IBM Ireland has added to its local data centre capacity through a contract with the Servecentric hosting facility in Blanchardstown, Dublin. The deal is an expansion of IBM’s managed services offering.
The contract will see IBM take dedicated floor space within the hosting site formerly owned by WorldPort and now owned and run by Servecentric, a fully funded Irish provider of infrastructure services such as colocation, custom suites, backup and connectivity. The new facility at Blanchardstown is an addition to the site that the IT giant operates in Tallaght.
Tallaght facility was opened 13 years ago and caters for IBM’s strategic outsourcing customers – indigenous and international – as well as some managed services customers. According to Tom Walsh, managed services manager at IBM: “The IBM Data Centre at Servcentric is a state-of-the-art N+1 facility which allows us to cater for our customers individual requirements whether it be individualised suites from 900 Sq. Ft. to 4,00 Sq. Ft. or hosting individual racks in a shared environment.”
Following the opening of the new data centre, IBM said it would be able to offer greater levels of service to its customers. Servecentric operates an N+1 facility, which means that spare capacity is always available in the event of any single component failing.
Explaining why IBM chose to partner with Servecentric rather than build or acquire its own facility, Walsh added: “A method of [expanding data centre capacity] is to work with a first-class business partner like Servecentric. This allowed IBM to take a large amount of dedicated space within the centre. With the ready availability of high-speed communications, we have established a 24 x 7 operations centre on site which has enabled IBM to provide our customers with an enhanced cost-effective service in a very short time frame.
Walsh said that the IBM data centre would have integrated 24/7 operations on site. “It marks a significant enhancement to the managed services portfolio we now have in Ireland,” he added. “Increasingly businesses are looking at this service in order to ease the pressure on an already over-utilised IT department or to enable them to concentrate their effort on core competencies by employing a managed service approach.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Servecentric has become an IBM Business Partner. The company’s Blanchardstown facility occupies 125,000 sq ft and has a power capacity of up to 10 Megawatts. The Servecentric Enterprise Data Centre, claimed to be the largest in Ireland, is built to the highest international standards. WorldPort originally commissioned the centre and construction began in 1999 with the centre being fully commissioned and operational by June 2000 of the following year. In August 2002, Servecentric acquired the assets of WorldPort and has continued operations since.
IBM has several customers already using the new data centre, including the Midland Health Board, St James’ Hospital and the national SAP projects for the Irish Health Agencies.
By Gordon Smith
Pictured at the opening of the IBM dedicated data centre at the Servecentric facility in Blanchardstown, Dublin are Aidan Donnelly, chief executive of Servecentric, with Michael Daly, country general manager of IBM Ireland.
