Colo Roundup 6-2: Colt, Interxion, Equinix, i/o

Lots of news this week from the colocation sector:

European provider Colt Group (LON:COLT, news) won a substantial colocation deal with IT services company Phoenix.  Phoenix will lease a 500 square meter modular data center space in the company’s London-3 facility as part of an effort to expand its service capabilities to clients in the UK and across Europe.  The modular design offers Phoenix their own M&E plant demarcation and complete security control, while still benefiting from being in a shared facility.

InterXion (NYSE:INXN, news) has teamed up with heavy hitters Microsoft, KPN, HP, and NL-ix to launch a turnkey cloud hosting test environment for service providers, entitled the Cloud Testlab.  Seems like a lot of these test environments are cropping up worldwide as everyone tries to figure out just what the industry structure will look like when the cloud’s eager fog finally lifts up a bit.  The first platform deployed is the Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters, which is built on an HP Converged Infrastructure environment, hosted within one of Interxion’s facilities, and can be accessed via internet connectivity provided by the NL-ix exchange and KPN.  Ah teamwork.

Over at Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings), two interesting contracts crossed the wires.  Over in Hong Kong, cloud solutions provider BrightHost will be working out of Equinix’s HK1 IBX.  BrightHost serves Australia mainly, but the way the geography works on this side of the planet is that Hong Kong is the hub you must have a presence in – and Equinix has been adding space here as well.  Back in the US, Catalyst Health Solutions selected Equinix to host critical business functions, e.g. claims processing and data warehousing, though the actual facilities in question weren’t disclosed.  The strict regulatory requirements for healthcare-related data makes it a complicated vertical to serve, but a profitable one too I expect.

And finally, i/o brought in a group of ringers to bolster its senior management team as the company continues to aim for a more national stage.  Kevin Malik will take over as CIO, David Shaw as COO, and Kathy Kim as VP of Corporate Communications.  While their main facilities are in Phoenix, i/o recently opened the first stage of a giant modular site in New Jersey as well as a factory for producing such modules.   In April, they raised $105M in growth capital, so we’ll likely be hearing rather more from them as 2011 rolls on.

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Categories: Datacenter