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Balfour Beatty Engineering Services has awarded leading technology provider Onyx Group a contract to provide IT services to the UK Engineering Services Division. Headquartered in Hillington, near Glasgow, and with further offices across the UK, BBES selected Onyx Group to provide an outsourced IT Helpdesk service. Onyx will act as a first line response to BBES staff experiencing IT issues and provides expert transition to BBES’s own IT teams when calls are escalated up the chain.

The Scottish Commission for Regulation of Care and the Social Services Council have gone live with Funnelback Hosted Search on each of their websites.This service allows Scottish residents to search for adult, child and independent healthcare services in Scotland. Funnelback is owned by Squiz whose Suite, the world's first supported open source web management suite is due for release in November 2010 incorporates a content management system,analytics capabilities, effective search and a platform for integrating applications and data, underpinned by a global, 24/7 support framework and an automatic update service.

Atlantis Resources have had the AK -1000 tidal energy turbine, believed to be the largest built in the world, assembled at a facility at Evanton in Ross-shire. It will be towed by barge from Invergordon to the European Marine Energy Centre test site of Eday, Orkney. The AK-1000's blades are 18m in diameter and can generate 1MW.

The world’s largest international conference on particle physics ICHEP attracted more than 1000 participants to its Paris venue to hear the four major LHC experiments – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – spokespeople present the measurements from the first three months of successful LHC operation at 3.5 TeV per beam, an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.

Cloud computing, in this conference context is internet-based computing, where organisational information, software and hardware is stored in, and accessed from external data centres. Key features of cloud computing include potential cost savings, flexibility and reliability. Perceived issues around the technology include the environmental impact, the costs of migration to the cloud, the challenges posed to existing security measures and data protection legislation.
A final session discusses how Scotland can position itself as a cloud host and will focus on the following: What are the economic benefits of cloud computing? How can Scotland become a leader in this new approach to ICT? What are the barriers to this emerging industry in Scotland?

Hewlett-Packard is to invest $1bn in its enterprise services business and the modernised data centers would enable its customers to run their businesses more efficiently from those data centers. HP will cut 9,000 jobs and take charges of $1bn over several years as it consolidates and automates the data centres, evidence that the data centre services part of IT is becoming highly automated and no longer the one-time computer bureaux employer.

As Scotland's data centre sector continues to grow, could be time to take a look at other takes on the subject of data centres. This month a Dublin exhibition and conference organised by Florida based professional association BICSI will be the launching ground for a new data centre design and implementation: best practices standard. It is believed to join around 40 different standards already in circulation.

Among two of the the presentations: “How Energy Legislation Will Affect the IT Industry,” Andrew Jones, RCDD, Alquist Consulting, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom The Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme started on 1 April 2010 in the United Kingdom. Under this legislation, users must reduce consumption by approximately 5% each year. Data centre managers will face significant challenges in complying with this new legislation.

Auditing a Data Centre—But to What Standard?” Barry Elliott, RCDD, Capitoline LLP, Nantwich, Cheshire, United Kingdom. Most would agree that auditing a data centre is a good idea to demonstrate compliance with various standards and operating practices. However, there is a great deal of confusion as to what data centres are being audited against. There approximately 40 different standards in circulation that claim some applicability to data centres, either very closely (e.g., TIA-942) or more generally, where a data centre is treated as just another place of work. So when a data centre operator or a customer of a data centre calls for an audit, then the issue becomes which subject area(s) are of most interest to that operator or user? One answer may be to audit all of them, but this would take a long time, cost more than €250,000 and need a full-time manager just to keep up with the paperwork and ongoing maintenance of these qualifications. Users and operators must, therefore, be specific as to what they really need to achieve.

As Alchemy Plus plans its northern data centres powered by renewable energy, over in Europe Green Data Systems BV has a different approach. It is launching its Green Data Center in-a-box [GDC-in-a-box] housed in enhanced 20' and 40’ shipping containers complete with a new Suite of Services to support GDC in-a-box use from site preparation to installation and testing, as well as its integration into existing IT infrastructures.

Lexar Media, a global provider of memory products for digital media, has introduced 8GB Crucial DDR3-1066 (PC3-8500) CL9 very low-profile (VLP), ECC registered dual in-line memory modules (RDIMMs), enabling blade and low-profile server users to populate their systems with up to 144GB of memory, depending upon motherboard and processor configuration.

When the new Harwell-based £40m International Space Innovation Centre was launched in March and a new Space Leadership Council established to provide advice on government response to the Innovation & Growth Team, Craig Clark asked for his thoughts. His reply was he had been invited to join the 20 man council, comprised of academia, government and the awesome five business members, Astrium, Logica, Surrey Satellites, Avanti, and Inmarsat (who also sit on the EU Space Council.)

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