Storage giant EMC opened a brand new datacenter recently in Durham, North Carolina. The facility is the latest of six so-called Centers of Excellence, or COE, that are spread throughout Russia, India, China, Egypt, Israel and Ireland.

The 450,000 square foot facility, a tier 3 datacenter, will serve a number of purposes,

“The new COE will extend EMC’s private cloud and will support more than 50,000 users across 400 corporate offices in more than 80 countries,” reports Zacks.  “In addition to the data center, the COE includes 130,000 square feet of space for research and development labs.”

EMC’s COEs also have a role in R&D, technical support and customer support, as well as a number of other areas, such as migration services.  Further, this latest datacenter is also eco-friendly. The company says the datacenter has free air cooling, a rainwater harvesting facility and a flywheel to supplement additional battery storage the facility would otherwise use.

Another update from today is a new high profile customer that signed up with EMC. The Canada-based Corus Entertainment is now using EMC Isilon scale-out NAS to improve file access from 15 to 200 simultaneous access points and increased efficiency in terms of time consumption for processes.

The company is venturing into other areas, too. One such successful (joint) venture is VCE, a team backed by the storage giant and Cisco that offers a cloud-in-a-box offering.  There has been some criticism claiming that it may not have turned out to be a good investment for the companies, but Wikibon’s Dave Vellante dismissed that claim in his post.

Back to the datacenter space, Twitter is also opening up a new facility.  A new datacenter will be set up in Atlanta’s 990,000 square foot Metro Technology Center.  The social network’s expansion is not a surprise – it needs more machines to support a growing number of users.