• NASA to spend over $4 Billion on IT Services. Federal Computer Week reports that NASA is planning on opening for competition a series of IT services contracts worth an estimated $4.28 billion.  Some Request For Proposals (RFPs) could be out as soon as September 22 for the agency-wide Information Technology Infrastructure Integration Program at NASA.     Included in the consolidation project is a contract for data center operations, facility management and hosting services for NASA’s Enterprise Data Center (NEDC).  This contract could be worth $1.5 billion over five years and is due to be awarded in May 2010.
• PG&E starts rebates for data storage. Pacific Gas & Electric has added thin provisioning and MAID data storage systems to the data center technologies it will pay people to install. According to the GreenTech Media article data centers in northern California use up about 2.5% of the power, compared to about 1.5% nationwide. Beyond looking at other storage technologies for possible rebates, PG&E is looking at developing incentives for thermal energy storage.

• LimeLight CDN used to roll out Brightcove Adobe Flash Media server. Online video platform provider Brightcove announced Monday that it has rolled out broad support for Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 through the Limelight Networks content delivery network.  Brightcove has also introduced on-demand access to advanced security options for video stream encryption to the company’s global customer base.  The BusinessofVideo.com blog points out that Limelight and Brightcove have been working together to sell to Akamai accounts as a team.  It was rumored last week that Google was weighing the acquisition of Britcove for between $500 and $700 million.
• Akamai managed delivery of virtualized desktops. Akamai announced Monday a managed Internet service for optimizing delivery of virtualized applications and desktops.  The offering is targeted at companies wanting to deliver applications over virtual desktop infrastructure products offered by companies such as Citrix, Microsoft and VMWare.  VMWare’s Scott Davis outlines the Desktop Vision in a Monday blog post.   Desktop virtualization is a hot topic, and is set to take off in 2010.

• NASA to spend over $4 Billion on IT Services. Federal Computer Week reports that NASA is planning on opening for competition a series of IT services contracts worth an estimated $4.28 billion.  Some Request For Proposals (RFPs) could be out as soon as September 22 for the agency-wide Information Technology Infrastructure Integration Program at NASA.     Included in the consolidation project is a contract for data center operations, facility management and hosting services for NASA’s Enterprise Data Center (NEDC).  This contract could be worth $1.5 billion over five years and is due to be awarded in May 2010.
• PG&E starts rebates for data storage. Pacific Gas & Electric has added thin provisioning and MAID data storage systems to the data center technologies it will pay people to install. According to the GreenTech Media article data centers in northern California use up about 2.5% of the power, compared to about 1.5% nationwide. Beyond looking at other storage technologies for possible rebates, PG&E is looking at developing incentives for thermal energy storage.

• LimeLight CDN used to roll out Brightcove Adobe Flash Media server. Online video platform provider Brightcove announced Monday that it has rolled out broad support for Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 through the Limelight Networks content delivery network.  Brightcove has also introduced on-demand access to advanced security options for video stream encryption to the company’s global customer base.  The BusinessofVideo.com blog points out that Limelight and Brightcove have been working together to sell to Akamai accounts as a team.  It was rumored last week that Google was weighing the acquisition of Britcove for between $500 and $700 million.
• Akamai managed delivery of virtualized desktops. Akamai announced Monday a managed Internet service for optimizing delivery of virtualized applications and desktops.  The offering is targeted at companies wanting to deliver applications over virtual desktop infrastructure products offered by companies such as Citrix, Microsoft and VMWare.  VMWare’s Scott Davis outlines the Desktop Vision in a Monday blog post.   Desktop virtualization is a hot topic, and is set to take off in 2010.

That’s why VeriSign is investing $100 million in upgrading the DNS infrastructure for the .com and .net top-level domains. Last year VeriSign deployed new infrastructure in Miami, New York City, Chicago, Palo Alto and Washington, DC to upgrade its DNS resolution sites. VeriSign’s long-term goal is to expand its capacity to handle more than 4 trillion DNS requests per day by 2010.

VeriSign (VRSN) said its DNS service continued to maintain 100 percent uptime during the second quarter, as it has for the past decade.

