(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.
