Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: October

To help you stay up to date on the latest in the data center industry, here are the 10 top data center stories of October from Data Center Knowledge:

With Microsoft Data Center Deal, EdgeConneX Takes on Wholesale Giants - The Comcast Ventures-backed data center provider appears to be throwing its hat into the ring to compete for large wholesale cloud deals with the likes of Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros Technology.

Verizon Said to Be Nearing Data Center Deal, Most Likely With Equinix - The portfolio consist primarily of data centers Verizon gained when it acquired Terremark in 2011, and the analysts estimate that Equinix may pay about $3.5 billion in the transaction, which would be neutral for Verizon and positive for Equinix, given high quality of the Terremark facilities and their locations, which would further increase Equinix’s already enormous global scale.

Oracle’s Cloud, Built by Former AWS, Microsoft Engineers, Comes Online - While Larry Ellison has been touting the might of Oracle’s cloud for years, the company has been far behind its rivals in the cloud infrastructure services market in terms of revenue. This latest attempt is its biggest effort yet to catch up, leveraging its experience in the enterprise, its hardware design and global supply chain expertise, and the cloud infrastructure know-how of the biggest players in the market.

Cloud by the Megawatt: Inside IBM’s Cloud Data Center Strategy - All major US hardware vendors have tried and failed to become formidable rivals to Amazon in the cutthroat cloud infrastructure market; all except Oracle and IBM, which continues to expand both technological capabilities of its cloud and the global infrastructure that makes it all possible.

Digital Realty to Build Data Center Tower in Downtown Chicago

Rendering of Digital Realty's planned data center at 330 E. Cermak in Chicago. The company's existing carrier hotel at 350 E. Cermak is immediately to the right. (Image: Digital Realty)

The data center REIT is billing the future Chicago data center as an expansion of 350 E. Cermak, which has historically been in high demand because of the large amount of networks that can be accessed there. Until recently, Telx, which Digital acquired last year, operated the network meet-me room in the building.

VMware Gives AWS Keys to Its Enterprise Data Center Kingdom

VMware CEO Pat Gelsigner speaking at VMworld 2014 in San Francisco. (Photo: VMware)

The move, aimed squarely at the enterprise market, is a strategic about-face for both companies, who in the past viewed each other as competition. As the world’s biggest provider of cloud infrastructure services, Amazon has been perceived as a huge competitive threat to VMware’s ubiquitous presence in enterprise data centers.

VMware Sells Its Governments Cloud Business to QTS - The deal comes about a month after VMware, now majority-owned by Dell, announced a major shift in cloud strategy, choosing to focus more on providing technologies that help customers use other cloud providers’ services rather than trying to compete with market leaders, such as Amazon and Microsoft, as a cloud provider itself.

Here’s Google’s Plan for Calming Enterprise Cloud Anxiety - Enterprises that sign up for Google’s cloud services will now have the choice to submit their software development and IT operations teams to the same level of operational rigor Google submits its own engineers to.

Iron Mountain Entering N. Virginia with Massive Data Center Build

Rendering of Iron Mountain's future 60MW data center campus in Manassas, Virginia (Image: Iron Mountain)

Already one of the most in-demand data center locations, Northern Virginia is expected to see annual demand growth in the high double digits over the next five years, according to real estate brokers. That growth will be driven by demand from cloud providers and managed services companies.

Space: the Ultimate Network Edge - A whole new global network backbone is being built, consisting of intercontinental submarine cables, capable of handling unprecedented amounts of bandwidth, 5G wireless networks, and satellites that beam data down to earth using lasers.

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