Data Centres ASIA

New HP data centre for Cyberjaya announced

2008-10-09T17:56:00.001+01:00

Hewlett-Packard is to develop a 60-acre campus at Cyberjaya in Malaysia. Scheduled to be completed in 2010, the campus will host multiple core functions in one location. The functions hosted would include an internal global application development centre for HP’s global IT organisation, a data centre for outsourcing services, a professional centre and a call centre.

Fujitsu Australia opens new data centre

2008-10-01T10:35:00.001+01:00

Fujitsu Australia Limited has opened its new sustainable data centre at Sydney’s Homebush Bay after work to improve the facility’s energy efficiency and reduce its environmental footprint. The three storey, purpose-built structure has undergone significant enhancements over the past eight months to meet Fujitsu’s stringent environmental design principles and deliver measurable savings on both greenhouse gas emissions and financial metrics The facility includes high density, hybrid cooling technology which uses recycled chilled water and spatial layout planning to minimise thermal currents. The company said that the use of a closed loop cooling system significantly reduces the amount of water needed to maintain the facility at an industry standard 23o Celsius and 50 per cent humidity. As a result, 80 per cent less water than a conventional cooling system will be used and the data centre will consume up to 32 per cent less energy. The facility will be managed from a central location, and auto-sensor lighting systems that only switch on when needed, reduces usage by up to 60 per cent.

JPIX extends peering fabric to Equinix

2008-09-30T13:29:00.001+01:00

Japan Internet Exchange Co. Ltd. (JPIX), the largest Internet exchange in Japan, has extended its peering fabric to the Equinix Tokyo-2 (TY2) Internet Business Exchange (IBX(R)) data centre located in Shinagawa. As a part of the agreement, Equinix customers will be able to directly exchange traffic, or "peer," with JPIX's Internet service providers, cable TV service providers and content providers, with the objective of reducing the costs of network traffic exchange. Under this agreement, JPIX will set up an Internet Exchange (IX) switch at the Equinix TY2 centre, and it will use Equinix's IBXLink service to directly connect to the Equinix TY1 centre located in Heiwajima.

New Data Centre to launch in India

2008-09-24T18:54:00.002+01:00

State owned Indian Telephone Industry is launching a new data centre which will become operational within the next six months. Located a the ITI Bangalore premises, the new facility is being constucted by a consortium of companies from Hyderabad. ITI Bangalore is providing the infrastructure, including land and building space for the centres, partner companies are to provide the required technology and equipment support to the centre. The centre will be 40,000 sq ft, but is planned to expand substantially over the next 2-3 years. ITI has been approached by a number of institutions including RailTel and some banking organisations to utilise the data centre.

New Data Centre in Queensland to open in 3 months

2008-09-16T10:25:00.004+01:00

Queensland's new A$220 million high-tech data centre will host it's first tenants within three months.
The tier 3 data centre, code named Polaris 1, is a joint venture between insurer Suncorp and the Springfield Land Corporation. The 14,000m², three-story building will colocate enterprises including Suncorp, NEC and Fujitsu with Queensland government departments and councils, including its service provider CITEC. Polaris 1 uses non-potable water for cooling, saving a potential 650,000 litres a day,trigeneration power feeds, and rotary UPS avoiding the use of lead-acid batteries. Two further Polaris data centres (one in north Brisbane) are planned targetting South East Asia as an overseas disaster recovery centre, once Pipe's Guam fibre link is completed.The data centre will be connected to the Springfield to Brisbane dark fibre networ owned by the Springfield Land Corporation and managed by Pipe Networks. Security is enhanced by Biometric devices installed throughout the complex, including deep-palm and fingerprint readers, while large vehicle and man traps measure the weight of people and machinery and can isolate unauthorised access attempts to the complex. NEC's Smartcatch video monitors use behavioral analysis and facial recognition to identify malicious activity. Power for Polaris 1 can be upgraded from 800 to 1500 watts per square metre, and support 60 kilowatt racks.

