SolidNode

Here is a roundup of some regional data center news around the United States:

• Midwest ISO seeks new home for backup data site. Major power consortium Midwest ISO is looking for a new home for their $35 million backup data site after the Boone County (Indiana) Commissioners voted down their rezoning request for land.  Due to a stipulation from the Department of Homeland Security, Midwest ISO was looking to build its 17-acre, $35 million data center in a rural area, away from major highways, railways and airports.  This is the second time they have been turned down in Boone county. Ten years ago they were turned down when they wanted to build a headquarters near Zionsville.  Midwest ISO recently announced expansion of their headquarters in Carmel, Indiana; investing around $110 million to upgrade computer equipment and adding 70 jobs over the next five years.
• Growth in Michigan for Online Tech.  CEO of Ann Arbor-based Online Technologies Yan Ness credits the cold Michigan temperatures for the continued growth of his business.  Online Tech has three data centers -  a 30,500 square foot facility in Genesee County, 10,500 square feet south of Ann Arbor in Avis Park and the newest facility, 5,000 square feet in down town Ann Arbor. Recently Online Tech won an Ann Arbor SPARK’s Fast Track award for a fourth consecutive year.  The award honors companies that maintain average annual revenue growth of 20% for three consecutive years.
• Texas data center demand outpacing supply. Sheila Bellinger, VP and Southwest director of the Grub & Ellis National Data Center Group spoke at Datacenter Dynamics Dallas Thursday on the topic of supply and demand for data center space in the Dallas-ForthWorth area.  Bellinger noted that about 1.5 million square feet of data center space was absorbed by the Dallas-FortWorth market over the past three years.  Although power costs in the area are expensive, other factors such as fiber-optic infrastructure, favorable regulatory environment and low construction costs are what drives demand.  Bellinger said that Texas is consuming more power than any other state in the U.S.

I am a little bit partial to this last story: Waterloo, Fastest (Internet) Town in the Midwest.  Stacey Higginbotham from GigaOm reports on a local newspaper story about Waterloo Iowa having faster broadband than even the most wired cities.  Mediacom selected Waterloo to (soon) have 105 Mbps cable Internet service on the downlink thanks to the town’s willingness to get involved in bringing better broadband to its residents.

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Regional Roundup: Indiana, Michigan, DFW

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Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• Amazon Web Services Asia Expansion.  Amazon Web Service announced Thursday that an expansion of their services into an Asia-Pacific region will take place in the first half of 2010, when developers and businesses will be able to access infrastructure services from multiple availability zones in Singapore, with other zones in Asia following in the second half of 2010.  AWS services included at launch will be Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage (S3), SimpleDB, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Queue Service (SQS), MapReduce and CloudFront.  Pricing for web services in Asia will be announced when launched in 2010.
• Hurricane Electric Expands Infrastructure at Equinix.  Internet backbone and IPv6 provider Hurricane Electric will extend its presence to additional Equinix data centers outside of the United States. Hurricane Electric will expand into Equinix Tokyo-2, Hong Kong-1 and Zurich-1 facilities.  Citing an increasing demand for IPv6 content in Asia and Europe as a reason for global expansion, the Hurricane Electric presence in global Equinix data centers will also allow other Equinix customers to easily exchange IP traffic with more than 500 associated IPv6 backbones.  Equinix chief marketing officer Jarrett Appleby said “operating also within our TY2, HK1 and ZH1 centers will put Hurricane Electric in the middle of an existing community of international and local networks and carriers for its next generation IP access service.”
• Level 3 expands in Atlanta. Level 3 announced Thursday an expansion of operations and enhancing local presence in the Atlanta area.  The initiative will provide mid-market enterprises with greater access to Level 3’s services via its extensive backbone network, metro fiber-optic footprint, and a locally focused sales and customer support team.  Level 3 will expand the network in the Atlanta area that already passes nearly 15,000 businesses today.  Following their “link globally and connect locally” mantra, the move will allow Level 3 to provide a competitive alternative for Atlanta area businesses.  Level 3 has announced similar focused expansions in Chicago, Miami and New York in recent months.

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Roundup: Amazon, Hurricane Electric, Level 3

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