Enterasys continues to lock horns with its rivals after launching its OneFabric networking solution Enterasys has officially unveiled its OneFabric architecture, and claimed that its solution is less complex and more complete than rival offerings. “There are other solutions out there, but none of them give an end-to-end view of services,” Ram Appalaraju, vice president of marketing at Enterasys, said in an interview with eWEEK, adding that similar offerings from other vendors are “fragmented,” vendor-specific and lack the ability to offer a single view of the entire infrastructure, from the data centre to mobile user environments.

Worldwide data centre hardware spending for 2011 is set to rise 12.7 percent from 2010, says Gartner Who says the future of IT is all in software? All software has to run on some sort of processor, physical or virtual, and all those have to run on something you can see and touch. And with the continuing deluge of data pouring into servers and storage arrays, there is no shortage of processors happening anytime soon. Thus, IT hardware sales are going nowhere but up and to the right. Gartner has some new numbers that back up this trend. Return to 2008 levels The industry researcher is projecting that worldwide data centre hardware spending will reach $98.9 billion (£62bn) by the end of calendar year 2011, up 12.7 percent from $87.8 billion in 2010, according to a report it published on 13 October. Data centre hardware spending ...

PUE and other efficiency measures are useful, but data centre owners are chasing money now, says Peter Judge Efficient data centres have always made an effort to meet commercial needs – but I think the economic side of the movement may soon eclipse the “green” side. The move to the cloud is driving this, I think. “Cloud-based services [like Facebook and Google], have the ability to build efficient data centres in locations where there is cheap power, and to highly utilise the IT equipment,” said Mark Monroe, executive director of the The Green Grid. “Their primary function is to drive the cost of a transaction down as low as it can be.” The Green Grid has just had its annual European conference, over two days in Paris and London, and is reacting to this world, where it is all about the lowest cost for transactions. “Amazon can deliver a CPU-hour, for ...

Disney has provided a peak “behind the magic”, at least in how its data centres will turn heat into energy Disneyland Paris is partnering with French energy provider Dalkia to showcase a green way to turn waste heat from its data centres into heating and hot water at a business park. Dalkia revealed that it will soon open its first district heating network in the Val d’Europe business park in Marne-la-Vallée near Paris. A BBC video of the building of the greenfield business park, which is mostly reportedly owned by Eurodisney, the operator of Disneyland Paris, can be found here. This district-wide heating network will be fuelled by energy recovered from a 8,000 square metre data centre on the site.

Users will be able to compare data centre efficiency using an online tool from the Green Grid

RIM’s BlackBerry data services are down across EMEA, as the company announces a new acquisition BlackBerry owners across the UK and Ireland have been suffering from a major data outage, with some sources reporting that the problem is affecting customers throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). “Some users in EMEA are experiencing issues. We’re investigating, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” tweeted BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) at around 3pm BST today. The outage began for some customers at around 11am this morning, with Vodafone UK customer services claiming that the outage had affected 80 percent of UK BlackBerry users on all mobile networks. T-Mobile UK support also tweeted that there was “an issue with Blackberry services”.

Datapipe signs up, as the modules start to ship to build Verne Global’s green data centre Verne Global has announced a customer for, and released more details of, the data centre it announced last month in Iceland, powered by renewable energy. Managed services firm Datapipe will deliver what it calls “green cloud” services from equipment installed in the data centre that Verne is building in the former NATO airbase in Kevlavik, Iceland. While Verne finishes the preparation of the building, Colt is shipping a modular data centre, which will be up and running before the end of the year. First of many? Verne gets its warehouse ready “The modules are now in the shipping process,” said Verne’s CEO Jeff Monroe, speaking to eWEEK Europe at the NetEvents press summit in Frascati, Italy. The data centre, apparently the first external order Colt has had for its modular product, will ...

Data centre managers are often unaware of security measures in place at their own facilities, says McAfee Senior corporate executives are largely unaware of how secure their data centres are, according to a recent McAfee report. Only 22 percent of data centre managers surveyed in a report felt senior management is aware of the company’s security preparedness, according to a data centre study from McAfee released on 3 October. There is a “serious disconnect” between what managers think about the security measures in place and what is actually implemented, the survey found. Management in the dark “It is astounding that almost two-thirds of our respondents say that their management is in the dark about their true security status,” said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group, who conducted the study on behalf of McAfee.

