The IBX Vault – A Major Data Center Expansion

February 21st, 2012 by Jon Greaves

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A wise man once told me, "All great partnerships have one thing in common; that is that both parties gain value from the partnership.” To me, this seems pretty obvious, but today in the IT space you see many partnerships of convenience which really just involve product placement or other more one-sided options. That’s part of the reason I'm so excited about the news we announced today with one of our top partners, Equinix.

Today, we announced a very special (dare I say unique?) data center that we are building with Equinix and Digital Realty. The building is adjacent to our current "Vault" data center located in Dulles, Va. and is 64,000 square feet, built to tier3 standards. We’re calling it the IBX Vault.

The partnership provides Carpathia with a custom-built facility designed to meet the most demanding compliance requirements and provides Equinix access to customers who have compliance requirements or require a solution that includes not just world-class space, but also includes services such as complex managed hosting and cloud. Together, now we have over 200 customers who have gained great value from this partnership, and today’s news only enhances this for them.

So what’s so unique about this facility?

It’s an IBX – Yes, Carpathia is the first hosting company to basically have its own Equinix IBX. The data center will look and function just like any of Equinix's other data centers - "blue steel" included but dedicated to Carpathia.
Its location – Dulles is just 3 miles from one of the Internet’s major hubs. Something like 80% of the worlds Internet traffic passes through data centers just a stones throw away. These data centers are directly connected to the new facility. In fact, customers or network providers in any of the Equinix Ashburn campuses are a cross connect away from the new facility.
It’s supported by our own perimeter controls/defense – Carpathia's own armed security force will provide physical security. This is much more than "guards"; our security force is highly trained in commercial and government compliance requirements. This includes requirements for media handling, access control and background clearances.
Carpathia is actively delivering services to the intelligence community – This new facility has been designed to support SCIF hosting requirements.
Finally, all of Carpathia's complex and compliance services will be offered in this facility – That includes our cloud (commercial and federal), compliant colo and managed services. This makes the IBX Vault an ideal location to put workloads that require the extra rigor of PCI, HIPAA, FISMA, DIACAP, etc.

You may also have seen a lot of coverage in the past week regarding the expansion of our healthcare solutions. In fact, I'm currently sitting at 38,000 feet, heading to Las Vegas for the HIMSS healthcare event. Carpathia will be sharing a booth with Equinix at this event, so please swing by and chat with our team about the solutions we’ve built for many of the industry’s most advanced healthcare providers.

We also have taken a pretty interesting and unique (there is that word again!) approach to servicing the compliance requirements of healthcare organizations -- that is to take a page out of our federal customers’ book and base our healthcare services on the requirements and best practices as defined by NIST 800 special publications. Since HIPAA is a very non-prescriptive set of requirements when compared to other compliance requirements, picking a high watermark standard and delivering to that has huge benefits for our customers. In addition, since it’s part of our DNA, we can deliver in an extremely cost-effective manner.

Finally, I should also mention that we have expanded our office locations, both at our headquarters, as well as two new offices in NYC and the Bay Area. As I’ve previously blogged, these are key markets for Carpathia and areas we have seen massive growth.

This is just the start of a month of big news. I can’t wait to share more exciting news about our expansion plans! Watch this space…