(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Data center openings certainly aren’t uncommon, but this week saw news of two new data center projects in the WHIR’s home town of Toronto, which is indeed unusual, and interesting for the potential future in-person coverage it represents.
On Monday, hosting provider PEER 1 announced that it had begun construction on a new 41,000 square foot “green” data center in Toronto, just 18 kilometers from the downtown core. The first phase of the $10 million facility will include 7,500 square feet of data center space and 8,000 square feet of office space. The remaining space will be data center space built out in future phases, according to demand and market conditions.
On Thursday, Carpathia Hosting announced that it had opened its first international data center in Toronto. The company says it chose Toronto to expand its reach internationally, bringing the company’s overall footprint to nine tier 3 data centers. After a 45 day build-out, says the company, the data center is now hosting hundreds of servers, more than 5 petabytes of storage and more than 80GB of bandwidth.
Sadly, not every data center announced this week was in Toronto.
On Tuesday, IT solutions company DataChambers said it plans to build a second data center on its 80-acre campus in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The company also said it would expand its existing facility for the second time in less than a year. The two projects will more than double the company’s capacity and cost more than $7 million.
Along with a series of data center projects, this week saw news of several significant appointments.
On Monday, network operator Infinera announced that it had named Dirk Corsus its vice president of systems engineering, making him responsible for providing experience and leadership to the company’s systems engineering team. Corsus has more than 20 years experience in engineering and product development, including work with Alcatel and Alcatel Lucent, helping to launch many of the company’s optical networking and routing products.
And on Tuesday, IT management services provider SAManage announced that it had named former Parallels VP Kurt Daniel to its board of directors. Daniel until recently served as senior vice president at hosting software provider Parallels, and worked with Microsoft prior to that. SAManage says his addition to the board will help the company take advantage of opportunities in the SaaS-based IT management market.
Finally, along with the new facilities and new appointments came a notable new product.
On Monday, hosting provider SoftLayer filled out its CloudLayer cloud hosting product with the launch of its CloudLayer computing service. After launching its CloudLayer Storage and CloudLayer CDN last week, the company introduced a cloud computing product, providing access to individual computing instances that can be connected and stacked, based on the Citrix XenServer virtualization platform.
While much of this week’s news was interesting, the greatest potential for follow-ups this week is driven by the proximity of two of the new facilities to the WHIR staff and our camera crew. It would not be unreasonable to expect a WHIR tv post from either facility in the near future.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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