Daily Archives: October 4, 2011

Datalink a leading provider of data center infrastructure and services, today announced that it has acquired substantially all of the assets, and selected liabilities, of Midwave Corporation. Based in Minneapolis, Minn., Midwave is an IT services and solutions firm focused on optimizing the data centers and IT infrastructure of enterprise companies. Datalink and Midwave share common go-to-market strategies and product and services portfolios, as well as a track record of success helping organizations optimize the business value of IT.

Datalink purchased Midwave for $17.6 million, comprised of a cash payment of approximately $16.1 million and $1.5 million in Datalink common stock. Datalink will also assume approximately $11.0 million of current liabilities and acquire approximately $11.5 million in current assets and $500,000 in property and equipment.

With the addition of Midwave, Datalink is positioned to close 2011 with an anticipated annualized run rate of more than $400 million and a workforce of over 400 employees. Midwave’s consulting and managed services business, along with its technology resale business, represents an estimated $65 million in annualized revenue and a base of over 250 customers.

“Our expanded footprint in the Twin Cities makes us the dominant data center services and infrastructure provider in the region,” said Paul Lidsky, President and CEO, Datalink. “This acquisition doubles our Cisco technology and services revenues, expands our managed services portfolio with the addition of a data center infrastructure monitoring service, adds an established security practice including product, services and consulting and doubles the size of our consulting services team. From our consultative approach and elite professional services teams to our robust portfolio and our customer-centric focus, we believe combining Datalink and Midwave is a tremendous opportunity for our customers, partners, employees, and stockholders.”

“Midwave and Datalink are a perfect combination. Together, we believe we have unparalleled professional and sales teams, data center best practices, and a passion for delivering long-term, value-based services to our customers,” said Midwave Chairman and CEO Jim Leslie, who is joining Datalink as Executive Vice President of Strategy and Business Development. “I am excited that Midwave’s talented team of employees will have the opportunity to join a growing and reputable company, like Datalink. And, our customers can continue to count on the first rate service that they are accustomed to receiving.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Datalink has acquired certain current assets and assumed certain liabilities of Midwave, subject to a working capital adjustment. Datalink anticipates that, based on its internal projections, the transaction will become accretive to net income within one quarter. The company plans to complete integration of the Midwave business within 90 days. Datalink will record a charge associated with the acquisition in the fourth quarter of 2011 of approximately $250,000, or $.01 per fully diluted share. The company expects cost synergies to take effect in the first quarter of 2012.

Managed Web Hosting Company, Liquid Web (www.LiquidWeb.com) announce the launch of its new proprietary Management interface, manage.liquidweb.com, as well as a contest in which users are encouraged to help name the management tool in exchange for the chance to win a Kindle Fire. The new management interface, developed in house by Liquid Web, is set to drastically streamline and modernize the way all accounts are managed for new and current Liquid Web customers, as well as provide added controls to the users’ experience.

IMPROVED FUNCTIONALITY
The manage.liquidweb.com account management interface features significantly enhanced functionality by adding an array of features previously unavailable to customers:
–Clone a server directly from the management tool
–Resize a server with the click of a button
–Automatic migrations directly at users’ fingertips
–API Access to programmatically control your infrastructure
–Integrated Firewall
–Advanced networking controls made easy
Manage.liquidweb.com will also bridge the gap between the management of our traditional hosting solutions (Dedicated, VPS and Shared) and our powerful new Smart Servers. This will unlock the flexibility needed for you to create extremely powerful and reliable Hybrid Hosting Solutions that utilize cloud servers as well as dedicated servers within the same physical data center.

Customers will experience the marked difference between the new Liquid Web account management tool’s robust and unique line of features and what was previously offered, via the PIMS Dashboard, starting on September 28th. All Liquid Web customers will be able to use their existing PIMS login credentials to gain access to manage.liquidweb.com immediately.

As users test out the new management tool, Liquid Web is encouraging them to help name it with the promise of a chance to win the soon-to-be-released Kindle Fire from Amazon. The contest will involve users suggestion names via the company’s Twitter and is outlined in detail here:

http://liquidweb.com/whatsnew/?p=145

Image: Liquid Web Datacenter

Immedion, LLC, a South Carolina based dedicated data center and managed services provider has expanded its footprint into western North Carolina with the purchase of Netriplex’s Asheville data center operation.
As of Monday Oct 3, Netriplex Asheville will operate as an Immedion Data Center. As part of the acquisition, Immedion will be retaining Netriplex’s highly qualified engineering and support staff.

