Roundup: IBM, Oracle, CoreLink, Force 10

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

IBM and Petrom sign agreement. IBM announced that Petrom, the largest oil and gas producer in Southeastern Europe, has entered into a 10 year, multi-million data center services agreement with IBM.  Under the agreement IBM will take over data center operations and provide cloud computing, hosting, installation and colocation services, backup and business continuity services.  "This collaboration with IBM reaffirms the high standards used for building and equipping the data center in Petrom City. Through this agreement, Petrom will benefit from a market leader's expertise in data center hosting as well as cost savings from the joint use of the facility," said Reinhard Pichler, Chief Financial Officer of Petrom.

Oracle acquires Passlogix. Oracle (ORCL) announced that they have agreed to acquire Passlogix, a provider of enterprise single sing-on solutions.  Passlogix was previously a successful OEM partner with Oracle and the acquisition will allow them to go deeper within Oracle solutions.  “Passlogix and Oracle have a shared vision on providing customers with an integrated solution that helps advance and improve security for the entire identity lifecycle,” said Marc Boroditsky, Passlogix president and CEO. “Passlogix’ products already integrate with Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Internet Directory and we look forward to expanding the scope of our solutions and making them available to a broader audience.”  It had been rumored that Oracle's Larry Ellison was shopping for a chip manufacturer - specifically AMD.  AMD CEO Dirk Meyer replied by saying that AMD was not for sale but they were open to listen to any interesting proposals.

CoreLink Chicago Grand Opening. CoreLink Data Centers announced that they will have a grand opening ceremony to unveil their state-of-the-art 80,000 square foot Chicago data center on October 20, 2010 at 2pm.  CoreLink will have the Mount Prospect, IL Mayor present for the ribbon cutting and will offer tours of the new facility. “CoreLink Data Centers is extremely excited about the grand opening of our state-of-the-art Chicago data center facility,” said Michael Duckett, President of CoreLink Data Centers. “This data center, coupled with multi-carrier connectivity options and CoreLink’s relentless approach to service delivery, provides businesses in the Chicago metro area with the utmost protection to house mission critical applications.”

Force 10 introduces new switch.  Force 10 Networks announced the extension of its S-Series family with the new S5 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) top-of-rack access switch.  The S55 compliments the recently announced S60 data center switch and provides line-rate, low-latency switching, with configuration flexibility.  The switch can be deployed with the Force 10 ExaScale virtualized core switch/router to create a flat, two-tier fully non-blocking GbE and 10 GbE data center solution. “As bandwidth scaling and virtual network management challenges increase at the server edge, network managers require greater performance and intelligence in the ToR switch.  Force10’s new S55 delivers on that requirement while rounding out the company’s line of high-performance 1/10 GbE ToR switches and paves the way for an expanded set of 10/40 GbE offerings in the future," said Steve Garrison, vice president, marketing at Force 10 Networks.