Coreix Managed Servers

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

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

Twitter has been flooded with complaints about a power outage at Equinix’s Sydney data centre which apparently knocked out data and network systems, including VoIP. Equinix operates facilites in Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific regions, with the data centre in the Sydney suburb of Mascot suffering the reported failure. Equinix’s Sydney office could not give any details about the outage at this time.

VoIP service provider MyNetFone issued a statement about a power outage. “We apologise for the service interruption on Thursday 2nd July 2009 between 11:40am EST and 1:00pm. The problem was caused by a nation-wide power outage which triggered a total loss of power at our colocation facility in Sydney.”

Source: Tech World

One of Europe’s largest business hosting providers based in Amsterdam, LeaseWeb, has increased the bandwidth capacity of its hosting network from 500 to 750 Gigabits per second, in a six-month period.

Con Zwinkels, managing director of LeaseWeb explained, ”We have recently seen a strong increased in the use of streaming video in Web environments. Video is a key factor in the growth of Internet traffic handled by our network. In addition, we’re seeing a continuous flow of new clients from the Netherlands, but particularly from other countries, who have come to appreciate LeaseWeb’s qualities and competitive price-quality ratio. To give you an idea, we are currently managing approximately 22,000 servers and we’re adding about 300 servers each month. This growth is significant.”

Source: Web Hosing News

The data centre sector must strive to build more data storage facilities in the UK if it is to meet growing demand, it has been claimed. According to communications minister Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, failure to do so will impact on the British economy.

The report claims that when the recession ends demand for data centres will start to increase and with London being Europe’s largest data centre market and a major location for international business, more needs to be done to ensure it remains at the forefront of the IT sector. “The current demand for highly-connected data centres in the UK points to constraints in supply which is of concern as these facilities can take up to two years to build from initial inception,” the report states. “All of the information on the global Internet, whether for commerce, industry or consumer consumption, has to be stored somewhere in digital form on servers,” it adds.

Source: Comms Express

Telecity Group, the data centre operator that hosts Sony Corp.’s European PlayStation servers, may pay its first dividend since its public listing in October 2007, Chief Executive Officer Michael Tobin said.

“We’re in a position to consider paying a dividend, and we want to do something to set a trend,” Tobin said in an interview in London. He didn’t specify when a payout may occur. The company reported net income of £25.3 million last year – its first profit – as revenue surged 36%.

The need for data centers is rising across Europe as people turn to the Internet to watch videos, share photos and shop, the executive said. Demand for space worldwide climbed 14 percent last year, while supply increased 6 percent, according to an industry report by Tier1 Research. U.K. viewers watched more than 2 billion videos on Google Inc.’s YouTube in January alone, a Comscore Inc. survey found.

Telecity rose 18.25 pence, or 6.6 percent, to 294 pence in London trading, the highest since January 2008. The stock has gained 67 percent this year, giving the company a market value of 582 million pounds.

Source: Bloomberg