Equinix to expand Singapore data center
Retail colocation provider Equinix announced a plan to expand one of its data centers in Singapore. Citing growth in demand for its services in the region, the company said Wednesday it will invest $43m to add 850 cabinet equivalents to its SG2 facility.

The announcement comes amid an already ongoing Phase 2 expansion project at the facility, which is expected to add 1,000 cabinet equivalents by September. The third phase is slated for completion in mid-2011. The first phase brought online 700 cabinet equivalents when it was launched one year ago.

Fujitsu rolls out two new servers
IT vendor Fujitsu unveiled two new servers earlier this month. One is a low-price machine targeted at small and medium-size businesses and the other is a high-end solution for large private and public organizations.

The new Primergy RX900 S1 x86 eight-socket rack server is powered by Intel's Xeon 7500 processors, using the chip-maker's QuickPath Interconnect technology. The company's new Primergy TX100 S2 machine is an "entry-level" server offered at a price comparable to that of a PC. It is powered by Intel Xeon 3400 series processor.

France's largest domain-name registrar signs with Level 3
Provider of network connectivity and data center services Level 3 has secured France's largest domain-name registrar Gandi SAS as a customer for its colocation and network services. Gandi also provides cloud-based infrastructure solutions.

Gandi plans to leverage the three-year agreement to expand its market reach in the US and support its cloud infrastructure initiatives. "Level 3's fiber-optic network offers us the efficient platform and scalable reach we need to better serve our growing cloud-services customer base," Gandi Director of Technical Operations Leland Vandervort said in a statement.

Brocade highlights education-sector clients
Network equipment vendor Brocade highlighted three clients in the higher-education space on Wednesday. Charleston Southern University and Chemeketa Community College in the US, as well as Cardiff University in the UK, have all deployed Brocade's core switches and routers.

In its six years of working with the supplier, Cardiff has spent £5m on Brocade core, distribution and edge networking solutions, including more than 1,000 switches with 51,000 edge ports available today. The two US schools are smaller and have much smaller networks deployed. Both use Brocade FastIron SX series switches, among other solutions.

Google scientists recognized for contributions to distributed computing
Three Google researchers received the Djikstra Prize in Distributed computing at the ACM Symposiu on Principles of Distributed Computing conference in Z├╝rich. The scientists received the award for authoring papers that had a significant impact on the theory and practice of distributed computing over more than ten years.

Lead author of the two papers is Tushar Chandra and his co-authors are Vassos Hadzilacos and Sam Toueg. The papers are titled Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems (1996) and The Weakest Failure Detector for Solving Consensus (1996).

Survey: more IT pros take cloud seriously
A recently completed survey by the market research firm Yankee Group concluded that cloud computing is gaining recognition as a viable technology among a growing number of IT professionals. About 60 percent of the 400 IT pros in the US surveyed said they saw cloud computing as a business enabler.

The rest said it would take many more years for the technology to mature and some doubted it would mature at all. The figures represent a shift from last year's survey by the group. In 2009, only 37 percent saw cloud computing as an enabler, while the rest adopted a "wait-and-see" attitude toward cloud.