Juniper’s new switches help ease admin burden of integrating smartphones into corporate network Juniper Networks has launches a new range of switches and security software to help ease the problem posed when staff access the corporate network with a growing number of smartphones and tablets. Juniper’s new offerings – including three new Ethernet switches, a new wireless LAN controller and new mobile security software for Apple iOS- and Google Android-based devices – are being offered under the vendor’s “Simply Connected” networking umbrella. Admin Burden The products are designed to make it easier for enterprise IT administrators to deal with the influx of mobile devices being brought into work by employees looking to access the applications and data on the corporate network. The days of IT administrators giving employees business-issued mobile devices to access the network is over, according to Dhritiman Dasgupta, director of product marketing for Juniper’s data ...

Pre-fab data centres are a reality, and containers are reaching places we wouldn't have expected, says Peter Judge. Pre-fabricated buildings have a way of becoming permanent. It looks like the data centre industry has cottoned to that, and is now selling a range of options to people who want different kinds of data centres. Essentially, we have full-on pre-fabricated data centres, such as that provided by Colt to Verne Global in Iceland, which are being offered alongside containers, such as those used by HP to supply Airbus’ high-performance computing needs. There are even micro-modular data centres – consisting of one rack in a box. And I think they all have their place. Homes for heroes Excalibur proves the prefab concept The word “pre-fab” has interesting resonances. After the Second world War, the British government built 156,000 temporary homes, universally known as “pre-fabs”, to replace bomb-damaged homes. They were designed ...

Virgin adds its network to cloud provider Savvis, and offers it with no set-up fees Virgin Media Business is offering a virtual cloud data centre service on its fibre network, with hourly fees and no set-up charges. The virtual private data centre (VPDC) offering uses cloud services from Savvis‘ data centre in Slough, which already serves customers such as the Ministry of Justice, and will be provided over Virgin’s fibre network, which is marketed to business customers as Big Red Internet. Virgin expects to reach mostly companies with around 250 to 1000 users, and will compete with rivals on price as well as on terms and conditions. Last to the party, but best dressed? “We are last into the party, but we are best dressed,” said Virgin Media chief operating officer Andrew Barron. Without actually naming the competition, he promised to outperform long-established rivals such as BT’s Virtual ...

Data centre company Verne Global is using modular components to build a data centre in Iceland for customers in the US and Europe, which will be powered entirely by renewable energy. Verne is shipping pre-fabricated data centre modules made by Colt to Iceland, where they will be put together to form a 500 square metre data centre before the end of this year, which Verne says will be more effective than rival data centres built from racks inside shipping containers. All the power you could need Keflavik in 1982 Verne has been building a data centre for some time in the former NATO Naval Air Station Keflavik (pictured in 1982) in Iceland, which has a dual source of renewable energy, both hydro-electric and geothermal, as well as good links to telecoms lines. It has decided to start the actual service from the site with a pre-fabricated system that should suit ...

After three successive tragic CEO appointments, HP is desperate to get things right this time. Eric Doyle looks at Meg Whitman’s prospects The permanent appointment of Meg Whitman as Leo Apotheker’s replacement at HP is creating a stir in Silicon Valley. Many people are questioning the gamble the HP board is taking by immediately making the appointment permanent. A previous intimation, before the decision to to sack Apotheker was finalised, said that a temporary CEO would be recruited.

Even after years of Green IT promotion, only a minority of IT people know how much power they use. Peter Judge is shocked The sustainable IT industry won’t like this. After years of activity, the green IT movement has apparently made little practical difference to IT managers’ lives, and sustainability may actually be moving backwards. More than half of IT managers have no idea how much energy their equipment uses, and overall the maturity of the sustainable IT field is actually decreasing, according to a survey of 1,000 top level IT people carried out by Fujitsu in seven countries.

Data centre efficiency standards groups from Facebook and Intel share… for greater efficiency The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has announced that it will work with the Open Compute Project (OCP) on selected projects relating to data centre systems design. In return, the ODCA will allow access to its customer base for testing the Open Compute hardware. The overall aim of the partnership is to improve the efficiency of hardware and to innovate, using ODCA’s over 300 customers to test new hardware and suggest improvements. Spurning The Hardware Makers The OCP grew out of Facebook’s decision to share its own efficient hardware designs – variations on vendors equiment which reduce power demands and materials used in its data centres. Allowing others to use and comment on these designs, the social media firm hoped to stimulate discusson and get energy-efficient ideas adopted faster.

