SoftLayer Opens New Virginia Data Center

SoftLayer has opened a new data center location in northern Virginia, expanding its capacity to meet growing demand. The company said the new facility provides space for an additional 10,000 servers on its growing network, which also includes data centers in Dallas and Seattle. SoftLayer announced in March that it would expand its on-demand hosting infrastructure to the East Coast through a five-year, $40 million contract with Internap Network Services (INAP).

"Now with three geographically diverse data centers, we will bring even more new services to our customers in the coming months," said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. "As we searched for the best site for expanding our presence to the East Coast, the D.C. area was an easy choice. It has one of the highest concentrations of fiber connectivity in the U.S., providing us and our customers multiple network options and world class performance."

SoftLayer's Washington D.C. is 7 miles from Dulles International Airport in a facility designed to Tier IV standards. It features redundant power connections, three 2-megawatt generators and eight 750 kVA UPS systems.

The company says it has begun pre-selling servers in the new data center, and is seeing strong demand from current customers, resulting in a high backlog of server requests. "We knew interest in the new location would be high, from both existing and new customers," said Crosby. "We wanted to give our current customers an opportunity to request servers here and meet their demand prior to opening sales to the general market."