Among the seismic events that affected financial services in September and October 2008, data center activity continued thanks to consolidation of facilities and new technologies. As the banking sector changed forever, Google also shifted from its previous position and broke its silence on its data centers. The company said it had measured PUE at six facilities and averaged it out at 1.21. For the first time the company gave some detail on how it operates its facilities.

September: US: Barclays bought two New Jersey data centers as part of its acquisition of failed investment bank Lehman Brothers while Citigroup's buy out of Wachovia bank included three data centers. Microsoft opened its $600 million San Antonio data center. Diversified industrial manufacturer Eaton said it was planning a $160 million investment on two 55,000 sq ft data centers in Kentucky. Agri-business giant Monsanto's $21 million, 40,000 square-foot data center at its global headquarters in St. Louis was granted Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Emerson Network Power said it is consolidating its world-wide 100 data center portfolio into four facilities. It will start with a 35,000-square-foot location in St. Louis, in the US.

UK: HSBC achieved the UK's first 'Excellent' rating for design and procurement of its North London Data Centre, under the Building Research Establishment's BREEAM Certification. Iomart opens a third UK data center while Servo opened up extra UK data center space in Farnborough and Leeds.

Asia PAC: Rackspace opens its first Hong Kong data center. Malyasia High Tech Park gets 100,000 sq ft data center as three phase project gets underway in northern state of Kedah. Saigon Commercial Bank opts for IBM modular data center while Philippine Savings Bank signed up for IBM Enterprise Data Center.

Europe MEA: Cisco announced plans for a data center in the Kingdom of Bahrain as part of a broader investment programme.

Technology: IBM unveiled its biggest ever" enterprise data center strategy offerings with over 30 storage products aimed at Sun and EMC. Google's ship based data center patent application surfaces: Google submitted a patent application for a wave powered ship based data center. Raritan began shipping Power IQ to help customers turn data collected from individual servers into insight on power usage in the data center. VMware announced its "self managing" virtual data center operating system.

Corporate: Aperture got a new president when Thomas Waun joined from parent company Emerson. Interxion secures $190 million for data center expansion.

October: US: Google claims world's most energy efficient data centers. Google achieved a PUE rating of 1.21 at six major data centers and urged the industry to measure its own performance against the Green Grid's Power Usage Effectiveness metric. ASHRAE announced it would sign a wide ranging collaboration pact with the International Facility Managers Association. Skanska landed a $150 million US west coast build contract with an un-named major internet player. Yahoo committed $100 million to a Nebraska site. The Bank of America announced a project to use RFID to track data center assets. A 10MW data center linked by local news media to Amazon, was reportedly being built in East Oregon, which is already the site of a Google data center.

Corporate: APC tied up a CA deal for hardware agnostic energy monitoring services. Rackspace drew on $150 million credit. In its third quarter financial statement Google said most of the rise in its expenditure was data center related.

Asia PAC: IBM opens cloud computing centers in Vietnam, Korea, Brazil and India. A huge row over the environmental impact threatened to derail the planned A$1 billion data center in Canberra, Australia.

Technology: Siemon introduced its version of the flexible cabinet and Google gave guidance to raise temperatures in data centers. Avocent added Citrix support to its management tool.

Europe MEA: Gulf's first Tier IV data center opens in Abu Dhabi.