Roundup: The Bunker, Brocade, Walmart, EMC, Dell

Here’s our review of noteworthy news in the data center industry:

The Bunker and Brocade expand partnership.  The Bunker announced the expansion of the partnership with Brocade (BRCD). Using Brocade equipment -- Brocade MLX Series Routers with "dual stack" capabilities -- will help The Bunker make a seamless migration from IPv4 to IPv6. With customer demand increasing, The Bunker decided to increase its partnership with Brocade. "We have noticed this growing demand with many of our customers and, as such, it became necessary to upgrade our network if we were to maintain the high standards we have set over the last seven years. In addition, there is the issue of IPv6 transition looming large on the horizon," said Mark Hemsley, Head of Core Network and Solutions for The Bunker. Leveraging an existing investment in Brocade MLX Series routers deployed at four operational points of presence The Bunker was able to scale their environment to cope with IPv6 licensing and run in 'dual stack' mode to migrate from IPv4." The Bunker has many financial sector clients.

Walmart purchases $5.3 million site.  The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that Walmart paid $5.3 million for 24 acres in northern Colorado Springs to build its 210,000 square foot data center.  Walmart confirmed that Colorado Springs was being considered for the $100 million data center project last May. The site is along Federal Drive, southeast of InterQuest and Voyager parkways. Local officials offered Wal-Mart $4.5 million in tax incentives  and have said the project will pump about $488 million into the regional economy over its first 15 years. Walmart spokesman Josh Phair said that construction would begin in October and be completed in late 2012.

EMC selected for hospital's private cloud.  EMC announced that Northern Hospital of Surry County, a community hospital in Mount Airy, N.C., is utilizing EMC VPLEX Metro to transform its data center operations and implement a private cloud for greater efficiency and agility. Using VPLEX Metro, Northern Hospital was able to move more than 100 virtual machines with applications and storage to their new data center without disrupting clinical and administrative operations, avoiding an estimated 50 hours of downtime.  They were also able to save $25,000 in server memory upgrades, condense their backup window timing by 98 percent, and eliminate more than 100 physical servers. "Now that we offload some of our production operations to our DR site, we're only using 25% of our server memory resources compared to 67% before," said Robert Hall, Northern Hospital's CIO. "Not only did we boost server performance and avoid $25,000 in memory upgrades but better server efficiency will help us drive more quickly to 100% virtualization within the next 6 to 12 months."

Dell completes Force 10 acquisition.  Dell announced it has finalized its acquisition of Force10 Networks, a high-performance data center networking company. In addition to strategic acquisitions, such as Force10, Dell expects to hire several hundred new team members in engineering, sales and marketing, and services jobs at the Dell Silicon Valley R&D Center. “Data center networking is going through a significant transformation to support applications and virtualization and meet the needs of end users and IT administrators. Simply put, customers need a new approach, which is what we are calling Virtual Network Services Infrastructure,” said Dario Zamarian, vice president and general manager, Dell Networking. “Force10’s history of product innovation and technology leadership in data center networking matches and accelerates our vision.”