Netriplex’s 20,000 square-foot Asheville facility expands Immedion’s overall foot print allowing them to service a broader range of customers in western North Carolina and beyond. Like all of Immedion’s facilities, this location will support customers with 24×7 customer service care.

This purchase is in line with Immedion’s overall expansion strategy. The company announced in September their plans to open a Data Center facility in Charleston. The Charleston facility will be complete May 2012. The Netriplex acquisition and the Charleston announcement expands Immedion’s data center footprint from two fully redundant data centers to four. This expansion gives Immedion greater leverage in the southeast region and gives their customers an added level of redundancy.

“We are very pleased to bring Netriplex’s Asheville data center into our growing family of data centers” comments Immedion CEO, Frank Mobley. “Their suite of services, location, and customer focused nature are a perfect fit for Immedion and the way we do business. This venture increases Immedion’s technical depth and gives our customers more disaster recovery and scalability options.”

“The entire Netriplex team is very excited about the merger with Immedion,” states Netriplex’s CEO Jonathan Hoppe. “The cultural similarities between the two companies will allow great synergy for the customers, the market and our employees as we transition into one enterprise. “

DreamHost, web hosting, has selected Jonathan LaCour to serve as its Vice President of Software Development. LaCour joins the company during a period of rapid growth and talent expansion.

Jonathan comes to DreamHost from photographer favorite Pictage.com where he served as Vice President of Software Products, overseeing and guiding the creation of several of Pictage’s cornerstone products.

In 2007 LaCour became employee number 1 and Chief Technology Officer at ShootQ Inc., a web-based management application for photography studios and professional photographers. ShootQ was later acquired by Pictage in 2010 for an undisclosed sum. After a brief period of dangerous living and personal excesses involving fine bourbons, rare caviar, and luxury automobiles, Jonathan began his tenure as Pictage’s Vice President of Software Products.

Prior to founding ShootQ Jonathan held development and analyst roles at Optio Software and VertiSoft, both Atlanta-based software development houses who, it is rumored, have yet to recover from his departure.

When asked for comment about his new role with DreamHost, Jonathan proclaimed, “I am a creative software visionary. It certainly makes sense that DreamHost would seek out my peerless talents. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken them this long.” Pausing to point both thumbs toward his chest, LaCour continued, “This gazelle was born to roam, but DreamHost intrigues me, so I’ll humor them for a while. Web hosting, huh? I’ll check it out. I guess.”

“I suspect it was my encyclopedic knowledge of various programming languages that first caught their attention,” continued LaCour, unasked. “Maybe they liked how I founded ShootQ and sold it to Pictage for millions and millions of dollars. Maybe — and this is probably the clincher — maybe it was how I won the 2006 Employee of the Year Award at Optio Software. DreamHost is truly lucky to have me and I am absolutely committed to fixing every single line of their imperfect, non-standardized, poorly written c-c-code…code…code…,” LaCour’s eyes then briefly glowed red, wisps of smoke erupted from his ears, and he slapped himself across the face. “Code,” he finished.

Jonathan will relocate himself and his family from the Atlanta, Georgia area to Los Angeles, California, the birthplace and current headquarters of DreamHost.

“I’ve spent quite a while working alongside Jonathan during my time at Pictage and I know for a fact that he is, as you say in America, ‘The Real Deal,’” said DreamHost CEO and Australian expatriate, Simon Anderson. “Jonathan’s vast technical knowledge combined with his unparalleled management skills together form an unbeatable combination. The man is a machine. In fact he is so committed to his art that I’ve never seen him eat or sleep. I suspect he has little need for either.”

“Consider this,” added Simon, “There are only two people in this world who can melt solid steel in seconds with nothing more than a sideways glance. Jonathan is one of them. I’ll leave you to guess who number two is.”

Jonathan will oversee DreamHost’s growing software development team and will be an integral part of the organization as it expands its footprint in the web hosting industry and brings to market several competitive next-generation hosting technologies.

