PacketExchange allows existing customers of the Telx facility to connect directly to their trading partners and access networks around the world.

It uses the PacketExchange private infrastructure, as opposed to the public internet, which improves the quality of service.

This makes the PacketExchange network available immediately to more than 400 networks and service providers currently deployed with Telx.

PacketExchange offers Layer-2 MPLS based services, provisioned on a redundant mesh of global 10G wavelengths.

By managing Quality of Service (QoS), PacketExchange offers the low levels of latency as well as near-zero packet loss and jitter that are required for real-time services and reliable transactions.

PacketExchange currently supports the network needs required by digital media, high-definition TV, video, telepresence and Web 2.0 applications.

PacketExchange eXpress, is an exclusive service that enables wide-area peering from one port, without the need to negotiate individual agreements with your globally located network partners.

Beginning June 1 and for a limited time, PacketExchange is offering Telx customers the opportunity to connect to its network without a port charge.

Company representatives of ukeasily/Port9 appear to be unreachable on their phone support number.

The company’s servers at the Greenheys datacenter went offline around 15:30 on Friday, taking down Port9’s own websites.

The Greenheys data center is operated by UK grid and located in Manchester Science Park.

The ukeasily servers appear to have been intentionally disconnected within the data center, which may be related to billing issues.

Anyone wishing to recover their data may be able to do so by contacting UKgrid directly on 0845 260 4743.

The data centre, in Slough, Berkshire, will draw power from a local combined heat and power plant that uses wood chips, waste paper and fibre fuel to generate electricity, hot water and steam.

Rackspace has converted a former warehouse on the Slough Trading Estate, to provide 55,000 square feet of net technical space.

Construction has been completed and equipment is being installed in the first data hall. The first customers are scheduled to go live in June.

Rackspace has committed to being energy efficient, as they believe that customers are increasingly looking for suppliers who can help them meet their own environment related goals.

Power for the data centre comes from the UK’s largest dedicated bio-mass energy plant, which is operated by Scottish and Southern Energy.

Rackspace was one of the UK’s first hosting companies to offer carbon neutral hosting in 2006 by planting trees through its relationship with the International Tree Foundation, the world’s longest standing tree planting charity.

The company has already planted more than 2,500 trees to offset the carbon emitted through running servers.

RatePoint declares the new email functionality will facilitate RatePoint members, for instance recent RatePoint partner DemoWolf, to put together winning customer relationships and cultivate their business through the new web-based marketing tool.

Comparable to an email circular application like iContact, RatePoint says its email marketing tool presents pre-designed promotion templates with visual editing tools and users will be capable of accessing sophisticated reporting information from each email campaign, together with the capability to track links and open rates.

The advance with RatePoint’s email marketing application is its express integration with RatePoint’s customer feedback platform so businesses can expediently contain customer feedback links and genuine RatePoint reviews into email campaigns, says the company.

Neal Creighton, co-founder and CEO of RatePoint said that by offering a powerful email marketing capability directly within the RatePoint platform, they are really rounding out the solution to provide businesses with the ability to quickly build and send customised emails to drive their business.

Previously, where businesses may have leveraged separate customer feedback, email marketing, and survey solutions like Constant Contact or Vertical Response, they can now use a single platform to easily collect authentic customer feedback and communicate with customers.

In April, RatePoint broadcast it had signed a tactical reseller partnership with SSL solutions provider Trustico.

In a moderately succinct letter sent to ICANN (icann.org) earlier this month, PIR CEO Alexa Raad says the company proposes to raise its wholesale rates from $6.15 to $6.75, commencing November 9, 2008.

A PDF reproduction of the letter is hosted on the ICANN site.

Raad doesn’t proffer any operations-related interpretation for the increase or any grounds actually, leaving the presumption that PIR’s foremost intention with the rate hike is an increase in revenue.

PIR appears concerned in making the .org domain, commonly associated with non-profit organisations, a more flourishing commercial venture.

In April, the company launched a .org resource center, designed to provide .org users with resources for maximising their sites.

The company looks involved in elucidating the fallacy that there are any limitations on .org ownership related to non-profits, while simultaneously serving the non-profits that make up a significant part of its business.

According to PIR’s 2006 .org registry agreement with ICANN, the company may raise service fees to 1.1 times the previous year’s maximum, meaning that the PIR is entitled to raise prices to $7.76 during 2008.

