London Roundup: Apollo, Telehouse, Infinity ONE

Here’s a roundup of data center headlines from London:

• Apollo Opens PoP in Equinix London. Transatlantic submarine cable system company Apollo announced Thursday that it has opened a new Point of Presence (PoP) in Equinix’s (EQIX) LD4 London Slough data centre.  This new PoP provides resilient, intercontinental access between the UK and major cities in the USA.  Apollo chose the Equinix LD4 facility to meet increasing customer demand for reliable, linear wavelengths between London and the USA.  “Directly connecting to LD4 will offer our customers diversity from other London networks and meet the growing requirements of our customer base,” said Richard Elliott, managing director of Apollo.  “By investing in this new PoP, we have enhanced our network in a way that cuts latency, increases diversity and ensures optimum resilience.”  Apollo is a UK based company jointly owned by Cable & Wireless and Alcatel-Lucent.
• Telehouse West preview. Key members of the press and analyst groups were given a tour of the Telehouse West facility in London.  In April 2009 Data Center Knowledge reported that the Greater London Authority had approved a plan in which waste heat from the $180 million facility would be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. The facility is expected to open in the first quarter of 2010 and the waste heat will keep 1,600 homes nice and warm.  Silicon.com has a few photographs of the facility and construction progress of the 9 story building.
• Infinity wins Datacentre Leaders award. London-based data centre company Infinity received the ‘Future Thinking and Design Concepts’ award at the Datacentre Leaders Award Tuesday.  A sustainable biomass plant at the Infinity ONE facility enables “dark green energy to be generated from bio-matter supplied by a local group of cooperating farms.”  Infinity is committed to reducing both the energy waste and the carbon footprint of the IT sector and has adopted recommendations within the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centre Energy Efficiency.

Roundup: Equinix, Telehouse, Polaris

Here’s a roundup of data center headlines from around the world – Singapore, South Africa and Australia:

• ACTIV expands to Equinix Singapore.  Equinix (EQIX) announced last week that ACTIV Financial, a provider of market data content and technologies, will expand operations to Equinix’s Singapore International Business Exchange (IBX) data center as a part of its global expansion.  Being in close proximity to the major trading venues and exchanges in Asia allows ACTIV to provide customers with low latency access to its high-volume market data services.  ACTIV currently leverages Equinix facilities in Chicago, New York, Frankfurt and London.  “ACTIV delivers more than one million updates per second including hard to process content such as equity options depth feeds, order book data, and the latest feeds from exchanges around the world,” said Timothy Neo, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, ACTIV Financial.
• Photo tour of the Polaris Data Centre. Australian iTnews has a photo gallery of the Polaris Data Centre, built in the newly-developed town of Springsfield, Queensland.  The five story, $241 million data centre is among five data centres shortlisted by the Australian Federal Government.  The facility opened in January 2009 and houses equipment from companies such as NEC, HP, Suncorp and others.  Polaris was designed for 20 megawatts at full capacity, holds 1.5 million litres of water in onsite water tans, and is served by a dual ring of diverse dark fibre.  The iTnews article contains photos inside the Queensland data centre.
• PIPE International selects Equinix Sydney.  Equinix (EQIX) announced that PIPE International has selected it as a key interconnect provider for its new PIPE Pacific Cable (PPC-1) undersea cable.  PIPE is also currently located in Equinx data centers in Tokyo and San Jose.  The newly laid PPC-1 undersea cable runs 6,900 km from Guam to the Equinix Sydney campus and has a capacity of 2.56 terabits per second.  “The new PPC-1 cable system will also enable our customers to increase the resilience of their international network and provide additional redundancy,” said Samuel Lee, President, Equinix Asia Pacific.
• TeleHouse launches data center in South Africa. TELEHOUSE Europe, a subsidiary of KDDI announced that they will open the data center TELEHOUSE CAPE TOWN in Cape Town, Republic of South Africa.  KDDI is a large Japanese telecommunications provider that has been growing its business in developing countries; including a recent partnership with Bangladeshi bracNet.  TELEHOUSE Europe is a part of KDDI Group’s European local subsidiary and will be the first data center opened by a Japanese telecommunications carrier in Africa.  The new data center is based on a partnership between TELEHOUSE Europe and Teraco Data Environments, the first carrier-neutral data center in South Africa.

Telehouse to Heat Homes at Docklands

Can a data center heat your home or office? It can in London, where excess heat from servers at the new Telehouse West data center in the Docklands will soon be used in nearby houses and businesses. The Greater London Authority has approved a plan in which waste heat from the $180 million Telehouse colocation facility will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community.

The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community, and allow the 130,000 square foot Telehouse West to reduce its carbon footprint by 1,110 tons. “The energy savings will equate to boiling 3,000 kettles continuously,” the company said.

Telehouse Europe’s expansion of its Docklands facility is the first major data centre to gain planning permission in London since the city passed stringent sustainability requirements. Telehouse said the project’s approval was enabled by green innovations developed with WSP Group, a London-based international sustainability and engineering consultancy. This will be the first time a data center heat export strategy has been introduced in the UK.

