GreenBytes, a unique data storage appliance company, has just received an $8 million Series A round of investment financing. Battery Ventures completed the deal, which provides fresh resources for the Rhode Island-based energy-efficient technology company.

Founded in 2007, GreenBytes offers network attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) solutions that reduce energy consumption, providing a cost savings opportunity while also addressing corporate social responsibility considerations.

Savvis Inc (NASDAQ: SVVS) announced transaction with Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) yesterday is another clear sign that the datacenter business is here to stay.

Savvis announced that Microsoft would assume leases for 300,000 square feet of datacenter space in Santa Clara that Savvis controls, the heartland of Silicon Valley. In return, Savvis receives $200 million. Microsoft gets greater control of more datacenter space and Savvis gets rid of below-market-rate leases that were signed when the industry was in the dump.

We began blogging that investors should jump into Savvis in April 2006 when the stock was selling for $26. Today, the stock is at $50, just shy of 100% profit. The datacenter industry was a boom-bust posterchild sector for Internet 1.0. Many of these companies went into or flirted with bankruptcy.

However, while the two largest stand-alone datacenter companies, Savvis along with Equinix Inc (NASDAQ: EQIX), have done considerably well since we started blogging about their merits as investments over one year ago, these stocks are still underfollowed and underknown. The fundamentals of this industry continue to improve and the barriers to entry continue to expand.

Stay with both Savvis and Equinix, and if you do not own them, I'd suggest buying them and putting them away. These are difficult assets to build and maintain and companies such as Microsoft, Google Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Level 3 Communications Inc (NASDAQ: LVLT) want to own more of them.

Savvis Inc's (NASDAQ: SVVS) business continues to improve, supporting the view that the data center business is a real business. As we have blogged about Savvis and Equinix Inc (NASDAQ: EQIX) in the past, these are two pure-play data center companies that were able to restructure their balance sheets in the post-tech & telecom bubble of the late 1990s. Here are some of the numbers for Savvis:

• Savvis revenue jumped 15%, with adjusted EBITDA jumping 55% to $123 million
• Revenue continued to shift to higher-end product lines, moving up the value chain to managed VPN and hosting services
• EBITDA for the fourth quarter jumped 67%
• Savvis was able to sell a subsidiary for $125 million which can be used to expand its core hosting businesses

The power of Savvis' model is that it can move its customers up the value chain which allows the company to grow revenue and EBITDA for a number of years.

For example, managed hosting generates $4 versus every $1 dollar earned for a commodity hosting business. In addition, for new services that Savvis will be able to sell to customers in 2008 on its upgraded infrastructure, that number goes up to $8 for every dollar of commodity services.

Savvis said by increasing co-location space and moving up the value chain, it can easily drive hosting revenue above $ 1 billion. High-end hosting and managed services is a real growth business. Stay focused on both Savvis and Equinix.