Roundup: VMware, Layered Tech, CenturyLink, SGI

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

VMWare to acquire Digital Fuel.  VMware (VMW) announced its intention to acquire Digital Fuel, a leader in IT financial and business management SaaS solutions. Digital Fuel products enable transparent analysis of a range of IT financial metrics from physical and virtual systems to people and application costs to compute, storage, and networking resources, even when sourced from public cloud service providers. "New levels of financial visibility and control in cloud environments will enable CIOs to engage with the CFO, line of business stakeholders and others around how IT investments translate to real business value," said Boaz Chalamish, VP and General Manager at VMware. "As an authority on helping organizations navigate the business operations of IT, Digital Fuel will add a significant capability to our portfolio, broadening beyond operational management to include business-centric capabilities." This is the third acquisition for VMware in just a few months, following Shavlik Technologies and SlideRocket.

LayeredTech achieves PCI DSS 2.0.  Layered Technologies announced it is compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard 2.0 (PCI DSS). Layered Tech has provided PCI-compliant hosting and managed services before and are now compliant with DSS 2.0 requirements which look at additional guidance and evolving requirements to address emerging threats and changes in the market. To adhere to these extensive data security standards they offer PCI-compliant monitoring, vulnerability scans and change management processes to an advanced suite of network administration and server management services. “Layered Tech actively participates in the proceedings of the PCI Security Standards Council, and in addition to maintaining a continual state of compliance, we leverage our relationships with Qualified Security Assessors (QSAs) in the industry to ensure we have a solid understanding of changing evaluation requirements,” said Layered Tech President Brad Hokamp.

CenturyLink prices $2 billion of debt securities. To fund the payment of the cash portion of its pending acquisition of SAVVIS, CenturyLink has combined cash on hand along with the financing of approximately $2 billion in newly issued and senior notes. The funds will also go towards refinancing of the credit facility debt of SAVVIS and to pay fees and expenses incurred in connection with the merger. Barclays Capital Inc., Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Wells Fargo Securities, LLC are joint book-running managers for this offering.

SGI ships over 500 Altix UV systems. SGI announced that they have surpassed the milestone of having shipped over 500 SGI Altix UV high performance computing (HPC) systems since it began commercial delivery in June 2010. Numerous government agencies and universities around the world are listed as customers, with one of the most recent systems being ordered by LRZ, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich.  The SGI Altix x86 platform allows scaling up to 256 physical cores and 2 terabytes of memory.  SGI announced that they will be unveiling groundbreaking solutions next week at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.