Roundup: Interxion, SunGard, The Planet, Nasuni

Interxion and euNetworks partner.  European data center operator Interxion and euNetworks announced a non-exclusive partnership to provide traders with turnkey pan-European colocation and low-latency access to key liquidity venues.  euNetworks is a provider of mission-critical, high performance data services such as euTrade, a next-generation pan-European trading solution.  “Both firms share a deep understanding of the needs and demands of the capital markets sector, and we believe our joint offering will be of interest to a range of performance-driven traders looking for guaranteed low-latency access to European liquidity," said euNetworks CEO Brady Rafuse.

SunGard CEO Resigns: SunGard announced Monday that Eric Berg has resigned as chief executive officer of SunGard Availability Services, a position he held since October 2007. The company has initiated an executive search and until a successor is identified, Cristóbal Conde, SunGard’s president and chief executive officer, will also act as interim chief executive officer of SunGard Availability Services.

The Planet Upgrades Network: The Planet this week outlined plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities. The company plans capital investments in network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for its Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. The Planet operates seven data centers — two in Houston and five in Dallas — with 179,000 square feet of raised floor. "Our network and data centers are core to the value we provide customers, and over the past three years, we’ve made significant investments to improve speed, reduce latency and ultimately provide the best customer experience," said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Doug Erwin.

Nasuni cloud storage gateway. 2009 startup Nasuni unveiled its gateway to cloud storage, the Nasuni Filer.  The filer runs on VMware and is a virtual NAS (Network Attached Storage) file server that leverages cloud resources to simplify file storage and protection.  Claiming 'unlimited cloud capacity' Nasuni's Storage-as-a-service technology lets companies pay for only what they need, when they need it.  The virtual NAS includes advanced caching, snapshot and deduplication technologies to simplify file access, storage and protection.  "We want to knock down the barriers that are keeping ordinary business users away from taking advantage of cloud storage," said CEO and co-founder Andres Rodriguez.  Partners listed on the Nasuni web site include Amazon, Iron Mountain and Nirvanix.  The free download now in a beta period offers free cloud storage.

New Riverbed Steelhead appliance. Riverbed Technology (RVBD) announced the Riverbed Steelhead 7050 model wide area network (WAN) optimization appliance. The new appliance combines new levels of bandwidth and TCP session scalability with solid-state drives (SSD) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE). The Steelhead 7050 achieves higher throughput for read, write and search performance through 28 solid state drives that maintain 100% of the persistent data store. It can also support up to four 10 GbE SR cards and is equipped to handle up to 100,000 connections. "We are committed to breaking down performance barriers within enterprises’ current network infrastructure and keeping it reliable, inexpensive and simple,” said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. The Steelhead 7050 model appliances are expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2010.