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Verizon Cedes Data Center Management To Terremark


Ten months after it was acquired by Verizon for $1.4 billion, cloud services provider Terremark is undergoing an assessment of Verizon data centers globally that will now be managed by the Terremark business unit while also increasing its own data center capacity.

Terremark executives last week took reporters on a tour of a newly remodeled Terremark data center in Santa Clara, Calif., a suburb of San Jose. The 40,000-square-foot facility, gleaming white and vacant except for power supply units, will be half full with servers and related equipment within a month, and nearly all the space is already spoken for, said David Layton, a senior VP for the West Region for Terremark. With the acquisition, Terremark will take over management of two Verizon data centers in San Jose and Layton has been visiting other Verizon data centers in Texas, Georgia, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, making an assessment of each facility.

"We're looking at the data center and saying, 'Okay, it's got X amount [of equipment], and if we wanted to take it to the next level, it would cost X amount of money.' Or do we just go ahead and ... build another data center?" Layton said. The new data center is next door to an existing Terremark data center and, being in the heart of Silicon Valley, is in an ideal location because of its proximity to high-capacity fiber optic trunks serving major carriers such as MCI, AT&T, and Qwest, he said.

The facility is highly-secured with visitors buzzed in by a uniformed security guard behind a bullet-resistant glass barrier. At another Terremark data center outside Washington, D.C., bomb-sniffing dogs are used and guards check under vehicles with mirrors to inspect them.

The data centers typically serve three categories of customers, Layton explained: colocation customers who install and maintain their own equipment in the data center while Terremark provides the power, cooling, and connectivity; managed customers for whom Terremark maintains the equipment; and cloud customers for whom Terremark delivers infrastructure as a service (IaaS).