Coreix Managed Servers

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

BT has just opened a new data centre hosting facility near St. Marks Place in New York City’s East Village. The new location, which increases the company’s hosting space in Manhattan by 30%, is geared toward financial services firms that want to colocate servers near the exchanges and trade execution venues downtown.

This new facility supplements BT’s existing New York metro data centre as well as those in London, Chicago, Frankfurt, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney.

Source: Wall Street Tech

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

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

The Planet has announced plans for its first international data centre, located in London. Based on significant customer demand for both international and globally redundant hosted infrastructure, the company initially will offer its virtual racks solution when its centre opens in April. Preleasing begins immediately. The data centre features up to 20kW of power per rack, backed by N+1 redundancy on generators, transformers and UPS systems. Customers gain access to a 10GB private fiber interconnect to The Planet’s core network through its Ashburn, Va., data centre, as well as local connectivity to Tier-1 providers and the major European peering exchanges.

The Planet has forged a colocation agreement with TelecityGroup, which operates 20 network-independent data centres across seven European countries. Procedures in the new facility comply with ISO 9001:2000, which benchmarks quality processes for data centre operations and management. TelecityGroup is highly regarded for both its premium data centres and operational expertise. It is also taking the lead in driving energy efficiency in the data centre in Europe as the first data centre operator to sign up to the new “EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres.” It is also a member of the Green Grid.

Source: Market Watch