Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of August 13th

Outage in Dublin Knocks Amazon, Microsoft Data Centers Offline - Power outages at major cloud computing data hubs for Amazon and Microsoft in Dublin, Ireland caused downtime for many sites using Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform and Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite). An explosion and fire in a transformer knocked out utility service and left both data centers unable to start their generators, resulting in a total power outage. The Dublin utility said the outage remained under investigation, but was caused by an equipment failure rather than lightning, as was initially reported.

IBM Pulls the Plug on Blue Waters - The National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) and IBM jointly announced that IBM has terminated its contract with the University of Illinois to provide the supercomputer for the NCSA’s Blue Waters project. NCSA says it is working with the National Science Foundation to ensure project continuity and that the goals of the project are achieved. “NCSA is confident that its goal of building a sustained-petascale supercomputer remains achievable in a timely manner,” it said..

Telx Acquired by ABRY, Berkshire Partners - The Telx Group, a leading provider of colocation and interconnection services, has opted for an acquisition rather than an IPO. Two Boston investment firms, ABRY Partners and Berkshire Partners, have bought Telx Group from GI Partners, the companies announced today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SoftLayer Reports $83 Million in 2Q Revenue - Hosting provider SoftLayer Technologies had $83 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2011, up from $78 million in the first quarter, the company said Tuesday. “This has been the greatest quarter of growth in our history,” said Lance Crosby, Chief Executive Officer for SoftLayer.

Stream Data Centers Focusing on Wholesale - In its 12 years in the data center business, Stream Data Centers has leased or sold data centers to blue chip companies like Apple, Home Depot, AT&T, Sprint and Nokia. It has followed the opportunities the market has presented, and recent shifts in demand have led the company to focus on the wholesale data center market.