Coreix Managed Servers

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

Rackspace’s Dallas-Fort Worth facility had “power issues” with its SSL server, bringing sites hosted by its network of cloud servers crashing back to earth. The company also acknowledged a separate power issue affecting the data centre at large. Rackspace acknowledged the problem both on its Twitter account as well as on its status blog. Sometime Monday afternoon Central Time, part of one of Rackspace’s nine data centres suffered a power outage, and then was brought back online around 5:30 PM Central Time. Until about 8:58 PM Central Time, that portion of the data centre, in Dallas-Fort Worth, was transitioning between generator and utility power, Rackspace said on its official blog.

The outages also affected the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) cluster hosted by Rackspace, apparently making e-commerce and other functions that depend on SSL inoperable for Rackspace-hosted sites. That cluster went down Monday afternoon and was restored at 5:03 PM, went down again at 6:11 PM CDT, was restored at 7:01 PM, and then apparently flickered at about 9:48 PM CDT, after which service was restored, the company said on a separate status blog.

Source: PC Mag

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

Space at a premium in your data centre? Steve Pinder, GlassHouse Technologies (UK) principle consultant suggests you do some spring cleaning.

Steve comments: New data centres are being built at a rapid pace as existing ones reach capacity. At the same time newer, faster and smaller servers, storage arrays, and switches are continually being purchased to compliment or replace legacy equipment that has passed its useful lifetime. IT staff worldwide love getting their hands on new equipment to give it a road test and see how it will make their lives that little bit easier. Unfortunately, they usually forget about the other factors that could make their lives much easier and save their organisation bundles of money at the same time, but often these are inherent in the old equipment that they have just replaced.

Source: IT proportal

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

As part of the green initiative and IT transformation program, Hewlett Packard has completed consolidation of 85 internal IT data centres into just six locations thus reducing costs, eliminate older technologies and improve service levels, while also decreasing the environmental impact of its facilities. It recently shut down all the existing data centres spread across Singapore, Korea, China, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and India, resulting in saving worth US$175 million.

Faisal Paul, head ESS Marketing & Growth Initiatives, HP India said “We have now consolidated our existing data centres to just six in three locations. By doing so we have achieved a 60% reduction in annual energy use through thermal mapping, virtualisation, technology refresh. Besides 80% more processing power with 80% fewer servers and also reduced the data storage costs while doubling the capacity”.

Source: CXO Today

Airport operator BAA is to spend £137 million over the next five years to overhaul the IT infrastructure at Heathrow. As part of the firm’s Capital Investment Plan published last month, BAA has highlighted four major IT projects that are required. One project is a £30.3 million IT infrastructure renewal will update systems supporting the airport, such as data centres, servers and software infrastructure, IT security, wireless networking, network management and customer support.

Separately, BAA owner Ferrovial has today published a contract notice inviting suppliers to bid for a contract for global telecommunications provision for the entire group.

Source: vnunet

Just off the North Sea coast in the UK, Hewlett-Packard’s EDS unit has built a data centre that largely relies on cold sea air to keep servers chilled and – by doing so – cut the centre’s cooling power needs in half. The expected reduction in electricity costs, from US$15 million to US$7.5 million, is achieved through a combination of factors that may begin with a 12-foot raised floor, which is easily three to four times the height of a typical data centre raised floor.

The higher floor allowed designers to install fans 7.5 feet in diameter that bring in outside air to cool the 305,000 sq ft data centre. The larger fans are more efficient than a series of smaller fans, said Ed Kettler, an EDS fellow. EDS is the HP division that is building the data centre in Wynyard for its clients. “That is a relatively new approach as far as we can tell,” he said.

Source: Computer World

A major central London data centre owned by Level 3 overheated in Sunday’s sunshine, taking down major websites including the popular music service Last.fm. Temperatures at the facility in Braham Street in the City topped 50°C at 7pm, after one of five chillers failed in the afternoon heat. According to data recorded at City Airport, the outside temperature peaked yesterday at about 23°C.

The other chillers were uable to bear the extra strain and the temperature rose uncontrollably. Servers shut down to cool and were gradually brought back online after about four hours. Level 3 said today that engineers were still working to repair the faulty chiller, but added that the other four were now able to maintain a working temperature. It said it had informed customers of the problems.

Source: The Register