SoftLayer is opening a second data center facility inside the Dallas Infomart, and upgrading its core networking infrastructure in the building, the company said today. The expansion into an additional 5,000 square feet of space provides SoftLayer with 220 more racks for its hosting clients.
"The new data center resides within the same building as our current facility, but it is completely redundant from all other risk variables, including power, bandwidth, and cooling," said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. "This allows us to deliver an additional level of failover and disaster recovery for customers seeking redundant Dallas facilities."
SoftLayer becomes the latest Infomart tenant to expand its operations at the distinctive 1.2 million square foot carrier hotel in Dallas. Other data center providers who have expanded within the Infomart include Dataside and Switch and Data. The building, which is owned by DCI Technology Holdings, is among the beneficiaries of strong demand for Dallas data center space.
SoftLayer has announced more than $50 million in expansions in recent months, including a $16 million Seattle data center and a $40 million deal to expand nationally in Internap facilities. Today's announcement included a $5 million investment in a core network backbone upgrade in Dallas. The upgrade included:
- The addition of three new Cisco 7600-S routers utilizing the latest RSP-720 Supervisor Engines
- An upgrade of all existing 6500-E switches utilizing the latest Sup720-3CXL Supervisor Engines
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and intrusion detection (IDS) protection with multiple Cisco Guard and Tipping Point installations
- Continued deployment of 40g to the rack (20g public and 20g private) utilizing Cisco 3560-E rack switches
The company says the upgrades will "significantly improve performance for all SoftLayer customers." as the new Cisco equipment provides increased CPU speed, memory and routing capacity than the
previous generation of equipment.
