Roundup: CSC, Equinix, i/o, Rackspace

CSC today announced that it will team with Microsoft Corp. to help independent software vendors (ISV) and enterprise customers build applications atop the Windows Azure platform. utilize the Windows Azure platform. With more than 2,000 .NET developers, CSC can support large scale development projects with public cloud computing benefits delivered by Windows Azure. The company also announced the formation of a dedicated CSC Global Competency Center located in Vietnam specializing in Windows Azure. "With a global commitment to Windows Azure, CSC is embracing cloud computing in a very aggressive fashion and we applaud the innovation this agreement will drive in the market," said Doug Hauger, General Manager of Windows Azure. "The partnership between our companies is a perfect match of software and services capabilities."

Colocation and interconnection specialist Equinix Inc. (EQIX) said that the Boston Options Exchange(BOX) will locate its primary matching engines for its all electronic equity options market at the Equinix NY4 data center in Secaucus, New Jersey. The move will provide BOX customers, including algorithmic trading firms, with a scalable data center infrastructure from which they can directly connect to the BOX matching engine. "Operating within Equinix’s NY4 center will put BOX’s order matching engine in the middle of an existing community of financial trading companies and electronic trading networks, while providing our customers with a high-performance trading environment from which they can link to BOX with the lowest levels of latency," said Alan Grigoletto, senior vice president for BOX. "This means we can now pair BOX’s ultra-fast matching engine with the advantages of colocating, thereby eliminating any geographic latency."

Both Level 3 (LVLT) and Cox Business announced that they have installed fiber conenctivity to i/o Data Centers' new Phoenix ONEdata center. "The i/o Data Centers' Phoenix ONE facility houses some of the world's largest corporations and Web properties, giving Cox Business an opportunity to serve an entirely new set of businesses," said Hyman Sukiennik, vice president of Cox Business, which built dual fiber entires into the 530,000 square foot facility. Level 3’s network will allow i/o Data Centers to deliver to its customers network connectivity up to 10 Gbps – enough capacity to transport 128 simultaneous high-definition video downloads per second.

Rackspace Hosting (RAX) today announced the availability of the public beta of its Cloud Servers API. Cloud Servers, part of the company’s portfolio of cloud services, is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that provides inexpensive compute capacity that can be instantly sized allowing businesses to pay only for what it uses—as needed. “With the launch of our API, we’re looking forward to working with our partners and the developer community to create a powerful cloud ecosystem which we believe will generate new tools and applications to make cloud hosting even easier and more efficient,” said Emil Sayegh, General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud. “We see programmatic control as essential for igniting an ecosystem around the Rackspace Cloud. It’s a key tool for generating the ‘next big thing’ in cloud because it gives developers the power and control to bring their great ideas to fruition."