Top 5 Data Center Stories: Week of April 30th

CenturyLink to Acquire Savvis for $2.5 Billion - CenturyLink, Inc. has agreed to acquire Savvis, Inc. for $2.5 billion in cash and stock in a deal that will boost the telco’s capabilities in managed hosting and cloud computing. CenturyLink is the third-largest telecom company in the U.S., having just completed an acquisition of Qwest. The transaction continues the consolidation in the managed hosting and cloud computing space,

Microsoft Reveals its Specialty Servers, Racks - As it seeks to slash power usage across its global cloud computing platform, Microsoft has been refining its designs for energy-efficient data center hardware. The company is now sharing the details of those designs, which feature customized servers, a high-efficiency power distribution system and in-rack UPS units.

Feds Will Shutter 137 Data Centers in 2011 - The U.S. government has shut down 39 data centers so far this year, and expects to close 98 more by the end of 2011, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said today. That would yield a total of 137 data centers shuttered in the first year of the Obama administration’s effort to eliminate waste by consolidating government data centers.

Equinix Announces New Data Center in NJ - Colocation market leader Equinix today announced a major expansion of its global data center footprint, unveiling plans to spend $140 million on a new data center in northern New Jersey and expand its existing facilities in suburban Chicago and Frankfurt, Germany.

Solar Power in Data Centers: No Longer A Novelty? - Solar power hasn’t been widely used in data centers because it takes a very large installation of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels to produce even a fraction of the energy required by most data centers. But the month of April has seen the debut of four new data centers featuring on-site solar generation