“Securing and protecting the integrity of DNS is critical to the stability of the global Internet, and VeriSign is continuing to make investments that improve the scalability and fortification of this critical infrastructure,” said Raynor Dahlquist, senior vice president of Naming Services, VeriSign. “VeriSign’s unique capability to operate global networks of this nature at this scale and reliability remains unparalleled.”

Commerce requires a meeting of the minds between buyer and seller, and it’s just not happening. The sellers can’t explain what they’re selling to the buyers, and the buyers don’t buy because they don’t understand what the sellers are selling. There’s a mismatch between the two; they’re so far apart that they’re barely speaking the same language. … For a while now I have predicted the death of the security industry. Not the death of information security as a vital requirement, of course, but the death of the end-user security industry that gathers at the RSA Conference. When something becomes infrastructure – power, water, cleaning service, tax preparation – customers care less about details and more about results. Technological innovations become something the infrastructure providers pay attention to, and they package it for their customers.

The bottom line, according to Schneier, is that many companies don’t want to be in IT security business.

Managed security has been an important service offering for hosting providers for years, with popular offerings including managed firewalls and defense against DDoS attacks. Earlier this year we wrote about how Terremark (TMRK) has partnered with Kroll to expand its security offerings, which has helped the company gain new customers for its secure hosting and disaster recovery services.

An examples of that relationship was on display last week, when Terremark and Kroll worked with the University of Miami medical system after backup tapes containing patient information were stolen from a truck operated by its records storage provider. The University turned to Terremark and Kroll to determine whether thieves would be able to access the records. “For more than a week my team devised a number of methods to extract readable data from the tapes,” said Christopher Day, senior vice president of the Secure Information Services group at Terremark. “Because of the highly proprietary compression and encoding used in writing the tapes, we were unable to extract any usable data.” Based on this analysis, the University said it believes misuse of the information on the tapes is unlikely.

VeriSign, which powers inter-carrier mobile messaging for seven of the top 10 wireless carriers in North America, said that the number of messages on its infrastructure has traditionally jumped 40 percent on February 14 compared to an average day.

“This is a business where the ability to quickly scale to meet huge spikes in demand is absolutely critical,” said Charles Meyers, VeriSign’s group president for Messaging and Mobile Media. “VeriSign successfully met this demand by delivering 530 million SMS messages on New Year’s Eve, and we’re confident that Valentine’s Day will bring another record day to the network.”

Mobile messaging activity has shown strong growth in the past 12 months. VeriSign’s global infrastructure currently enables over 400 million messages on a typical day. In 2007, VeriSign enabled 96 billion mobile messages across its network globally, up from 43 billion in 2006.

VeriSign, which powers inter-carrier mobile messaging for seven of the top 10 wireless carriers in North America, said that the number of messages on its infrastructure has traditionally jumped 40 percent on February 14 compared to an average day.

“This is a business where the ability to quickly scale to meet huge spikes in demand is absolutely critical,” said Charles Meyers, VeriSign’s group president for Messaging and Mobile Media. “VeriSign successfully met this demand by delivering 530 million SMS messages on New Year’s Eve, and we’re confident that Valentine’s Day will bring another record day to the network.”

Mobile messaging activity has shown strong growth in the past 12 months. VeriSign’s global infrastructure currently enables over 400 million messages on a typical day. In 2007, VeriSign enabled 96 billion mobile messages across its network globally, up from 43 billion in 2006.

NetMagic has four data center facilities and 500 customers in India, and a data center presence in Silicon Valley. NetMagic says its expansion will target US firms that want to retain their infrastructure on-site but need help managing it. NetMagic offers services to monitor and manage IT equipment remotely from its facilities in both the US and India.

“One of the biggest concerns for US companies we’ve spoken to is staffing, especially the number of skilled people who are retiring,” said Gupta, who said NetMagic is already providing remote management services for several large international customers, including a global VPN provider and an American firm offering software as a service (SaaS).

The $20 million funding was led by the Indian proprietary venture and growth capital arm of Fidelity International Limited (FIL) and India’s leading venture capital firm, Nexus India Capital.

