Interxion recently completed a major project to expand its data center in Germany.

The company is a carrier-neutral, colocation provider, giving it a somewhat unique position in the market. This position has created increased demand for its services, and the company upgraded the data center to handle a larger capacity of customers renting space on equipment racks.

The expansion was completed in the company's data center in Dusseldorf, Germany. The facility is one of the only data centers in the region that supports two of the most prominent local internet exchanges, making its colocation services especially important.

Peter Knapp, managing director of Interxion Germany, elaborated on the technologies that went into the data center's design.

"Our Dusseldorf data center combines state-of-the-art infrastructure with outstanding connectivity and provides the ideal environment for existing and prospective customers demanding robust infrastructure and optimum connectivity," said Knapp.

Matching a data center with the right location can be a key part of a facility's success. According to a recent AreaDevelopment report, energy reliability and cost are typically the most prominent factors in any data center location strategy. However, tax incentives and factors can also influence where a data center is built.

Consolidating servers, network hardware and other components on equipment racks is a growing trend in the data center. However, successful data center consolidation projects need to begin with a clear strategy that defines goals and processes that will inform the procedure, Government Computing News reports.

According to GCN, defining a clear strategy should be followed by beginning the virtualization process. Server virtualization is typically the first tangible step in a consolidation project because it allows administrators to get the most out of hardware.

Within that ideal of maximizing hardware, the report said, consolidation projects should also include updating any legacy hardware systems. Retiring and replacing outdated systems is key to limiting the maintenance needs of the new facility and reducing costs, the report said.

The report also advised using the data center consolidation process to create revenue. By leasing the extra space created by consolidation to other companies working to reduce their hardware quantities, the company can create more profits and become a leader in the consolidation sector.

Managing virtual machines is one of the critical parts of any successful data center consolidation project. According to a recent InformationWeek report, virtualization management is become so challenging that cloud-based applications may be needed to manage virtual servers.

Titan Data Center is amid an expansion project at its Moses Lake, Washington, facility and is courting telecommunications providers, financial institutions and medical organizations to rent space on its new equipment racks, the Columbia Basin Herald reports.

Avner Papouchado, president of the Red Sea Group, which owns the Titan Data Center, told the news source the company's current expansion project is designed primarily to create more space to lease to new customers.

Currently, the company has completed approximately one-third of the data center expansion, which will eventually amount to 60,000 square feet, Papouchado said..

The report said the Titan Data Center is unique in the region, as most of the area's data centers are located in Quincy, Washington and are single-tenant facilities owned by major technology companies.

The new expansion will help provide data center space for small businesses and other companies that would not be able to build their own dedicated facility, Papouchado told the news source.

Colocation center expansions are becoming more common around the world. Recently, Interxion completed an upgrade to one of its colocation facilities in Germany to support the growing needs of its customer base.

Fitchburg, Wisconsin, will soon play host to a larger data center, as TDS recently announced plans to expand its facility in the city.

According to a recent Wisconsin State Journal report, the move comes as the company works to expand beyond its roots as a phone service provider and solidify its offerings in other telecommunications services.

The report said the new facility will be a $14 million project. It is expected to triple the company's data center, which currently features approximately 7,000 square feet of space for server racks and other data center storage equipment that houses advanced hardware.

Bill Megan, president of the newly created subsidiary TDS Hosted and Managed Services Operations, told the news source the company is using the data center to expand its hosting services.

"We think if we build up the service set, we can offer it in many different geographies," Megan told the Wisconsin State Journal.

Telecommunications companies are rapidly moving into the hosted and managed services sector, creating a large market for data center projects. Recently, Titan Data Centers began looking to lease its facility in Moses Lake, Washington. Telecommunications providers are among its targeted customers, the Columbia Basin Herald reports.

It is often easy to think of data center efficiency as something for the realm of large data centers that feature thousands of server racks and hundreds of thousands of square feet of space.

However, small- to medium-sized data centers also have a major impact on the environment, and there are many things data center managers can do to improve energy efficiency without dramatically impacting spending, according to BNET's analysis of presentation's at the recent Google Data Center Efficiency Summit.

Urz Hoelzle, senior vice president for Google, told conference attendees that data centers use approximately 0.28 percent of all electricity consumed in the United States. While such statistics are fairly widely known around the industry, Hoelzle revealed that approximately 70 percent of that energy comes from small- to medium-sized data centers.

He urged such facilities to focus on their power usage efficiency. To accomplish this, various presentations at the conference recommended such steps as airflow management.

Managing temperature is one of the most energy-consuming processes in the data center. In a recent interview with Computerworld, Kim Stevenson, vice president of IT at Intel, said the company is using plastic sheets essentially to create chimneys that funnel heat out of the building without wasting energy.

