Roundup: Terremark, Alcatel-Lucent, Interxion

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

New Pricing for Terremark vCloud Express.  Terremark (TMRK) announced the addition of new levels of support and an innovative new storage pricing model for users of its vCloud Express offering. The company also updated its pricing model for virtual machines leveraging large amounts of memory, processing and storage resources. Price adjustments on vCloud Express account for peak storage capacity utilized over the course of a month, instead of being charged for the total disk space deployed. "The thousands of users that leverage the secure, reliable, and cost-effective computing resources offered by Terremark's vCloud Express are consistently delivering the innovation and value that allow their private or public-sector organizations to succeed in today's rapidly evolving environment," said Chris Drumgoole, Terremark's Senior Vice President of Client Services. "We believe these updates will serve to extend the leading-edge nature of our service and enhance our position in this highly competitive market."  Modified price structures are retroactively effective as of April 1.

Alcatel-Lucent enters data center switch market. Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) announced its new data center switching solution blueprint for enterprises. The unique solution delivers 'mesh' and 'pod' architectural designs.  The 'mesh' architecture is a switching fabric that can combine over 14,000 server 10Gig ports with only two core switches, with end-to-end latency of less than five microseconds.  The 'pod' architecture addresses server-to-server traffic and cost reduction with the highly dense, stackable OmniSwitch 6900 solution as a top-of-rack switch. The new Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), a part of the OmniVista Network Management System, addresses network management constraints related to application virtualization and virtual machine mobility in the data center as well as provides tracking and visibility. “As we build on our Application Fluent Network vision, our new data center switching solution is empowering enterprises to set up a virtualized network for their data centers, allowing users to easily take advantage of real-time applications from any location across any device," said Michel Emelianoff, Vice President and General Manager of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Networks.

Akamai delivers March Madness On Demand.  Akamai Technologies (AKAM) announced that the Akamai HD Network was the exclusive video delivery platform for the 2011 NCAA March Madness on Demand (MMOD) coverage of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship provided by Turner Sports and CBS Sports. Akamai's HD network delivered all 67 games online, with more than 1.9 million unique visitors per day on broadband sites and more than 680,000 daily visitors on mobile applications.  “Working with Turner Sports and CBS Sports on their enhanced, innovative online features, including free video content across broadband and mobile devices, was a slam dunk for all involved," said Robert Hughes, Executive Vice President of Global Sales, Services and Marketing at Akamai. "By leveraging Akamai's HD Network, Turner was able to offer higher bit rates across broadband and mobile devices, which helped contribute to longer viewing times, more multi-game watching and more user engagement."

Interxion customer wins.  Interxion (INXN) announced an agreement with Quod Financial, a global provider of adaptive trading technology, to locate its servers in Interxion’s City of London data center. Also announced was an agreement with ICF Systems AG, a full-service IT provider for the financial industry, to build a point of presence for ICF’s managed trading services at Interxion’s Frankfurt data center campus. ICF Systems AG is one of the first customers to take advantage of Interxion’s multi-member access service that was launched recently. "Interxion’s scalable Frankfurt data centre campus is the perfect location for us to deliver our services from," said Michael Krug, CEO of ICF Systems. "We intend to migrate our customers to the Interxion platform to allow them to benefit from the quality and flexibility provided by the architecture of Interxion’s multi-member access service. The existing community of financial services firms already at Interxion provides us with an additional revenue opportunity, whilst the choice of more than 150 communication networks, means both ICF Systems and our customers can source the best connectivity solutions available.”