the key things in sport now, and it’s certainly our intention to have an infrastructure that allows us to do all the analytical work our coaches require,” said TA chief information officer Chris Yates.

Juniper and Polycom Partner. Juniper Networks and Polycom announced an alliance focused on improving the reliability, cost-effectiveness and quality of the customer experience for telepresence and video conferencing services. A joint managed video services solution will pair Juniper’s network resource control platform and the Polycom video call control system, with the aim of reducing costs and improving the delivery and manageability of visual communications. Polycom CEO Bob Hagerty said “teaming with Juniper, our goal is to help improve the quality and efficiency of visual communications on the network, so customers have deployment options and can confidently incorporate the technology into their core business processes and as a key component of their unified communications initiatives.” A Juniper/Polycom service provider solution is expected mid-year 2010.

Marketing of Iceland as a data center detination from Verne Global, which this week announced funding for a data center in the island nation.

After years of marketing itself as an ideal destination for green data centers, Iceland is about to see the completion of its first major new data center project. Verne Holdings announced Friday that the Wellcome Trust had taken an equity position in the company that will fully fund construction of the first phase of a new data center in a former NATO Command Centre in Keflavik, Iceland.

The Wellcome Trust, a medical research charitable foundation based in London with $21 billion of assets, will become the largest shareholder in Verne Holdings, joining existing investors General Catalyst and Novator.

“Large scale customers face a critical need to reduce substantially the power costs and carbon footprints of data centers,” said Dominic Ward from the Wellcome Trust’s Investments Division. “Verne Global is breaking new ground in using Iceland’s natural green resources to mitigate both increasing emissions and rising energy costs.”

Geothermal Power, Free Cooling
Verne Global’s 44 acre data center campus is currently under construction. The facility will be powered entirely by renewable geothermal and hydroelectic energy, and will be able to use fresh air cooling for virtually the entire year, Verne says.

“What makes us unique is that we are able to offer our customers a cost effective, yet truly green solution to their data center needs by providing the benefits of Iceland’s 100 percent free cooling, renewable energy resources and predictable forecasting of energy pricing,” said Jeff Monroe, CEO of Verne Global. “Together, Verne Global and the Wellcome Trust are creating a powerful solution that enables data center users the opportunity to go green without paying a price premium.”

Pitching Iceland’s Advantages
In early 2007 the government of Iceland began been touting the country as an affordable destination for data center development, citing its abundant supply of geothermal power. At the time, we noted that companies considering Iceland “not forget the source of all that geothermal energy: Iceland sits atop an active volcanic rift.”

In 2008 Iceland was hit by an earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale and became one of the leading casualties of the global financial crisis.
In Feb. 2009 Verne Holdings said construction would be delayed by about 12 months, pushing the launch back to at least mid-2010. This week’s funding announcement puts Verne in position to meet that adjusted timetable.

Targeting LEED Gold
The data center, known as KEF001, is being built in four phases. Customers will have the option of data center pods sized at either 1.2 megawatts or 2.4 megawatts of electric power, and the facility’s location provides direct access to all three of the country’s submarine communications cables. Verne Global is targeting the facility for a Gold-level certification under the LEED ( Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard for energy-efficient data centers.

The Wellcome Trust is an independent charitable trust, established under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome in 1936. The Trust is the second largest biomedical research funding foundation in the world, with a mission to foster and promote research with the aim of improving human and animal health. Registered in England and Wales, it is the largest foundation in the UK by assets, managing a diversified investment portfolio of $21 billion as of Sept. 30.

Intellifiber Interconnects DuPont Fabros. Intellifiber Networks announced it has interconnected its fiber network to DuPont Fabros Technology’s (DFT) Ashburn Corporate Campus.  The DFT Ashburn campus customers will be able to access Intellifiber’s suite of Layer 2 and Layer 3 services, routing diversely from other carriers, both in and out of the facility.  Intellifiber’s network extends into many major carrier hubs and across the network footprint customers can receive low flat-rate pricing, quote responses within 24 hours and service activation in 10 business days or less.  “Our customers require diverse, high-capacity fiber providers to be interconnected with our facilities,” said Lee Kestler, senior vice president of sales and leasing, DuPont Fabros Technology. “The addition of Intellifiber Networks to the DFT Ashburn campus provides superior connectivity options and access to the entire suite of Intellifiber services.”

ColoHouse adds Internap to Miami facility. ColoHouse announced availability of Internap Performance IP Service direct to customers out of its Miami Colocation facility.  The Internap Performance IP service leverages their patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer (MIRO) technology, which dynamically determines the best path for traffic across multiple Internet backbones based on network performance characteristics instead of the least number of Internet hops. ”The addition of Internap to our mix of directly available carriers follows through on our commitment to our customers in providing them all the necessary tools and options to allow their businesses to be successful,” said Richard Duman, Vice President of Sales.

Interxion selected by Fortis Bank Global Clearing. the European operator of carrier-neutral data centres Interxion announced an agreement with Fortis Bank Global Clearing N.V. to house their Market Access platforms and provide client hosting services, as well as providing colocation for specific markets at Interxion’s City of London data centre.  Low latency access to major London financial markets was listed as a reason for selecting Interxion.  “By colocating at Interxion’s City of London, data centre we are able to provide clients with faster access to the markets, allowing them to increase their trading efficiency and grow their business volumes while being able to react faster to changes in the exchanges and trading venues,” said Neil Singleton, Global Head of Market Access Architecture at Fortis Bank Global Clearing.  Interxion also offers high density power configurations ranging from 5 kW to 30kW per cabinet.