May 9, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Any other week, the big, notable thing about this week's news would be the steady continuation of the flood of data center openings we've seen in recent weeks. But this week also saw the utterly remarkable matter of two separate disappearances of servers containing customer data from facilities.
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On Wednesday, we reported that the server containing the website of Pop musician Peter Gabriel had been among an undetermined number of servers stolen from the facilities of his hosting provider. The service provider in question appears to be Rednet, which is a defunct brand of UK company Opal Telecom. Very little information about the robbery was available, but the matter was addressed on the replacement-site online at Peter Gabriel's domain.
And on Friday, financial institution HSBC admitted that it had lost a server containing transaction data for about 159,000 account holders from its Hong Kong office branch. The server disappeared during renovation at the branch April 26. The company says it held on to the information for two weeks while it conducted an internal investigation. It's not certain that the server was stolen, but HSBC says it does not contain any customer PINs, passwords or user ID's and it has security features that make the risk of data leakage or fraudulent transactions "low."
While it was a remarkable week for disappearing servers, we also saw a continuation of the impressive trend of data center openings and expansions.
On Tuesday, Global Crossing announced that it would open a new hosting data center in London, England. The company also relocated its data center in Miami, Florida to meet the needs of US customers looking for connectivity to Latin America.
On Wednesday, fast-growing dedicated hosting provider SoftLayer reported that it had opened a new data center in Washington, DC, bringing its total capacity to 45,000 servers in five facilities. The DC facility is the third data center the company has opened in the last five months.
On Thursday, Technical Real Estate announced that it had received approval to build a facility consisting of three $50 million data centers in Sydney's Norwest business park. The company says the facility is the first of a series of data center projects it has planned for the next few years. Each of the three data centers will contain approximately 10,000 square feet of space.
Also on Thursday, we reported that web security firm Commtouch had launched a new data center in Hong Kong, the fourth such facility operated by the company worldwide. Its existing facilities include two in the US and one in the UK. Between its facilities, Commtouch says it processes more than one billion messages per day to identify suspicious traffic.
Confirming the obvious increase in data center building over the last few months, Digital Realty Trust announced on Friday that it had released the results of a survey it had commissioned, saying that close to 90 percent of data center decision makers at Fortune 2000 companies had plans to increase their data center capacity in the next 12 months, and that many of those providers plan to work with a partner in deploying that data center capacity.
The most remarkable news this week was undoubtedly the disappearance of servers in two separate instances, which might mark the growth of a new variety of crime against which web hosts might have to better guard themselves.
