Roundup: Fortress, Symantec, IBM

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

Fortress books $4.5 million in new contracts. Fortress International Group (FIGI) announced that its Facilities Management and Technology Consulting divisions closed new contracts totaling approximately $4.5 million during the fourth quarter of 2010. Approximately $3.0 million was attributed to facilities management, including new recurring revenue contracts related to the maintenance of containerized data center facilities, commissioning and start-up work for a large electrical products manufacturer, renewals of expiring service contracts and customer site upgrades. "Our new business and pipeline opportunities continued to grow in the fourth quarter from both new customers and follow-on projects," said Thomas P. Rosato, Fortress' Chief Executive Officer". This high level of activity demonstrates not only the strength of our offering, but the continued recovery of the markets in which we operate, and positions the company for sustained growth as we enter 2011. We completed the year with 37 service agreements, which provide guaranteed annual revenue of approximately $5.5 million. With several large projects expected to commence in the near future, we are confident in our ability to build upon the progress we made during 2010."

Symantec introduces NetBackup 5200. Symantec (SYMC) announced the NetBackup 5200 appliance series to help customers expand their data protection infrastructure with an easy to deploy, all-in-one hardware and software backup solution that integrates deduplication to reduce storage.  Features of the NetBackup 5200 include 32TB of usable dedupe capacity that can be used in primary, secondary and remote sites and managed through one console, the built-in source and media server deduplication in one appliance, and a single point of contact for both hardware and software technical support from Symantec.  “As we move all of our primary backups to disk, adding Symantec NetBackup 5200 appliances to our environment was a natural next step. We talked to a handful of other appliance vendors, but being able to tie NetBackup 5200 into our existing NetBackup environment helped us save on costs and maintenance. The ease of implementation and configuration was also a driving force," said Tommy Meek, systems operations manager for the storage and backup team, Cbeyond.

IBM and ARM to collaborate for mobile electronics. IBM and ARM announced an agreement between the two companies to extend their collaboration on advanced semiconductor technologies to enable the rapid development of next generation mobile products optimized for performance and power efficiency.  With the aim of speed to market IBM and ARM will collaboratively develop design platforms aligning the manufacturing process, microprocessor and physical intellectual property design teams. "ARM’s Cortex processors have become the leadership platform for the majority of smart phones and many other emerging mobile devices,” said Michael Cadigan, general manager, IBM Microelectronics.  “We plan to continue working closely with ARM and our foundry customers to speed the momentum of ARM technology by delivering highly advanced, low-power semiconductor technology for a variety of new communications and computing devices."  GigaOm had an excellent article recently about ARM, its platform and popularity in a changing data center.