Data center energy consumption is on the rise, and current efforts toward sustainability may not be enough to keep equipment mounted in server racks operating at an efficient pace.

Reporting on Google's recent European Data Center Summit, the Sustainable Business Forum said the event was marked by a single overarching theme – many data centers are missing out on easy ways to improve energy efficiency.

The report said presentations on creative and unique cooling and power systems were exciting, but the event's most overwhelming message was that small improvements can make a big difference in the data center.

Joe Kava, director of operations for Google, told audiences at the conference about a few simple procedures for improving data center efficiency. One of those was simply using meat locker sheets at the end of data center aisles to contain cold air without significant expense or any technological investment.

Aisle containment systems are rapidly emerging as inexpensive and efficient ways to improve airflow and sustainability in the data center. According to a recent ZDNet report, such systems are especially effective in legacy data centers, where advanced technologies for efficiency are not an option.

At the recent SAP Sapphire conference, SAP and Dell announced a new partnership to deploy a technology that could revolutionize the capabilities of servers in equipment racks – in-memory computing.

In the SAP and Dell in-memory model, advanced controllers in hardware chips allow servers to analyze high quantities of data in real time. In the setup, a server's DRAM is used to handle database functions while a solid state drive logs the information processed by the system.

The in-memory technology will operate in Dell's blade servers, and it is designed to foster data analysis in financial institutions, scientific research and other such sectors that process large quantities of data and require optimal performance.

Essentially, in-memory technology will optimize the hardware so that organizations can deploy cloud-based data analysis platforms instead of having to deploy on-premise IT resources.

Cloud computing is one of the most influential technologies in the data center industry, and it is leading to many expansions, migrations and new projects. Recently, Paetec Holdings Corporation announced plans to double its data center footprint to support new cloud initiatives, CRN reports.

Data center consolidation is allowing many data center managers to serve more customers by filling equipment racks with highly utilized servers. However, adopting such a policy requires power and cooling infrastructure to handle the high utilization rates.

Recently, CoreLink announced plans to expand its facility in Las Vegas through such a consolidation plan. The company is responding to growing demand by increasing server utilization rates. As a result, it plans to add one megawatt of power to its electrical system and cooling infrastructure.

Charles Picasso, chairman and CEO of CoreLink, said the upgrade will meet customer expectations for 100 percent uptime and secure services.

"[Improving services and uptime] includes increasing our capacity to assure that present and future customers have the available bandwidth to support their growth by providing them with ample power and cooling," said Picasso.

To accomplish all of this, the company will increase the size of its utility transformer and upgrade its backup power systems.

Increasing data center capacities to support advanced services is a growing trend in the industry. Recently, Paetec Holdings Corporations announced it plans to double its data center footprint in the United States so it can support new hosted services, CRN reports.

Google recently opened a data center in Belgium that sparked some controversy because it did not include any chillers. Instead, it depends entirely on free cooling, something that most data centers will only rely on for part of their temperature management needs.

Data Center Knowledge reports Google's experiment has paid off, and the chiller-less data center is delivering spectacular results.

In just more than a year, the facility has already emerged as Google's top performer. Its 12-month average for power usage efficiency stands at 1.11, and its PUE dropped to 1.09 during the first quarter of 2011.

This growth reduced the company's overall data center PUE to just 1.16 during the first quarter.

PUE is rapidly emerging as one of the most powerful measures of efficiency in the data center. Essentially, it tracks how much power from the electrical system makes it to the equipment in server racks. Therefore, a data center with a 1.0 PUE would use absolutely no energy for anything other than IT systems.

However, PUE has come under some scrutiny due to its limited scope. Recently, Green Grid and the Data Center Metrics Coordination Taskforce made a few key revisions to the PUE standard to overcome some of its limitations.

Paetec Holding Corporation has been active recently. The company has expanded its cloud services to reach new customers with more advanced capabilities. In time, it also hopes to expand its data center footprint to support these services, CRN reports.

According to the report, Paetec is on the brink of a large-scale national plan to build a number of new data centers filled with server racks to support its cloud initiatives.

Currently, the plan is slated to double the number of facilities Paetec has in the United States, the report said.

The cloud services announced by Paetec include a virtual server plan that lets companies rent virtual machines, a dedicated server plan that supports leasing physical hardware and a managed storage solution.

To support such programs, the company will need its intended data center upgrades to create new server and network infrastructure.

Such expansions are becoming somewhat common in the data center industry, and they are representative of the growing amount of information processed in data centers. According to a recent Forbes report, the current pace of growth will be unsustainable unless economic systems or current efforts to improve environmental efficiency in the data center take hold across the industry.