Shay Walsh, managing director, Business, BT Ireland
Global telecoms giant BT is expanding its Dublin data centre as part of a multi-million euro investment that will see the addition of 5,500 sq feet of data centre, including 300 new racks and one megawatt of power.
The investment aims to meet growing demand by organisations in Ireland for traditional data centre services, such as co-location, as well as fully managed physical, virtualised and cloud-based services.
BT’s centre in Citywest is the only carrier-neutral data centre in Ireland that has its own global network, connected to 45 BT data centres around the world. BT first established its data centre in Dublin in 2000, and subsequently bought out Telecity Redbus from its data centre in Citywest in 2004.
The 190,000 sq-foot data centre campus facility, which includes 62,000 sq feet of customer technical space, holds ISO 20000 accreditation for IT service management, ensuring best practice service provision and on-going service improvement as cornerstones of all data centre solutions.
“BT’s continued investment in this key centre provides Irish industry and the public sector with a local platform from a trusted networked IT services supplier for the provision of future new high-tech infrastructure services to Ireland and beyond,” Shay Walsh, managing director, Business, BT Ireland, explained.
“We believe that the scope and scale of our data centre services places BT’s Dublin facility as one of the main transactional hubs in Ireland.
“From financial transactions, online auctions, booking engines, internal corporate and public-sector systems and gaming – a vast range of our customers’ activities are hosted, connected and protected by BT’s data centre, making it by every metric one of the most successful commercial data centres in Ireland,” Walsh said.
The facility provides the infrastructure organisations need to access or provide cloud computing services, application modernisation and data centre transformation and optimisation, enabling customers to devote more resources to innovation and increase productivity.
BT encompasses all of these elements into an integrated capability portfolio known as BT Compute. The company’s clients span a range of sectors, such as retail, manufacturing, finance, tourism, technology and mobile network operators. BT also has a data centre in Belfast, making it the only company with all-island capabilities for its clients.
BT Ireland employs close to 3,000 people on the island of Ireland, including more than 500 IT specialists in its networked IT services team of which the data centre forms an integral part.
