Data center equipment provider Verari, whose line of products includes a containerized data center solution, on Monday discredited a rumor that surfaced on the Web during the week prior that the company was going out of business.

"Some disgruntled employee got onto Twitter and said we were closing down," Verari SVP of Marketing Dan Gatti said in an interview. "We will sell some of the business components but we're certainly still in business. That's the important thing."

Gatti said the rumor came from an employee who had been let go in a round of lay-offs that were part of a downsizing effort, announced Dec. 11.

The company is undergoing major restructuring as it approaches the end of a rough year, he explained. Gatti attributed the state of affairs at Verari mainly to the trend of postponement of equipment purchases by customers and scarcity of available capital in the market.

"We have very expensive equipment and data centers themselves are an expensive item. Everybody's faced that environment this year. Decisions have been delayed. Decisions that used to be made at one level now have gone up a level or two."

A company statement on its Web site said a process had been initiated to "protect our customers' investment and benefit our creditors as we restructure the business... There are several options that are being considered to provide solutions to our customers. We expect to have the new plan in place soon."

Gatti also denied a rumor that the company had lost a major client.

The company has had several notable clients for its containerized data center Forest, including Microsoft, Cisco and Qualcomm.

One of the two containers shipped to Cisco went to the NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, filled with Cisco Unified Computing System equipment to run the space agency's cloud-based system called Nebula.

"We just shipped one about two weeks ago to Cisco for another government customer (on the) East Coast," Gatti said.

Microsoft bought four containers over the past two years and the most recent deal is with Qualcomm, whose one Forest box is on order.