Roundup: Amazon, Hurricane Electric, Level 3

Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• Amazon Web Services Asia Expansion.  Amazon Web Service announced Thursday that an expansion of their services into an Asia-Pacific region will take place in the first half of 2010, when developers and businesses will be able to access infrastructure services from multiple availability zones in Singapore, with other zones in Asia following in the second half of 2010.  AWS services included at launch will be Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage (S3), SimpleDB, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Queue Service (SQS), MapReduce and CloudFront.  Pricing for web services in Asia will be announced when launched in 2010.
• Hurricane Electric Expands Infrastructure at Equinix.  Internet backbone and IPv6 provider Hurricane Electric will extend its presence to additional Equinix data centers outside of the United States. Hurricane Electric will expand into Equinix Tokyo-2, Hong Kong-1 and Zurich-1 facilities.  Citing an increasing demand for IPv6 content in Asia and Europe as a reason for global expansion, the Hurricane Electric presence in global Equinix data centers will also allow other Equinix customers to easily exchange IP traffic with more than 500 associated IPv6 backbones.  Equinix chief marketing officer Jarrett Appleby said “operating also within our TY2, HK1 and ZH1 centers will put Hurricane Electric in the middle of an existing community of international and local networks and carriers for its next generation IP access service.”
• Level 3 expands in Atlanta. Level 3 announced Thursday an expansion of operations and enhancing local presence in the Atlanta area.  The initiative will provide mid-market enterprises with greater access to Level 3's services via its extensive backbone network, metro fiber-optic footprint, and a locally focused sales and customer support team.  Level 3 will expand the network in the Atlanta area that already passes nearly 15,000 businesses today.  Following their "link globally and connect locally" mantra, the move will allow Level 3 to provide a competitive alternative for Atlanta area businesses.  Level 3 has announced similar focused expansions in Chicago, Miami and New York in recent months.