Jayshree Ullal, who initially joined the company with its purchase of Crescendo Communications in 1993, said in a posting to the company’s blog that she would be leaving.

Ullal is the third key executive to depart the company in just over 12 months.

In December, chief development officer Charles Giancarlo left the company to join private equity firm Silver Lake.

Additionally senior vice president Mike Volpi left to become CEO of Internet television company Joost in February 2007.

Ullal’s post didn’t state what she aims to do after leaving Cisco.

The blog post stated that it was with mixed feelings and much introspection that she had come to a decision to leave Cisco after 15 great and memorable years.

Her loyalty and affection to Cisco, CEO John Chambers, and her teams made this a very difficult and lengthy decision process.

However, she is confident that she is passing the baton to some of the best engineering talent and general managers in the industry.

John McCool, senior vice president of the Internet systems business unit, and one of Ullal’s deputies, will reportedly take over her position.

The company has previously said the whole amount of the new money will be used to obtain servers, to assist in accommodating the rapidly mounting numbers of new users, and fashionable plug-in applications, that have made the site one of the sensational stories of the social networking world.

The new funding is over and above the $360 million already raised by the company in the last seven months.

Recent information puts Facebook’s user figures at over 35 million in the US.

Approximations have put the company’s current data center capability at something like 10,000 servers.

The new money will provide the means to append approximately 50,000 more servers, leaving an abundance of room for expansion.

Facebook supposedly secured the loan without losing equity in the company.

The loan was made available through a venture arrangement with TriplePoint Capital, a Californian based lending company.

This is reportedly TriplePoint’s principal deal to date.

According to reports, Facebook has not revealed which vendor or vendors it intends to use for new servers; however the company has been a chief customer of Rackable Systems historically.

That company reported in up to date statements that 17 percent of its first quarter revenue, $11.5 million, came from Facebook.

The packages comprise new HP servers configured with Quad-Core AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processors and the option to provision up to 12 hot swappable hard drives.

Layered Tech says the new machines present a huge increase in the price-for-performance value equation.

Layered Tech’s new server offerings come soon after the company took a chief step up in the dedicated server business, announcing mid-April that it had bought Fastservers.net, making the company one of the more considerable players in the dedicated server business.

In the press release, Todd Abrams, president and COO of Layered Technologies said that Layered Technologies has a history of leading the market in next-generation technology and will continue to seek ways to maximize performance, optimize virtualization, increase levels of utilization and enable greater energy efficiency.

The new name-brand server offerings are unrivaled and give their customers greater choices and unbeatable value.

Total Care, says Frontpages, provides 24-hour hardware monitoring and alerting, and monthly reports on critical hardware thresholds, including disk space, CPU and memory.

The service also provides controlled patching, with critical security patches applied within 72 hours of release and standard patches within 14 days or as requested.

Through the promise of a fully managed solution, Total Care Support provides the customer with the sense of security they require, stated Rob LaMear, Frontpages president, in a press release.

Unsurprisingly, he predicts the enhanced management will allow customers to center their wherewithal on their core businesses, one of the hosting business’s most commonly repeated formula for success.

A Microsoft gold certified partner since January, Frontpages provides hosted applications including SharePoint, MOSS, Exchange, CRM, SQL Server, in conjunction with its more standard selection of dedicated server offerings.

The Frontpages announcement provided no particulars about the pricing of the new management services, but the company appears to be following the presently fashionable model of addressing its existing customer base by moving up the stack toward a more managed offering.

Hyperspin states that the upgrade will allow resellers to acknowledge and process online payments through practically every payment gateway or system.

Providing superior flexibility in payment processors appears to be the company’s method of meeting the demand from its growing international reseller foundation.

Formerly, payments had to be processed through PayPal or 2Checkout.com.

ChoonKeng Chua, managing director of Hyperspin, said that by supporting external payment systems resellers are able to resell services more easily to their target clients.

Resellers can link their website with any external payment system they wish to use, just by implementing a simple API.

Established in 2002, Singapore-based Hyperspin says its website and server monitoring service supplies SMS and email notice of website downtime, enabling website owners and server administrators to capitalize on uptime and increase sales and ROI.

According to the press release, Hyperspin presently monitors the dependability of more than 20,000 websites and servers.