Coreix Managed Servers

Digital Realty Trust is living in a different world than most of the rest of the commercial real estate industry. The locally based data centre REIT’s 11-million sq ft operating portfolio is 95% leased, demand appears high and new average rents are three-times higher than expiring rents. “Despite the deepening economic downturn, DLR is seeing solid pricing and demand in almost all regions and sectors,” JMP Securities Analyst Will Marks said in a client note. “This is difficult for many to fathom, particularly in light of what happened to the data centre market during the last downturn and the severity of this global recession in comparison to the last one.”

“Today, data centres are used by a wide variety of companies, from startups to well-established giants, and are now a necessity for businesses in every sector,” Marks writes. Looking ahead, despite a constrained supply of data centres and sufficient liquidity to develop and meet debt maturities over the next two years, Digital Realty is holding back on pursuing this demand in order to maintain a strong balance sheet with a liquidity cushion, Marks reports. While it may not speculate it certainly will be willing to develop freely on a build-to-suit basis with strong tenants, and Marks thinks the demand will be there.

Source: Globe Street

Internet Facilitators (IFL), providers of ‘Business Class’ carrier neutral colocation services in Manchester, have announced the launch of their Premium Scheduled Engineering service for customers with equipment hosted in IFL data centres. Streamlining regular data centre tasks and minimising costs associated with visiting and carrying out work within the data centre by utilising IFL’s on-site technical resources can go some way to achieving the best value and ROI from hosting your equipment at IFL2.

By using on-site support teams to carry out tasks such as server racking, tape rotation, component swapping, and software services, clients can eliminate some of the travel and time costs associated with sending engineers to site, ensuring engineers are available in-house to focus on other business areas where their time and resources can be better utilised.

Source: Internet Facilitators
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About half of data centres are responding to the economic crisis by cutting their budgets an average of 15% for 2009, according to a new survey by the AFCOM Data Center Institute.

While the overall cuts were “surprising low” in the view of Jill Eckhaus, the CEO of the Association for Computer Operations Management (AFCOM), she said she doesn’t want to minimize the impact those cuts will have on the 49% of affected data centres. Eckhaus said the low number of data centres making cuts indicated their importance to the businesses. And while half are cutting, the budgets for the remainder are staying the same or going increasing. That’s important, because it wasn’t long ago when data centres “used to be known as the money pit,” she said.

Source: Computer World
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