Tata enters content delivery space with BitGravity

2008-09-10T10:59:00.002+01:00

Tata Communications, and broadcaster BitGravity have launched a worldwide Content Delivery Network (CDN) service. Tata has more than 300 points of presence worldwide throughout Europe, Asia, North America and India. Tata has also invested USD 11.5 million in convertible debt in BitGravity who in turn has named Tata Communications’ Chief Technology Officer, John Hayduk to its Board of Directors. Customers can access content, including High-Definition Video, without delay or jitter. Fast forwarding, cache clearing, resolution switching and rate throttling are just a few of the features. With the rise of Video as the main application, combined with data centre storage facilities, a CDN was the missing piece of the puzzle. Watch for other players to finalise their global plans.

Haryana State to build new Data Centre

2008-09-09T14:47:00.002+01:00

Haryana State, in northwestern India, will build a new Data Centre as part of its plans to implement the National e-governance Plan. The project is awaiting a go ahead from the central government with a proposal prepared by consultants PWC, to the Government of India and the approval is expected to come by the end of this month. The state data centre will be developed and maintained by a private company in collaboration with Haryana State Electronics Development Corporation (Hartron). It will act as the main data centre where all the state government departments for data storage. The facility will have a 35 rack storage capacity which will be sufficient to store data for the next 10 years and the capacity may be scaled up in future.

Rackspace opens new data centre in Hong Kong

2008-09-08T09:13:00.002+01:00

Rackspace has opened its Asian headquarters and data centre in Hong Kong. The data centre, located in the Fo Tan district of Hong Kong, will represent an investment of at least US$20 million when complete, inclusive of lease obligations and infrastructure, equipment and personnel expenses. The new data center will initially have approximately 9,500 gross square feet and will be expandable to about 18,000 gross square feet. The operation in Hong Kong will offer the full range of Rackspace service offerings including managed hosting, cloud hosting, virtualization, security and email services, storage and backup and professional services. Rackspace already has more than 500 customers based in Asia Pacific

The data centre in Hong Kong joins Rackspace's existing data center operations, including facilities in San Antonio, Dallas, northern Virginia and London.

Inter-Asia Internet traffic increases as demand for Video apps surge

2008-09-01T13:09:00.005+01:00

An article in the New York Times about how internet traffic is increasingly flowing around the US is very poignant for those who forecast many ions ago that in Asia, network superiority combined with data centre assets would enable powerful platforms for content distribution. Citing Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, that the United States carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic a decade ago, he now estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent. The article quotes World Stats, a market research organisation: Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the world's Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet. Content and traffic are closely related and it is interesting to note that Friendster reports that 90% of their current traffic now comes from Asian countries. The Philippines has the third largest user base for YouTube in the Asia Pacific region, next to Japan and Australia. Facebook grew in Asia (June 07-08) by 23 per cent to about 200 million unique visits. It is not surprising therefore that many operators in the region are focusing on bandwidth provision technologies to help cope with upsurge in demand arising mainly from video apps.

Tokyo Stock Exchange to provide colocation/managed services

2008-08-28T09:22:00.000+01:00

Tokyo Stock Exchange, Inc. (TSE) will launch a new "TSE Co-Location Service" at its data centre.
This represents an interesting departure because it effectively offers colocation and a form of managed services to its investor and trading customers. The TSE will introduce 2 new trading systems as a response to changes in the development of financial engineering and information technology, as well as the increasing speed of trading systems. The new systems, the Tdex+ new options trading platform, and arrowhead, next generation cash equity matching engine, will offer higher capacity, throughput, and what is billed as an extremely rapid response time. As applications with automated order placing functions have become popular for market users like trading participants, the demand for colocation services has also increased. The new colocation service will be available when Tdex+ and arrownet are introduced, and then for the derivatives trading system following connections with arrownet. TSE has also been in discussions with NTT Communications Corporation about providing customer connectivity service at the TSE arrownet access point. NTT operate a data centre at the TSE arrownet access point, which is planned to be launched in early 2009.

