Mar 2, 2009 : The Planet Plans London Data Center

📅 March 2, 2009 - Texas-based global IT hosting provider The Planet (theplanet.com 👉 Total Reviews: 3
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Opening in April, according to the company's announcement Monday, The Planet has begun preleasing the London facility, which will feature up to 20kW of power per rack, backed by N+1 redundancy on generators, transformers and UPS systems. The new data center also gives customers private access to a 10GB fiber connection to The Planet's core network through its Ashburn, Virginia data center, as well as local connectivity to tier-1 providers and the major European peering exchanges.

The London facility will initially roll out its "virtual racks" solution as its first offering. Virtual Racks host business web application infrastructure, allowing clusters of servers to easily work together, offering unlimited server-to-server connectivity, pooled bandwidth and access to a wide array of advanced firewalls and load balancers.

"For the past 18 months, we've evaluated international markets that are of strategic importance to our planned global expansion, and Europe has been at the forefront of those discussions," The Planet chairman and chief executive officer Douglas J. Erwin said in a statement. "We've had serious customer interest, which underscored that the time was right to move forward."

The London data center is a product of a colocation agreement The Planet has made with London-based TelecityGroup (telecity.com), which operates 20 network-independent data centers across seven European countries. TelecityGroup guarantees the new data center will have ISO 9001:2000 compliance, a demanding operations and management benchmark for data centers. TelecityGroup is also a leader in European data center energy efficiency. It is the first data center operator to sign up to the new "EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres," and is a member of the Green Grid (thegreengrid.org).

TelecityGroup UK and Ireland managing director Adriaan Oosthoek said his company plans to uphold The Planet's reputation for delivering high quality, reliable hosting and web services. "I'm delighted that TelecityGroup will play a crucial role in supporting The Planet's roll out into Europe by hosting and maintaining their infrastructure in our new highly resilient and secure Powergate data center," Oosthoek said in a statement. "We continue to be the data center of choice for leading US businesses expanding into Europe."

In December, The Planet announced plans for a 86,000 square foot colocation facility in Dallas. When the first phase opens in May 2009, it will be the company's seventh data center.

The Planet's UK expansion comes at a time when data center operators are scrambling to meet the increasing demand for data center services amidst the scarcity of data center space in London. Last week, Indian telecommunications giant Tata Communications (tatacommunications.com -> bigrock.in) revealed details about its Tier-3 data center located just outside of London, which is planned to open in the second quarter of 2009. Also last week, addressing the deficit of data center services in London, European managed hosting and data center provider Netcetera (netcetera.co.uk) announced it would be expanding its facility on the Isle of Man, a small independent island nation in the Irish Sea.

For The Planet, as well as many other companies in the past few weeks, addressing the London market has looked especially lucrative, and, at least for The Planet, the next logical step after achieving its goals in the US.

Erwin concludes, "We've made substantial investments in our data centers and our network over the past two years, including the recent addition of new peering points on the East and West Coasts of the US. Our storage cloud and CDN products also provide global access points. With 42 percent of our customers located in international markets, we expect considerable interest in this new operation."