Weekend Roundup: Syria Offline, Nortel Patents, GoGrid

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

Syrian Internet Shutdown.  Following Egypt and Libya Internet shutdowns, the recent anti-government protests in Syria this past Friday were followed by the country dropping off of the Internet. Renesys has a run-down of events and statistics around Syrian networks. Over the course of roughly half an hour the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table. As with other protests, people have turned to social networks to help spread information.  Facebook has setup a Syrian Uprising 2011 Information Centre.

Fighting over Nortel Patents.  TechCrunch summarizes the fight over more than 6,000 Nortel patents among Google, Apple and Microsoft. With a recent bid from Google of $900 million the Department of Justice is looking into the patent wars.  While the DoJ may not be concerned as much with Google acquiring the patents, the same is not true of Apple. The Nortel patents cover technologies related to 4G, data networking, optical, voice, Internet and semiconductors. The Nortel bankruptcy has been progressing for over two years now, with their wireless division being sold to Ericsson and the enterprise networking business sold to Avaya.  Google is claiming they are interested in the patents to create a  disincentive for others to sue them.

GoGrid CEO exit due to huge growth.  GigaOm's Derrick Harris digs into the news of GoGrid's CEO John Keagy leaving to discover that the reason is ultimately the result of the company growing too quickly. According to Keagy it came down to refocusing on strategic partnerships and serving as an evangelist, after wearing many other hats as the company experienced triple-digit growth every year. After building a team of new CMO, CIO and CFO's Keagy felt it was time to put someone at the top as well.  Keagy will discuss the IaaS market on stage at the Structure 2011 conference later this month.