About DreamHost

DreamHost is a leading web and application hosting provider with over 300,000 customers and 1,000,000 domain names hosted worldwide. The company offers a wide spectrum of web hosting solutions including traditional Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, and Domain Name Registration. DreamHost is the principal sponsor of the Ceph open-source distributed storage system. Please visit http://www.dreamhost.com for more information.

F5 Networks, Inc. the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, announced that it will exhibit its award-winning ARX® solutions at the SNW Fall 2011 conference taking place October 10-13 at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando, Fla.

F5 will conduct ongoing demonstrations of its ARX series, including the ARX Cloud ExtenderTM solution, highlighting the products’ intelligent storage tiering capabilities. Demos will illustrate the ease with which data can be automatically moved between tiers, including the cloud, and how cloud storage can be seamlessly integrated into existing file storage environments using automated storage tiering policies.

F5 experts will be on hand at the event to help attendees identify key strategies for reducing the cost and complexity of managing file data. By virtualizing their file storage infrastructures and implementing automated data management policies, organizations can achieve dramatic improvements in storage utilization, data migration and backup times, and operational efficiencies while driving down capital expenditures.

Attendees are encouraged to visit F5 at booth #99 for a personalized technology demonstration. As part of the conference agenda and presentation schedule, attendees attendees are also invited to the following F5 customer presentations at SNW Fall 2011 (specific location information will be available onsite):

F5 Networks, Inc. announced its new IPv6 Solution Services offering. This Professional Services offering will help organizations address their need to establish a presence on the IPv6 Internet as new IPv6-only devices flood the market and the available supply of IPv4 addresses dwindles. F5 has also announced that its BIG-IP® solutions are deployed in the Network Operations Center (NOC) at Interop New York, happening October 3‒7 at the Javits Convention Center. These solutions will provide key application and IPv6 connectivity in support of Interop vendors and attendees.

Every device that connects to the Internet must have an Internet Protocol (IP) address, but the current protocol version, IPv4, doesn’t have the address capacity to meet today’s explosive demand in Internet-connected devices. IPv6 does, but because it’s incompatible with IPv4, organizations worldwide must inevitably transition to or provide support for IPv6 to ensure that their web-based services and applications are available to the broadest range of Internet users.

“We’re seeing many enterprises struggle to transition their public-facing websites to IPv6 networks, deliver reliable services for new IPv6 client devices, comply with stringent new regulatory requirements, and adjust to the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses,” said Ian Jones, VP of Global Professional Services Consulting at F5. “Many customers don’t feel they have enough in-house knowledge and understanding of IPv6 on their own network infrastructures to attempt an IPv6 deployment without outside assistance. Our new Professional Services offering for IPv6 provides the support and best practice guidance customers need to make these transitions as easy as possible—whatever their unique requirements are.”

F5® BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM®) provides customers a clear and seamless method for staging their migration to IPv6 without making wholesale network and application upgrades all at once. F5’s new IPv6 Solution Services are designed to support a range of IPv6 initiatives, whether customers want to transition internal infrastructure from IPv4 to IPv6, support dual stack implementations, or provide continued support for legacy IPv4 applications. Each IPv6 Professional Services engagement includes an architecture review, base connectivity, BIG-IP IPv6 gateway configuration, and knowledge transfer.

The announcement of F5’s IPv6 Solution Services offering coincides with the company’s participation in the Network Operations Center (NOC) at Interop New York 2011. As it did for Interop’s Las Vegas event earlier this year, F5 is providing NAT64 and DNS64 translation services, making it possible for IPv6-only clients to seamlessly connect to domains on both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet networks. F5 is also providing enhanced acceleration services for Interop’s www.interop.com website, as well as other essential networking services to ensure the global availability and functionality of critical system services for Interop vendors and attendees.
“In support of our NOC infrastructure for Interop New York 2011, we’re pleased to have F5 provide an array of IPv6 and intelligent traffic management solutions,” said Lenny Heymann, Interop General Manager. “IPv6 migration strategies are top of mind for many of our attendees, so the availability of F5’s IPv6 Solution Services offering is timely. We appreciate and applaud all participating InteropNet vendors, including F5, for helping us deliver the best possible experience for both attendees and exhibitors.”

Availability
F5’s IPv6 Solution Services offering for BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager deployments is available today for purchase through F5 and the global F5 partner network. For more information on F5’s Professional Services offerings, please visit www.f5.com/services/professional-services.