AT&T; Inc. has announced it is opening two new Internet data centers in Shanghai, China, and in Oak Brook, Illinois, which is located outside Chicago, confirming recent intense media speculation. The centers, the latest additions to AT&T;'s 1.8 million square-foot global Internet data center footprint, will help the company further accelerate its position in the hosting business worldwide.
The new Shanghai facility, located in the city's Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, is the second AT&T; Internet data center in the city. AT&T;'s first Shanghai data center, also in Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, opened its doors to customers in summer 2006. AT&T; will operate the Shanghai facilities in alliance with local service providers and will coordinate service delivery with those providers. AT&T;, however, will be customers' single point of contact for Enterprise Hosting Services being delivered in China.
Along with the Shanghai facilities, AT&T; added more space earlier this year to its Internet data center in Hong Kong. Combined, the Shanghai and Hong Kong centers have nearly doubled AT&T;'s Web hosting footprint in the Asia/Pacific region since the beginning of 2006.
In the US, the new Oak Brook facility complements AT&T;'s data center in nearby Lisle, to further expand the company's hosting presence in the Chicago area. The Oak Brook center's proximity to an AT&T; central switching office means customers have convenient connectivity to the AT&T; network backbone. In addition, the center maintains multiple active power and cooling distribution paths, redundant components and fault-tolerant design to provide 99.999 percent availability. As a result, the Oak Brook center has a Tier IV site infrastructure rating from the Uptime Institute - its highest classification among data centers for reliability, availability and serviceability.
The new facilities bring the total number of AT&T; Internet data centers to 32, including 17 data centers within the US, six in Europe, and nine in the Asia/Pacific region. The addition of the new data centers is the latest move by AT&T; to participate in the booming global hosting business. In China, the total enterprise managed service market is expected to top $3.7 billion (U.S) in 2006, according to the research firm IDC1; while in the US, IDC forecasts the market in 2006 will reach $8.0 billion.
The addition of the Oak Brook data center caps a year that saw AT&T; grow its data center footprint in the US with expansions of facilities in Lithia Springs, Georgia, and Mesa, Arizona. Both centers added 25 percent more space to handle increasing customer demand for hosting services, and AT&T; plans more data center expansions elsewhere in the US and around the world in 2007.