March 10, 2008, Dallas, TX – SoftLayer announces the immediate availability of a second datacenter facility in Dallas as well as a complete upgrade of the company’s core networking infrastructure in Dallas at an investment of more than $5 million.
The new facility features 220 new racks, more than doubling SoftLayer’s server capacity in Dallas. It has its own multiple power feeds supported by independent UPS systems and generators for failover, while leveraging the same network operations (NOC) as the existing SoftLayer facility.
“The new datacenter resides within the same building as our current facility, but it is completely redundant from all other risk variables, including power, bandwidth, and cooling,” stated Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. “This allows us to deliver an additional level of failover and disaster recovery for customers seeking redundant Dallas facilities.”
As part of this expansion, a major core network backbone upgrade was completed to better serve all customers using the Dallas facilities.
The upgrade included:
- Upgrade of all existing 6500-E switches utilizing the latest Sup720-3CXL Supervisor Engines
- Upgrade of all existing 6500-E switches utilizing the latest Sup720-3CXL Supervisor Engines
- Continued deployment of 40g to the rack (20g public and 20g private) utilizing Cisco 3560-E rack switches
This upgrade will significantly improve performance for all SoftLayer customers as the new Cisco equipment provides increased CPU speed, more memory, and far greater routing capacity than the previous generation of equipment. SoftLayer continues pushing innovation by deploying the latest technologies and increasing its investment in retrofitting the existing environment. Mr. Crosby added, “SoftLayer has a mandate to provide continuous innovation to its customers and be the first to market with products and services that enable our model of on-demand IT.”