Seattle-based Blue Box is planning a new European data center in London, to support its private cloud as a service (PCaaS) offering, based on OpenStack.

Though an existing European facility is already in operation in Zurich, Switzerland, Blue Box  said the new London center is aimed at customers who need European Union (EU) data center residency (Switzerland is not part of the EU). Blue Box has a US data center in Ashburn, Virginia.

The London facility is the first Blue Box data center to be built entirely with Juniper’s switching, routing and security technology. Blue Box will use Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways to secure its network, which is standardised on Juniper’s MX480 3D Universal Edge Routers, QFX5100 data center switches and EX4200 Ethernet switches.

Also doubling in Virginia

Blue Box said it will also double the company’s current capacity in its US facility in Virginia.

Blue Box recently announced a proof-of-concept (PoC) program for European customers evaluating OpenStack-powered private clouds. The programme helps customers decide if a hosted or an on-premise private cloud is better suited to their workloads.

Blue Box Cloud needs the extra capacity because private clouds – minus the headaches of infrastructure ownership – are proving popular, according to Blue Box CEO Matthew Schiltz. “Existing customer growth and new deployments will continue to drive our plans for expanding our data center number and boosting capacity at existing facilities in the year ahead,” said Schiltz.