Press Release:
BROOMFIELD, Colo., March 26 PRNewswire-FirstCall — Level 3 Communications, Inc. today announced that the company has expanded its relationship with Telefonica International Wholesale Services to establish a dedicated wavelength network across North America, which represents the largest single capacity commitment in Level 3 history. Click here for more information.

As Cisco entered the blade server market with its hotly anticipated Unified Computing System Monday, competitors lined up to dismiss the new technology, saying it raises the problem of vendor lock-in and is too limited in scope to address broad customer needs. Click here for the rest of the article.

The talent pool of senior data center pros is shrinking faster than anticipated as budget cuts have forced businesses to close their doors and shed older workers, the ones with the most knowledge and experience, according to the AFCOM Data Center Institute (DCI).

Three years ago, DCI predicted that the talent pool of “qualified senior level technical and management data center professionals” will shrink 45% by 2015. Click here for the rest of the article

Cisco Systems Inc. and several industry partners today launched an ambitious new design for data virtualization that the vendor is calling the Unified Computing System. The entire UCS relies on a new Cisco blade server that runs on Intel Corp.’s upcoming Nehalem processors.
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Juniper this week unveiled a top-of-rack data center switch targeted at high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet deployments.

The EX2500 provides server access with 24 10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP+ ports and 700 nanosecond latency. The fixed configuration switches support 480Gbps full duplex throughput in a 1 RU footprint. All ports are non-blocking, Juniper says. Click here for the rest of the article.

Money is tight, but CIOs are planning to spend on dozens of technologies. To determine which technologies will get the most budget dollars, we created the CIO Insight Growth Score, which calculates 2009 budget growth scaled to the percentage of companies that spent in 2008, plus the change from 2008 spending. Click here for the rest of the information.

A sluggish economy is a perfect time for slugging it out in the data center.

That seemed to be Juniper Networks’ rally cry at its annual analyst conference last week as the company launched an aggressive campaign to expand its enterprise business with a targeted assault on the data center. Juniper disclosed that it is working with partners on a multiyear project to develop a converged switching fabric for the data center; and unveiled a top-of-rack 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch optimized for low latency server access. Click here for the rest of the article.

Disk drive maker Seagate is working on solving the issue of power consumption in the datacenter, the company’s CEO said in an interview with InfoWorld. While short on specific details, CEO Stephen Luczo said the company believes it has a competitive advantage with the issue. “There are architectural items that we’re working on there,” Luczo said. Click here for the rest of the article.

The IT department buys the technology; facilities buys the energy . That’s the way it’s always been in corporate America. But that may be changing.

As energy costs seesaw wildly and public concern over the environment grows, data centers are landing in the corporate cross hairs. And IT managers may find themselves on the hot seat, asked to account for the energy costs their systems incur. Some forward-thinking companies are even beginning to wonder if it isn’t time for their IT and facilities departments to merge. Click here for the rest of the article.