The Telehouse project is the most ambitious effort yet to reuse the excess heat from data centers. IBM has designed a data center in Switzerland that that uses waste heat to warm a  nearby community swimming pool. Researchers from Notre Dame University placed a rack of high-performance computing nodes at a local municipal greenhouse, the South Bend Greenhouse and Botanical Garden, to help heat the flowers and plants in the facility

Telehouse Names New President & CEO

Yasushi Kubota has been named President and Chief Executive Officer of Telehouse America and its parent company, KDDI America. Kubota replaces former President and CEO, Toshiaki Miki, who was recently named Vice President of KDDI Europe. Telehouse recently announced a major expansion in London.

Kubota is a 25-year veteran of the IT and telecommunications industry, serving in a wide variety of positions at KDDI, most recently as General Manager of Global Business Planning. He also served as KDDI’s General Manager of Global Corporate Sales, Senior Manager of Global Networks Projects; and Manager of International Relations and Affairs.

Huge Expansion for Telehouse London Hub

Telehouse Europe today announced a huge expansion of its London data center complex in the Docklands, one of the world’s busiest network traffic hubs. Telehouse will invest £80 million (about $162 million) in a new eight-story, 130,000 square foot colocation facility, a huge increase in the size of its London Docklands data center facilities.

The Docklands project in part of a global expansion of Telehouse facilities to meet surging demand for data center space from its clients in the financial and telecom indsustries. Telehouse will invest in an additional 160,000 square feet of new facilities near Paris and open a new 16,000 square foot data center in Singapore, a new market for the company. Telehouse recently opened a datacenter in Beijing, China and already operates three facilities in the New York area, and one apiece in Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

While no additional projects are planned in the US, Telehouse said that over the long-term it intends to expand across nine countries in South East Asia, Eastern Europe and emerging markets, giving it more than 1 million square feet of premium data center space by 2010.

NY Internet Exchange Tops100 Members

The New York International Internet Exchange (NYIIX), a carrier-neutral exchange point for New York providers, has experienced solid growth in recent months and now has 104 members. That’s up from 92 members in November 2006, according to Telehouse, which operates the NYIIX in its facility at the 25 Broadway carrier hotel in Manhattan.

The NYIIX is also experiencing higher traffic volume, up from 14 Gbps last year to 23 Gbps this year. NYIIX is equipped with IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, and provides Internet services such as DNS F, I, and J root servers, and an ENUM server for VoIP technologies.

Telehouse Reports Growth in NYC, LA

Colocation provider Telehouse announced that it has seen “double-digit growth” in both members and traffic at its Internet exchanges in New York and Los Angeles. The number of companies peering at the The New York International Internet Exchange (NYIIX) at 25 Broadway rose from 73 to 92 companies (26 percent) in the period between October 2005 and September 2006, Telehouse said. Membership at the L.A. peering exchange at 626 Wilshire Boulevard grew from 26 to 37 companies (up 42 percent).

Bandwidth upgrades helped fuel growth in peak traffi volume at both exchanges, Telehouse said. The NYIIX’s peak traffic volume went from 10.8Gbps to 19.4Gbps, while LAIIX peak traffic scaled from 1.0Gbps to 3.3Gbps. Telehouse attributed the gains to focused efforts begun in 2004 by the sales, marketing and Internet engineering teams.

“We anticipated the traffic volume trends driven by the media, entertainment, financial, legal, government and health sectors. NYIIX and LAIIX were ready to handle the demand,” said Akio Sugeno, the director of IP engineering at TELEHOUSE America.

Telehouse Beefs Up NYC Power Infrastructure

Telehouse America will expand the power capacity and infrastructure of its Broadway Center colo facility at the 25 Broadway carrier hotel in Manhattan. The upgrades, which will be compelted by December 2006, will make the facility more reliable and increase its power capacity by 20 percent. “As metro New York’s power distribution grows more uncertain yearly, the changes at 25B will insure that clients and NYIIX members will have dependable, secure power availability,” Telehouse said.

Telehouse said it will add four new UPS units to 25 Broadway’s existing UPS setup. In this setup – known as an N+1 configuration – if a UPS unit exhibits a power load distribution failure, the load will transfer to its UPS mate without interruption.

Telehouse said the UPS upgrades were motivated by New York area power outages over the summer. “An extremely hot summer severely tested New York’s power generation and distribution,” said Masahiro Furuya, president and CEO of TELEHOUSE America. “Our clients expect us to be their safeguard in these situations. This upgrade insures that we will meet our clients’ reliability expectations for years to come.”

Telehouse Internet Exchanges See Growth

Internet exchanges operated by colocation pioneer Telehouse in New York and Los Angeles experienced strong growth in the second quarter of 2006. The New York Internet Exchange (NYIIX) and The Los Angeles Internet Exchange (LAIIX) each added members as more companies opted for public and private peering’s economic benefits.

The NYIIX, metro New York’s largest peering exchange, now has ninety-three members as it welcomed Access IT, Choopa, Dream Tank, Freedom Networks, Interserver, Virgin Radio, MTN and Xand Communications. The increase in membership and upgrades for Globix/Neon and Internet Solution (which are at NYIIX’s home base at the 25 Broadway carrier hotel) helped the exchange hit a peak traffic volume just under 16Gbps.

“Paralleling our growth in peak traffic and membership is the expanded media and entertainment peering opportunities NYIIX and LAIIX offer our members and customers at 25 Broadway, 60 Hudson, 111 Eighth, and 626 and One Wilshire,” said Michael Vallone, head of marketing at Telehouse America. Our new members make this space even more attractive.”