A new £60 million (€76 million) facility in Co Dublin will cement the Republic's position as an international player in the electronic commerce market by providing top-tier, ultra highspeed Internet access hosting the most demanding Web projects, The Irish Times has learned.
Telecommunications company Global Crossing's subsidiary, GlobalCenter, is to base a state-of-the-art, 100,000-square foot data and networking centre in the former Hitachi site in Clonshaugh, Co Dublin.
The 200-employee site will connect directly to Global Crossing's fibreoptic network to the US and Europe, and is understood to be a prime international facility capable of handling the largest-scale electronic commerce projects. GlobalCenter is the second largest data centre company in the world after rival Exodus, and has more than 500 customers including Yahoo, the Washington Post, Motley Fool, and Viacom. Web hosting facilities like GlobalCenter's house the large computers called servers that hold company websites. The company also manages the sites and builds out the computer networks needed as e-commerce sites expand. High traffic sites such as Yahoo need to be able to handle millions of hits per day and adjust to large fluctuations and sudden surges in the flow of Internet traffic.
Because GlobalCenter houses sites for Internet-focused companies that cannot tolerate any down-time, their data centres are also highly secure and include triple-redundant back-up power systems - copies of each utility system needed to run the facility and diesel generators that can run for several days in case all utilities are cut. In addition, servers are kept behind a security wall that includes motion detectors, alarms, guards and cameras. "The only thing that's more secure is the Pentagon," said one senior source.
The centre would be nearly double the size of GlobalCenter's only other European facility, in London. But London is now considered to be one of the most congested areas on the European Internet "highway", with its Internet network suffering from frequent slowdowns. The backups can make e-mail travel slowly and affects the speed at which Web pages download and video, sound and other digital data can be sent.
The Co Dublin site is believed to be especially attractive because it can take advantage of the "virgin connectivity" - brand new networks and Internet bandwidth - provided by Global Crossing's transatlantic, broadband Internet cable, which comes into Dublin and goes live in weeks. Many of GlobalCenter's US clients will have their European Web networks housed in the Republic as a result of the deal and it is understood that this enhances the possibility that the companies themselves might choose to base corporate operations here as well.
"This really puts us on the map. You're talking about a global player with recognised expertise," said one senior analyst. "It's a vote of confidence in Ireland's future as an e-commerce hub. Infrastructure and services had been our Achilles' heel."
The Department of Public Enterprise's Advisory Committee on Telecommunications (ACT), set up by Minister for Public Enterprise, Mr O'Rourke, to consider the Republic's infrastructure problems two years ago, stressed in its 1998 report that seeding the market with Government-backed projects such as the Global Crossing cable would encourage the rapid growth of an e-commerce market.
The IDA is understood to be encouraging additional Web hosting facilities by other companies, to take advantage of the connectivity provided by the Global Crossing cable and next year, an additional transatlantic cable from Canadian company Network360. Data warehouse company EMC2 already has one such facility in Ovens, Co Cork, and both Eircom and Esat are understood to have multi-million pound Web hosting facilities in the pipeline as well.
