Roundup: VMware, Equinix, Limelight

VMware Opens Washington Data Center.  Virtualization giant VMware announced Tuesday the opening of a new green IT data center in East Wenatchee, Washington.  VMware expects to save $5 million per year due to $4 million in energy savings and $1 million in location consolidation costs.  A LEED platinum certification from the Green Building Council is pending.  Green technologies employed at the Washington data center include Hydroelectric power, an economizer strategy to take advantage of free air cooling, containment methodology and virtualization technology (of course).  VMware is targeting a PUE of between 1.2 and 1.5. “By utilizing a non-proprietary datacenter design, the facility is one that virtually any enterprise or government agency can build," said CIO Mark Egan. "And we are committed to using the lessons learned in the design and development of our datacenter to help our customers achieve similar benefits.”  Last May VMware bought a 5% stake in Terremark, who was featured in the keynote by VMware CEO Paul Maritz at VMWorld 2009.

Equinix Develops Carrier-Neutral Ethernet Exchange.  At the ITU Telecom World 2009 conference in Geneva Equinix announced a global carrier-neutral Ethernet services platform, aimed at creating new and expanded Ethernet serivce opportunities for carriers.  Equinix has partnered with Alcatel-Lucent in this venture.  “Equinix’s new carrier neutral Ethernet exchange program is a natural extension of its existing IP interconnect offerings and gives a competitive edge to customers already interconnecting in Equinix POPs/carrier hotel locations," said Alcatel-Lucent President Basil Alwan. The Equinix solution is designed to automate the process of interconnection agreements between carriers and enable them to seamlessly interconnect with multiple Ethernet carriers that have complimentary footprints through a centralized switching fabric.  Alcatel-Lucent recently had their next generation optical transport solution deployed by First Communicaitons, an integrated telecommunications carrier based in the Midwest.  The solution was a part of a DWDM high capacity, low latency network from Chicago to New Jersey.

Limelight introduces next-generation global network. On Monday Limelight Networks introduced XD, the next generation of the company's global network Platform.  Along with XD,  Limelight (LLNW) announced three new services that take advantage of Adaptive Intelligence to provide advanced levels of control, performance and insight into real-time delivery conditions. "With XD, we are combining network innovations and advanced software to actively manage each object delivery in real-time on a per-connection basis, ensuring a brilliant user experience across a wide variety of devices, even under extreme and changing network conditions,” said Limelight co-founder and CTO Nathan Raciborski said