Sparkle's new PoP was activated at Aruba's Hyper Cloud Data Centre (IT4), a technology campus located at the Tecnopolo Tiburtino.
Tecnopolo Tiburtino is a technology district where more than 150 companies operate, ranging from aerospace to ICT, in an environment designed also to support the growth and development of new companies and start-ups.
The data centre campus covers an area of 74,000 m² and when fully operational will include five independent data centres for a total of 30 MW of IT power.
Sparkle claim it is designed to the highest standards of resilience and infrastructure quality, and list its attributes as using renewable energy, cooling systems and highly efficient equipment.
The Aruba data centre already hosts important international players in connectivity, and Sparkles PoP there adds to its four existing PoP’s in Rome.
Now, with five PoP’s, Sparkle has increased the resilience of its metro fibre ring, a protected and redundant system fully integrated with its tier-1 global IP network “Seabone”.
Rome is also home to a connection with Sparkle’s BlueMed cable system that connects Mediterranean countries such as France, Greece, Israel and Italy.
BlueMed is an integral part of the Blue & Raman Submarine Cable Systems project, in which Sparkle is participating alongside Google and other telecom operators.
“With the activation of the new PoP integrated with BlueMed, we intend to respond to the needs of companies and operators that require large international interconnection capacities,” said Enrico Bagnasco, CEO of Sparkle.
“We bring Rome closer to the world's major connectivity exchange points thanks to a unique, low-latency route to Marseille and Palermo, integrated with the main submarine cables crossing the Mediterranean and other destinations in Sparkle's global network.”
Designed with an “open cable system” and “open landing station” architecture, BlueMed ensures maximum openness to other operators and the development of internet traffic interconnection ecosystems.
With four fibre pairs and a capacity of over 25 Terabits per second (Tbps) per pair, BlueMed offers operators and businesses high-speed, high-performance international connections from Rome to all of Sparkle's destinations worldwide.
“We share with Sparkle the aim of serving companies and operators, that need large capacities, with not only connectivity but also space and power within state-of-the-art data centres that are large enough to support even the most ambitious growth plans,” said Stefano Cecconi, Aruba’s CEO.
“Being able to host a Sparkle PoP, with the availability of BlueMed, is an important building block in the consolidation of our data centres as strategic assets at a national and European level, and is perfectly in line with our carrier neutral philosophy. This approach is designed to allow customers to enjoy, in maximum autonomy, extremely reliable and high-performance internet connection solutions, and to foster the development of interconnections that benefit the entire ecosystem, making Rome an additional connectivity hub and an IT and cloud service delivery centre for the capital and all Central and Southern Italy.”