“The latest round of funding demonstrates our investors’ confidence in our management team, our strategy and roadmap,” said Sharad Sanghi, chief executive officer and managing director, NetMagic Solutions. “Over the last few years, we have built a blue chip client base in the financial, telecom, media and Internet sectors. This is the right time to invest more aggressively and scale our business to the next level and roll out new locations and services.”

While leading Ensim, Gupta developed long-term relationships with over 200 global service providers before the company was sold to SWsoft last year. Earlier in his career, Gupta held senior positions at Indus Consultancy Services and Tata Consultancy Services.

NetMagic has four carrier-neutral datacenters located in Mumbai, Bangalore, with a total footprint of about 100,000 square feet.

Wikia Search is launching a people-powered search engine to compete with algorithm-based engines such as Google. Wikia’s goal is to provide fewer search results with “parked” pages and ad content. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide hosted community-based wikis. On Dec. 23, Wales announced that Wikia Search would officially launch on Jan. 7. (UPDATE: The service is now live. See TechCrunch, CenterNetworks and TechMeme for early reviews).

USSHC’s data center is housed in a former government communications facility, and is “designed to survive and operate normally during a major disaster.” The facility is several stories underground and is hosting the core of the Wikia search system, according to Isaac Helgens, sales and marketing director for USSHC.

“USSHC is serving as our critical hub for this launch,” said Jeremie Miller of Wikia Search. “Their level of service and security is as unprecedented as the disaster tolerance of their facility itself.” Miller, who was hired by Wikia in May, is known as the developer of the Jabber instant messaging program, and is based in Iowa.

“We are very excited to host Wikia at our facility for their various projects,” stated Jerry Pasker, CEO of USSHC. “Our facility allows us to offer the best physical security available without breaking your budget. Companies that are looking for more than just commodity data center space expect a higher standard. We’re able to offer that peace of mind through our attention to detail and dedication to having the best systems and practices in place.”

Wikia also appears to be using content delivery network (CDN) services from Xeex, a business unit of NR Software, as well as services based at Ethr.Net in Los Angeles. Xeex is based in LA but has servers in data centers in 23 locations around the U.S. and operations in Asia and Eastern Europe.

USSHC says it offers fully redundant fiber connectivity and power infrastucture, and multiple onsite generators with secure fuel storage. On the security front, USSHC uses multiple levels of physical and biometric security, is the sole owner of the data center facilities and the land, and has complete control of all infrastructure and upgrades.

USSHC is among a growing number of providers offering underground ultra-secure hosting. Here are some other recent examples:

• StrataSpace, a 500,000 square foot underground data center outsider Louisville, Kentucky.
• The SpringNet Underground, as 56,000 square foot data center located 85 feet underground in a limestone cave near Springfield, Missouri.
• Cavern Technologies, a 200,000 square foot facility near Kansas City that is 125 feet underground.
• The Mountain Complex, a large facility built into the side of a dolomite mountain in the Ozarks near Branson, Missouri. The facility recently won a deal to house backup data for thousands of financial institutions.
• The InfoBunker, a 65,000 square foot ultra-secure underground data center in Iowa, built in a decommissioned Air Force bunker.
• The Montgomery Westland (The Westlin Bunker) provides 40,000 square feet of underground data center and office space in Lake Conroe, Texas, and recently announced plans to add 100,000 square feet of subterranean data center space.
• The Bunker is a 10-year old ultra-secure colo facility built in a former nuclear bunker in Newbury, England.
• Iron Mountain has a data center within its huge underground records storage facility near Pittsburgh, previously known as the National Underground.
• Mountains West Exploration Inc. (MXWI) entered the data center business in November with the acquisition of Secured Digital Storage, and plans to develop former military ammunition bunkers as ultra-secure storage.

It’s an innovative approach, but perhaps more productive than other recent data center team building strategies, like playing Halo 3. And there were no reports of anyone trying to label cables using the Gravity Hammer. One thing’s for sure: data center culture is never boring!

It’s an innovative approach, but perhaps more productive than other recent data center team building strategies, like playing Halo 3. And there were no reports of anyone trying to label cables using the Gravity Hammer. One thing’s for sure: data center culture is never boring!