Second Life Adds East Coast Servers

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The NAP of the Capital Region in Culpeper, Virginia.

Linden Lab will expand the back-end for its Second Life virtual world to the East Coast, adding server infrastructure at the NAP of the Capital Region, a large data center operated by Terremark Worldwide in Culpeper, Virginia. The colocation agreement will help Second Life extend its 3D virtual world environment to support additional users.

Second Life was launched in 2003, and has become a large hub for user-generated content, with an "in-world" economy with more than $450 million in annual user-to-user transactions. The primary hosting facilities supporting the game are in San Francisco and Oakland. The future growth of Second Life was a factor in Linden's choice of Terremark and the NAP of the Capital Region, a technology campus designed to eventually house five large data centers.

"As Second Life continues to expand its infrastructure to meet current and future demands in user traffic and content generation, we felt Terremark’s full suite of world-class IT solutions provided a high level of flexibility for those future business and technology needs," said Frank Ambrose, Senior Vice President of Global Technology for Linden Lab. "The NAP of the Capital Region’s sophisticated design affords us the opportunity to expand in multiple facilities within the same campus while partnering with a company that shares our commitment to limiting the environmental impact of our activities by employing energy-efficient systems."

The NAP of the Capital Region has industrial-strength infrastructure, supported by two 30-megawatt power feeds from Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, anda third 30-megawatt feed from Dominion Virginia Power. Each of the five planned 50,000 square foot data centers at the site will be supported by 11 Caterpillar 2.25 megawatt generators, for a total of 55 generators once the campus is completed. To support those generators, the NAP of the Capital Region can store up to 520,000 gallons of diesel fuel on site.

For additional details, see our video tour of the first facility at the Culpeper campus.

"The fact that Linden Lab has selected to colocate their critical infrastructure in Terremark’s data center outside Washington, D.C. is a powerful testament to our impressive combination of leading-edge solutions and world-class datacenters," said Barry Field, Terremark’s Senior Vice President for U.S. Commercial Sales. "From colocation and disaster recovery to cloud computing and secure information services, the availability of our complete set of offerings from a global datacenter footprint presents compelling value to public and private-sector organizations searching for solutions to meet their full-range of IT needs."