Leading Thailand bank migrates to new Data Centres

2008-08-27T07:33:00.000+01:00

Datacraft has planned and project managed the migration of a leading Thailand bank's core data centre and backup facilities to its two separate new premises. The data centre will also be upgraded to boost its computing performance and systems resilience to assure 24x7x365 business continuity and disaster recovery for the bank's business critical applications.The 12-month, complex data centre relocation exercise entails the relocation of the bank's main data centre to its new headquarters in Bangkok, as well as the consolidation of the two existing backup facilities into a single state-of-the-art backup centre located in the outskirts of Bangkok.

Rackspace looks to expand in Asia

2008-08-25T12:44:00.000+01:00

In its IPO prospectus, Rackspace (ww.rackspace.com) has said its goals for the flotation are to grow its hosting efforts around the world, particularly by expanding into markets in Europe and Asia. It has experienced fast revenue growth between 2005 and 2007 of USD 138 million to USD 362 million which has strained its operating and financial resources, hence the IPO. Joint book-running managers for the IPO are Goldman, Sachs & Co., Credit Suisse Securities and Merrill Lynch & Co. W.R. Hambrecht + Co., Jefferies & Company, Cowen and Company, RBC Capital Markets, JMP Securities, Signal Hill Capital Group, and E*TRADE Securities are the co-managers for the offering. Interestingly the company has launched CloudFS, an offering in beta mode from Rackspace's Mosso division, which will add a new storage option to its range of services, and can be accessed on-demand and scaled to greater storage amounts as needed.

Taiwan Data Centres Go Green

2008-08-25T12:27:00.000+01:00

Among the companies involved in IBM's Project Green are 10 enterprises in Taiwan. China Steel, one of the largest on the island, has upgraded its data centre under the scheme, and China Development Industrial Bank, became the first-ever financial company in the Asia-Pacific region to have a green data centre according to IBM. The project now has more than 2,000 clients worldwide.The IBM project targets corporate data centres where energy constraints and costs can hamper their ability to grow, and utilises a global team of more than 850 energy efficiency experts.

IBM moves ahead with Cloud Computing platform build

2008-08-20T20:10:00.000+01:00

IBM plans to spend USD300 million this year to build 13 "cloud computing" data centres. Sites selected across 10 countries are reported to include China, Japan, Turkey, Poland, France and the United States. The acquisition last year of Arsenal Digital Solutions, will provide the rack-mounted storage appliances for information and applications data. There does not appear to be an indication yet of the size of these centres.

This investment follows on from the establishment of cloud computing research centres - around 200 researchers worldwide (in China, Ireland, South Africa) and the company is also collaborating with universities and government agencies including the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology and Kyushu University in Japan.

Data Centres in Asia at inflection point

2008-08-19T17:50:00.000+01:00

Current research by BroadGroup suggests that Asia is now positioned for significant growth in the data centre sector. The market holds many similarities to Europe around 2-3 years ago, although the player landscape is markedly different. There are few pan-Asian players - with SingTel's EXPAN and PacNet formed from the recent merger of Pacific Internet Singapore and Asia Netcom - as leading contenders in this space. A recent alliance between 4 independent data centre operators in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam may also herald a shift in market play. The presence too of property players, investors and entrepreneurs across the region is also evident. Much of the remaining data centre sector is dominated by telcos. It will be interesting to observe developments now as enterprises outsourcing to third parties demand increasingly tough conditions to comply with legislative mandates, but also the well honed corporate social responsibility (CSR) requirements for Green data centres at a time when it is at its most challenging moment to upgrade and mitigate power and cooling requirements.

WELCOME

2008-08-19T15:08:00.000+01:00

Welcome to the first Data Centres Asia Blog, hosted by BroadGroup.

http://www.broad-group.com/