TECHNOLOGY
the Balkans : a route through Italy would meet both the Apennines and the Alps : Marseille is the southernmost entrepôt of the EU and has none of these disadvantages . Once again , a simple matter of geography .
That is why Interxion ( pronounced interaction ), the NYSE listed data centre and ‘ colocation ’ specialist , was so keen to get up and running in Marseille that it purchased its latest data centre from SFR last August as a going concern . Typically Interxion builds its facilities from scratch , but MRS1 , in a converted warehouse complex in the centre of the city , had plenty of elbow room for expansion within its 6,200 square metre footprint , direct access to all those submarine cables , and more than 70 network providers already on site .
Loom of global interconnectivity Connected directly to eight undersea cables , the datacentre provides space and interlinkage to global and regional capacity providers like AT & T , Vodafone , BT , Bharti Airtel , Maroc Telecom and Gulfnet ; French carriers like Orange , Bouygues Telecom and Jaguar , and hosts many more through internet exchanges like
France-IX . France-IX was already located at MRS1 when Interxion took it over . An internet exchange point ( IXP ) is a shared , physical facility where users , such as internet service providers ( ISPs ), eyeballs and content delivery networks ( CDNs ), can connect or ‘ peer ’ with one another to exchange internet traffic .
The data centre is a powerhouse . Its basement houses a rank of towering SDMO generators sitting quietly but ready to take over and provide more than 6MW of power if there should be an outage . The floors above house the customers ’ equipment in rooms with raised floors , with cabling ducts running underneath to feed power to the cabinets . The environment is temperature and humidity controlled , with state of the art fire detection and control to ensure the performance and the operational integrity of the systems within . Security is everything to the customers so contractors and visitors are closely monitored .
Interxion operates 39 data centres at 13 cities in 11 countries . “ The major cities are the hubs where the data converges ,” explained Fabrice Coquio , Managing Director of Interxion France . “ Frankfurt , Amsterdam ,
10 June 2015