Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2013/05/28/savvis_data_center_expansion/

Savvis summons swarm of data centers

Adds two facilities, expands in eight

By Jack Clark in San Francisco

Posted in Channel, 28th May 2013 23:52 GMT

Enterprise cloud and colocation provider Savvis is going to build two new data centers and add racks in eight existing facilities around the world as the company tries to skim money off the rising tide of data that people want to store.

The buildout of the VMware-friendly infrastructrue was announced by the CenturyLink-owned company on Tuesday. It will see Savvis add two new facilities, one in Hong Kong and one in London, along with expanding existing data centers around the world. Savvis's former president, Bill Fathers, was recently tapped by VMware to run the virtualization giant's new cloud efforts.

The new facilities and expansions should all be finished by the end of the year, with many of them already completed or being finished in May, the company wrote.

The buildout will add 85,000 square feet of IT space to Savvis's available infrastructure footprint, taking the total amount of infrastructure operated by the company to over 2.4 million square feet. Unlike traditional cloud companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, Savvis is more of a traditional colocation provider that specializes in selling space in reasonably reliable, well-maintained facilities around the world.

"The opening of new data centers in Hong Kong and London, paired with expansions of eight existing Savvis data centers, are in response to growing global demand for enterprise cloud, managed hosting, network and colocation services," the company said in a statement.

Savvis is a frequent associate of traditional IT OEMs, and counts both HP and VMware among its partners. It is a longtime supporter of VMware-virtualized clouds via its Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC).

But like many colocation providers that are seeing their margins shrink in the face of growing competition from public clouds, it also offers more Amazon AWS-like tech via its Symphony Database, and commodity compute via Savvis Symphony Open.

Besides its own technology, the company has attempted to create a third-party ecosystem for its cloud, including BMC Software, RackWare, ScaleXtreme, and ServiceMesh, among others.

With the build-out, the company will operate over 50 data centers across the world, giving its customers access to something that none of the major cloud providers can offer: geographic breadth, with bit barns spread across different legislative regions with different data regulations. ®