Telefónica’s state-of-the-art Alcalá Data Center located outside of Madrid has been named Europe’s largest data center and the third largest in the world. The facility has achieved TIER IV Gold certification from the Uptime Institute, which certifies the center’s operational sustainability and attests to its high level of infrastructure availability.
The Alcalá Data Center, which recently completed its first year anniversary of launching commercial services, is the cornerstone of Telefónica’s Data Center consolidation strategy, as well as one of the company’s four new generation strategic data centers globally, which will act as hubs for a small number of satellite data centers that will support local services. All of Telefónica’s data centers will be inter-connected via a corporate global network, all supervised and operated under one roof. This will allow Telefónica to optimize infrastructure use, enhance virtualization levels, phase out obsolete equipment and standardize the infrastructure’s operating model in step with the company’s global objectives.
UK, Spanish and German services are being established at the Alcalá Data Center in addition to global processes, thereby making inroads into improving the levels of quality, simplification and standardisation, which are key to Grupo Telefónica’s transformation.
Telefónica has also established a new Innovation Center demonstration area at the Alcalá facility to showcase cloud services. The company is developing Hybrid Cloud and Corporate Cloud concepts that could be enabled in a Virtual Data Center 2.0 service.
- In April 2013, Telefónica inaugurated the first phase of its massive Alcalá Data Centre project outside of Madrid, which aims to be one of the largest Tier IV data centers in Europe and the world. The first phase, which became operational in April 2013, is a new building measuring 24,700 m2, with seven IT rooms covering an area of 682 m2 each. The complete project, which will progress gradually, will cover a total area of 65,700 m2 (over 700,000 square feet) and include a further 16 IT rooms, on a 78,400 m2 plot of land (the size of 8 football pitches). The Alcalá Data Centre uses a modular architecture with redundant energy supplies and communications for each hall. Telefónica expects an annual reliability of 99.995%. Each module will be independent, allowing new rooms to be activated without affecting the operation of the rest. Similarly, the 1,200 kW of IT power for each room can be multiplied up to fourfold without impacting the housed systems. A redundant fiber optic ring connects to the company’s Julián Camarillo Data Centre (Madrid), providing mutual back-up in case of faults. The facility was built by Ferrovial and Master Ingeniería, with technological advice provided by Digital Realty.