Roundup: CloudKick, Tieto, IBM, Juniper

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Cloud management Start-up Cloudkick launches. San Francisco start-up Cloudkick announced its cloud server management and monitoring services coming out of beta. Cloudkick is trying to leverage the trend towards monitoring as a service by creating a unified dashboard that helps end users monitor the workings of a variety of cloud services. The service currently works with EC2, Rackspace, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, Rimuhosting and VPS.net. Cloudkick recently posted charts showing periodic ping latency between EC2 nodes in an embattled debate over cloud capacity issues.

Tieto builds new data centre in Finland. Helsinki based IT services company Tieto announced they are building a new, energy efficient data centre in Espoo, Finland.  The 1,000 square meter (10,764 square feet) data centre consists of two 500 square meter modules and will double the area of Tieto's data centers located in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The EUR $18 million project began this month and is expected to begin operations near the end of the year. "Modern data centre technology will enable full-scale production of the growing cloud computing services and the energy-saving virtualization of servers. Through new data centres, Tieto can also respond to the future growth of the market and IT outsourcing in particular," says Ari Karppinen, Tieto's Country head of Finland.

IBM Upgrades Tennis Australia. Australian IT news site reports on an IT infrastructure upgrade for the Australian Open, led by IBM. The Tennis Australia (TA) infrastructure powers massive data capture and distribution systems for the two week event where staffing changes from 300 to about 2000.  The infrastructure is being hosted by IBM in a U.S. data center that is also used for supporting Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.  To handle the large amount of data being captured TA purchased an IBM XIV Storage System with a 42 terabyte capacity. "Video analysis is one of the key things in sport now, and it's certainly our intention to have an infrastructure that allows us to do all the analytical work our coaches require,'' said TA chief information officer Chris Yates.

Juniper and Polycom Partner. Juniper Networks and Polycom announced an alliance focused on improving the reliability, cost-effectiveness and quality of the customer experience for telepresence and video conferencing services. A joint managed video services solution will pair Juniper's network resource control platform and the Polycom video call control system, with the aim of reducing costs and improving the delivery and manageability of visual communications. Polycom CEO Bob Hagerty said "teaming with Juniper, our goal is to help improve the quality and efficiency of visual communications on the network, so customers have deployment options and can confidently incorporate the technology into their core business processes and as a key component of their unified communications initiatives." A Juniper/Polycom service provider solution is expected mid-year 2010.