Intel has ramped up production of its solid state drives (SSDs) for enterprises and data centres Intel has used the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco to highlight the launch of its latest product line, namely the Solid-State Drive 710 Series. The 710 Series SSDs are purpose-built multi-level cell (MLC) enterprise data centre-level replacements for Intel’s own X25-E Extreme SSD, which came out in 2009. Cheaper Prices The new Intel offering follows a trend toward more enterprise-type deployments for the MLC SSDs. MLC actually is about half the cost of single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory, but it has had reliability problems during its development. Thus, enterprise IT has largely shied away from MLC until manufacturers solved those problems.

The majority of big businesses are still deeply committed to their mainframes, and expect to increase spending

Cisco CEO John Chambers planted his feet took aim at the company’s competitors during Cisco’s annual anlysts day Cisco Systems, which for years owned more than 50 percent of the Internet networking gear market but lost some 10 percent of that market share in the last few years, never had to position itself as aggressive in the marketplace because it was usually in a comfortable first-place position. Today, the company still is in first place, but the situation is a lot more dicey. National and international competitors are gradually gaining market share, most of Cisco’s public-sector customers are wading through major income cuts, and the general world economy is still slumping. Cisco has been forced into expansion into new markets, such as data centre servers and other equipment. It also has excised some of its lower-margin consumer businesses, including the popular Flip videocam—which it produced for ...

inShare 1 Companies such as Amazon, eBay and Google must do better on energy management and emissions disclosure The world’s leading Internet companies are still delivering mediocre results where it comes to their energy and carbon management strategies, according to a new study from green consultancy Verdantix. The study, Carbon Strategy Benchmark: Internet Sector, examined the carbon and energy-management strategies of the top 14 Internet and social networking firms, including Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent along with Akamai, Amazon, Apple, eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Priceline, Salesforce and Yahoo.

The data centre sector is beating the economic downturn, with investment expected to exceed $35bn in 2012 Investment in data centre infrastructure will exceed $35 billion (£22bn) during 2012, a new report by DatacenterDynamics Research has found – with around a tenth of that money to be invested in the UK. The DatacenterDynamics Industry Census 2011, based on responses from 5,400 data centre owners and operators from around the world, found that the global data centre industry is set grow 16 percent over the next 12 months, helping the sector to beat the global downturn. Beating the downturn The Western United States is to receive the largest investment of $3.5 billion (£2.5bn), closely followed by the UK with $3.35 billion (£2.1bn) and China with $3.1 billion (£1.9bn). However, in terms of percentage growth in data centre investment, South East Asia will far outstrip other ...

Vertical air cooling improved French designers’ energy efficiency – and inspired the name of their data centre Celeste, a French high-speed Internet access provider, is to launch its power-efficient Marilyn data centre at the end of September, featuring vertical air cooling and an innovative flywheel-based UPS system. The data centre took only ten months to build, according to Celeste chief executive Nicolas Aubé. As of February the 200-bay, 900-square-metre data centre was still at the concept stage, he said. Power backup Located in the Île-de-France region near the A4 motorway, Marilyn has already attracted the interest of banks, hosting companies and other IT services firms, Aubé said.

One Level 3 data centre in Amsterdam and two in London now get all of their power from renewable sources Level 3 Communications has taken a move toward green technology by certifying that three of its data centres – including two in London – are powered entirely by renewable energy sources. The US-based communications services provider said it has received certifications from energy providers in Holland and the UK affirming that one of its colocation centres in Amsterdam and two in London now receive all commercial electric power from renewable energy sources. Those include wind power, hydroelectric power and solar power, according to Level 3.

A data centre in London’s East End has opted for 100 percent renewable energy to meet carbon targets Colocation data centre services provider Interxion has revealed that its data centre, located in London’s Brick Lane, is to be powered using 100 percent renewable energy. Interxion operates 28 data centres in 11 countries across Europe, and the decision to move its Brick Lane facility to 100 percent renewable energy is part of its efforts to provide a clear and transparent audit trail for its customers. The decision will see Interxion source its renewable power from UK provider SmartestEnergy. The renewable energy comes from a combination of wind, hydropower and biomass, as well as Good Quality CHP (combined heat and power).