Strategic, M&A capabilities, expansions, HPC, containers
It was a busy week on the strategic side of things, while wholesale data centre activity, driven by the cloud build out, was again prominent.
There were a number of interesting developments. Singapore’s STT, which operates and owns data centres in Asia-pacific and the UK, took a stake in Dallas-based Armor, formerly known as FireHost. Elsewhere and also in Asia, Digital Pacific acquired Anchor as it adds to its portfolio and value proposition.
Geography is a driver of M&A and that was one of the rationales behind OVH’s purchase of VMware’s vCloud Air retail cloud business as it tries to build some momentum in the US market. VMware became the latest large entity to move out of retail cloud.
Other developments saw Akamai acquire performance optimization technology provider SOASTA and H5 Data Centers acquired a second data centre facility in Ohio.
There were a number of developments around wholesale data centre. DuPont Fabros started work on its forthcoming facility in Toronto, Zenium secured a pre-let as it begins a second build in Frankfurt and Colovore is adding 2 MW in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, AWS is building out big in Sweden and added more CloudFront nodes in other parts of Europe.
Amazon also continues to add to its cloud-based services portfolio. It has moved info unified communications and recently rolled out new HPC and contact centre services. HPC is an area of growing focus and Google recently launched HPC capabilities and IBM did as well (more details to come on IBM).
Elsewhere in cloud, we saw a couple of other developments that are of note. Packet and Virtuozzo partnered to enable containers, hypervisors and storage on Packet’s bare metal and Interoute used Rancher Labs to enable containers on its cloud. Meanwhile, CtrlS in India is trying the community cloud concept, which is a way to alleviate concerns some organizations have over multi-tenancy.
or