Coreix Managed Servers

BAE Systems has received a contract from the US Department of the Treasury for managed information technology services with a ceiling of US$325 million over seven years. BAE Systems competed against major enterprise IT companies to serve the nation’s leading fiduciary agency.

BAE Systems will provide Treasury headquarters and participating bureaus with engineering, implementation, operations, administration, and maintenance services. The company will design and deliver these services at a firm, fixed price.

Source: Business Wire

eCool Solutions has developed an innovative vertical infill panel that allows 19 inch products to be stored vertically in the space normally wasted within a rack cabinet increasing the “U” space capacity by 57%. The panel, when used for air management within the Cold Aisle Containment system, can also contribute to a drastic cut in energy consumption.

Despite this, in its thermal analyses of data centres, eCool Solutions has found that it is not unusual to have a 40° variation in temperature between and within the aisles of a data centre and as a result the cold aisle is frequently overcooled to 20° below the recommended levels.

Source: Cambridge Network

Government plans to make Britain a world leader in the digital economy are under threat because high electricity prices are forcing companies to locate power-hungry data centres in other countries. Under the Government’s Digital Britain report, published last month, every British home and business will have a minimum 2MB broadband link. However, Derek Webster, associate director of McBains Cooper, a building consultancy, said that British electricity prices, which are the third highest in Europe, are forcing developers to build the infrastructure needed for these plans in countries such as France, potentially undermining UK competitiveness.

Some companies, including Yahoo!, have already switched their European headquarters from London to the Continent, citing high costs and a lack of the infrastructure needed to support their businesses. Santander, the Spanish banking group, recently scrapped plans to locate a big European data centre in London, opting instead for a cheaper site in Madrid.

Source: Times Online

At the annual Dell analyst day, Dell executives say the company is looking to change its product mix, moving more upstream into the data centre with a solutions-based approach and away from its heavy reliance on PC sales. The executives, including CEO Michael Dell, say this will be accomplished through a combination of targeted acquisitions, partnerships and organic growth. However, while they say the move away from reliance on PCs is key, it is unclear how easy such a move will be, given that PCs still account for about half of Dell’s revenues. Dell also says the company won’t offer an all-in-one data centre solution, as Cisco and HP have.

Dell is going to continue moving away from its PC roots and deeper into bigger – and higher-margin – areas, particularly services and the data centres of large enterprises.

Source: eWeek

The Bunker has announced that final planning permission has been granted for The Bunker2, a new 12,000 sq m high specification carrier-neutral London contingency data centre on its existing military level, ISO 27001 accredited security site in Sandwich, Kent.

The Bunker2; will be situated at the hub of the main UK to Europe Internet routes, offering high-speed, non-London reliant links to Europe, the US and traditional ‘at risk’ London Internet hubs, while perfectly positioned to provide London-based data centres with long awaited N+1 redundancy. The new facility will be supported by 2,000 sq m of rentable support and office accommodation manned 24/7/365 by CRB screened security and technical personnel.

Source: The Bunker

The majority of Britons believe eco-friendly technology is important despite the credit crunch, new research reveals. A report published by Global Action Plan and Cisco found that almost three-quarters (70%) of respondents think green ICT is an important part of the campaign to fight global warming and expenditure on eco-conscious technology should not be trimmed.However, 60% of those questioned were unaware of the government’s Greening ICT strategy, which aims to use carbon neutral technology by 2020.

Announced in July 2008, the government’s Greening ICT strategy aims to make the energy consumption of the office estate technology completely carbon neutral in three years’ time.

Source: Cool Earth

A global 2000 Enterprise IT group is caught in a groundswell of chaos. The current economic malaise is forcing a challenge from the business to IT to cut operating expenses by 20% or greater while preserving capital ferociously. All this while the IT team is faced with another reality, the main corporate data  centre has six to 18 months left in terms of shelf life. The data centre’s power distribution and patch panel design was not built to handle the massive density and cooling power requirements. The sprawl of unstructured data, app servers, Web servers, and now virtual machines is proliferating at a pace that will force a space crunch in a time frame that is counter to the challenge from the business in terms of capital preservation and opex reduction.

What does a firm do? The standard playbook is consolidate, virtualize, and automate. This strategy is absolutely critical and is part of a target foundation that must be built. However, it will not solve the challenge of above.

Source: Info World

Virtus Data Centres, the data centre operating entity of Obsidian, have announced that they have completed on their all cash purchase of a 40,000 sq ft building in Enfield, North London for the development of our new 60,000 sq ft Tier 3 data centre facility.   Having completed the purchase and secured specific planning consent for use as a Data Centre, Virtus have now triggered the installation of the 8MVA from EDF.

The facility designed by Norman Disney and Young will have a power density of 1.72kw per sq m across 25,193 sq ft (2,341 sq m) of net technical space. Structure Tone, in partnership with Gratte Brothers, has been formally appointed as the principle contractor and will be responsible for the entire construction and M&E fit out.

Source: Virtus

A fire at a major carrier hotel in Toronto left several data centre customers offline for hours over the weekend. Peer 1 Networks reported that a fire broke out at 2:26 am Sunday in an eighth-floor electrical room at 151 Front Street, the city’s primary telecom hub. The fire broke out in a section of Peer 1 Networks’ colocation facility housing UPS equipment, causing power to be shut off to the seventh and eight floors, and prompting a vigorous response from Toronto emergency services, which dispatched at least 17 fire units to the building.

“There was a fire which was localized to the 802 Suite UPS room within the 151 Front Street Facility,” Peer 1 reported on its forum. “The Fire Department mitigated the fire with dry chemical and CO2 extinguishers. No water was used, and all PEER 1 equipment (with the exception of the UPS), and ALL client equipment is unharmed.” Peer 1 said it was able to bypass the UPS system – which typically is positioned between the utility feed and the data centre – and restore power to the affected areas by 5 am Eastern time Sunday morning.

Source: Data Center Knowledge

An electrical fire at downtown Seattle’s Fisher Plaza has interrupted service at a long roster of Web sites, including Microsoft’s Bing Travel and Authorize.net. Fisher Communications said in statement Friday that the problems at the Fisher Plaza data centre started in a garage-level electrical room at approximately 11:10 p.m. Thursday night. Fisher said the cause of the fire remains under investigation.

Fisher Plaza is also home to Seattle’s KOMO-TV and KOMONews.com, which reports that the server farm fire also impacted television and radio broadcasts. As a result, KOMO Radio and KOMO-TV are broadcasting Friday from remote locations. Verizon Communications spokesman Jon Davies said the fire also temporarily disrupted Verizon’s Seattle-area DSL service. About 50,000 customers in Oregon and Washington lost Internet connectivity, Davies told TechFlash.

Source: CNet