Roundup: Go Daddy, SGI, Akamai update from September 2010

Here’s a roundup of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Go Daddy Opens Singapore Data Center.  Go Daddy announced that it it expanding its global reach by opening another data center in Singapore. Go Daddy will give customers in Asia quicker access to their websites as they have seen demand grow dramatically in places like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. In 2009 they did a similar expansion in The Netherlands for a growth in demand from Europe. Go Daddy recently opened a customer care center in Hiawatha, Iowa.

SGI selected by LANL. SGI announced that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has selected SGI to provide a computing solution to enhance an existing unclassified institution-wide computing capacity.  The solution selected by LANL features two large SGI Altix XE 1300 clusters. Built with Intel Xeon 5500 processors, the Altix XE clusters will provide about 50 teraflops and 14 terabytes of memory with over 4,500 processor cores. "LANL's research requires top-notch computing and infrastructure for processing massive amounts of data," said Andy White, deputy associate director of the Theory, Simulation and Computing Directorate at LANL. "We have had excellent experience in the past with SGI systems and are pleased to be deploying systems and working with them again to provide the computing resources required to support our important research initiatives."

Akamai unveils new payment service. Akamai (AKAM) unveiled its Edge Tokenization electronic payment security service.  The new service enables credit card data to be converted to a token prior to Web transactions landing on a merchant's infrastructure. By doing this the service alleviates having credit card data the customer's own infrastructure.  As a part of the launch of this service Akamai also announced that it has  integrated its cloud-based technology with tokenization solutions from its partner CyberSource, a Visa company. "We’ve always maintained merchants shouldn’t seek to secure payment data, but instead, eliminate contact with it," said Michael Walsh, president and chief executive officer, CyberSource. "Akamai’s Edge Tokenization automatically combines the concept of hosted payment acceptance and payment tokenization with cloud-based web infrastructure, making it easy for online merchants to meet compliance requirements with less cost, complexity and time."