Coreix Managed Servers

As France continues to face a heat wave, a Paris-area Equinix data centre has suffered a cooling outage, leaving some customer services offline for hours. Equinix used backup cooling units to cool the facility and regain control of the second floor of its Paris 2 IBX data centre in St. Denis, France.

“Multiple chillers that support the second floor failed, and the standby chiller system did not start in time to absorb the load,” Equinix France general manager Michel Brignano explained in a report posted to the FrNOG Internet community forum. “This impacted temperatures on the second floor and had indirect effect on the ground floor as well.”

Source: The WHIR

Moving more quickly than some analysts and legal experts had predicted, US regulators have approved Oracle’s plan to acquire Sun Microsystems in a US$7.4 billion deal that would create a powerful new force in the market for data centre equipment and software.

The deal still requires approval from antitrust officials of the European Union. But the action by the US Department of Justice, disclosed by Oracle on Thursday, is a major step toward completion of the purchase. European officials have said they will decide by early September whether to approve the deal or launch a more extensive investigation.

Source: iStock Analyst

It will soon be possible for data centre operators to move workloads between data centres in pursuit of the cheapest electricity supply. As reported in the MIT Technology Review, researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University and Akamai developed and tested a routing algorithm that showed energy savings of up to 40% could be made by moving workloads from expensively-supplied data centres to ones with cheaper electricity.

The MIT researchers worked with Akamai and its internet content distributed server infrastructure to use its traffic routing data to test out their ideas. They tracked over three years of electricity supply costs in 29 cities in the USA. With this data to hand a routing algorithm was developed that calculated energy cost savings if data workloads were moved from high-cost-to low-cost data centres.

Source: The Register

Managed hosting service provider Rack Force has accidentally deleted one of its customer’s decade-old databases, which contained more than 1.5 million forum posts. Impalassform.com, which is a leading automotive forum and allowed users to share information on the Chevrolet Impala, has now lost around ten year’s worth of data.

RackForce’s general manager Randall Robinson said that the error was an extremely unusual and unfortunate event. “The issue was caused by a miscommunication between the customer and one of our technical staff, which resulted in a data file being deleted,” Robinson said.

Source: Global Gold

The data centre is increasingly being viewed as a critical business priority. Even in the poor economy, data centres are receiving ongoing investments so they can be improved in performance and reliability, finds a new survey commissioned by CommScope found.

The “Global Data Centre Survey,” found that 32% of all organizations surveyed worldwide are planning or building new data centres, while 83% of existing data centres continue to receive investment for infrastructure and technology projects. Of the 730 IT professionals surveyed, 65% said they were required to demonstrate a specific return on the investment before their data centre projects were approved.

Source: eChannel Line

Baronyx has announced that it plans to build a 28,000 sq ft data centre in Stratford, Texas that will be powered by wind turbines: 38,000 acres will be offshore, and 8,000 acres will be onshore turbines.  Initially, the data centre will be powered by 150 onshore wind turbines near the data centre, located in the Texas panhandle.  Each turbine will be capable of generating from 3.3 to 6 megawatts of power.

Over time, however, the data centre anticipates adding more machines, which will require more power.  Baronyx says it will then add 450 additional offshore turbines, which will be located in the Gulf of Mexico, and generate significantly more power.

Source: Fudzilla

Bedford Borough Council has given its support to TRE Global UK’s plans to build a 200,000 sq ft data centre at Twinwoods Business Park near Bedford. The £150 million data centre plan received a resolution to grant consent by Bedford Borough Council’s Planning Committee at their meeting on Monday.When completed, the data centre will contain 10 data halls, 700 computing servers and an attached office building. Work could start onsite as soon as this year. It is expected to become operational in late 2010.

In the next months TRE is planning to make further investments in an energy recovery facility that will generate renewable energy for the local area and a new surfing simulator at Bodyflight.

Source: Property Week

Power usage is one of the biggest concerns for a data centre, particularly because it involves so many other aspects of operations, such as heating and cooling, network efficiency, and monitoring. Here are 10 ways to reduce power use without negatively affecting the data centre.

Do an onsite audit & modelling: An audit can help identify areas of inefficiency, says Greg Stover, senior vice president of sales at NER.The audit should take into account items such as room layout, rack-by-rack IT equipment densities, CRAC type and location, total equipment power consumption, point temperatures throughout the room, cutouts, and leakage. Stover says, “Next, a modelling process with many iterations and scenarios can help you develop a complete thermal solution for the data centre that prevents excess power use.”

Source: Processor

Internet firms have condemned the government’s “Big Brother” surveillance plans as an “unwarranted” intrusion into people’s privacy. The companies, which ministers are relying on to implement the scheme, also say the government has misled the public about how far it plans to go in monitoring internet use. The criticism, contained in a private submission to the Home Office, threatens to derail the £2 billion project, which ministers claim is essential to combat terrorism and crime.

Despite hostility from opposition MPs and civil liberties groups, government security officials want to be able to monitor every e-mail, phone call and website visit of people in the UK. However, the submission — by the London Internet Exchange, which represents more than 330 firms including BT, Virgin and Carphone Warehouse — said: “We view the description of the government’s proposals as ‘maintaining’ the capability as disingenuous: the volume of data the government now proposes [we] should collect and retain will be unprecedented, as is the overall level of intrusion into the privacy of citizenry.

Source: Times Online

IBM and Defence Equipment and Support, a department of the Ministry of Defence, have announced a five-year strategic agreement for IBM to manage the UK Air Surveillance Command & Control System (UCCS). The IBM system is used to identify every one of the thousands of aircraft that are in the skies above the UK at any moment of the day. It tracks their movements against filed flight plans and sifts through real-time data to pinpoint suspicious activity.

The system was originally designed and implemented by IBM staff in the UK in 2001. The new agreement continues the existing relationship and covers the support for all hardware, software, training, helpdesk and onsite assistance to meet the most demanding requirements specified by the Royal Air Force.

Source: IBM