Roundup: Akamai, Fisher Plaza, Rackspace, Verari

Akamai Shares Lower After 2nd quarter results: Content delivery market leader Akamai Technologies (AKAM) missed analyst expectations and shares were down about 10 percent in after-hours trading.  Revenue for the 2nd quarter of 2009 was $204.6 million, a 5 percent increase over the second quarter in 2008. Cash from operations was $105 million and the company has approximately $927 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. A record 2,979 customers had recurring contracts at the end of the second quarter, a 9% increase year-over-year. In a conference call with analysts, Akamai executives said third quarter sales would likely fall below estimates. 

More maintenance work planned for Fisher Plaza: Adhost Internet LLC, a colocation provider at Fisher Plaza in Seattle reported in a blog post that more maintenance work is planned for Saturday night. Fisher Plaza East suffered a major outage earlier this month that left much of the complex without power and generator support. The maintenance window is phase 2 of 3 to restore normal power to the facility. Adhost CTO Michael Smith details the event, impact and procedures in his blog post.

Rackspace Private Cloud Leverages VMWare: Leading hosting provider Rackspace announced a new Private Cloud offering Wednesday which allows customers to run the centrally managed VMWare virtualization platform on private dedicated hardware environments. Private Clouds can be configured in Fundamental, Essential or High Availability options. "We view the Rackspace Private Cloud as having a large impact for our enterprise customers who need the flexibility, scalability, and reliability provided by VMWare's virtualization, paired with the control and security of a dedicated environment", said John Engates, Rackspace CTO.

Cloud Provider Deploys Verari FOREST Container: Verari Systems announced today that a "major cloud player, with worldwide operations" has deployed a second generation FOREST container to support its cloud services platform. "With its focus on effective resource utilization, the Verari FOREST Container was purpose built to deliver the most energy efficient solution to meet that criteria and demonstrated immediate results that produced significant savings", said Dan Gatti, VP of Worldwide Market Operations at Verari. Verari is a market leader in blade storage and energy efficient platforms. The FOREST container is an industry standard form factor (40' x 8.0 x 9.5') and can store up to 2,880 servers or 13 Petabytes of storage.

NationalNet Completes Atlanta Data Center: Hosting and colocation provider NationalNet announced it has completed a new data center in the Northwest Atlanta suburb of Marietta, Georgia. The 35,000 square foot initial phase will house the managed hosting and colocation divisions as well as a newly formed unmanaged dedicated hosting division. The data center features N+1 redundancy throughout every critical component, as well as redundant, loop-fed utility power. As we noted last week, NationalNet has documented its buildout on its company blog.

Green Building As an Economic Imperative: A new McKinsey study released Wednesday states that "investing in the energy efficiency of buildings represents a powerful and strategic energy and climate solution that combined with other non-transportation initiatives could reduce the nation's energy consumption by 23 percent by 2020, save the U.S. economy $1.2 trillion, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.1 gigatons annually". The report (PDF) was sponsored and released by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), Department of Energy and other companies. The report details how much the U.S. could increase energy efficiency in buildings and other non-transportation sectors using existing methods and technologies. The USGBC released a draft of an energy-efficiency standard for data centers to expand the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program last February.